Theories of Quantum Matter by Austen Lamacraft The Elastic Chain Oscillator Quanta are Bosons! Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
Why do the electron and the proton have the same charge except for the opposite signs? Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
Given the view of the Standard Model where the electron and quarks are just completely separate matter fields, there is at first sight no clear theoretical requirement for that.
As mentioned e.g. at QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 1.6 "Hole theory", Dirac initially wanted to think of the holes in his hole theory as the protons, as a way to not have to postulate a new particle, the positron, and as a way to "explain" the proton in similar terms. Others however soon proposed arguments why the positron would need to have the same mass, and this idea had to be discarded.
Fixed quantum angular momentum in a given direction.
Can range between .
The z component of the quantum angular momentum is simply:so e.g. again for gallium:
- s-orbitals: necessarily have 0 z angular momentum
- p-orbitals: have either 0, or z angular momentum
Note that this direction is arbitrary, since for a fixed azimuthal quantum number (and therefore fixed total angular momentum), we can only know one direction for sure. is normally used by convention.
Mathematics course of the University of Oxford structure Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
is a hyperparameter, and are common choices when doing dataset exploration, as they can be easily visualized on a planar plot.
The mapping is done by projecting all points to a dimensional hyperplane. PCA is an algorithm for choosing this hyperplane and the coordinate system within this hyperplane.
The hyperplane choice is done as follows:
- the hyperplane will have origin at the mean point
- the first axis is picked along the direction of greatest variance, i.e. where points are the most spread out.Intuitively, if we pick an axis of small variation, that would be bad, because all the points are very close to one another on that axis, so it doesn't contain as much information that helps us differentiate the points.
- then we pick a second axis, orthogonal to the first one, and on the direction of second largest variance
- and so on until orthogonal axes are taken
www.sartorius.com/en/knowledge/science-snippets/what-is-principal-component-analysis-pca-and-how-it-is-used-507186 provides an OK-ish example with a concrete context. In there, each point is a country, and the input data is the consumption of different kinds of foods per year, e.g.:so in this example, we would have input points in 4D.
- flour
- dry codfish
- olive oil
- sausage
Suppose that every country consumes the same amount of flour every year. Then, that number doesn't tell us much about which country each point represents (has the least variance), and the first PCA axes would basically never point anywhere near that direction.
Another cool thing is that PCA seems to automatically account for linear dependencies in the data, so it skips selecting highly correlated axes multiple times. For example, suppose that dry codfish and olive oil consumption are very high in Portugal and Spain, but very low in Germany and Poland. Therefore, the variation is very high in those two parameters, and contains a lot of information.
However, suppose that dry codfish consumption is also directly proportional to olive oil consumption. Because of this, it would be kind of wasteful if we selected:since the information about codfish already tells us the olive oil. PCA apparently recognizes this, and instead picks the first axis at a 45 degree angle to both dry codfish and olive oil, and then moves on to something else for the second axis.
This game is quite detailed: www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Jmqp8a_bU
Theories of Quantum Matter by Austen Lamacraft The Elastic Chain Properties of the Fourier Transform Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
Theories of Quantum Matter by Austen Lamacraft The Elastic Chain The Quantum Chain Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
Theories of Quantum Matter by Austen Lamacraft ) limit The Elastic Chain Thermodynamic ( Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
The orthogonal group is the group of all matrices that preserve the dot product Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
The orthogonal group is the group of all matrices with orthonormal rows and orthonormal columns Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
Or equivalently, the set of rows is orthonormal, and so is the set of columns. TODO proof that it is equivalent to the orthogonal group is the group of all matrices that preserve the dot product.
The prototypical example of it is the complex dot product.
Note that this form is neither strictly symmetric, it satisfies:where the over bar indicates the complex conjugate, nor is it linear for complex scalar multiplication on the second argument.
Bibliography:
As of 2020, basically means "liquid nitrogen temperature", which is much cheaper than liquid helium.
The dream of course being room temperature and pressure superconductor.
Haven't found the one yet:
- open source software, doh
- end-to-end encryption...
- has browser frontend and Android app
- public URL without sharing your mobile phone: messaging software that force you to have a mobile phone
- self-destroying messages (turned on by default please)
- user base large enough to give some confidence that it was reviewed for security issues
- easy/built-in setup over Tor
Optional but really ideal:
- can delete messages from the device of the person you sent it to, no matter how old
- decentralized, your username is a public key
The state of messaging is ridiculous as of 2020.
Why Wikipedia sucks: Section "Wikipedia".
Best languages:
The most important page of Wikipedia is undoubtedly: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources which lists the accepted and non accepted sources. Basically, the decision of what is true in this world.
Wikipedia is incredibly picky about copyright. E.g.: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_of_all_fair_use_images_of_living_people because "such portrait could be created". Yes, with a time machine, no problem! This does more harm than good... excessive!
Citing in Wikipedia is painful. Partly because of they have a billion different templates that you have to navigate. They should really have a system where you can easily reuse existing sources across articles! Section "How to use a single source multiple times in a Wikipedia article?"
- youtu.be/_Rt0eAPLDkM?t=113 encyclopedia correction stickers. OMG!
- youtu.be/_Rt0eAPLDkM?t=201 Jimmy was a moderator on MUD games
Inside the Wikimedia Foundation offices by Wikimedia Foundation (2008)
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