Recent content by Nugatory

It is not impossible that more years (decades?) of AI development will lead to conscious physical systems In which the underlying physics is well understood. We may be perplexed by the emergent behavior of a system of, say, ##10^{15}## transistors, but we would not doubt that we understand the...

If it is at rest in the center of mass frame and we have arranged for a fully inelastic collision to happen inside it?

This is tricky even without introducing the complexities of an evaporating black hole. "Crosses the horizon at a finite proper time ##\tau_1##" doesn't make sense unless and until we specify the point on the infaller's worldline where the proper time has been arbitrarily considered to be zero...

This is a false dichotomy. For purposes of constructive discussion of special relativity, forty or so hours with Taylor and Wheeler’s “Spacetime Physics” will suffice, and that’s a few months of hobby/spare time not the years that you’re talking about. Taylor and Wheeler first edition is free...

The equivalence principle says that sitting in a box at rest on the surface of a gravitating body (for example, in a closed room on the surface of the rest) is indistinguishable from sitting in a box that is being accelerated in empty space - Google for "Einstein's elevator" for more. And of...

When @geordief wrote that he was still under the misunderstanding that “I think parallel transport relies on these tangent planes [that is, planes in the 3D space]” from the original post.

Does that force us to deal with clock synchronization? Start with a source of light signals and a mirror, move the mirror around until the reflected signal is back at the source in 2/299792458 seconds and we have a one-clock standard meter. I’m thinking that we need clock synchronization for a...

They aren't "on" the sphere anywhere. There is a mapping from each point on the surface of the sphere to a two-dimensional vector space specific to that point, which we call the "tangent space" at that point. But the elements of that vector space are neither vectors in the embedding...

The tangent space at a point is not a plane in the 3D embedding space (although that is a natural way of visualizing it, continuing our general tendency to think of the 2D surface of a sphere as embedded in the 3D euclidean space containing the sphere) and can be defined without reference to...

You have been victimized by pop-sci misdescriptions. The entire notion of “wave-particle duality” was abandoned as a false start almost a century ago and is not part of the modern understanding of quantum mechanics. There’s no substitute for a real textbook with its non-trivial mathematical...

You might want to, as it makes it possible to prove that a message came from you. Say you want to make a public proclamation that is unquestionably from you instead of an imposter…. You would encrypt it using your private key, then release that to the world. As long as your public key is...

You are starting from the premise that there is such a thing as a "multiverse". Maybe there is, maybe there isn't, but nothing in our current understanding of physics would be affected either way. Thus, speculation about the possibility is out of scope for this forum. You may be confusing...

thank you, yes.

By proposing a further explanation. Until this happens there is no explanation, just as a book does not exist until someone writes it.

You have not thought through the implications of the question in post #16 of your other thread. Say that we set this random number generator to work. How will observing its output permit us to distinguish between “probability zero” and “probability very small but not zero”?