nyc111

This is a well-known rite of passage in academic physics and mathematics. But it is usually celebrated by junior members of the profession who think they’ve made it because some layman wrote them to ask their opinion on some topic. But the author is emeritus so I guess he just wanted some diversion by publishing a fluff piece

Hubble observed less than 30 galaxies. I could never understand how they concluded that the _whole universe_ was expanding by observing a mere 30 galaxies. It doesn't make sense in terms of statistics. The sample is too small, more importantly, the population is unknown.

As usual comments here are more informative than the article. But no one mentioned that this is not a physics subject. The question “What is a particle?” belongs to philosophy not to physics. The problem for physicists is that they assume the Newtonian worldview that the world is made of indivisible units of matter called particles. [1] This assumption cannot be questioned. It is a dogma of the profession. But their experiments tell physicists again and again that the world is not made of indivisible units of matter. Physicists can either respect their experiments and accept that the world is not made of indivisible units of matter called particles or choose sophistry and try to fit their dogma into nature by wordplay. Physicists chose the latter and instead of dropping their dogma they keep changing the definition of the word “particle”. It does not matter what you call those indivisible units of matter. Physicists used to call them “particle” then “field”, then “excitation” and many other names that can be used case by case to save their sacred Newtonian dogma. Physicists’ dilemma is that they do business under the professional name of “particle” physicists. If there is no particle their profession would be redundant. Obviously they cannot call themselves “excitations of the field physicists”. So they keep the word particle but keep changing the meaning of it and they blame the public for not understanding physics jargon. My advice to physicists: respect the authority of your own experiments and drop the Newtonian dogma of a material world made of indivisible units of matter.

[1] "God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable movable particles." Isaac Newton, Optics, 1704, Book III, page: 375

"So much for atoms being uncuttable."

This is a very common misunderstanding of what Democritus' atom means. Strassler forgets what he wrote a few sentences ago. Dalton named "atom" what he believed to be indivisible with the technology available to him at the moment. Dalton's atom was never indivisible. There is a confusion about naming. Physicists gladly perpetuate this confusion to suggest that they divided something that was indivisible. Democritus' atom is an ideal. Assuming that indivisible objects exist, if they exist, we call them atom. Of course, we can never know if what we observe is the limit of our technology or if it is really indivisible.

I think Strassler does not see that physics jargon is inherently and intentionally confusing and physicists like it that way.

I tried several paragraphs from HN Guidelines and it could not come up with anything simpler or better. It produced some pointlessly snarky remarks.

I checked the links and I think it's amazing and it answers with Latex formatted notation.

But I was curious and I asked something very simple, Euclid's first postulate and I got this answer:

Euclid's Postulate 1: "Through any two points, there is exactly one straight line."

In fact Euclid's Postulate 1 is "To draw a straight line from any point to any point." http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/bookI/bookI.h...

I think AI answer is not correct, it may be some textbook interpretation but I was expecting Euclid's exact wording.

Edit: Google's Gemini gives the exact wording of the postulate and then comments that this means that you can draw one line bitween two points. I think this is better

I wasn't clear if they bought the "Moleskine" trademark, did they? Apparently the original company had been sold before.

I wonder if such an office is sustainable in the long run. I never saw an office like this. The video is about a worker in the PR department in a staffing company.

The article mentions 26 constants but it seems there is more than that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_physical_constants

And I think if the constant is a ratio, like the fine structure constant, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant no change can be detected, even if there were a change because the ratio will stay the same. Likewise a constant like pi will stay the same because it is a ratio.

Same goes for their new thorium “clock”. They define it as their unit to measure everything else. They assume that all constants may be changing but not their thorium clock. I think this is an unjustified assumption.

The subject of study of physics is "physical quantity" which is defined as a number with a unit. Physical quantity doesn't have to be a "physical" quantity. So physics does not study exclusively physical objects. I think this is how mathematics and physics are related, mathematics does not deal with units (except unity).

Thanks, this was helpful.

