No Big Bang

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Ned
Well, Jon, the next time I hear any request for funding of a science project, I know where my vote will lie. Your and KN attitudues about non physicists is nothing less than appalling.

Your attitude about physicists is appalling. I'm smart enough to know when I don't have the tools to comment on a subject.

You would do well to learn that.

[KrazyHorse]

Did we hurt your feelings, Neddie?

Maybe you should leave again because nobody's voting for you for the hall of fame.



The simple fact is that you need us more than we need you. Physicists are smart mother****ers. Cut our funding and we'll make twice as much money whoring ourselves out to companies or instead we'll go to Europe. We're the ones who made the electronic revolution possible. We made nuclear power and nuclear weapons possible. We made electricity possible. There are only 40000 of us in the whole world, and we're the smartest single group of people around.

[KrazyHorse]

We've been building a pyramid of knowledge for the last 400 years, starting with Newton.

Most people don't even understand him. But they want to be taught the stuff that sits on the apex. Or even worse, they have some crackpot idea of why that stuff at the apex is wrong. You don't even speak the language, so stop trying to make stylistic corrections to our writings.

It took me until I was 17 to learn everything done until 1700. It took me another year to get to 1800, and one more to get to 1900. It took two more years to get to 1950, and two years after that to get to 1975 or so. Then I specialised, and now I know most everything done in a few subfields up to basically the present day. Nothing after 1850 or so was "easy". I had to work at all of it. And I'm ****ing smart.

[trev]

IIRC Inflation theory was developed to address the structural issues you raised.

It has been developed as a mathematical construction, but there is no proof it could address the problems, no known mechanism that would cause expansion, just unproven guesses and no way of proving or disproving it as a workable theory outside of mathematics. It is highly uncertain that it could address many of the Big Bang problems which is why there are many incompatible big bang theories, each designed to address a specific issue, but all incomcapable of fixing more than 1 or 2 of the many problems with the theory.

[KrazyHorse]

Seriously. what would those problems be, trev?

[KrazyHorse]

This gem, for instance

The organisation of the universe into walls of super clusters of galaxies with large voids in between the walls cannot be explained by the Big Bang model as the time frame required for these structures to develop naturally is many orders of magnitude larger than Big Bang lifetime of our universe.

is completely false.

[KrazyHorse]

I have personally written a crude N-body simulator (particle-mesh method) using the zeldovich approximation to set initial conditions and I arrived at something approximating the right answer.

I also personally know two or three of the top working cosmologists in LSS. They are not off by "orders of magnitude". They are, in fact, frighteningly close to reality.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Just for kicks KH, what is your IQ (I'm shure you know) and what IQ would you say is required for general coneptual understanding of physics and what level is require for your level of expertese, aka able to make meaningfull contributions to the field. Do you feel this later number is continuing to rise as physics becomes more complex, it has been rising has it now stabalized or has it perhaps always been the same? Do you see physics eventualy becoming so complex that it simply outstrips the capacity to learn the current body of knowlage within a human life time (assuming no major incresse in life expectancy) and thus advancment will slow to a crawl?

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Impaler[WrG]
Just for kicks KH, what is your IQ (I'm shure you know)

I do, but I actually think IQ is rather meaningless. I was given tests at the ages of 4 and 7. The test maxed out at 155, which is the score I was given both times. I think the SD on that test was 15, but it could have been 16. I'm probably not too much above the ceiling score (just a feeling I have). Between 160 and 170 would probably be reasonable. Call it ~1 per 100000.

Like I said, though, it's not really a meaningful number. I have doubts both about the relevance of IQ tests in general and also about the ability of such tests to perform reliably in the upper ranges.

[KrazyHorse]

Generally the people you meet who work in theoretical cosmology and high-energy theory (the two things I work at) do not come much lower than that (based solely on what I've seen of the speed of their thinking). I'm probably a bit above average even for that pack, but not enough to make a real difference to the amount of work I have to put in to keep up.

[KrazyHorse]

I think that physics has become so complex that inventing entirely new fields as was possible for individuals a couple of hundred years ago is now probably impossible. At best you get something like a string theory creation, which is a great creative leap (despite the fact that its usefulness is dubious) but which cannot compare to earlier discoveries in either its profound novelty or its breadth.

Luckily, we've also become better at breaking problems up into smaller pieces and we have more people working on problems. The number of scientists increases even faster than the general population. While this does sometimes mean a dilution of the talent, it's mitigated by the fact that there is a bigger pool to draw from. Previously more of the public was excluded by accident of birth from ever taking part meaningfully in the scientific process (class and money). In the modern world most top talent has a chance.

Scientists have also become more professional. Greater portions of their lives are spent working on individual problems. We don't get to be like Newton any more, spending decades on alchemy and theology. The training takes so long that there is less time to spare during the productive decade or decade and a half (25-40).

[Impaler[WrG]]

Ok darn high, though I've heard childhood IQ tests that young cant be directly applied into adulthood as their taking mental-age into account, aka at 4 you had the mental age of a 7 year old, at 7 you had the mental age of a 12 year old or somthing along thouse lines. A child may just be a little ahead of the curve which iis ofcorse a sign of potentialy high adult IQ but is not in itself a guarantee. I'd also agree that high IQ testing is more difficult then normal.

1 in 100,000 sounds a bit high to me as that would put you in the top 3,000 people in the whole country and would be on par with Willey Coyote super-genius. You earlier sighted 40,000 as the total world population of Phycisits which out of 6 billion is 1 in 150,000 but to be fair only a small fraction of the worlds population is born in a country that has the kind of educational oportunity nessary to get in the club. I'm shure some very bright diamonds are picked from the rough but the reality its predominantly westerners and the Japanese, I'll be generous and say 1 billion is the real talent pool which drops the ratio to 1 in 25,000. Now also consider that not everyone of that level is a physisist, some are going to be in other science fields and other carrear paths. So I think were looking at around 1 in 5,000 for typical physisist which would be around 155.

Thanks for the reply

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Impaler[WrG]
So I think were looking at around 1 in 5,000 for typical physisist which would be around 155

a) That is higher than I think a typical physicist scores. The study I saw gave a figure of 140 for an average faculty member (I believe this was a median)

b) One in a 100000 is an IQ of 163 or so (assuming sigma=15)

c) The average is driven down by experimentalists. At least that's the theorist's conceit. It does seem to be true, however. From what I've seen, it goes: astrophysics < experimentalists < theorists

[KrazyHorse]

There are, for instance, a number of physicists in my department who do not know and who would probably not be able to learn quantum field theory in any meaningful way. They don't need to know it, and can be good physicists without knowing it. There are virtually no theorists (whatever their field) who do not understand QFT in a deep way.

Again, I don't think it completely corresponds to IQ. It takes a peculiar kind of intelligence. The fundamentals of logic and mathematical ability have to be there, but in addition you require a significant physical intuition for problems. It's the reason that mathematicians often can't be physicists. The reason physicists often can't be mathematicians is that we're sloppy. We come to trust our intuition so much that we throw around bald assertions which are not necessarily sufficiently precise.

We generally assume that functions are (to quote a professor of many-bodied QFT) not "pathological"...

[KrazyHorse]

Just for general reference (since I had to look up the constants in the normal distribution versus defn of error function), the proportion of a normally distributed population more than x standard deviations above the mean is 0.5*erfc(x/sqrt(2)) where erfc = 1 - erf