4 ms·

I don't know if it's still the case, but arxiv papers without a subject classifier used to be more likely to be "cranky" (contrast the /math/ in the Chaitin pap

I don't know if it's still the case, but arxiv papers without a subject classifier used to be more likely to be "cranky" (contrast the /math/ in the Chaitin paper url.) So I don't know about the paper here - I only read the abstract - but I wouldn't get too hung up on terminology. "Random" is just an easier way of saying "uncomputable" I guess. But the broad topic itself is quite respectable and of interest to non-cranks, for example, see John Baez' "Struggles with the Continuum"[1]: > Is spacetime really a continuum, with points being described — at least locally — by lists of real numbers? Or is this description, though immensely successful so far, just an approximation that breaks down at short distances? Rather than trying to answer this hard question, let us look back at the struggles with the continuum that mathematicians and physicists have had so far.... 1: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/continuum.pdf http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/continuum.pdf EDIT: The author seems like a perfectly respectable, non-crank physicist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Gisin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Gisin) as per another comment here.

ssivark 8y ago
That difference is due to a systematic change in how arXiv generates URLs for submissions, starting a few years ago. No arXiv submissions today will have a URL with a category. Articles (each with a unique arXiv id YYMM.xxxxx) can have multiple topic tags; the article under discussion has two tags, one of which is "quant-ph". Cranky articles which cannot be refuted on technical grounds are often found on the "general" topic tags. As an aside, since the above comment is essentially trying to infer the quality of the paper from metadata, it might be worth knowing that the author is a well-regarded quantum physicist with many highly cited papers.

ssivark 8y ago

That difference is due to a systematic change in how arXiv generates URLs for submissions, starting a few years ago. No arXiv submissions today will have a URL with a category. Articles (each with a unique arXiv id YYMM.xxxxx) can have multiple topic tags; the article under discussion has two tags, one of which is "quant-ph". Cranky articles which cannot be refuted on technical grounds are often found on the "general" topic tags. As an aside, since the above comment is essentially trying to infer the quality of the paper from metadata, it might be worth knowing that the author is a well-regarded quantum physicist with many highly cited papers.