This was written as a response to an entry in Pocket's LJ, http://onefamiliarface.livejournal.com/93608.htmlRead more... )

I feel as though I'm far more cognizant of my mortality than most people my age, which leads to an irrational fear of dying before I get to raise my children. Somehow I feel as though raising children is the most a person can do to achieve a meaningful way of living on and affecting the world when you die. Of course I also worry that such ( Read more... )

So I'm trying to make a Minkowski-like space-time diagram with a proper time axis. This obviously presents some conceptual challenges when dealing with multiple frames of reference, and a hard to shake Minkowski diagram intuition ( Read more... )

alright, that was too long and not engaging enough. How about this one. So here's the idea with the multiverse. The eternal/infinite inflation model is basically the following. Ignore the universe, and suppose all there is is an infinitely large vacuum. Turns out even empty space can have intrinsic field structure with energy density. E = mc^ ( Read more... )

The cosmology group that I'm trying to get in with at Tufts has a few of people who work with eternal/infinite inflating multiverse theory, a couple of which deal with the anthropic principle, which I offer an example of as Bostrom states it apparently. It's not something I've put a GREAT amount of thought into. Also, it's in reference to a paper ( Read more... )

The Play Write wishes to inform You that he doesn't really know where he's going with this one. Yet, here it is. It's started. And unfortunately for the Play Write, inaction is simply not possible. For here We are, and even if the next hour and a half had only the soundtrack of the occasional cough courtesy of the swine flu from the audience, ( Read more... )

I very nearly posted a nice little self-deprecating monologue for y'alls before snapping out of it, so be thankful. But it's recently hit me that I've had my head in my proverbial academic ass for a while now, and now that I have a week or two to breathe before grad school hits me, I find myself reflecting on how I haven't hardly done anything ( Read more... )

Here's a question. Suppose I have an electron sitting comfortably in some finite potential well (think a ball in a soup bowl where the ball is moving around in the bowl but not moving fast enough to pop out of the bowl). Suppose further that the wavefunction of the electron extends outside of the bowl (think of the ball as a wave whose ends flop ( Read more... )

You know the scene in the Prestige when they're meeting with Nikoli Tesla and he takes them to a field at night time with all the lightbulbs stuck in the ground and yet shining, but taking them out of the ground turns them off? I didn't like that part of the movie because I thought that was not possible, and for some reason I appreciated some ( Read more... )

I am writing a thesis now. I wanted it to be about teleportation, as per long standing obligations, but that didn't pan out. It's about dipoles, their potential functions, and the existence of bound states for various dimensions. It's only interesting if you have any idea what it is, but even then it's not stellar. Of course I'd be happy to get ( Read more... )