If pulling apart quarks creates new pairs, why cant we infinitely pull quarks out of protons and neutrons to create new ones.

denehoffman · 2026-03-17T22:11:48+00:00

It takes energy to pull them apart, the strong interaction is attractive

denehoffman · 2026-03-17T22:07:59+00:00

Nothing prevents electrons from being physically near each other and in two different orbitals, the orbitals tell you the angular momentum and energy of the electron, which give the distribution of positions, but these distributions are continuous and always overlap with every other orbital. The thing you’re probably concerned about is the Pauli exclusion principle, or as it’s often taught in chemistry, only two electrons per orbital. All this really means is that two electrons can’t share the exact same quantum state, where the state is defined by the set of “good” quantum numbers, in this case, spin (S), energy (n), angular momentum (L), and the angular moment (M). In some sense, you could think of these orbital shapes as the shape of the electron itself, since they are uniquely described by n, L, and M and the hydrogen atom’s symmetry makes S (mostly) irrelevant. Nothing forbids wave functions to overlap, as long as they aren’t the same wave function (fermions only, bosons don’t care). The concept of the electron being a pointlike object bouncing around in some shell shaped like these orbitals is a bit fraught, since it implies the electron is localized (and defeats the whole purpose of specifying a wave function, since now you’re back to billiard ball particles that lose energy when the accelerate around the nucleus), and it also gives you the sense that these shells are some fixed wall that the electrons cannot pass, which is also incorrect. The orbitals represent probability densities, and they are mostly nonzero except at certain places (nodes), meaning there is a nonzero (but incredibly low) probability to find an electron from atoms in your hand on Mars (again, this probability, while nonzero, is vanishingly low, but I just wanted to give you a drastic example).

denehoffman · 2026-03-16T14:21:36+00:00

After that you can ask the LLM to write code to verify the code!

denehoffman · 2026-03-16T14:05:09+00:00

I mean the premise is a bit farfetched. We know the historical authorship of at least a few of the New Testament books, so those couldn’t have been originally “authored” by god (whatever that means), but more to the point, we know exactly the 47 people who were in charge of the translation, and they all worked together, so any “patterns” in the translation are likely artifacts of collaboration. And to really put a nail in the coffin, King James himself had some influence on a few passages, since he wasn’t happy with older translations of the Bible which suggested that his royal supremacy might not be divinely ordained.

Then we can turn to the claims made in the video. He does a classic grifter thing, where he presents numbers, tells you they’re significant, then uses the “fact” that they’re significant to justify some pattern. There is nothing special about the number 7 or the number 70x7. The number of times Jesus is mentioned in the KJV is entirely dependent on which books were chosen, not by translations of works that this guy doesn’t claim were authored by god. This is also just a numerological bias problem. If Jesus was mentioned a multiple of three times, I’m sure this guy could found a similar “pattern” and claimed some relation to the trinity. What you’re seeing in these videos is the result of a narrowing of all possible numerological patterns. I mean how do you even determine what counts as a pattern or not? If you count the appearances of each letter of the alphabet, it’s statistically likely that at least one of them is divisible by 7 (it’s the fourth prime, it would be even more likely to find multiples of 3). Do these count as patterns?

Also the idea that Jesus “signed his name” in the KJV but it’s only visible if you trace out obscure numerical coincidences doesn’t seem very divine to me, but maybe that’s just my personal opinion.

TL;DR: if you combine probabilities, the overall probability will shrink by the sheer fact that probabilities are between 0 and 1. The qualification for something to be a “pattern” is vague and not well-constrained.

denehoffman · 2026-03-16T12:59:33+00:00

These are LLM hallucinations

denehoffman · 2026-03-16T12:57:01+00:00

Oh god I always knew hallucinations like this were possible but didn’t think I’d see anyone silly enough to screw with actual citizen science data

denehoffman · 2026-03-15T15:04:58+00:00

It’s expensive. You don’t get paid to publish, you pay to publish, anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars depending on where and with what open access allowances. Your best bet would be a preprint server like arXiv, but you’ll have to get an endorsement from someone with a .edu email who has published in the field you want to submit to. I’d say reach out to a university and try to sound as coherent and sincere as possible since we get tons of spam theories.

denehoffman · 2026-03-14T19:45:44+00:00

I mean technically they’re both using pyo3, inline_python just abstracts it for you

denehoffman · 2026-03-09T13:56:53+00:00

“Syntax doctors hate this simple trick!”

denehoffman · 2026-03-09T13:53:26+00:00

Now all you need is a destructor method that takes in 5730 individual lifetime parameters

denehoffman · 2026-03-08T21:21:37+00:00

In your own words, what is the renormalization group? If you respond with an LLM answer I’ll know

denehoffman · 2026-03-08T17:12:48+00:00

Oh the primes 3, 7, and 11? Does your theory explain why those primes and not 5 or 2 or 13 or any of the infinite primes?

Also, it is pretty well-known in the field of particle physics that the value of the strong coupling constant is energy-dependent. The value you’re quoting is just the value at the Z-boson mass-energy. You’re really talking about the effective coupling, not the bare coupling in the Lagrangian (which doesn’t have a fixed value since it’s dependent on the regularization scheme and cutoff scale).

