The h Bar

3:02 AM

@dmckee as the article points out, bayesian statistical reasoning has a lot of parallels to QM wavefn analysis.

at this point there is no way to discriminate any different interpretations (aka popperian falsifiability), but think we are right on the cusp/ eve of seeing that change.

think the real answer may be a hybrid mix of different interpretations now floating around like indistinct clouds in the sky.

QBism meshes with some other interpretations & gives some greater philosophical justification for them. bayesian reasoning has some deep analysis in statistics/ probability. its also big/ apparently increasing in machine (deep) learning.

esp suspect/ think that experimental "weak measurements" are pointing to the incompleteness of QM & towards new theory. dont exactly see how they fit into the conventional theory/ foundations.

DanielSank

5:33 AM

Is Johnson noise an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process?

12:27 PM

@Icosahedron Yeah.

12:40 PM

@DanielSank Yes. It makes sense as in "long" time scales you just get a Gaussian.

1:00 PM

Physics chat session in 3 hours I guess, why do we have these?

@UserAnonymous To discuss site topics

@KyleKanos I see. Like people higher up trying to gauge what the public feels in general about some issues?

"higher up?"

"public"?

Moderators and non-moderators!

That makes sense. I thought you were talking about StackExchange employees for a moment

1:06 PM

It's a chat, not some kind of audience, and it's not even guaranteed that any mod will be here at all.

^ What he said.

OK. And hi @ACuriousMind, I remember having a very helpful discussion with you very long time back!

You used to look different then!

Like a Clown?

@KyleKanos certainly not ablaze!

I think was either Morte or Edwin back then

1:09 PM

Was Edwin the sword guy or the head?

Very long time back...probably looked like my meta profile:

304 1 8

@KyleKanos ....what sword guy?

Yes, that.

For some reason I thought that that guy was holding a sword

But it's just his fingers

Why are you ablaze now?

@UserAnonymous I'm quite frequently changing my picture, they're all characters from my favourite RPGs, there's no deeper meaning to the pictures.

1:13 PM

OK.

@ACuriousMind Except to make Sofia cringe

(not that she's around anymore)

Well, that was a funny side effect :P

quantum-mechanics homework-and-exercises newtonian-mechanics special-relativity wavefunction measurement-problem waves

I still wonder if she's lurking

Well, according to her profile she was on an hour ago

Sofia

4k 2 4 23

2:13 PM

Did h bar turn into a porn site yet?

@KyleKanos So does Ron Maimon, I bet he visits Physics more often than I do. Although I don't know what he exactly does, maybe he secretly sees the chat transcript periodically giving Intel to PO.

@0celo7 There's a fetish for everything - to some, it may be!

Sorry for rising from the dead.

@Gaurav His profile says that he responds to comments on his posts & nothing more.

@Gaurav The chat transcript is accessible even if you're not logged in, it's not exactly secret information

2:19 PM

@ACuriousMind I go through physics books like crazy. Too sticky.

user54412

@ACuriousMind And I'm reasonably sure various people over the years have written scripts to alert them if keywords are mentioned in chat.

@ChrisWhite Like a certain us er?

@ChrisWhite That wouldn't surprise me either.

@ChrisWhite Well that doesn't seem paranoid at all

user54412

@KyleKanos Shhh. They're listening!

2:25 PM

Meh, they already don't like me, so I don't think I can change their opinion.

user54412

Oh, I thought I was supposed to be the paranoid one.

Oh no, I meant them

Darn, those conspiracy theory movies.

@ACuriousMind Secret or not, they still get the info. Including those rants on him.

What rants?

Essentially discussions about PO. They turn into rants by the end.

2:51 PM

Hello, I have a general question about the equation $E = mc^2$.

Ask away

The equation itself proves that the smaller the object is, the less energy is required to accelerate the said object to the speeds near the speed of light. Is this true?

No, that's not what it means

It says that mass & energy are related

I see. If than is the statement I wrote above still true?

2:55 PM

It is, but the equation that shows it is $$K = mc^2\biggl(\frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}} - 1\biggr)$$

(hope I got that right)

Ah, I see. Thank you.

(...looks right)

And v means velocity?

Yep

And K means kinetic energy.

