@vzn Is this a real thing that the site has decided to do?

If so I can probably do it Sunday, unless people want a week day.

@DanielSank You people on MIT Tech Review, fancy!

@BernardMeurer Yah.

@DanielSank I'll tell all the kids at school I know someone who was at that magazine

@BernardMeurer do you have a crush on me?

@DanielSank Yes. If you were woman I would have moved to Santa Barbara already

I see.

@DanielSank Don't tell your fiancee, I don't want to make an astronomic enemy

@BernardMeurer ok

@DanielSank Dude, what is wrong with UCSD, they just sent me 5 emails about the same damn thing

@BernardMeurer Not sure.

Someone there might be bored.

Gotta go.

Catch you later, baby.

See ya love

@Slereah This question has nothing to do with the Hairy Ball theorem.

@DanielSank its real if someone/ anyone agrees to it & everyone else carries it fwd (not really requiring major work). ok maybe best to let the guest pick time/ day if the std mtg time is not convenient. can you pick a time on sunday 29th & then remaining time after you agree can be for announcement to stick on site somewhere (hopefully main page).

another idea for publicity: site community ad. that would be very cool/ ideal but requires some "serious" community cooperation (someone making it, and 6v!)

I think we should start a monarchy

I can be the queen, I don't mind

nature.com/articles/srep25890

what could machine physicists can taught us about how to run an experiment...?

@vzn I agree that a thing is "official" when someone just goes ahead and does it.

However, if people are going to to dedicate time to do an AMA it's best to make sure there will actually be an audience.

@BernardMeurer I accepted my waterloo offer. :D

you better get in.

or else.

@3075 Congratulations.

@DanielSank Thanks

I chose waterloo because of perimeter institute and also their physics courses. ucalendar.uwaterloo.ca/SA/GRAD/1314/GRDcourse-PHYS.html

@JohnRennie This is a Rule of Internet: Every community has a few people who think the moderators are evil. These people blame the moderators for some amount of the communities problems. Maybe it's just easier than the alternatives.

@3075 Go molest the office of admissions people

I really want Waterloo

@BernardMeurer o.o

because unless I get that fancy scholarship I can't go to UCSD

and if I can't go to UCSD I'll wind up somewhere random in this world

or Waterloo

:p

waterloo should reply by may 31st since it's the last day to apply for residence.

::stroking begins::

you should call them and make sure they're considering you.

@3075 I hit them an email after I got everything sorted to recheck it was all okay and they confirmed already

ok good.

THEY JUST DON'T LOVE ME

did they say how long it would take?

They're not like @DanielSank

@3075 They gave the estimate on the website, until may 31st

oh cool

fingers crossed :D

@3075 I'm dying, slowly and surely

@MAFIA36790 I have that effect on people

no.

Don't think so, no

@BernardMeurer what will you do if you're denied D:

did you get in anywhere else other than ucsd?

@3075 Well if I get the scholarship I will go to UCSD

and transfer to UCSB later probably, because CEng is 'impacted' they say at UCSD so you need a 4.0 GPA to get in, which I don't think I will accomplish

what if you get the scholarship and you get into waterloo? :(

If I get into Waterloo I'm going there, no question

ok cool. :)

If I get no scholarship and Waterloo rejects me I'll go to the University of Lisbon or Coimbra

over in Portugal

@MAFIA36790 I'm trying to escape the third world, not change scenes :p

@MAFIA36790 I'd disagree that they are some of the 'best' but I will wholeheartedly agree that they are very good

IIT yes

People use IIT exams to study here because of how good they are :)

@DanielSank sigh, just do it... the regular chat room mtg time will have a significant audience just based on historical attendance, anything else may be more random, and nothing is guaranteed in cyberspace. if @DavidZ publicizes it on the home pg, think that will likely increase the exposure/ attendance. anyway 1st time, lets not expect fireworks, lets just see if we can pull it off, eh? and build on it each time...? sound reasonable? (invite your fiance etc for a guanteed audience, wink)

@3075 congratulations, a real accomplishment! and as they say "now the hard work begins"! maybe you could put more info in your profile that might help reveal some of your presumably impressive qualifications!

@JohnRennie It's pretty cool to try, my school disagrees

If I were a teacher I would get all my students to do that experiment. If you've never seen it before it's absolutely amazing!

