h34d

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

He says he has a new way of describing light where it loses energy over time (something weird) and so it explains redshift.

From what I understand, the main idea behind tired light isn't particularly weird, it's just that scattering could potentially lead to a redshift as well. The issue is that if you assume enough scattering to explain cosmological redshift you would also get some other effects, which are however not observed. This basically ruled out the original tired light theory by Zwicky from the beginning. The author of this paper seems to try to get around that by combining a smaller amount of "tired light" with time-varying couplings. Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall and I can't tell any more details.

He also says universal constants can change (something never observed before that would fundamentally change physics)

No, he says that coupling constants (not sure if that is what you mean by "universal constants" or not) can change, which is a generic consequence of the RG and has in fact been observed in nature (e.g. electron charge or strong coupling, to name just the most famous examples). From a QFT perspective, the cosmological constant is also a coupling, and several quantum gravity theories do in fact generically predict or suggest a time-varying cosmological constant. So this part by itself isn't really that out there, nor that original for that matter. However, since I can't access the paper I can't judge whether the author's way of varying Λ is reasonable or just a way to fit the data without any physical motivation, and I don't really know what the article means by "he proposes a constant that accounts for the evolution of the coupling constants".

and he can explain dark matter

That seems like a more grandiose claim to me, if accurate. Do you have a source for where the author claims that? Although he wouldn't be the first to do so.

I’m pretty sure this guy isn’t toppling physics today as the bar is set high for whatever evidence he is sharing.

I think this can be said for a lot of popular science article with topics like this. However, in many cases the blame can lie more with the pop-sci journalists who are looking for a cool story and might over-interpret the author's claims (I guess "physics toppled!!!11" sounds more interesting than "some guy suggests that some data might be fitted in a slightly different way"). Although in this case at least the age of the universe claim does seem to come from the author.

Edit: Judging by another article of the author someone else linked me to further down, it seems that while the author does speak of coupling constants, he really does refer to time-varying fundamental constants. So I must agree with the previous poster on this, it does seem quite a bit more out there than I had originally assumed.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago

Developer of RedReader also said they want to eventually support Lemmy and perhaps tildes and hacker news, even though RedReader got an exemption from the api fees for now. But as a "long-term vision", so probably not immediately.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thanks! Tbh I don't care much about the first reason. I've been planning to eventually get around to watch at least ENT and some of the newer shows, so I probably won't be finishing with DS9 regardless. So far I've been following more or less the "start with TNG" ordering in the OP, and am now in season 3 of DS9. Do you think it would still be a gain to start VOY or am I already through the looking glass, i.e. does the latter add more to the earler seasons? If it's mostly about the world building and not the story I might give a rough version of the "chronological viewing order" a try and see if I enjoy it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Can you give a (spoiler free if possible) reason for why you would recommend watching VOY before DS9 instead of the other way around? I assumed that VOY might contain spoilers for DS9 since it aired later.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Shit, I like HEVC in theory for the compression especially but it’s copyrighted bullshit or whatever.

Isn't the same true for AVC/h264, at least in principle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding#Licensing Might be less of an issue in practice though, idk.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

To my knowledge, neither the USSR nor the PRC ever claimed to actually have achieved communism (hence why the USSR has "socialist" in its name, not "communist"), but they were governed by "communist" parties in the sense that they were following in the tradition of Marx and Lenin and at least claimed to want to achieve communism at some point. Of course, the USSR no longer exists, and the PRC has undergone a series of economic reforms since the 1970s, after the death of Mao. They now claim to follow something they call "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", but as far as I can tell it seems very similar to something I would call "capitalism in an authoritarian one-party state and a bunch of blabla about how it technically doesn't contradict Marx", but ymmv. So imo the CCP is now only called "communist" for historical reasons, and in that sense I see it as similar to the case of North Korea, but they might still have some theorists who would disagree with that assessment. And in the West in particular many people just mix up terms like "socialist" and "communist" anyway, and also often don't realize that the economic systems of Russia and China have changed a lot since the end of the cold war (or Mao's death).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

sidebery (best tree tabs I can find)

I was looking for something like that, thanks! I also followed these instructions to hide the native tab bar.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Just read the second (or the first, but that is more technical) link I shared. Some native speakers do in fact seem to say "should of" even when the "of" is stressed, so in their dialect it would be grammatical.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I believe this can happen if your instance (in this case lemm.ee) doesn't yet know about the new community. But if you enter the full url (https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/lemmy_wishlist) into your instance's search, it should look for it and find it. Maybe you have to wait for a couple seconds but for me this usually works.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

While it is true that "should of" etc. can easily originate from a confusion between "'ve'" and unstressed "of", which sound identical, the statement

"Should of" is incorrect

itself is at least a bit misleading and prescriptivist in its generality.

Interestingly, there seem to be at least some native English speakers who genuinely do say "should of" (with a stressed "of") sometimes. This paper for example argues that people who say "should of" really do use a grammatical construction of the form modal verb + of + past participle. One argument the author mentions is that this would also explain the words "woulda", "coulda" and "shoulda", since "of"->"a" is quite common in general (e.g. "kind of" -> "kinda"), but "'ve"->"a" basically doesn't occur elsewhere (e.g. no one says "I'a" or "you'a" instead of "I've" or "you've"). Another is that the reverse mistake, i.e. using "'ve'" in place of "of" (e.g. "kind've"), is much rarer, which is a clear difference to e.g. the situation with "they're"/"their"/"there", where people use these words in place of the others in all combinations frequently. I recommend this blog article for a much longer discussion.

Also, whether genuine mistake (which it almost certainly is in many cases, although probably not all) or different grammatical construction, YSK that "should of" etc. didn't just become popular recently, but have been used for centuries. E.g. John Keats wrote in a letter in 1814: "Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fiery phrase in my first Letter.". Many more examples (some older as well) can be found e.g. here or here.

TL;DR: While in many cases "should of" etc. can well be a mistake, originating from the fact that it sounds identical to "should've" when unstressed, there is some interesting linguistic evidence that at least in some dialects of English native speakers really do say "should of" etc. (i.e. in those cases it is not a mistake, merely non-standard/dialectal).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

It's not entirely the same though. Some of the "tankies" in the West seem to be Maoists more than Stalinists, as far as I can tell. Besides, some (many?) Stalinists also consider the term "Stalinist" derogatory, and prefer to call themselves "Marxist-Leninists".

view more: ‹ prev next ›