Recent content by jacksonwalter

Get a CS Minor if you can. If you're dedicated you can take one CS class, learn the basics, and pick up anything else you need. Most people aren't and it's hilarious to see my physics and math friends that took C++ their freshman year or something try to program something nowadays. I program all...

Has anyone heard back from UNCG? I applied there, Bard, and UCSB. At this point it seems like plently of people have heard back from Bard and UCSB so I doubt I'll be getting into either of those, but I think I was probably best suited for the one at UNCG anyways so fingers crossed.

Here is the response I just posted on Landsburg's blog. Seems to make sense. I apologize in advance for the crappy notation.

Wolfram is probably using a Taylor series with many terms to do the ln (1+x) calculation, which would produce the oscillatory behavior.

Hm..just read it, don't really have time to work on it. Maybe try setting f(x) = 1 and seeing if it has multiple intersections on x:(0,1)?

Well, now I know to take most of what he says with a grain of salt, although I was really trying to get at the broader point of figuring out how to identify nonsense physics being masqueraded as cutting edge research if you're not an expert in the field yet, as well as nail down the connotations...

Coincidentally, Woit wrote http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=2720" a few hours after I started this thread.

Thanks, there seems to be a little more politics in physics than I realized, especially on the cutting edge of research where people's opinions can be pushed in the absence of hard data.

Verlinde's paper was cited over 200 times apparently but he is labeled as a crackpot in "The Reference Frame." I agree, that word is used way too often, many times in place of an expanded account of why it is believed that the person is a 'crackpot'.

Being an undergraduate, it's difficult to simply read a paper or book and be able to label it as crackpottery, as I'm attempting to learn what's in the paper or book itself. I read a bunch of physics blogs, which makes it even harder, as they're usually radically opinionated. I just finished...

Thanks for the props, Phrak, although I don't really find it too great a question as it already seems to have a well founded explanation. In regard to Phrak's signature, maybe it'd be better phrased as 'where's the experimental evidence' rather than photograph. I agree that while all this...

So what exactly do you mean by us having made great progress? It's hard to see how you can 'almost' have proved something. Are there any specific stumbling blocks or general properties of the Riemann Hypothesis that make it in particular especially difficult to solve?

Sweet, thanks. So what consequences will occur as a result of proving the Riemann Hypothesis?

What about the Riemann Zeta function makes it so difficult to prove that all the zeros have real part 1/2? Is it that we lack the discoveries and tools necessary, or we just aren't creative enough, or maybe both? Same question for Goldbach's. Fermat's seemed to rely on elliptic curves which have...

Thanks. The other assumption that I had made which may or may not be true was that information is always conserved. I've read a little about the Hawking-Susskind debate and I guess it's now commonly accepted that Susskind was right, information is never lost in a black hole. His main motivation...