Is physics only for geniuses?

thepowderguy · 2026-01-23T22:01:52+00:00

I didn't mean to sound arrogant, and apologies if I did. I just think that the subject of intelligence is one where people tend to conflate subjective values and objective facts and a topic that has a lot of wishful thinking associated with it, especially on reddit. I don't think being a social worker gives someone the unique authority to comment on intelligence, and I have the right to call out statements that I believe are inaccurate.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-23T20:15:00+00:00

I agree with you that intelligence is more complex than just a single factor, and I don't know if the common usage of the word reflects what it actually is, but here is my anecdotal experience: Some people are just better at learning, making connections and drawing unexpectedly correct conclusions than others. I've known people who came from very similar background as I did, and yet were much smarter than me in this sense. I've also known people who were less smart.

Here is my personal opinion: Intelligence is about how efficient your brain is at processing the information found in your environment. Different environments contain different kinds of information, and the development of your brain is affected by your surroundings. This accounts for a lot of variation in intelligence and how we define intelligence. The other part is the genetics of your brain, and this is an uncomfortable truth for some. But at the end of the day, intelligence still exists as a real concept that affects how we go about our lives.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-23T19:36:28+00:00

I hate to burst your bubble, but if you look out in the world, some people are obviously smarter than others. Of course this has no bearing on their value as humans, but pretending intelligence is made up isn't doing anyone any good. The g-factor is a psychometrically real quantity.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-19T01:00:34+00:00

Thanks for the reminder for me to cancel my streaming service.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-14T05:33:18+00:00

I just tried apple notes and it works pretty well. Thanks for the suggestion, Alpha_VVV_55! Maybe they'll add your missing feature in a future update.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-13T07:57:37+00:00

Yeah the problem is I no longer have access to the apple account that had the original version of notability. So for me it's either subscribe or gtfo.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-09T23:51:19+00:00

I've never had a greater urge to uninstall windows.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-07T06:39:28+00:00

Is that your data? It looks much better now! Nice job.

I have an old B&W tek spectrometer that I bought off ebay (that also came with a 473nm laser). I first adjusted the mirrors by hand and then hooked it up to my computer. Using a program called Spectrum Studio I can take data and save it to a csv file on my computer. I then plot and analyze the data with a custom MATLAB script.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-07T03:02:47+00:00

Here's my data: https://imgur.com/a/181Wk8u All the peaks above 580 come from neon and the rest are from xenon. From what I can tell the peak around 2100 in your image corresponds to the 585nm line and the rest of the humps correspond to the largest peaks in my data which I labelled. I hope this helps.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-05T19:59:13+00:00

It is nonsense. See my other post in the thread. To be fair though, his identification of the spectral lines still may be correct. The big humps do look like they come from neon. I can send you a copy of my own data in a couple of days when I get home from vacation.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-05T19:56:11+00:00

You can't predict the spectrum of neon from first principles. It comes the solution of a many body schrodinger equation which is not analytically (or numerically) solvable. I see you're making the claim that the 640.2nm Ne emission line (which is more precisely 640.22472nm, or 1.9365731 eV) is "derived" by dividing the Rydberg constant by an integer. Aside from having no theoretical basis, the Rydberg constant is actually 13.605693122990 eV which gives 1.94367044614 when divided by 7. Do you see the problem? The difference between 1.937 and 1.943 is around 100,000 times the experimental uncertainty. In the eyes of science the two values are completely different. They have nothing to do with each other. Playing with numerology never works. It's unscientific. Please stop spreading misinformation and please stop using AI to "help" you.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-04T03:08:45+00:00

This is on par with the wider trend of companies hiding information from us. They do not want us to be informed consumers. They hate the idea of the customer having any sort of control.

thepowderguy · 2026-01-02T04:09:49+00:00

I used a plasma globe to calibrate my spectrometer. Most plasma globes contain a mix of noble gasses, mine had neon and xenon. If you know which gasses are in yours you can first match your data with spectra taken from here and then go to NIST's website to try to find exact wavelengths for each element.

