Ancient Greek's theories rooted in the scientific method? That's news to me. Could you pinpoint one?
You miss the point. No physicist thinks that the Standard Model (or GR) is the final theory; many details of it are open to question, and they'll probably be disproved someday.
But there are fundamental principles that are beyond specific theories. We call them meta-theories. That is, a framework that any theory has to obey to be taken seriously.
Take FTL communication. Its impossibility is implied by the causality principle. And if you've given up causality, you might as well give up physics. Related to it is locality. No theory that allows me to change things in Andromeda while messing with things here can make any sense (quantum non-locality is local).
Or NP problems. Deutsch has a beautiful paper in which he uses time travel to devise an algorithm to solve NP problems in polynomial time. He then argues that what this proves is that time travel is impossible. For him (and I agree), the hardness of NP-complete problems is a fundamental property of nature, and a theory that violates it is just plain wrong.
There's another paper, whose author I forgot, in which is shown that if you add a non-linear term to Schrödinger's equation you can violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the second law of thermodynamics (among other things). Again, what this proves is that quantum mechanics is definitely linear.
You should pay more attention to arXiv. Most research published these days is there. This article is. Which makes me wonder, why have they linked to PRL and not arXiv.
Even though he can't talk, he's right. You have to have some healthy skepticism, but at some point it just becomes stupid.
Can you honestly conceive of "technological advances" that would make FTL communication possible?
Or some engine more efficient than Carnot's cycle?
Or a computer that could compute all the evolution of the universe in a second?
There are things that just don't make sense. These things are so fundamental that to give up on them you would have to give up all of modern physics, and any hope of being able to correctly describe nature.
The problem is that hyper or super don't belong to the SI.
I propose that we should use kilodrive for it, so we can upgrade it to megadrive or gigadrive when the technology becomes more refined, or downgrade it to just drive if it is proven useless.
I'd like to point out that even though the rejection rates are so high, they aren't nearly high enough. There's a significant number of articles (never calculated the exact percentage; it seems to me be more than half) that are published and then languish uncited forever.
One poster above mentioned adding ISBN numbers to an article, and apparently an evil, faceless editor reverted his edits, making him/sadface. What was not mentioned was whether they actually asked in the discussion page first if they may add these numbers in order to enrich the article, which would make the motives behind the edit known (and the account/IP for the comment and edit are the same, therefore anyone conducting an edit review can known the motivation for the edit).
Are you bloody mad? We should now ask permission to make any edit, no matter how trivial or neutral they might be? What happened to "be bold"?
Most of my edits are without any comments. They are usually obvious (like the ISBN). Only when they aren't, or change the lead section, I leave a note in the talk page.
I've actually looked at your edits and the following discussion. There's nothing in it to claim that wikipedia is rotten from top to the bottom. They seem to me honest editors that are annoyed by your attitude. Let me give you some free advice: when you make major changes to an article, explain why in the talk page. You'll find your edits reverted very rarely. Mine, at least, never where. Except when I was actually trolling.
As for the merits of your edits per se, I agree with you on the most part. A math article should begin with a formal definition (that's obvious), and the current rambling is worse than useless. But the best way to define the function to me is by f'=f; it's naturally linked to the 'exponential growth' people see in the streets, and anyone with half a brain can deduce the series from it.
You just couldn't resist using Everett's interpretation, could you?
I don't think it is a good idea using it to explain something to laymen. They usually end up thinking that quantum mechanics is some kind of inaccessible black magic.
Just to be clear here, it is possible (and it is what's done most of the times) to describe quantum mechanics without ever talking about splitting universes.
Let's see: the qubit can hold some combination of 0 and 1 (NOT 0 and 1). By the same reason (superposition), the quantum computer can perform multiples paths of computation at the same time, which can be used to accelerate the computation of some algorithms.
Quantum computers are quite sensible to noise; it causes decoherence, which can be understood as a loss of quantumness. In other words, a qubit that suffered too much decoherence can't hold a superposition of 0 and 1 anymore.
There are some jokes in the Hitchhiker's trilogy that are hard to get, but this one from the Restaurant took me the longest:
"Did you know," interrupting the ghostly figure, fixing Zaphod with a stern look, "that Betelgeuse Five has developed a very slight eccentricy in its orbit?"
So DNA was just joking about the impeding nova, giving a clue in the disturbances it would cause in its planets' orbits.
