ArXiv: The Physics of baking good Pizza

Huh I didn't even know there was a pop-ph category

But I'll go with lots of heat = good pizza

"lots"

but too much heat = very bad pizza

so science

When I worked in a lab, we gave protons lots of energy from big voltages

bigly voltages?

HUGE

the biggest I'm sure

the bigliest

oh no

that paper was written in word

oh noes

the bigliest of faux pas

man I need more data

more monthly data

@bolbteppa lol Lumo is a (very colorful) curmudgeon/ luddite. he increasingly reminds me of 19th century physicists/ scientists, some quite prominent, who rejected atomic theory even as overwhelming/ irrefutable evidence piled up. maybe most prominent case is Mach which is studied. jstor.org/stable/2708449 when the new theory arrives, it seems likely Lumo will be the last to accept it, if ever. ps does he have anything to say about Adler-Vinante? or Tenev-Horstemeyer?

There's being a curmudgeon and being an a******.

I've made up my mind about where he falls on that line.

@Semiclassical lol touche Lumo flirts with that boundary almost daily eh? yes his writing is routinely outright misogynistic + ad hominem / worse. hes a highly educated troll. maybe without a day job, hence too much time on his hands... re the chinese expr one does not grow taller chopping off the heads of others o_O

Maybe he still does. I stopped reading his blog quite a while ago because I just got tired of the invective

> Incidentally, in a video, she also repeats the widespread view that quaternions underlie special relativity which is really a misconception for the same reason: the spacetime is 4D but there's no natural "product" defined on a pair of spacetime points so it makes no sense to represent the four-vectors as quaternions.

↑ a moment googling as by me earlier (on a whim) refutes this.

I always find those articles 'Mach was wrong' etc troubling

@vzn quaternions don't underlie special relativity

@vzn but if you do chop off everyone else's heads you will be taller in relation to the population average

and in fact for every head you chop off, the taller you are in relation to the population average

@enumaris what might be called genghis kahn reasoning :P

People nowadays tend to chop off your head before you can make a statistically significant change

Real numbers are a subset of quaternions so quaternions underlie all theories which use real numbers :P

lol

@enumaris what might be called genghis kahn reasoning :P

> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. —Planck

↑ one wonders if Planck had Mach in mind when he wrote that! o_O

Still gotta convince the new generation tho

translation: "Get rekt old people!"

@Semiclassical they convince themselves so to speak.

Yes. They just sometimes convince themselves that the old people had a point

No, you have to read the correct translation.

Clearly Planck tells the old people to get rekt.

Lumo... the Great... anklebiter

U calling him a midget?

@vzn the article introduces them for basically no reason

He even goes on about octonions

lol was going to tip off Lumo et al about Adler-Vinante in the comments section (maybe starting out with the title where physics goes to die) and wow! new development! cyberthoughtcrime

My sense is Hamilton was looking for a 'representation' of the rotation group $SO(3)$, and found his way to the quaternions as a representation of the rotation group $SO(3)$, he basically found the double cover of the rotation group, $SU(2)$, which can be realized in terms of quaternions, which is more important in quantum mechanics, but not special relativity

it seems to me a bit )( of a anthropological bias to talk about the quaternions. the general idea is analysis of properties of 4-vector algebras. GR is a 4-vector algebra. minkowski space is distinct 4-vector operations. etc

There is no algebra involved, it's linear algebra, the quaternions allow you to multiply, but you're trying to represent points of spacetime by things that multiply, it's like multiplying two points of space together

@bolbteppa Lumo makes the same point, but think obviously multiplication is only one operation in a vector algebra.

So using quaternions is just, as he says, bookkeeping

@bolbteppa lol whatever you do, dont (seriously) consider any contrary evidence. just like Lumo the Great

If we're going to start adding extra things, lets work with the set of quaternions plus their multiplication plus the set of answers to every problem while we're at it

What evidence is there that you can multiply two points of space together?

← going somewhere else for now to try to find a serious/ thoughtful/ deep discussion about physics in cyberspace... or not

@vzn anthropological bias indeed

@bolbteppa one thing to note is that there was a period where some people really did want to teach SR using quaternions. That fell out of fashion, and I think it’d be clarifying to see why that stopped being seen as worthwhile

use whatever math you need to get the physics

who cares what math that is as long as it's consistent