5 ms·
Motl thinks everybody is on crack.
by szany 15y ago
Motl thinks everybody is on crack.
- JonnieCache 15y agoThis is true. And he's a birther, and a heavy climate change skeptic. His writing about physics is refreshing though.
- kmm 15y agoIs Motl famous? I've seen his name popup everywhere physics related. Should I know him?
- happy4crazy 15y agoHe was in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, and is an extremely prolific, opinionated blogger. He and Peter Woit over at Not Even Wrong used to feud constantly. Interestingly, Motl is actually really polite and charming in a shy, goofy way in person.
- VladRussian 15y ago"Even in classical physics, dice may have probabilities 1/6 for each number, but once we see "6", we update the probabilities to (0,0,0,0,0,1)." It is obvious that he himself is on crack. I couldn't read past that gibberish.
- kmm 15y agoThat is a correct reasoning. In classical physics, as everything is predetermined, no real probabilities exist. We use probability theory to gauge our uncertainty about the world. If you knew the position of every particle in the dice, there would be no distribution of side, it would always come up the same. But we don't and can't know everything, thus we use probabilities to express that. If you throw the dice, your uncertainty drops because you know the outcome of the experiment.
- Jach 15y agoYes, but is he assuming that all initial conditions are known when it hits 6 while also assuming classical theory? If he is, fine. If he isn't, he updated wrong.
- schrototo 15y agoIsn't this just saying that any number has a chance of 1/6th for being "it" before the dice is rolled, and that once we have rolled the dice and it landed with 6 on top, the number 6 obviously has a probability of 1 of being "it"?
- leoc 15y agoExcept, of course, the string theorists...