Comment by 8bitsrule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8bitsrule | Hacker News Reader

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We have made some fundamental mistake...

I was just thinking about how Schroedinger 'worked up' his famed equation. A physics historian told me (not in these words) that he didn't actually 'derive it' but sort of ... 'arrived at' it.

The WP bio says that in his fourth paper on the subject (which first involves time), he greatly simplified the -equation- by introducing complex numbers ... and then:

"something magical happened, and all of wave mechanics was at his feet.... Schrödinger was not entirely comfortable with the implications of quantum theory. He wrote about the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics, saying: 'I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.'"

Introducing complex numbers -made the equation more beautiful-. The equation e^(i*pi) = i^2 is amazing, but may also suggest that we're not looking at the math's basement level.

It's been suggested that all of the pyramids' stones couldn't have been cut with two-foot-long copper saws. It may be that the 'beauty' people are seeking is limited by their tools, as much as their imaginations.

> It's been suggested that all of the pyramids' stones couldn't have been cut with two-foot-long copper saws.

Pyramid stones are made of concrete and cast in place. It's very primitive technology, which is known for few thousand years.

The pyramids were not made of concrete. They were built from sandstone blocks and clad in limestone. and the stones were cut using stone tools, not copper. Copper is too soft for stone working but quite a few rocks are harder than sandstone.

Quote:

The pair believe that the concrete method was used only for the stones on the higher levels of the Pyramids. There are some 2.5 million stone blocks on the Cheops Pyramid. The 10-tonne granite blocks at their heart were also natural, they say. The professors agree with the “Davidovits theory” that soft limestone was quarried on the damp south side of the Giza Plateau. This was then dissolved in large, Nile-fed pools until it became a watery slurry.

Lime from fireplace ash and salt were mixed in with it. The water evaporated, leaving a moist, clay-like mixture. This wet “concrete” would have been carried to the site and packed into wooden moulds where it would set hard in a few days. Mr Davidovits and his team at the Geopolymer Institute at Saint-Quentin tested the method recently, producing a large block of concrete limestone in ten days.

http://www.ce.memphis.edu/1101/interesting_stuff/pyramids_in... https://www.geopolymer.org/archaeology/pyramids/are-pyramids...

This is very far from accepted and is thoroughly refuted here

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288698728_Evidence_...

Accepted by whom? Information about ancient concrete and other types of cementation can be found in various books, e.g. [1].

I saw picture of cement klin (oven?, non-native speaker) in Peru, built more than thousand years ago, which looks _exactly_ like freshly build cement klin near to my home (Rivne, Ukraine), but labeled as "an ancient temple, filled with dirt".

[1]: Lea's Chemistry of Cement and Concrete

Concrete is a science of its own- it is not so simple at all.

Yep, so it's why it was forgotten so many times in history.

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