“We note that there are contrary requirements on drivers in that they must respect the minimum [sic] time, they are attempting to create manageable gaps to cars in front, yet they are also required to avoid unnecessarily stopping at the pit exit or driving unnecessarily slowly. It was also particularly noted that the race director accepted that these contrary requirements exist.”

This is such a load of bullshit. Respecting the maximum lap time is a requirement set by the director's race notes. Avoiding stopping and/or driving unnecessarily slowly at the pit exit is a requirement set by the rulebook. Creating a manageable gap to cars in front is NOT a requirement. It is a competitive advantage. And as such, drivers and teams are free to pursue an advantage as long as they are within the requirements. There aren't contrary requirements. You either set a lap earlier than everybody else when the track is not in optimal conditions, or you wait till the last moment and take the risk of traffic.

If I were Leclerc or Hamilton, I would use this ruling to challenge last week's DSQ. After all, there are two contrary requirements if we follow the stewards' logic: the requirement of the wear of the planck and the requirement of running low to maximize ground effect.

Ok, so Andretti made their bid supported by three arguments:

1. They had arranged a PU deal with Renault. This technically is not necessary, since a team without PU supplier is automatically assigned one. But things go always smoother when the agreement is mutual instead of forced.
2. The deal also included something similar to the Haas model, where Andretti would be able to buy many parts from Alpine. This is really important for Andretti, since all their racing experience is in spec or quasi-spec series.
3. And the deal also included the rebranding of the Renault PU as Cadillac. Andretti wanted to sell this as bringing a new constructor to the sport.

But it turns out that all three arguments are no longer true, and haven't been true for seven months. This is a huge question mark about the viability of the Andretti project.

And it is also a huge question mark on FIA's bidding process, that selected Andretti just one week ago. Did Andretti try to hide the fact that the contract had expired? Did FIA fail in the due diligence? Or maybe FIA knew about the expiration, but didn't care since they only care about their stupid dispute against FOM and the teams, and not the quality of the racing.

Friendly reminder that FIA gets their funding from the entrance fees paid by teams and drivers, so more teams equals more money for FIA, no matter how shitty those teams are. On the other hand, FOM and the teams get their money from tickets, F1TV subscriptions and sponsors, which rely (among other factors) on the popularity of the sport. So FOM and the teams have a vested interest in protecting the quality of the racing as a means to gain popularity. Both parties to this dispute are moved by greed, but only one is (accidentally) aligned with our interest as fans.

What you're talking about is the energy dependence of the coupling constants, which is a phenomenon that is very well understood theoretically, and also checked in experiments. The early universe was much hotter, and thus particles had much more kinetic energy and "felt" slightly different coupling constants. The neat thing is that, since this is a purely energy-dependent effect, we can recreate the conditions of the early universe: the collisions at LHC have an energy of the order of 1 TeV, which corresponds to a temperature of 10^16^K, the temperature 10^-12^ s after the Big Bang. Anything after the first 10^-12^ s we can directly recreate, and from 10^-12^ s to about 10^-30^ s-ish we can more or less reliably extrapolate. And of course this is all included in the standard Lambda-CMD cosmology.

Although the article is behind a paywall (which is somewhat strange in cosmology, but I digress), you can check other articles by the same author that also use the "varying constants" framework, for example https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11667. His framework is that the speed of light c, the Planck constant h, the Boltzmann constant k and the Gravitational constant G depend directly on time, or to be more precise, on the expansion factor of the universe. There are two big differences with respect to what you were saying:

• c, h and k are not coupling constants, and therefore they don't receive any energy-dependent corrections. In fact, you could think of these constants as "conversion factors" between units: c converts space-time coordinates in seconds to space-time coordinates in meters, k converts kinetic energy in Joules (or electronvolts) to kinetic energy in Kelvin, and h converts angular momentum or action measured in quanta to angular momentum or action measured in J·s (or eV·s). Honestly it doesn't make much sense to me that these constants could change (what does it means, in physical terms), that they could change in a correlated way, or that they could change in a correlated way to one, and only one, coupling constant, G.
• Since this is a time-dependent change, there is no real way to significantly test the hypothesis (unlike the energy-dependent changes). We can not go back in time, or to wait to a different time when these constants would be different. He actually proposes to study how the experimental determinations of these constants in the last 10-20 years, which sounds very wild, as those tiny differences are very susceptible, by definition, to experimental uncertainties, and they are not very suitable for controlled tests.

New distro just dropped

RES has (had?) a dark mode for old reddit.