So what you suggest? To accept the report of your undergrad that he violated the law of conservation of momentum? Or another that violated the conservation of energy?
Deviations from the laws are interesting, in that you can go find out why your experiment deviated, and learn a lot in the process. You don't learn anything if you just assume your experiment went wrong because of x, and leave it that way. You do the experiment again to check if it was what you imagined.
I'm talking as someone who has plenty of times repeated his experiments. I don't know what rock you live under, but in my college it was just unacceptable to turn in a speculative report. Sure, there were kids that faked data so they wouldn't have to redo the experiment, and most weren't caught. Fuck them, they're just hurting themselves.
And I don't buy the limited lab time either. The basic lab sciences are always empty, you just go there out of class time. If you are in the advanced course, it's rarer that you commit such basic mistakes, but if you do, you can prepare yourself to sleep a little less that day.
Okay, you know what you're doing, so you must be able to change the settings and put your user as superuser.
The problem is when the default is superuser, so granny has to find out how to degrade her powers to avoid infecting the machine with her cool email attachments. Face, the great majority of user are five-year-olds when it comes to computer literacy. A app who requires these users to be root is just criminal.
Ubuntu does it the right way. root is disabled by default, and only the first user is automatically added to sudoers. Those who know what they are doing can enable root in a couple of seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think so, you ought to study more physics. All three are equally impossible. But the second one really offends my aesthetics instinct.
Ancient Greek's theories rooted in the scientific method? That's news to me. Could you pinpoint one?
You miss the point. No physicist thinks that the Standard Model (or GR) is the final theory; many details of it are open to question, and they'll probably be disproved someday.
But there are fundamental principles that are beyond specific theories. We call them meta-theories. That is, a framework that any theory has to obey to be taken seriously.
Take FTL communication. Its impossibility is implied by the causality principle. And if you've given up causality, you might as well give up physics. Related to it is locality. No theory that allows me to change things in Andromeda while messing with things here can make any sense (quantum non-locality is local).
Or NP problems. Deutsch has a beautiful paper in which he uses time travel to devise an algorithm to solve NP problems in polynomial time. He then argues that what this proves is that time travel is impossible. For him (and I agree), the hardness of NP-complete problems is a fundamental property of nature, and a theory that violates it is just plain wrong.
There's another paper, whose author I forgot, in which is shown that if you add a non-linear term to Schrödinger's equation you can violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the second law of thermodynamics (among other things). Again, what this proves is that quantum mechanics is definitely linear.
You should pay more attention to arXiv. Most research published these days is there. This article is. Which makes me wonder, why have they linked to PRL and not arXiv.
Even though he can't talk, he's right. You have to have some healthy skepticism, but at some point it just becomes stupid.
Can you honestly conceive of "technological advances" that would make FTL communication possible?
Or some engine more efficient than Carnot's cycle?
Or a computer that could compute all the evolution of the universe in a second?
There are things that just don't make sense. These things are so fundamental that to give up on them you would have to give up all of modern physics, and any hope of being able to correctly describe nature.
The problem is that hyper or super don't belong to the SI.
I propose that we should use kilodrive for it, so we can upgrade it to megadrive or gigadrive when the technology becomes more refined, or downgrade it to just drive if it is proven useless.
Probably it'll be illegal to turn it off. The same way it's illegal to drive at night with the lights out.
Disclosure? It isn't a disclosure, it's more of a disclaimer.
AFAIK you disclosure when you have a potential bias about the subject matter, and want to be honest about it. What you have here is bragging rights.
(Disclosure: I'm a physicist too)
Of course there's a pattern. In fact, an infinite number of them. My favourite is the one in the generalised continued fraction expansion of pi.
I'd like to point out that even though the rejection rates are so high, they aren't nearly high enough. There's a significant number of articles (never calculated the exact percentage; it seems to me be more than half) that are published and then languish uncited forever.
I have bad news for you. Reality has a strong materialistic/scientific/atheistic bias.
One poster above mentioned adding ISBN numbers to an article, and apparently an evil, faceless editor reverted his edits, making him /sadface. What was not mentioned was whether they actually asked in the discussion page first if they may add these numbers in order to enrich the article, which would make the motives behind the edit known (and the account/IP for the comment and edit are the same, therefore anyone conducting an edit review can known the motivation for the edit).
Are you bloody mad? We should now ask permission to make any edit, no matter how trivial or neutral they might be? What happened to "be bold"?
