The h Bar

Slereah

5:00 PM

@JohnRennie Big talk from an englishman

With your flavourless food

John Rennie

Flavour is bad for you - all those terpenes. Food needs to be cooked (preferably boiled) for at least 24 hours.

vzn

@ACuriousMind lol feel that way about all of cyberspace sometimes... aka "trying to boil the ocean" o_O

@bolbteppa 't hooft seems like nearly a modern day einstein incl with kooky-regarded by other physicists in later age

ACuriousMind

@vzn The main point of being like Einstein is not being regarded as kooky - it's also being right, which is much more difficult and much more rare.

6

vzn

@ACuriousMind modern attitudes seem to view einstein as "right" for about ½ his life and ~~kooky~~ "off" for the other ½

ACuriousMind

Also, 't Hooft has no doubt made great contributions to physics but that doesn't directly say anything about his more controversial ideas

bolbteppa

5:07 PM

Einstein did not even accept the weak interaction apparently

vzn

insert smbc cartoon on aged physicists here

Slereah

Einstein never really got kooky as far as I know

I mean he was stubborn on some issues

But he never went off the deep end

vzn

~~kooky~~ eccentric...

Slereah

coughPenrosecough

bolbteppa

I think he just wanted to unify EM and GR and that's supposed to be everything, not sure, forget the pop sci discussions on this

haha

Slereah

5:08 PM

Nah, even in Einstein's days they knew there were more

The strong interaction goes back at least to the... 20's?

but really nobody really knew anything about the strong interaction 'til the 60's

vzn

einstein was looking for a GUT/ TOE 2nd ½, now regarded as largely quixotic by many... reminds me a bit of gauss who is said to have spent 2 decades calculating orbit of ceres asteroid iirc, said to be another "waste" by some...

Slereah

The Yukawa model was about as good as it got

Well you know, you have to do what interest you

And Einstein already was the most famous scientist of all time

he had nothing to prove

bolbteppa

'The discovery of two new forces in addition to gravity and electromagnetism – the strong and weak nuclear forces – also made his work of a unified field based only on two forces unattainable.'

I think he was trying to get QM as some derivative of these two

vzn

einstein spent many years at IAS (virtually part of the founding afaik) and had little to show for it.

bolbteppa

He may yet be right :p

Slereah

5:11 PM

Unifying GR and EM was actually very useful

It gave us Kaluza-Klein which was a big inspiration for string theory

Also for gauge theory

vzn

@ACuriousMind think there is some merit to his intuition.

Slereah

People hate a lot on weird theories that go nowhere but I think it's great

It always provides inspiration for later theory or ground for new math frameworks

vzn

← working feverishly on many great/ weird theories :) :P

@Slereah penrose must be having some last laugh with the idea of QM in biology which is a very widening field lately.

bolbteppa

Twistors are another thing we all need to know but don't

Yeah KK is extremely important

Slereah

Nobody thanks Lorentz ether theory for giving us the idea of mass renormalization

Did you know

bolbteppa

5:17 PM

(Instead people thank him for Lorenz's discoveries)

Slereah

The mass energy in Lorentz ether theory for the electron is $4/3 mc^2$

So close

vzn

yes think einstein did not seem to credit lorentz transformations in early papers...?

Balarka Sen

5:40 PM

@Blue is it? idk

its one of the guiding forces of the human civilization, pretty pretentious to call it overrated

John Rennie

Is pretentious the correct word?

Emilio Pisanty

> Unfortunately this will not work, but the counterexamples I know rely on results that are either difficult or unpublished. (source: MathOverflow)

that's the kiss of death, no?

vzn

@bolbteppa thx nice find reminds me a lot of tao here also great terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice

@BalarkaSen lol seems now to be arguing against your own position.

Balarka Sen

im a walking contradiction of course i argue against my positions

@JohnRennie i used it because i think we all know the social interactions are the basis of humanity even though the nerdier of us wants to dismiss it

thats a pretentious behavior, sort of

John Rennie

Pretentious means pretending to be something you aren't ...

I would have said short sighted or something to imply that's your personal view

I must admit a really great word doesn't spring to mind.

Balarka Sen

5:53 PM

i suppose you're right

John Rennie

I'm sure that word exists but I'm burned out after a whole afternoon of meetings and my brain has turned to sludge

Balarka Sen

hah

skullpatrol

If the nerdier of us wants to "dismiss" it, then that's "dismissive" behaviour, right?

vzn

← looking up meaning of "pretentious" & trying to figure out aptness, seeing many sides/ levels dictionary.com/browse/pretentious?s=t

John Rennie

opinionated?

vzn

6:02 PM

careful interpretation is complicated in that Blue was clearly only ~½ serious wrt the emoticon (somewhat like often BaSe)...

