Timeroot's comments

Timeroot | 2 years ago | on: New theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics

It's of no relevance to MOND, at least none that I can see.

MOND gives a different scaling relation, and is therefore contradicting general relativity. Its goal is to explain the effects we associate with dark matter, without the need for dark matter.

General relativity is (we are pretty sure) inconsistent with quantum field theory. String theory tries to fix the issue by replacing the particles in field theory with strings. Oppenheim is trying to fix it by putting general relativity as a classical phenomenon that lives "outside" of quantum field theory.

They're trying to solve different problems. And, Oppenheim's classical gravity picture could be used just as well with MOND instead of standard general relativity, if that's what you wanted.

MOND is getting less popular every year as evidence for dark matter piles up. The Bullet Cluster is a particular instance where we can actually "see" the dark matter flying around, in a way MOND couldn't hope to explain. LIGO has also given us a lot of confidence we have the right theory of gravity, at least up to the quantum scale.

Timeroot | 2 years ago | on: New theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics

(I went to a talk by Oppenheim author a couple weeks ago on this topic.) The idea is that gravity, as a force, only operates classically. More precisely: there is a classical state describing the curvature of space time, and then a quantum state describing the configuration of particles on that spacetime. But then, that quantum state needs to affect the classical state again (mass bends space), which would usually lead to the classical half becoming quantum and entangled with the other half.

You can keep the classical half (the shape of spacetime) classical, if the effect of the quantum part is partially stochastic. There's a minimum amount of random noise you need for it to be mathematically consistent. So, you set up an experiment where a particle is acting on another via gravity. There's a quantity of noise you should expect to see in the gravitational force.

"Inertial Mass=Gravitational Mass" now only holds on average. The gravitational mass will effectively have a Brownian noise term added in.

Timeroot | 11 years ago | on: How not to attract women to coding: Make tech pink

As a possible countereffect -- not one I necessarily believe to be stronger, but one to consider -- is that women might be weaker due to the culture they're coming from. Plenty of males have been encouraged to play with computers from the age of 8 or 10, and so will have large amounts of [at least some kind of] experience coming in to the workforce. Women are far less likely to have had this experience. Additionally, males (who will have more male friends) will quite possibly have plenty of coder friends whom they have learned from. Females statistically will have less, and have less exposure this way.

i.e. the culture not only makes it harder for women to get through learning compsci, but they'll also have less exposure to it in the process. This could potentially make them weaker candidates.

I don't know to what degree that actually happens.

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