Recent content by pellis

I now use it even more than Wikipedia, and to be completey honest, and accepting its faults (very poor graphics, occasional freezing,, occasional loss of material, poor transfer of math formatting into Word...) nevertheless it makes a very useful tutor - unlike Wikipedia or Google searches, one...

@renormalize @sbrothy @TensorCalculus In order to find those references, aside from my own files I could have found them in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory_of_Everything, and you likely wouldn't have objected. Does the fact that I used the newly released ChatGPT5.0...

Organic chemistry is only a focus as it is the gap in my studies that limits my understanding of the bigger issues relating to the origin of life, but I think it's just as subject to the same points as the ones my summary covers. I only mentioned gravity as I'd mentioned the em field, but in...

@Muu9 Agree about electronegativity. As for energy minimisation, Peter W Atkins (well known text writer at Oxford U) reckons all energy is PE or KE, with one exception - if I remember correctly, he can't decide how to consider photons... But energy minimisation is central to quantum chemistry...

@Mayhem @TensorCalculus @DaveE @berkeman @Borek @mjc123 @sbrothy @erobz @renormalize To try to bring this discussion back on course, just briefly, I would appreciate any comments on what you think my answer (#36, Tuesday 3:07pm) omits or gets wrong. I take mentions of a few points, especially...

AGAINST: Distler & Garibaldi (2009, peer-reviewed), SABINE HOSSENFELDER https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/11/theoretically-simple-exception-of.html ATTEMPTS TO ENGAGE: “The Plebanski action extended to a unification of gravity and Yang–Mills theory” by Lee Smolin (Physical Review D, 2007)...

@sbrothy Thanks for the reminder - I was intrigued by the idea of E8 at the time but didn't follow it up till now. Recent online evaluation, in summary (GPT): "Lisi’s proposal attracted media attention as a refreshing departure from mainstream approaches—but the physics community judged it...

Unless you're a natural mathematician, which I am not, it takes a lot of study to get to the point of being able to make some sense of these topics, and I'm still learning - its the buzz of that moment when it finally clicks that makes it all worthwhile :smile:

@TensorCalculus As the name implies, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chemistry is the application of quantum physics to chemical systems/problems. In my day that often boiled down to using large computer programs to solve, by energy minimisation, approximations to Schrodinger's equation...

Sounds like poor lecturer/tutor support.

With thanks to all contributors so far, here is my own answer to the question, with an explanation after it, for anyone interested in how I reached it. Even though I would now make some small changes as I can see that it's not quite as clear as it seemed to me at first, I've left it as I first...

@sbrothy @TensorCalculus Take a look at quantum chemistry, then - it's nothing but equations: from calculus and Lie algebra to group theory and beyond, eventually realised as computer programs - mainly FORTRAN, C AND C++ - and of interest to TensorCalculus - Python,: so you might consider...

Sure - interesting way to put it. Yep - precisely! At the research frontier some of the rules are still developing. At some points - like Pauli working out the exclusion principle - it's an interplay between physics, maths and chemistry - which really are almost arbitrary classifications at...

@Mayhem Yes - good point about becoming "indistinguishable from physicists..."

@berkeman Thank you for your advice. As you may appreciate, I was aiming to avoid long rambling accounts that might be thorough ["TL;DR"] but less likely to convey a sharp focus. But at this point I will be pleased to see any more contributions. Incidentally, the nearest I got to being...