antognini
Joined 12 years ago
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Comment · 7 days ago
This is more or less Roger Penrose's position: https://web.archive.org/web/20150327124054id_/http://image.s...
He argues that the wavefunction collapses on a timescale of h-bar / E_G, where E_G is the gravitational self-energy of the quantum system.
Comment · 7 days ago
I've heard this claim, but I don't think it holds up. The idea is that supposedly the calculation is done in parallel across the different universes which allows you to see an exponential speedup in some calculations. But the whole point of many-worlds is that after a branch event the various branched portions of the wavefunction no longer interact. Even if it were true that quantum computing was really a bunch of parallel classical computations (which it is not), there would be no way for any of the other universes to communicate the result back to the universe you observe it in.
Comment · 21 days ago
I think a lot of people have an understanding that the force that binds the nucleus together is quite a bit stronger than the electromagnetic force. (Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1162/)
What is not always appreciated is that the forces binding the nucleus together are the strong force analog of the van der Waals force in electromagnetism. So it is not really right to compare the way the electron is bound to the nucleus to the way the nucleus itself is bound together. If you want to compare the electromagnetic force to the strong force, the better comparison is between the force binding the nucleus to a hydrogen bond.
The strong force itself is many orders of magnitude stronger than the force binding the nucleus together.
Comment · 1 month ago
I'd recommend Carroll & Ostlie's Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, though it requires some basic calculus and physics.
Comment · 1 month ago
The outer boundary is the point where a photon has a ~50% chance of escaping without encountering another particle.
Comment · 2 months ago
We have constraints that primordial black holes must be less than the size of a large asteroid. They would be gravitationally insignificant to the Earth unless they actually passed through it.
I also don't think it would really be detectable in the Sun. Perhaps there would be some transient astroseismology signature.
Comment · 2 months ago
They did some modeling in a previous paper of how this would impact Ia supernovae and it depends on whether the supernova is driven by Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities or not. In the case that it is, this would only trigger Ia supernovae for white dwarfs which are already very close to the Chandrasekhar mass. In this case the standard candles would be pretty much the same.
In the case that KH instabilities are weaker they claim that you can get supernovae at masses farther from the Chandrasekhar limit. This could plausibly have more of an impact on Ias as standard candles. (Though perhaps less than you might think becauseit would also likely have an effect on the shape of the light curve, and Ias are normalized based on their light curve shape.)
All that said, even if this process does occur, I doubt the rates would be high enough for it to be a substantial fraction of observed Ias.
Comment · 3 months ago
To paraphrase the old joke, if you wake up with a $78,000 AWS bill, you have a problem. If you wake up with a $78 million AWS bill, Amazon has a problem.
Comment · 6 months ago
We already know that some particles interact extremely weakly with others. Neutrinos were postulated as a "dark" particle in order to preserve conservation of energy and momentum, but it took more than a decade before they were observed directly. There's no reason there couldn't be another particle with an even weaker interaction.
Comment · 6 months ago
This is the field of information geometry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_geometry
Comment · 7 months ago
In a similar vein I highly recommend Behind the Curve, which is a documentary about the flat Earth movement. It was a pretty fair film and tried to get to know the people involved in the movement and what it was that motivated them.
It was interesting to see that one of the main figures featured in the documentary started out pretty generically wanting to get into conspiracy theories and started reading up on one after another until he found a particular one that clicked.
Comment · 7 months ago
Did Moltbook even have any investors?
Comment · 8 months ago
I think the long term impact of this will be to strengthen the importance of social ties in academic publishing. As it is there are so many papers published in many fields that people tend to filter for papers published by big names and major institutions. But the inevitable torrent of AI slop will overwhelm anyone who is looking for any gems coming from outsiders. I suspect the net effect will be to make it even more important that you join a big name institution in order to be taken seriously.
Comment · 9 months ago
I remember one of my friends in college pointing out before lecture that the professor would always start by saying "OK, So."
Prior to that I've worked on Google Photos, Google Brain, and at a startup building a hearing aid. My academic background is in astronomy where I worked on the dynamics of few-body systems. Sometimes I write about astronomy, machine learning, or other things here:
https://joe-antognini.github.io/
I did a podcast for a few years about the history of astronomy which you can listen to here: https://songofurania.com/
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/antognini; my proof: https://keybase.io/antognini/sigs/wSHkmk20mL-K5z6jWnqwqfFzzrDQ_tcJgci1pMD-qMk ]