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8:00 PM
poooooor unfoooortunate soul
 
that.... is not going to work
 
what is poor about him
 
You're essentially trying to prove that an apple is a fruit using only the fact that it is an organic object - i.e. the tools you're using are intrinsically limited and they are strictly insufficient to get you to what you want to prove. — Emilio Pisanty 19 secs ago
this, mostly
 
Like trying to explain the sound of water using the color blue
 
8:03 PM
he's doing category theory
I see nothing wrong
 
hey @BernardoMeurer I have a question
but more importantly
what's a "stack-based programming language", and what does "concurrent" mean?
 
unspecified?
 
I think I should do the last two questions first
 
Hi everyone, I have a simple question
about energy levels.
First of all, if the chemical properties of an atom depend on its electron configuration then surely exciting the atom so that it has a higher energy state will mean that the electrons are in a different configuration.
As a result, this means that the atom will have different chemical properties?
 
one line from the Wiki article on Lame functions is notable: "Lamé equations arise in quantum mechanics as equations of small fluctuations about classical solutions—called periodic instantons, bounces or bubbles—of Schrödinger equations for various periodic and anharmonic potentials."
 
8:05 PM
Therefore my question is does exciting an atom change its chemical properties?
 
and that's pretty neat.
 
though then again, I imagine a "stack-based programming language" is just a euphemism in CS-speak for "a language that's as horrible (or more) as the BibTeX style-file language"
 
@EmilioPisanty ugggghh BibTeX
 
@Semiclassical ever edit a .bst file?
 
I think I've avoided doing that
by stealing one that already worked
 
8:06 PM
@Semiclassical then you don't get to uggghhh at BibTeX
 
fiiiine
 
@Turbo it would - except the atom will decay to the electronic ground state instantly by any chemistry timescale.
@Semiclassical use arthur.bst here
it's nice
 
I suppose you might have some cases where you'd have a metastable state?
 
I've already gone in and edited the bibtex for you
 
8:08 PM
@EmilioPisanty So the electron configuration would revert back to that of the ground state instantly? And as a result, the chemical properties do not change?
 
@Semiclassical you can. But any interaction with a neighbouring atom will break that metastability.
 
@EmilioPisanty hmmmmmmm
What I'd wonder, basically, if there's a case where you can sustain the excited state using some external field
 
Does anyone know how to get a good color photocopy of a passport page?
 
@Turbo well, not instantly instantly. On a few-nanoseconds timescales, typically.
 
Is a phone picture admissible?
 
8:09 PM
And therefore get something chemically interesting.
 
@EmilioPisanty So the rest is correct?
 
@Turbo mostly, yes. But it's a complicated question.
 
And where does that energy lost in the reversion go?
 
@Turbo mostly, emitted as a photon
 
(Or maybe I should say, have a system where some fraction of the atoms would always be in the excited state)
 
8:10 PM
but then there's also things like this
Internal conversion is a transition from a higher to a lower electronic state in a molecule or atom. It is sometimes called "radiationless de-excitation", because no photons are emitted. It differs from intersystem crossing in that, while both are radiationless methods of de-excitation, the molecular spin state for internal conversion remains the same, whereas it changes for intersystem crossing. The energy of the electronically excited state is given off to vibrational modes of the molecule. The excitation energy is transformed into heat. == Examples == A classic example of this process is the...
the "internal conversion" step is generally classed as a chemical reaction
which can be initiated by photoexcitation
there's a lot of recent work on time-resolved photochemistry initiated by an excitation
 
Therefore, most atoms are in the ground state then?
 
@Turbo unless you make a dedicated experimental effort to engineer situations that will change things, yes
 
This feels like a stat mech question
 
Alright, thanks
 
@0celo7 Just...put it on a scanner/photocopier and scan?
 
8:12 PM
(for answering my question)
 
what's extremely hard is to start with an excited atom $A^*$ and prod it with a different atom $B$ such that they will join up to give an excited molecule $(AB)^*$
 
Bottom line is probably: There's ways excited states can matter for chemistry, but they're not trivial
 
the initial configuration, $$A^* + B \to ???$$
is extremely useful
but it will rarely produce an excited-state molecule
 
If the excited states and corresponding electron configurations are so trivial, then why are they worth studying?
 
@Turbo who said they're trivial?
 
