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Brian Skinner
16.3K posts
Brian Skinner
@gravity_levity
"All who have passed the age of 30 are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance" -George Orwell
Katılım Eylül 2009
421 Takip Edilen11.7K Takipçiler
First trip to Los Alamos in a while
"Your z-number is really low!"
(Me slightly offended thinking it is like h-index)
Apparently LANL assigns persistent badge numbers in numerical order...
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Don't take this the wrong way, but I most definitely don't want to know how to train my dragon.
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@Thinkwert Glad to find a fellow non-enjoyer of Moonrise Kingdom.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is in a league of its own in my opinion.
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@LauraDeming There's lots of great ongoing work on this question! I'm happy to answer questions about it to the extent that I can, if you have any.
x.com/gravity_levity…
Brian Skinner@gravity_levity
There is lots of great ongoing work in physics on exactly this question: when does the ergodic hypothesis (e.g., entropy maximization) hold and when does it not? In other words, when does thermodynamics work and when does it not?
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I don't...buy the ergodic hypothesis in stat mech. Any recs for how to get comfortable (even empirical?)
Seems just obviously not something that follows from first principles - unless it's like every system is noisy and that's why? But aren't there attractor trajectories that would kinda violate it?
Stat mech would be so much easier if I believed in statistics, lol
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Here is a talk by me on one variant of this question.
It turns out that if you subject a collection of particles to random dynamics, but you force them to conserve their center of mass, then they will only obey ergodicity if their density is high enough
youtube.com/watch?v=aF28Qf…
YouTube
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There is lots of great ongoing work in physics on exactly this question: when does the ergodic hypothesis (e.g., entropy maximization) hold and when does it not? In other words, when does thermodynamics work and when does it not?
Laura 🌲 ⛰️@LauraDeming
I don't...buy the ergodic hypothesis in stat mech. Any recs for how to get comfortable (even empirical?) Seems just obviously not something that follows from first principles - unless it's like every system is noisy and that's why? But aren't there attractor trajectories that would kinda violate it? Stat mech would be so much easier if I believed in statistics, lol
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Brian Skinner retweetledi
Harvard. PEPFAR. LIGO. Basic science. And dozens of other crown jewels of not just the US, but of humanity. And one extremely corrupt man and his cronies and enablers are attempting to partly or totally destroy them
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@michael_nielsen One of my favorites, which for some reason consistently surprises people, is that Mormonism has no hell (in the sense of a permanent resting place). The lowest level of afterlife is still incomparably wonderful compared to mortal life.
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@michael_nielsen Some things that Mormons believe, which strike me as "singular" if not surprising:
- God is not omnipotent. He has a physical body and a wife
- It is not possible to sin before age 8
- The Garden of Eden was in Missouri (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam-ondi…)
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What are the most surprising religious beliefs you know of?
Feel free to interpret "religious" very broadly. For instance, for purposes of this question, I'm happy enough to consider the hypothesis of a machine-driven Singularity transforming life on earth as religious, though by some interpretations of "religious" this would not be religious. (Not interested in arguing definitions here.) But other people do regard it as religious, insofar as it will affect birth, death, and almost every aspect of life and relationship to the universe
Another surprising one, albeit very commonplace: the genuine Catholic belief in transubstantiation, the belief that bread and wine genuinely becomes to body and blood of Jesus Christ during the Eucharist
Other suggestions? I'm especially interested in very striking beliefs that I'm unlikely to have heard of. I'm very uninterested in people using this to debate or pour scorn on others for their beliefs - just trying to get some increased sense of the varieties of remarkable ways in which people relate to existence.
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Brian Skinner retweetledi
Watching electronic ice melt | Science
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
I’m delighted to share a perspective I co-authored with Brian Skinner (@gravity_levity), highlighting an exciting new experiment that captures quantum melting in a disordered 2D Wigner solid.
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@Chris_arnade in what sense is this irrational? I think even the Rationalists (well, most of them) would easily concede that this is a net positive action
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It's amazing how fulfilling it feels to do something like this, despite how "irrational" it is -- which is a reminder we are not meant to be fully rational beings.
Pablo Iglesias Maurer@MLSist
Thought I might share a life story from a few months ago to brighten your day. Back in March, I spotted a raccoon on the side of the interstate that had very clearly been run over. I pulled over thinking I’d have to put it out of its misery. We ended up becoming good friends.
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@alexeyguzey lol I hate to break it to you, but what this really says is that you have the literary tastes of a 19 year old
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@gregeganSF @SBSOnDemand I've been trying hard to find this in the US!
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I enjoyed the Pakistani animation “The Glassworker” (on @SBSOnDemand in Australia). The visuals are stunning, and it’s such an undisguised homage to Miyazaki that it seems wrong-headed to decry it as derivative. Unsure what to make of the ending, but definitely worth watching.
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Brian Skinner retweetledi
"Gut Biomes win championships" - Nico Harrison
Jovan Buha@jovanbuha
JJ Redick said that Luka Doncic hasn’t been feeling well for 24 hours. He doesn’t think Doncic slept much last night. He was throwing up all afternoon going into the game. And Redick isn’t sure what caused the halftime delay to cause him not to start the second half.
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@alexeyguzey the buried lede is that every single one is a sequel
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pretty crazy--every single highest-grossing film of 2024 is a kids movie.
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@ctrlcreep Heaven and Hell have similar energy density, but in Hell the energy is dissipated as heat while in Heaven it is efficiently directed into work toward the Divine Purpose
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It's not right that Hell is depicted as a higher energy state. Heaven should be hotter than Hell. A greater brilliance, a more extractive engine
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@ArindamPhysics Turns out that the "Feynman only published 37 papers" factoid is not really true (see this tweet and following thread)
x.com/michael_nielse…
Michael Nielsen@michael_nielsen
@gravity_levity It's not really true, except for very narrow meaning of publications: scholar.google.com/citations?user…
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Question is whether he would have even got tenured today...
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@ArindamPhysics I learned during the process of job interviewing, when the work I presented in my job talk was accused of being "trivial", that "topologically trivial" has become conflated with "intellectually trivial"
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Attended a quantum material workshop last week. I concluded that we can now safely rename 'condensed matter physics' as 'topological matter physics'. No one is doing anything else. Topology is taking over the world.
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Brian Skinner retweetledi
We’re celebrating #IYQ2025 with monthly #quantum science collections. March’s edition explores measurement-induced quantum phase transitions — where measurement competes with internal evolution, triggering a phase transition in entanglement structure.
🔗 go.aps.org/4iCyRPU
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Brian Skinner retweetledi
@InnaVishik The utility of photovoltaics seems possible precisely because the science is so boring: it's the same p-n junction that we've had since the 1940s.
The more interesting the science, the more skeptical one must be of claims of utility.
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