nchagnet (u/nchagnet)

nchagnet commented on The History of F1 Design espn.com/espn/feature/sto... · Posted by u/anonyonoor

nchagnet · 18 days ago

Interesting that they just skipped the entire Verstappen dominance era, but decided instead to jump to the budgeoning McLaren Piastri-Norris dominance (about a year old only).

Of course with 75 years of history you need to trim it down, but that's an interesting choice...

nchagnet commented on Europe launches a drive to attract scientists and researchers apnews.com/article/europe... · Posted by u/benkan

andsoitis · 4 months ago

> More than 380 grant projects have been cut so far, including work to combat internet censorship in China and Iran and a project consulting with Indigenous communities to understand environmental changes in Alaska’s Arctic region.

I do not know that these are two strong examples in favor of an argument that important research is being cut.

If anyone thinks they are, I would be curious to hear whether the EU would fund these two projects.

nchagnet · 4 months ago

I would argue the latter one is quite the interesting project from a US interests perspective. I've personally been hearing and reading a lot about the possible impact of climate change on the artic region in terms of resource availability and even transport channels (an arctic passageway would be huge).

nchagnet commented on Show HN: Undercutf1 – F1 Live Timing TUI with Driver Tracker, Variable Delay github.com/JustAman62/und... · Posted by u/deltaknight

nchagnet · 4 months ago

This is such a cool project! Congrats!

nchagnet commented on Einstein's dream of a unified field theory accomplished? phys.org/news/2025-04-ein... · Posted by u/MadcapJake

floxy · 4 months ago

What would be a better title? "Unifying gravity and electromagnetism in a classical theory"?

nchagnet · 4 months ago

That'd be a good start. This article is well anchored within geometrodynamics (the theories which attempt to explain all physics as geometry), so maybe making that clear would avoid confusions already.

nchagnet commented on Einstein's dream of a unified field theory accomplished? phys.org/news/2025-04-ein... · Posted by u/MadcapJake

floxy · 4 months ago

Interesting, I've never heard that before. Do you know of a lay-man's article / book that goes more in-depth into treating mass as a curvature of space-time?

nchagnet · 4 months ago

Sadly no, most examples I'm familiar with are within research articles. A typical thing done within such articles is to consider a spacetime geometry, calculate its Einstein tensor and map it to some ansatz like that of a perfect relativistic fluid. It's a neat way to interpret the geometry in question as an energy/matter content.

Hope that helps point you in the correct direction!

nchagnet commented on Einstein's dream of a unified field theory accomplished? phys.org/news/2025-04-ein... · Posted by u/MadcapJake

floxy · 4 months ago

But I want to go the other way. In general relativity space-time curves because of mass. But what is mass? Just a given. But maybe mass comes about as distortion of space-time.

nchagnet · 4 months ago

This is what I was trying to convey: this is already how we think about it.

In general relativity, mass is not more fundamental than the gravitational field and its curvature. While we generally speak of spacetime curving because of mass, this doesn't mean this is a one way relation. The stress energy tensor is equal to the Einstein tensor (roughly curvature), so the relationship is already two-way.

It's a cool thing to think about of course, just wanted to clarify.

nchagnet commented on Einstein's dream of a unified field theory accomplished? phys.org/news/2025-04-ein... · Posted by u/MadcapJake

floxy · 4 months ago

>We discovered that on top of the new nonlinear field equations, electric charge is related to the local divergence or compression of spacetime. Charge is therefore a field, which has its own laws of motion.

I wonder if mass could also be represented as a distortion of space-time. Like if charge is the divergence, mass could be the curl?

And I'm in way over my head here, but if charge is the compression of space time in a classical theory, what keeps it in place, instead of diffusing/spreading out? Seems like space-time is very stiff (i.e. speed of light is pretty high). Something to do with the non-linearity built into this new theory? Space time "yields" after a certain point?

Fun stuff to think about anyway!

nchagnet · 4 months ago

This is already sort of the case. Of course it's not as immediate a comparison, but in the same way that charge sources the divergence of the electric field (Maxwell's equations), mass-energy are sources of the Einstein equations involving the curvature. It's the same reasoning and something we generally already consider.

nchagnet commented on Einstein's dream of a unified field theory accomplished? phys.org/news/2025-04-ein... · Posted by u/MadcapJake

nchagnet · 4 months ago

The title of the phys.org article is a bit more misleading than the article itself (when are they not).

What the authors did is build a unified setup for classical gravity and electromagnetism as the solution of one action, under specific assumptions (Weyl geometry, etc...). Usually we consider gravity as the curvature of spacetime, and electromagnetic forces as the curvature of the electromagnetic field. The authors built something elegant where you can get both in one go.

What this work doesn't do is as important as what it does given the "ambitious" title. The authors' work is interesting, but a casual interpretation of the title would really mislead people into thinking they solved the unification problem.

This work doesn't address other forces or the general particularities of the standard model and how they would also bundle. The second thing it doesn't answer is how to quantize any of these fields (gravity is notoriously difficult to quantize for many reasons).

nchagnet commented on Marine Le Pen banned from running in 2027 and given four-year sentence theguardian.com/world/liv... · Posted by u/tlogan

ChocolateGod · 5 months ago

I didn't say letting someone of, a crime has been committed and the person should be punished. But forbidding someone from running from office? I don't think that should be the power of the judiciary. That should be the power and responsibility of the electorate (to not vote for them).

nchagnet · 5 months ago

You do understand that this is explicitly mandated by the law and only in special cases can this be lifted (and here the judge mentioned the lack of remorse or admission from the defendant was a deciding factor for this)? Here is a reference for that: https://www.vie-publique.fr/questions-reponses/297965-inelig...

nchagnet commented on Show HN: Recipe Search Engine for Cooking Enthusiasts chefcodex.com/search... · Posted by u/losincos

nchagnet · 5 months ago

Why do you need a signin to search the recipes? What does it bring to the experience besides bookmarks?