not working

@EmilioPisanty thx for clarification; am willing to accept some criticism of all popsci sites that they "dumb down" content and mostly rewrite press releases, sometimes not really adding a lot on top of that. however think some criticism of them is unfair. think professional scientists should not have "too much" disdain about communicating with the mass public. re that...

@vzn I don't fully understand your grammar, but OK.

I'm not sure whether you're charging people in this chatroom with having "too much disdain" about communicating with the mass public.

But I'm not sure whether you realize to what extent the stuff we're asking of you is related to a perceived disdain on your part to whether the science communication is done correctly.

@EmilioPisanty there has been a lot of disdain expressed for popsci in this chat room over the yrs. but (also) theres a lot of disdain expressed in general in this chat room.

@EmilioPisanty huh, you just said sorry earlier, this isnt sounding as much like a sorry any more. :|

@vzn The overall theme of my previous remarks stands.

@EmilioPisanty am trying to find the perfect comic for this, it was posted in here recently, maybe by slereah...

A lot of popular math is just plain garbage, really.

On the other hand there's a lot of it which are good too

@vzn in this connection, do you mean disdain of scientific communication in general, or of specific outlets?

Mostly not written by news articles unfortunately, and by actual mathematician of sorts

@EmilioPisanty Does the kerning on the right of that $n$ look off to you?

@0celo7 as in, is the space too wide?

yes

yeah

@EmilioPisanty should I fix it or will I go insane?

@0celo7 code?

just that line

@EmilioPisanty the link explains it better

In general, for $n$ odd, $\bar\psi$ can be a sum of polynomials in $\mathscr P_k$, $4\le k\le n$.

@EmilioPisanty the bad one I ran across recently was this one: phys.org/news/2014-01-nanoscale-standard-efficiency-limit.html

the arxiv preprint was fine

@0celo7 huh

actually, that one wasn't too bad. but the headline might make someone think "oh hey more efficient engines"

I'd ask on the tex.se chatroom and if they don't have a fast answer then I'd drop it

it looks too mysterious to not promise a full six hours of pain if you even get started

rather than "20% efficient instead of 10% efficient"

ok

@0celo7 Ok, that's it, I am subscribing to God of Cringe

@BalarkaSen I don't know who that is.

@0celo7 You could always try hacking it and go for the n \text{ odd, } \bar\psi...

$n \text{ odd, } \bar\psi$

@0celo7 Do you want to know?

@BalarkaSen idk, do I?

I kinda like being a normie

h3h3 made a video on him once upon a long time ago

oh

him

@vzn funny you should link to Jorge Cham

is he good?

lol not at all

given how often you have a choice of which of these you choose to link to

he is literally the god of cringe

and how often you choose terrible outlets when there are far better options on the first page of google search results

the closer you start to the beginning of that cycle, the better

@EmilioPisanty stop criticizing my linking. there is nothing wrong with my linking esp wrt informal chat room contents. dont scapegoat me.

lmao

i take emilio's point to be that people are judged not just by the arguments they make but the evidence they cite in the process

it seems EP may have missed some of the key pts of Chams presentation.

and citing such sources does really run the risk of harming the credibility of the speaker

in general, the farther one is from the initial source, the more diluted/distorted the presentation will be

@Semiclassical try listening to Cham esp his last summarization/ conclusion at the end.

@vzn if you're trying to make a personal attack there by appealing to some stereotype, this is not the venue.

@vzn How many people have criticised your 'linking' in this chat room? (you can include me on that list as well)

@EmilioPisanty who is "attacking"?

@Mithrandir24601 oh 1 more for the cyber lynch mob eh? why dont you guys start starring now?

lolw0t

@vzn Please refrain from hyperbolic insults such as "lynch mob".

@ACuriousMind lol, "hyperbolic insult", would that include use of word "crusade"? etc

@vzn please, this is meant to help you not, be offensive.

I have literally no idea what that's supposed to mean.

surely you'd agree that the original paper would be a better source than a pop-sci article?

or a blog post by the researcher, better than an article on CNN?

let's not all pile in

@Semiclassical sorry =) i'll back off.

