191–200 of 301 posts
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An old professor of mine loved the "Throw something at the blackboard" technique. Great way to get the class potheads to wake up
how many potheads did you have in your quantum mechanics class?
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To clarify, for those not familiar with this topic, this experiment is making measurements at such exquisite precision that even the calculations for the theoretical prediction are extremely non-trivial and require careful estimation of many many pieces which are then combined. Which is to say that debugging the theoretical prediction is (almost) as hard as debugging the experiment. So I would expect the particle phy…
If the theoretical prediction can't be calculated until the experiment is done that motivates the choices of what and what not to approximate, is it really a prediction?
Let me make that more meta.
If a theory is unable to predict a particular key value, is it still a theory?
This is not a hypothetical question. The theory being tested here is the Standard Model. The Standard Model in principle is entirely symmetric with regards to a whole variety of things that we don't see symmetry in. For example the relative mass of the electron and the proton.
But, you ask, how can it be that those things are different? Well, for the same reason that we find pencils lying on their side rather than perfectly balanced around the point of symmetry on the tip. Namely that the point of perfect symmetry is unstable, and there are fields setting the value of each asymmetry that we actually see. Each field is carried by a particle. Each particle's properties reflect the value of the field. And therefore the theory has a number of free parameters that can only be determined by experiment, not theory.
In fact there are 19 such parameters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Theoretical_asp... has a table with the complete list. And for a measurement as precise as this experiment requires, the uncertainty of the values of those parameters is highly relevant to the measurement itself.
Nature seems to have this interesting property of always increasing in perceived complexity.
Sometimes I think about this half-baked theory where physical laws don't exist until they are discovered. Once you catch physics with it's pants down it now must maintain those constraints or have it's bluff called.
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That's what Duhem-Quine thesis in the philosophy of sciences is. The thesis is that "it is impossible to test a hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical of the hypothesis requires one or more auxiliary/background assumptions/hypotheses".
Not exactly. Analytic solutions to simple problems will produce as many predictions as you want from them, and you can test them in a year, two years, or a century from then. These highly approximated calculations, in contrast, will come out one way or the other, depending on how many of which terms you add (this is especially common in quantum chemistry) - and nobody will decide on the "right" way to choose terms un…
Can anyone recommend any pop-sci books? I haven't taken a science class since high school, and that is barely remembered. Mostly interested in getting philosophically up to date with the state of matter(?), it's different types, how these objects interact.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Lig...
There was a nice explanation of the finding in comic format from APS & PhD Comics: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/47
This sound like the hypothesized „subtle-matter“ as proposed by Dr. Klaus Volkamer [1]? - still looking for a better link than the Book… I’ll update this later [1] https://amzn.to/3mvvsWW
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the theoretical prediction can't be calculated until the experiment is done that motivates the choices of what and what not to approximate, is it really a prediction?
If the theoretical prediction can't be calculated until the experiment is done that motivates the choices of what and what not to approximate, is it really a prediction? Let me make that more meta. If a theory is unable to predict a particular key value, is it still a theory? This is not a hypothetical question. The theory being tested here is the Standard Model. The Standard Model in principle is entirely symmetric…
There was a nice explanation of the finding in comic format from APS & PhD Comics: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/47
When I was younger, I remember to read cyberpunk comics quite a lot. They explain a vision of the future that is improbable, but in many ways it get stuff right. Imagine aligning this with real word science. Imagine hearing from a superhero how his powers came to him. Imagine having a scientist name on the movie credits.
It doesn't need to make everything scientifically accurate, but explaining the fundamentals can engage more people to enter science.
Yesterday I was watching a new movie from Netflix called 'hacker'. The movie is awful, but it starts showing how Stuxnet should work, and that is pretty awesome. This is cool because I know the fundamentals of Stuxnet.
If they break the 4th wall and show something that could happen for real, it could bring more emotions to the movie.
There was a nice explanation of the finding in comic format from APS & PhD Comics: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/47
There was a nice explanation of the finding in comic format from APS & PhD Comics: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/47
Spooky quantum effect, there!