8:15 PM
pretty sure I just said the opposite
 
trivial in the regard that the excited state only exists for a few nanoseconds
and immediately reverts back to the ground state
 
physics.stackexchange.com/questions/398526/… this should be closed, right? or not?
 
Spectroscopy is the study of the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation. Historically, spectroscopy originated through the study of visible light dispersed according to its wavelength, by a prism. Later the concept was expanded greatly to include any interaction with radiative energy as a function of its wavelength or frequency. Spectroscopic data are often represented by an emission spectrum, a plot of the response of interest as a function of wavelength or frequency. == Introduction == Spectroscopy and spectrography are terms used to refer to the measurement of radiat...
↑ to begin with
 
I understand, in line spectroscopy, the atoms de-excite and release photons to revert back to the ground state
facepalm
Ahh yes, line spectroscopy!
 
@Turbo ... as a start.
it's also impossible to describe any time-dependent phenomenon using only the ground state
 
8:18 PM
@EmilioPisanty Still around? I just got back
 
I recommend David Tannor's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics: A Time-Dependent Perspective for a very different perspective
@BernardoMeurer yes but I was just kidding when I pinged you
 
@EmilioPisanty Oh, lol
Here I was writing a long intricate answer
 
Thank you for the recommendation
 
@BernardoMeurer ever edit a bibtex style file?
 
8:20 PM
any insights into why it's so painful?
 
@ACuriousMind do they have color scanners?
 
@EmilioPisanty Something like this you mean?
 
@Turbo It's important to keep in mind that this is only for an isolated atom. Excited states are still extremely important to understand chemical bonds quantitatively, because the molecular ground state involves a linear superposition that included excited states of the constituents. Ditto with the band structure of solids.
@BernardoMeurer oh no, that's just a bibtex database
I mean something like this
 
I see
 
@EmilioPisanty Oh god, my eyes
 
8:23 PM
@BernardoMeurer I know.
 
But my answer would me similar either way: It's surprisingly difficult to create a general format to support the entire taxonomy of any given thing
Look at music metadata for example
 
@0celo7 Depends, but most scanners I've used did scan in color
 
it's a MESS
 
@BernardoMeurer yeah, that I understand
what I don't understand is why we need a stack-based language to manipulate that metadata into formatting instructions
 
@ACuriousMind I've never used a scanner
 
8:25 PM
@EmilioPisanty Because TeX people are fucking insane? :P
 
@BernardoMeurer that's an awful .bib file, btw
 
@BernardoMeurer Language >:(
 
They're like the old UNIX wizards, who wishes everything was built using solely awk and sed :P
 
you should be shooting for something like this
 
@EmilioPisanty oh please do tell us what a good .bib is
 
8:26 PM
@EmilioPisanty Aint nobody got time fo dat
 
@BernardoMeurer ... until you've got 300+ references to keep organized, no journal copy-editor to mop up after you, and lousy .bib internals start causing more work than it takes to maintain them.
 
The day I write something with > 300 references you can kill me :P
 
300 seems excessive
 
@0celo7 well, it was a PhD thesis
@BernardoMeurer seriously, though, a consistent formatting on your .bib file makes it much easier to spot mistakes and bugs which do impact the bibliographic data that makes it on the document.
say, if you skip a comma then bibtex will act like everything after that doesn't exist
 
@EmilioPisanty To be honest, I didn't write any of those myself
I used easybib or the "cite" button on the thing's page
 
8:32 PM
spotting those kinds of bugs is easier to spot if you impose a consistent formatting - but you already know that
@BernardoMeurer you do need to curate those
 
@EmilioPisanty It seems excessive for a PhD thesis, but maybe physics is different
 
@BernardoMeurer ... because those will produce inconsistent bibtex
which will produce incomplete or misshapen references
@0celo7 it is excessive if you don't care about typesetting
but if you don't care about typesetting, what are you doing on the h bar?
 
yeah, spotting .bib errors is painful if you're not proceeding in a consistent way
that much I do know
 
This makes me feel like never writing anything again
 
@EmilioPisanty ...what does the number of references have to do with typesetting
 
8:33 PM
@EmilioPisanty ::raises hand:: I only care a little about typesetting :P
 
@0celo7 ah, I thought you meant the typesetting
 
I am a typesetting nerd, as you well know
 
@0celo7 then yes, physics is different ;-)
 
@0celo7 Not true, typesetting nerds use \colon
 
it is on the high side for my field, but within normal bounds
 
8:34 PM
that is one thing I refuse to do
people who use \colon should probably be shipped to Mars
 
@BernardoMeurer Not true. Typesetting nerds disagree vehemently about whether to use \colon.
 
