1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. John C. Baez

John C. Baez Quotes

John Carlos Baez is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside in Riverside, California. He is known for his work on spin foams in loop quantum gravity. For some time, his research had focused on applications of higher categories to physics and other things.Baez is also known to science fans as the author of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, an irregular column on the internet featuring mathematical exposition and criticism. He started This Week's Finds in 1993 for the Usenet community, and it now has a following in its new form, the blog "Azimuth". This Week's Finds anticipated the concept of a personal weblog. Additionally, Baez is known on the World Wide Web as the author of the crackpot index.



Wikipedia  

✵ 12. June 1961
John C. Baez photo
John C. Baez: 4   quotes 0   likes

Famous John C. Baez Quotes

“Quantum theory may be formulated using Hilbert spaces over any of the three associative normed division algebras: the real numbers, the complex numbers and the quaternions. Indeed, these three choices appear naturally in a number of axiomatic approaches. However, there are internal problems with real or quaternionic quantum theory. Here we argue that these problems can be resolved if we treat real, complex and quaternionic quantum theory as part of a unified structure. Dyson called this structure the "three-fold way"…. This three-fold classification sheds light on the physics of time reversal symmetry, and it already plays an important role in particle physics.”

John C. Baez

“The conformal invariance of the Yang-Mills equations in four dimensions greatly facilitates the study of the temporal asymptotic behavior of their solutions.”

John C. Baez

[Scattering for the Yang-Mills equations, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc., 315, 1989, 823–832, 10.1090/S0002-9947-1989-0949897-7] (p. 823)

“The most popular approach to quantum gravity is string theory. Despite decades of hard work by many very smart people, it's far from clear that this theory is successful. It's made no predictions that have been confirmed by experiment. In fact, it's made few predictions that we have any hope of testing anytime soon! Finding certain sorts of particles at the big new particle accelerator near Geneva would count as partial confirmation, but string theory says very little about the details of what we should expect. In fact, thanks to the vast "landscape" of string theory models that researchers are uncovering, it keeps getting harder to squeeze specific predictions out of this theory.”

John C. Baez

[2008, http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html#baez, Should I be thinking about quantum gravity? (essay at the World Question Center), edge.org]

“Besides their possible role in physics, the octonions are important because they tie together some algebraic structures that otherwise appear as isolated and inexplicable exceptions.”

John C. Baez

The octonions, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 39, 145–205, 2002 http://doi.org/10.1090/S0273-0979-01-00934-X, (p. 147)

Similar authors

Donna Strickland photo
Donna Strickland 4
Canadian physicist, 2018 Nobel prize winner
Jenny Han photo
Jenny Han 226
American writer
Cassandra Clare photo
Cassandra Clare 2041
American author
P. C. Cast photo
P. C. Cast 136
American writer
Christopher Paolini photo
Christopher Paolini 166
American author
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Chuck Palahniuk 555
American novelist, essayist
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Patrick Rothfuss 236
American fantasy writer
Andrew Biersack photo
Andrew Biersack 24
American singer-songwriter
Jared Leto photo
Jared Leto 12
American actor and musician
Dan Brown photo
Dan Brown 135
American author