John Rennie

bumptious? That's a good word :-)

vzn

bumptious is a great word but here the context seems merely joking or ironic

John Rennie

misanthropic?

Balarka Sen

harsh

vzn

@JohnRennie yeah, if he (blue) was serious. honestly BaSe is the one who sounds misanthropic sometimes... o_O

skullpatrol

6:08 PM

Define: misanthropic

John Rennie

Hates people

skullpatrol

Antisocial

Anonymous

@BalarkaSen Things like partying, dating, drinking in groups, attending events, etc are actually overrated. A major chunk of the young population will look down on you if you don't participate in such social stuff and will label you as "nerd, geek, weirdo,.. ". ;)

John Rennie

I suppose it strictly speaking means hates men but it's derived from the Greek and for the ancient Greeks human = men.

Emilio Pisanty

@Blue is there some objective ratings standard with respect to which things can be said to be "actually" overrated?

vzn

6:09 PM

@Blue lol used to feel same way at your age, now think it was (a different kind of!) youthful folly

Balarka Sen

@Blue shrug

John Rennie

@Blue it's possible to be social without being gregarious ...

skullpatrol

Antisocial =/= asocial

ACuriousMind

@JohnRennie No, anthropos is indeed human, while andros would be man.

John Rennie

Dammit, there's always an ancient Greek speaker around when you don't want one! :-)

2

vzn

6:10 PM

my opinion, everyone on this chat line is cyber-social ... which btw is not a great substitute for RL social! (new psychology research...) ps Blue, many geeks are quite social in their own groups/ clubs etc...

Emilio Pisanty

@JohnRennie did you just call @ACuriousMind old?

Anonymous

@vzn Well, this is the only place where nerds and geeks can meet people with similar interests :P The people I meet in the real world are mostly too boring.

John Rennie

@EmilioPisanty :-)

Ah the ambiguities of the English language :-)

vzn

@Blue lol try going to a comiccon or Magic meetup :P

Balarka Sen

cyber social is good because you don't have to see each other's disgusting piece of face

its the most abstract communication possible right now

Emilio Pisanty

6:13 PM

yo @Semiclassical

Semiclassical

oh hey

vzn

@BalarkaSen whoa, self esteem alert.

Emilio Pisanty

in addition to my rant above, see also this on MO

0

Q: What are good ways to 'relax' a uniform approximation into independent saddle-point expressions once the uniform approach is no longer needed?

I am doing long-running project that involves asymptotic saddle-point estimation of integrals (for flavour, it's this sort of stuff) and I would like to ask if there are established ways in the literature to deal with the hand-off between regions where different pairs of saddle-points interact, a...

ACuriousMind

@Blue That's not universally true, I've met a great many nerds and geeks through real life :P

John Rennie

@BalarkaSen I suppose there is some comfort to be derived from the fact you lot are mostly several thousand miles away ...

Emilio Pisanty

6:14 PM

seems to be sinking to the bottom untouched though

Balarka Sen

@JohnRennie hahaha

skullpatrol

Social caution is adaptively advantageous :P

vzn

@JohnRennie lol not sure how to take that (sounds kind of British maybe) :P

Balarka Sen

I'm not as edgy in real life as I am in this chat

dont worry

Semiclassical

@EmilioPisanty ...huh

Emilio Pisanty

6:16 PM

@Semiclassical exactly

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind Ah, I meant the probability of that is quite low. Of course out of a 100 people you'll probably find 1 or 2 interesting people. That's totally okay. I love hanging out with my small group of friends (2-3) in real life.

Semiclassical

what do you get when you zoom in on the upper crossing?

vzn

← thinks many faces can be quite beautiful, like snowflakes (esp female ones) :P

Emilio Pisanty

@Semiclassical just the crossing

Semiclassical

hmm

Emilio Pisanty

6:17 PM

the double lines are just imperfections of the quantity I used to plot things

ACuriousMind

@Blue Well, but you don't meet 100 people randomly drawn from the populace! The people you get to know are usually ones you have something in common with

Semiclassical

I'm perplexed as well

Balarka Sen

there are too many people with too many things in common with you generally

there is no such thing as uniqueness

Semiclassical

it looks like multiple sets of stokes lines just super-imposed

@BalarkaSen there are few interesting forms of uniqueness, at any rate

Emilio Pisanty

@Semiclassical yeah, but the intersections of Stokes lines are meant to be saddle coalescences, no?