@ACuriousMind Are parabolic insults allowed?

i prefer elliptic ones

Meh, they just don't hit the spot

You got to hit the nerve real fast instead of swinging around it

mine is more a pun on the other meaning of 'elliptic'

Heh

I found that directly or indirectly associating mathematicians to ncatlab usually works as a great insult

lol

it does depend a bit on the page, mind

there are some nlab pages which are not bizarrely obscure

some

You need to look for the n-point of view pages

The ones made by Urs Schreiber are high on the list

right

or anything involving topoi

ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+mechanics

Useful

lol

everything in section 1) seems fine

hahah

hah, classical mechanics

sniiiped

(word vomit starts)

Newtonian, nah. Lagrangian, nah. Hamiltonian, meh. Poisson algebras? oh hell yeah!

good lord

We have a winner

Say I have a basis where I have one timelike and one spacelike basis vector, forming an orthogonal set, and start with the simple (1,0) and (0,1) pair, how does that actually become useful when considering motion?

I assume I apply a lorentz transform to the space but what do I do then to actually get a result that's equivalent to just doing simpler algebra

I'm not sure why you're ridiculing them - they're very up-front about the "nPOV" being their angle of approach to everything, and they're not claiming other approaches don't exist - they're just not interested in them. And considering how little other resources like the nLab exist for non-nPOV approaches, the amount of effort that went into the nLab is impressive and it's a bit sad a similar resource doesn't exist for more "down to earth" mathy physics.

ehh

@ACuriousMind The thing is, the premise of the site itself is ridiculous.

I find it hard not to find titles like "Deep Beauty – Understanding the quantum world through mathematical innovation" to be pretentious

(though tbf that title may be more reflective of publishing incentives than anything else)

If you ask anyone who has worked his or her whole life on differential geometry whether thinking of a differential form as a n-functor on the n-path space is even a little bit useful, the answer is going to be "no".

And indeed, unraveling the definition gives you something very tautological.

ehhh

it being tautological isn't necessarily a bad thing

The site is based off on putting concrete mathematics into symbolic pieces of nonsense.

it's trying to translate everything into nPOV

@Semiclassical No, but the idea that such a "n Point of View" on literally every corner on mathematics could turn out to be useful is

on that, I tend to agree

Anyway, I do not think this is "bad" per se. It's just lol-able

They are putting a lot of effort, but into making up definitions which are not going to be useful in anything other than perhaps making definitions :P

@BalarkaSen So what if it may not be useful in every (or even most) cases? Why does it make it ridiculous to try and see how much of math and physics can be made to fit this general language?

It's ideological statements like "The following is effectively a derivation of, and an introduction to, classical mechanics by studying correspondences in what is called (as we will explain) the slice topos over the moduli stack of prequantum line bundles." ncatlab.org/nlab/show/prequantized+Lagrangian+correspondence that are the problem with this site

a line of Kierkegaard comes to mind

Most of it is good in that it applies ideas in general, multiple fields etc, and seems like a good idea of expressing things in one language in another etc... but then you have religion like the above peppered into it

@BalarkaSen There's a quote (I think by Lawvere or MacLane) that goes like this: "The purpose of category theory is to make the obvious obviously obvious", and this motivates a lot of the "weird" definitions they make - they're not choosing definitions that are "intuitive" or useful for applications, they choose definitions that lend themselves best to deriving theorems by nPOV techniques.

"If Hegel had written his whole logic and had written in the preface that it was only a thought experiment, he undoubtedly would have been the greatest thinker who has ever lived. As it is he is comic."

@ACuriousMind Well, right now I am trying to construct a binary operation on the set of prime numbers. I want to make it a semigroup, take it's Grothendieck completion and study it's group structure.

That's an interesting endeavor, by your logic

To the mathematical community, it's lol-able. Ask someone.

It's just smashing togather different corners and ideas of mathematics to a meaningless pile of formalism

i think the 'comedy' of nLab comes from it seeming to lose track of the 'thought experiment' it represents---namely, to what extent can physics/math be expressed from nPOV

Even professional mathematicians who use category theory on day-to-day basis ridicule that site

to the extent that the site succeeds in making clear how nPOV people find it useful to view physics, it works

My sense from this site is: 'I can't understand physics, I can understand math, maybe if I write physics in a mathy way I'll understand physics'

to extent that it seems like it's staking out claims about how physics should be understood, it's comic

@BalarkaSen And yet some professional mathematicians also contribute to it. I think the case is not as clear-cut as you make it out to be.

