joigus

I think @studiot brought up this very interesting question, which I will paraphrase as "what are the limits then?". Whether Pi is the accepted value is good enough for the sake of argument. But suppose conspiratorial thinking is addressed to set up an (economic) internet scheme to deprive people of their life's savings. Or with consequences for public health. Or with consequences for national security. Or... The possibilities are almost limitless, and we should be concerned. That's why I gave a positive point to @exchemist for trying to draft a set of criteria --that should be made available to people who don't know better-- even though I liked many other arguments exposed here.

I will only add: Be careful, the BS is out there.

I've always been more of a top-and-bottom kind of guy. Quarkwise.

Two wonderful books whose titles, translated to English, read Tell me what it is, and Tell Me why. There were simple explanations of apparently magical phenomena, like will o' the wisps, based on methane from organic-matter decay. Now we know phosphine may be involved too. Then I toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor. Then I got into biking, and thought of becoming an engineer. Then I did coursework on interactions for Physics course and fell in love with Physics. I share much common ground with most users here, except @iNow. To me, sex has always been a distraction from physics. It's only helped me reckon my chances of getting laid as a consequence of talking about physics as nearly zero.

I would give him a break, @MigL, although I see your point. The word "truth" is perhaps not the best choice --sociologically--, granted. But, Number of times Feynman uses the noun "truth" in the Feynman Lectures on Physics: Volume I: 5 Volume II: 6 Volume III: 9 Number of times the adjective "true" appears in the Feynman Lectures on Physics: Volume I: 128 (one of them in the composite word "untrue") (at this point I stopped counting) The difference is these were not tweets. If you think about it, there are two ways in which you can present scientific "truths": 1) Inertial mass and gravitational mass are equal 2) Inertial mass and gravitational mass are equal to within 1 part in 5 billion Now, I don't know about you, but I don't mind calling the second one "true." The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. I 18-1 (My Italics emphasis.)

Yes, wonderful illustration of patterns emerging from collective behaviour. Taken one by one these starlings seem quite "vulgar" as compared to other, more beautiful, birds. But when they team up to do this in the sky, they truly are a wonder of Nature.

Starlings, a new state of matter? (lots of minutes, I've cut the last video.) How do they do that? Remind me of cellular automata. But far more amazing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Cheney_(cartoonist)

Please, @porton, do not embed your own words in a quote by other user. It's very confusing.

My two cents: What for? So that we can have Donald T**** still around 3000 years from now? Einstein still working on the unification of EM and gravity? The genius of Chaplin in a Tarantino movie? Highly proficient old geezers taking up all the god jobs so that young people never get their hands on the task? What about overpopulation? Those aren't questions. They're assertions. None of them remotely related to immortality. Stem cells, telomerase, hello...? And guess what types would be first in line to achieve immortality. A world full of moguls, fighting with each other for a piece of eternal time. I don't think so.

Do you mean "some kind of justice"? Perfect justice? Come on.

As @swansont said, energy levels are a characteristic of bound states under an attractive potential. For all intents and purposes, you can assume energy levels so close to each other that considering them anything other than a continuum is pointless, IMO. Also, dark matter appears as a distribution of mass density that starts to be noticeable at the level of or well beyond galactic halos. I don't see how dark matter would have sizeable effects at Casimir-range scales. There probably are inhomogeneities, but they're about the size of intergalactic distances. And I don't understand the concept of "weak space."

Count me in. We could do worse.

Sorry for conjuring up the image of Gandalf thrown out of a jet, @MigL. I know how much you love movies.

Not so much of a digression. If I were to be thrown out of a jet at high speed, I'd rather be a Bilbo Baggins type than a Gandalf type. Even better an ant, for all kinds of physical reasons.

God! I mean, good! Informative, interesting, very telling, that some of the chief warden concerns are very reasonable --to do with security, mainly--. But some others clearly go off limits. "What would the victim's family think of this?" comes to mind. I think there are some lessons for the victim's families and the victims themselves. If you come to me and twist my arm, and you harm me, what good does it do me to twist your arm, and harm you, in return? Nothing! No reparation, only more harm spread around, no relief for me, and a radicalisation of your already violent profile. Plus my inclusion in the not-very-commendable group of people who willingly harm others --you're being harmed on my behalf".

