The h Bar

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5:14 PM

@Slereah How else would you define being good or bad at science, a method for discovering truths about the world, besides whether or not you discover truths?

I can't imagine anybody outside of a very small corner of physics disagreeing with me on this.

Great scientists can only be great if they're actually right!

enumaris

cries theorist tears

ACuriousMind

@enumaris Not really, imo.

John Rennie

2011 though. Is it really worth wasting those valuable close votes on?

In other news:

Hellboy (2019 Movie) Official Trailer “Smash Things” – David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane

►

HELLBOY!!! :-)

enumaris

oh it's from 2011 lol...it showed up in the questions today, I guess there was activity on it

Slereah

5:30 PM

@knzhou negative results are also important!

knzhou

@Slereah A negative experimental result is important because it tells us about the world, namely that some theories of it are wrong. A wrong theory doesn't do anything at all...

Experiments can prove things wrong, while theories can only get proven wrong.

Slereah

Knowing which theory is wrong can also be important

knzhou

That's what the experimentalists do for us, right?

They get the credit for that!

danielunderwood

@JohnRennie But there's already a movie just called Hellboy!

knzhou

Unless you mean 'exploring theory space', which I don't put much stock in because there are infinitely many possible wrong theories out there...

I could write down a couple wrong theories right now without any effort, I shouldn't get rewarded for that. Even if I make the math extra fancy.

John Rennie

5:41 PM

@danielunderwood shrug. I'm not that fussed what they call the film. Judging from the trailer it's closer to the spirit of the comics than either of the two previous films.

enumaris

cries more theorist tears...

danielunderwood

It's been ages since I saw the first one, but I think I liked it a good bit. I don't think I ever watched the second though. Is this one supposed to have any plot relation to those?

John Rennie

@danielunderwood no, or at least I don't think so.

Slereah

Can't know which theory is correct before the experiment, though

There's no more skills involved in investigating a wrong theory than a correct one

Plus the correct one may turn out to be wrong

enumaris

how come John gets to have this hat over his entire name

and has a giant hat

but I get a small one that just covers my icon

John Rennie

5:44 PM

@danielunderwood the two films with Ron Perlmann were fun, but they were a bit of a pantomime. In the comics Hellboy is a much darker figure.

enumaris

the girl was cute tho

John Rennie

@enumaris you can resize the hat in your profile.

enumaris

@JohnRennie I think I already made it as big as it can go...

danielunderwood

Covers his entire name? On my screen, @enumaris' hat is bigger

enumaris

hmmm

@danielunderwood that's funky, on mine John's hat is like 4 times my size

John Rennie

5:46 PM

@enumaris I doubt it. Refresh the page and check out my hat now! :-)

danielunderwood

@JohnRennie I thought that the older movies were darker than that trailer is. Maybe my memory is just bad

enumaris

nope, yours is even bigger now lol

danielunderwood

oh now your hats are the same size now that I refresh

John Rennie

Oh wait ... that's annoying. The page is resizing the combination of hat and avatar. So now my hat is the same size and my head has shrunk! :-)

enumaris

your hat is so ginormous it covers 3 people lol

danielunderwood

5:56 PM

I wish I could see these hat shenanigans. They sound entertaining

bolbteppa

@Slereah modern string books go into susy point particle stuff more, to motivate the GS action

Slereah

@bolbteppa nice

Any specific book in mind?

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood You...can't see the hats?

enumaris

maybe he's selectively blind to hats

he might be sensitive about it

danielunderwood

I can see hats. I just can't see the ridiculously-sized hats that @enumaris seems to see

bolbteppa

5:59 PM

@Slereah The Freund susy book has it

danielunderwood

And I'm mildly bothered that they show up everywhere except the list of people in the room

enumaris

I'm betting it's cus his icon is not visible to me

Slereah

@bolbteppa who is that friend

enumaris

it seems that people who's icon I can't view have giant hats

danielunderwood

ahh right I forgot you can't see some images

ACuriousMind

6:01 PM

@danielunderwood There's no good way to fit them there - since they can leave the square of the actual picture, they could intrude into other people's avatars if there's enough people in a room for a second row

danielunderwood

That does make sense

Everywhere that has the hats already has a margin from what I've seen

bolbteppa

@Slereah These ncatlab.org/nlab/files/MajerSuperstrings.pdf amazon.com/… amazon.com/Introduction-Strings-Branes-Peter-West/dp/0521817471 bartholomewandrews.com/teaching/notes/year5/string_theory/… are some of the things I have lined up to make sense of this stuff hah, some more I can't remember right now, BBS has a problem on it I think

Slereah

thx

danielunderwood

It's almost like the SE devs think about their development...unlike some devs

bolbteppa

I really need to know this stuff :(

danielunderwood

6:04 PM

bolbteppa

I'm recently thinking this amazon.com/Supersymmetry-DeMYSTiFied-Patrick-Labelle/dp/… is incredible if you accept it for what it is

bolbteppa

6:18 PM

Fierz identity

In theoretical physics, a Fierz identity is an identity that allows one to rewrite bilinears of the product of two spinors as a linear combination of products of the bilinears of the individual spinors. It is named after Swiss physicist Markus Fierz. There is a version of the Fierz identities for Dirac spinors and there is another version for Weyl spinors. And there are versions for other dimensions besides 3+1 dimensions. Spinor bilinears can be thought of as elements of a Clifford Algebra. Then the Fierz identity is the concrete realization of the relation to the exterior algebra. The identities...

This is what's bugging me now with susy, being more general about these things

2 hours later…

danielunderwood

8:19 PM

Do cosmic rays refer to a specific type of particle or any particles coming in from space?

Or a certain energy threshold?

Slereah

8:31 PM

No it's pretty generic

enumaris

9:03 PM

yarp

danielunderwood

So if aliens were to fly in from space...

enumaris

cosmic ray

danielunderwood

So since we have cosmic rays coming in, it's proven that aliens exist?

enumaris

sounds legit

danielunderwood

Well that was easy

Silly SETI

Kentucker_Filled_Turkey

9:15 PM

@Pieter are you here to discuss about some solid state physics?

ACuriousMind

@Kentucker_Filled_Turkey That user doesn't appear to have been here lately (no autocompletion after @Pie); they won't receive your ping.

Kentucker_Filled_Turkey

I see... thanks @ACuriousMind

basically I don't know what the charge carrier density represents in the hall coefficient R_H

is it the total number of free electrons divided by the volume, or only the electrons that participate in electrical conduction? if it's the latter, how come it is the same whether we apply Drude or a QM treatment (with fermi dirac statistics)

in the QM treatment I would expect much less electrons to participate in conduction (only those near the Fermi surface), while for Drude, it's roughly 1 electron per atom that participate

there are orders of magnitude of differences