Balarka Sen

6:19 PM

i was mostly joking, but yeah.

Semiclassical

exactly

ACuriousMind

For instance, while studying I mostly got to meet students, and mostly math and physics students at that. There's a higher than 2-in-100 proportion of nerds in there, believe me ;)

Emilio Pisanty

if you're interested in having a poke around, the notebook is

Semiclassical

that's why I'm confused

got it, thanks

skullpatrol

How are we defining "nerd"?

Semiclassical

6:21 PM

not sure when i'll get a chance to respond though

Emilio Pisanty

@Semiclassical there's several Manipulate's there that'll let you click on the control plane and see the corresponding landscape

Semiclassical

yeah

Emilio Pisanty

the one with this plot as background is probably the most useful one

Balarka Sen

I have seen that in reality a lot of people have the same thinking pattern and ideas as myself, even though I believed them to be singular initially from a pretentious egotist point of view. So I have slowly shifted from the everlasting sheeple xkcd comic to the opposite extreme that "every human being generically thinks the same way"

vzn

@skullpatrol heres the perfect analysis of that :P dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2442364/…

Emilio Pisanty

6:22 PM

wait, no

Semiclassical

I'm curious how you do that, my previous attempts to plot stokes lines in Mathematica were pretty bad

Emilio Pisanty

that was yesterday's notebook

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind Perhaps being from an engineering stream makes my experience a bit different :P I'm guessing in grad school you meet more like-minded people since people who pursue tertiary degrees are normally interested in the subject

Emilio Pisanty

@Semiclassical not to my satisfaction =P

Semiclassical

@EmilioPisanty got it

vzn

6:23 PM

@BalarkaSen "egotists" are more obsessed with their own uniqueness & downplay others

Semiclassical

lol

Balarka Sen

Not to say that I have become a supreme humanitarian or something. Robbing oneself of the idea that you're unique is a direct hit at the existential basis of your life

vzn

@BalarkaSen youre UNIQUE! just like everyone ELSE! :P

Balarka Sen

But that is fine (dog in a fire comic here)

ACuriousMind

@Blue ...you have people studying engineering at any level who are not interested in the subject?

Balarka Sen

6:24 PM

@vzn right

John Rennie

@BalarkaSen I believe most people think in basically similar ways, but their going in assumptions, their axioms if you like, are different.

vzn

@BalarkaSen havent seen that one curious now

Balarka Sen

@JohnRennie Probably right

ACuriousMind

I think it's possible it's more different cultures/countries than different subjects at fault here

Emilio Pisanty

@Semiclassical so for a given $\Omega+iu$, I find the three saddles $\{t_s^{(j)}\}$, then I find the real part of the action $\mathrm{Re}(S(t_s^{(j)}))$, then sort by increasing $\mathrm{Re}(S(t_s^{(j)}))$, then take differences between those things, then take the minimum

this plot is a contour plot of that minimum at a value close to zero

John Rennie

6:26 PM

@ACuriousMind in India you don't study engineering because you love engineering. Well, not necessarily.

Emilio Pisanty

hence the occasional gaps, sub-awesome reliability, and double lines

Balarka Sen

@vzn this one

its a classic

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind Yeah, that is true. Well, you already know the stories about India I guess. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is forced to take up engineering...

Semiclassical

@BalarkaSen goo.gl/images/ENoZWQ

Emilio Pisanty

but I don't see any other solution that will get around the fact that you can't uniquely and continuously label the saddles

Semiclassical

6:27 PM

@EmilioPisanty kk

will have to look at another time

Emilio Pisanty

If you do end up finding a better way, lemme know

Semiclassical

yeah

Balarka Sen

@Semiclassical lmao

vzn

@BalarkaSen oh! maybe did see that in here. dont get it :(

Balarka Sen

i think its part of a coherent comic strip but that two panel has taken up a surreal reputation of itself

Emilio Pisanty

6:28 PM

@Semiclassical no worries

Semiclassical

@BalarkaSen well

Emilio Pisanty

I'm interested in your take on it, though

Semiclassical

@BalarkaSen sorta yes sorta no

yes, insofar as the webcomic as a whole has a very definite tone

vzn

@BalarkaSen now would like to see the whole thing ha

ACuriousMind

@BalarkaSen That's because it's so relatable, whatever that says about the human condition :P

Balarka Sen

6:29 PM

@ACuriousMind Yup

Semiclassical

that tone, however, doesn't require a very coherent narrative

Balarka Sen

@Semiclassical I don't even know which webcomic it is

lol i see

Semiclassical

Pictures for Sad Children

ACuriousMind

@Semiclassical He's talking about the dog, not your image

vzn

Oct 23 '17 at 15:00, by Semiclassical

Famous line from Sartre: "Hell is other people."

