Get Started Handling Academic Citations Like a Pro

…to the clipboard, you can add it automatically to Bibdesk by typing Command-Option-L. Textmate Drop-down Menu. Make sure you’ve installed Textmate (trial available from Macromates) and Bidesk. To set up that neat little drop-down menu in Textmate, first download and unzip the “Completion.zip” package (available here). Second, double-click each of the .tmComand files. Next, copy the binary file “BibDeskTMCompletions” somewhere convenient, like a fo…

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LHC Black Holes: Why I’m Not Holding My Breath

…t-jobs are receiving is a bit discouraging. Some people do hope to see mini-black-holes at CERN, it’s true. Some calculate that we will see thousands. But: (1) if you have any empiricist scruples, then you won’t believe in these mini-black-holes at CERN; alternatively, (2) if you have no such empiricist scruples, then you’ll agree that all mini-black-holes at CERN are short-lived and harmless. Here’s why: Let’s begin with (2), and suppose that you…

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Beyond the CPT theorem

…entirely. It is in this sense that this fact expresses something like the -theorem, although unlike the -theorem the mathematics is completely trivial. There are two steps to seeing why this “Fact” is true. The first is to observe that, for every self-adjoint operator , there is something called a conjugation operator such that . Here’s how it’s defined. The self-adjoint operator comes with its own basis set for the Hilbert space, . That’s becaus…

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Accuracy, Applicability, and Tarskian Semantics

…the behavior of the system accurately enough. That, however, is too coarse-grained a measure of the way models can fail to provide semantically sound representations of physical systems. Consider the example of a model of a body of liquid as provided by the classical theory of fluid mechanics. When the liquid is not too viscous, is in a state near hydrodynamical and thermodynamical equilibrium and the level of precision and accuracy one demands o…

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Is the cosmological metric about to flip Euclidean?

…leration: a very brief background. Around 1998, the majority of physicists accepted that expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Since then, all bets are off as to the large scale structure of the spacetime. The experts simply don’t agree as to what kind of Universe we live in, and it sometimes seems that the wilder the proposal, the better. This makes peering over the fence at the zoo of cosmological theories rather entertaining. There are a l…

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