2:56 PM

Right

@DavidZ $\gamma-1$...looks right

Thank you. Just one more question. Are any of you familiar with the Particle Accelerators and their inner workings?

I'd suggest thinking of $E = mc^2$ as simply meaning $E\propto m$. It means that any object with mass has a certain amount of energy simply by virtue of having that mass. The amount of energy is $mc^2$ (the $c^2$ is just a proportionality constant, which is also needed to make the units work out)

@PhonicsTheHedgehog a little bit, why?

Not to the expert level, but just to the point of knowing it well.

@DavidZ That explains it better, thank you

@DavidZ I have found a source online that explains the workings of Particle Accelerators, and I was using it for research purposes.

Now I have examined the author who wrote it, and I have found out that...

He has B.A. In Biology and Ph.D. in Physiology, but I was wondering whether that would be enough to make one a reputable source in terms of Particle Acceleration.

No it's not

but it doesn't mean he's not a reputable source

3:00 PM

Ah, I thought as much. If I post the source here would you have time to skim through it?

only that if he is, it's for some reason other than his formal education

science.howstuffworks.com/atom-smasher.htm

When I had examined other sources this particular source seemed to trivialize the Accelerator a bit, although I had thought that would help me in my assignment (succinct explanation in short amount of time)

I have to go in about 5 minutes, but I will probably back in later afternoon.

FYI

This goes a little beyond my knowledge of the accelerator itself, but I don't see anything to suggest it's bogus. Or in other words, a quick skim suggests it's valid information.

Thank you very much for your help. I need to shut down the school computer now, so I'll have to go in few minutes... Have a nice day everyone.

3:47 PM

Hi folks, random thoughts:

Clifford tori are cool. They exist in 4D and look sort of like a double-ended Klein bottle. Arguably, the classic tori of 3D space -- a circle times a circle -- are really just projections of Clifford tori into 3D.

Big Marble Run Machine: 11000 Marbles!!!

hi all just found on a cs blog. luv it

►

What I think is interesting from a physics viewpoint is that projecting a Clifford torus into 3D space requires a symmetry break, part of a general principle of such breaks when down-projecting across Euclidean spaces.

Dunno if any physics uses such symmetry breaks, though --

Garrett Lisi's E8 e.g.?

Hi @TerryBollinger !

@Gaurav Hi! Don't recall your name. Are you new to chat?

@TerryBollinger is he still working in physics or did he take up surfing full time? :|

3:52 PM

@TerryBollinger The Clifford torus is also just a circle times a circle. The difference is that it is equipped with a flat metric, which you can't isometrically embed into 3D.

@ACuriousMind Yes! That's exactly why I think of it as the "natural" form of such tori. The distortions of tori in 3D are part of the symmetry breaking.

I accidentally re-invented them once and got John Baez very angry at me for claiming they were the "real" tori. Wasn't until years later I found out they had a name.

@TerryBollinger I used to go by my strange surname 'Simha', which literally means 'lion'.

@Gaurav Cool in multiple ways! What language?

@TerryBollinger You are correct to think of it as natural - it is what you get when you do the operation "circle times circle" for manifolds with metrics, while the other tori come from "circle times circle" for topological spaces, and then equpping the result with a (arbitrary) metric. But why do you find them so interesting?

@ACuriousMind I wonder if there is an opportunity somewhere there for an interesting way to represent real symmetry breaking in physics, given the Euclidean limits 3+1 space imposes.

3:57 PM

Hallo all!

@UserAnonymous Greetings! Wow, now that's about as generic a name as I can think of!

@TerryBollinger Lol

Another random thought I've had fun with for years: Combine electric and strong into a single vector. All the fermions then become the vertices of a cube, or more precisely the diagonals of the subspace cubes of the cube.

@TerryBollinger As usual, you speak in riddles to me ;) What "Euclidean limits" does "3+1 space impose"?

So... chat session time, y'all

4:01 PM

@TerryBollinger ...where does the cube come from? What do you mean with combine? Your imagination makes jumps I cannot follow.

@ACuriousMind If "something" is inherently 4D and you try to project it into 3D, you are forced to make symmetry break decisions.

