superposeur

I mean, a psych experiment will never have an N comparable to a particle physics experiment or be able to reach the 5-sigma threshold for discovery that now prevails in physics. On the other hand, the object of study for psych is intrinsically interesting since we are people and if something reliable can be gleaned then it's certainly worth money. My concern is that "bigger, better" (as you say) would have to include millions of people across cultures and times, tracking longitudinally, with randomization and controls. (Again, more complexity requires more statistics, not less.). Is this practical? Maybe ...

> it's much easier to conduct controlled experiments.

Very true. But this means more statistics and controls are necessary to get solid result from a social science experiment then a particle physics experiment, no? Clearly, this is practically impossible, but there you go.

Yes, the devil always seems to be in the details in psychology experiments. Were the experimenters giving subtle cues to the child, and was this simply a test at how deftly the child picked up these cues? What was the exact wording of the “deal” offered to the child and would a wording change alter the results? Was the experiment conducted at a time of food scarcity or abundance? What were the prevailing cultural norms of how a child “ought” to behave? Would the results change if average child age was 6 months older or younger when experiment was conducted? What was in the drinking water and the air and the paint at the testing site? (With strong claims in the literature that all these are correlated with measures such as average population IQ!)

In the face of all these potential confounders, more statistics and controls seem necessary than, say, in a physics collider experiment on electrons (each electron possessing exactly two characteristics, location and spin, and all such electrons behaving identically regardless of location or time). Yet, even in this setting of simplicity and reproducibility, physicists have still found it necessary to establish a stringent, five-sigma threshold for discovery — 3 sigma anomalies come and go. Such a stringent threshold is unthinkable in psychology due to practical considerations. Ergo, it’s hard for to see how psychology can become a reliable empirical science.

Thank god, as I love marshmallows and instant gratification.

FWIW, here is CrowdStrike’s own comparison of features:

https://www.crowdstrike.com/compare/crowdstrike-vs-microsoft...

I’m surprised no one has yet noted that Microsoft itself is a chief CrowdStrike competitor.

Whitmer far and away best. But she’s had every opportunity to throw her hat in the ring and unfortunately the window for doing so is all but closed by now. She seems genuinely not to want it / lacks the courage to proactively make it happen.

Does anyone use obsidian for editing and managing emails? I have some email templates I need to adapt and send over and over (including file attachments and embedded links). I’d love a way to store and manage them from within obsidian without having to awkwardly copy paste into outlook, use an old Chrome plugin to convert the markdown to html, and manually attach the files. (My idiotic current scheme until I have a chance to “get myself organized”.)

No. Due to the game theory of the (non-parliamentary, winner-take-all) system, 2 is an equilibrium for number of parties. As in, smaller third parties are quickly “absorbed” into one of the two large parties to have any shot at winning.

As a consequence, the two parties are constantly changing, to the point that, for instance, the Republican Party of 2024 has little to do with the Republican Party of a decade ago.

To support your point, I think the role of memory in creative work is highly underrated.

I’ve seen up close a few people who could fairly be described as “most creative researchers in the world” (in my field at least) according to metrics such as h-index and Nobel prizes. It always strikes me how essential exceptional memory is to what they do — they have detailed, immediate recall of the problems in their field and, to the extent this recall is no longer present, then they are no longer producing groundbreaking work. Their recall of facts outside the field is often nothing special.

Imagination, creativity, intelligence all seem to rely on memory in order to operate.

I would think this point would be obvious, but apparently not given the many frustrating discussions I’ve had with smart people on the topic. (Maybe there is a subtlety I’m not appreciating?) It’s a relief to see the good solid sense in all your comments on this thread.

The “differentiation” in the title turns out to be derivative of a quarternion-valued function with respect to a scalar parameter.

But, I wonder if you math folks know of a definition of derivative of a quarternionic function with respect to quarternionic variable, generalizing the Cauchy-Riemann definition [1] of complex differentiation?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy%E2%80%93Riemann_equat...

This question isn’t actually anything to do with quantum mechanics. One can already ask, for GR, can a gravity wave generated by a wiggling object that has already passed the event horizon propagate back out through the event horizon? The answer from gr is unambiguously no. Effectively, all complicated goings-on inside the black hole are washed out into just a couple parameters for an outside observer: total mass, total charge, total angular momentum. All the matter contained by the black hole does still make its gravitational effect felt on outside objects through these three parameters.

This observation in fact is what inspired wheeler to ask his grad student bekenstein what then happens to the entropy of a cup of tea thrown into the black hole — how to reconcile with 2nd law of thermo. Which in turn was the start of the very long story of black hole thermodynamics.

These experiments confirm the classical theory of gravity, which is Einstein’s general relativity, just as Maxwell’s equations are the classical theory of the electromagnetic field. Just as Maxwell’s equations are perfectly adequate for waves of macroscopic intensity, GR is perfectly adequate for astrophysical gravity waves.

A whole separate question is what is the quantum mechanical theory that has general relativity as its classical limit? For electromagnetism, quantum electrodynamics (understood in the 40’s) is the quantized version of Maxwell’s and predicts that electromagnetic energy measurement outcomes come in “chunks” (photons). But, although much is known about features of “quantum gravity” (like that gravitons will be massless, spin 2), there is famously no consensus yet about the precise theory.

