Slashdot Mirror
Is The Fabric of Space-Time Woven With Noise?
Grubert writes: "Some Australian mathematicians have found a way to explain many deep problems in fundamental physics using mathematical models based on noise. (This statement is slightly inaccurate; read the New Scientist article."
Given the justified head-scratching that accompanies any investigation into the origin, age, weight and dimensionality of the universe, and considering that this theory bears on each of these, it's exciting stuff. Could this be the beginning of a breakthrough in our understanding of /everything/?
Scientist 2: Can you keep the noise down, I'm trying to study.
Scientist 1: That's just it, man. Noise.
Scientist 2: Be quiet, please.
Universe: LALALALA LAAAAA LA LALALALA LALALALA LALALLALALALALLA LALALALALAAAAAAAALA LALAAA LA!
A new study from this week's New Slashdot Science reveals that not only are trolls inescapable in /. message boards, but that they are actually woven into the "fabric" of slashdot itself, due to unpredictable interactions of certain aspects of the source code.
/. users. Such questions as:
It is believed that this theory could answer many of the questions of current
1. Why are there so many useless, garbage posts?
2. Why do people persist in clogging the discussions with pure crap?
These questions become irrelevant and easily answered once it is realized that this sort of behavior is innate to slashdot and cannot be stopped. See newscientist.com for more information on this and other incredible scientific developments. Additionally please see Weekly World News for additional updates.
As for the article linked to in "the core laws of quantum mechanics ...":
There's a slim chance of this not being a crackpot's work, but I seriously doubt it. Over the years I've seen a fair share of physics "outside geniuses" who've discovered something which radically transforms our world view and which every scientist before them had missed. Every single one of those has turned out to be a complete crackpot.
Before you turn on the flamethrowers: yes, I'm fully aware that Einstein was a patent office clerk and not a university physicist at the time, but if you read any of his 1905 papers they are solid science from the first word to the last. This is not!
A few tips:
- It's too long (86 pages) and wordy, full of adjectives. Typical of crackpots in love with their own work but with zero experience in actual scientific writing.
- These guys don't know how to use latex properly (everything is in text mode), which basically every working physicist uses to communicate.
- There's way too little math for something that "deep". And what little there is doesn't look promising. I didn't read the whole thing (barely skimmed it) but one "theorem" (Causal Trace Theo, p. 52) is a linear algebra triviality, while their use of "mixed states" is incorrect. In statistical quantum mechanics, a mixed state (more properly referred to as a mixed ensemble) is an ensemble of states which can *not* be expressed as a linear combination of states. This is fundamentally different from simply expressing any pure state as a linear combination of other states, which is nothing but a choice of basis (another linear algebra triviality). Mixed ensembles are precisely what makes statistical quantum physics different from "regular" quantum mechanics of simple systems, and is a topic not covered by most undergraduate quantum mech. books.
As I said earlier, there's a non-vanishing probability that these guys aren't crackpots. If you ask me, it's comparable to that of a cracked eggshell reassembling itself: non-zero in the purest statistical sense, zero for all practical purposes.