@ACuriousMind That's one's not complicated, it's just organizational. Balance a cube on its corner. The body diagonal from the table to the top vertex represents on unit of positive charge. The other vertices are at +1/3 and +2/3.

The bottom vertex has no charge, the first plane of 3 +1/3 charge, the second layer of 3 +2/3 charge, the top vertext +1.

@TerryBollinger Only if we are in the Euclidean case where it is not clear what direction I should project out. In Minkowski space, there is a singled-out direction along which to project to 3D, no decision needed.

Is F77 going to screw me over if I cast an INTEGER to an INTEGER using INT (which expects REAL as the argument)?

@TerryBollinger Ah, I see, I didn't expect you to be talking about the charges

@alarge what does that mean?

4:04 PM

The horizontal axes represent a (projected) space of three axes, the strong charges.

@alarge Uh...I dunno F77, but why do you want to cast a type into itself?

Agreed

Also, why are you using F77?

Oh. Fortran 77!

That sounds like a do nothing operation to me.

Neutrino at the bottom, three color charges of anti-down the first layer, three anti-colors of up the second layer, positron the top vertex.

Anti-particles (and particles) become vectors in the opposite direction.

4:06 PM

@TerryBollinger Most Indian surnames are in Sanskrit, and all of them have a meaning. My first name 'Gaurav' means respect.

Makes a nice memory mnemonic. Every fermion and anti-fermion becomes a diagonal.

@TerryBollinger Are you talking about some eightfold-way type supermultiplet patterns?

@Gaurav Cool! Is that Hindi, or original Sanskrit?

@UserAnonymous Yes, but intentionally as something more easily visualized.

I think we should specify the educational pre-requisites for attending the Physics Chat Session!

I'm really feeling out of place!

The middle layer e.g. is actually a 3D space itself, projected into 2D (some of that down-projected symmetry issues actually). It's a distorted octogon with charge-anticharge on the vertices.

4:10 PM

I am really happy I changed my zoom limits on Firefox to being 100% & 100%.

No more accidental zoom in/out

@UserAnonymous User, oops, sorry I'm kind of overdoing it this morning...!

(which happens a lot with two finger scrolling & using ctrl-w to close a window)

I have a type I know to be int, but because it is coming from an external library, F77 can't figure this out and a function taking this as the will then fail. Well, it compiles if I cast it to int explicitly

@UserAnonymous Seriously, any questions on any topic? This place is pretty free-flowing...

I am using Fortran because of legacy code

4:12 PM

@alarge gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/INT.html

@TerryBollinger Nope, sir. Its just that I don't think I can add anything meaningful. You please continue with @ACuriousMind.

@alarge Fortran is entirely compatible (i.e., you can mix F77 & F90+)

It's not unusual to have two or even three conversations going on, on different topics and at different levels

@TerryBollinger Nice picture, but not something "fundamental", I think, because the three colors are not the proper analogous properties to electric charge, since electric charge is gauge invariant, while the colors are not.

The argument for INT Shall be of type INTEGER, REAL, or COMPLEX.

4:13 PM

@DavidZ haha, I can see that happening now!

@KyleKanos I miss Fortran 77, I once knew the manual inside out.

@TerryBollinger Lol, I don't! Fortran 90+ is so much cleaner

user54412

Stockholm syndrome

Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness. The FBI's Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 8 percent of victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm syndrome can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding...

True story: The Beauty and the Beast is a Disney movie about the Stockholm syndrom

@ACuriousMind Unless you associate gauge invariance with vertical symmetry, in which case only the neutrino and electron would qualify...

user54412

4:15 PM

On yet another topic: I came across a problem in my research, thought "someone must have worked this out already," googled it, and found my own answer on this site.

3

@KyleKanos Was it originally written that way before Disney?

@TerryBollinger Probably, though I've never read the original source.

@ChrisWhite link?

RE: Entropy! You have to occupy all states, right? So matter in inherently low entropy because it bundles energy up into tiny locations in space.

user54412

@TerryBollinger This one

Only an all-photon universe can approach max entropy by that logic...

4:17 PM

@TerryBollinger In your picture, that SU(3) gauge symmetry would indeed by a rotation about the axis through the electron and the positron, I think. The actual states of things have to lie on the axis - one could think of identifying the three color thingies with their barycenter on the axis. Also, the rotation "switches" the three points around, which is not surprising if you know that the representation theory of SU(N) is controlled by permutations of N elements.

