Randall's Theory Increases Number of Dimensions in Physical Universe (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Randall's Theory Increases Number of Dimensions in Physical Universe (2009)

thecrimson.com

48 pointsbootload9 comments

Title led me to expect a discussion of the mentioned theory; it turns out to be a biographical piece in the "Look how awesome our alumni are!" portion of the Harvard Crimson magazine. Nothing wrong with that per se, but not what I expected from the title.

This is exactly correct. I flagged the submission.

@jerf, @silentplummet (all of 39 days) the article is posted on "thecrimson", expect it to be a bit bio-ish. What title would you give the article? For me I only change the title if it's too long. This is a fault of story posters web wide. A bug bear of mine - there is no universal editor on the web.

Well, since you ask, I wouldn't post it as it doesn't seem to have anything of HN interest ("people exist who have done interesting things" isn't all that great of an article to start with, it being in a marketing context cuts it down even more), but apparently 47 people disagreed, so shrug. I do sometimes wonder if there's a substantial contingent of people who upvote things based on the title alone, bolstered by the occasional appearance of commenters who have clearly only read the title, but there's no way for me to prove it either way. (And that's an observation well beyond just this one article, btw, not a targeted thing.)

"I wouldn't post it as it doesn't seem to have anything of HN interest"

I add anything I find interesting. You'd be surprised what the HN crowd read. A lot of the time I'll add two stories. The first a journal with an in-depth description of some topic. Followed by a general science article that points to the journal. Rarely does the source article get upvoted to the first page. Not always and it depends on the topic.

The article added here is further information on this article "What killed the dinosaurs? Dark matter, says theoretical physicist Lisa Randall", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10714657 I was curious what kind of background Randall has to theorise an idea linking asteroid impacts, dinosaur extinction and dark matter.

Dimensions in Physics are like indirections in C. One extra level of indirection fixes most problems in C. Same for Physics. The challenge is in explaining with less dimensions.

I don't see how that analogy works at all. Higher dimensions have completely different physics than lower dimensions. Whereas pointers are just an interpretation of an already existing data type.

Article is from 2009.

My first thought was something XKCD related. I was dissapointed.

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