This is just straight-up gossip, but why not:
Tegmark used to go around polling physicists at conferences about which interpretation of quantum mechanics they prefer. A colleague of mine said that they were sitting near Tegmark and saw him fudging the numbers in his notes — erasing the non-Many Worlds tallies from those who said they supported Many Worlds as well as others, IIRC.
Banned for using the word metacognition seriously.
Max Tegmark has taken a break from funding neo-Nazi media to blather about Artificial General Intelligence.
As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
The first clause of the opening line, and we've already hit a "citation needed".
He goes from there to taking a prediction market seriously. And that Aschenbrenner guy who thinks that Minecraft speedruns are evidence that AI will revolutionize "science, technology, and the economy".
You know, ten or fifteen years ago, I would have disagreed with Tegmark about all sorts of things, but I would have granted him default respect for being a scientist.
Hark! I hear the wanker roar.
Rooting around for that Luke Skywalker "every single word in that sentence was wrong" GIF....
"Comment whose upvotes all come from programming dot justworks dot dev dot infosec dot works" sure has become a genre of comment.
Yeah, that sounds like text which somebody quickly typed up for the sake of having something.
Scott Computers is married and a father but still writes like an incel and fundamentally can't believe that anyone interested in computer science or physics might think in a different way than he does. Dilbert Scott is an incredibly divorced man. Scott Adderall is the leader of the beige tribe.
I found this description in the PhD thesis of Crystal Bennes:
Despite months of searching online and making requests for a copy of the image from those present at the talk, the image exists in description only. In a 2016 Science magazine article on the likelihood of Barish’s winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 2017 (which he eventually did), journalist Adrian Cho describes the image as ‘a man writing on a woman’s bare back and, next to her, a stage prop in the form of a cartoonish racial caricature’. On Twitter, the photograph has variously been described as featuring ‘blackface and bikini-clad girls’ and ‘a horrible racist/sexist slide featuring blackface’. Although one can easily conjure up a photograph from any of the individual descriptions, it is rather more difficult to imagine a single image which includes all of them.
Yet after spending much time attempting to source the image used by Barish, it occurred to me that, in many respects, the fact that I could not locate the image was almost more interesting than if I were able to find it. While the sexist and racist undertones of the image speak to Barish’s individual inability to comprehend its inappropriateness, the fact that I was unable to obtain a copy of the image through my professional and social networks in the physics community hints perhaps at that community’s tendency to pull together and close ranks in the face of potentially explosive press for one of the field’s leading lights. [...] Eventually, after many months of emails to different people in my physics network, I was able to obtain a copy of the image. The image was provided to me on the sole condition that I did not reveal who I obtained it from.
This reminds me of the time a few years before that when Didier Sornette illustrated his conference-talk slides with mudflap women silhouettes.
Sneers from r/physics! First up, this comment by napqe:
I'm sorry, but this is like awarding the nobel prize for literature to Xerox/HP/Brother for "improvements to printing".
And in the same thread, from GustapheOfficial:
Last year's prize was too relevant, they had to stagger the physics by a year.
We also have this by M1st_:
What's next? Someone gets a Nobel prize for another algorithm that numerically solves differential equations??
Finally, we've the title of this thread, by TheSkells:
Yeah, "physics"
Fun fact: The plain vanilla physics major at MIT requires three semesters of quantum mechanics. And that's not including the quantum topics included in the statistical physics course, or the experiments in the lab course that also depend upon it.
Grad school is another year or so of quantum on top of that, of course.
(MIT OpenCourseWare actually has fairly extensive coverage of all three semesters: 8.04, 8.05 and 8.06. Zwiebach was among the best lecturers in the department back in my day, too.)