I'm sorry, but I respectfully disagree. From the Nature article: (My emphasis.) Exactly as I said. AKA virtual particles. No mention of Euler axes on the Nature article. No mention to Euler axes on the BBC report either. It's not a classical phenomenon. Here's an abstract of the PRL paper: No mention of Euler axes either. Here's another one from PRL-D: No. Prof did. I didn't. I did only mention it in response to his bringing it up, for reasons completely mysterious to me, as it as no bearing on the problem. I only intervened to say that curvature can never be a 1-rank tensor, as he suggested. And I stand by what I said. I remain as clueless as I did before as to what curvature has to do with all this. The quantum calculation for g-2 gives \( \frac{\alpha}{2\pi} \) as first-order quantum correction to the classical gyromagnetic ratio of the electron. Because \( \alpha \) is dimensionless only because it's an \( \hbar \)-rationalised constant: \[ \alpha = \frac{e^2}{\hbar c} \] it is obvious that we're dealing with a quantum correction. The Physics Reports paper is full of mentions to \( \alpha \) as well. It's a quantum correction.

I set my bets in that the calculation is right. Eleven significant digits cannot be out of sheer luck! It'd be a pleasure paying you the prize, @Eise. Fix it, and we'll talk. I'd be a pleasure meeting you, even if it's to pay you for losing that bet.

More on this topic... An interesting possibility, I think, is that the baryon and lepton-number conservation laws that we know to be satisfied exactly --and put into question only on the grounds of GUTs and cosmology--, really are exact conservation laws. In fact, the principle could then be raised to a local gauge principle. This would require a baryodynamic/leptodynamic field that could[?] account for these discrepancies from the SM. Because this topic of a possible baryodynamic field is a long-forgotten road, I've tried to dig out something relatively recent about it on Google. I've found this: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014MPLA...2950031H/abstract One consequence of this idea is that, for galaxies with a large baryon number, there would be a repulsion that would reflect in the virial theorem so much as to be observable on the large intergalactic scales. I wonder if dark matter issues could be addressed on these grounds too. But not many people are considering anything like this today.

Very interesting googling suggestion! I wasn't aware of this "extra dimension." The dream of cheap energy is too attractive, and it's bound to die hard. But I also agree with you that the internet plays an important part in keeping the dream alive --zombie-like.

This makes a lot of sense.

I very much agree with Eise on this one too. When I said deterring works to some extent, I meant for ordinary cases of breaking the law. Not for violent criminals. I lost some focus. For violent criminals I don't think deterrence is a factor. Nor is it positive to clump together people of a violent profile. I liked the video very much. Just one thing. When you say: I think you meant lose-lose. I don't think you want to conflate "lose" and "loose" when talking about criminals! I know it was an innocent typo, Eise, I hope you forgive me.

I meant "radiative" as in "radiative corrections" = "quantum corrections". In QFT, when you calculate any parameter like mass, charge, etc., you don't know what happens at very small length scales. So you have to assume that all possibilities quantum-mechanically possible, somehow, are there. Classically the gyromagnetic ratio is just 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyromagnetic_ratio#For_a_classical_rotating_body Any deviations from this factor of 2 are purely quantum. Quantum electrodynamics owes much of its well-deserved prestige to the success of this calculation. The discrepancy with the classical factor of 2 is due to "radiative corrections", which means that you have to account for virtual particles contributing to these renormalised quantities. The mass, the g factor, even the charge, are affected by quantum corrections. If the salient suggestion of Fermilab and Brookhaven is that a fifth force is necessary to explain this anomaly, it must be because new gauge bosons have to be conjectured. That is, bosons other than photon, Z and W's, or gluons. IOW, bosons that are not contemplated by the standard model. That's what I meant by "new radiative modes." And I didn't mention curvature. That was @Prof Reza Sanaye.

Dear professor, I would very much enjoy that sitting with you and @MigL. Sometimes I have a feeling that you're intellectually honest, sincerely interested in knowledge, and perhaps just a little bit "spread too thin", if you take my meaning. I'm a bit "spread too thin" myself so... And you have a sense of humour, which is always a big plus. Take care, and keep an eye on radiative modes.