@ChrisWhite That's not a casual SE answer, it is a spent-lot-of-time-on-it-answer!

user54412

@TerryBollinger With entropy, I'm always wary of how we enumerate the state space. A universe of photons is very restricted in the sense of E = p everywhere.

@ACuriousMind Positron, electron, neutrio, anti-neutrio. Every fermion becomes a neutrino (or anti) that has been "inflated" by an electric+strong charge vector.

re old (f77) code its also known as "lock in" or "legacy systems" etc! ... did use f77 many yrs ago but can barely remember!

user54412

@UserAnonymous It's weird then that I didn't remember writing it.

4:21 PM

lol

@ChrisWhite It's more than two years old! I barely remember the stuff I wrote here a year ago

@KyleKanos disney is the source of all wisdom esp now with pixar + marvel + star wars combined.

@vzn A boss once asked me to use division to stuff bits into Fortran 77 bytes. I came back on Monday with a masking technique and logical ANDs that had only one line of very fast code for both insertion and access. Fun!

@vzn Pixar is the source of wisdom, Disney just finally woke up to it.

@TerryBollinger sig other just told me they are doing Nemo 2 sequel with Dory. maybe she heard it on facebook.

BTW, on the cube the weak conversions become full-unit translations up or down (two cubes, one positive charges above, one negative charges below, pro- and anti- layers alternating.

4:23 PM

chagrined, disney recently announced they are not doing tron sequel. :(

@vzn Too bad, though I think I liked Tron II mostly for Daft Punk.

@TerryBollinger liked it for olivia wilde & daft punk in that order. :D

@vzn Dory is one of my all-time favorites, cool

@TerryBollinger was thinking they should use portia de rossi for voice talent also :)

so pixar fan? did you see big hero 6? decent/ funny

@ChrisWhite Wow, interesting but a bit intense to read mid-chat!...

4:28 PM

disney apparently just lost big $$$ on tomorrowland. maybe that was the tron III budget, ouch :(

New, sort of: Garrett Lisi in one TED talks describes E8 in terms of toruses. Is that right? I only recall coming away a bit confused...

@vzn That's because Disney did that one, not Pixar! Nice graphics, even nice character development, non-engaging or poorly done plot.

@TerryBollinger garret lisi the matthew mcconaghey of physics... youre a fan?

@vzn Big Hero 6 was excellent! Nice exploration of a lot of robotics issues too (my real work BTW). Wish we has power sources like they showed for microbots, though.

@TerryBollinger oh really what are you doing with robotics? saw some awesome new microbotics origami recently...

@vzn I like Garrett Lisi in part because he's trying to do real physics. String theory is just very bad, very un-verifiable programming done on a massive, massive scale.

user54412

4:32 PM

Am I the only one who mourns the Pixar-ification of Disney's animated graphics? I'm fine with cartoons, but not the uncanny valley "look what we did with Blender shaders" style that's taking over.

@vzn I've been involved mostly in cognition research, including bio-inspired, thought I like the materials and energy side very much (energy is very hard).

MIT origami microbot

it almost looks like a cartoon when walking

@ChrisWhite I think there's a counter-trend. Folks have gone back to real claymation, and all of the vehicles in Mad Max were real (!!)

@TerryBollinger Have you read/assessed the mathematical rebuttals that show that E_8 does not have the required representations/the representations Lisi claims it has?

@ChrisWhite which movie were animated characters "too real"?

frozen was one of their most successful movies ever! boy that snowman was annoying, almost as much as jar-jar binks :(

user54412

4:36 PM

@vzn Tangled, Brave, Frozen, and presumably everything in between I never saw. Note that I never liked the animation style of Toy Story.

@TerryBollinger yeah that mad max director is very opinionated about that in interviews etc

@vzn Wow, that is SO cool! That is an example of the incredible potential and diversity of the field... innovative materials and control concepts e.g. I'll look closer at that one, wow.

@ChrisWhite "uncanny valley" in those movies? lol ?!?

@ACuriousMind While I like Garrett, yes, there are problems with his model, and I don't think (at least from what I've seen) that it's a full physics model. But I think an iterative approach more along those lines has promise.

