Tuesday / Wednesday at LSE

Tuesday November 11th

Two very busy days planned down at LSE. A 9:00a.m. arrival for time in Library - and beginning to work through the list of nearly 20 books I wanted to find. Highlights so far include Agassi's book on his time as a student of Karl Popper, though his Towards an Historiography of Science was not in. Also Bruno's Ash Wednesday Supper, Porter's book on Revolutions in History, a collection of essays on Feyerabend, a book on sociology of departments in universities (!), and a real find - Kragh's book on the Historiography of Science, and so on.

No History of Science lecture today as John Worrall is away in the USA at a conference. Today's seminar is on, with Caroline speaking on Tycho Brahe. My main contribution is to have remembered to bring down the internet link to the astronomical model site. Leonardo makes a few contributions, mainly against mine and Victor's view that Tycho's system is progressive versus Ptolemy and (perhaps) Copernicus.

I had lunch with most of the seminar group - Victor, Leonardo, Anne Marie and Caroline. Part of this was a discussion of history in general (Caroline did history and Philosophy at College). I feel that some of my work over the coming weeks should be on ideas of history - I'm am really out of touch with anything like current thinking on history.

My talk to the Hedge Fund group seems to go ok. I spoke for an hour from just a few notes and then took a further hour of questions (but most of the audience left at 3:00). Most people wanted to talk about trading systems. One person in the audience was an options trader and knew of Victor Neiderhoffer. There was also a very old lady in the audience who came up afterwards to congratulate me on a very clear talk. And a third year finance student said that it was a real shame that his course teachers didn't share my enthusiasm for their subjects - apparently I should be a professor

I just have time to check into my hotel this afternoon. This week I have a noisy front room with bunkbeds. But at least it is not smokey. Then back to LSE for the evening

Today's Philosophy of Science lecture was on introductory probability - not one of my favourite areas. I had thought that maybe the Seminar might drag, but actually it was fine. I made one or two ok points, for instance on the basis for assigning equal probs in absense of any evidence. But I spent most of the seminar jotting down ideas on bayesianism confirmation e.g. that prior prob of H = x means anything implied by H must have a prob of greater than x, less than one. The lower the amount above x, the more impact on P(H) - but this means that as x rises, very few surprises can remain - not sure if this is a correct for science though. e.g. once P(Newton) = 0.6, no implication can have P(E) < 0.6.

Quite tired this evening - a quick Pizza on way to hotel and probably asleep by 10:30

Wednesday November 12

Awake early - lots of traffic noise outside. Time for an hours reading, then down to LSE for the 8:00 am library opening. Agassi has a new book on History of Science that was published in March 2008, but is not yet in library. I really want to read this but it is £75 to buy. Spent an hour or so reading a Very Short Introduction to History, and spent some time on LSE PCs looking at how to access BJPS articles - I have found actual hard copies but online journal access is something I've not looked at before. I could print off hundreds of articles!!

10:00 Dissertation seminar by Femke. She has three possible ideas but they are very general and difficult to pin down at this stage. It must be very hard for someone so early in their Philosophy and History of Science study to come up with a good topic. I can think of hundreds that I could do, but that just reflects my greater time of study. On the way out, Miklos's comments from that I seem to be doing very well so far on the course.

Spent a hour having a drink and a chat with Vicenzo. He is the other part time student on my course but is on year 2. We talked about his part-time experiences and about the various seminars and different contributions. Having read a bit of Agassi's book I can confirm that none of them are like the old Popper seminars!

As a result of my library time, I have so many books with me for the journey home - it turns out I selected 12 in all.