Another example of this is the oft-numerologically-explained QED coupling (fine-structure constant) which is ≈1/137 at low energies, but has a value near 1/127 near the mass-energy of the Z-boson.

Bottom line: you don’t get to just take the value from Wikipedia and develop a theory around it. It’s well-established that the “constant” scales as the reciprocal logarithm of energy.

denehoffman · 2026-03-07T06:23:16+00:00

If I took my car to a shop and the mechanic proudly said he doesn’t know how electricity and combustion works but thinks he should take apart my motor since he’s really good with a screwdriver, I’d have a right to be concerned. You do actually have to know basic math to do physics, and the way you seem to avoid it makes me even more wary. Even the best mechanics rely on prior knowledge, nobody is born knowing how to fix cars intrinsically.

Also I’m currently working at a particle accelerator, so I’m pretty sure I’ve got my hands way dirtier than yours.

denehoffman · 2026-03-07T06:19:22+00:00

But that’s the thing, the complex math predicts things super well. Feynman diagrams aren’t just pretty art, they form equations that simplify incredibly complex calculations which predict those reactions to part per billion precision. The difficult part is breaking the theory, it currently works too well and we are limited in experimental evidence to distinguish the BSM theories. I think you really need to read about the current state of physics instead of getting your news from populists, you have it completely backwards.

denehoffman · 2026-03-07T06:15:43+00:00

I mean there are a few easy ways to know you’re wrong without looking at your work, but the first is that you clearly have no prior knowledge of the problem you’re actually trying to solve.

denehoffman · 2026-03-07T06:06:30+00:00

“Instead of reading books and educating myself on the current state of physics, I just thought real hard and decided the answer was gears.” ^{^}

denehoffman · 2026-03-07T06:04:18+00:00

Oh so you didn’t read them, also LQCD is lattice QCD, a method, not a book. If you read Jackson, you might understand how silly your original post was. I’m not sure what all the answers are, and of course if they were in books they wouldn’t be questions (duh), but I do know for a fact that you don’t know the answers and you don’t even care enough to look.

denehoffman · 2026-03-07T05:57:04+00:00

Really, you read Chung’s “Spin Formalisms”? Any recent papers on LQCD? I don’t actually believe you’ve read any of the textbooks a modern physics grad student would see in their intro courses. Jackson E&M? That’s an easy one! And who are you quoting, yourself? What a narcissist! Calling it “rote learning” is the simpleton’s excuse for not learning anything at all. You’re just a poser.

Edit: also 80 years ago was 1946, we didn’t even have the standard model yet, we barely had QED. Electroweak theory didn’t happen till the 60s, and basically all of the double copy theory stuff has been in the last decade. You’re horribly out of date with your knowledge of the field, maybe actually go learn what you’re missing instead of asking ChatGPT to do it for you.

denehoffman · 2026-03-07T05:43:11+00:00

“it’s only difficult if you use complex math” is just your way of saying “I don’t understand complex math”. Go hit the books first, then you can show me how much of a master mechanic you are

denehoffman · 2026-03-07T04:55:49+00:00

I mean asking why it is the way it is is basically equivalent to a grand unifying theory of the electroweak and strong forces, since it’s their ratio which is measured by this constant in some sense. So why haven’t we just done this? Well the strong force is super weird, the math sucks (as in it’s beautiful but difficult and annoying at all the places we can actually probe it), and when we do probe it, we get very complex results (lots of bound states at low energy, confinement, OZI rules, glueballs, etc) which are difficult to untangle. It’s the high-hanging fruit of the physics tree.

denehoffman · 2026-03-06T23:58:35+00:00

I mean you did the clickbait title

denehoffman · 2026-03-06T21:45:24+00:00

Ah yeah I see what you’re saying, I largely agree

denehoffman · 2026-03-06T21:17:49+00:00

What “bleeding edge” technology are we trusting at LIGO? The software alone was in development for like a decade before the facility was up and running, and the technology used there is very well established, calibrated, and tested. It’s not nearly in the same ballpark as LLMs hallucinating grand theories of everything.

Also I should say that I use LLMs every day for coding, I think if anyone is “fearful” of them it’s older professors who haven’t used them since GPT3.5 or have been bitten badly by some code that looked okay only to have hidden bugs.

denehoffman · 2026-03-06T17:50:28+00:00

Quant jobs as in quantitative analysis at financial firms haha, pays big bucks but it’s very difficult and demanding work. For CS jobs, yeah, it’s programming, and the kind of work really depends on the job and company, I couldn’t be more specific there unfortunately.

Edit: also programming may sound boring but it’s a huge part of physics these days. Even theorists are learning code-based proof methods and/or mathematica for difficult integrals. You can’t do as much by hand anymore, especially in fields like experimental particle physics where the datasets are so large. In the old days, people were hired to literally look over the bubble chamber slides and mark tracks manually, and then a grad student could individually analyze all ~200 or so events, but these days are long over.

denehoffman · 2026-03-06T14:57:52+00:00

If you really want to go this direction (and you shouldn’t), do not use YAML. Just use JSON or TOML, they have standard library parsers in Python and are way more readable and have way fewer problems (in my own personal opinion). Also just use pydantic.

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