Note the late discovery of the noble gasses (why?)
Month: November 2019
Beautiful painting
Automated Education
I think one of the most efficient ways of learning something is displaying a text and then makeing test questions about that text which you repeat.
The most hard thing about this is making appropriate and enough test questions. Can you automate this?
You would need software that understands text and can make comprehensible questions. This is very hard and I believe still can’t be done. However there is a shortcut possibly.
What if you could make an example text and highlight some words. Then the program uses example questions which are reallly common, e.g. ‘what does … mean’ and automatically substitutes the word that you highlighted?
‘Turtles all the way down’
After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, James was accosted by a little old lady.
“Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it’s wrong. I’ve got a better theory,” said the little old lady.
“And what is that, madam?” inquired James politely.
“That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle.”
Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.
“If your theory is correct, madam,” he asked, “what does this turtle stand on?”
“You’re a very clever man, Mr. James, and that’s a very good question,” replied the little old lady, “but I have an answer to it. And it’s this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him.”
“But what does this second turtle stand on?” persisted James patiently.
To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly,
“It’s no use, Mr. James—it’s turtles all the way down.”
Coulomb’s law
How to view the path integral
Dirac noted that the action was an important principle in classical mechanics but did not have any importance quantum mechanics.
How to intubate
Nice article explaining a geometrical derivation of Kepler First law (planets move in ellipses around the sun)
The place where foundations of quantum mechanics were discovered
Helgoland …
How to bruteforce science or even a theory of everything
Step 1: make a database of all physics papers
Step 2: use a certain program to find probability of certain words coming up and which words follow after that word (using for example Markov Chains)
Step 3: let the program churn out papers and read them, see if there randomly pops out a paper that is brilliant and unlocks the key to physics.
A writing place. 