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00:00
I don't know PDE theory m8
Of course you do
You were talking about it a few months ago
Was I
Take a look at this wacky question I just found. I don't even know how to react, it's so off-topic: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/273148/…
Good lord
Sorry to just barge in and say that, but it's pretty funny
00:01
hahahahahaha
Never seen the "ghosts" tag before.
Nicole fine as hell doe
can't disagree
it s OK guys
found her
she has a kid and no husband
so she s available
Yikes
I ain't about that life
00:02
u aint about women>
?
Ha-ha
Single mom is never good
everybody makes mistakes
u d never date a single mom?
once u get older
Unless she was one by choice (and had a good reason), no
Widows don't count
What's the logical alternative? Date married women, only? :-)
Would someone with the right background write at least a summary for the tag?
To try too minimize the recurrance of questions like
-1
Q: Why do things move on their own?

Nicole CottinghamI am not a believer in anything spiritual or religious, including ghost, but i have had some strange occurrences that i cant explain. I've done some research on why things move on their own before i decided to directly ask on here after finding no non-biblical explanations on why this happens. Wh...

00:06
@CuriousOne Huh?
@dmckee haha
why not get Shog to delete it
yhea we need someone who went to hogwart university and has a Phd in ghostology
to write a summary for that tag
@0celo7: I didn't get the logical alternative to single moms. What's that? Married women without children?
he likes to have husbands hunting him I guess
@CuriousOne How about not dating mothers
you don t like experience?
you can be experienced without being a mom though...
00:09
@dmckee who upvoted that question?
this is getting really weird
the person who upvoted this is the person who feels lonely at night
@Slereah How the heck does $$\limsup_{t\to T}\sup_M|R_{g(t)}|=\infty$$ make sense when $M$ is compact?
@0celo7: Depends on neediness. If you can't stand being eternal number three+, then you shouldn't.
I'm number one, bro
Hmm
I guess $[0,T)\times M$ isn't compact
@ChrisWhite Hey, you work with PDEs. Do you know anything about parabolic equations / the maximum principle?
user54412
00:17
uh maybe
user54412
I do relativity, so I only actually work with hyperbolic equations
@ChrisWhite ok, well
you guys are mean
Let $F:\Omega\times [0,\tau]\to\Bbb R$ be smooth, where $\Omega\subset\Bbb R^n$ is open and $F(x,0)=0$ $\forall x\in\Omega$. Suppose $\partial_t F\le\Delta F+C\tau^{-2}$ on $(0,\tau]$, where $C>0$ is a constant. Why does the maximum principle imply $\sup_\Omega F(\cdot, t)\le C\tau^{-2}t$?
00:32
@0celo7: I am not even a "bro". :-)
@CuriousOne it s OK bro , we all appreciate u for what u do
@DaveCoffman We seem to have a small but persistent cadre of users who vote for anything that interests them no matter how off-topic or cast pity votes (no idea which is more prevalent).
@privetDruzia: So do I. I especially appreciate myself for all the stuff that I don't (have to) do, anymore. :-)
@dmckee: I like to hope that my occasional pity vote will prevent me from going to hell. Call me an eternal optimist. ;-)
@CuriousOne do you want to be a sistah instead
@0celo7: Are we talking reincarnation? Can I choose? In that case I want to be a bird, first.
00:38
I'm confused
Or are you confused
don t worry guys I ll figure it all out if u r too confused to do so
let s just build a wall
and make the mexicans pay for it
I agree with this plan.
OK @CuriousOne start building the wall, I ll join u guys later
everybody will participate in the construction of this wall: we are all equal in here.
But some are more equal than others
@privetDruzia: Nothing to worry about, birds can fly over walls. :-)
Some
some birds
00:50
sometimes I use so much oil when grilling birds, I am affraid the US army invades my kitchen
*some birds
Not funny
because u r American, hahaha
@0celo7: You didn't think I wanted to be an emu, did you?
just to be clear: I am laughing because the joke was so good, not because u r American
I'm German
00:53
I'm Belgian
you disgust me
Don't make me invade you
@privetDruzia: Real Americans can still laugh about themselves. Sadly, it's a dying breed. Too many Americans are channeling their inner German, these days, and are not funny.
@Shrodinger2016 c'mooon there are worse things than being German
Belgian, Spanish
00:55
Belgian, Spanish, Chinese
Indian
Russian
Canadian
Somalian
These ICHEP slides are getting out of hand
(courtesy Christos Leonidopoulos's slides)
does any of you like the big bang theory?
Sheldon Cooper must be your hero, right?
