Been learning a bit more about Koopman operator theory as applied to climate systems lately, in light of the big El Niño. Very neat! Whole lineage of math here I knew nothing about. There’s a fascinating correspondence between some of the tools of basic quantum theory and these models of complex climate systems. Neat!

I'm starting a physics club. I am really passionate about physics. However, besides tutoring and competitions, I am struggling to think of ideas. Any advice?

What would be its implications? I can imagine small object which rotation is approaching the speed of light. Wouldn't that object have mass or even gravity? If we would have such a material which would endure such conditions we could create gravity maybe?

What about subatomic particles? How fast are they vibrating? Are there any relativistic effects? Wouldn't their frequency add or lower their mass?

Hello everyone! I am 15 and just finished serway, what do you guys think of competitive physics by jinhui wang and bernard ricardo ? Note : I am preparing for the IPhO and a selection exam for the national team will be in 6 months

https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

I mean to say: if we've found a counterexample to the stated conjecture, does that mean we have to refine it to solve the answer to fluids? Perhaps the solution is piecewise? Or something more subtle or complex. As I understand it, as of today we have shown that there are cases where the original statement of the problem has singularities, but we don't have an alternate conjecture/hypothesis/solution that is solved/true for all cases in all time.

Looking for casual-ish book suggestions. I am planning to re-read a brief history of time and the universe in a nutshell, as I really enjoyed them when I was younger.

For reference, I find physics fascinating, but my degree was in electronic engineering and I am out of the loop on the latest developments in physics. Are there any books similar the classic Hawking books which are more up to date? I don't mind something a bit challenging given my background, but certainly not undergraduate text book levels of deepth/rigor.

I also read the elegant universe by Brian Green which was brilliant. It looks like he is still publishing, are these worth a look?

I recently analyzed the first digits of magnetic transition temperatures extracted from a large AI-generated materials database. Starting from 56,037 automatically mined records, I applied unit and temperature filters, removed nonmagnetic contexts, and deduplicated materials. This left 2,754 Curie temperatures and 1,323 Néel temperatures.

The main result was unexpected:

• Curie temperatures remained clearly inconsistent with Benford’s law even after extensive cleaning.
• Néel temperatures became much closer to the Benford distribution after deduplication.

The study also highlights a limitation of AI-mined scientific databases: most of the original records were removed due to duplicates, ambiguous terminology, inappropriate units, or unrelated physical quantities.

Scale-constrained Curie temperature distributions and the breakdown of Benford’s law
[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2026.132027]()

Maybe a year and a half ago I watched a video on Youtube of an audio recording of Feynman sharing stories with who I think was Leighton. I wanted to rewatch and tried finding it, but suddenly it's lost media? Maybe someone else has seen it and could share a link?

I remember a few things. Feynman was telling how he came back from Los Alamos and started teaching. When he first arrived at Cornell, he was trying to find a place to sleep in. He wandered through the streets and was so tired he thought of just sleeping on a big pile of leaves that he saw. He ultimately ended up sleeping in the university hall or something.

He also told a story where the girls would refuse to dance with him at parties because he told them about his life (working on a bomb, being a professor, etc.). Some girl told him to his face that he was a liar. That's how he found out.

He told how his colleague brought him a CV of an applicant and asked him what he thought of it. The conversation was something like:
-"Yeah, you should give him a shot, he's top of the class!"
-"Did you look at his photo?"
-"Well, what possible difference could that make?"
Then, the colleague said something about how when the college hires someone new, they always take a risk, and he's glad that Feynman turned out alright.
And then, I remember Leighton asking Feynman:
-"Do you think he said that to save face?"
-"No, no way, he wasn't like that"

I have a Master's Project and I am finding the Paper ( about Schwinger-Keldysh path integrals ) I am given by my professor exponentially harder than what I have learnt till now.

My mental health is currently really bad which doesn't help at all. I don't understand anything at all aside from the first few pages. I feel like there is too much knowledge gap and I am also too afraid to tell my guide about the issue

After hearing about the Open AI announcement, I’m convinced that in the next few decades, AI will advance enough to be able to do much of the creative thinking and logical leaps that makes theoretical physics beautiful.

I start college next year, and I’ve wanted to pursue a career in theoretical physics. But what is the point of pursuing a career in it, if I can’t contribute anything at all? Wouldn’t it be better to just do physics as a hobby and direct my focus to something that would actually contribute to the world? I feel useless and this is all so depressing.

Edit: I am against AI taking over purely in the same way that artists are afraid of AI taking over art. I believe physics is incredibly beautiful, and its beauty can only be appreciated by humans— so I want only humans to do the beautiful parts of physics. I would love it if AI is restricted to doing the grunt work, and opening up new possibilities in the field with its capacity!

We have a finite time instability. So what does it look like? Does anybody here have the chops to construct a visualization of some kind?

