Didn't mix that well with communism either :p

From what I've read science in China was abysmal 'til the 80's

@Slereah capitalism outlasted communism but think something else is likely to outlast capitalism, exactly as marx predicted.

Capitalism isn't gonna be that relevant with future technology

@vzn the curse of progress, rationality and ethics

china is also very strong in supercomputing last few years, they seemed to "come out of nowhere"...

Most economy systems are based on the notion of scarcity

And the necessity of labor

its an area (supercomputing) where (almost only) throwing huge $$$ at it puts you at front.

Once most jobs are automatized most current systems are a bit irrelevant

yes "scarcity" have pondered that a lot myself.

it seems to transcend economics and enter many human relations and social systems.

also pondering much the (inter)relationship of tech and employment etc

Pre-agricultural people had no economical system for basically the same reason

Not much you can sell to another hunter gatherer that you can't get yourself

nice chatting gotta go to (boring?) xmas party, am hoping to get in some more SE chat or something

l8er

@Slereah There's plenty of high performance compute and math stuff available for people with physics backgrounds as well. Like, a lot. If you're interested that is.

I've been to those places, too!

But they have a bunch of better qualified people for those positions

I didn't do much computing when I did the physics

Basically all my master thesis was done without computers

Just a big stack of papers

Well if you're going for an entry level position, you only need to know some basic stuff, like say solving PDEs numerically, or writing some machine learning algorithms if that's more to your interests. That and a good grasp of programming languages should get you through interviews.

The problem will be getting an interview, but you might be able to get in through a headhunter or whatever.

@Slereah not even mathematica

of course Mathematica

I'm a lazy shit

you did that one horrible integral all by hand

But Mathematica can only get you so far

And pretty much yeah

2 weeks to solve

Tho to be fair, the integral itself wasn't hard to do

@Slereah link to the thesis plx tx? Paywall?

I mean it basically boiled down to solving $\int x^n e^{ix^2} dx$

a large number of times, but srill

@Slereah that's trivial

I hope you can read French then

why did it take 2 weeks?

@Slereah Hehehe

:P

I can read integrals...

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19940612/Science/…

The big integral is in appendix C

why all that boring theory

that everyone knows anyways

bc it's a thesis

so

we never include that kind of shit

"mesure de Wiener" I can read French!

It means "measuring your wiener"

@Huy what

what don't you include

calculations?

"le meme"

boring theory that everyone familiar with the topic already knows

oh appendix A or what

Do you already know the phase space formalism of quantum mechanics

ofc

and B

also do you not like \left| \right|

I forget what I used

Been a while

@Slereah Unfortunately I can't figure out the general flow of the paper. Haha I thought I would. Everything looks familiar and now I'm sad I can't read French.

just ||

General flow is

What is a path integral

How to find path integrals from Schrodinger and vice versa

I did some computation with Matsubara Green's functions

Operator ordering problem in path integrals

no idea what that was about, physically speaking

Phase space quantisation method

And then applications to a curved space path integral

@Slereah cf. any first semester QM book

Do you mean "cf no first semester QM book"

We didn't see path integrals at all during my studies

wat

I did that master thesis because our big theory professor offered the topic

@Slereah what book did you use o.o

What non-relativistic QM book has path integrals in it?

wat

path integrals are in Shankar and Sakurai

literally the two most popular QM books

literally

even the math nerd has read them

Landau doesn't :p

no I haven't read them, I've read Salmhofer's intro to renormalization

Landau's like 10 pages long

(which is a terrible book imo)

Landau is 800 pages or so

Landau QM?

yes

689

We didn't even see path integrals in our QFT class

But it was a pretty shitty class

my QM prof didn't do them either, but the one in the year after that did them

We had a lot of shitty classes

me too

but also a few good ones

Our "GR" class (cosmology) didn't do the EFE

wat

Should have picked another school really

did your QM class do schrödinger

We did everything with the FRW metric directly

to what end

Because it was cosmology

ok

To compute redshift and such

@yuggib Can you please leave me a note explaining how to get the AMS discount?

@Slereah that's cosmology in a nutshell

pretty much

very interesting

would have been nice to at least see the EFE in some detail

Derive FRW

I should start studying Lie groups tomorrow

@0celo7 kick me in my ass if I don't

@Huy From what book?

@NeuroFuzzy: no book, from prof. Einsiedler

@Huy Ahh okay.

I like Asimov and all but he's kind of a hack

To be fair

Merry Christmas!

@Slereah : Interesting topic.

Too bad I never got to do it!

If you're interested I think this is on the topic :

arxiv.org/pdf/1012.2069.pdf

(Smilga was my thesis advisor)

@Slereah : Thanks.

@Slereah (ah, wifi at my party...) like asimov too but non sequitur? what are you talking about? fyi browsed your thesis, thx for posting. something about connections between brownian motion and qm? also have not seen path integrals connected with qm after browsing much undergrad level material... what is the basic idea there?

I am currently rereading Asimov

He is good at doing plots and settings

Writing not so much

Also the brownian motion stuff is just the intro :p

The topic is about operator ordering in path integrals

@Slereah asimov on what? still not exactly following, is this wrt anything in the (prior?) chat?

