There are moments in the history of human thought when a simple realization transforms our understanding of reality. A moment when chaos reveals itself as structure, when disorder folds into meaning, and when what seemed like an arbitrary universe unveils itself as a system governed by hidden symmetries.
    • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
      1·
      1 day ago

      I love numberphile for explaining complex math in a simple, engaging way while also making me feel stupid for not understanding it once done.

      I’m a science major, I should be able to understand it, yet I feel like I’m five.

      • pyre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        it definitely changes by the guest imo. although I have a number of favorites, ben sparks to me is the absolute best. he not only explains things in simple terms but often has these programs to help you visualize things to intuitively understand them in some capacity, and also adds a narrative that’s really interesting to follow.

        he often talks about things he discovered while messing around with his programs, so he can tell an engaging story by walking the viewer through the thread that he himself went through, encountering mysteries and making discoveries. he’s a math story wizard.

        there are many other guests who are really fun to listen to as well. and a couple that unfortunately just easily gets into advanced math that completely loses me and leaves me more confused than before the first minute.

  • angrystego@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    This is a beautiful article that reads like a poetic sci-fi. Altough the real math and physics behind it are elusive for me, the poetic language let’s me grasp some basic understanding.

    • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      1 day ago

      I was gonna say it’s sciencey sounding dribble wrapped in pseudo-poetic gush. ChatGPT is my main suspect.

      • CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        It reads like someone trying to sound smart, but failing. I’ve used ChatGPT to explain abstracts of scientific papers, and it never sounds like this. This was written by a human.

        ChatGPT is actually rather critical of the article:

        It’s definitely well-written and poetic, but it does seem heavy on grandiose language that might obscure the actual scientific content. The core idea—reformulating the Bekenstein bound using a toroidal structure and relating it to entropy, quantum mechanics, and cosmology—is intriguing, but the argumentation is somewhat buried under metaphorical and philosophical flourishes.

        If the goal is to make a technical argument, it could benefit from a clearer, more structured explanation of the key mathematical and physical insights. Right now, it reads more like a mix of scientific exposition and philosophical reflection, which makes it engaging but also somewhat vague.

        What exactly changes in the equations? How does this solve the cosmological constant problem? These aspects should be spelled out more clearly.

        • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          8 hours ago

          How could a human be dumb enough to talk about the Bekenstein bound having something to do with the shape of galaxies, but them seamlessly go from there to talking about the shape of flowers? Flowers have nothing to do with the Bekenstein bound. Of course it’s dubious even for galaxies. And anyone who has studied basic classical mechanics or ODE’s knows that harmonic oscillators occur everywhere in nature. Unforced ones give circular or elliptical orbits, and forced ones (meaning the eigenvalue is not purely imaginary) give spirals, inward or outward depending on the sign of the real part.

          Human or ChatGPT, meh, maybe you are right that it was written by a human, at least partly. But I’ve seen flowery though meaningless language come out of ChatGPT before.

          Anyway, it’s crap.