191–200 of 218 posts
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Exactly. Its value comes from being measured.
It comes from the magnetic moment of the electron being measured and then run through more than 10k Feynman diagrams. The second part wouldn't work if QED didn't.
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I don't know why you find it implausible given that there are plenty of people who already do both those things while having enough money not to.
How many is "plenty"? What percentage of people who have enough money not to do those things actually do them? My sense is that that percentage is pretty low. Yes, there are people like pg or sama who continue to work and add value even though they don't have to, and I think that's an admirable thing to do. But I think there are many more people who, once they have enough wealth to not have to work, stop working for…
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It comes from the magnetic moment of the electron being measured and then run through more than 10k Feynman diagrams. The second part wouldn't work if QED didn't.
I can't tell whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with me. Let's make it easier. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: The value of the fine-structure constant is not predicted by any physics theory.
Eq. (13) in [1] is a prediction of the electron's magnetic moment given the fine structure constant. Eq. (15) in [1] is a prediction of the fine structure constant given the electron's magnetic moment. For the purposes of that paper (testing QED) it turns out to be more convenient to use Eq. (15).
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How many people contribute to open source, wikipedia and debate stuff online? A lot of it produces ZERO economic returns. But the fallacy is that we need top-down institutions to move things forward. I would argue that we are better off abolishing intellectual property laws as well and allowing everyone to contribute to open source drugs the way they do in other sciences. Watch these two videos: Drive: the surprising…
> A lot of it produces ZERO economic returns. Exactly. > the fallacy is that we need top-down institutions to move things forward That might well be true. And it has nothing whatever to do with what I said. In fact, abolishing top-down institutions would, if anything, make it more difficult to have a scheme like universal basic income (the topic we're discussing here) at all. > of course Property is a coercive instit…
The same can be said about the social contract. Is the only thing preventing you from running red lights the fear of enforcement?
For many people, yes. That's the only thing. And we violate property rights in many ways, like peeing in a forest that may be "owned" by someone. Or by using an idea that may be "owned" by someone.
Property rights become "States" if the organization is large enough.
Property rights are basically monopoly rights to exclude others, by force if necessary, from the use of a resource.
Sometimes this exclusion actively harms wealth creation. Especially if the resource is a public good.
Love this comment left on the post by Peter Shor (of Shor's algorithm--the algorithm that kicked off the quantum computing frenzy). I assume it's him and not an imposter. "It's not just that scientists don't want to move their butts, although that's undoubtedly part of it. It's also that they can't. In today's university funding system, you need grants (well, maybe you don't truly need them once you have tenure, but…
The only question then is whether there is enough philanthropic research around. Are there perhaps, 2000 different projects around the world getting something like 5M USD each from an philanthropists? Or does the modern zeitgeist that assumes science funding is a thing for governments to do crowd it out?
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One slightly cynical strategy I've heard is that your next grant proposal should be for the work you've already completed, giving you time to come up with the idea for the one after :)
Not really workable in practice. Are you going to lie in the project schedule section of the application? Nowadays the grant agencies expect to have Gantt charts and other crap. It also would require delaying publishing a work when it's finished, which then raises the chances of perishing... What people however do is to smuggle more risky ideas into proposals for less risky ones. But that in the end means they'll be…
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> A lot of it produces ZERO economic returns. Exactly. > the fallacy is that we need top-down institutions to move things forward That might well be true. And it has nothing whatever to do with what I said. In fact, abolishing top-down institutions would, if anything, make it more difficult to have a scheme like universal basic income (the topic we're discussing here) at all. > of course Property is a coercive instit…
Property rights are agreements. If it is a net gain for all parties to follow an agreement, they will follow it, even in the absence of coercive enforcement. The same can be said about the social contract. Is the only thing preventing you from running red lights the fear of enforcement? For many people, yes. That's the only thing. And we violate property rights in many ways, like peeing in a forest that may be "owned…
This is a very telling question. Of course the answer is yes--if you qualify "running red lights" to mean "running red lights when it is clear that it is not going to cause any harm or violate anyone's property rights". For example, it's very late at night, it's an intersection with clear visibility in all directions, well lighted, and there is obviously no one else in sight. In such a case, yes, the only thing preventing me (and probably any reasonable person) from running the red light is fear of enforcement.
But of course that's because any reasonable person has the common sense to know that running a red light under circumstances where it will clearly violate no one's property rights and cause no one harm is not a crime; it's just a violation of an administrative rule, which in practice is used as a revenue source by localities, not to improve traffic safety.
And of course any reasonable person will not run a red light if it would risk causing harm or violating someone's property rights. But in that case, it is not because of fear of enforcement; it's because reasonable people understand that harming others or violating their property rights is a net loss for everybody, including them, so they have a good, rational reason not to do it and would behave the same even if it there were no enforcement.
> we violate property rights in many ways, like peeing in a forest that may be "owned" by someone
If this does no harm, how is it a violation of property rights?
> Or by using an idea that may be "owned" by someone.
Ideas are different because there is no such thing as exclusive "ownership" of ideas. Governments create "ownership" of ideas by making laws, but that doesn't make ideas the same as physical objects. If I take your car, I deprive you of it; we can't both have it. If I take your idea, you still have it; I can't deprive you of it. That is a key difference.
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Thank you, that's a good explanation- in the sense that I understand now what the previous comment, by Koshkin meant in responding to mine that there is no "wrong" frame of reference. >> The location, and speed with which you are travelling is what general relativity calls a "frame of reference", and none of them are "correct" or "incorrect", they're just predictors for what observations will be possible from that fr…
Right, so what was ground breaking about General Relativity, is that it challenged the newtonian axioms (assumptions) that there's a single universal clock, and that all objects within the universe are effectively rigid and exist in something resembling euclidian geometric space, and all move forward through time at the same speed. Newtonian physics explains many things very well, but couldn't explain other phenomeno…
Unfortunately, the two theories, while both being extremely successful and accurate in their predictions, are incompatible with one another. Quantum Field Theory has successfully combined Quantum Mechanics with Special Relativity, but that is all.
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The same way we distinguish the shadows cast in Plato's cave from the objects occluding the light. The more situations in which a theory or model makes accurate predictions, the more correct it is. Epicycles are much, much more wrong than mathematically perfect elliptical orbits.
> Epicycles are much, much more wrong than mathematically perfect elliptical orbits. Not if you define "wrong" as "inaccurate predictions". You can approximate ellipses with circles and epicycles to any desired degree of accuracy by putting in more epicycles. So you can match the predictions of ellipses to any desired accuracy with epicycles. Also, as I noted, the actual orbits of the planets are not perfect ellipses…
I suppose this is as an appropriate time as any to ask for advice: I am a multimillionaire from inheritance, and am about to complete my masters in physics. I wish to work on long term theoretical physics problems that do not seem to be possible under the current publish-or-perish academic system. The plan was to complete a PhD, then leave academia, but lately I have been having severe doubts about continuing onto a…