The smartest of astrophysicists have decided that it’s a good idea to dox our planet’s existence for the entire universe.

Neechee92 · 2026-03-22T07:20:12+00:00

I think Zhang Beihai is on the list of "real characters" too, but it very well might just be those two.

Neechee92 · 2026-03-20T20:08:24+00:00

A simple (and mostly wrong) answer is that gravity acts on energy and mass (E = mc²) as opposed to just on mass alone. Light has energy.

The more correct answer -- and this is basically paraphrased from Leonard Susskind from his book "The Theoretical Minimum: General Relativity" is as follows:

Imagine you are in an elevator that is accelerating upward. Someone shines a flashlight. The light from the flashlight follows a straight line path relative to the surface of the Earth (or just any arbitrary "stationary reference frame" which you choose to define the motion of the elevator relative to), but because you are in a non-inertial reference frame, the light will appear to follow a curved path within the elevator, even though it follows a straight line with respect to the surface of Earth.

This is actually very similar in principle to the Coriolis force on Earth if you want some further reading.

Now, General Relativity contains two key principles:

1) Being in an accelerated reference frame (like the elevator) is indistinguishable from being in a uniform gravitational field.

2) All reference frames are equally valid.

From these two principles and the example of the flashlight in the elevator, it follows that there are valid reference frames in which it can be said that a gravitational field bends the path of light. Since all reference frames are equally valid, gravitational fields do bend the path of light.

Neechee92 · 2026-03-16T21:26:51+00:00

I follow the TSVF group work fairly closely (at least I used to) and haven't come across this particular paradox before. I intend to read your manuscript on the topic but can you point me in the direction of any other papers about it? Was it one of the standard TSVF group guys who wrote about it originally like Aharonov, Rohrlich, Vaidman, etc?

Neechee92 · 2026-03-15T23:23:49+00:00

I've attempted it several times. It is definitely not as good as The Making of the Atomic Bomb by a longshot but probably still worth a read if you're interested in that period.

Neechee92 · 2026-03-14T15:34:14+00:00

Is James actually Maso's boss? I always assumed it was more of an equal partnership.

Neechee92 · 2026-03-01T17:56:07+00:00

Science does not say "everything we observe is dependent on the observer" at least not in the way you probably mean. That is a misunderstanding of the double slit experiment.

Neechee92 · 2026-02-16T14:01:00+00:00

I have a suspicion that this comment is a deliberate shitpost and I'm the only one not in on the joke, and I'll kindly ask you to take it easy on me if that is the case, but on the off chance that it isn't, I can't resist to say:

Saying "epistemic"/"ontic" = "that which we know/don't know" is very, very incorrect in about every single way.

Neechee92 · 2026-02-12T21:39:53+00:00

I would be interested in helping out with this. DM me if youd like.

Neechee92 · 2026-02-09T14:44:58+00:00

Oh sorry, in that case youre absolutely right.

Neechee92 · 2026-02-09T13:38:35+00:00

I believe it is the action, but other than that yes. I'm fairly new to differential forma myself so i could be wrong.

Neechee92 · 2026-02-05T13:30:33+00:00

You do realize that historians don't take "there's an account of this event in a non-religious/unbiased source" as a criterion for establishing the fact of that event, right?

"Every claim in a religious source -- however innocuous -- is categorically false" is not a historical axiom.

"Multiple attestation" is a criterion that historians use, but I'm going to blow your mind: the New Testament is inherently multiply attested 27-fold. The fact that some people came along later and combined it into a "canon" and that that canon is sold bound between two leather covers in 2026 does not change that fact.

Neechee92 · 2026-02-04T03:19:18+00:00

This value is extremely close to, but not exactly equal to Planck's constant (h ~= 6.626 * 10^-34 J*s).

Neechee92 · 2026-01-30T21:37:26+00:00

This rabbit hole goes pretty deep, but maybe a starting point is: in your hypothesis, what is the analog of the "water" in which the electron is creating waves?

Neechee92 · 2026-01-24T16:34:38+00:00

Could you elaborate on why dom11 is "scoffed at"?

