The n-Category Café

See also:

Augmented Social Cognition (ASC) Group @ PARC

Blog Research On Genre (BROG) Project @ Indiana University

In very brief summary the roundtable discussion last night maybe demonstrated that there are various interesting promising and also successful models for new web based science communication in the natural sciences (including math in that, for the purpose of this comment) - in particular the model of open access publishing where some remarkable successes were reported, while in the humanities and in parts in the social sciences the web is largely regarded more as a threat to the self-understanding of the field than a useful tool. This might be related to another general aspect which kept coming up: that the new possibility of online communication highlights existing differences in discussion cultures among different fields.

Now, next morning, first thing to notice is that the wireless access has broken down and one sees everyone cursing over their notebooks. Maybe a bit ironic to be forced offline while hearing presentations on how even Twitter is beginning to being used for serious science communication (namely apparently for keeping scientific groups together and synchronized: on which conference are you, what’s the state of your part on our article draft, etc. )

Then the first talk. The $n$-Category café keeps being mentioned as one of the interesting real-life examples. After Prof. Gloning in yesterdays roundtable discussion now also Gerd Fritz, professor for linguistic in Giessen, in his talk emphasizes what a useful and interesting resource for their research this interview by Bruce Bartlett has been.

Parts of this interview had been the topic of the roundtable discussion yesterday. At some point apparently John Baez said something about me using the blog to spread ideas around. I could provide a few examples for when that turned out to be have been very useful and fruitful and again there was a discussion about how that is a natural sciences or math thing which can’t work in the humanities, where the idea of spreading an idea before having written it up apparently is regarded as unthinkable.

That made me think of Deligne’s recollection of his time with Grothendieck, which Peter Woit recently highlighred here.

Anita Bader gave her talk on her PhD research that I mentioned. Among other things, she presented a graphic showing the activity of the usenet usegroup sci.physics.research that John originally initiated and ran and she analyzed what happened around the time that the $n$-Category Café was created.

I was very much involved back then and knew these things from the inside perspective, but it was certainly interesting to see this analyzed with concrete numbers. The spr newsgroup activity peaked in 2003. Then in 2005 when the $n$-Café finally branched off activity had dropped to 1/3 of that value.

There is a long story to be told here for what exactly happened, which probably those researching such group activity might be interested in. We chatted a bit more about this over coffee. It fits into one other general theme that kept coming up: with all the talk about web technology etc. it remains a simple fact that archaic mechanisms of group dynamics have a huge impact on what happens with science communication on the web.

Over coffee I also had a chance to chat with Michael Nentwich, director of the Institute for technology Assessment and Systems analysis. He wrote a book on “Cyber Science” already seven years ago. I haven’t seen it yet, but he says he has a whole chapter on the Café-metaphor in scientific and online communication.

Now I am already at the train station again, on my way back. Will hence have to miss the second 1.5 days of the conference, unfortunately. Tomorrow the talks will concentrate on weblogs as such.

Eric wrote:

I still get the impression that people use the nLab more to “publish” then to “work”. People seem to be reluctant to try working out stuff on the nLab and prefer to just contribute content they are already comfortable with.

I noticed that you and Andrew were discussing this on the $n$-Forum. I seem to recall that he pointed out that he was a ‘professional mathematician’ — someone who earns his living by publishing results — and thus wants there to be policies in place that deal with research done publicly on the $n$Lab.

You may resist this, but ultimately it needs to be addressed, one way or another.

Since the $n$Lab has been in operation I have been very busy finishing off papers, mostly with grad students. I wouldn’t do this sort of work on the $n$Lab until there are better policies in place for what to do when someone takes an idea from the $n$Lab and tries to publish it.

Urs has some ideas that are so big nobody can steal them: it’d be like a shoplifter trying to sneak out of a store carrying a dishwasher. Similarly, I feel no worries putting my work in progress with James Dolan on the $n$Lab. These ideas are so big — and so little of them has been made publicly visible yet — that I’m not afraid of anyone stealing them. But I don’t feel the same relaxed attitude with the smaller projects that I’m doing with grad students. Perhaps I’m being paranoid — but just as parents worry more about their kids than themselves, academics feel (and should feel) protective about their grad students.

Another issue will become more pressing when I write my first book on categories and $n$-categories. If people help me write it on the $n$Lab, do they become coauthors? Do we have to work out an agreement ahead of time?

