SPECULATIONS ON THE FŒTUS.

On the Fœtus in Utero

Speculations on the Stationary State

What is the historical significance of the implosion of neo-liberalism, coming less than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union? A disconcerting thought experiment suggests itself. The ussr, it might be recalled, had reached the summit of its power in the 70s, shortly before stumbling downward into a spiral of retrenchment, drift and collapse. Could a comparable reversal of fortune...

Speculations on the Glass Trans

I speculate about the ingredients needed for a theory of the liquid+glass transition. Experimental phenomenology suggests that there is an underlying equilibrium thermodynamic transition. Because of a breakdown of hyperscaling, the free-energy barriers to relaxation diverge at the critical point leading to a Vogel-Fulcher-like divergence of the characteristic relaxation times. The glass is thus...

Speculations on Story Puns

There is a class of joke which consists of an anecdote , which is sometimes quite long and often has no inherently humorous content, followed by a punchline which is a distorted form of some well-known phrase, proverb or quotation. Usually the punchline purports to summarise or draw a moral from the preceding story. This genre has some unusual aspects, from the viewpoint of conventional claims ...

Speculations on Hodge theory

Recall that a Mumford–Tate domain DM is an open set in its compact dual ĎM — the latter is a rational homogeneous variety defined over Q (think of the upper half plane H ⊂ P1). Thus a polarized Hodge structure (PHS) φ has an “upstairs” field of definition k(φ). If H•,• ⊂ T •,• is a subalgebra then the Noether-Lefschetz locus NLH = {φ : Hg•,• φ ⊇ H} is defined over Q. Its components are defined ...