221–230 of 282 posts
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In Dutch-speaking Belgium, soup used to be a staple of our diet. Every meal started with soup when I was young.
Een Nederlander zegt tegen zijn vrouw: “Johanna, giet een liter water bij de soep, we hebben gasten!” (I'm German, but I live in the Netherlands. I absolutely love these jokes between you)
'Ober, deze soep smaakt naar afwaswater.' 'Hoe weet u dat, meneer?'
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We had the internet before the web, and we had gopher. So we had an open network, the client server model and links. What the web brought was a more flexible protocol and document format. That was important, but there's no way we'd have been stuck with compuserve or AOL.
Do you remember the time when messenger services were open to third party clients? You could actually talk to all your friends using only one app! Those days have ended .
There never was a golden age of interoperability on the internet, at least not after HTTP. Maybe there was a lot of cooperation when it was purely academic in the late 70s and 80s. BBS operators often were cooperative. But commercial internet has always and forever been cutthroat.
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Sabine went on full rant/iconoclastic/grudge mode IMO recently. It's a shame, as she a good communicator, but I just see myself skipping her content when it pops up. “I left the field because it's a paper production machine that adds no value to society” without substantiation is simply a frustration ridden meme.
I agree with her, I've been seeing the same problems with the physics community for decades. Everything kind of stopped after Einstein, and in particular I think nuclear weapons scared the heck out of everyone. I have long suspected that physics research since that time has been intentionally limited to "safe" areas like semiconductors, cosmology, and string theory. The old guard essentially decided that having physi…
Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR: > "I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so…
Sabine went on full rant/iconoclastic/grudge mode IMO recently. It's a shame, as she a good communicator, but I just see myself skipping her content when it pops up. “I left the field because it's a paper production machine that adds no value to society” without substantiation is simply a frustration ridden meme.
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> No, it wasn't. There was a huge body of experimental evidence already about gravity. It was true that all of that evidence, except for the anomalous precession of Mercury's perihelion, could be explained by Newtonian gravity; but general relativity, as a proposed new theory of gravity, had to also account for all of that experimental evidence. In other words, in the appropriate limiting case (weak fields and low sp…
> I assumed that reproducing Newtonian gravity in the classical limit GR itself is a classical (i.e., non-quantum) theory. The Newtonian limit of GR is not usually considered a "classical" limit, just a weak field, slow motion limit. > would be considered theoretical Ok, then we just have different definitions of "theoretical". To me, having to account for a mass of experimental data is an experimental constraint. It…
I dunno why this blog keeps be voted to the top. Yeah, current physics research is lacking in some areas .since when was it perfect?
Because Sabine is has the bona fides to know her stuff but also a contrarian and a bit of an outcast, and she knows how to market herself. All of this combined is perfect for hackernews.
It's more like everyone is doing the marketing for her
The field of physics has gotten bigger overall, including experimental physics. It's not like physics is 100% theoretical , untestable stuff.
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Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology that benefits society? Well, it's the same principle for esoteric experimental science: unique requirements leads to new tech being developed and then you can turn around, and if you find some use for some bit of the new tech you can tout it as a "boon to society".
> Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology that benefits society? No, not since World War 2. Examples?
Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR: > "I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so…
> "Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress [...] But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics [...]" Can anybody explain the relevance of cosmology and astrophysics to societal progress? I'm sure these are very worthwhile fields of study in other respects.. but societal pr…