00:59
no
Being german is cool.
k
@PhysicsGuy So is being Werner von Braun
or Elon Musk
I know.
@GPhys Strangely enough in that one frame Jack Nicholson looks a lot like one of my former bosses who works on CMS.
@privetDruzia One of my experiment got on the white board. Does that count?
We made fun of the way they butchered our typographical conventions for spelling it, however.
@dmckee There are a few details sometime that indeed are quite funny. Things that the producers are not aware of I think
the simplest example is how Howard, the engineer, holds a soldering iron
01:05
Hehe, Howard from "The Big Bang theory".
the way he holds it (like a knife), he won t ever be able to solder anything properly
@dmckee one of your own invented experiments or an experiment invented by someone else that you are studying?
@dmckee Nice
@privetDruzia One that I worked on. DoubleChooz. The first experiment to get published with evidence for $\theta_{13}$ non-zero. Alas, Daya Bay got to 5 sigma about 2 months before we did, so they score the big prize.
What is $\theta_{13}$
@0celo7 On of the neutrino mixing angles.
01:10
@dmckee nice. Did they ask your permission or anything to use it?
@privetDruzia Not that I heard. But why would they?
@dmckee What's that
@dmckee idk. when using someone elses song they have to ask permission to the singer or songwriter or someone else, in order to not infringe laws and all that stuff
@0celo7 It has nothing to do with differential geometry or category theory.
@dmckee I can never remember off the top of my head if it's PMNS or PNMS
You'd think I would, since it's alphabetical
01:14
@dmckee That's fine, I know nothing about the second
Although if it were the first, that would be helpful
I'm interested in topology and geometry btw, not cat theory :)
are there today really students as intelligent as Sheldon Cooper was when he was a student?
@dmckee ELI5 neutrino mixing angle pls
vzn
vzn
@privetDruzia found her where? if a few ppl give her more upvotes shell have enough rep to chat =D
@vzn hahahaah. facebook
vzn
vzn
@privetDruzia lol ok right ofc didnt occur to me (maybe too old) :(
01:22
@0celo7 What? Should I know what "ELIS" means?
@dmckee explain like I am 5
@dmckee Yeah, I did expect that...
It's a number about neutrino mixing.
But then a 5 year old wouldn't know a neutrino from a numerator, so what's the point?
@dmckee What's that?
@dmckee ELI18 then
Hmmm ... looks like I've never written out the mixing matrix on the site.
Look on page 7 of ...
The limits on page 8 are now very much out of date, of course. Indeed there were a few of important announcements in the last month.
01:35
lol what
what are these things
@dmckee I know nothing about particle physics, what is happening
@0celo7 Experiments have been running. The evidence is increasingly holding that the mass hierarchy of the neutrinos is "normal", and that $\delta_{CP}$ is likely non-zero.
...$\delta_{CP}$?
Maury Goodman's "long baseline neutrino newsletter is a great way to follow that without having to read tons of papers.
@0celo7 Another number about neutrino mixing. The CP-violating phase; and a possible explanation for the matter/antimatter asymmetry in the universe.
For that to work we needed relatively large $\theta_{13}$ (check) and large $\delta_{CP}$.
The evidence for tha latter is starting to look pretty good.
@dmckee What's the latest experiments? Was it.... JUNO or something (?)
going to sleep it s 4am here
bye folks
01:45
There was one using the Super-Kamiokande I thought too
let your day be as nice as you were to me
I don't know so much about neutrino experiments
$\text{NO}\nu\text{A}$, T2K. Super-k is still running as are Daya Bay and Double Chooz. KamLAND is doing yet another re-configuration. microBooNE is starting.
crazy names.
It is easy, when reading the popular press to get the feeling that the LHC is particle physics, but on the ground that simply isn't true.
01:47
ICECUBE is still the most exciting particle physics experiment to visit
DUNE planning is ramping up fast, too.
or is it IceCube?
@GPhys ICECUBE is way cool. ::get it? get it?:: But in some ways it is an astrophysics experiment that just happens to be a neutrino telescope.
@GPhys Don't recall.
@dmckee hahaha
@dmckee When I visited Stony Brook's open house while deciding on a graduate program, I spoke with one of the grad students that had just got back from IceCube
He was only there for the "summer" though
He said he enjoyed it, though
@GPhys Very few members of the experiment over-winter, the guys who are there know how to do what little actually needs hands on-site to fix.
01:54
makes sense
I enjoyed talking with the nucl-exp guys at Stony Brook a lot
I was impressed
vzn
vzn
02:08
@Dave are you new to chat? are you affiliated with IYPT? looks interesting can you say something about it?
