exchemist

Almost invariably what we get with these guys is a lot of fancy talk about "Christoffel symbols", "Riemann geometry" and all the other sexy buzzwords, but with without an understanding of even 1st yr undergrad physics. (That hogwash about Planck's constant and virtual particles is one example.) What they miss, with their grandiose ideas about pushing forward the frontiers, is that the real innovators in science first master the current science, before embarking on new thinking. Trying to criticise or replace something you yourself don't properly understand is an idiot's approach, doomed to failure. The unpalatable fact is there are no short cuts. You have to learn the stuff and be good enough at the associated maths used in the modelling before you can contribute. (I'm not, by the way. I can just about hack the maths of quantum chemistry but that's my limit. In fact, one of the insights I got from quantum chemistry was to start thinking in maths rather than in pictures. That gave me a glimpse of how people at that level of physics have to operate.) My great fear today is that, with the advent of chatbots that are programmed to tell the user how brilliant they are in order to keep the chat going, a new generation of cranks will be spawned, implacably convinced they are all geniuses and thus impervious to reality. Ballocks will reign supreme, if we are not careful.

His thread got closed, after running for 11 months and 8 pages.

Ah yes but first you have to share knowledge. Not ballocks. There is a distinction. These science forums (I've been a member of several for some years now) attract posts by cranks and nutters, writing ballocks while thinking they are the next Einstein. Some of these can be quite instructive: I have learnt quite a lot from reading some of them - usually where the writer has got wrong some piece of science I did not previously know about. But in the end moderation has to close them, once it has become clear they are going nowhere, otherwise the forum becomes full of angry people arguing repetitively against nonsense. You've been given a very good run for your money, it seems to me. There is a relevant aphorism attributed to Carl Sagan: "Sure, they laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown". Everyone putting forward a new theory should ask himself at intervals which of the two he is, just as a reality check. (I say "he" because women are generally not so egocentric as to fool themselves they are more brilliant than they actually are.🙂)

You are not paying attention to the earlier responses in this thread. Who is going to arrest Trump? The judge himself? No, it is the marshals. And they are controlled by……the Dept of Justice, which is headed by……a Trump appointee. Now do you understand the problem?

Just guessing but something to do with undeclared use of AI text, perhaps? It's not me though, as I don't read your posts.

You need neither photos nor videos to comply with moderation’s request.

It’s not rocket science, Professor. You can just copy a link and paste it into your text. If your source is not available on line, all you need do is provide details of it in normal text.

Yes, I note the sugary, ingratiating style of the chatbot, designed to lure you and me into further conversation by giving us compliments. I'm reminded of the absurd "excellent choice" that comes up when I order a pair of underpants from Marks and Spencer online.😆

OK, sorry for the rant, but it is a subject that worries me quite a lot at the moment. These things are being hyped to the skies and they look impressive, even seductive, but the content they produce....not so much. he other aspect that is worrying is the appallingly high electricity consumption of the damned things. People are now using them for what could be simple search queries but the power consumption is thousands of times higher than for a simple search. They are putting under strain the electricity grids of entire nations and risking the use of more fossil fuel to satisfy the extra demand.

This illustrates one of the problems with chatbots, wich is why I will have nothing to do with them. They are programmed to ingratiate themselves with the user so that he or she comes, to use your words, to "trust" them, in spite of knowing - knowing - they are untrustworthy, and to think they are having some sort of "relationship". With a fucking machine! Moreover a machine controlled by some giant corporation with the ability to influence the responses of the chatbot. Exhibit A is Musk and Grok, but do we really think Sam Alt-Right or Google will be able to resist the temptation over time? This delusion of a trusting "relationship" has the potential to poison human thought and wreck society. We are already seeing signs here on this forum. Poster after poster is outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot (chatbots' formatting and their ingratiating, verbose style are often obvious) and posting garbage as a result, having opted out of exercising editorial control of what they put out in their own name. We can easily become a society of gullible idiots. And in fact bored gullible idiots, because chatbots seem incapable of answering a question succinctly or displaying any flair in their writing style to command attention.

A relationship? With a chatbot? Is this a joke, or have you drunk the kool-aid? I’ll treat the chatbot’s explanation as a no more than a plausible possibility, pending more direct information on the subject.

Hmm, the only question is whether I can trust this response!