Most of my edits are without any comments. They are usually obvious (like the ISBN). Only when they aren't, or change the lead section, I leave a note in the talk page.
I've actually looked at your edits and the following discussion. There's nothing in it to claim that wikipedia is rotten from top to the bottom. They seem to me honest editors that are annoyed by your attitude. Let me give you some free advice: when you make major changes to an article, explain why in the talk page. You'll find your edits reverted very rarely. Mine, at least, never where. Except when I was actually trolling.
As for the merits of your edits per se, I agree with you on the most part. A math article should begin with a formal definition (that's obvious), and the current rambling is worse than useless. But the best way to define the function to me is by f'=f; it's naturally linked to the 'exponential growth' people see in the streets, and anyone with half a brain can deduce the series from it.
You just couldn't resist using Everett's interpretation, could you?
I don't think it is a good idea using it to explain something to laymen. They usually end up thinking that quantum mechanics is some kind of inaccessible black magic.
Just to be clear here, it is possible (and it is what's done most of the times) to describe quantum mechanics without ever talking about splitting universes.
Let's see: the qubit can hold some combination of 0 and 1 (NOT 0 and 1). By the same reason (superposition), the quantum computer can perform multiples paths of computation at the same time, which can be used to accelerate the computation of some algorithms.
Quantum computers are quite sensible to noise; it causes decoherence, which can be understood as a loss of quantumness. In other words, a qubit that suffered too much decoherence can't hold a superposition of 0 and 1 anymore.
See? It wasn't that difficult.
That's why I always indent my code GNU-style:
void foo()
{
do_nothing();
}
http://xkcd.com/145/
It is not that incorrect. Anyway, it is the type of linguistical hacking that I appreciate.
There are some jokes in the Hitchhiker's trilogy that are hard to get, but this one from the Restaurant took me the longest:
"Did you know," interrupting the ghostly figure, fixing Zaphod with a stern look, "that Betelgeuse Five has developed a very slight eccentricy in its orbit?"
So DNA was just joking about the impeding nova, giving a clue in the disturbances it would cause in its planets' orbits.
Shit, I feel dumb.
We make war on our neighbors over resources and things that matter even less than that.
Try to live in a desert without water and tell me that resources aren't important.
And ALL CAPS ARE BAD MANNERS! The <em> tag exists for a reason.
So what you suggest? To accept the report of your undergrad that he violated the law of conservation of momentum? Or another that violated the conservation of energy?
Deviations from the laws are interesting, in that you can go find out why your experiment deviated, and learn a lot in the process. You don't learn anything if you just assume your experiment went wrong because of x, and leave it that way. You do the experiment again to check if it was what you imagined.
I'm talking as someone who has plenty of times repeated his experiments. I don't know what rock you live under, but in my college it was just unacceptable to turn in a speculative report. Sure, there were kids that faked data so they wouldn't have to redo the experiment, and most weren't caught. Fuck them, they're just hurting themselves.
And I don't buy the limited lab time either. The basic lab sciences are always empty, you just go there out of class time. If you are in the advanced course, it's rarer that you commit such basic mistakes, but if you do, you can prepare yourself to sleep a little less that day.
Or you can just stick the disc in the player, go make popcorn and when it's ready the movie has reached menu. What's so difficult about it?
I'm not talking about media you purchase, but media you rent.
Well, I rarely watch a DVD more than once.
Sure, films that I like are on my PC, but it's just stupid ripping every film just to get rid of the warnings.
I'd bet that ripping the DVD takes more than a minute.
I agree with your point entirely. I'm atheistic.
But what I'm amused with is your desktop environment analogy for belief systems. Bizarre, geeky, precise. Congrats.
IMHO completely orthogonal is plain exaggeration. Switzerland has some treaties with the EU, such as the Shengen and Dublin ones.
I think they are just linearly independent, not orthogonal.
Actually it's 1/sqrt(2) living cat + 1/sqrt(2) dead cat = 1 cat
Okay, you know what you're doing, so you must be able to change the settings and put your user as superuser.
The problem is when the default is superuser, so granny has to find out how to degrade her powers to avoid infecting the machine with her cool email attachments. Face, the great majority of user are five-year-olds when it comes to computer literacy. A app who requires these users to be root is just criminal.
Ubuntu does it the right way. root is disabled by default, and only the first user is automatically added to sudoers. Those who know what they are doing can enable root in a couple of seconds.