@GPhys we are always looking for chat speakers, any interest?
@vzn I do not believe I am qualified to answer anything interesting (I only have a BS in physics, and I'm only just starting graduate school)
02:40
@vzn I was affiliated with the 2015 USA team that attended the IYPT in Thailand, though I didn't actually go. I just worked on some of the problems in school. I have no current affiliation with any teams, though I believe that there is an effort to begin recruiting for the 2017 USA team. I can look into that, if you are interested. Bear in mind I won't be able to get any information about that for a few weeks.
@vzn If you're interested in the International Young Physicist's Tournament, their main website is here: iypt.org
They can explain it far better than I could.
But in short, it's a physics research competition between high school students.
So, possibly stupid question
Say we know the mass of an elementary particle
I have a stupid question
Then, according to the uncertainty principle, shouldn't the particle have no specific velocity, rather than momentum?
you're right
that is a stupid question
Cool?
Oh
Dammit
02:51
velocity is not an observable
But if we know the mass of an object, and p=mv, shouldn't the only thing undefined be velocity?
hmm
I'm trying to compute something stupid
this should be trivial
vzn
vzn
@GPhys ok. (reading your profile) did you do a sr honors thesis? how many pgs? did you do a presentation?
@vzn yes/yes, and other research with ATLAS and solid state neutron detectors (as an undergraduate)
02:55
@SirCumference that all depends on its position localization
but (I guess?) that's probably typical of most people going into ~top 20-30 physics programs
Let $f:S^2\to \Bbb R$ be the function associated with a gradient Ricci soliton $g$ on $S^2$. Let $\xi=\mathrm{grad}(f)$, and let $J$ be an almost complex structure on $S^2$ compatible with $g$. Then $J\xi$'s flow is a group of isometries $\varphi_t$. Let $p$ be a critical point of $f$, then $a:=\rho -\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{scal}_p$, where $\rho $ is the soliton constant. Then $(\mathrm d\varphi_t)_p(v)=\cos(at)v+\sin(at)Jv$.
But the basic idea is right: in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, if the mass is fixed, then the uncertainty in momentum is related to the uncertainty in velocity. Under these circumstances the velocity operator is defined as $\vec{v} = \vec{p}/m$.
This last equation is giving me trouble.
All right, next question
Degenerate gases
You know about them?
02:58
Me? No
@vzn only ~30 pages, nothing significant
I wish I knew about Ricci solitons
@0celo7 Er...do you know about degenerate gases, by chance?
my math thesis ended up being horrendously long, ~50 pg even after I switched it to two column. It was inflated a lot because it needed a lot more background information than is probably typical
02:59
@SirCumference no
@GPhys It wasn't on Ricci flow, by chance?
vzn
vzn
@GPhys its nearly as long as some masters theses. think 30pg thesis as an undergraduate is significant. & another 50 in math? think you would be interesting speaker, plz consider it. plz note theres a substantial undergrad contingent on the site
@0celo7 Internal Set Theory
Close enough I guess
03:01
@GPhys huh, I was going to say that does not seem very long
@0celo7: Did you ever get out of a speeding ticket with "Velocity is not an observable!"? ;-)
@DavidZ Maybe I'm just deluded from the experience of writing two theses at the same time :P
@0celo7: Or... in relativity with "It's all observer dependent... "
there were only 3 of us dumb enough to try simultaneous honors degrees at my university that year
@GPhys oh, well if you write two your page count is the total of both
That just goes without saying :-P
vzn
vzn
03:02
@GPhys "dumb," lol
Hmm, maybe I have to differentiate that equation
vzn
vzn
@0celo7 (uttered the magic word!) why? what are they good for?
@vzn I wish I knew
Ricci flow, apparently
No offense, but does page count matter for those of us who are gifted? I know that I wrote a lot to deflect from the fact that I didn't have much intelligent to contribute (I had basically figured out why everybody was designing the wrong DAQ architecture for an experiment, which made me correct but looking stupid...).
vzn
vzn
@0celo7 havent heard of em, where did you hear of em
03:05
In a Ricci flow book
@CuriousOne Page count doesn't matter for anyone except those who impose page count restrictions (and those who have to meet them), I'd say. But still, it's one of those numbers people compare because that's what we do, we compare numbers.
Or something like that.
vzn
vzn
@CuriousOne pages alone are not significant but apparently a lot of undergrads write nearly nothing
@vzn: Interesting... I wasn't aware of that problem. Having said that... US undergrads? I think the expectations are a bit different between the US and the European system.
