Lee Phillips’ Website

1/10/2024 14:54 The Page 99 Test: Einstein’s Tutor

24/9/2024 14:18 A short review on Noether’s theorems, gauge symmetries and boundary terms: This widely-cited paper came out in 2016 but I just found out about it (too late to mention it in the book​): “This review is dedicated to some modern applications of the remarkable paper written in 1918 by E. Noether. [I]n a single paper, Noether discovered the crucial relation between symmetries and conserved charges as well as the impact of gauge symmetries on the equations of motion. Almost a century has gone since the publication of this work and its applications have permeated modern physics. Our focus will be on some examples that have appeared recently in the literature. This review is aim[ed] at students, not researchers.” Also at https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.03616.

22/9/2024 17:11 Practical Julia Errata Page: I’ve added a list of errata and other notes to the book’s website supplement.

14/9/2024 8:39 Einstein’s Tutor: A review of my book in Science: “Phillips’s writing shines in his exhaustively researched historical narrative…Accessible to both nonscientists and trained physicists…ultimately, everyone will learn something new from this book.”

14/9/2024 8:19 Good creative tools are virtuosic and open-ended: Good insights in this article by Linus Lee.

13/9/2024 12:19 Consciousness will slip through our fingers: Thoughtful and provocative.

10/9/2024 15:24 Einstein’s Tutor sold out on Amazon: My book about Emmy Noether and the emergence of modern physics went on sale today. Shortly after midnight, Amazon reported the book as out of stock: the pre-orders wiped out their inventory.

10/9/2024 15:10 DBCollections.jl: Lets you “use the exact same code to manipulate regular Julia collections and SQL databases.” This will be immediately useful: data persistence, using arrays not limited by RAM, and more.

6/9/2024 15:26 ‘Einstein’s Tutor’ Review: Emmy Noether in Space and Time: An intelligent review of Einstein’s Tutor​ is up at the Wall Street Journal.

5/9/2024 15:18 Exclusive: Editor resigns after he says publisher blocked criticism of decision to retract paper on gender dysphoria: An important story about the ideological capture of some of our formerly prestigious scientific journals.

1/9/2024 15:49 Columbia task force reports ‘crushing’ discrimination against Jews: This report could be describing the university environment in 1930s Germany.

31/08/2024 12:10 Three Translations for Einstein’s Tutor: As of today we have contracts to translate the book into Russian (with distribution in Russia and the CIS), Polish (with worldwide distribution), and Simplified Chinese (with distribution in Mainland China).

31/8/2024 10:04 The aside element: The humble HTML element, with insights about accessibility.

29/8/2024 22:36 A new non-parametric method to infer galaxy cluster masses from weak lensing: “a new, non-parametric method to infer deprojected 3D mass profiles M(r) of galaxy clusters from weak gravitational lensing observations…We provide an efficient implementation in Julia code that runs in a few milliseconds per galaxy cluster.”

29/8/2024 10:21 A Stupid Cartoon and the University Ideology: The current surge of antisemitism in the U.S. and Europe placed in historical and cultural context as only​ Paul Berman can​.

27/8/2024 10:56 Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra: “Many of the foundational concepts in geometric algebra (GA) are poorly designed at the defining level and/or hijack the meanings of well established terminology.” I’ve noticed that GA is somewhat of a fad in some programming circles. If you think you want to learn it, read this article first and choose your textbooks carefully.

22/8/2024 14:35 The Elegant Universe: 25th Anniversary Edition: Mathematician Peter Woit looks at the string theory hype machine on the 25^th anniversary of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe.

19/8/2024 15:07 This Spider Uses a Light Show to Trick Eager Male Fireflies Into Its Web: This hardly seems sporting.