@0celo7 Because they're the elite we should choose to colonize other planets? :P
 
Anyone who doesn't use \colon should be shot on the spot
@ACuriousMind Exactly
 
@ACuriousMind it's my way of performing capital punishment that's not flaggable
 
wait, what was the argument again? $$f: A\to B$$ $$f\colon A\to B$$
yeah, the second spacing looks wrong.
 
8:37 PM
$f:X\to Y$
this is correct
$f\colon X\to Y$
wtf
why would anyone do that
yep, electric chair on mars
@ACuriousMind "blah blah blah, converges to a blah blah on open compact subsets of $\Omega$"
:/
 
Hmmm?
 
$f\!: F\to B$
 
open compact
 
Well, that's one way to say it never converges :P
 
12
A: What is the maximum altitude ATC would deal with?

CrossRoads(posted as answer, too long for a comment) In his book, Sled Driver, SR-71/ Blackbird pilot Brian Shul writes: "I'll always remember a certain radio exchange that occurred one day as Walt (his backseater) and I were screaming across Southern California, 13 miles up. We were monitoring v...

↑ this is hilarious
 
8:47 PM
@ACuriousMind I need a letter for a Sobolev space that's not W, H, or S
pick something please
I was thinking $Y$ for no good reason
 
that's taken by the bilinear form on the space
 
@0celo7 $\Phi$
 
taken by a map in another part
 
@0celo7 $\Delta$
 
8:49 PM
clearly a bad idea
 
@0celo7 $\kappa$
 
@EmilioPisanty only Evans nibbas understand this
 
(those things are taken from Evans)
@ACuriousMind that's the modified volume functional
 
8:50 PM
@0celo7 have you seen the elliptic-curves one?
 
$\aleph$
 
@ACuriousMind stop posting misshaped TeX
 
@ACuriousMind Ah, you know for damn sure there's no logic in this thesis ;)
 
@0celo7 $\mathfrak Y$
 
so that letter, while free, is an abomination
@BernardoMeurer I don't even know what that is
 
8:51 PM
a y
 
@0celo7 That's why I suggested it, hoping it would have no collisions :P
 
$\mathscr G$
 
No mathscr
 
@0celo7 ^
dingit
 
@BernardoMeurer or $\mathfrak{x}$
 
8:51 PM
no mathfrak for spaces, only mathfrak is for the space of metrics
 
$\Gamma$ @0celo7 ?
 
@EmilioPisanty What do you have against the humble aleph? :O
 
@ACuriousMind $\aleph$ is fine
 
@BernardoMeurer Hmm.
 
8:52 PM
imma delete that out of decency
 
That doesn't scream Sobolev to me
maybe I should just do $\mathfrak W$
 
oh god
 
Why no mathscr?
 
it looks like a ribeye
@BernardoMeurer Mathscr is thin and clashes with my thicker font choice.
 
8:53 PM
@0celo7 do Щ
$Щ$ ?
 
You sure are a thicc boi
 
Shcha (Щ щ; italics: Щ щ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Russian, it represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative /ɕ(ː)/, like the pronunciation of ⟨sh⟩ in sheep (but longer). In Ukrainian and Rusyn, it represents the consonant cluster /ʃt͡ʃ/. In Bulgarian, it represents the consonant cluster /ʃt/. In Kurdish, it represents the consonant /d͡ʒ/. Other non-Slavic languages written in Cyrillic use this letter to spell the few loanwords that use it or foreign names; it is usually pronounced /ʃ/ and is often omitted when teaching those languages. In English, Shcha is romanized as ⟨shch...
 
