One can hope that the bilateral risk reduction dialogue between the US and Russia, still going on despite all other conflicts, would at least prevent the described Russian confusion over the American launches.
The Schrödinger equation emerges from classical mechanics most closely (well ok that's a bit subjective) from the Hamilton Jacobi frame work, and it was indeed here that Schrödinger saw, in hindsight, because in the beginning he pretty much guessed it, the biggest connection to classical dynamics. This is also related to the optic-mechanical relation that abstracts mechanics to the point it becomes comparable to optics.
Ah, you've given me a thought I'm grateful for. Thanks!
I'm someone who's had a gut feeling about something in some random niche of science for several years. I've spent that time slowly gathering evidence from the literature to validate my hunch. It feels less like a "guess" and more like a high dimensional observation (of a form that's hard to cite or trace origins for) that first needs to be re-grounded in "real research".
Though maybe it DID feel like a guess to Schrödinger...! but if he didn't say it that way, I'd assume it's not quite so accurate a framing :) though it is an entertaining way to communicate it, and I appreciate that it lends a sense of serendipity and happenstance and luck, which is perhaps the most important thing to telegraph about how science happens... to take a swing at the false inevitability and certainty that has its hooks in our histories!
I've spent that time slowly gathering evidence from the literature to validate my hunch.
That is most likely the wrong way to go about this, you should probably look for evidence that your hunch is wrong, that it is in conflict with established physics.
Right, in fact it's very much "a thing" for bored/retired engineers (or otherwise physics-adjacent) to guess a new physics principle and convince themselves that it must be correct without actually doing the boring and difficult work of checking it against existing known-good principles / data and coming up with experiments that prove it to be usefully differentiated. You know, the difficult parts of science.
This is the source of a steady stream of crackpots that regularly pester the physics community. Don't be one of them. If your trajectory doesn't include a bunch of graduate level physics classes, a literature review, and a big math slog, you are at risk. Existing techniques are very powerful and you need to know them well before you know what counts as a genuine addition.
Meh, I wish I'd had taken the physics path. But life happened. Too late to change now. Maybe I can at least make a lot of money by making something useful.
The fact that physical theory has such good coverage of everyday circumstances is really tough news if you want to do physics, but it's excellent news if you want to do engineering :)
It can mean the same thing - when I have a hunch I think of as many ways of shooting it down as possible - but that often involves predicting something starting from the hunch and then testing that prediction against nature/existing literature. I'd still call it "trying to validate this hunch".
It was a guess in a sense, but a very educated guess. Schrödinger didn’t get lucky, he was hard working, talented and very educated in his field. He was already one of the most revered physicist at the time he came up with the Schrödinger equation.
And in the Christmas spirit, he made his big discovery while cheating with his wife on a Christmas retreat in 1925-1926
>A few days before Christmas, 1925, Schrodinger, a Viennese-born professor of physics at the University of Zurich, took off for a two-and-a-half-week vacation at a villa in the Swiss Alpine town of Arosa. Leaving his wife in Zurich, he took along de Broglie's thesis, an old Viennese girlfriend (whose identity remains a mystery) and two pearls. Placing a pearl in each ear to screen out any distracting noise, and the woman in bed for inspiration, Schrodinger set to work on wave mechanics. When he and the mystery lady emerged from the rigors of their holiday on Jan. 9, 1926, the great discovery was firmly in hand.
He was also an admitted pedophile. It is possible that that "mystery girlfriend" he was with while coming up with his revolutionary perspective on quantum physics was an underage girl he was grooming
Sounds like a stretch if she was described as “an old girlfriend” (as in, much time has passed, not that she is old). But she may have been significantly young in their first relationship, who knows?
GP is saying that there are hunches that are not ready for primetime but which are creative thought nonetheless, and which need to be worked with before they can become workable. It's a good thought, echoed by quotes from other designers like Alden Dow, as well as theologians, scientists, and engineers. Not an encouraging way of letting GP know you encountered difficulty in engaging the nonstandard phrasing. GP was trying to discuss the phenomenon without disclosing his or her hypothesis directly.
Do I get this right, you are blaming the women to be immature and irresponsible for...couch surfing at someone's place? I don't think that's sound. People should absolutely be confident that staying at someone's place via couch surfing will not lead to them being raped. Or is this bar too high for men, because boys will be boys? I really don't see the rope's other end.
The problem with the "victim blaming" concept is that it prevents us from giving good advice about how to avoid being a victim. It's clear that women shouldn't stay with male strangers. Men should think carefully about it too.
It's not about blame. If someone drugs and/or rapes someone else, that person is to blame. But it is possible to avoid situations where you're vulnerable.
This is such messed up logic. You can apply it to basically anything.
Taken to the extreme, never get in a car because you can get in a car crash. Never go on a plane because it can crash. Don't send your kids to school because they might get shot.
Many people used the couch surfing website and did not get raped (the vast majority). Many people have been raped in ways completely unrelated to couch surfing.
Comparing "riding in a car" and "flying in a plane" to a "young woman staying with a male stranger she met on the internet" is bizarre. The risk involved in the latter example is way higher than the risks involved in the former two.
Also I'm not arguing for avoidance of all risk. If people want to do risky things, fine. Heroin, BASE jumping, staying overnight at a stranger's house -- have at it. What I'm objecting to is the idea that there's something wrong with giving people advice about the potential danger in certain situations. There isn't!
There must be cultural factors that influence one person’s ability to conceptualize the likelihood of becoming victimized in a given situation and another’s inability.
