evanb

I thought all of this machine learning business was about minimizing the loss.

You can adjust the speed of light and hold the fine structure constant (and all other dimensionless parameters) fixed by adjusting some of the other dimensionful parameters.

But you could collect this data point by chance in a bigger or smaller detector.

What I was addressing was whether this detector is big enough for a reliable discovery. In that case what you really want to constrain is the rate, such-and-such events per kilogram of xenon per year (the per-kilogram-of-xenon can be traded for a per-liter rate given the density of the xenon).

No one knows if it’s big enough—-that depends on the properties of dark matter and its interaction with xenon.

Whether or not they've "seen" 3x more events is a little bit of a tricky question, because while they may have captured 3x the data exposure (see sibling comments) experiments often operate blinded to the data. They can develop their analysis scripts, play out various different scenarios via Monte Carlo simulation, and get their whole pipeline working without the bias of actually seeing how each change in algorithm alters the outcome for the real data.

Then, at some point, they freeze their pipeline, "open the box", run the analysis on the real data, and report what they find. But they can only "open the box" once per exposure, after that you can worry that human bias can creep in.

Maybe there are even dark scientists trying to explain the missing 15% of the universe! One such scientist, easily pegged as a kook, suggests a model with SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) gauge symmetry, with one sector spontaneously broken by a scalar field, and three flavors of fermions to allow for enough CP violation and masses spanning 10 or 11 orders of magnitude.

Yeah but no matter how hard I look I never seem to be able to read anyone else's email. Maybe OpenAI's upcoming models can help me find those references.

They aren't, as clicking through on a sibling's link demonstrates. Moreover, Senegal is nowhere near Cape Town.

Both / they're related. More mass gravitates more.

Suppose you had an infinite universe that was filled with a cool gas of low uniform density. Then the gravitational field at any particular point would be 0, by Gauss' law.

But, if you wait a brief moment the gas will not stay uniform, because each atom of the gas will have some velocity. You'll observe fluctuations: places with small over-density and small under-density (compared to the average). The places with over-density will gravitate more than the average and places with under-density will gravitate less, and gravity will cause the gas to clump.

Wait a few billion years and some places will have amalgamated whole galaxies' worth of matter around them and other places will be empty.

No, sorry, the singular surface in a Schwarzschild spacetime is not the event horizon. Nothing particularly interesting (from the GR point of view) happens at the event horizon.

Yes it is?