It was my salvation during boring classes :)

@0celo7 does it not

@BernardMeurer Did you ever make nitrogen triiodide?

@JohnRennie I was banned from the lab during my second year of high school for suceeding in making HF

@BernardMeurer err, you do realise how dangerous HF is? Couldn't you have made something safer like cyanide or Sarin? :-)

@JohnRennie I had a mask on! And I was doing it inside the magic gas chamber!

Fair enough then!

And it was a minimal amount too, I just wanted to see something dissolve glass :D

HF dissolves glass only slowly so it's not that spectacular. Mostly it just frosts the glass.

@JohnRennie I didn't know that at the time, now I do :v

@ChrisWhite I had gloves and all, and hey I was 15 I was about 30% more destructive than I am today

I worked for a bit at crystallising zirconium organophosphates from HF

OH I HAZ QUESTION

I got in a massive discussion with a friend yesterday because he was saying that fire 'isn't matter'

and I know it is

is there any empirical way to prove this in a bar?

@lucas there are some restrictions on when an OP can delete their question

We have beer, matches, a lighter, smokes and paper near by

You need to agree on your definition of fire. Most non-physicsts think it refers to the heat/light not the hot gas.

That's my point! Fire is just hot gas

but I couldn't come up with a dumb proof

Well hot gas is present because you can see convection currents in the flame e.g. bits of ash rising. The point is that your friend will claim that's not the fire.

So all I have to do is turn him into a physics major!

Actually the visible flame comes mostly from black body radiation emitted by particles of carbon.

Your problem is that non-nerds think fire is somehow mysterious

But then mankind has thought that for all of recorded history

Physics - spoiling people's superstitious fun for two millenia!

LOL

You get a marking on my beer list for that

I'll be off to bed now, night folks!

Hello

@JohnRennie Thank you because of your response. Don't you think those restrictions aren't enough? I think those make the users that don't answer the questions that their vote is zero or under. And as anyone that have 125 rep can downwote a question (and it is easy to earn 125 rep (considering the Association Bonus)), so it is possible that a good question is downvoted by those that don't have the competency for judging.

@JohnRennie I think it is better that the moderators or high rep users control the deletion of the questions. In other words, any OP cannot delete his/her questions without having permit from moderators or high rep users. Don’t you agree? :-)

@lucas If you read the link John gave you, you'll know that regular site members cannot delete their own questions when they have a positive-score answer, or multiple answers. This generally prevents people from removing other members' content, when that content is considered useful to the site.

"It is well–known that"

No dammit

I'm reading this paper to learn!

Tell me the details!

@Slereah ahahah I also do that at times

however it is better to give the bibliographic reference

to contain all the details, an article would be $10^{\text{very large s**t}}$ pages long.

@MAFIA36790 in mathematics, there is no article or book that is completely self-contained; apart (maybe) from bourbaki or set theoretical books that start from the very foundations

:-)

@yuggib Principia Mathematica is best

Although their way to handle the Russell paradox is a bit poor

@Slereah it is a bit outdated...actually bourbaki set theory is outdated as well

personally, I like either set theory by Jech

Is there a modern book like that?

or model theory by chuang

I only know metamath as a modern "Let's do all math without any reference" thing

well, any book that introduces to set theory does everything from scratch

But you know, I'm not expecting something self contained

Just

Anything related to the Thirring model, write it out?

I don't want you to redo QFT

Just don't assume I know about bosonization or the Lorentz group in 2D

I can understand the need for references but it would be nice not to have to do the daisy chain of references until I find the correct explanation

That's why I want to write a QFT book sometimes :p

I don't want to have to juggle 5 different books to get a complete picture of it

It will be called

THE UNIVERSE FROM SCRATCH

calls from Carl Sagan's lawyer

There actually already exists a paper with that title

There's a bunch of QFT stuff you basically never see really

Like anything related to quantum optics never appears in a generic QFT book

Also I find it a bit weird that like

Hydrogen atom is almost unheard of in QFT books?

Even the fixed nucleus limit

It's all scattering all the time

Yeah that one

The best book

One thing I find annoying in some books is the habit of putting hugely important parts in the exercize section, without any solution

Ignore me, it was mistake ;D

what is even a Lorentz transform in 2D

Let's see

$t' = \cosh(\phi)t - \sinh(\phi)x$

$x' = \cosh(\phi)x - \sinh(\phi)t$

i think that's just a hyperbolic rotation in 2D ?

