My letter is very similar. However as I stated in my note if the criteria was lack of institutional affiliation, and the intent was to strictly limit participation based on that, I can only assume they would have communicated that to us.

In any case hey…..only two more years before we get another whack at it

Of course by then we will both be famous for solving the fundamental mysteries of the universe without academic or foundational support

(let me see where is that Baez crackpot index again. It was right here a minute ago.)

Cheers,

Elliot

That makes two of us in the rejected column so far, but the only process I was included in was as a recipient of the standard rejection notice sent to all the rejectees. Did they actually ask you questions about your proposal or something?

I hope others here who submitted proposals will share results. It would be interesting to see who else did, or did not, receive the dreaded message:

Thank you for your application to the Inaugural FQXi Request for Proposals. We received 172 excellent applications requesting a total of US$23M in grants, a figure some ten times larger than we are able to fund this time.

To limit the time spent by the research community writing ultimately unsuccessful full proposals, the review panel has now completed a careful assessment of these initial applications. It clearly had some difficult decisions to make, and I regret to inform you that the panel has declined to request a Full Proposal from you at this time.

While we are unable to provide detailed feedback on all uninvited proposals, common reasons for non-selection include lack of direct or focused relevance to the FQXi mission (e.g., too mainstream) and low potential impact per dollar (e.g., it was unclear that the FQXi grants would fund research that would otherwise not occur; or potential gains from the research were incommensurate with the funding requested.)

The good news is that there will be many future FQXi programs to which you can apply, including another RFP in 2008, as well as essay contests coming soon. We have therefore added your name to the FQXi mailing list to be notified of these opportunities as they arise. (Please notify Kirsten A. Hubbard, our Scientific Program Manager, at hubbard@fqxi.org, if you would prefer not to be on this list.)

Thank you again for your interest in FQXi, and the time spent on your Initial Proposal. Your efforts helped to establish that research into Foundational Questions is a fascinating and important goal for a wide variety of people and institutions.

Sincerely,

Kirsten A. Hubbard
Scientific Program Manager
Foundational Questions Institute

In any case, I’m glad I did it, and look forward to seeing what emerges from this process both in terms of what projects are funded and what the results of those projects are. I would not be reluctant to give this another shot in the future with the same groundrules.

Elliot

I knew the importance that Anthony would play, and Sean for the introduction of this article above. Why? Because of the “connection” Peter has made in the past.

That Sean might have held about taking a stance, on the templeton issue. So Peter and Sean would have been in agreement as far as I could tell, until, the answers about the role this funding might play, and who was backing it?

Had Anthony maintain some distance from such an association? I bet him and others were sleeping quite comfortably, while the work was yet to come:)

No money, and I continue to endeavor from a personal motivation of interest about science. If I had a proposal such as Sean’s about atheistic valuation, would it now seem important(?) with the dynamics being changed by one of their own( Peter)?

Anthony,

Oh, it wasn’t even close to badly mishandled–he was very diplomatic and logical about the whole thing.

I think wrote him a note:

Do you want to go to the dance with me?

And then I had check boxes (SNORT. yes, check boxes…if we had had email then I imagine I would have had embedded radio buttons…) for “yes”, “no”, and “maybe”.
I believe he checked “maybe”, and added a disclaimer, “I have already asked Michelle, so if she says yes, I will go with her, but I will still dance with you there.”

Hey, even in 6th grade we knew to keep our options open…

It has been fun to reconnect. I’ll be in touch.
Hope you & yours are well.

Tara

Hi! That is extremely amusing and it is nice to hear from/about you! Please drop me an email anytime, if you like.

Sean:

My precise recollection of these events is foggy, but I’m pretty sure that there was another girl involved and that, characteristically, I badly mishandled the whole situation…

All:

FYI, the first round of proposals was a great success and we are very excited about the proposals we got. While these are being processed, a goal over the next couple of months will be to develop the FQXi forum, which many here will hopefully find of interest.

Also, thanks to Doug, Belizean, Elliot, et al., for lots of interesting food-for-thought in connection with the support of ‘outsiders’ that have a real potential contribution to make to FQXy research.

The only reason why they might not support this is because it has become too conventional by now

That is so cool! I wish I knew you.

For instance, this happened to me yesterday.

Let me give a little bit of context.

For various reasons, I wasn’t real fond of classroom education, finished high school in 3 years motivated solely by the desire to be out of it (i.e., not out of intellectual ambition), never took math past Algebra II, never took physics. I got a vague-ish, English composition-centric Liberal Arts BA right after that because I knew if I ever found something that I really wanted to pursue I might as well have it out of the way so I could start Graduate studies.
Now I work as a financial/business analyst for Agilent Technologies. I wanted to work for the company because the innovative history of the company and what we produce intrigued me. The way I explained it to my mom, “There’s just something neat about working for the company that invented the atomic clock.” Even though my educational background doesn’t support it, I fell into a job that allowed me to realize that I what I really love thinking about is statistical modeling, computational finance, relational databases, and theoretical concepts. Especially theoretical concepts that have to do with absolute, subjective, and relativistic thinking.

