The region was an excellent choice for me to get my education. It was easy to get a research assistant position throughout my studies at the various academic institutions and then advance to my career from there.
Cost of living is still quite cheap compared to other metropolitan areas.
Only thing that is missing is more bold risk-taking on new startups. Also the horrendous bureaucracy makes things slow-moving.
Otherwise they have everything they would need for a great hub. Smart and well educated students. A great university and cultural scene.
They are still doing plenty shots for the national ignition campaign and figuring out the target manufacturing process.
The official purpose of NIF has just been shifted to support security research.
I am not sure if they are aware of the Fediverse [1,2]. The Fediverse essentially rebuilds all the social-networking services but as federated services. This means each service can be hosted by multiple instances and instances can communicate with one another, but all still have their internal rules. I think they even used the "-verse" term before the whole Metaverse-hype.
They could move the tracker to a suitable Mastodon instance [3] or even host their own Mastodon instance in order to get a suitable exposure out there (Maybe even use one of the Blogging instances). This would also be a first test how robust the Fediverse is with respect to external pressure.
I really love the strong connection between statistical mechanics and information theory.
Before attending a statistical mechanics lecture I was not able to comprehend why entropy was a relevant quantity, beyond the definition of the second law of thermodynamics. My statistical physics professor motivated entropy, by saying: "We need something to measure how much information we can extract from a system. Let's call it entropy, and it should reach its maximum value in a closed system when we are only able to extract the minimum amount of information from the system". And this opened my eyes on how intertwined information theory and statistical mechanics is. In my opinion one of the most beautiful connections in physics!
This is absolutely devastating! His talk "The Mess We're In" was one of those talks which were incredibly funny and informative at the same time. I absolutely lost it, when he told the story of the single comment his coworker put into the Erlang code.[1]
Are there any papers already out which focus on the technical aspect of reconstructing the image? I heard that they analyzed 3.5 Petabytes of data for this.
Keep in mind that a lot of the details will NOT be in those papers as they have used CASA and AIPS, two standard software tools that have been developed over more than a decade. Details are consequently scattered over many papers. Radio interferometry is not new and there is entire textbooks on the subject. The exiting bit here is not that we go a first image from interferometry but that we have a first image of the region just around a black hole.
I once took an advanced seminar course on the mathematical foundations of electrodynamics in parallel to my theoretical electrodynamics course during my third bachelor semester. I did not have any clue about differential geometry and did not understand the advanced formalism the lecturer introduced in the seminar. But I was quite shocked how easily Maxwells equations can be derived and how compact the formula was. The article suggests that Gauge theory and fiber bundels are subjects, where math and theoretical physics seem to help each other, which is absolutely facinating!
Note the article is by Nobel Laureate C.N. Yang [1] who also worked with James Simons and co-authored what has become known as the "Wu-Yang Dictionary" [2].
...The mathematics of these results is in fact well known to the mathematicians in fiber bundle theory. An identification table of terminologies is given in Sec. V. We should emphasize that our interest in this paper does not lie in the beautiful, deep, and general mathematical development in fiber bundle theory. Rather we are concerned with the necessary concepts to describe the physics of gauge theories. It is remarkable that these concepts have already been intensively studied as mathematical constructs.
Thank you for the interessting material! I have heard a lecture on the geometric and topological applications to solid-state physics. This is one of the things that excites me a lot that whole areas of physics can be "geometrized".
Part of me believes that geometry is really just a subset of human thinking that comes very naturally/quickly to us, and thus we are more successful studying physics through geometry than through less 'algebraic' frameworks. So we made the most advances there just because we are biased toward doing so.
But then I think that we may be so strongly biased toward doing so because there's something fundamentally easy about evolving a brain that comprehends geometry. That information with geometric representations are fundamentally easier to evolve good mental models for than other kinds of information.
where ◻· is the 4-divergence. Again, the equation is manifestly covariant and very elegant. There are reasons to believe that the electromagnetic potential is in a sense more fundamental than the electromagnetic field:
Nice to see this article available on the Internet: I read a PDF that was passed around by email at the time it was published (Frank Yang is a relative of one of my neighbors and I once tried to chat with him about Maxwell over dinner...).
