Viewing profile — knzhou

The Physical Review is a gigantic set of journals, and like anything of its size, many of its published results are wrong. At this very moment I'm writing a rebuttal to a PRD paper…

Indeed, the author's 2000-page online textbook, heavily promoted on the internet, is a classic trap for unwary students. It looks alright at first: volume I is light on math, but f…

This is a new proposal, fresh on the arXiv today, from a group of U.S. particle physicists. The introduction is very readable and lays out the mission clearly: > We can now confide…

One should keep in mind that most dark matter "alternatives", including this one, actually include dark matter. It says so right on the 2nd page of their paper: > Consider requirem…

> What happened to the recent work showing that galactic rotation curves are consistent with ordinary GR? Last I read, cosmologists were choosing to ignore it. Gravitomagnetism is …

This is why I left this site. Endless smug engineers explaining condescendingly to physicists why they’re stupid sheep, without knowing the first thing about anything. Intellectual…

The same criticism applies for any other crappy paper HN likes. Whenever I check this site, half the time the front page has something even worse. Just assume everything you see he…

Gravitomagnetism is a well-understood and experimentally measured effect. It is also a very small effect, of the order v^2 / c^2 where v is the speed of the sources. In the galaxy,…

I'm glad we agree that development and opportunity are good things. The average per capita income in China is lower than countries like Costa Rica or Venezuela. It's less than half…

> However, I have no fear of speaking publicly about Guantanamo Bay and then traveling to the US. I think you're too optimistic. If you'd made similar comments during the Red Scare…

When did I make that argument?

It was not a hard thing to infer. There is a very particular kind of deep ignorance one needs to write a comment like OP's.

Yes, you didn't, but you weren't really looking, were you?

All of these examples are pieces of entertainment being pulled because they offend Chinese sensibilities. Here's the thing: pieces of entertainment are also pulled if they offend A…

> OP described living in a China-centric world, not one of equals. Yes, but there's no evidence to suggest this will be the case. The average yearly income in China is not even hal…

> The original commenter professed a fear of what that would look like for outsiders in a China-centric world. Yes, and for the third time now: my point is that the absolute worst-…

What he directly said is that he thinks the prospect of there being a single non-white country not being crushingly poor "makes his hair stand on end", supplanted with some typical…

Do you really think agitating for World War III was productive to start with? I pointed out rationally and straightforwardly where such extreme opinions come form.

The "discrimination" they fear is no longer automatically being worshipped the second they step foot in a non-Western country, for being the richest guy in every room. In other wor…

Before I answer that, you are aware that we casually started two wars last decade that directly killed 200,000 innocent civilians, right? And that we reliably do that every other d…

This is the kind of comment that makes me know there's no hope for HN. The color of your skin has bought you a lot. When you were a kid, my parents were making a dollar a day. When…

Well, I've read almost all the books she lists and I've been a quantum field theory practitioner for years, and I can at least attest the list is good. People actually learn from t…

This is a great point. Out of all the ones I've looked into, I think MIT has by far the most complete public curriculum (because of MIT OCW), but Cambridge and Oxford are not far b…

I personally know the vast majority of the material in both roadmaps, so I know that 't Hooft's is far harder to learn from. Anybody can check this for themselves. There's plenty o…

This is cool as always, but in case anybody is seriously contemplating using it: this list is infamous for its complete uselessness for anybody actually trying to learn. It's mostl…