@vzn: In the US I would expect the grad students to do the heavy lifting, while in Europe one can occasionally get useful work out of an undergrad (not always, of course).
I thought it was exactly the other way around.
Undergrad research is very common in America, and completely unheard of in Europe.
From what I've heard, the prevailing attitude in the US is that if you have done research as an undergrad, it gives you a big boost in getting into grad school in that field. Which implies that a lot of people don't.
03:13
@0celo7: We got pretty good results from our undergrads, on average. That's in Germany, maybe it's different in other countries. Personally I was working in a research group after my first exams... for a living, I needed to money from the RA position. OK, I was lucky getting that job.
at least at my undergrad university and physics department (larger "R2", but luckily nice physics department), I had to rely on charisma/class performance and seeking out professors to secure research opportunities
I was one of the only ones in the department, but I had convinced a good portion of friends to do as well
undergrad research was available, but you had to seek it out and it wasn't the "norm", I guess is what I'm saying
In my department at an R1, you're weird if you're not working for someone.
it seems like it would be a very departmental thing
Freshman research is a little unusual
But I know 5 who are
That's 10% of the class
vzn
vzn
@CuriousOne it depends who you talk to whether its a "problem", its not regarded as one in the US
03:15
There are probably more
@GPhys: Anybody who says that one can just stumble trough university without personal contacts to and help from faculty doesn't understand how science works... who you know (and who trusts you) is an enormous deal.
If there is nobody around who can help you... run!
So what that means is that 90% of the undergrads who don't move on to grad school never learn the real deal? Ouch.
[scifi] Yet another day to wrestle with those wiki markup...
@CuriousOne I mean 10% of first year students are, at least
@0celo7: Ah... OK. Yeah, nobody cared about first year students in my university, either. They were waiting for us to wash out in the first exams. Not that many did in my year, but still. After that I got the job and a lot more exposure to what science really involves (like writing grant applications...).
Either? I think 10% is pretty good
03:21
One guy went to the same physics professor week after week until the guy said to him "I can't get rid of you, so I might as well give you something to do... ".
That's weird
In hindsight... not a bad strategy.
I'd call security on him
He was actually good at math.
vzn
vzn
@GPhys exactly, understood, thats how it was in my time. btw are you in US or europe? can you say state? yes undergrad initiative/ effort/ results similar to yours seems notable/ uncommon all over the world, in a word "honors"
03:23
How on earth does one take the differential of a flow
@vzn US
this is nutso
what's the ODE that's solved by $\cos at+\mathrm i\sin at$?
vzn
vzn
@GPhys what do you want to work on now? your enthusiasm for particle physics is duly noted
HEP-exp, but Stony Brook almost convinced me to jump ship to nuclear-exp
they were this close
$x''=-a^2x$?
03:25
There is a large ATLAS collaboration at the university I'm going to, but there are also some neutrino guys
I'm eying particular advisor (who isn't?), but keeping open, mostly
already had lunch/met with people I was interested in some months ago before deciding
vzn
vzn
@GPhys this stuff is increasingly moving online/ open science/ open source, rewarding those with initiative/ selfmotivation, have some links on that, posted one recently
@GPhys just wondering are there aspects of HEP that are not particle oriented?
@CuriousOne yeah its kind of wild sometimes what actually constitutes a bachelors of science... it means more learned science not nec practiced it much different scenarios
@vzn Sure, there's plenty of long meetings with ATLAS management
(sarcasm, kind of)
vzn
vzn
@GPhys so (your take, recent fiery topic in here) what are the directions post Higgs?
@vzn What do you mean in particular? The next big discovery, big experiment, big theoretical idea?
vzn
vzn
03:43
@GPhys any/ all of the above, or whatever else... buzz, rumors, gossip etc
aka as the (silicon valley) media sometimes says, Next Big Thing™
Whereas theoretical physics is evolving (somewhat, jab) in meeting the latest data, I can focus on effectively providing the data to shape discussion regardless of origin. Even those of us not on the diphoton analysis always have something to excite people with
regarding the next big experiments, I think everybody (or at least me) is looking forward to DUNE getting off the ground
and keeping an eye on what China is going to be doing wrt colliders
but the LHC will live on for some years
vzn
vzn
@GPhys what do you mean "focus on effectively providing the data to shape discussion regardless of origin"? are you talking about the IT infrastructure etc? "origin" in different experiments?
