User:Kwamikagami

A few words about my interests: I love languages, travel, and the sciences. Recently I've been combining two of these in trying to verify the English pronunciation of the solar system's moons and asteroids, and finding the Arabic, Chinese, and Sumerian sources for the names of stars. I'm fascinated by cladistics (especially the major branchings of the eukaryotes), astronomy, and physics.

In the next few years, I hope to see genetic assays clarify the relationships of the eukaryotes, and perhaps the bacteria and archaea.

For language, I believe grammar is an epiphenomenon of generations of language use, not something hardwired into our brains. The more we learn about how the brain works, the more it looks like Noam Chomsky and his advocates like Pinker are completely off base. At best, the neurological and developmental evidence put forward for these "formalist" models (when they even bother with evidence) seem to be cases of the theorists finding only what they want to see. For "functional" views less publicized by the popular press, but much better supported by the evidence, see Joan Bybee, Elizabeth Bates, Michael Tomasello, William Croft, Sandra Thompson, Bernard Comrie, Maria Polinsky, and their associates.

I've been shocked to find how poor the evidence for the Standard Model of particle physics really is: quarks are not very convincing as a hypothesis, they're not predictive, and I'm starting to wonder if they aren't mere figments of the model. The innumerable variants of String Theory, of course, are even worse. Richard Feynman made some sensible observations here. Then there's the problem of singularities: why should black holes collapse to geometric points? just because we don't know of any form of matter denser than nucleonic or (hypothetically) quark matter? It's also problematic for elementary particles to be singularities, and quantum mechanics in its traditional interpretation just fudges the issue. David Bohm, who wrote the most popular textbook on quantum mechanics of his generation, spent the latter part of his life trying to reconcile QM and classical physics by taking the view that the Copenhagen interpretation of QM is nonsense (as evidenced by Schrödinger's Cat and our inability to describe the collapse of a simple wave function), as are alternatives such as the many-worlds interpretation, and that QM can be made deterministic and fitting relativity rather than the other way around. There's also a possibility that electromagnetism can be derived from gravitation through a 5-dimensional Kaluza-Klein modification of general relativity (something that Einstein thought might prove fruitful), and that nuclear forces might be derived from electromagnetism without requiring any further "dimensions".

Then there's the "aquatic ape" hypothesis, the speculation that at least for a while, our ancestors lived in an amphibious environment like the modern proboscis monkey, which is the only other primate to be observed walking upright for extended distances, or to carry its young on the hip like we do. Only circumstantial evidence for this; it will be interesting to see if anything ever comes of it.

The name "Kwami", by the way, is a Twi (Ashanti) name for a man born on a Saturday, which I was.