@ACuriousMind these are not the E_8s you are looking for...

4:39 PM

Also, I worry about symmetry alone "answering" everything. I think the universe and its rules of physics are likely a bit more fractal or recursive than that.

@vzn LOL!

user54412

@vzn Anything that's pseudo-3D (pseudo because they can never get textures to look like any substance I've seen in the real world) is uncanny for me.

@ChrisWhite It's interesting how the "uncanny" effect only seems to apply to 3D

@TerryBollinger already figured it all out, solitons are the 1 true TOE :D

That christmas train movie... aieee, that was the creepiest movie I saw that year!

@vzn I like solitons very much, and I do think they've been overlooked!

@TerryBollinger yeah polar express. a lot of critics complained about the "dead eyes". defn agreed uncanny valley came into play on that movie. yet did very well at theatre. knew kid that kept replaying it on dvd back when he still believed in santa claus hah.

4:42 PM

@vzn ... and I didn't check your link, and I bet it's crackpottery! Nonetheless, solitons really are interesting...

← lol, author

user54412

@TerryBollinger I was once taking a friend through an art museum roughly chronologically. As soon as we hit the Renaissance with its experiments in chiaroscuro, he complained everything looked too uncanny. The effect lessened as we got to more recent art.

@vzn Ah, excellent, thought you were Rick Rolling me for a minute there... yes! QM seems a place where solitons could be useful.

@ChrisWhite Uncanny evidences itself only as you approach reality "fairly closely." Seems biological, e.g. telling live from dead is important for real organisms...

@vzn "Emergent QM," hmm!

@TerryBollinger I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling / Gotta make you understand / Don't tell me you're too blind to see

Hey, here's my theory of the universe: Everything (rules of physics included) is part of a fully cancelling virtual pair, and we live on a particular branch of a very large fractal where the rules came out just right. Symmetry breaks happen because the pairs are slightly broken by their location in the overall fractal (the Juliaverse).

@vzn LOL^2!

4:50 PM

@ChrisWhite someday an AI will complain nearly all human art is too anthropocentric :\

Folks, I must be leaving early today, doctor's appointment. Very fun talking with everyone! @vzn, I'll look over that a lot more closely, I do like solitons. Everyone, both the cube-of-fermions and the Juliaverse are tips of carefully considered ideas, not just offhand. Later!

@TerryBollinger :)

5:09 PM

Any denizens of Physics voting at Chemistry elections ?

my internet connection flaked out for almost exactly the hour of the chat session :-(

sometimes I swear they're watching me and picking the most inconvenient times to block VPN traffic

@DavidZ haha that's nothing. Over here they cut Internet connection every time an opposition party speech takes place during elections. Maybe it's a rareity over there.

If you mean elections, then yes :-P

5:28 PM

:D

I'm just wondering, what proportion of scientists in the US vote for the Democrats ? At first thought, it seems an overwhelming majority. But isn't it possible for one to be economically right while being left at religion, etc. ?

Normally one considers economical conservatives + social liberals as libertarians; not sure their voting trends

What's your preference ?

I'm economically & socially conservative

5:58 PM

Oh, that comes off as a surprise, since most scientists come off as pro-lgbt , atheists, etc. , at least those most visible in the public space.

Dawkins, etc.

Here I'm assuming both British and American scientists have more or less the same social views.

@Gaurav You should not be surprised that the data set $\{\text{Kyle Kanos}\}$ with a size of 1 does not conform to your expectations ;)

Similarly, the data set $\{\rm Richard\, Dawkins\}$ should not be a baseline for anything

Also, what does "pro-lgbt" even mean? Conversely, what would the opposite (anti-lgbt) mean?

@ACuriousMind :) Surely I'm not questioning his choices, just making an observation. I thought that was amply clear in the way it was written .

As an aside, most != all, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise (per se) that anyone is contrary to the most position

@KyleKanos As in those who support gay rights etc. (Ref your previous comment)

6:12 PM

Since when have gays been denied rights in America?

Certainty not denied, but looked down upon by a section of the electorate

So it's not much different than the way a certain "section of the electorate" looks down upon the religious?

