Brian Skinner
@gravity_levity
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"All who have passed the age of 30 are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance" -George Orwell
Joined September 2009
I guess I'm on the other site now. Give me a heads-up (here or there) if you want me to follow you there.
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Here is a talk by me on one variant of this question. It turns out that if you subject a collection of particles to random dynamics, but you force them to conserve their center of mass, then they will only obey ergodicity if their density is high enough.
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There is lots of great ongoing work in physics on exactly this question: when does the ergodic hypothesis (e.g., entropy maximization) hold and when does it not? In other words, when does thermodynamics work and when does it not?.
I don't. buy the ergodic hypothesis in stat mech. Any recs for how to get comfortable (even empirical?). Seems just obviously not something that follows from first principles - unless it's like every system is noisy and that's why? But aren't there attractor trajectories that.
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RT @michael_nielsen: Harvard. PEPFAR. LIGO. Basic science. And dozens of other crown jewels of not just the US, but of humanity. And one….
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RT @The_Correlator: Watching electronic ice melt | Science.I’m delighted to share a perspective I co-authored with….
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RT @gravity_levity: @InnaVishik The utility of photovoltaics seems possible precisely because the science is so boring: it's the same p-n j….
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Briefly poking my head into this site to make sure you know that Microsoft has absolutely not realized a new phase of matter, nor have they created a new type of qubit.
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If you want to contact your senators/congressmen about the NIH freeze, the advice I've been given is to keep it brief and emphasize why it matters to you personally. Here's what I sent just now.
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Posted my first scientific explainer thread in forever over at the other site
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This is one of the great (and dangerous) things about getting a PhD: it the last remaining realm of education where there is enormous variance in what and how you learn. It still produces a wide range of thinking styles and competencies among people getting the same degree.
That one time @DavidDeutschOxf spoke to Richard Feynman:. “We had a wide-ranging conversation, mostly about quantum theory and computation, but we deviated a bit to talk about physics generally. And I said that physics seems to have slowed down, and he said, “There will be no
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. huh.
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RT @PhysicsCWRU: Join us TOMORROW, 11/4, at 12:45 pm in Foldy Room and Zoom for a condensed matter seminar! Brian Skinner (@gravity_levity)….
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Sometimes being a dad means that you have to make a promise to your toddler and you end up lecturing to your graduate class wearing a giant sloth costume
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This is one of the most aesthetically unpleasant things I have ever seen. Imagine thinking that quantum mechanics is just a jumble partial differential equations and ugly special functions.
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RT @EugenieReich: Update: I plan to release a second edition of Plastic Fantastic by Kindle and Paperback through Amazon, correcting typos….
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