mnl

18 ms·

121.
by mnl 7y ago
You're mixing up laws with models. Conservation of momentum is a physical law, that is, we're not making that up, we always see it. The Navier-Stokes equation is a continuum mechanics model of fluids with interesting mathematics,
122.
by mnl 7y ago
I still don't get why people do this. You can't use snippets of Wikipedia to make a point you don't understand. We're talking about macroscopic systems here. The laws of thermodynamics depend on the law of large numbers
123.
by mnl 7y ago
Oh well, if you come up with magic materials you can do anything, of course.
124.
by mnl 7y ago
That's the great thing about thermodynamics, you can determine bounds for a few magnitudes in a physical system ignoring all the details about its evolution. For instance you can't disrupt the 2nd law, so at some point it's a
125.
by mnl 7y ago
Free depends on the context. These electrons are in a potential well, they're in a bound state. Actual atoms are just an example of that. My point was that conceptually both situations are alike, as they are bound states you get discre
126.
by mnl 7y ago
Well, if they're confined they're not free. I guess they mean the spatial probability density (modulus squared of the orbital wavefunction in an atom, you might skip the orbital label if the potential is not central, but it's
127.
by mnl 7y ago
I don't understand why everybody is dismissing any chance of retaliation against for instance Apple. With this they're killing a major player outside China, that's about half of their smartphone sales ($52B revenue). I don&#x
128.
by mnl 7y ago
I don't think it's for us to decide. We've been mourning the loss of the Library of Alexandria for circa 1,500 years and I can't notice that we're getting radically wiser during the last 25 ones. Letting all go is d
129.
by mnl 7y ago
We should aim at browsing the Internet by date . We're moving everything there ignoring the fact that as it is there is no built-in permanence. We're accustomed to that after Gutenberg: it wasn't that easy losing every copy
130.
by mnl 7y ago
Yeah, normal ordering and contractions, if we're expanding the fields in terms of such operators when doing canonical quantization using Fock spaces. There's a lot of stuff going on there. The fact that we can draw nice pictures r
131.
by mnl 7y ago
They're just a pictorial way of arranging calculations involving pretty technical stuff really. You're not expected to make sense of it without going through the (roughly grad school level physics) groundwork. I get that this can
132.
by mnl 7y ago
Exactly. Skimming through a book is not reading a book. Reading a book is not studying what's in a book. That's what I'd assume it's common knowledge about books. That and the usual study techniques: you read the materia
133.
by mnl 7y ago
I find this fascinating. Maybe it's because I can read books, have been doing that since I was 4, and it never crossed my mind that my books weren't working. Apparently something must have happened with education or attention span
134.
by mnl 7y ago
Yes and no. Physics is done by humans, but at the end of the day this Higgs from the convoluted construct is actually there, go figure. Maybe physics is onto something, maybe aliens can't get here because conservation of momentum is a
135.
by mnl 7y ago
> In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with A
136.
by mnl 7y ago
I've rarely seen more spectacular agreements with a theory than those of a Lambda-CDM fit of Planck's 2015 data. That can't be wrong (but as I've never worked on it, this statement is just some guy's personal impres
137.
by mnl 7y ago
I don't know how you came to model anything about this with "1^N" (I don't recognize that either). A nuclear chain reaction for instance starts with a single fission event, and if it's supercritical neutron populati
138.
by mnl 7y ago
I passed it at 7 and it wasn't easy. I have personal experience of it being nasty, anti-vaxxers mostly don't. They don't even know what they're talking about because that's the whole point of their position, ignore
139.
by mnl 7y ago
Well, measles is extremely contagious and nowadays you can't expect that everybody else is vaccinated, so... I'd call a single case of smallpox "Smallpox Outbreak". Too bad this recent outbreak of sheer ignorance and pre
140.
by mnl 8y ago
I'm just tired of nonsense. I don't understand what's the point in writing op-eds pontificating about things you have no idea, and now they're coming in every day because for some reason many in the HN community think th
141.
by mnl 8y ago
I found HN somewhat amusing when it came to physics, now I find it increasingly irritating. I don't think the same arrogant know-it-all attitude coming from laypersons would take place if the topic were neurosurgery or the theory of in
142.
by mnl 8y ago
I'm surprised this has been downvoted. I just can't understand how can be relevant the opinion of a physicist about something they've not worked on just because they have a blog. Sabine is on some kind of crusade nowadays, th
143.
by mnl 8y ago
Well, as far as I know (I might be wrong) she hasn't done any HEP phenomenology, so maybe at this moment she can't get that electroweak precision tests at a Higgs factory aren't a question of if, but when. She has enough trai
144.
by mnl 8y ago
Well, those challenges are fairly trivial in comparison, so it'd probably be good training.
145.
by mnl 8y ago
People use LaTeX because they have to write equations —besides referencing and quoting them, such a pleasure without it— and the alternatives suck. If the author of this obtuse rant doesn't need equations in print and to begin with has
146.
by mnl 8y ago
Technically this is the intrinsic motivation (task-oriented student) vs extrinsic motivation (goal-oriented student) divide. The thing is that everyone agrees that meaningful learning needs the former and this ideal lies at the root of ever
147.
by mnl 8y ago
Of course, but that doesn't mean that they aren't more than capable of performing an stellar job. Talking from experience I'd rather have professionals worried about what works and what doesn't than naive twenty-somethin
148.
by mnl 8y ago
Not really, let's see: You have two analogue ears and a smartphone, the traditional and cheaper way is to put the DACs and the battery inside the smartphone and then feed two passive impedances using 4 wires. So far, so good: it makes
149.
by mnl 8y ago
Obviously you're trolling here, but I expect more from adults that behaving exactly like spoiled children dropping litter everywhere because their parents or maybe their servants will clean up after them. About this convenience thing,
150.
by mnl 8y ago
There are deprecated extensions that can't be ported to Quantum and were actually useful to many users. And then Quantum is a memory hog, jumping from ESR 52.9 to the current version it needs a couple GB more for my workflow. It's

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