There’s an interesting case where someone took some ideas I explained on the $n$-Café and developed them into a very nice paper. Luckily this person was very honorable: he credited me extensively, and now he’s asking me to be a coauthor. More on this as it develops.

But not everyone is so honorable.

We must always remember that on Tlön, the subject of knowledge is one and eternal. Within the sphere of literature, too, the idea of the single subject is all-powerful. Books are rarely signed, nor does the concept of plagiarism exist: It has been decided that all books are the work of a single author who is timeless and anonymous.

— J.L. Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Most fundamnetal and “relatively stable” physical systems go without valid descriptions (based on the “so called” laws of physics) eg the stable, definitive, discrete spectral-orbital properties of general:
nuclei
atoms with more than 3-electrons
molecules
molecular shapes
crystal properties (the high critical tempertaure predicted by BCS has been exceeded) etc
and
the relatively stability (apparently stable for billions of years)of the many-bodied solar system, also has no valid description.
Nonetheless the attempts (by the physics and math communities) at the descriptions of these systems is to use ever more general techniques which are believed to be able to describe all aspects of all details of physical possibility. (Perhaps most of these details are irrelevant).
Perhaps the direction of how physical description should proceed should be toward greater simplification and in a much more restricted context (as Coperniucus simpified the model of Ptolemy).
For example, the geometrization theorem of Thurston-Perelman may suggest that general shapes evolve towards stable discrete hyperbolic shapes over long time intervals (in 3-space).
The main structure of physical description of material systems’ stable spectral properties should be based on the very stable discrete hyperbolic shapes related to the discrete subgroups of the isometry and Hermitian-invariant classical Lie groups [SO(n), SO(n,1), SO and SU] ie the stable material spectral systems settle into such stable discrete hyperbolic shapes [in 3-space they would be hyperbolic 2-dimensional space-forms], and furthermore, the over-all containing space (which contains existence) (can) be higher-dimensional, but again based on stable discrete hyperbolic shapes. The higher dimensions are hidden due to the values of physical constants, where “dark matter” is not seen becasue of the natural size of interacting systems related to “dark matter” (ie observable dynamics) are of the size of the solar-system (and this is due to the values of physical constants which relate two adjacent dimensional levels to one another, [hypothesize that something similar to the van der Waals forces are smaller versions of the forces of dark matter]).
That is, things are not fundamentally random, rather the stable spectral properties of material systems are based in geometry … (though the apparent [and observed] fundamental randomness is a property which can be derived from the models of interations of mirco-systems in the new descriptive structrue based on linear, discrete, geometrically separable models of physical systems contained in simple metric-spaces, where Euclidean discrete shapes are continuous and thus can be used in dynamic descriptions to allow for both apparent fundmaental randomness as well as non-linearity to enter into the (details of the) dynamic properties of physical systems)… and the stable shapes are the discrete hyperbolic shapes which (when projected down to 3-space) identify the stable nuclei, general atoms, etc, and they also explain the (apparent) stability of the solar system.
But the currently (accepted) laws of physics cannot be used to describe the stability of fundamentally stable physical systems

yet it goes on-and-on about issues which are only related to the particle-collision model of bombs, where “the collision probabilities of broken-up components” determine the rate of transition from one relatively stable system to another relatively stable system, ie the chemical model of interacting relatively stable molecules by means of the probabilities of molecular collisions (the true focus of “particle-physics”), and spherically symmetric singularities of non-linear systems (in bomb engineering this is the model of the singularity of a very high energy particle collision) whose non-linear descriptions which are not useful in regard to practical creativity.
General relativity will never (through non-linear descriptions) identify the cause of the solar system stability.
Then the physics-math communities try to unify these bomb engineering models through string theory, and quantum gravity, etc. (all pursued with a great deal of superior self-importance [as by a set of people who believe they are in possession of an absolute truth] but rather pursued by a bunch of fools, who have been tricked by the military interests of the society).
Note: Spectral models of physical systems only work on systems whose descriptions are based in the geometry of classical physics, eg electric circuits, which may couple to properties of quantum systems, but the descriptions of these circuits do not depend on the laws of quantum physics, since quantum physics and particle physics do not describe any physical system (which is not a part of a transient state of a probabilistic transition) in a useful way, ie related to practical creativity, other than through “How Bosons and Fermions fill discrete states” of quantum systems, but the discrete states of these quantum systems have no valid description based on the laws of quantum physics.