usenet weirdness

You "carry" an electron beam? Did you put it in a stroller on a nice day?

Electrons follow the path of least resistance to the WTC.

Nothing is more than you know, cuz everything you think you know is wrong.

Wooohoooo!!! Honey, put on yer party dress.

Have you tried asking nicely for a refund?

Yet you had to comment on it at length.

My women don't want to hear about muons.

Is that what you tried to talk to girls about? Are you still an incel?

Ok... you first posted here in 1996 and then your post was published 24 years EARLIER. Did they teach you some time travel at TU? Or just the part about how to shamelessly spin whoppers?

Re "The Atlas of Independence", for example.

I love M(u)onbeams, so romantic !

Not that I know of. Best known is loop quantum gravity. His invention of 'cosmic natural selection' in combination with anthropic principles is a complete disaster. (if you ask me) It is tantamount to an admission of defeat.

Smolin is part of the general failure of string theory and quantum gravity to produce anything worthwhile.

The field certainly needs popularising. And to be fair, Smolin was one of the first to emphasize that his field, which he identifies with 'physics, is in a deep crisis. (it still is, btw)

I think Einstein generally was a kind man. He disliked severly criticising people in public. Worst example perhaps: Velikovsky. It is known that Einstein told V. in private that all of his ideas of cavorting planets was bunk. (and that it detracted from the rest of his work) E. kept silent when V. published his 'Worlds in Collision' nevertheless.

I hadn't encountered his writings.

About 'relativistic mass' and Feynman, in your ref.: I think Feynman's treatment of relativity in his 'Lectures' is poor indeed, the worst part of the series. Feynman was too easy on himself there. (he should have paid more attention to Wheeler)

Jan

More kindly inclined people may call it 'pure science'.

Scientists will be opportunists. They will do what can be done.

See above.

We seem to have acquired an adequate feel for each other, in the meantime. No need for further problems.

Minor league professors tend to have minor league students, who may become in their turn minor league professors. So it goes, in this, the best of all possible worlds.

Conversely, great names tend to have connections with other great names. Books have been written about it, like on 'heritability' of Nobel prizes. There is a nature versus nurture problem here. One may speculate that the better students tend to move out to more promising places, or that great professors may bring out the best in their students.

I see. Pentair-Haffmans these days,

Jan

In that case she may also have met him occasionally at meetings of the KNAW, [1]

Jan

Plato, and most mathematicianswith him, will disagree very much with you.

And all of physics of course. Fred Hoyle, in his Andromeda books, also makes use of the same point, when elaborating on communicating with another intelligence. (like them knowing about the hydrogen spectrum)

What has human language got to do with it?

Jan

That is quite arguable. Much of mathematics wouldn't exist without (what was once) new input from physics. Many a luminary, Von Neumann for example, has said that mathematics will go stale without regular fresh input from the natural sciences, bringing new needs.

Why discredit him by calling him 'a mathematical physicist'? He was a theoretical physicist,

Jan

Steel beams differ from electron beams. You could point an electron beam at ground rod, and the electrons would vanish into the rod, but they wouldn't come out the other side looking anything like a beam.

Conspiracy theory fans follow the path of least cognition to the conclusion they want.

A sweeping judgement, which does happen to be wrong.

They don't even refund money to people to people who don't finish their courses - which is to say to people whom they shouldn't have accepted as students. I came out with an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. and they'd probably claim that I'd got value for money.

Never miss a chance to show up the twit you are responding to.

They'd need to be functionally illiterate to put up with you.

My wife would have found that an odd question.

Phil Hobbs found a cite of my 1972 comment in Volume 6 of "Experimental Physics". It was about photomultiplier non-linearity, which doesn't come up here often. Your reading skills aren't great. A post here is a different thing from a comment published in a peer-reviewed journal. Admittedly you don't seem to know enough about peer-reviewed journals to be aware of that - confirming your status as a very dim newbie.

We left the Netherlands in 2011. We came back pretty much every year until 2020 when Covid-19 put a stop to international travel, but she didn't spend her time in the Netherlands going to KNAW meetings.

Students vary a lot. The nuture problem is about putting the good ones where they will do well, and some great names were good at doing that

I've seen a bit of that.

They tend to send them on to places where their particular skills will be appreciated, and to get students and post-docs from acquaintances who think that particular students would do well with them.

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but a bad supervisor can wreck a pontential silk purse.

So LinkedIn tells me, quite often.

Why the anxiety about mRNA vaccines? At least you know exactly what you are getting. You can't be as confident about the effect on you because we've all got about a million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (out of our three billion nucleotides). Enough people have had their DNA sequenced that we can hope that we will eventually learn about the interaction between particular vaccines and particular genomes, but that's going to be a long way off.

Chemistry is about the electrons. Changing the neutron count has pretty much zero effect on the chemistry.

Rubbish.

Who cares? And why would they?

If you need a new word, invent it. You may have trouble defining it, but if you felt the need for the new word you should be able to explain why. It's considerably safer than trying to attach an old word to new concept.

The recent AI slop attempting to simulate Feynman is garbage, since not only was he not that pretty, also he was always rather laconic, that it reminds me of the AI slop garbage about neo-Stoicism, which doesn't reflect the ideals and is shamelessly self-centered.

I.e., it's what Feynman didn't say what usually made him less than insufferable.

Yeah, that AI slop garbage will always be rejected.

Why should there be only one theory? There are lots of natural languages, and lots of different words for roughly the same ideas.

Translation between languages is usually pretty straightforward, but there are exceptions.

Logical positivism is a waste of time.

Science is about observations, and you need language to describe your observations. So far nobody has found any language that works notably better than any other.

The people that thought that chemical atoms were indivisible got a nasty shock when nuclear fission showed up.

The hypothesis that the relations are mathematical is circular.

Physicists use mathematics to express the relationships they could observe. Mathematics is largely a way of talking about relationships in the most abstract way we can manage. It's a language,and we may be able to invent a better one.

Mathematicians, having invented a language, want to claim that it is the only possible way of talking about abstract relationships. It's the only one we have got, which isn't quite the same thing.

If you haven't got anything to say, don't say anything.

Not that it's so relevant to matters of great theory, yet besides that the mRNA operation is not only like a terrible infection yet also like a junk machine about inflammation and also incredibly cheap and depending on hijacking the body's RNA replication mechanisms, there's also that wild-type Coronaviridae are part of the body's viriome and part of messaging and signaling in the body.

Also there's that mRNA is more authentically messenger RNA, it should also be mu-RNA or miRNA I suppose it is, since mRNA and tRNA and so on were already used. So, I'm simply against it since it's dirt cheap and subverts natural mechanisms, then that ideas like traditional vaccines with more expensive yet live-type results are having a much longer run of testing.

The other vaccines in development like the original Oxford vaccine were much more involved and intended to treat originally other diseases like those of the T-viridae. Then TMV post-nasal delivered epitopes and Omicron crowded it out, it being the successive waves of the contents of SARS capsid payloads.

Since at least twenty years ago one there's a laboratory where one can simply order DNA, or RNA, assembled to sequence, then there are virus research labs who make their own. It's not rocket science, though, it is virus science.

Don't confuse "miRNA rejection" with "vaccine intolerance".

Yeah, "infinity" is a natural part of the lexicon since soon after socialization and matters of indefinite comparison.

Infinity-many, ....

Invoking artificial intelligence to generate your word salad for you is taking time wasting to absurd lengths. Silence is definitely golden when you don't have anything useful to say.