I get why you're skeptical of the usefulness. But I think calling the site ridiculous and a pile of meaningless formalism goes a bit far.

I do think that it's easy to mistake the intended audience

The outrageous point of the site is not the site itself, but the fact that this alleged n point of view is giving birth to a new trend in mathematical education where people learn a bunch of abstract words and learn to throw them out without understanding the meaning behind them

Take a look at a conversation on the math chat we had an hour back; someone was asking about abelian categories and the likes without understanding/knowing that cyclic groups are not free abelian

@BalarkaSen I have no evidence of such a trend, nor of it being caused by the nLab. Where's that coming from?

i suspect part of the problem is that there's some articles on nLab for which there really aren't great Wikipedia alternatives

as an example, there's an nLab page on resurgence theory but no such article on Wikipedia

@ACuriousMind Oh, this is a pretty generic phenomenon. I can link you some MO posts.

This has come up multiple times I have talked to professional mathematicians in real life

so that means that someone who wants to read up on the subject will find themselves on nLab, whether or not they're interested in nPOV

(Admittedly those who belong to the concrete side of mathematics; geometry and topology in particular)

@Semiclassical I already said above: "and it's a bit sad a similar resource doesn't exist for more "down to earth" mathy physics.", so I agree

right

so someone just interested in math-physics in general may not really get the premise of the site and so take it as a joke rather than an intentional thought experiment regarding nPOV

is Balarka on an anti-nLab rant again?

@ACuriousMind One case in point

By J P May, a homotopy theorist, who uses category theory as a livelihood, mind

("thought experiment" is not the right word, but eh it's what i've got)

the other line which comes to mind: "The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space"

Anyway, this does not point to anything inherently wrong with nlab; the whole association with the mentality of $(\infty, n)$-point of view being the best formal viewpoint is the depressing thing in this situation.

that's what reading nLab feels like at times: the belief that one can fly more easily in the vacuum of abstraction

Eg, consider Univalent Foundations/Homotopy Type Theory. Greatly advocated by a large group of people involved in the infinity business as a "formal" approach to homotopy theory. There is a series of heated exchange between Jacob Lurie and Urs Schreiber on the usefulness of this thing in a blogpost out there.

I have not heard a single person talk about $(\infty,n)$ in real life.

which is great if one has a rocket engine, but is entirely irrelevant for a dove or a plane

Where are all these category theorists hidden?

Jacob Lurie wrote a book on (infty, n)-topoi!

I can link you the conversation if you want.

(to extend the metaphor a bit: the simplest way to fly through vacuum is to carry around fuel to push against)

...bleh, too much metaphor

@ACuriousMind Second case in point, check out the comments below by Lurie and Schreiber

At high energy scales does quark confinement stop applying?

Could one theoretically make an accelerator to smash two protons together and briefly result in free quarks?

appropriately, one of us already made an answer in relation to this: physics.stackexchange.com/a/317743/55641

(spoiler: it's not me)

I don't know how high the deconfinement scale is, though (if it's even known)

@Semiclassical ugh I was treating one result as a black box but now that I look at the proof, it needs to be explained too

:/

@Semiclassical Huh, you found that quicker than I did ;P

lol

i guess i'll ask, then, do we have any idea what the quark deconfinement scale is?

@Semiclassical Only a vague one I think - it's pretty difficult to extract good values from the lattice simulations as I understand. There might be developments I'm not aware of, though

sounds about right

in general, getting precise numbers out of QCD seems exceptionally hard

not surprising, though. you've got more fields to deal with, a much larger coupling constant, and the numerical sign problem to deal with

(plus everything interesting is nonperturbative, and that's hard)

@BalarkaSen reading that back, what I find appalling is someone trying to learn abelian categories without knowing what abelianization means

I think that's abelianization in a different context

You can abelianize categories, i.e.

Hmm

Okay, fair enough

Hi, everybody.

@Semiclassical I have linear operators $L,L_0,$ and $K$. I don't want to use $K_0$, should I just use $H$ next?

Seems reasonable enough absent some other obvious name

@Semiclassical ok, there's another error/omissionin this proof lamo

the $n=4$ case is bad