joigus

(my emphasis.) Huh? The atmosphere sounds like a fun place --I don't mean the bacteria.

Let's give them a call: Hi, @Enthalpy.

This hypothesis was very much talked about as far as decades ago. If I remember correctly, it was on a Scientific American issue.

Great answer IMO. Very interesting aspects have surfaced here that no doubt played a role in evolutionary history of humans and their brains. But as Ken points out --in my own words-- we must keep in mind that evolution is multi-factor, intricate, arguably chaotic. A particular development that could be advantageous if you, as an animal, have a lifestyle 'on-the-run', could be detrimental if you are sedentary; advantageous if you're a predator, detrimental if you're more of a gatherer, ineffectual if you're a scavenger; advantageous if you live in the tropics... Etc. You get the picture. I think what the OP suggests as a possibility could well have happened --had one or many of the circumstances that constrained human way of life been different. Maybe modern humans would be like pandas, which have some of the most extreme ratios in size between infants and adults.

That's not general. That's only true in non-relativistic classical mechanics and in gauge field theory. Not in GR, not in relativistic particle mechanics.

That's why your depiction of a sombrero potential superimposed to a gravitational singularity doesn't make any sense: One makes sense with the spatial radius, \( r \) as a variable; the other with the 'radius' of the field variable \( \left| \varphi \right| \). Unless I've misunderstood you really badly, but as I see no equations...

For balance of what? In the standard model, the Higgs field is a constant, which corresponds to a possible vacuum. The famous sombrero curve is not the field; it's the Higgs potential, which depends of the field. The X-axis is the field variable, and the Y-axis is the potential energy. Space doesn't even appear in the picture unless you excite the field locally. And, as Swansont said, what singularity? The sombrero potential has no singularity. The gravitational field of the Earth has no singularity either. And so on, and so on...

What mass are you talking about? Inertial mass or gravitational mass? They are very different concepts.

If they were, we might as well stop saying 'no' altogether. I don't think you want to do that.

Agreed. I suppose what you wanna do here, @NTuft, is something like considering a complex variable, \( z \), differentiating by it, \[ \frac{d}{dz}\left(\frac{1}{2}z^{-1/2}\right)=-\frac{1}{4}z^{-3/2} \] and then substituting, \[ \left.\frac{d}{dz}\left(\frac{1}{2}z^{-1/2}\right)\right|_{z=i}=\left.-\frac{1}{4}z^{-3/2}\right|_{z=i}=-\frac{1}{4}i^{-3/2} \] But be careful; you may be re-discovering complex calculus. The connection to number theory is something I'm missing. I'm very skeptic to there being a connection between physics/chemistry and number theory. There is a connection between physics and complex calculus, provided by harmonic functions in two-dimensional problems.

Exactly my feelings. Unfortunately there's an army of people like this in high places.

This looks like no hype at all. My feeling is that this has the makings of a real breakthrough in quantum computing. The possible implications for investigations in climate models, protein-folding, virology models, etc. are mouth-watering. I can't wait for the moment when this chip is finally built. https://phys.org/news/2021-08-critical-advance-quantum.html?fbclid=IwAR2mj_PP9NqXylVALnJQSbysOxzwF4HnU9_zFeNVTBiflnSrTq8phZdNUe0

I agree. This is not to say that physics and mathematics don't have interesting connections. They do, and they surface from time to time. But in the way the OP is dealing with it, I find it almost impossible to fathom what the proposed connection actually is. Again, I'm missing a clear statement of what is supposed to be the conjecture. It's more like a purée of mathematical, physical, and chemical terms.

This argument is incorrect because I was in a hurry. I will try to add the proper disclaimer later. Electrons cannot be probed with collision energies corresponding to wavelengths smaller than their Compton wavelength --I think that's the correct argument.

(My emphasis.) This video is famous and has been going around these forums for quite a while. I think it's related to your problem: Light has no fundamental length parameter characterizing it --unlike electrons, or protons, for example--. Why? There you are. Electrons cannot come in wavelengths much smaller than their so-called Compton wavelength. If you try to do so, you don't get smaller-wavelength electrons; you get more electrons and positrons of larger wavelengths than the electron's Compton wavelength. But photons behave differently. Adding to what Swansont has said, wavelength is a frame-dependent quantity. If you had a photon with a certain wavelength in one frame, it would have a different wavelength in another frame. But then you can ask again, why?

