Category: Math, natural sciences, and engineering

  • Problem: Linux running in a VM in VMWare Fusion loses network access (sometimes) after a suspend and restart

    The symptom is easy to see if you try to access a website from the browser. After a suspend, the DHCP address can expire. This causes network failing including inability to access interent. It needs to be reset manually: Acknowledgement: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-linux-renew-dhcp-client-ip-address/

  • 2022 Physics Nobel –

    I am pleased that this year’s Nobel in Physics honored work that had its foundation in J. S. Bell’s work, and it is unfortunate that because of his untimely death he cannot receive the Nobel. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2022/press-release/ However there is a technical inaccuracy in the announcement: ‘John Clauser developed John Bell’s ideas, leading to a practical experiment.…

  • Physics and math are not what I was taught

    This is a running list of corrections to things I thought I knew at one time but which have either proven to be untrue or at least been called into question. Schrödinger did not claim that quantum mechanics says that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. (Schrödinger’s cat is…

  • Photons are not particles

    “…the electron has more of the attributes of a classical particle than does the light quantum although neither, of course, has all the attributes of a classical particle, since they both show interference effects. In the chapter on the uncertainty principle we shall verify that, in an actual process of measurement of the position of…

  • What if spacetime is flat?

    The original derivation of Einstein’s laws of gravitation (general relativity) was based on the notion of curved spacetime. The same equations can be derived assuming flat spacetime, taking a particle physics viewpoint. Does it matter, since the equations are the same? Evidently yes – this is from Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler’s 1973 classic Gravitation, also…

  • Great written works of the Indo-European world

    Obviously this is very much a work in progress! Homer The Iliad The Odyssey Pānini Aṣṭādhyāyī Dhātupāṭha Euclid Elements Apollonius of Perga Conics Archimedes On the Equilibrium of Planes The Sand Reckoner Quadrature of the Parabola Anonymous The Bhagavad Gita Aeschylus The Oresteia Plato The Republic … Aristotle Categories Poetics The New Testament – multiple…