ziggurism

"Rollenden Königlich"? Ist das wie "Rolls Royce" auf Deutsch heißen soll?

Article says the ceasefire was originally planned for 4 days, so they made the hunger strike coincide with the end of the ceasefire. But then the ceasefire was extended. But they went ahead with hunger strike anyway? Ok…

Is this news current? Isn’t the conflict in like day 3 of ceasefire? Are they still on hunger strike?

Here’s wiktionary:

Although sometimes used, normalcy is less common than normality in American English. It is very rarely used in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is frequent in India and Zimbabwe however.

So it’s a regional thing.

Although the claim that in US English the “normality” form is more common does not match my experience as a speaker of US English.

I did not recognize that form and assumed it was not a word. I stand corrected.

the word is "normalcy"

Lie groups are my favorite thing in all of mathematics, and gauge theory is my favorite thing in physics. E8 and all its connections to other subjects is one example of how amazing this subject can be.

It would be a coup de grace of the highest order, just the crowning intellectual achievement of mankind, if we could stumble upon a theory of everything explaining the entire Standard Model, just by fiddling around with how to fit SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) fits inside E8 or whatever.

But I guess it's not going to happen.

you don't need a uniform distribution. if the server distribution mirrors the population distribution (and why wouldn't it?), that will still achieve the desired effect.

Do people not remember back in the 2010s when bit.ly was the main link shortener used everywhere on the internet, and then Ghadafi, the then dictator of Libya, declared the site to be incompatible with Muslin decency norms because it was used for porn? And then all bit.ly links were just dead links?

How many times do we have to learn this lesson? Domain name hacks are fun but just not worth it. And in 2023, now we have all the new TLDs. This was a dumb decision

I'll level with you. I know how to use QED to compute the cross section of a scattering reaction. But I do not remember, or perhaps never knew, what the QED theoretic description of classical wave mechanical phenomena like diffraction, reflection, refraction, and dispersion look like.

Well... actually of those phenomena, I think diffraction is fine. A single waveform will exhibit diffraction. It doesn't entail any interactions. A single photon can still exhibit a diffraction pattern. It doesn't mean that the photon has changed directions or circled around or in any way accelerated. The only reason you might think so is that you're thinking of photons as billiard ball type classical particles, but of course they are not, they are quantum particles with spread out wavefunctions.

Dispersion I guess is just scattering combined with absorption re-emission (and as we discussed, even scattering is itself a form of absorption & re-emission). But as for reflection and refraction? Those are the phenomena that Entropius was pointing to elsewhere in this thread. I remember how those look in terms of solutions to Maxwell's equations and boundary conditions, but that's classical wave mechanics. I do not remember how to translate that into the language of QED.

QED is a fundamental theory, so I assume that a description exists, and of course because I know what QED looks like, so I am certain that it will still be true that in this description, photons will be absorbed & emitted by charged particles, but photons will not interact with photons. However beyond that I cannot say much. How do we describe reflection of light in a mirror as photons scattering off electrons? I don't know exactly.

One thing I can say is that generally classical states are modeled in quantum mechanics as coherent states, which are eigenstates of the annihilation operator. They look something like exp(N)|0> where N is the number operator, which means that they are states with a superposition of 0 photons, 1 photons, 2 photons, etc. They don't have a well defined number of particles. So maybe if you want a QED theoretic description of reflection, you can have it, but you won't be able to talk about specific numbers of photons. But again, I don't know the details of this.

I wonder whether this concept of classical waveforms as coherent states with a superposition of all numbers of particles will help at all with this philosophical debate about whether two photons are the same particle or not, or about whether you can have a universe with only 3 photons

complex numbers are just numbers in a plane instead of a line. saying you don't believe in i is like saying you don't believe in "up"

Look bro. Your top level comment that I replied to was generally correct, and also very helpful. I liked it. I liked the suggestion for people to look at the Feynman diagrams. I agreed with it. I upvoted it.

I hope I'm not giving you the impression that I'm taking a personal issue with you. I'm not. I like you and I hope we'll still be friends when this is all over. I promise to read Discworld soon.

The only quibble I had with what you wrote was this one sentence:

So for a photon to change course, aka accelerate, it does it by absorbing a virtual photon and emitting another.

Photons do not absorb virtual photons. And real on-shell photons do not interact. In Compton scattering and 1 loop photon-photon scattering, you can think of photons emitting e+e- pairs. But never do they emit or absorb other photons.

Maybe that's not what you meant with that sentence, and I misunderstood. If that's the case, my bad. Maybe you didn't need the explanation. If someone else made the same misunderstanding reading your comment that I did, then maybe my comments will help them even if you don't need them. Or if not, if it's just me being dumb, well c'est la vie.

Cheers bro.