I can see difficulties with anything resonant rather than random. Resonance implies defined frequencies are favoured, which should lead to detectable effects.

It may not be relevant but I read in the Financial Times a couple of days ago that Google is starting to catch up, after being left behind in the AI race. I can't recall what it was the article says they are doing to catch up, but I wonder if this centralisation of search enquiries is in some way connected to a push to provide more advanced AI.

Are you suggesting the electromagnetic fluctuations of the vacuum should be treated as torsional vibrations rather than random?

So it was the Browse Tool that "decided" to pretend it was accessing the web?

Interesting. Did it "decide" to simulate web access - in effect to lie to you - or was that somehow in the programming, do you think?

And a good job too! Was he prosecuted?

Too bloody true, Squire! 👍

But Harrop represented himself as an individual down on his luck, living in his car and "sentenced to a slow death" due to lack of timely access to FMT to fix his CFS. Whereas in fact he has been running a dangerous business trading stool samples without appropriate medical oversight and promoting excessive claims for the utility of this largely unproven therapy. And he wants us all to join in his crusade. As for donor quality, to judge by the comments of @SFBayFMT5 Harrop does not have much idea of what constitutes an appropriate donor for a particular case - unsurprising as he has no medical training. If he wants to go about this the right way, he should team up with a gastroenterologist with a research interest in this area and do some proper scientific work, with a professional safety net for the participants in any trials.

Thanks again, I appreciate the clarity you are bringing to the background to this thread subject. Everything you have said here reinforces my view that Harrop has not been straight with us about his background and motives, that he has an evangelising agenda not supported by the science and that he has been doing things he should not be doing without, at the very least, oversight from a gastroenterologist. But as so often I've learned something here: that there is an unregulated trade in stool samples going on, among people who are medically unqualified.

Yes I think, as @swansont said previously, you have got this a bit arse about face, as we say in Britain. 😁 If you find π "emerging" in the course of exploring algebraic relationships in physics, that will be due to one of the reasons he and I have mentioned. What you cannot - and I mean really cannot - do is to claim that π itself, i.e. the transcendental number defined in mathematics, somehow arises from physical properties in nature. It may well pop up in what to you are unexpected places in the algebra of physics, but these relationships are not what defines π and makes it what it is. For example, ("h bar") is commonly used in quantum theory as it makes the algebra a bit simpler than Planck' constant itself, h. That's because a factor of 2π otherwise crops up a lot in QM. Why? Well, QM is about the wave properties of matter and a wave cycle comes back to where it started every 2π radians. So we shouldn't be surprised to find a few 2πs scattered about the place.

Chabots are programmed to engage you in chat. So they will always encourage you and tell you what you want to hear. You need to aim off to correct that bias, or you may end up with false confidence in something that is actually ballocks. Chatbots can't think. What they are clever at is constructing sentences that seem human-like. The content of those sentences can, not always but surprisingly often, be garbage. @swansont has nicely explained why π crops up so often in physics. Any form of cyclical process or behaviour is going to be something we can express mathematically using π somewhere along the line. (An angle of 2π in radians describes a complete circle, so every 2π-worth of whatever it is gets you back to the start and begins a new cycle.) And anything to do with, say radiation, or a field, that spreads outwards from a point evenly in all directions, is going to have spherical symmetry, for which again π is going to come into the maths in many cases. π is thus part of the mathematical toolkit for describing these phenomena.

Interesting topic, but hard to work what's going on just from reading the exchanges in the link. Can you summarise what happened, in a paragraph or so?

Regarding the bit in red, you have certainly implied it. To quote you (from the other thread): "i challenged the current thought process.. im not the first to do this, many theories did the same and were rejected at first (a very important and proven theory comes to mind). And no, i do not equate myself to giants like Einstein., just saying." and "You may ultimately be right, or wrong, but closing the door on a thought simply because you know better is exactly why progress is stifled." But OK, you seem to be becoming more reasonable now, so that's a good thing. (By the way, Einstein's relativity theory was taken up with alacrity by the science community. It is a romantic myth that he somehow laboured on in spite of rejection. His 1905 publications immediately made a great impression on the scientific community and he was appointed professor (which in those days didn't just mean a college lecturer but was a very senior academic position) within five years. But Einstein accepted his ideas would be challenged to see if they were robust, and he knew his physics and of course his maths. He also, later, went to get help with the maths he needed for general relativity.)