Recent content by Nugatory

The term “fabric” is used as a metaphor in unserious descriptions of relativity to avoid the math required for a real explanation of the theory. But it is a metaphor, and will be serious misleading if taken too seriously - there is no fabric and hence nothing to “tear”. So your question is...

There is a (possibly apocryphal) account of great consternation when Magellan returned to Spain and his ship’s log was missing a day….

There is not. Nothing stops you from writing down a wave function and a Hamiltonian with spherical symmetry. These might not describe any physically realizable system, but you’ve already excluded those concerns: "I am not asking about experimental feasibility, observers, or measurement...

From the very first post in this thread: “the moment when B has ##|b>_B##” is specifying an event.

The collapsed state is a mixture of ##|+-\rangle## and ##|-+\rangle##; the uncollapsed state is a pure superposition of the two. These are different states that behave differently in experiments designed to expose the difference. What does it mean to “interpret” one as the other?

@Filip Larsen said in a later post that this was decades ago. Depending on how many decades ago (Python is 35 years old) this would have been appreciably more difficult. Four hours for a constant-space solution using K&R C would be pretty good.

We can’t say for these exact images because we don’t know where they came from - they may be real photos or they may be simulation output. But they could be real, there are techniques sensitive enough to detect the impact of a single subatomic particle and amplify it into a visible dot on a...

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You are just cheating yourself out of essential background understanding (which is the really fun part) if you've skipped chapters 1-3. (Edited to add: I said above that I had learned relativity from that book - actually the first edition, which I still prefer. By far the hardest part was...

There’s no “if” here, dark matter is defined to be the stuff we haven’t seen yet that is interacting with the mass we have seen. It differs from ordinary matter only in that we haven’t seen it yet; in particular it has mass and behaves gravitationally just like any other matter. Please please...

Yes, seriously in some philosophies of ethics and less seriously in new-age pseudo-philosophy. However this thinking has proven unhelpful in empirical science - there's no getting around the "but what difference does it make?" question.

No. Your speculative idea neither explains some previously observed but unexplained phenomenon nor suggests some experiment/observation that might demonstrate an otherwise unexplainable result. Thus, as far as empirical science is concerned, there is nothing to explore here.

Very sorry to hear this - he contributed much over the years and will be missed.

Do remember that collapse is not part of the theory of quantum mechanics as described by the math (which is the only real description of the theory). Collapse is an interpretation, a way that we can think about what the math is telling us if we find it helpful. But we don't have to think in...

Your hypothetical “electrop”differs from the positron (the electron’s anti-particle, and not hypothetical) only in that it doesn’t interact with electrons? They would form bound pairs with electrons (like positronium, but stable), these pairs would be neutral, and now we don’t have charge...