@KyleKanos Well, I'd say the "don't ask, don't tell" policy banning openly gay people from serving in the armed forces was a denial of rights, wasn't it? Also, not allowing gay people to legally marry is a pretty clear denial of rights.

Serving in the military isn't a right

Note also that the military is ageist, sexist, educationist, demographicist, and a whole slew of other things that it necessarily discriminates against

@KyleKanos (ref your previous comment ) That's true too. Communism and leftists are increasingly becoming as bigoted as the right wingers.

6:27 PM

@Gaurav I would argue that, in many cases, they are more bigoted than conservatives

@KyleKanos Note the necessarily you snuck in there ;) For each such discrimination, the burden of proof of necessity (or at least plausibility) lies on the discriminator, not the one claiming it is unnecessary.

Why personal sexual orientation would make anyone unfit for any task not related to sexual activities is not obvious.

In other news, "bigoted" is a wonderful word because it expresses you distaste for another person's opinions without stating anything tangible. "This is bigoted"...what precisely does that mean? No wonder it's used in political discourse so often ;)

@ACuriousMind Sad but true. It also generates a large disdain/hate for the one being claimed as bigoted, even if they're not

They say Communism is something that people need to grown out of. The problem is that the Leftist space is dominated by mere societal rebels and less of intellectuals. These guys don't represent the intellectual roots that Communism was born out of.

In RE necessarily: there is a claim of unit cohesion falls with gays in the military; I have heard stories (from soldiers) on both ends about this.

@Gaurav And I believe the communists say that capitalism is something one needs to grow out of ;) The claim that leftists are less intellectual seems to conflict with your earlier stated impression that most scientists lean towards the left

Also, "leftist" is a very variable word. What's already called leftist in America would be center or at most left-leaning in most of Central Europe, I think.

6:36 PM

@ACuriousMind In the previous comment I refer to Communists in the present age. The phrase is a famous one in the present Indian political scenario.

@ACuriousMind I'm not disputing the variable usage of the word at all.

Job hunting sucks :(

@ACuriousMind Where did it occur here in the present discussion that I did not do justice to the variable meanings of the word ?

@KyleKanos Did nothing come of the financial thing?

@ACuriousMind They up & cancelled the job last week

No reason given, no comments from the managers I was talking with. Just a simple memo from some HR rep

That's unfortunately how corporate bureaucracy often works

6:46 PM

@Gaurav I wouldn't say you "didn't do it justice", but your statement "Leftist space is dominated by mere societal rebels and less of intellectuals" is problematic without appending what kind of "leftist" you have in mind (in this case evidently a particular Indian variety)

@alarge I think it was because they didn't schedule things appropriately. The job was formally to have started today & they, from what I heard from my brother-in-law, were still planning on interviewing people as late as Monday last week :/

@KyleKanos So, are you seeking only for other jobs in that sector, or for anything you might be qualified for.

@ACuriousMind Anything I'm qualified for. Most of it's turned out to be Data Science type jobs

My cousin is a stock broker, and he told me it's a gold mine for physicists in the share market. I don't know remotely how that's possible, but the career advice stuck.

Banks want PhDs from STEM because they're smart & can think outside the box (or some dumb reason)--honestly, BS and MS STEM students can do the same work for a lower salary

They generally want the people they hire to know (a) C++, (b) stochastic calculus, (c) linear algebra, and (d) finite difference schemes

(probably other finer details they'd like, but broadly those are it)

7:03 PM

It's a huge risk hiring a person as they'll cost a lot of money and can't do much in the beginning. Requiring a PhD is more of a cultural fit thing and a first filter of sorts

That's why there's a larger interview process with the higher-paying jobs (such as quantitative finance)

It's not like most PhDs who claim to know the stuff you listed know them well enough, and in general BS/MS know even less

And indeed as the interviews are somewhat lengthy, you don't want to be wating your time as an interviewer. So you try to hook up PhDs, although surely there are MSs who'd probably be better at the job

Not at first, but they learn them over time

7:28 PM

I'm assuming these are usually guys fresh out of college or interns. I don't think a reasonably experienced scientist would take the risk of entering a totally new field for a low pay.

