Today’s xkcd captures an important insight.
Click for the whole thing. (Update: Darn it, Cosma Shalizi got there before me.)
Perspective is Bidirectional
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Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
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March 2nd, 2007 at 1:49 pm
When I finally started to prepare for my Hodge Theory exam You give link like this. Now I have no choice but to go through the whole archive.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:01 pm
I love xkcd.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:48 pm
LOL. “I love the punchline.”
Thanks for brightening an otherwise dreary Chicago day.
Elliot
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Ironic that this involves Hamilton. Wasn’t he out walking with his wife when he came up with the formulas for quaternions and carved them on a nearby bridge. Obviously, neither he nor his wife had any paper, and they were Victorians.
March 3rd, 2007 at 3:20 am
I laughed, but I’m not showing it to the “physics widow”.
March 3rd, 2007 at 3:45 am
I’ve just read your post about the Boltzman Brains.
I’d like to have my comment anyway, and here your opinion about it.
1.during a transition from a low entropic state to a higher one, in the Boltzman entropy curve, there’s a possibility of having the nested moves against the
current direction of change in entropy. For example in the midst of going from a low entropy situation, to a higher level a region can experiance a movement toward lower entropy state, and it can happen again and again in a nested fashion.
In this case, we would observe a mixture of higher and lower entropy past. Isn’t this the case for us?
2.The main essence of a theory about the formation of universe is the proper justification of current situation, and the secondary condition would be simplicity.
) probability of existance.
But considering the Boltzman universe, current situation of the universe has the lowest (and exactly the lowest
The theory minimizes the first variable instead of maximizing it.
March 3rd, 2007 at 2:43 pm
I can so see a scene similar to that one in Dangerous Liaisons, only this time the poor woman is covered in formulas. “You cannot bathe, do not shower, put on your robe and come with me to my lab!”
October 6th, 2008 at 1:54 am
[…] geek-friendly web comics. Everyone’s fave Xkcd has been getting CV love for a couple of years now (and I’ve been remiss in linking to the latest size-o-everything visualization). PhD […]