@vzn in different experiments or analyses
vzn
vzn
@GPhys yeah they are a big deal and DZ is there & up to his elbows as you may have noticed (see his blog for more gory detail)
at, e.g. ATLAS, analysis is broken up into, say, a team doing a search for vector-like bosons all by themselves, and another team doing a dark matter search, etc etc
@origin
even if I'm on, say, the vector-like boson search and I don't think vector-like bosons exist, it's still an important analysis
04:09
0
Q: How should we deal with incorrect answers?

knzhouWhen a question makes the HNQ list, upvotes and answers from outsiders flood in. The score distributions on these questions are highly abnormal. Often, a mediocre answer that misses the actual point of the question is voted up. Rarely, a totally incorrect answer gets voted to the top: the publi...

Theoretical physicists better come up with a good reason why there will be more to see below 10TeV than there was just below 1TeV... otherwise the taxpayer will cut us off. Sigh...
05:01
@DanielSank Chris White and I are room owners so we can pin messages and deal with any fracas. I will be present at the chat.
05:36
@SirCumference momentum is a useful quantity to work with for several reasons. For example it is conserved, and in Langrangian/Hamiltonian mechanics it is the conjugate variable to position. So we generally use momentum rather than velocity even though for a specific particle they are proportional to each other.
@JohnRennie I do hope the level of fracas is reasonably civilized.
I'd hate to be remembered as the guy who's AMA had too much fracas.
In fact, @JohnRennie I hereby appoint you moderator of the fracas level of my AMA.
Should the fracas level be too high or too low, you will be held accountable.
Should the level of fracas be pleasing, you will be rewarded.
OMG the resposibility :-)
::looks up "fracas"::
Yet another English word that isn't English. We must have the most promiscuous language ever!
Indeed.
05:42
While you're here, a while back you mentioned that vacuum fluctuations could be detected as noise in electronic circuits.
Yes! Indeed they can.
Would you like a reference paper?
I'd be interested to know more about that. What's the best way to pursue it?
Well, there's a reasonably accessible paper by Roger Koch.
I'm looking for it.
Alternatively, if you post a question on the main site I might be able to answer it.
@JohnRennie That might be it.
I don't have journal access at the moment so I can't check.
Yeah, that abstract looks right.
How do you read papers... you're retired, yes?
05:46
Thanks, that gives me a starting point. I'll do an author search on the Arxiv and see what he's written that's publically available.
@DanielSank I only have access to the publically available stuff.
Though you'd be surprised what can be downloaded if you search.
I suspect a lot of academics don't like the way journals behave and are quite happy to quietly leak stuff :-)
@JohnRennie Yes, paying to have your paper published and then paying access it is rather irksome.
Let me know if you need anything.
Thanks :-)
It will help in your reading to know the following simple facts:
1. An infinitely long transmission line is like a one-dimensional electromagnetic vacuum: if you send a pulse into the line, it never comes back.
2. From a circuit theory point of view, a resistor is equivalent to an infinitely long transmission line. For example, if I have a finite length transmission line with characteristic impedance of 50 Ohm, and I terminate it with a 50 Ohm resistor, then a pulse traveling in the line will go into the resistor without any reflected part (i.e. we have matched impedances).
The same thing would happen if we had "terminated" our finite transmission line with an infinite transmission line. Therefore, the infinite line is equivalent to the resistor.
3. Resistors produce voltage noise, called Johnson-Nyquist noise. Therefore, the transmission line must also produce voltage noise.
This noise is required to exist because of statistical mechanics, so a classical theory predicts it. It's actually exactly equivalent to black body radiation!
However, because of quantum mechanics, the voltage noise is still there at zero temperature.
How's that sound?
Feel like an expert now?
:-) Thanks. It sounds as if what we're seeing are effectively zero point fluctuations in a free electron gas.
@JohnRennie Mmmmm, I dunno about that.
05:55
> Johnson–Nyquist noise (thermal noise, Johnson noise, or Nyquist noise) is the electronic noise generated by the thermal agitation of the charge carriers (usually the electrons) inside an electrical conductor at equilibrium, which happens regardless of any applied voltage.
@JohnRennie Indeed.
Note, however, that the quantum noise is there even in a superconductor at near zero temperature.
In the superconductor, the electrons are all in their ground state.
Thanks, I'll have a read around and attempt to get to grips with the subject.
Great.
It's one of my favorite topics.
I still haven't given up hope of understanding what vacuum fluctuations are without actually having to learn QFT.
This is hopefully one more step on that path.
Ahhhh, warning, warning!
You absolutely 100% do not need QFT to understand vacuum fluctuations.

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