It was pretty amazing and I was so such awe combined with fear of saying something stupid that I don't remember everything. He mostly talked about non-Physics subjects. He did talk about Fermi and working for Oppenheimer. I asked about Teller...do not now remember what he said to that. I had attempted to understand something about Yang-Mills Gauge Theory in preparation for dinner, but completely failed, so instead I figured as a Scot and card-carrying EE I'd ask him what he thought about the apparent quantum jump in progress made by Maxwell -- how was Maxwell able to come up with such modern looking physics in the age of steam, for example. At the time I did not know that the history of Maxwell was one of his subjects of interest. He talked about some of the themes that you can see in the article above (which was written 10 years later). He also mentioned, in a joking way, his prediction years earlier that "In the next ten years, the most important discovery in high-energy physics is that `the party's over'.".
The problem is getting worse as new jobs are mainly created in cities. They also offer a more attractive infrastructure such as fast internet speeds and shorter commutes, than rural areas. There are of course many other advantages, but I think these are some of the most significant ones. This creates an unhealthy growth, which we see now manifests in the completely out-of-control rents worldwide. The only way this problem can be tackled is to invest massively in the rural infrastructure and stop this disturbing trend towards growing megacities and sparsely inhabited rural areas. Rising rents contribute to an large extent on social inequality. As a renter will only get living space for each month but nothing else of value in return, as opposed to buying a house/flat. The calculation for renting has been fine in the past decades as renting was often cheaper than buying a house, but this changed as we see now.
I agree with all of this, and I think megacities would be fine if the US had adequate public transit that actually goes to places where people live and work.
Even if this would be the dream of a lot of theoretical physicists to replace experiments with simulations, this must not happen! Ever! Even if every complex system in the world could be simulated in reasonable time it would still require experiments to verify or falsify the simulation results. A simulation is essentially just a calculation from a model someone came up with to describe a system. In order to check how good the model is one has to check it against experimental data. Just expanding the models without experimental verification will not necessarily result in a good theoretical description. It would be like writing software without testing the components and expecting it to work correctly when you're done. There was recently an article on HN where economists were described as the astrologers of our time [1] since they do not verify their mathematical models to an extent where they can predict economical systems.
This is another example where more experimental data should be considered in order to falsify certain theories.
Those are the reasons why string-theorist will not (and should not) get any Nobel price in the next decades. Since its predictions are hard to measure on those small scales there's no way of telling if the model is any good until it is compared against suitable experimental data.
Agreed. My background is philosophy, and while i rarely get into the STEM arguments. This has everything to do with inductive learning vs deductive learning. Any simulation will be run with the premises already built in, but cutting edge science is always about learning what those premises are. If we knew what they were, it'd be trivial to set up the reactor. Here we need inductive experimentation to learn how to simulate it trivially.
If you're doing science, experiments are hugely important. If you're doing engineering and you're reasonably sure that the physics guys came up with a good model, having everything in a computer would make development a lot cheaper.
Physics is a lot more than just fundamental physics. H-Bomb designs for example get hundreds of hours of super computer time to simulate a few pounds of stuff for 1/1,000th of a second and even then they are approximations which need to be validated.
The text said that they begin in the age of 15 or 16, so the "duale Ausbildung" system is meant by that, because "Dualstudenten" are usually 17 or 18 when they start. The "Dualstudium" combines the practical "Ausbildung" with an applied science bachelors degree like CS, EE, mechanical engineering and so on, so it double the stress, but you'll also get a lot of work experience, a bachelors degree and an apprenticeship diploma. Also you will get paid.
Otherwise they have everything they would need for a great hub. Smart and well educated students. A great university and cultural scene.