Condensed concepts

On a recent flight, I watched the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley . It chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes , founder of a start-up, Theranos , that claimed to have revolutionised blood testing. There is a good article in the New Republic What the Theranos Documentary Misses Instead of examining Elizabeth Holmes’s personality, look at the people and systems that aided the company’s rise. In spite of the weaknesses described in that article, the documentary made me think about a range of issues at the interface of science, technology, philosophy, and social justice. The story underscores Kauzmann's maxim , `` people will often believe what they want to believe rather than what the evidence before them suggests they should believe.'' Truth matters. Eventually, we all bounce up against reality: scientific, technological, economic, legal, ...  It does not matter how much hype and BS one can get away, eventually, it

In my view, the central question that Condensed Matter Physics (CMP) seeks to answer is: How do the properties of a distinct phase in a material emerge from the interactions between the atoms of which the material is composed?  CMP aims to find a connection between the microscopic properties and macroscopic properties of a material. This requires determining three things: what the microscopic properties are, what the macroscopic properties are, and how the two are related. None of the three is particularly straightforward. Historically, the order of discovery is usually: macroscopic, microscopic, connection. Making the connection between microscopic and macroscopic can take decades, as exemplified in the BCS theory of superconductivity. Arguably, the central concept to describe the macroscopic properties is broken symmetry , which can be quantified in terms of an order parameter . Connecting this microscopics is not obvious. For example, with superconductivity, the sequence of di