Semiclassical

6:30 PM

ohh

I'm forgetting who did the dog comment, though I have looked it up

Balarka Sen

oh i didnt realize SemiC was talking about his webcomic

all confus

Semiclassical

gotcha

@vzn I bet I followed that up with a specific TS Eliot reference. time to find out

John Rennie

Gunshow

Semiclassical

ding!

Anonymous

@JohnRennie How do I add page-breaks in WordPad? I don't have Word on my Windows it seems

Emilio Pisanty

6:31 PM

knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-fine

Semiclassical

that last panel never ceases to creep me the f*** out

vzn

@Semiclassical you are way too educated to be a serious physicist :P

Balarka Sen

oh god

Emilio Pisanty

@Semiclassical yeah, it's pretty bad

I assumed there would be a larger comic but I'm not sure I'd gone looking for it before

it is pretty upsetting

0celo7

@EmilioPisanty me rn

Emilio Pisanty

6:32 PM

as @JohnRennie and them brits would say

Balarka Sen

i kinda like it

0celo7

Help

vzn

@Semiclassical do you have the other panels? also confused o_O

Semiclassical

I was referring to the one I linked when I said that

John Rennie

@Blue I'm not sure there is a way of doing page breaks in Wordpad. If you want a copy of Office 2003 (15 years old but still working fine) then I might allegedly know someone who has a copy. Or you could use OpenOffice I suppose.

Semiclassical

6:34 PM

I should note, though, that "Pictures for Sad Children" is apparently not online anymore

aside from a few random examples of stripes around the internet

vzn

@Semiclassical comics are at least ½ the fun of this chat for me. but ¼ a comic is less fun :( ... something missing :(

Anonymous

@JohnRennie I think Office 2003 will work fine for me! But I need to edit this document now. Gotta submit it tomorrow morning. Maybe I should download OpenOffice (? How to?)

Anonymous

Is it on the app store?

Anonymous

Checking...

John Rennie

@Blue Let's flick over to Facebook Messenger ...

vzn

6:37 PM

@BalarkaSen spking of "existential basis of life," wondering (then) what yours is? thought math might be it, not always so sure :P ... (tarkovsky movies?) :P

bolbteppa

That cartoon needs a Trump-era modification :p

Balarka Sen

math has nothing to do with life. naive minds tend to confuse our academic interests with philosophy of life, but they grow out of it

bolbteppa

On that note

Stewart Lee on university funding and the arts

►

Semiclassical

@bolbteppa there is one

thenib.com/this-is-not-fine

2

vzn

@BalarkaSen anyway, wondering wrt your ideas/ philosophy, taking away uniqueness/ humanitarianism, what is left? is there more than nihilism at the center so to speak? or maybe there is no center?

Emilio Pisanty

6:41 PM

sigh

@ACuriousMind is there some flag on that IP that can be raised?

os is the system already handling it?

bolbteppa

haha

Semiclassical

@EmilioPisanty ...f***

Balarka Sen

@vzn there is nothing i have to say that hasn't been said by experts in the field of philosophy or artists who project life and humanity through their visions. read books if you want to know i guess

ACuriousMind

@EmilioPisanty I...actually have no idea how unregistered edits are handled by the system, I only know how to ban accounts from suggesting edits

vzn

@BalarkaSen am interested in your (unique?) :P pov since it seems rather acute sometimes

Emilio Pisanty

6:43 PM

@ACuriousMind fair enough

ACuriousMind

23

Q: Is there some form of blocking in place for rejected suggested edits by anonymous users?

When a registered user gets enough suggested edits rejected, they're blocked from suggesting edits for a number of days. I've always assumed it was a user-level block, but what about anonymous suggested edits? Can anonymous users suggest edits with impunity, or is there a lower-level block (like...

support suggested-edits

Apparently, yes, the system will handle it

Semiclassical

good

Emilio Pisanty

... with an unknowable threshold, of course

ACuriousMind

Did you see more than that one edit of that sort?

Emilio Pisanty

anyways, it's unlikely to slip past the queue, so I guess that's that

@ACuriousMind just that one

but there was also this one physics.stackexchange.com/review/first-posts/204751

which... just... wow

0celo7

6:58 PM

@Slereah “R. Schoen, Talk given at the Miami Waves conference, 2004”

Wtf

Slereah

it's not that rare to see conferences in bibliographies

Emilio Pisanty

@0celo7 would you prefer "private communication"?

