“In this post I want to try and paint a picture of what it means to have a field that respects the laws of quantum mechanics.  In a previous post, I introduced the idea of fields (and, in particular, the all-important electric field) by making an analogy with ripples on a pond or water spraying out from a hose.  These images go surprisingly far in allowing one to understand how fields work, but they are ultimately limited in their correctness because the implied rules that govern them are completely classical.  In order to really understand how nature works at its most basic level, one has to think about a field with quantum rules.”

“It’s aspirational stuff, and as he riffs I notice the team shares an unexpected point of inspiration: Disneyland. “Walt Disney believed that he could take a fantasy world from cinema that he was making, and basically create a physical experience that you could walk into,” Gaeta says. “This is like a 2.0, supercharged version of the same philosophy.” It makes sense; when you zoom out, Gaeta’s grand vision resembles nothing so much as a digital Disneyland, and Walt Disney Imagineering even has a satellite team embedded at ILM for working on Disneyland attractions. “There’s a lot to be learned from those formats in the parks.””

“We are living in a depressing era in which we no longer have courage. We no longer think governments should have missions. But the market never chooses anything. IT wasn’t chosen by the market. Biotech wasn’t chosen by the market. Nanotech wasn’t chosen by the market. So why should green technology be chosen by the market? It comes back to the austerity craziness that we’re in today where governments are not allowed to dream; and green is a dream.”

“The custom is to think of value added in a corporation (or in the economy as a whole) as just the sum of the return to labor and the return to capital. But that is not quite right. There is a third component which I will call “monopoly rent” or, better still, just “rent.” It is not a return earned by capital or labor, but rather a return to the special position of the firm. It may come from traditional monopoly power, being the only producer of something, but there are other ways in which firms are at least partly protected from competition. Anything that hampers competition, sometimes even regulation itself, is a source of rent. We carelessly think of it as “belonging” to the capital side of the ledger, but that is arbitrary. The division of rent among the stakeholders of a firm is something to be bargained over, formally or informally.”

“I’d seen enough chinlone, or thought I had seen enough. I still honestly can’t say whether watching five minutes of the game or five days’ would be enough. It was hard to say you’d even seen it, or that it was even you seeing it. Something kind of terrifying happened if you watched enough chinlone: there was nothing, a perfect blankness between annihilation and calm.”

“What distinguishes Finland from France and even Hungary is its geographic proximity and historic intimacy with Russia. So another layer of romance and danger is added: Russia appeals to those who need to side with the more powerful. This is exactly what scares Sofi Oksanen and inspires Johan Bäckman.”