Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Course plan:

Toy model of matter that exhibits phase transition in dimension 2 and greater. It does not provide numerically exact results by itself, but can serve as a tool to theorize existing and new phase transitions.

Each point in the lattice has two possible states: TODO insert image.

As mentioned at: stanford.edu/~jeffjar/statmech/intro4.html some systems which can be seen as modelled by it include:

Also has some funky relations to renormalization TODO.

Bibliography:

Ciro Santilli is old enough to remember his parents whispering its name with a respectful tone.

Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) mentions several times how Richard Feynman was a reader of the encyclopedia. E.g. in youtu.be/ivxkd98mDvc?t=50 Richard's sister also talks about it.

Then the Internet came along and killed it.

The motivation model for collaborators was simple: to get famous. To be able to be selected contribute an article meant that you knew something or two! There was some physicist Ciro read the biography of who was really glad to be able to write an article on the encyclopedia after having worshiped it for so long, TODO find the reference.

While this is somewhat a part of Wikipedia motivation, it is much less so because there is no single article authorship. This is something OurBigBook.com aims to improve.

In the 2010's/2020's, many people got excited about getting children in to electronics with cheap devboards, notably with Raspberry Pi and Arduino.

While there is some potential in that, Ciro Santilli always felt that this is very difficult to do, while also keeping his sacred principle of backward design in mind.

The reason for this is that "everyone" already has much more powerful computers at hand: their laptops/desktops and even mobile phones as of the 2020s. Except perhaps if you are thing specifically about poor countries.

Therefore, the advantage using such devboards for doing something that could useful must come from either:

External libraries

Interesting to note that there are quite a few nearer than Sagittarius A, as of 2022 we know of one at 1.5 kly: universemagazine.com/en/discovered-the-closest-black-hole-to-the-sun/

It is interesting that a few months earlier there seemed to be no known specific black holes in the Milky Way: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/hubble-determines-mass-of-isolated-black-hole-roaming-our-milky-way-galaxy although their count is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.

For comparison, remember that the Milky Way is 185 kly in diameter x 2 kly thick.

IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0066839/

Episodes of the life of Blaise Pascal.

BLAST is a sequence alignment.

The NCBI free-to-use BLAST server: blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi. Having a centralized query server is fundamental, because the gain of sequence alignment really comes from having one huge database to link information together, which is best centralized.

Coinbase message are messages that only miners can embed in the blockchain.

As such most of them tend to be boring ads for mining pools, but there are a few exceptions, especially in the early days.

This is something worth investigating!

Bibliography:

A more concrete and easier to understand version of it is the more photon-specific Poincaré sphere, have a look at that one first.

The student organized bar of the École. There's a corresponding Binet that takes care of it.