An audiobook?
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I tried to watch that, but it was insufferably youtube. Plus, in the first few minutes he’s all like “what does conjugating a wave function even mean”. But it’s just the vector version of complex conjugation. i.e. you complex conjugate and also take the transpose. (column vectors become row vectors and vice-versa) Despite it being used as word-soup, it has a perfectly sensible meaning on wave functions. It’s basically the duality between bra and ket vectors.
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I guarantee you that Terrance Howard still would not have a clue what any of that means.
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… as @Shuck described Tucker Carlson, “he pretends to be dumb, but is also actually dumb”
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It’s a Dune flex. He thinks he a pre-born, like Paul’s sister, Alia. An Abomination. Next, he’ll claim to be the Kwisatz Haderach and go on about “free bottled spring water” for everyone, in BPA free bottles.
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A diamond ring where the band is made from a single diamond. Been done.
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Came here to mention Time Cube if others forgot. Thank you.
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I have chosen to capitalize particular words that are fundamental to Nature as a whole because these forces play a much more important role in Life than any VIP as a single person, place or thing, that has ever been venerated by Man.
I don’t know why it’s so common, but Capitalising certain Words is always a good sign of a crank.
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I’m sure you are right. Even still, it’s a bad look for the linked youtuber when he literally says “you can’t conjugate a wave” after talking about conjugations in language and biology. It’s easily googeable:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/physics-and-astronomy/phase-conjugation
or
I know that, in some sense, any take-down is going to be arguing from a place of less ignorance. Still, it’s an annoyance when a debunking is also wrong in a way that I could see immediately.
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My very non-math brain just imploded. BRB…
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Not as bad as of a look as it is for Howard, who has been spewing way more nonsensical shit for a while now, apparently.
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Yeah, it was something we did as physics students in undergraduate quantum mechanics. It’s weird because given his background in biochemistry he must have taken a p-chem course at some point, which means he should have an acquaintance with evaluating wavefunction probabilities. He’s maybe a little too zealous in his debunking.
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It is a very frequent thing that someone with no knowledge of {certain field} announces that they have solved a long-standing question in said field in a way that makes absolutely no sense to anyone who does have knowledge in that field.
(This woman is another really good communicator, kinda dry and sarcastic at times, but this is a style I really like. YMMV.)
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I remember some years back (when they had a print edition) Wired Magazine did a piece about a college freshman who just simply could not understand calculus and somehow came to the conclusion that time does not exist (because of how an arrow flies half the distance and then half again and again without ever actually reaching its target or something like that). He kept bugging his professor, who finally told him, “Write up an article and get it published, and then we’ll talk.”
And he actually did it, hence the article in Wired that was just asking, “Is this the next Theory of Relativity?” I wonder what ever happened to that guy. I wish I could find the article.
At the end of the day, one has to understand the rules before one can break the rules.
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Some guy named Zeno tried that a few centuries prior. Doubt very much this kid improved on it.
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Yeah, the article mentioned that, but the kid somehow still managed to get the idea published in a journal (which evidently wasn’t a paper mill).
Come to think of it, I wonder what ever happened to Wired Magazine…
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The snark is strong with this physicist. 36 Chopstick Teslas absolutely made my day.
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If you want to know what’s happening…well, you hopefully know the idea of a vector as something with a magnitude and direction. Like an arrow, which is basically a linear path (at least locally).
You can also represent directions with something called a covector, which is basically a linear function (at least locally). So there is one side of space that’s positive and one side that’s negative, with a zero plane between them. That’s useful for describing waves traveling through space, which after all have nodes along planes too.
In a purely general vector space there’s no way to relate the lines to the planes, and so these are really different concepts. However, if you have some idea of angle (or equivalently inner products) you can find an arrow perpendicular to the plane, or a plane perpendicular to the arrow, and so turn one into the other. And that’s basically what transposition is, or conjugation if you’re using complex numbers.
Does that help understand at all?
(For the record, bras and kets are what physicists call the covectors and vectors, since then applying the one to the other gives you a bracket.)
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I was truly wondering what women’s underwear had to do with this, and yes, that helps it be not so confusing. I am a huge nerd, but a math-deficient one. I had to purely muscle my way through calc 3 without ever really understanding what the hell was going on. Anything beyond that was out of the question!
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