Recent content by inflector

You can do the same thing with a plastic comb you run through your hair or a balloon your rub on your head.

I've always interpreted Rovelli's hedging as him being fairly conservative in his claims, not that he didn't necessarily expect more over time. What marcus said rings true: So I'm encouraged by approaches that move in this direction.

Seems like in the Smolin world, matter could come from repeating causal loops where the energy of the causation is stored in the loop. By loop here, I mean loop in the algorithmic sense not in the geometric circle sense. More like the repeating oscillators in cellular automata like Conway's Game...

A year or so back, I had a couple-hour discussion on physics ideas with David McConville, chairman of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and one of the principals of elluminati who produces spherical projection systems for museums among other things. One of the more interesting aspects of the...

I've spent much of the last couple of years working with web programmers and teaching web programming. Almost everyone I know uses Sublime Text for both HTML and related web languages (like javascript, Python, and Ruby). It's available on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. You can try it out for free...

Check out his paper with Ashvin Vishwanath of the same title from January: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.3736 'Gauging' time reversal symmetry in tensor network states Xie Chen, Ashvin Vishwanath Abstract: It is well know that unitary symmetries can be `gauged', i.e. defined to act in a local...

Can't quite follow all of that yet, but I'm quite pleased with the ways that pentachorons are showing up in many places of late. They first appeared, at least in my purview, in CDT quite a few years back and seem to be used much more in the new exciting progress of the last couple years. I...

To date, my most significant contribution to physics and math is probably sending John the invite to Google Plus, and then hounding him a bit to get him to go there. Not much I realize, but hey, it's a start.

Very interesting new developments gentleman. I can't but wonder if this doesn't tie into Jim Gates's work given the interesting four-node connections in the network diagrams he pulls out of the equations of Supersymmetric String Theory, he calls them Adinkras, the Peacock in particular shows...

Any comments on the recent N. P. Pitjev and E. V. Pitjeva paper: Constraints on Dark Matter in the Solar System arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.5534 MIT Technology Review article...

skydivephil asked: and Marcus responded: Barbour's view of time has been one of my core interests for the last three or four years. My take is that as Marcus surmises, this is indeed a semantic difference rather than an underlying conflict in meaning. Barbour says that time—as this...

Very interesting and promising direction. As an outsider coming to physics as an accomplished adult about six years ago, I found the baseline assumption of many physicists that quantum reality is fundamental and therefore that causality is an emergent phenomenon to be misguided, at best. After...

Did anyone read Lee Smolin's response to the Edge.org question: "What are you worried about?" http://edge.org/response-detail/23778 Opening paragraph:

Yes, I concur.

Without periodicity, one would not make the argument that something consistent is passing. Without periodicity, there is nothing against which to measure the passage of time. No clock ticks means no clock. In Newton's world, time was thought to be continuous and unchanging because of the...