Load-following electricity, heavy-duty transport, shipping, aviation, iron, steel, cement and chemical industries are really, really hard to decarbonize.

Load-following electricity, heavy-duty transport, shipping, aviation, iron, steel, cement and chemical industries are really, really hard to decarbonize.

It's not difficult to understand: Fossil fuels have made our lives vastly better than those of previous generations. Millions of children would have died without them. Abandoning them is genuinely hard.

It's not difficult to understand: Fossil fuels have made our lives vastly better than those of previous generations. Millions of children would have died without them. Abandoning them is genuinely hard.

Very nice -- and great that you cite Barandes, whose ideas indeed fit there.

The challenge for these kind of (psi-epistemic) views seems to be not that the violate "locality", but that so far no one has managed to come up with a compelling explicit non-Markovian microdynamics that does the job.

AI capabilities are advancing way too fast.

I support the call for a pause.

Very good that you research this. Identifying different types of coherent indeterministic universes (which may interact with the free wil question in different ways) is so important and, in my impression, neglected.

I am working on how to combine indeterminism and time symmetry, a very nice task.

I really, really enjoy working with Claude -- in particular having it identify holes in my arguments and calculations -- but it also fills me with grief to experience how it gets stronger and stronger.

I can't help hoping that this progress will somehow stop.

Vor allem wirr -- Gretha Thunberg und Nick Bostrom gemeinsam als Agenten des Anti-Christ...

The irony: Sustainability-oriented politics has led to an unsustainable neglect of its own material basis.

Europe Forgot the Lesson the 1970s Oil Shocks Once Taught The continent answered with reactors, pipeline diplomacy, and offshore drilling, then spent three decades neglecting and dismantling everything it had built.

"The pathology arrives when those governing from the upper floors lose the ability to perceive the importance of the foundations [...], and begin making decisions that erode that base in the service of ideological commitments the foundations had made affordable."

www.decouple.media/p/europe-for...

Very interesting -- and I broadly agree with the message.

The paper relies heavily on assumptions about how quantum theory should be interpreted, though, and those assumptions do not seem connected to any specific coherent view.

GPT 5.1 (paid version) seems to get this okay:

"Short answer: No, Steven French is not an advocate of QBism.
But he does take QBism seriously and has written about it in a broadly sympathetic and illuminating way.... [and] has sometimes defended QBism against superficial criticisms"

The combination of the NVidia-chips decision and the EO creates the impression that the biggest concern is not China winning the race to AGI/ASI, but not getting to AGI/ASI at all, unless it's done very quickly.

The goal of protecting liberal democracy might be more served by measures that help European economies and increase its military power, e.g. getting rid of aggressive decarbonization targets.

Perhaps we want to keep those for other reasons, but there are definitely unpleasant tradeoffs here.

This suggests that, if you want to understand QM like Einstein wanted as akin to statistical physics, in terms of genuine phase space probability densities, Anti-Wick quantization is a natural place to look.

And the connection with Anti-Wick quantization is simply that a quantum expectation value <F|Â|F> calculated via Segal Bargmann space is a weighted phase space integral of the function A that is promoted to  by Anti-Wick, not Weyl, quantization.

Oh, I'm sure that you could familiarize yourself with Segal-Bargmannspace very quickly. It has a nice Wikipedia entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segal%E...

To be really convincing, this approach needs a concise account of underlying microdynamics. Right now, I am working on this. Before that, the next item in the series will be on the Kochen-Specker theorem and non-contextuality.

Anti-Wick quantization has its natural home in Segal-Bargmann space: the Hilbert space of Gaussian-integrable holomorphic functions, where creation and annihilation operators correspond to multiplication and derivative wrt to the complex phase space variable.

This goes together with a view of the Husimi function as a probability density, proposed earlier by Frit Bopp, Drummond and Reid, and myself.

It turns out that, yes, if you assume that self-adjoint operators represent the functions assigned to them via Anti-Wick quantization, you can interpret quantum expectation values as phase space integrals.

Classical mechanics has no measurement problem, quantum mechanics does. Mathematically, the transition goes via quantization: mapping phase space functions to self-adjoint operators.

A natural idea: Can a smart choice of quantization scheme help avoid the measurement problem?

Sharp values for all dynamical variables via Anti-Wick quantization This paper proposes an approach to interpreting quantum expectation values that may help address the quantum measurement problem. Quantum expectation …

Why philosophers of physics should look more into Anti-Wick quantization -- and quantization in general.

New paper in Physics Letters A: Sharp values for all dynamical variables via Anti-Wick quantization sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Relativistic Covariance and Nonlinear Quantum Mechanics: Tomonaga-Schwinger Analysis We use the Tomonaga-Schwinger (TS) formulation of quantum field theory to determine when state-dependent additions to the local Hamiltonian density (i.e., modifications to linear Schrodinger evolution...

This new peer-reviewed theoretical physics paper, in a good journal, is, according to its author (on X) based on an AI-generated research idea:

arxiv.org/abs/2511.15935

The research is probably not very original. Still, I find it depressing how close we are to being superseded by the machines.

Also, a typical ambiguity that occurs here again:

The economic loss in question would be relative to a counterfactual scenario with no/less climate change, not an absolute decline.

Good question!

It might help if the authors of climate scenarios would not also advocate specific decarbonization pathways and make otherwise highly political recommendations. It might also be good if they acknowledged that decarbonization is hard and very risky when done unilaterally.

Mijn ervaringen: dat collega's migratie altijd als wenselijk zien, dat ze liever onderzoek doen naar hoe migratie negatief "geframed" word dan naar hoe de maatschappij echt met bepaalde aspecten van migratie worstelt.

Algemeen word naar tradeoffs van migratie en cohesie niet zo graag gekeken.

Ja. Mijn ervaring stemt overeen met jouw verhaal (goede speech).

Of: Maatsschappelijke relevantie van onderzoek ook als risico voor bias zien. En in voorstellen schrijven hoe ons onderzoek, indien maatschappelijk relevant, voor zowel meer linkse als meer rechtse projecten interessant zou kunnen zijn.