Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Obviously we haven't read the same books. You'd be suprized at how closely related to phi many of the low level physical constant are.


doing some quick searches comes up with something like http://www.sacred-geometry.es/?q=en/content/phi-atomic-struc... , but I can't tell if this serious or satire...

(It's true of any number that x = x/phi + x/phi^2, surely you can do better than that in a satire? )

edit: holy shit, people actually try really hard with this nonsense... http://www.ijsciences.com/pub/pdf/V2-201305-08.pdf


Yes, it's sad. It's as if dimensions/units don't matter. There was a story about this quack on NPR that thought he could prove Einstein wrong. Turned out the guy couldn't differentiate (or wouldn't?) between momentum and energy. All his units were mixed up. He didn't even see the flaw in that.


Act Three (Sucker Mc-squared) of the This American Life episode "A Little Bit of Knowledge" and I promise you I didn't remember all of that offhand:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a...

According to the capsule summary, he also thought he'd disprove Newton's work, in addition to disproving Einstein's.


And then he proved that black is white and promptly got killed on the next zebra crossing?


Yes, it's serious. But I'm sure I'll get more downvotes for saying that too...whatever.


You're getting downvotes because you're making an assertion (phi is related to many cosmological constants) but are consistently not backing it up, citing any specific sources, etc.


For many reasons we can remove phi from discourse, and that might be a point. http://www.quora.com/Language-Seeking-Behavior/What-great-sc...


It doesn't mean anything to compare a constant to phi unless that constant is itself dimensionless. What low level physical constants (and relations between them and phi) do you have in mind?


[This is not to support the idea that phi is related to physics constants. This is only a technical comment about unitless constants.]

It's usual to redefine the constants using other constants. The most well known case is the fine structure constant, aka alpha, aka almost 1/137. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Definit...

The idea is that in many particle physics calculations you don't use the charge of the electron alone. Every time it appears, it's multiplied by other constants like c or h, so you redefine it as a new constant that is the usual product you have to put in the calculations.

The problem with constants with units is that they mix real physics with the arbitrary choose of the measurement units, like the time the Earth do a complete spin divided by 24 by 60 and by 60 and other complete arbitrary chooses.

It's difficult to say if "e" the charge of the electron is big or small. But in many calculations you can use alpha that is clearly a small number (~=1/137) and try to use perturbation theory to get a good approximation of the actual result. (You can imagine this as a lot of Taylor approximations.) (There are a lot of technical details hidden in these calculations that can make a mathematician cry but a physicist happy.)


When things are real it doesn't matter what books were read, because you can show you are right with concrete real life proofs.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: