…f the equation above. Someone the same height as you but heavier will have increased mass, and fall faster. Someone the same weight as you but taller will have increased surface area, and fall slower. It’s even easier if your partner is of your same proportions (that is, taller or shorter, but no more overweight or underweight than you are). Everyone has roughly the same body density, so mass is roughly proportional to volume. But volume is roughl…
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…kowski. So, William will identify one possible sequence of spatial regions leading up to the death of Harold. An astronaut moving away from William with velocity v = c/2 will identify a different sequence of spatial regions. However, William and the astronaut will agree about the order in which time-like separated events occur: first Harold is crowned, and then Harold is slain. Figure 1: An observer on Earth and an astronaut traveling away with ve…
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…choosing 20 of my favorite great physicists, I charted each one’s date of birth against the date they published a groundbreaking discovery. This indicated how old each physicist was when they made a major breakthrough. Here are the results, organized from youngest to oldest (the physicists inside the dotted lines are the median): Here are a few interesting features of this chart: There are great physicists on both ends of the list. Those who were…
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…s introduces a tower’s worth of ‘lower down’ groups into our ontology, and risks the possibility that a ‘highest’ automorphism group doesn’t exist. Or, if it is possible to fix a structural foundation by promoting the ‘whole shebang’ of higher group structures, then it seems that our ontology is excessively extravagant and uninformative. In summary: structural realism is forced to either risk incoherence (Horn 1), or else adopt an overly extravaga…
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…etween author and reviewer, when everyone has access to the interwebs? An anonymized online interface would be quicker, easier, and more useful. In particular, it would allow for quick clarificatory questions, and even back-and-forth discussions of important results between author and reviewer, before a finalized report is submitted to the editor. Incentives for high-quality reviews. Most journals don’t offer you an incentive to do a good job in a…
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