It is unrelated

Asimov the science fiction author

Of science fiction

I am talking about his books and not his chemistry papers

you seem to have a nonlinear way of writing here. yes ofc have read asimov.

The link with the brownian motion btw is that path integrals were originally used to describe it

By Norbert Wiener

just a little historical intro

@Slereah what asimov are you reading? did a biography on him as highschool english class assignment. 20p complete with footnotes.

Currently up to Foundation

do you read any of his nonfiction also? he was very prolific but seems to have been forgotten somewhat. like his I Robot stuff a lot.

No

what languages do you use on front end web dev? jquery?

@vzn I'm not sure how to put this politely, but Nature is not exactly known for publishing the most important/correct papers.

Nature is a magazine, not a journal.

@DanielSank fighting words! challenge you to find a written/ documented assertion of that fact assertion rather than mere hearsay.

@vzn I decline that invitation.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. Something being published doesn't mean it's changing our understanding of quantum mechanics.

@DanielSank will concede, nature functions as a journal-magazine hybrid. but the journal requirements are high, some higher than other journals say in physics or other fields it covers etc

agreed all journals can make mistakes (2020 hindsight)...

@vzn Give me a written/documented assertion of that :-)

Again, forget the journal thing.

There's a lot of stuff published that's mostly just hype and not actually moving science forward.

@DanielSank do you know anyone publishing in Nature/ Science? just ask em! :P

@vzn I can't tell if you're joking. Have you seen my group's publication list?

all magazines are focused on novelty. in fact gibson (sf writer) in interview once called them "novelty aggregators" (and therefore a source of some of his ideas!)

you say that likes its a bad thing :P

its a feature, not a bug :P ...

@vzn I'm not interested in arguing this with you.

You seem to be on a soap-box and I have no reason to push you off it.

@DanielSank who is arguing? also not interested in arguing etiher!

@DanielSank you seem to perceive a soapbox...

@vzn Fine whatever.

I disagree with your suggestion that being published means a piece of research is necessarily important and/or moves its field forward in a meaningful way.

@DanielSank hasnt your "understanding of qm" ever changed? :P

However, I decline to provide examples as it would require me to essentially insult the authors of said works.

@vzn Yes. Considerably.

@DanielSank lol a rather absurd/ ridiculous/ indefensible position (for you) to take!

@vzn k

@DanielSank why not insult them if they truly deserve it?

@vzn Are you kidding?

What stage of your career are you in?

ah so its now a monologue (soliloquy?) oh well. a chance to practice some google fu

@DanielSank theres a fine line between humor and seriousness sometimes eh?

@DanielSank "midcareer"

We all know the cool journal is Physical Review D

@vzn Soliloquy? What? I've totally lost track of what you're talking about.

@vzn It's hard to tell via internet chat, anyway.

@vzn Not sure what that means, but forget it.

@vzn I can give you some advice on that.

Check out Microsoft's Typescript language.

It's essentially js but with static typing, making it much easier to write complex applications.

It integrates well with ES6. We use it with polymer for the GUI stuff. It's working pretty well so far.

@DanielSank ok thx for tip. sounds relatively new. jquery is nearly "solidified" std now.

@vzn There are a lot of "standard" practices in web development which you should not accept.

Web programming became popular really fast. Lots of inexperienced programmers produced lots of really terrible code in a really terrible language (javascript).

@DanielSank example(s)? think geneally no sense "pushing the river". its all evolving...

@vzn Watch this: destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Javascript is a disaster.

@DanielSank agreed, it is still "work in progress". it is still undergoing innovation. eg "node.js"

@vzn The idea of node is cute but bad in practice.

@DanielSank js is a near disaster yet widespread and now forever inescapable.

Who in their right mind would want to write a server in a dynamic language with absolutely no safety?

@DanielSank in practice there is no difference between theory & practice, but in practice there is...

node.js has significant/ rising momentum at this point.

js is widely considered one of the worst languages in existence. Why would you want to write a server in it?

@vzn Uh, false. See typescript, GWT, etc. etc.

@DanielSank maybe a question to ask the bazillions of developers now doing exactly that...

@vzn Have you ever actually written a web app

?

Bazillions of developers are doing what they need to do to get paid.

its a big ecosystem. theres big room for different ideas. they all are complementary. occasionally competing. "frenemies"... (huh! that reminds me of this conversation!)

@DanielSank yes

Facebook is written in php. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to learn php and start new projects in it.

@vzn Yeah, ok, did you like javascript?

@DanielSank zuckerberg with his billion$$$ and deluxe hawaii property (and hit autobio hollywood movie!) surely doesnt give a ---- about your opinion of php eh?

@vzn Yeah, fine, and I'm giving you some well meant advice about which ideas to use and which to approach with skepticism.

@vzn You're missing the point.

@DanielSank thx for that.

@DanielSank the point of your sword? :P

Folks made bazillions of $$$ on steam engine trains. Does that mean we should use them for new projects?

The fact that there are so many attempts to not use js for web apps says something about how horrible it is.

@DanielSank geez man are you doing web dev or physics electronics?

@vzn Some, yes.

It's really nice to be able to access our data via the web.

That way we can set up an experiment and go do something else, checking progress of the scan on our phones etc.