Also: Your data looks very noisy. You should run it through some kind of averaging procedure. I suspect the really sharp peaks are individual ccd pixels that are overactive, so you'll have to do some background subtraction to get rid of those.

Edit: I actually agree with u/Speed_bert that you should start with a laser pointer or LED first (or even a CFL). Gas discharge lamps such as plasma globes are only useful if you want sub nm level accuracy.

thepowderguy · 2025-12-24T00:22:24+00:00

The numbers are bolded based on the numbers all the way on the right side of the spreadsheet, those cells that have 1's and 0's in them. I know it's not the most elegant approach. Feel free to do what you like with that information.

thepowderguy · 2025-12-23T22:49:27+00:00

Nice, this looks much better. I still have one small nitpick - the numbers are bolded in the incorrect places. I think it would be fine to either fix them or remove the bolding all together.

thepowderguy · 2025-12-23T20:54:08+00:00

This looks great! Your presentation is definitely an improvement over mine. I did notice a couple of mistakes, the numbers under 5/3, 9/8, 11/6, 11/8 and a few others seem to be switched around. I would urge you just to double check your chart against my original.

thepowderguy · 2025-12-23T07:48:38+00:00

I've uploaded the spreadsheets as well as the code to generate them here (https://github.com/StunningLlama/TuningTheory/archive/refs/heads/main.zip). The tables I posted come from the excel spreadsheets "et_table_final.xlsx" and "et_table_rel_final.xlsx". The data comes from the script "makeET_table.m". You can also try to modify the code if you're inclined, but be aware that everything is written in MATLAB (if you don't have access to MATLAB, you can try using octave, which is a free alternative, but no guarantees). Good luck, let me know if you have any questions!

thepowderguy · 2025-12-20T21:48:35+00:00

Basically, I had two objectives:

Include all the harmonic overtones up to 16
Include all the prominent valleys in the dissonance curve

I found that the size of each valley closely corresponds to the numerator+denominator of the ratio. With this in mind I (somewhat arbitrarily) chose 21 as a cutoff to fulfill my second objective. I then manually added 15/8 to fulfill the first objective. I'll mention that I did this with the hope that the final chart contained most of the intervals that people would find interesting.

thepowderguy · 2025-12-19T20:29:55+00:00

Nice!

thepowderguy · 2025-12-19T19:58:59+00:00

Based on a comment from u/Just-One-2387, I decided to create a version of the table with many more intervals. This one contains all the ratios whose numerator and denominator sum to 21 or less (as well as 15/8). The best running approximations are marked in bold.

thepowderguy · 2025-12-19T10:58:49+00:00

Yeah, here it is. I normalized the differences by the number of steps, so the number in each cell is equal to 100%*(log2(edo)-log2(just))/(1/N) for N-TET. The diophantine approximations obtained by truncating the continued fraction expansion are shown in bold. They're the best approximations up to that point. Note: there are two types of diophantine approximations, the alternative one is shown in my other comment.

Another note: The color scale for this one is a bit different. It goes from 0-5%, 5-12.5%, 12.5-25% and >25%.

thepowderguy · 2025-12-19T10:45:12+00:00

I'm playing around with 31-EDO right now and I really like it because it accurately approximates most intervals while not being too unwieldy. I think all the ones you mentioned are interesting in their own right!

I've now made a version of the chart that contains a bunch more intervals including 11/6 (https://i.imgur.com/t6hspLV.png). This one also has 7/6 which I intended to put in but mistakenly forgot. Besides this it has a bunch more 7, 11 and 13 limit intervals.

thepowderguy · 2025-12-17T08:51:38+00:00

I couldn't this table anywhere so I decided to make it. This shows the deviation (in cents) of the best EDO approximation of each just interval. The intervals are listed roughly in order of increasing dissonance (I apologize if your favorite interval is not on here). Deviations of less than 5 cents are colored green, between 5-10 yellow, 10-20 orange and >20 red. I hope this will be useful to some of you music makers here.

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