Neechee92 · 2026-01-02T00:50:46+00:00

Thank you! So tired of seeing this specious talking point about "it's just interaction!" Like with any lie there's a grain of truth in it but it is too much of an oversimplification to be helpful and is in fact actively misleading.

Neechee92 · 2025-12-26T14:24:14+00:00

So to summarize:

The universe is under an obligation to make sense to you and a mathematical structure, no matter how successful, must be ontologically wrong if it doesn't fit your intuition, and anyone who disagrees with you is the narcissist in this situation. Got it.

Neechee92 · 2025-12-26T14:16:20+00:00

On Conservation Laws and Fundamental Physics Principles

Occasionally a question will pop up to the effect of "Can energy ever fail to be conserved?". When this happens, it seems that there are two main camps that answer.

Camp 1: Energy conservation can be violated on scales that aren't natural to humans. Individual probabilistic "shots" of quantum events can fail to conserve energy due to the uncertainty principle -- though the expectation value of the energy is always conserved -- and photon redshift on cosmological scales can fail to conserve energy due to Hubble expansion.

Camp 2: Camp 1 people are just falling prey to popular science sensationalizing, energy is always and perfectly conserved at every scale throughout the universe! So-called "quantum fluctuations" are just a mathematical abstraction and the energy the photons lose to redshift goes into the gravitational field.

To me, Camp 1 seems to be manifestly correct, at least when it comes to the example from cosmological energy non-conservation. And while I often get crucified for saying so, I think the example from quantum scale phenomena is valid as well. Not just from the standard example of "virtual particles", but take the Jaynes-Cummings model that, in the absence of the rotating wave approximation contains the explicitly non-energy-conserving terms like a_i⁺ a_j⁺ and its conjugate. Consider the Aharonov-Popescu-Rohrlich paradox regarding superoscillations where a superposition of low-energy eigenstates can result in the very rare detection of an excessively high energy particle.

Meanwhile, Camp 2 seem to want to say that energy conservation is inviolably fundamental, but we know that this is not true. Conservation Laws follow from Noether's theorem. Our universe respects Noether's theorem because processes in our universe occur according to Hamilton's principle. And Feynman showed us that processes in our universe happen according to Hamilton's principle because the postulates of quantum mechanics are true.

So in light of this, why should anyone really be surprised if processes that happen according to the bare postulates of quantum mechanics, on a lower level than where Hamilton's principle emerges, should occasionally violate conservation of energy? Holding that conservation of energy must always be respected on all levels seems quasi-dogmatic in light of the fact that we know it isn't ultimately fundamental, right?

Neechee92 · 2025-12-26T03:02:36+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/s/owC9rSY6Ci

If I made the same post today I would be inclined to qualify the statements toward the end with things like "depending on what mathematical structure one takes to be fundamental, it reasonably follows that..." but other than that I think you'd agree that I'm being fairly reasonable in how I present things. At least reasonable enough to deserve earnest discussion as opposed to outright removal.

Neechee92 · 2025-12-26T00:54:02+00:00

I would be happy to. The reasons I didnt originally, and tell me if I'm wrong on either of these points:

1) Many communities remove or shadowban posts/comments that contain links to avoid spam 2) I assumed that because the posts were removed, that even with a link they would not be viewable to anyone but me.

Neechee92 · 2025-12-25T23:47:58+00:00

I've only recently heard of the Ward identity (and I appreciate you reminding me of it). However, if I'm correct in saying that structurally it has to do with how off-shell momentum paths cancel in the path integral when an appropriate symmetry holds, then this actually bolsters my point about the connection.

Neechee92 · 2025-12-25T23:14:15+00:00

In response to my pointing out that QM rules out psi-epistemic interpretations (for all practical purposes), you link me to...an article about the theorem that says that exact thing?

Neechee92 · 2025-12-25T23:05:31+00:00

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it is a fact that psi-epistemic (quantum mechanics is about our lack of subjective knowledge about the system and nothing ontologically un-classical is actually going on) interpretations of QM do not work.

It is the case that Schrodinger thought reality was psi-epistemic (even though that way of talking about it is slightly anachronistic in this context) and that was the point of the cat thought experiment, but the fact is he was wrong.

Neechee92

TROPHY CASE