swansont

Abouzar Bahari has been suspended for abusing the report post system.

Did I say anything of the sort? I enforce the rules - critiquing what is posted is allowed. Whether you find this insulting or humiliating is on you. Nobody else is responsible for your thin skin. If we’re not in a position to verify, one has to wonder why you posted here. But consider this: if the Lorentz transforms aren’t symmetrical, then it must matter which frame is S and which is S’. You must get a different answer if you solve an identical problem by switching S and S’. But that doesn’t happen - you get the same result.

Probably because it only impacts a minority of physicists. Atomic physicists tend not to discuss high-energy particle physics, and vice-versa. We tend to discuss topics close to our area of expertise. I’m not sure what is supposed to be surprising about this. My point is that you’re overreaching with your unsourced claims. They aren’t true. But the models are of behavior. How do you test for reality? We can think there’s something real, but physics isn’t describing it. The physics we come up with allows us to calculate behavior we can observe. The more we dive into details the more abstract it gets. Or is reality “a continuous field of operators on an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space” as found in quantum field theory? http://wwwp.fc.unesp.br/~malvezzi/downloads/Ensino/Disciplinas/IntrodMecQuant/textos/What's bad about this habit - David Mermin.pdf

Whenever this comes up, the distinction of what one means by real needs to be made: real as opposed to fantasy/fictitious, or real in the sense of physical existence vs concepts. These aren’t completely orthogonal thoughts, but the latter is a better description IMO. Much of physics is comprised of calculational conveniences. Math, for example, is conceptual, but it’s not fiction. A photon or a phonon doesn’t need to physically exist to be useful to describe the relevant behavior. How would one tell if they do, since all we can do is look at experimental results? It’s like Plato’s allegory of the cave. Bull. That you are unaware of discussion of the issue does not mean that it has been ignored or is being evaded. For a lot of physicists, the issue has no impact on them and the physics that they do. But some do study it (people working on foundations, for example) People complain about this right here on SFN. Often right before asserting that MOND is the answer.

“Yes, everything in physics is completely made up – that’s the whole point” https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/everything-physics-made-up/ Is it ever true, then, to say that an electron is ‘real’ when it’s in motion? If we believe that electrons are real things, have we just made up the wavefunction to make the math work out? Absolutely – that was, in fact, the whole point. We couldn’t get the equations to work if the electron was a solid, isolated particle, so we made up something that wasn’t, and then the numbers started making sense. … physics isn’t built around ultimate truth, but rather the constant production and refinement of mathematical approximations. It’s not just because we’ll never have perfect precision in our observations. It’s that, fundamentally, the entire point of physics is to create a model universe in math - a set of equations that remain true when we plug in numbers from observations of physical phenomena. Another physicist’s take on physics describing behavior vs reality

! Moderator Note Commentary on what one posts is fair game. If you were expecting a credulous audience, you have miscalculated. As far as humiliation goes, that’s in the eye of the beholder. I guess this is goodbye, then

Where sock/bot/troll and rules violation accusations go to die

There’s been a recent uptick in off-topic commentary about (alleged) rules violations, happening instead of (or sometimes in addition to) using the report post function. Posts that purport to call out bots, sockpuppetry, trolling, even duplicate posts. This approach show a combination of Bad Faith Arguments, Hijacking, & Soapboxing all at once. They add nothing to the topic that’s supposed to be under discussion, and often lead to these issues being debated instead. And if they aren’t being reported, the mods may not even be aware of any potential infractions. Everybody should be afforded due process in regard to potential infractions - we aren’t going to ban someone just because of an accusation of sockpuppetry (these accusations are incorrect a significant fraction of the time) so the mods need to investigate, and picking a fight with a suspected bot is something I just don’t get. If you think a post violates the rules, report it. Respond only to the subject under discussion. And if it’s spam, don’t reply at all. (And for Zeus’s sake, don’t quote anything that includes spam links.) We’re considering just trashing posts that include such material as described above. Even if there’s “proper” content in it.

The reporting, which is presumably based on something, is that the two agencies saying leak are saying it leaked from WIV https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-02-27/u-s-agencies-divided-over-covid-19-lab-leak-origin-theory However, one must also note

People are saying “the lab” and I ask again, to which lab are you referring? The Wuhan Center for Disease Control or the Wuhan Institute of Virology? The former is BSL-2, the latter is BSL-4. The OP discussed gain-of-function research, which suggests the latter, but other discussion suggests the former.

Science does not tell us what reality is, and reality predates science.

You still have to learn the behavior, and someone has to teach you. The genetics just says whether you’re susceptible to the teaching.

! Moderator Note Under the forum rules, disagreement is not considered an insult. However, telling someone they are not literate at the kindergarten level is.

It spiked high in ‘20 during the lockdown (higher still in ‘10 as part of the crash) so an article from a while back might have been focusing on the unemployment numbers from the last administration

3.1% now https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm

In that light, it should be unsurprising that the US has an urbanization rate above 80%, while Vietnam’s is under 40% (using my previous countries) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_sovereign_state

Yes. a study in 1990 found that genetics account for 50 percent of the religiosity among the population — in other words, both identical twins raised apart were more likely to be religious or to be not religious, compared with unrelated individuals. https://www.livescience.com/47288-twin-study-importance-of-genetics.html Search on studies on twins reared apart or studies on separated twins

Which lab? I read that there are two in Wuhan.

I think our nature us to want explanations/answers. We also tend to want neatness. Sometimes we settle for simple and wrong because then no further thought is required.

The numbers are not normalized by cost of living. Rice, for example, costs ~4x as much in the United States as it does in Vietnam. So an expenditure that is 4x higher does not mean they are eating 4x more. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings?itemId=115

That’s nihilism.

! Moderator Note This is a discussion site, not your blog. Preaching is not allowed here Link removed.

The electrons repel each other, too. Any perturbation of the electrons that distort the cloud leaves a charge imbalance. I don’t see why the inverse square law is a problem. Yes, but thermal energy is typically much smaller than the ionization energy, so that’s not a problem unless the temperature is quite high.

The electrons attract nucleus. If you move the electron cloud around, it will drag the nucleus with it.

But such transitions could be induced in collisions