161–170 of 231 posts
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I guess it should really be proving the general proposition that dropped keys are discoverable.
Great, it's been proven. Should we go pick up our keys now or just move onto another math problem?
on edit: can I stay at your house for a bit while waiting for publication?
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Absolutely, they're still handing out nobels after all. Personally I think the ER=EPR conjecture and the complexity/action duality hypothesis are incredibly interesting. Technically ER=EPR was formulated in 2000s (maybe 90s?) and CA-duality is approaching if not just past 10 years old, but the thing about asking for breakthroughs is that they take a while to percolate. Ex Hawking radiation wasn't formulated until, li…
The Higgs boson was predicted in 1964. Gravitational waves were predicted in 1916. Bell's theorem was published in 1964. Basically every recent discovery in physics has been observations confirming old predictions and refuting the endless zoo of poorly motivated, imaginary particles that seems to be standard practice these days. There have been almost no truly significant, novel predictions that have a hope in hell o…
Higgs/Bell/GW were experimental results, I was indeed trying to show that there's a huge lag between prediction and observation.
Imo the paradigm shift that we're slowly undergoing is thinking about physics from a information theoretic perspective instead of a kinematics one. I'd argue that's even more fundamental of a change than Newtonian physics to early GR & QM.
A physicist, walking home at night, spots a mathematician colleague under a street lamp staring at the ground, "something wrong?" he asks; "I've dropped my keys" he replies, "whereabouts?" asks the physicist, keen to help. "Over there" says the mathematician pointing; "So why don't you look over there?" retorts the physicist, "the light is better here" says the mathematician. Disclosure, I'm a mathematician.
"Don't use statistics like how a drunkard uses a lamp-post, for support rather than for illumination".
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Software developer: It is more important to find out how the keys were dropped in the first place. And after I do that it will be more efficient to just generate new keys. Disclosure, I'm a software developer
Write a unit test to prevent future key droppings.
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It is a common (but not universal[0]) practice in English writing to use either "he" or "she" as a pronoun for a person of unspecified gender to avoid the awkwardness of "they" or "one" or constructions like "he or she". No gender has been specified here, this is a neutral use of "she". [0] Very few practices in English writing are universal.
I think your entire reasoning is in reverse. Using "she" where no gender needs to be specified is the awkward thing to do, and it's not neutral, it's explicitly designating a female gender . Using "they/them" is far less awkward, the reader doesn't have to have any kind of opinion about the text based on gender associations, making it less awkward .
A physicist, walking home at night, spots a mathematician colleague under a street lamp staring at the ground, "something wrong?" he asks; "I've dropped my keys" he replies, "whereabouts?" asks the physicist, keen to help. "Over there" says the mathematician pointing; "So why don't you look over there?" retorts the physicist, "the light is better here" says the mathematician. Disclosure, I'm a mathematician.
Software developer: It is more important to find out how the keys were dropped in the first place. And after I do that it will be more efficient to just generate new keys. Disclosure, I'm a software developer
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G.H. Hardy would like to disagree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Apology
I don’t think his point and mine are incompatible, the language can have beauty in its own right and still be a model. Legos can be built into something which resemble a house, or something which resembles nothing real; their usage is a separate thing from the joy that comes from playing with them. Math is driven by utility and elaborated by enthusiasts.
> Hitchin agrees. “Mathematical research doesn’t operate in a vacuum,” he says. “You don’t sit down and invent a new theory for its own sake. You need to believe that there is something there to be investigated. New ideas have to condense around some notion of reality, or someone’s notion, maybe.” This is kind of it I think. It's not just physics that drives interesting math, and it's not just recently that this rela…
G.H. Hardy would like to disagree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Apology
One of my physics lecturers at university made the offhand observation that the distinction between physics and mathematics is a twentieth-century idea : it wasn't made during the nineteenth century or before, and it seems to be disappearing in the twenty-first.
> Hitchin agrees. “Mathematical research doesn’t operate in a vacuum,” he says. “You don’t sit down and invent a new theory for its own sake. You need to believe that there is something there to be investigated. New ideas have to condense around some notion of reality, or someone’s notion, maybe.” This is kind of it I think. It's not just physics that drives interesting math, and it's not just recently that this rela…