OK, meta question: What would keep a posse of like 20-30 users from posting questions and answers and everyone upvoting everybody? Wouldn't that be a way to boost reps?
@ACuriousMind I thought one could derate that value of votes from an upvote whore, for example. I guess that's too complicated, and since organizing tech people are like herding cats, such a posse would be hard to assemble.
@ACuriousMind looked it up on wikipedia. ~ is the old way of indicating NOT in written mathematical logic, but it's more often replaced by ¬ these days
@Jiminion What a coincidence. I live north of parts of Canada too!
@ACuriousMind Maybe the field of logic wasn't progressed enough to consider that? Modern logicians have advanced techniques to realize not to use ~. It's like asking why Newton didn't just use GR
@Sofia Should be "A problem with losing identity of fermions and the order of applying operators" Or something like that.
I've been to Pelee Island! I spent a week in Toronto (actually a long weekend). Canadians are more relaxed than Americans. They probably think of Americans what Americans think of New Yorkers.
@Jiminion Well I can't speak to that, but if you're basing that analysis off of people in Toronto, you should know that Toronto is an amalgamation of like 20 different countries and cultures. The true Canadian persona is found outside Toronto
Vancouverites are different than Ontario folk. I'm used to them. (Ontario). I always detect a British tinge to stuff when I'm in Ontario. Hard to place, but definitely there.
Okay, so I e-mailed a professor at MIT about something, and he replied but with an answer for a high school student, because he didn't know about me. Would it be rude if I gave a quick description of my background, so he can reply appropriately?
There's a course 18.821 for mathematicians on paper writing. Part of the course is writing your own paper on a problem, and the prof keeps a list of interesting problems in mathematics and physics. I asked for that list, and he assumed I was a high school student, and didn't give me the list but rather a simple problem.
"So, I wouldn't want you to feel as though you ought to restrict yourself to problems appropriate for high school. That's why I originally asked for the list, to browse for something appropriate."
Not saying you must or even should link your SE profile (I agree, he probably won't even have a look), especially as you are asking for something rather trivial (a list), but I'm sure the professor gets emails from people who claim to know string theory, when in actuality they've read Greene's book.
Thanks a lot for response. Even though I realize that the projects represent a time investment that may seem unreasonable to a single high school student, I would still be very interested in having a look at the list, if this would be at all possible. Over the past years, I have familiarized myself with roughly the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics, and I was hoping that I could draw some inspiration for my latest self-study project from your list. "
@0celo7 People who don't like the s- prefix sometimes switch to the -ino suffix, but I thought that an "X-ino" usually indicated the fermionic partner of some bosonic X
You can modify the sentence to: "...and physics, up to and including Yang-Mills theory, basic string theory, and [some mathematics topic] [or whatever you want to put in here]. I was hoping..."
I am kinda curious what happens to all these professors who spent decades of their lives writing papers and getting grant money and their research turns out to be entirely wrong
@JimdalftheGrey And in truth there is no shame in it. Everyone know that theorists are wrong most of the time and get to be famous for being really right just once.
Fun fact: there's a formulation of string theory that is actually consistent in 4 dimensions, and includes both bosons and fermions, but unfortunately the signature is $(2,2)$ not $(1,3)$.
@Jiminion It doesn't seem to me that we concluded our dialogue about the meaning of the word "whore". I asked you what is that. Are you able to answer? Please also imagine that I stay in front of you when you explain.