As to how to reconcile the force carrier picture with spacetime picture — even classically one can consider an “overall” spacetime background geometry such as that created by the whole earth. Then consider little ripples perturbing this background. Gravitons are these little ripples turned on a quantized amount (heuristically). How the overall background itself gets formed as an “enormous pile of gravitons” will depend on the precise theory of quantum gravity. String theory does have a partial answer to this so can model such things as black holes quantumly.

I love to imagine this kind of thing dug up by an alien civilization. That it displays the moons of Jupiter will be a fun puzzle and a source of wonder. “Obviously”, they will say, “these people must have worshipped Jupiter as a god and used the position of its moons to keep time.” But the pieces of the puzzle will never quite fit.

Who knows, maybe the Antikythera mechanism or the pyramids were a similarly ludicrous prank?

Reading this story inspired me to work through Joe Polchinski’s classic paper on the “Everett phone” [1]. The paper partially answers a question I’ve long had about Quantum Mechanics, what is so special about linearity? In a nutshell, the paper demonstrates that even the tiniest bit of nonlinearity (at least of a certain sort) would allow for communication between branches of the wavefunction, like in the Chiang story. Super deep stuff that, in my opinion, physics hasn’t even fully come to terms with.

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Everett-Wheeler_telephone

Interesting — thanks

Interesting. With all the mega bucks and efforts to produce smaller wavelength photon beams, I wonder if a comparable investment would increase throughput? Or maybe there is an insurmountable technical hurdle.

Extremely small wavelengths can be achieved using beams of electrons in place of beams of photons, as in Scanning Tunneling Microscopes and electron diffraction.

Do you know if there is any thought of developing “electron beam lithography”, where an electron beam would etch the pattern on silicon and not merely be used as a source of secondary photons?

As other commenters have said, whether or not an electron’s magnetic moment is “to do with currents” is a little open to interpretation.

I’ll add that the Dirac equation (governing electron field) correctly predicts magnetic moment given the inputs of charge and mass. * I interpret this as indicating that magnetic moment is a derived phenomenon just as it would be in the classical picture of a spinning ball of charge; I.e. the quantum picture refines but does not totally discard the classical understanding.

* Well, technically, sympathetic vibrations with all the other standard model fields also make tiny contributions to the magnetic moment.

Labels are important and I think progress on Everett QM (or, maybe “unitary QM”?) has been held back by the label “Many Worlds Interpretation”.

“Worlds” is inaccurate since there is still only one world (the ordinary, uncontroversial, tensor product Hilbert space of textbook qm). It the stuff in the world that enters into superposition, among which stuff are the atoms making up “observers”.

Similarly “completion” would be a better word than “interpretation”.

Agreed that “science accepts their ideas” is a mischaracterization (indeed Everett annd Bohm are probably mutually exclusive so couldn’t both be “accepted”). Better to say that the community now takes both seriously as contenders for a completion of quantum mechanics.

I deliberately say “completion”, not “interpretation” since, without further elaboration, Copenhagen quantum mechanics is only a piece of a model.

I started reading the different sections of the paper and —- wait, no, this is still the Abstract!

Cool use of maser for receive.

Not having thought this through before, I see now that while a transmit maser may have efficiency advantages, it may not improve directionality relative to a standard parabolic radio transmitter. All methods of producing microwaves will have basically the same diffraction-limited gain for a given “aperture” (dish) size. That darn uncertainty principle! (However, an optical laser would still give way better directionality.)

Ok what about using a maser instead of a laser?

Interesting about the JPL program and I’m amazed this prototype was only launched last year! Apparently the answer to comms laser use is “not yet but soon”.

The overwhelming loss in this calculation is from the antenna’s radiated energy spreading out over a larger and larger area (despite the directional “gain” factor).

I’m wondering: would a probe launched today instead employ a laser to communicate? This would seem to offer many orders of magnitude improvement in the directionality of the signal.

A shattering film called Open Hearts (2002) made me appreciate that every day is a miraculous gift and that the proper stance toward life is warm hearted gratitude, as well as an awareness that you are a mote in currents beyond your control.

I still think of it as the most (the only?) “grown up” movie I’ve ever seen in its incredible realism.

I saw it many years ago in an art house theater, but oddly have never even heard a mention of it since.

At top it should read “L = …” (as it does in the compact form printed on the coffee mug image).

Here, L represents Lagrangian density. The integral of L over spacetime (between some initial and some final time) is the action S, which therefore is a functional of the particular configuration the various fields take. The classical configuration of the fields (solutions of equations of motion) is the one that minimizes S between initial and final times. Quantum mechanically, the amplitude to find final field configuration given initial field configuration is obtained by integrating e^iS over all field configurations. Modulo a few details* the workings of the universe ensue.

*joke

You describe a local hidden variable theory such as has been definitively ruled out by Bell/CHSH inequality experiments (see, e.g. (2022 Nobel Prize)[https://www.nobelprize.org/all-nobel-prizes-2022/] ).

But even if you could make some baroque version of a model like this (with the position of one ball instantaneously reacting to other far away balls perhaps and some pilot waves) invoking it still wouldn’t answer my question about ontology. Implicit in this description seems to be the existence of a separate non-quantum realm (little balls that spin, jostled by “wind”). What are these balls supposed to be made of? If not atoms (since atoms are stable by virtue of quantum mechanics, which you seek to explain), then why don’t they suffer from ultraviolet catastrophes? Hopefully you see my point.