Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

– that guy

You need to forget about the details in order to grasp the essence.

OK, but where are they when the LK99 first came onto scene?

Scale of velocity as well so we have a more complete picture in phase space

The referees who let this slip are either brilliant or lazy (or both, I guess)

Well, even the picture is in the picture…

Now let’s see which youtube “science channels” do a debunk on their own content pushed out a mere month ago.

Resubmitting to multiple journals is not a typical (nor the “right” one however it is interpreted) strategy though (at least not in physical sciences). You’ll usually ping the handling editor, who will then contact the referee on your behalf. The referee will then either “promise a report soon”, or, in the event they didn’t reply, the editor will find another referee. Nowadays with arxiv and such, there is usually no rush to actual publication as far as priority is concerned.

I’d also say, don’t take the combative mindset as suggested in the comic. Think of it more as having some fresh pairs of eyes to check your work as well as communication (if a referee misunderstood something in your paper, chances are many readers will as well).

One idea that captures my imagination is the concept of cyclic inflation – a framework that combines cosmic inflation with the notion of cyclic collapse and expansion, or bounces.

This captivating idea, conceived by former postdoctoral researcher Dr Tirthabir Biswas and myself, suggests that the Universe undergoes infinite cycles of collapse and expansion.

Here’s a link to the good professor’s paper for those interested. As others have already pointed out, cyclic universe as an idea is not new – the paper itself cited refs 11-19 as prior art, the oldest of which dated back to 1931.

The claim the good professor is trying to make is somewhat subtle for any lay person skimming through the article: the novelty of their idea is not cyclicity itself, but rather to combine cyclicity and inflation. To be honest, as a lay person I would have thought a cycle would consist of an inflationary period and a deflationary period, so forgive me for not seeing the point! The following technical statement from the paper perhaps makes more sense:

Thus although cyclic and inflationary models are not mutually exclusive, it is natural to try to attempt to replace inflation altogether with “cyclicity”. In this paper, however, we take a slightly different approach, by exploring whether by embedding inflation in a cyclic universe setting, some of it’s problems viz. (i-iv) can be alleviated. Our main idea is to merge inflation with cyclic cosmology where the universe undergoes an infinite number of cycles before bouncing into a final power-law inflationary phase.

I think the better way to say this is that not only do you get inflation (and deflation) for free within each cycle, but the sequence of cycles is itself inflating – a larger scale inflation modulated by a smaller scale periodic function if you will.

The question now is, of course, is there a “first cycle”, and what happened before it. Why stop there and not have some meta-cycles? That would bring the whole business to a full circle.

The point is there are established conventions among the practitioners on how these are pronounced, and not getting them right says something about the youtuber who may otherwise appear as an expert.

You might be right on how the name ‘Schrieffer’ should be pronounced in its original tongue, but I’ve heard multiple former students and colleagues of Bob Schrieffer pronounce it otherwise to conclude that theirs is probably how Schrieffer himself intended his name to be pronounced.

Yeah, can’t wait to hear economists’ take, or The Economist’s…

Hi Joe Brian

It is waiting for reproducibility is what it is. It won’t matter much if it got published today in some no name journal – a journal is going to gamble just as this youtuber did, for the slim chance of this being true (not saying it isn’t)

Also, a quantum well is just particle in a box. Nothing fancy about it. Guy mentioned tunneling a lot but tunneling happens in metal, semiconductor, and insulator. Doesn’t really mean anything. In fact if you need to tunnel, that means there’s a chance to back scatter, so it won’t be superconducting.

Not to be snobbish or anything, but at this juncture I wouldn’t trust anyone who can’t pronounce arXiv (or Schrieffer for that matter) correctly to explain room temperature superconductivity to me. Hell I barely believe anyone with a materials/physics degree…

Just espresso? Conflict of interest!

/s just in case

Thanks, I think we are actually in agreement here: if you account for the fact that \gamma > 1 in general, then your calculation showed that T' = \gamma T > T, that is, the moving observer in general registers a longer duration T' between the two events than the clock at rest (T). I was just taking a shortcut when I said this should follow from X' != 0 (the -\gamma v T in your calculation).

Also, thanks for the imagery of aliens taking earth for a joy ride. This might be how we are saved when the sun dies.

Edit: I think we agree on both accounts as the twin paradox is also the only way I can rationalize the original claim (even said so in my first reply)

Hey, you seem to have a better understanding of the stuff, so perhaps you could point me in the right direction? Here’s my confusion: Let’s say at the inception of the earth, a clock started ticking (event 1), and let’s count earth’s age as up to the moment I made the post right next to that same clock (event 2). By special relativity (so obviously ignoring gravity etc), the interval between the two events is s^2 = t^2 - x^2 where t is the time elapsed on the clock, and x = 0 is the distance traveled by the clock in its own frame (earth’s frame), which is zero. For an observer moving at a constant speed relative to earth, the clock has moved, so x' != 0 (using ' for the moving frame), but the interval s is the same in both frames, so the time elapsed in the moving observer’s frame, between the same two events, must be greater than on the earth clock, t'^2 = s^2 + x'^2 > s^2 = t^2. In other words earth appears older (as measured by the relative time between the said two events) to the moving observer than to someone living on earth. This is where my comment about “two points in time” come from: without the spatial information, I wouldn’t be able to compare different relative times and pick its maximum.

I’m obviously not an astrophysicist and not familiar with the “well understood facts by astrophysicists” of maximum relative time/space. I suspect from your comment that my interpretation of “relative time” is wrong, but if you could point me to some accessible references, that would be very much appreciated!

I’m not an astrophysicist nor a relativity theorist, but this makes absolutely no sense… The article writes,

When we say that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, technically we mean 4.5 billion years is the maximum amount of relative time any thing could have experienced since the Earth was formed.

If by “Earth is 4.5 billion years old” it means the time lapse as experienced on earth – in other words, as measured by a clock on earth, then the clock is in the rest frame and therefore measures the shortest possible time duration among all clocks in other (moving) inertial frames, not “the maximum amount of relative time” (special relativity). I think the author is confusing this with the twin paradox where the traveling twin ages slower. The talk of

There is a maximum amount of relative time that can be experienced between any two points in time (no time dilation). There is a maximum relative distance between any two points in space (no length contraction)

is also troublesome – what is even “two points in time (no time dilation)”? One should instead be talking about two events and their space-time coordinates

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CS7j5I6aOc

Off topic, but I must admit I clicked the thumbnail thinking it’s the right half of a split ergo keyboard 😅

Technically technical

This was the 2020 material science Ig Nobel winner. Personally I think their control for the annealing process is flawed but somewhat understandable given the difficulty in securing the amount of material necessary for a more refined experiment. For reference, here are all the papers citing this work: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cites=17315240754674471683

How else can you generate a micro blackhole for space jump???