So, yesterday. I spent probably too much time “contemplating the foundational questions”.
I exhausted my husband’s knowledge on the fun bits of physics I had gleaned from reading some of Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, which was given to me by my father-in-law. I had also exhausted his curiosity in talking about theoretical subjects (whether Zen Buddhism sees time as linear, and what the are parallels in thinking about absolute vs. subjective morality in theology and the cosmological constant, and has someone figured out if light is actually stationary and matter and dimensions are intersecting it in such a way that we only perceive that it’s moving?).

I get to the point where I’m saying things like, “I mean, I can’t tell if I’m sounding like Art Bell and should go make myself a tin foil hat and go searching for crop circles, or if I should just go do some research to find out if there’s some just-for-the-fun-of-it forum where actual well-respected scientists post so I can read up on it, because these are really absorbing ideas to me,”

My husband says that I should talk to his dad, who is an Engineer who also worked for HP/Agilent for 30 years, and is also intensely into multiverses and thinking about the nature of the cosmos. And, he understands all the math to back it up. However, it’s late. I make a mental note to call him the next day, but, being curious, I do a Google search to see if the sort of forum/venue I have in mind exists, and I stumble across this thread, and the Foundational Questions Institute.

Just what I was looking for.

Great.

But that’s not the joke part.

The joke part is that Anthony A. and I already know each other. I asked him to the school dance in 6th grade, in fact.
Synchronicity, coincidence, alien/illuminati conspiracy, some one playing dice with the universe? Ah, who knows. Boggles the mind, though, at least mine.

I hope this is as amusing to those of you who stuck with me this far as it is to me.

I believe the answer to the question of whether you can find people who aren’t crackpots and are also capable of out-of-the-box-thinking on topics such as these, and who have the time & motivation to do so and the aplomb to present it in such a manner that it is taken seriously, is an unequivocal YES. My father-in-law, for one. Recently retired, math/science savant, disciplined, and already does ponder these subjects many hours a day, unfunded.

I’ll give him the link, so you just might hear from him. I am sure you will hear from like-minded individuals around the globe.

In any event, I’m very glad you’re all out there. I think this is a fantastic and exciting way of getting the creative juices going and moving science forward. At the very least, you’ve motivated me to go get more education about cosmology and physics so I can find out what fun puzzles I’ve been missing all these years….

I’m very much looking forward to seeing what comes out of this project. I do so love limitless possibilities.

Take care,
Tara

This is ahistorical. Weinberg was writing about an anthropic explanation for the cosmological constant long before the landscape was even a glimmer in Lenny’s eye.

(Shamit’s eye? Joe’s eye? Steve’s eye? Nah. Lenny scans better.)

I didn’t say physicists and mathematicians can’t think, I said Smolin laments that the schoolmen discourage them from thinking about foundational issues, something, which he himself experienced. However, I can understand why they do this, since thinking about these issues is so impractical, and can be so distracting to students, that it can put their education in jeopardy.

I recall the story Weinberg tells of a promising grad student that he realized he hadn’t seen around campus for a while. One day he asked a colleague in an elevator if he knew what had happened to this bright fellow. The answer was that he had dropped out of school, because he couldn’t stop thinking about the meaning of quantum mechanics, so I’m sure this is why “shut up and calculate” has become the mantra of the schoolmen that it has.

However, the issue of the value of science education, the training of physicists and mathematicians to think in terms of “the language of physics and math,” is not so straightforward. Certainly, it is absolutely indispensable to the practice of normal science within the current paradigm of thought. Nevertheless, the very process is predicated upon the assumption that one can take the validity of the paradigm for granted, but, while this works for a while, eventually it is self-defeating, because the half-life of any paradigm is relatively short. When the paradigm has decayed sufficiently, we get the undesirable results we are seeing today – a revolutionary spirit is growing. We are more and more prepared to accept anything that promises a way out of the fundamental crisis, even to the point that schoolmen are prepared to suggest that the traditional understanding of science itself should be sacrificed – that we need not assume that there exists a paradigm that will work any better than the one we have.