Thanks for posting this. I downloaded and was playing with it. But I'm puzzled about new note creation. When I type in the title next to the equal sign, I need to move the cursor below the date line to compose the note. Shouldn't the date line be on top?

"you need to develop a level of automaticity on your foundational skills."

This makes sense. So in this regard there is an analogy with sports where you need to perform foundational skills without thinking.

“ Discomfort is Required

Deliberate practice requires repeatedly practicing skills that are beyond one’s repertoire. However, this tends to be more effortful and less enjoyable, which can mislead non-experts to practice within their level of comfort.”

This seems to be one of the key factors. But how do we apply deliberate practice to mathematics? Unless we are planning to enter math competitions, speed doesn’t seem to be relevant to make mathematical discoveries.

"By the fourth day, she had weakened further and no longer felt hunger or thirst..."

So, the feeling of hunger disappears after a few days of fasting or semi-fasting? I would assume that hunger will increase. You'll start to dream about nothing but food.

What does “number of floats between 1 and positive infinity” mean? For example, in PHP “A numeric value that is larger than PHP_FLOAT_MAX is considered infinite.” So in computer science “infinite” means a number greater than the largest number the computer can handle and it has nothing to do with mathematical infinity or the philosophical infinity. I’ve been trying to understand how mathematicians define infinite, that’s why I’m asking.

“Yet these are concepts that reify a certain approximate sketch of the structure of the world. Physicists once thought that these categories were fundamental and real, but we now understand them as necessarily inexact because they ignore the finer details that our instruments have just not been able to measure.“

How do you get the archie.is link?

In this video https://youtu.be/lVKT09eLTn8?si=ODZRS3cMvvDqlTOz it looks like he traces only the rough outline and fills in the details free hand. If so it is amazing. It's amazing too if he traces the whole thing from a photo. Chuck Close transfers the photo into canvas in small squares and paints the squares, so his style is more mechanical.

This game was played for hundred years in real time. The referee stopped the game in real time when he saw an action violating the rules. Now with VAR decisions are no longer made in real time in the pitch. Some guys looking at screens miles away from the stadium make a decision by debating the position. This is a game. If the referee always whistled what he saw and nothing else that’s the reality of the game. Slow motion is a different reality. It is ridiculous to measure offside to centimeters in a game where the referee measures 10 yards by his steps! And in throw-ins players usually take several steps away from where the ball went out. And you measure offside with 15 cameras

How do they interpret the three handbag like carvings on top also seen in other prehistoric figures https://www.pinterest.com/pin/642466703103282106/

g is the distance an earth skimming satellite falls to earth in one second along the tangent. But I don't know how it is related to pi.

"for discovering that subatomic particles, [...] are always symmetrical."

"for overturning what had been considered a fundamental law of nature — that particles are always symmetrical"

The first sentence from the subhead is wrong. The second sentence is correct. "the laws of physics are not identical when observed directly or as a mirror image."

So, before Lee made his discovery physicists believed (or assumed, or conjectured, or theorized) that “the laws of physics were identical whether observed directly or as a mirror image." Lee and Yang proposed that this did not always hold. Their proposal was later confirmed by experiments.

So, what physicists believed before Lee, was not a law of nature. Lee challenged what his colleagues believed to be true.

But you are right all so called laws of physics are provisional.

“subatomic particles, contrary to what scientists thought, are always symmetrical.”

This cannot be called challenging a law of nature. He questions what his colleagues generally believed. He challenges a convention of physics profession not a law of nature. But we know that media must exaggerate to sell papers.

They list some causes but I don't think they are really helpful. Why do we exaggerate when faced with certain situations?

“This left a small but unsettling possibility that many zeros could be hiding out right at three-quarters.”

Ok, but if zeros there are found some mathematicians may as well call them “trivial zeros.” Can there be an objection to that?

"Scientism is the view that [...] scientific method [is] the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality."

I don't think the so-called scientific method is a method or algorithm. If I'm working on an experiment and I'm stuck and something good occurs to me in my dream, this is not scientific method but it may help to further the experiment.