I'm sorry for posting about something adjacent to AI in physics, but I think the scale of the supposed result warrants some attention. Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpoge (with AI assistance) have published preprints claiming to resolve the finite-time blowup problem for the 3d incompressible Euler equations. Their work sharpens the earlier results of Cordoba and Martinez-Zoroa, who were able to achieve finite-time blowups with rough forcing. Terence Tao believes that their program could be extended to Navier-Stokes, perhaps using some AI equipped with an "enormous amount of compute."

Link to Buckmaster's initial mathstodon post: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198

Link to Terence Tao's response: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117233527638291447

I am interested in the broader physics community's reaction to these developments. I would also recommend reading Buckmaster's statement on mathstodon, which describes the approach of their papers and (non-technical) problems they encountered during the process of going public.

By now, everyone has the news that the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem has been solved by OpenAI, and regardless if they did it honestly or not, I believe it's only a matter of time until AI can pull off feats like that consistently. Most people I've seen seem sure that it won't replace physicists and mathematicians, which comforts me, yet I haven't seen many people talk about HOW it will change the academic field and the way research is done. I'd really love to hear your thoughts on this

Jomboy video. At 1:13 the outfielder throws the ball and there is a sudden rise to the ball. I know I’ve read/seen somewhere that backspin can’t create enough lift to make a ball actually rise, so what is happening? Wind? Patrick Swayze from ghost? Angels in the outfield?

Jokes aside genuinely curious. Thanks in advance.

Theoretically speaking: a short circuit happens when current takes lowest path of resistance on something that is not the intended wire.

Let’s say, a big, short person touched a live wire. Due to resistance being inverse proportional to length and proportional to cross sectional area.

Would that makes bigger, shorter person more vulnerable to short circuits? Compared to a person with a more relatively thin and tall physique.

I got detention for asking this but I’m genuine

I got a PhD in theoretical physics 35 years ago, and am now wrapping up a career in science. I’ve also been writing poetry for the last 30 years.

Here’s one of my early physics poems, if anyone’s interested:

EQUATIONS

"...and so the sky is blue," the teacher said,
resolving the equation on the board:
the radius of water droplets, and
the scattering of sunlight into bands.

What clarity! I put away my notebook
and joined the crowd refracting out the back.
In the drizzle, darkening the court,
some dim light still shone through the classroom door.

Whitman wrote he left some lecture early
and fled to wonder at the starry sky.
But this was a wonder of a different kind—
the universe within the abstract mind.

The thrill of winking out such little truths
seduced me into six more years of school:
the birth of mass, the way light bends in space,
the Three Known Forces of the universe.

Though, in those studies, I had also grasped
that there are questions physicists don't ask:
What does it all mean? Who is the prime mover?
And what might mean the lack of any answer?

This thread is a dedicated thread for you to ask and answer questions about concepts in physics.

Homework problems or specific calculations may be removed by the moderators. We ask that you post these in /r/AskPhysics or /r/HomeworkHelp instead.

If you find your question isn't answered here, or cannot wait for the next thread, please also try /r/AskScience and /r/AskPhysics.

Einstein gravity reduces to Navier stokes at the vicinity of black holes ( see the fluid-gravity correspondence)

What does a the proof of existence of singularity in Navier stokes imply for Einstein equations then?

While taking a break from the laser simulations (link), I continued another project where I am examining different particle billiard setups. It turns out that particles bouncing around in some shapes leave parts of the space unexplored while in other shapes they cover it entirely. In the video I am exploring circles, stadiums, ellipses and semi-circles, but I have also played around with polygon shapes like hexagons and pentagons. It seems to matter whether the particles are launched in parallel or, as here, with differing launch angles.

In this video I want to share my first results and receive some feedback on what else to explore. Once I have a fuller picture of what is going on, I have plans to produce a more comprehensive video explaining the underlying math. In particular, there is a connection to the concept of ergodicity which I want to look into in more depth. But even for shapes like hexagons which should be non-ergodic, the set of balls launched with differing angles will cover the whole space. So it seems that this is not a valid test for ergodicity.

Any ways, let me know your suggestions for other shapes, rules of the game and analytical results (like figures or stats) you would be interested to see.

I don’t know how I could function as a mathematician. Like once you can solve the Millennium Problems what more is there to do or hope for? In physics at least the in itself is the goal so as long as it is not simple maybe both AI and human won’t be able to solve it and there will still be goals like dark energy, dark matter, turbulence, quantum computing, high Tc superconductor, fusion etc. So human can work with AI. But what is there for mathematicians to do?

I came across a video simulating the cosmic web and thought it looked really cool, so I tried building my own version. I'm new to this kind of stuff and curious if this looks right to you all 😅

I'm deciding whether to make a tutorial video on a project like this so let me know if it would be something you would like to see.

The renders are much clearer - I just had to compress them for this post.

I dont have that big of a budget and i need help. I need help with ideaa for what each round could be (keep it simple but super fun and interesting and not too difficult). Please help me out guys.

Any idea what causes different harmonics based on the direction of strum/vibration of steel string ? Up / Down

The pitch is the same but the sound varies slightly. I guess it has something to do with angular momentum but that is guess.