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Sean Carroll

@seanmcarroll

3 Nov

My rough election-watching algorithm tomorrow:

* If either PA or FL are called for Biden, he'll win.

* If both PA and FL are called for Trump, he'll win.

* If they're both delayed, but Texas is called for Biden, he'll win.

Otherwise we're in for a long night/week/month.

These are far from certainties (T could win both PA and FL but Biden somehow wins both Georgia and North Carolina, for example), but I think a decent calibration of expectations.

Also, scrap the Electoral College, it's absurd.

Read 4 tweets

Sean Carroll

@seanmcarroll

6 Oct

Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize for showing that black holes are an almost-unavoidable prediction of classical general relativity. Let's take a peek into what that entailed. 1/n

Einstein wrote down the equation for the dynamics of spacetime in 1915. It was complicated, and he was skeptical that it could be solved exactly. For his own investigation of e.g. the orbit of Mercury, he used approximation methods like any good physicist. 2/

But just a month later Karl Schwarzschild, taking time off between battles in the German army, found an exact solution under the assumption of perfect spherical symmetry. Tragically, Schwarzshild died of pemphigus a year later. 3/

Read 19 tweets

Sean Carroll

@seanmcarroll

7 Jul

I firmly believe that the best response to speech that one disagrees with is to offer better arguments in refutation, not to silence people. But an open letter like this one in Harper's is pretty unpersuasive, to the point of being anti-productive. (1/n)
harpers.org/a-letter-on-ju…

In part that's due to the particular group of signatories. Several of them are people I enormously admire. But others have themselves been involved in attempts to silence people they disagree with. And none of them is exactly lacking ways to have their voices be heard. (2/n)

More importantly, the letter declines to engage with substance, instead straw-manning the incidents they object to. We are told, for example, that "professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class." (3/n)

Read 10 tweets

Sean Carroll

@seanmcarroll

15 Sep 19

@NewsHour

Our experience constitutes only a tiny sliver of reality — me on PBS @NewsHour.

@NewsHour

@NewsHour It’s fair to ask how we would ever know something like that. The answer is that we provisionally accept the best theory we have that explains what we do experience, and if that implies there’s much more out there, so bit it.

Of course someone might come up with a better theory, or new data might change our view of the best current one. But until then, the universe is under no obligation to confine its extent to that which is easily perceptible to us.

Read 5 tweets

Sean Carroll

@seanmcarroll

14 Mar 19

One of the many great things about Pi is that it's algorithmically compressible. You can express the idea of Pi using far fewer characters than are actually contained in its numerical expression (which would be an infinite number). #PiDay 1/

Between 0 and 10 (say), there are an infinite number of rational numbers: those expressible as p/q, where both p and q are integers. The rationals are "dense" - given any number between 0 and 10, there is a rational number arbitrarily close to it. 2/

But there are infinitely more irrational numbers, those that can't be expressed as p/q. It's a bigger infinity than the number of rationals. The rationals are "countable," the irrationals are "uncountable." There are a lot of irrational numbers out there. 3/

Read 7 tweets

Sean Carroll

@seanmcarroll

14 Feb 19

@nature

A new study in @nature shows that small scientific teams are more likely to be truly disruptive than large collaborations. It's great work, but has engendered a "shift funding to smaller science" narrative that I think is a bit off the mark.
nature.com/articles/s4158…

For one thing, I would bet that papers with fewer authors are also more likely to be ignored and get zero citations than those from big collaborations. There's just more variance in the world of papers with one or two authors.

@edyong209

More importantly, this paragraph in @edyong209's writeup of the story kind of undoes the narrative entirely. The causal factor doesn't seem to be size of the collaboration, it's receiving funding from top agencies! theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

Read 5 tweets

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