Recent content by Lt_Dax

I'm not at all surprised that String researchers are slowly tranforming what they study into something more involved with cosmology, or as part of AdS/CFT. Even though something can be science even if it is untestable (we may be able to test it in the future), let's be honest - we don't want to...

I admit to a little laughter on my part when you said "what's the big deal with carbon anway". I'm not laughing at you, just with you. I assume you were just having a bad day and that you can't possibly mean that seriously, especially as a biochemistry major of all things (you must have already...

I am English, and I consider myself both English and British - the two identities don't contradict each other, because one is a subset of the other. I can be patriotic for England and Britain without confusion. As for whether England is a "country", it really depends on what you mean. If you...

England and Britain are not synonymous terms. Britain is the officially accepted shorthand for the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. England, as a sovereign state and independent geopolitical entity, did not exist during the events you...

Yes, it's very common to solve a problem in programming without ever figuring out what the problem was! It's happened to me many, many times...

Your code looks good, as far as I can see. I will make one or two suggestions, and then I will post some code which definitely works for getting the transform of a 2-D function. My first suggestion is to try making the plan before filling the 1-D contiguous arrays image_v_spat and MTF_v with...

What are the problems you are having with FFTW? Might I be able to help? FFTW3 is very convenient for multidimensional transforms, and an FFT deals with complex numbers by definition (each discrete value is a sum of complex numbers in polar form, you can separate the real and imaginary parts...

Physicists in the centuries past have often needed to be mathematicians too - Newton didn't have the luxury of being able to select the mathematical tools required to explain the motion of physical objects (observations), so he had to invent calculus. So the Lucasian chair has real meaning to...

Yes I've "ruffled a few feathers" here and there as one fellow put it, which on most occasions is probably a good thing! Nevertheless not all opponents resorted to weak arguments, so I've learned some things too. And yes! Since the thread died down I've made much more progress at work! Such...

@PAllen I know you don't have the time to respond, just wanted to say I found your post very interesting. I'd like to pick up on the above point if I may. It's a plausible sounding view and I totally agree that models are worth studying because we can learn useful mathematical things from them...

What if it takes 5,000 years to develop this TOE? It still wouldn't prevent us from discovering things, but it renders the concept of a TOE somewhat meaningless. Why do people have the feeling that to discover fundamental things about the geometry of space time we need to explain "everything"...

I think we agree more than you might think. You could argue that unification (the way you describe) is the operation of physics as a subject, but it is and always has been a piecewise process, not a one shot approach, and above all, an evidence based approach. That's why we don't even have a...

Einstein thought that a TOE was the logical next step, but he was missing many important pieces of the puzzle (including two forces!). I've always believed it to be extremely strange that we act as though the current situation is different. A person pursuing a TOE is effectively claiming that...

@Pallen This is the kind of thing I've been trying to say all along. When your premise is also your conclusion, it's circular reasoning. @Haelfix You can't just keep repeating that the thread is meaningless to keep yourself satisfied. If it it so meaningless, why participate in it? The fact...

Always follow your dreams, regardless of what other people tell you. And physics in 10 years will probably be fascinating, with less emphasis on this string argument. I remember a popular article a year back detailing some of the extremely smart new proposals for testable theories of quantum...