Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

– that guy

You need to forget about the details in order to grasp the essence.

OK, but where are they when the LK99 first came onto scene?

Now let’s see which youtube “science channels” do a debunk on their own content pushed out a mere month ago.

The point is there are established conventions among the practitioners on how these are pronounced, and not getting them right says something about the youtuber who may otherwise appear as an expert.

You might be right on how the name ‘Schrieffer’ should be pronounced in its original tongue, but I’ve heard multiple former students and colleagues of Bob Schrieffer pronounce it otherwise to conclude that theirs is probably how Schrieffer himself intended his name to be pronounced.

Yeah, can’t wait to hear economists’ take, or The Economist’s…

Hi Joe Brian

It is waiting for reproducibility is what it is. It won’t matter much if it got published today in some no name journal – a journal is going to gamble just as this youtuber did, for the slim chance of this being true (not saying it isn’t)

Also, a quantum well is just particle in a box. Nothing fancy about it. Guy mentioned tunneling a lot but tunneling happens in metal, semiconductor, and insulator. Doesn’t really mean anything. In fact if you need to tunnel, that means there’s a chance to back scatter, so it won’t be superconducting.

Not to be snobbish or anything, but at this juncture I wouldn’t trust anyone who can’t pronounce arXiv (or Schrieffer for that matter) correctly to explain room temperature superconductivity to me. Hell I barely believe anyone with a materials/physics degree…

Just espresso? Conflict of interest!

/s just in case

I agree with ya. I can hear it whenever I intentionally seek it out, even when it’s relatively loud out there. I tend to think of it as some baseline intensity (at some extremely high frequency/frequensies I’ve tried but yet to pin down) my brain perceives, that gets washed out more as external stimuli become stronger. This is partly what prompted me to speak about a reference level of intensity distribution over frequency (and therefore a power spectrum if you will) in the other comment thread. Normal brains have a reference level that adapts to the environmental average. Those of us with tinnitus have some nasty spikes at high frequensies. “Hearing silence”, I speculate, is more of a response to a changing reference level – some of the responses will be the brain compensating for the change and thereby inducing acoustic (?) illusions reported in this work. A tinnitus brain will respond to a receding reference level by focusing again on those nasty frequency spikes.

Having read the NYT article (with the PNAS paper still not available through a certain hub), I think a useful analytical framework would perhaps be to think of silence as a negative space. E.g., take some background noise (this could be the environmental noise averaged over some time scale) at certain overall intensity as “zero” (or reference level), then complete silence will have the same frequency content as that background but with negative intensity. From there one can start talking about various forms of “partial silence” as different spectral compositions of negative intensity. I’d even posit that some of the illusions they discovered would work in a similar fashion with positive intensity boost as well (e.g.two disjoint boosts vs one sustained boost). It is probably more about the frequency content than the intensity relative to the reference level.

In fact this goes all the way back to Hamilton when he invented quaternion, in which i,j,k are used as basis vectors (which are generalizations of the imaginary i). Later Gibbs dropped the scalar component and gave us the modern vector.

I mean, anyone with tinnitus will tell you you can definitely hear silence. People without tinnitus just hear a more subtle version.