Yes

Or

$(u',v') = \text{diag}(e^\phi, e^{-\phi}) (u,v)$

$\text{diag}(e^\phi, e^{-\phi}) \text{diag}(e^\theta, e^{-\theta}) = \text{diag}(e^{\phi+\theta}, e^{-(\phi+\theta)})$

Which sounds fine for group structures and all

diag? but the above 2D lorentz matrix is not diagonal?

It is in null coordinates

You can't turn everything into null coordinates in more than two dimensions, though

It is useful though

scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jmp/24/5/10.1063/1.525798

Oh boy

what prevents that in > 2D?

and wow, "square root of vectors??" (must get a read to see what they have to say)

Well you only have one timelike direction to work with

That's 2 null directions max

ok makes sense

@MAFIA36790 That paper seemed to have CDT as a central subject, just noticing

Where is ACM

if any of you would like to have fun, there is a new question on aviation.se that contains "a few" physics misconceptions: aviation.stackexchange.com/q/27603/1467

@0celo7 can't help me now

@Federico indeed, though I would imagine the people who know how to answer such a question properly are probably already on Aviation

It's really about how aircraft work; the physics is merely incidental

@MAFIA36790 : I can't tell you how to get a universe from scratch. But I can tell you there are some big issues with the abstract of arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0509010. Why don't you ask a question about it? Then I'll elaborate.

@MAFIA36790 I just noticed that it is not a CDT paper, it is in fact THE first CDT paper

So Causal Dynamics Triangulation begins with this conference and this paper that follows it...

@JohnDuffield that falls in the category of things we'd rather not have you posting here

@Slereah Ask on Skype if you need something.

@David Z : that's why I said why don't you ask a question about it? By the way, when are you going to lift this unfair censorship imposed on me without warning. 0celo7 has served his time, why should I endure a life sentence?

@vzn Your "just do it" attitude is typical of someone who's never traveled hundreds of miles and spent many hours preparing for a conference/talk/etc. only to find it poorly organized and/or the audience lacking.

I am happy to do what you describe, but not only super short notice and in the total absence of advertising, etc.

If you think I sound like a snob, then you're probably right, but it's a learned behavior, not an innate one.

@MAFIA36790 o/

@Slereah I have been summoned. What is your request?

Save us from evil.

@BernardMeurer lol. How did you have access to a microwave during a philosophy class?

@ACuriousMind He was at home. The real question is how the administration found him.

@DanielSank That task might be a tiiiiiiny bit too big for me ;/

@DanielSank I'd rather be wondering why they seem to have taken more offense at him microwaving grapes than him skipping class

@ACuriousMind Even with asymptotic series?

Are grapes sacred in Brazil?

@ACuriousMind Perhaps. @BernardMeurer?

@DanielSank I'd say those are evil themselves

They work, but they really shouldn't!

I once read in the forward of a textbook that an author never finishes a book, they rater abandon it.

I think this is true also of journal papers.

@acuri what do you think is better for new students to physics: model SHM with a well-known periodic function like sine/cosine or to model SHM with a more general periodic function that would be constructed?

I feel like the latter would give the students experience in abstracting physical phenomena with math

@Obliv Probably best to start with a sine wave and introduce the more general stuff afterwards.

The problem, of course, is that at the stage that most students first encounter harmonic motion, they don't know enough mathematics to treat it in generality.

True

@Obliv I don't understand the question. You don't "model" the SHM with sine/cosine, you model it with the equation of motion and find that the solutions are sine/cosine/linear combinations thereof. What do you mean by "modelling" it with a more general periodic function?

I remember when I learned the how to deal with arbitrary phase, damped, driven oscillations as a freshman in college. It was the hardest part of the entire course because it was done in the typical "differential equation" style rather than just using a damned Fourier transform.

This happened, probably, because the textbook writer didn't assume the reader knew how to use Fourier analysis.

@Secret I'd have to actually read the paper.

Can access it at the moment.

Heya

@Secret However, even without reading it I'd bet you that when they say "apparently breaking the second law of thermodynamics" it's a dumb way of saying "if you ignore part of our system it appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics", which is not surprising.

@BernardMeurer <3

@BernardMeurer quest...

@DanielSank <3

@3075 DOING IT

@3075 Nuthing

@Secret Oops, meant to say "cannot" access it at the moment.

oh well