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Posts tagged with physics

Murray Gell-Mann became annoyed with Richard Feynman

  • generating anecdotes or stories about himself
  • not brushing his teeth
  • not washing hands after urinating
  • “You’re just a salesman type. You’re just a normal person, not an independent thinker.”
  • purposefully cultivated outsider image. Feynman, you hipster!

(por Muon Ray)




philosophy & quantum mechanics

@jtc_19 asked:

The isomorphismes links (last three tweets) might be worth sharing with everyone. (I’ve been accused that this site is hard to browse—sorry!)

@isomorphisms haha, yep.

— Clark (@jtc_19) April 15, 2013

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By the way! OCW has course notes on the standard weird phenomena and also the standard interpretation of the physics. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-111-philosophy-of-quantum-mechanics-spring-2005/lecture-notes/




detecting clandestine nuclear reactors globally by tracking antineutrinos Projected results for antineutrino detection, Image Credit: Fabio Mantovani

hi-res




Just a reminder that humans have harnessed the forces that bind atomic nuclei together to unleash total destruction.

hi-res




Some level surfaces (isoclines) of the simplest atom’s electron position. (Electron orbitals.) Remember that electrons control chemistry i.e. why things are the way they are on Earth. (High-energy physics, like as high of energy as a star, is where the new particles and quantum gravity, QCD, and such take place.) from The Picture Book of Quantum Mechanics via heioghopp

hi-res




Nice Pictures of Hamiltonian Dynamics

I had judged The Emperor’s New Mind by the negative reviews but never actually picked it up. It has a lot of great stuff, almost like an “early draft” of The Road to Reality.




All I knew about Emperor’s New Mind before was that it invokes quantum mechanics to explain free will, which was perceived as “icky” by people who study the brain. (Despite that, like quantum nonsense, the “greats” of QM—Bohr, Schrödinger—also weighed in with QM/free-will speculations (do you hear me, Conrad&Kochen? Quantum communication folks?) — because, let’s be real here, free will is a millennia-old conundrum and I think we’d all appreciate it if the people who understand compositions of Hilbert spaces weighed in on whether and what the latest “master theory” (bringer of semiconductors = transistors, LCD’s, lasers, MRI/PET and certain polymers/piezoelectrics/other materials) would say about the age-old question)

I got a bit more of the debate whilst reading about pi-1 sentences, which is a computability/knowability/logic dealio. But again, this was the level of “What’s RP’s argument in a nutshell?” rather than “Is here anything worth reading in the 400 pages?”. It’s a lot of good.




Apparently the “extra” dimensions of string theory are only supposed to be a few millimetres thick.

If that’s the case, could you dodge a bullet by moving a millimetre in the 10th dimension?

I guess it would depend on how wide the bullet and your liver are in the 10th dimension. Could lead to an interesting superpower: move in hidden dimensions.

  • The hero wouldn’t be invulnerable but would be less vulnerable. Still get an exit wound but maybe she’d only be grazed through the interior rather than completely ripped to shreds.
  • Still worth dodging/blocking a fist in the normal-sized 3 dimensions, but even a “direct” uppercut or body blow could become more of a “glancing blow” if she dodged in the thin directions. (NB: If ∃ 7 extra thin dimensions, each 1mm wide, and she dodged at once to “the other side” of all 7 at once—assuming, as well, that we’re “all the way to one side” of each of the extra dimensions—then she’d have made a total distance of √7mm between her and us.)
  • Joint locks—could she put someone in a joint lock they couldn’t get out of? Couldn’t she also get out of joint locks that no-one else could?
  • Couldn’t become invisible but become less visible.
  • Couldn’t pass through walls but could reach into crevices easier.
  • Could swim faster (twist her torso in the 10th dimension so the hands & feet still pull water, but less resistance on the mass of the body).

Am I thinking about this right?