@Gaurav Huh? Bank jobs are actually well-paying

Academic jobs are the ones that are "low paying"

Blimey, that. :D

Working with money makes you more money than working with your brain?

That's the essence of Capitalism, is it not?

True.

7:37 PM

@KyleKanos Maybe, the bank companies also aren't ready to shell out that much for a scientist new into the field ? There is a difference between the well-paying regular bank job and that of a scientist working at the bank, no ?

What are ethical career choices for physicists? I don't ever want to work for a bank.

I fail to see how working for a bank is unethical

But there's always pure research with national labs

Data analyst positions with tech companies

Research positions with private (albeit DoD funded) companies

Maybe immoral, but not unethical ;-) (joke)

If you don't choose the thug life of that scientist from breaking bad, you're ethical bro.

Hmm, they don't seem to be really giving much back

7:41 PM

I mean, if you're concerned with ethics, then, the way I see it, the only company you can work with is the one you started; every company is "dirty" in some way

Didn't you see the video of the interview I posted here about the mathematian worth $14 billion?

The only company you could work for, perhaps. But you could work for a school, government, charity, co-operative etc

From my exposure to those, same things happen there

@innisfree Go into the ivory tower of academia and lock the door. Otherwise, become a schoolteacher or an engineer for some aid project.

Most banks have no clear ethical policy about their investments. It's not ethical to invest in companies that sell guns and arms, trash the environment, trample on people's rights or generally exploit people, lobby the government, mis-sell financial produces, rip people off etc

That's the problem, though, academia is an Ivory tower - you're not contributing much or helping anybody. It's basically impossible to live an authentic, ethical life.

7:56 PM

Like I said, the only way to be happy "ethically" is to own your own company (with the caveat of "and don't be a hypocrite")

Even then, you're probably going to be doing business with someone who does something "unethical"

So maybe the only real solution is to just never get a job and never interact with anyone

Some people actually do that ;) they go "off-grid", cut themselves off from all ordinary, capitalistic society

I know. They're a sad lot, IMO.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons

And for those not on mobile:

James Harris Simons

James Harris "Jim" Simons (born 1938) is an American mathematician, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is a code breaker and studies pattern recognition. Simons taught mathematics at Stony Brook University on Long Island in New York. In 1982, Simons founded Renaissance Technologies, a private hedge fund investment company based in New York with over $25 billion under management. Simons retired at the end of 2009 as CEO of one of the world's most successful hedge fund companies. Simons' net worth is estimated to be $14 billion. Simons lives with his wife Marilyn H. Simons in Manhattan and...

Nooo...ChatJax mangles the dollar signs in there.

8:10 PM

Wow that does suck

Wonder if that's a ChatJax fault or a OneBox fault

@Gaurav No need to speculate: Go to glassdoor.com and have a look at the salaries. That said, banks are often not the ones paying the biggest bucks in the financial industry.

Hey peepz!

And there goes the chatroom volume level....

Yo pal!

@KyleKanos whaaaaat?!

8:12 PM

Well you said Hi and then no one said anything

For like a good 40 seconds

Screw you too! :D

Hey, you're the one that (seemingly almost) killed chat!

@innisfree Well, I'd say ivory tower is better than actively unethical, buy you're right, of course

@ACuriousMind So what do you think about pedophilia?

@KyleKanos You killed the cat

I've never killed a cat

I've killed a few birds & a rabbit with my cars in the past (all their fault)

8:13 PM

Curiousity did :-)

@skillpatrol Never make jokes too explicit ;)

I did not kill the cat.

sorry

He could be talking about some other curious one

Today in so-called Riemannian geometry we got into higher Chern classes

friggin' awesome dude

8:15 PM

Cherning butter?

It helps EFLs

Would anyone happen to know what the first Chern form, trace(R) where R is the curvature tensor, would represents in physics-speak in the case of the tangent bundle?

Looking at you, @ChrisWhite @ACuriousMind

It's not the Ricci tensor because it's a two-form, but I'm not sure what it is. Also, I temporarily fooled my prof. into believing it was the Ricci tensor, but he recovered and said it was related somehow but he couldn't recall exactly how.

Amazon needs some help in categorizing their movies

Wolf on Wall Street and Christmas Classics Volume I are considered "Action & Adventure" movies