I learnt about it from a commenter on Peter Woit's excellent blog, Not even wrong.
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Superconductivity: a poster child for emergence
Superconductivity beautifully illustrates the characteristics of emergent properties. Novelty. Distinct properties of the superconducting s...
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Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
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If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
I must confess that as a cond-mat physicist I don't even get the joke...
ReplyDeleteAdam
Hi Adam,
DeleteIt is subtle. I probably only appreciate it because I follow Peter Woit's blog. He does an excellent job exposing/critiquing string theorists who seem to claim SuperSymmetry (SUSY) and string theory is true, regardless of what experiment says.
The poster is a nice parody of many issues that come up on Peter's blog.
I take the comment about condensed matter to be a dig at theorists who just don't get the idea of emergence and think that reductionism is the answer to everything. I also take it to be a possible dig at the AdS/CFT crowd who claim string theory is going to solve condensed matter problems; and are bemused that some of us don't share their excitement or buy into their hype.
Hi,
DeleteI know Peter's blog (I saw the poster in the comments there too), it's just the joke on cond-mat physicists that I found cryptic. But your explanation makes sense.
Adam