Posts

Foundations of Physics and Mathematics

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There's obviously some overlap in these fields, because physics depends upon mathematics and so you would think that anyone in one of these fields would be at least cognizant of the other, but are they? There are plenty of people who claim to have answers and they often involve computation. But why? Roger Penrose wrote his book The Emperor's New Mind : Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics for these people, I think! In it he touches on the foundations of Mathematics too, but in a somewhat cursory way: his discussion of intuitionistic logic in that book is almost dismissive. I think it is the failure of mainstream physicists and logicians to relate these inter-dependent foundations that makes room for ideas of computation as somehow foundational in itself, rather than as a framework for effective reasoning. Here's a rather good survey of the idea of inertial frames in physics by Robert DiSalle , who is a Philosopher at UWO: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Popinat - Channeling Steve Jobs

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Subscribe to Popinat . The people who own Apple? Here's one, he's a surf-bum who lives in Hawaii and does theoretical physics. He's actually quite good at it too. See https://deferentialgeometry.org/   On exotic solutions to the Einstein equations (Goedel's rotatating universe with closed time-like curves): Whilst listening to Curt's interview with Julian Barbour the other day, and thinking about Newton's bucket and Mach's principle, I came across this paper from the Romanian Journal of Physics in 2006: Modeling the Electric and Magnetic Fields in a Rotating Universe by Brindusa Ciobanu and Irina Radinschi . Julian Barbour was the person who first coined the term "Relational" with regard to ineterpretations of physical theories. See Relational Concepts of Space and Time by Julian B. Barbour published in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Vol. 33, No. 3 (Sep., 1982). Subscribe to Theories of Everything .

Another Oarfish Beached in California

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Poor things! See  Giant Oarfish in Southern California .  Subscribe to CBS8 San Diego .

Sabine Hossenfelder - Science is in trouble and it worries me

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Subscribe to Sabine Hossenfelder . Here's a nice post that the Nobel Prize people just did about science in India during the roaring twenties. You can read Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman 's lecture on the research that was happening at the time: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/raman-lecture.pdf See also Jade on Ising Models .

Grammarian vs Errorist - a supervillain showdown

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This is the feature-length version, where you almost see how it ends, ... And it now has references to things I've never even heard of before. This was just the first half, or maybe it was Part I? Subscribe to Elle Cordova .

Jade on Ising Models

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See  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ising_model and Douglas Ashton's blog post on the Renormalisation Group . Subscribe to Up And Atom . Here's Douglas Ashton's video: Subscribe to Douglas Ashton . And here's one describing the idea behind renormalisation: At 14:50 there is an interesting thing that can happen. It makes you wonder about what else could happen at critical points. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onsager_reciprocal_relations . Subscribe to Broken Symmetries . For more on Temperature and stuff: Why I Don't Think Reductionism Should Be Part of the Physics "Package" and Angela Collier, Anne L'Huillier and Jacob Barandes on Physics .

Emily Teede - Helena's Monologue from A Midsummer Night's Dream

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Wow, she's really good. Shakespeare too, I suppose! She was a finalist in the World Monologue Games 2024 : Subscribe to Emily Teede . I didn't know what to do with that until I saw this: Sydney Sweeney calls out Hollywood hypocrites claiming they LOVE women! Subscribe to Yellow Flash 2 .

Anastasia on Computers Made of Josephson Junctions That Can be Used to Teach Polar Bears to Play Guitar

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That's good, because the Polar Bears are going to need new jobs soon, ... Being a Polar Bear is not something that people are going to need for very long, ... See also Angela Collier, Anne L'Huillier and Jacob Barandes on Physics . Subscribe to Anastasia in Tech .

Some Ideas for Better User Interfaces

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I thought I'd throw out some ideas here for anyone interested, and indeed anyone who's not interested, because maybe you are the problem! I have a lot of related projects all on the go, and maybe one day I will need to do unrelated projects for the purpose of getting money, but I hope not. These different projects all use various editors and apps opened on certain files and terminal windows in certain directories, and certain apps running in the background. The apps also may have certain privileges. Some of these projects may get left for weeks without my even looking at them and when I go back, I have forgotten what are the relevant files in the relevant directories, if I even remember the project exists, ... often I just forget I was doing it and I only rediscover the idea when I see a weirdly familiar filename somewhere and look at it and realise that I was doing that thing about graph reduction machines in ARM assembler once, ... And then I remember there were some papers I

Angela Collier, Anne L'Huillier and Jacob Barandes on Physics

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Angela has done two really great videos in the past week or so: See Anne L'Huillier's Nobel Prize talk last year, and note the bit at the end about the time-delayed transitions from different shells: Then the day before yesterday Angela came up with this one about the sorts of physics problems that students learn to solve, and abstracted five Common Notions: So, instead of revealing unity in the fundamental laws of Nature modern physics is unfolding this enormous complexity in our different ways of describing Her. There might be a reason for this, ... Subscribe to Angela Collier . And I am one and a half hours through this really interesting interview Curt Jaimungal did with Jacob Barandes about his connection between non-Markovian stochastic processes and Quantum Mechanics. He just took a naïve approach and modeled a fundamentally stochastic measurement process which he found was non-Markovian in the sense that the transition distributions between states were not constant,