I find it so ironic that Weinberg is at the forefront of this movement to abandon the almost sacred definition of science in order to save the current paradigm, because he was so insistent that Kuhn’s conclusion, that normal science does not necessarily take us closer and closer to the truth, was, as he put it, “wormwood to scientists like myself.” Now that the predicted revolution is upon us, however, Weinberg wants to change the definition of science; apparently, this is a new position, a compromise with his adamant defense of the ultimate nobility of mankind’s scientific quest to understand nature: our struggle has meaning not because there is one truth out there to be discovered, but because we have discovered that there is no meaning to the idea that truth can be circumscribed into one great, comprehensible, whole that mankind can master. Truth is whatever works for us, but it can be anything else as well, something that we can never know.

Personally, I reject both Kuhn’s position and Weinberg’s new position. I believe that truth IS something that can be circumscribed into one large whole and understood by man, and that the progress of science toward it is real and worth the effort, precisely because of that fact, as Weinberg apparently once believed.

Hence, while we must view the progress of science as substantial in one respect, given the magnificent feats of modern science and technology, in another important respect, we’ve lost something rather significant that the Greeks possessed centuries ago, the simple and elegant view of a harmonious universe. The reason that the string theorists like Gross are expecting that the coming revolutionary idea predicted by them will redefine the nature of space and time, and that the non-string theorists like Smolin believe that the new definition of space and time needs to eliminate the background structure of space and time in physical theory, and that the mathematicians like Atiyah think that the new paradigm will exhibit mathematical simplicity and elegance and reveal the origins of mathematics in the fundamental structure of nature, is that these conclusions are those that they have reached in the context of seeking that view of nature, which the ancients possessed: a unified and harmonious understanding of the structure of the physical universe.

Achieving such an understanding IS possible – we must believe that, but it’s clear that what has to change is fundamental, that the paradigm under which we now labor has to change, and consequently, while such a change will be wrenching, it will also be immensely impowering and liberating. In the meantime, it’s important to recognize that the numerous ad hoc inventions, crafted in terms of the dying paradigm, such as those you mention and describe as “radical and non-intuitive,” can never have such power to change things, because they do not provide the basis for a new round of inductive science – a new paradigm that provides for a new, more powerful, view of the structure of the physical universe.

When I review your position on this issue I find the fundamental flaw is that you assume some negative correlation between being “in the system” and “being able to think in an unencumbered fashion”. I don’t think that’s a fair statement for a couple of reasons. 1) I think you will have to admit (howeve grudgingly) that knowing the physics and mathematics itself can not be considered a negative attribute since I think many of us believe that the the “foundational” description of reality will be done in the language of physics and math. 2) Sabbatacals compared to the non-academic world, tenured professors are given extended periods to “think” about things which the rest of us working stiffs don’t have. Certainly these periods provide an opportunity to think. and 3) Some of the most radical and non-intuitive ideas are already being generated by those very insiders. Look at Lee Smolin (CNS) Jakob Bekenstien (Bekenstein Bound) Lenny Susskind and others (Holographic Principle) Roger Penrose (Twistors and concepts of gravitational entropy) These are all insiders who are see things in a very different way.

I further disagree with your pessimistic attitude about progress. I think that the recent WMAP results are a good example of solid progress and that given the enormous experimental issues of trying to reconcile low energy standard model physics with planck scale theory we need to realize we are aiming high.

I guess Elliot is still laughing, because this is so much like a tempest in a teapot now. However, I want to point out, for arguments sake, that your point of view assumes that the product, which the schools produce, the philosophical doctors, gain a knowledge of reality that is not accessible any other way. Yet, Lee Smolin just wrote an article regarding the lamentable, but not subtle, built-in disincentive, which exists in those very schools vis-à-vis contemplation of foundational questions. Smolin laments that the famous words of Feynman, just “shut up and calculate” have become the “mantra” of the schoolmen.

Mastering the practice of science might be a prerequisite for understanding the issues of science, but not for understanding reality. The discovery of “innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality” requires only one thing – thought. The title of PhD is not an authorization to think, issued by those who are in charge of thought. I’m sorry. The greatest minds the world has to offer in the last couple of generations have been working feverishly day and night to understand the structure of the physical universe, based on some fundamental assumptions that the schoolmen try their best to avoid, and what’s the result?

Turmoil and confusion. “Something’s wrong!” exclaims Gross. “Many physicists feel stuck”, says Baez. They “continue to make predictions but they are usually wrong or not yet testable. This has led to a feeling of malaise. Why are they failing?” he wants to know. Well, in the meantime let’s keep on churning them out of the grad schools anyway, because we can’t just stop the enterprise now can we? Of course not. Let’s throw some more money at them. Maybe we can get them to stop calculating and to start thinking, if we pay them. Just tell them, “shut up [take this money] and think!”

What a joke this is, huh Elliot? Pass the cheese and turn on the jazz. Let’s Jam!