I was a physics and mathematics double major in college and I got my Ph.D. in physics studying galactic cosmic ray electrons. I love brewing beer and watching rugby.
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2026-07-24T19:12:16Z Event JSON
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"content": "{\"name\":\"Dave\",\"about\":\"I was a physics and mathematics double major in college and I got my Ph.D. in physics studying galactic cosmic ray electrons. I love brewing beer and watching rugby.\\n\\nFavorite physicist: Richard Feynman\\nFavorite type of vector: Covariant\\nFavorite ruler: Golomb\\nNumber of Nobel Prizes won (to date): 0\\n\",\"website\":\"https://mathstodon.xyz/@zornslemmon\",\"picture\":\"https://media.mathstodon.xyz/accounts/avatars/109/340/165/798/181/196/original/dd40e8b05447c77f.jpg\",\"banner\":\"https://media.mathstodon.xyz/accounts/headers/109/340/165/798/181/196/original/c5185d689b571a9f.png\",\"nip05\":\"[email protected] \"}" ,
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Last Notes npub1789sznms6zt003f3x347k07yqlra5mrqjuc586xh4ee0ma703qlqq970sd Dave I made it very far in and around mathematics without seeing (or at least remembering or appreciating) that Euler sum to get -1/12. Then I saw everyone losing their minds when Joe Polchinski's String Theory book came out and it just stated it as a fact and continued on. My guess is that book was what spurred the creation of the many oft-cited YouTube videos that followed. npub1789sznms6zt003f3x347k07yqlra5mrqjuc586xh4ee0ma703qlqq970sd Dave I know in projective geometry that a line transforms to another line (and I suppose the point at infinity maps to another point at infinity?). Is this the constraint or what actually defines a projective transformation? And I've never read about them, but what do projective transformations do in higher dimensions? Maybe our reality is just a movie being projected onto a 3D movie screen from a movie theater in a 4D world! npub1789sznms6zt003f3x347k07yqlra5mrqjuc586xh4ee0ma703qlqq970sd Dave My comment was partly tongue-in-cheek, but I did actually check the link. My dissertation was about galactic cosmic ray electrons. It was written in the mid-nineties and I'm pretty certain it doesn't exist in any digital format I generated, which would have been PostScript. I vaguely recall having to provide proof-ready paper copies that were sent off to a company (UMI Microform) to be converted to microfiche. npub1789sznms6zt003f3x347k07yqlra5mrqjuc586xh4ee0ma703qlqq970sd Dave I checked to see if my dissertation was there, but it wasn't. It would have been nice to know that it was read by more than just my committee, even if it was a machine. 🙂 npub1789sznms6zt003f3x347k07yqlra5mrqjuc586xh4ee0ma703qlqq970sd Dave What did you start them with (e.g., eyes from a potato you had)? npub1789sznms6zt003f3x347k07yqlra5mrqjuc586xh4ee0ma703qlqq970sd Dave Those look like the plastic Little People. We had the wooden ones. npub1789sznms6zt003f3x347k07yqlra5mrqjuc586xh4ee0ma703qlqq970sd Dave This was a nice explanation, thank you. I've been hearing these annoying ads from Meta touting their "open source" AI that anyone can use and how great everything is when it is open source and how cool they are for that. And I love free beer as much as anyone, but I'd rather be able to homebrew my own. npub1789sznms6zt003f3x347k07yqlra5mrqjuc586xh4ee0ma703qlqq970sd Dave I'm not sure what Angela Collier was expecting for Manhattan Project stories. I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies in the 80s from many of those physicists and I can't say there are lots of tell-all stories from them from those days, particularly since materials from those days weren't even fully declassified by the time Feynman died. What stories does she think were made up? npub1789sznms6zt003f3x347k07yqlra5mrqjuc586xh4ee0ma703qlqq970sd Dave Feynman clearly didn't like the process of writing books, or had no desire to (or both). His other works, like 'The Lectures', were transcriptions of talks and lectures he gave. 'QED', 'The Character of Physical Law', and even my copy of 'Statistical Mechanics A Set of Lectures' were all compilations of his lectures put down on paper. And it's all spilled out in the prefaces, forwards, editor's notes, and acknowledgments. The statistical mechanics book is part of a Foundations in Physics series intended to give leading physicists of the day to explain topics they are expert in (there are also Feynman books in that series on QED, 'The Theory of Fundamental Processes', and 'Photon-Hadron Interactions). It consists of lectures he gave on statistical mechanics sponsored by Hughes Research Laboratories in 1961. npub1789sznms6zt003f3x347k07yqlra5mrqjuc586xh4ee0ma703qlqq970sd Dave Perhaps I'm missing the main point that Angela Collier is making by getting confused by these revelations that are made where there is nothing to reveal because it is all out in the open. It is not true that "every book 'by 'Feynman'" was written by a Leighton, but even of the ones that were, it was very explicitly pointed out how the books came to be. My 1977 printing of 'The Lectures' has a lengthy preface where he uses the words like 'I' and 'my' when talking about his lectures, and 'we' when talking about transcribing and editing the books. That is followed by a lengthy forward by Leighton who talks about how it came together and all the people involved in the project. The 'Surely You're Joking' and 'What Do You Care What Other People Think?' are explicit in how they were transcribed by the younger Leighton from recordings of telling the stories. The latter, in fact, has a preface from Leighton that says 'My motivation is simple: ever since hearing my first Feynman stories, I have had the powerful desire to share them with others." If you want to know Feynman's involvement in those concoctions, you can just read the dust covers and prefaces, or better yet, listen to the audio stories yourself which have been also published. If telling the stories to someone who writes them down somehow discredits the authorship, I anxiously await her videos tearing down Stephen Hawking's books and papers too.