$\mathcal W$
I might just do this
Ugh, no
I want to write $H^k$ in a fancy way
but then I get $\mathcal H^k$ which is the measure
 
heck, you should just do Я and Ю
@DanielSank will surely support that idea
 
I support it
 
8:55 PM
$\mathfrak H$
nice
My advisor will kill me; worth it
 
I have no idea what that is
 
@0celo7 a puzzle
 
clearly
 
dunno if you're mathy enough to solve it, though
 
8:56 PM
seems like algebra
 
@0celo7 under a suitably broad definition of "algebra" but so is most of mathematics
 
$\mathfrak L^p$
lordie
 
Please stop
 
mathfrak L looks like a sick old man
@EmilioPisanty what I do is not algebra
under no definition is what I do algebra
that's the nice thing about it
algebraists have tried and failed to claim this crap
 
well, if you don't want to algebra it, you can just brute force it
=P seriously though, it's an interesting enough problem
at least to read about quora.com/…
 
9:01 PM
Last night dream decided to somehow mix statistical mechanics, popsci illustration of quantum flucturations and politics:
Clockwise from top right:
1. Political equlibrium: In a span of time, at least 3 policies are enacted in different regions (represented by their color and location) and then quickly get dominated by another. The appearance of that diagram is similar to orbital bombardment but in blue, as the bluish dots rise and dim away. The result is that the overall policy in this landmass is the time average of all policies in all locations
2. Unrelated policies that somehow felt like a connected whole (The two complicted shape each represents a policy from a different party)
 
@Secret why are you blasting Hungary to bits with meteorites?
 
@EmilioPisanty related to your meme
 
@EmilioPisanty He resents Erdos
 
@EmilioPisanty 1) That is not Hungary, any similarity is a coincidence. 2) The animation in the dream looks like orbitral bombardment but blue in color, it is not really being bombarded by meterorites
 
@0celo7 a mathematician that's reluctant to generalize and abstract their work is no true mathematician
 
9:04 PM
(and tbh I don't know what Hungary shaped like)
 
@Secret coincidence, or Freudian indication?
 
@EmilioPisanty analysts are just useless engineers in that regard
worse even than the dirty theoretical physicist
 
Well you will know that it is a coincidence since I have absolutely no reason to blast any country
 
@0celo7 I thought you were an analyst?
 
Indeed I am
 
9:06 PM
@Secret </joke> ;-)
 
I also used to be an engineer
 
lol
 
@0celo7 are you officially no longer an engineer?
 
as of several months, yeah
 
9:26 PM
What does one give as the units for impedance?
Ive seen it written as ohms but this seems misleading not that useful
misleading/not that useful*
 
@JakeRose why would it be misleading or not useful?
 
Ohms is used more generally for resistors
And it doesnt convey any info about what components are present
Also, for any dimensional analysis it doesnt give the units for said components
Would you agree or am i being a bit naive?
 
@JakeRose you're being naive, I'm afraid
take, say, a series RC circuit
the resistor has resistance $R$ and the capacitor has inductance $i/\omega C$
the combined resistance in series is $Z=R+i/\omega C$
taking $Z$ in anything other than ohms would be misleading
the difference between resistive and reactive impedance comes from whether it's real or imaginary
the difference between inductive and capacitive reactance comes from the sign of the imaginary part
@JakeRose so this is just closing your eyes to the wealth of information that's there
@JakeRose not that dimensional analysis should give you any more information that what's already available.
hey @dmckee, do you know why this paper has so few authors?
 
9:55 PM
@EmilioPisanty Not off the top of my head, but it that's not a huge detector like the ones for the LHC.
 
@dmckee ah, so author lists are on a per-detector basis?
 
I may know C.J.Baker or M.Jones if they are the same ones who worked at JLAB in the late 90s and early naughties.
 
@EmilioPisanty Thanks!
 
@JakeRose no worries.
@dmckee "naughties", smh
 
@EmilioPisanty They are decided on a one-by-one basis, but for those very large projects there are well defined rules in the Memorandum of Understanding (or some other title).
This looks like a small (but important) project that takes advantage of infrastructure at CERN not including the LHC. And it may have been there for a while.
 
9:58 PM
@dmckee ah, so this doesn't involve the LHC?
what infrastructure does it share with it? and what parts does it not?
 
Hey guys Ive got a more general question. How do/did you revise physics?
 
@EmilioPisanty No. In fact, it involves an apparatus brought to CERN when TRIUMPH closed down: alpha.web.cern.ch/node/245
 
@dmckee hmmmm. So there's no shared accelerator at all?
 
@EmilioPisanty ::shrugs and starts googling:: I was only vaguely aware of it's existence until you asked about the paper.
 

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