Who would consider such a stupid thing? I mean you do, are doing, \[ \frac{d}{di}\left(\frac{1}{2}i^{-1/2}\right)=-\frac{1}{4}i^{-3/2} \] So you seem to be considering the imaginary unit, \( i \), as a constant. variable. That shows that you don't understand what differentiation is about. No target in sight.

I wanted to fire away real bad, but I didn't spot any physics. No chemistry either. And the only maths is wrong. You can't consider increments of a constant.

If we were to be dropped in a part of the universe made of anti-matter, we and the unfortunate piece of anti-matter that faced us would be mutually annihilated into gamma rays, as this famous poem conjures up: If you (and the universe around you) were made of anti-matter, it remains to be seen whether you could have a 'normal' biology, as it is known that amino-acids making up our proteins are of the L-variety, and their mirror images never occur in biology, at least on this earth. There may be a fundamental reason why that's so. Maybe a biology expert can tell us more. But suppose all the biological functions were to be unchanged by the shift from their matter versions to their anti-matter ones, and this anti-you were dropped in an anti-matter galaxy. Then I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to survive. But you would have to be formed from anti-matter.

Let us know if you make any progress on any of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics

Good point. What we call 'matter' and what 'antimatter' is a matter of convention. Some people get confused about this. The question all boils down to a possible baryon-number non-conservation. That's the present standing issue. Sakharov's conditions for there being a cosmological unbalance between matter and antimatter are: 1) Time/parity/charge asymmetry 2) Universe out of equilibrium at a very early stage 3) baryon number non-conservation (implies lepton number non-conservation). We are certain about 1), pretty sure about 2), and do not completely understand 3) or whether it's actually true. I have to read more carefully on proposals to go beyond the standard model, which is what @beecee has linked to, I think. But I don't think that changes point 3) in an essential way. Baryon number is the number of protons or neutrons minus the number of their antimatter counterparts. Quarks having 1/3 of a proton's baryon number, and their antiquarks, -1/3. Leptons are electrons and neutrinos. The rest are neither baryons, nor leptons (photons, gluons, etc, the interaction particles themselves). The standard picture so far is that protons (and other baryons) should disappear at an extremely low rate (larger than the age of the universe). We've been trying to detect proton decay for decades --see, eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande. So far, nothing has happened.

A leading physicist today --Nima Arkani-Hamed-- pondering the contribution of Steven Weinberg to modern physics: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-steven-weinberg-transformed-physics-and-physicists-20210811/?fbclid=IwAR27IwXxENuqp7AujdfZ0EZ6cJc0LdkIHXiK_XmhpsKVHjh9Vf8jpf9Uy5Y

My experience of meditation is very much like @Prometheus'. Don't try to fight your thoughts; it's futile. Don't let your thoughts run the show, that's all. Breathe low and become aware of your breath. Observe your thoughts. You can't control what you think, but you can take a sit and watch your thinking. Then, at some point, your thoughts become like fluff that's passing by in front of you. You get used to this feeling of watching your thinking like watching clouds going across the sky, one after another. Let go of any thought that stays there for two long (more than a couple of seconds). If it doesn't disappear, question it: Why this thought? Where did it come from? Where will it go after an hour? Questioning is very powerful. Generally.

Yes, the next line after the equation says exactly that: "where the dot means...". It should be, \[ \kappa = \dot{\psi} \] 'dot' to represent the derivative by the length of arc is traditional in differential geometry.

How can the paths be 'kept joined' if a Stern-Gerlach splitter is introduced? The whole point of the SG experiment is to introduce a correlation between spin projection and linear momentum --which gives you the path. Maybe there's something about your setup I don't understand. Perhaps you could make a drawing?

I can't give you references to something 'I have a feeling' of. So I suppose you mean the bit about 'information is physical'. Physical systems --whatever the theory we're considering-- have a way of measuring the total amount of information, which is called volume of phase space. Phase-space volume is a way of assigning a measure to the extension of all possible dynamical states accessible to a physical system. The definition can be applied to quantum systems as well as to classical (non-quantum) systems, thermodynamic systems, etc. Volume of phase space is synonymous to 'amount of information stored in the system': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space Another formulation of the relationship between physics and information is Landauer's principle. If you erase one bit of information from a computer, you must do it at the expense of heating up the universe. On the different definitions of entropy: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Entropy