[–] Gorillion 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
What's the scuttlebutt on Climate Modelling in your world? Are we fucking shit up or is the earth just doing it's thang and not really bothered?
Obviously this flows into the big question: how much overt or subtle pressure is placed on you guys to produce results that play into a certain political worldview? And what happens if you don't produce "sexy" results that play well with MSM style stories?
[–] The_Cat [S] 1 point 3 points 4 points (+4|-1) ago (edited ago)
We're fucking up the planet and our climate on an unprecedented scale. This has been found, established, verified and confirmed over and over again. And it's getting worse. More warming means less ice means more warming means more methane means more warming etc etc. If we don't get our shit together right now, we're fucked. We're probably already too late.
There is no overt pressure. Officially we're allowed to research whatever the fuck we want. But whether you get funding depends heavily on how much you publish, how high impact you publish, and if your research reaches news outlets etc. So in that sense, there is a LOT of subtle pressure to produce "sexy" research. What's sexy varies from time to time and domain to domain. Nanodots are sexy, and so are neural networks and machine learning. So if you do a machine learning/neural network study on nanodot properties, the government is going to be all "shut up and take my money". Meanwhile, research into high pressure material properties gets a big shrug, which leads to me currently doing research for free because the funding ran out. How's that for financial incentive.
Edit: If you want accurate and reliable information about climate change, Skeptical Science is clearly explained and very well sourced.
[–] [deleted] 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago (edited ago)
[–] Fibbideh 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
What is your favorite research project you have participated in?
Did you ever have a project that made you feel like you were in way over your head?
If you can, try not to simplify it or dumb it down for me to understand. I know I won't but I get a kick out of trying anyway.
[–] The_Cat [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Funny enough, my answer to both those questions is the same: trying to implement a thermostat for a fermionic molecular dynamics simulation.
Molecular dynamics just means that you start from the laws of mechanics/dynamics, start with an initial configuration and follow the system through time. A thermostat keeps the simulation at a constant temperature.
Now, fermionic molecular dynamics (FMD) is a method to simulate a system of indistinguishable particles, fermions, like electrons or neutrons for example. The clever thing about it is that instead of going full quantum, these particles are considered as semiclassical wave packet, a 3D gaussian distribution that roughly keeps it shape.
Fermions are antisymmetric upon exchange, meaning that you cannot have two in the same location, and they will repel each other when they get close. This interaction you can encode by considering it as a curvature of state space (the space of all positions and momenta). So the system follows a semiclassical path through curved state space, where the size of state space is significantly contracted for points when two fermions are close together in position and momentum. This causes the fermions to naturally avoid each other, and is an exact implementation of the Pauli repulsion within a semiclassical context.
Happy googling :p
[–] The_Cat [S] 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
I'm working on solid-solid transitions and material properties of materials under very high pressure (around the TPa range). It's really interesting to see how the chemistry in these materials changes completely, because the valence shells fully metallize, and you start getting direct atom-atom interaction between the lower-lying shells. Changes everything.
What language do you use for this?
[–] kittysaysmeownow 0 points 5 points 5 points (+5|-0) ago
Do you think we might live in one, do you think that's a viable theory?
[–] The_Cat [S] 0 points 7 points 7 points (+7|-0) ago
It's not impossible. But it's also not very relevant. Even if our universe is a simulation, that doesn't make it any less real for us who live in it.
[–] 8931125? 0 points 4 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago
This is the most pragmatic way to view this question.
[–] goatboy 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
It matters for those of us who want to turn ourselves in to computer viruses. If this isn't a computer simulation, then we'll be wasting our lives in the pursuit.
[–] 8985629? ago
Well, if you know it's a simulation, you know the rules don't have to make sense. Presumably the "real world" has to make sense. I think the most relevant place this matters is: A simulation can be set (in order to save resources) to only properly simulate a certain area, everything else is just assumed until it needs to be rendered. Presumably, reality doesn't have this constraint.
So whether things happening in distant places are real until that information is called upon or not (a tree falling in a forest where nobody's around to hear it, so to speak) is pretty relevant. How big that area of rendering is (bigger than our planet? our solar system? our galaxy?) is also relevant.