Slereah

though whether or not conference notes exist is the problem

"private thought"

Emilio Pisanty

Mar 23 '17 at 17:19, by Emilio Pisanty

=P

Slereah

Sometimes I reference private communications on this chat in my PSE questions

To give it more pomp

0celo7

7:00 PM

@EmilioPisanty I know both authors, none of them were old enough to be around in 2004

Emilio Pisanty

@0celo7 then... yeah, that's a whole other order of things

and also, "Miami Waves Conference" sounds pretty suspicious

0celo7

Gravitational waves, probably.

Slereah

@0celo7 Maybe they have a time machine

Or they found some conference notes

Or they asked Schoen for what he said

Or, more probably

They found a paper that said "the proof is in this talk"

So they just referenced it themselves, by the transitive property

0celo7

God damn, + epsilon to make thing converge. Not even math is safe

Slereah

well does it not work

0celo7

7:04 PM

In this case it does, but it’s quite tricky

Slereah

Also is it $+\varepsilon$ or $+ i \varepsilon$

0celo7

Check the paper I sent you on skype

Page 3

Slereah

Vaugon?

0celo7

No

Maybe I didn’t send it to you

@Slereah the arXiv link above that

The top one

Slereah

7:22 PM

oh boy

new Physical Review D is out

journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.024042

Emilio Pisanty

8:56 PM

@JohnRennie congratulations on elbowing your way into the HNQ list with a community wiki =P

dmckee

He still gets the shiny, shiny badges.

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee yeah, I reckon he deserves them

also, what's one more silver Good Answer among 150+?

Cookie Toast

9:37 PM

We had a quiz in class today, and one of the questions was:
"Is $Ae^(kx-\omega t)$ a solution to the wave equation?" My thought process said: A) It's missing $i$ so it's not a simple sin/cos function in Euler's form. And, if I rewrite the equation to $Ae^{kx}e^{-\omega t}$, then if I fix a value of $t$, like $t = 0$, the $Ae^{kx-\omega t} \to \infty$ as $x \to \infty$. Waves don't gain infinite amplitude, right? But it looks like I got the problem wrong, because differentiation satisfies the wave PDE. Could someone explain what I'm missing?

Semiclassical

@CookieToast The distinction made in these contexts is between a PDE and a boundary value problem.

The wave equation is a PDE, specifically $\partial_{tt}u=c^2 \partial_{xx} u$ in 1D. as you note, $u=Ae^{k x-\omega t}$ is a solution to that (with the understanding that $\omega=ck$). More generally, any function of the form $u(x,t)=f(kx-\omega t)$ will satisfy the wave equation.

By virtue of this, there are a lot of solutions to the wave equation other than standing waves. For that reason, in actual applications you don't just ask "does it solve the wave PDE" but furthermore whether it satisfies the correct boundary conditions

For instance, if you affix a taut string at two points and then pluck it, every part of the string will move up and down except the endpoints; these stay fixed, so you'd require that $u(x_1,t)=u(x_1,0)$ and $u(x_2,t)=u(x_2,0)$ for all $t$.

That eliminates the function $u=Ae^{kx-\omega t}$ from consideration, since for any particular $x$ you'll find that it decays with time. So while $Ae^{kx-\omega t}$ satisfies the wave equation, it does not solve this boundary value problem.

(There's probably a setting in which that function does satisfy the boundary conditions and so solves the BVP, but it's not obvious to me what that'd be)

Cookie Toast

10:05 PM

That's very well explained @Semiclassical, thank you! I guess the scope of the problem makes all the difference here. And I see how the decay over time is another indicator as well.

Semiclassical

Right.

Cookie Toast

It's a shame I didn't make a question out of that because you could have earned some easy answer points there :)

Semiclassical

lol

i imagine it's shown up here or on MSE before

0celo7

@Semiclassical currently trying to understand boundary value problems

this paper says to take the boundary "in the sense of geometric measure theory," which is stupidly vague

Semiclassical

god help you

0celo7

10:11 PM

esp. because if you take the natural thing it gives a contradiction

the reference is "Federer Chapter 5"

0celo7

11:49 PM

@Slereah black holes suck

Secret

Uh....

I think I posted in the wrong room...

I need to ask John Rennie to move that block for me to my room

@JohnRennie sorry, could you help me to move the above block of sciencedaily to the secret labs room, cause I mis posted as I cannot easily see which chat I am in on mobile?

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