The line you’re drawing is arbitrary. It is clear to all that getting drunk, ever, lowers your security. You can couchsurf five hundred times and have nothing like this happen. You can get drunk at strange bars day in and day out and have nothing like this happen. You can be walking from a bus stop to your cheap motel a bit too tired or take a jog too early in the morning and be victimized in much the same way.
We can ensure our safety, or we can live our lives and experience the world. Perspectives that jump instantly to what a victim could have done better to improve their safety are reasonable, especially when discussing prevention, but you might learn something about the very common angle of these perspectives if you consider other situations re: personal security where you don’t immediately ump to what the victim could have done.
My observation is you get a LOT more of the “oh you silly thing, how could you have not known this would happen to you?” When dealing with female victims of sex crimes.
Global warming is not a matter of belief, but of trust in the scientific community. What you may be criticising is how some media report on the climate catastrophe, which itself has been scientifically studied since the 1970s and has been concluded to be caused by humans as much as scientists can agree on anything. Whether people "believe" in global warming is only relevant in terms of policy, just like it took some time in the late 19th century for people to accept that some illnesses are caused by bacteria and implement policy accordingly. Understanding the mechanisms of a threat is the first of many steps, but the threat itself doesn't care about whether you believe in it.
There is a difference between accepting bacteria which is something that is happening at the present to accepting predictions about the future of the climate and the state of the world which is something that might happen in the future. Predicting the future is always harder, especially when trying to predict complicated systems like climate, so there is here an element of believing.
Bacteria cannot be seen with the naked eye so for almost anyone, and especially at the time there is a huge element of 'believing' for bacteria as well. So today we can buy our own microscopes, and maybe you have but certainly back at the time when policies on health were changed in response to science on bacteria, it wasn't because every single person who implemented them had a microscope or the appropriate training - they had to trust some other people who had done the background work - much as today. The biggest problem I see with the same trust applied to the work done on climate change is the human lifetime. Antibiotics, for example can have a positive effect in a timescale appreciated by everyone but changes to policy that can help climate change take place over many years and are much harder to visualize or associate cause and effect.
That's a good point regarding scientific claims about the future, thanks. You are right that the future of a complex system is impossible to predict precisely, and maybe that's often misleadingly communicated.
I think in terms of negative consequences, though, the effects of anthropogenic climate change are already here in the present. Although it is scientifically debated to what extent one can attribute single weather extremes to co2 emissions, it's not really disputed that today's climate, which is already severely impacting humans negatively, is due to past human emissions.
Basically: it's already happening right now, and to identify the mechanisms responsible for the present climate does not require belief that goes beyond other scientific insights that are otherwise widely accepted.
Is there a specific example that you could cite about weather extremes?
Most of these claims I've seen are either wrong or fail to take into account several obvious factors.
For instance, claims of rising property damage amounts or lives lost fail to account for the amount of property that has accumulated in these locations or the population explosions in these places.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand correctly. Do you mean a) examples for increasing frequency of weather extremes? Or b) present day damages attributed to climate change (which can only be attributed in probability: this heat wave is X times more likely thanks to human emissions..)
If it's a), examples are that the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the past 13 years; also increasing are the volatility of rainfall, the likelihood, duration, and intensity of heat waves, the arctic temperature, the temperature in the tundra, the acidity in the oceans, etc..
If it's b) you can look at area of bush and forest fires, duration of droughts, areas of flooding, desertification etc. which are all increasing, and which cause tangible damage.
Of course you have a good point; it's nontrivial to "distribute" the damage of, say, the flood in Pakistan last year, into: climate change, bad urban planning, high population density, bad political response etc. But the bottom line is: the climate is changing quicker than we are adapting to it. The fact that many factors come together, and that it's complicated, doesn't mean that this isn't a factor.
I think one of the main misconceptions is that the discussion is too centred on average global temperature, or average rainfall. It's the increasing frequency of wild fluctuations (droughts, floods, heat waves) that creates the challenges.
If you like I can dig out references etc., I just wasn't sure what kind of specific examples you were looking for.
How is trust in the scientific community not belief? If you aren't checking their claims directly, then it's just that you believe them and others don't.
BTW it's not really trust in the scientific community. There are lots of scientists calling foul on this kind of story. What happens is, we get told they're the wrong kind of scientists, or "fringe" or whatever. It's social signalling all the way down and the message is Follow The Science.
Note the response - yes they may be nuclear physicists or hydrologists but they can't possibly comment on climate, they're the wrong sort of scientists. Also they even say they have a good understanding of science and then define science as "what 99% of experts believe" which is just hilariously medieval.
These are just examples. I can't be bothered trying to draw up huge lists. Other people have done that, it doesn't matter, the crisis true believers just use a circular definition of expert in which if you disagree the world is doomed you can't be an expert, therefore, are not worth listening to.
It's more like how you have to be careful with psychotherapists because they may try to sell you therapy you don't really need, and maybe your mate who's a surgeon points that out to you.
But thanks for illustrating my point so perfectly. All the people who think they're most rational on this topic are actually the least rational. Relying purely on mental shortcuts and social cues works right up until someone figures out how they can game you for profit, which is what's happening here (cry crisis = funding, grants, status, fame).
Yeah, but you would probably listen to a Neurologist about your lack of a foot problem if 99 out of 100 podiatrists told you 20 years ago that your perfectly healthy foot would fall off in 10 years if you didn't stop driving your car or you didn't pay them the money every day for the rest of your life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Risk_Reduction_Center
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Nuclear_Risk_Reductio...
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