Mateus Araújo

Recent Actions

• Commented on Pushing it back
  Mass extinctions stay recorded pretty much forever. We have clear records of the Ordovician-Silurian extinction 443 million years ago. We don't really have record from before that because there wasn't really multicellular life to get fossilized. I'm mentioning that because...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Honestly I just want to see the Queen's (or the King's) head in a Tzompantli....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  I was actually replying to Grant #225, but forgot to click the button. Being a monarchist and against democracy is at least consistent, I grant you that. But you didn't say how do you think the government should be chosen...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  The only thing special about the UK is the FPTP voting system, that indeed is the worst in all European democracies. But the people, the politicians? No, all countries are full of scoundrels. I'd wager that you are deeply familiar...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  There's nothing special about the UK. People are the same everywhere. Shallow, incompetent politicians without principles exist in every country, yet somehow they manage to get respectable presidents. Now come on, do you seriously believe that the British people are...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Parliamentary republic, presidential republic. Please inform yourself before embarrassing yourself in public....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  That's why I'm insisting one should not speculate, but instead look at the people that actually get elected in parliamentary republics. At least in this way the discussion is based on reality. I think it's a safe assumption that in...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  I really don't see how you find such an argument compelling: look at this list of politicians who always tried to get power! They would surely try to become a powerless President in an alternate reality. Again, a compelling argument...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  I wrote parliamentary republic, i.e., one where the real power lies with the prime minister. The US is a presidential republic, where the real power lies with the president....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  She still had advisors, that could tell her the blinding obvious. Do you seriously think that things would have turned out different with a bright young monarch, like the 74-year old Charles? I don't think the British monarch has the...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Given how universally loathed Rees-Mogg is, I find it inconceivable that he would manage to get more than 50% of the country to vote for him. In any case, this is again pointless speculation. A valid argument would be to...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  No, you emphatically do not end up with President Farage, President Johnson, President Trump, or President Bolsonaro. Ambitious partisans do not seek the position of President in a parliamentary system, because a ceremonial head of state simply does not have...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  I've seen this argument many times before, but they never address the point that it just doesn't happen! Your example of Finland shows a President that had a lot of power abusing it, but the crucial point is that a...
• Commented on Quantum of Nightmares: spoiler time!
  One thing I didn't understand is why the Banks took so long (6 days?) to come back from Hawaii after the kidnapping of the children was noticed. They stayed there for the conference? Was it so important? I expected them...
• Commented on New publication dates (and audiobook news)
  Charlie #2: Thanks for the info! I'm surprised that ebooks can get up to 70%, but probably science fiction readers are keener on newer technologies than most. Maybe the day will come soon when it will be the norm for...
• Commented on New publication dates (and audiobook news)
  I hope I'm not asking anything you're not allowed to talk about, but how relevant are the print editions? Could you give a rough breakdown of digital versus print sales of your books? It seems so quaint to wait for...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  I don't know how much mathematics are you interested in; it can get quite hairy. I think this paper does a good job of being precise without getting bogged down in details. See sections 3 and 4. In a nutshell,...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Your last sentence is correct: the quantum state includes everything, even position and velocity. For the particles to interfere they must be completely indistinguishable, on the fundamental level. So there wouldn't be interference in your drawing. This is quite hard...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Many-Worlds is proposed as an interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics, where energy is conserved as a fundamental law. You are speculating about some alternative to quantum theory, where energy is not conserved, that would also allow a many...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  There is no creation of mass/energy. I already explained that in my comment 544. Come on, if there were a problem with conservation of energy Many-Worlds would not be taken seriously....
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Problem? That's just life....
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  There is nothing mystical about this, it comes straight out of the equations. And the reason for that is just statistical: two quantum states can only interfere if they become exactly identical. Easy to do with a single photon or...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Your mental model of Many-Worlds is a bit off. Different worlds can interfere, but it's extremely rare, and gets rarer as the world-splitting spreads through space. It's like all the air in a room spontaneously gathering in a corner. Technically...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  This is what everyone wants. Directly measuring the force of gravity that a lump of mass exerts in another is extremely difficult. AFAIK the most ambitious proposal in this direction is this paper, that wants to measure the gravitational attraction...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Unitarity doesn't have anything to do with dimensionality, you can have a 10+1 theory that is unitary (or not). A unitary theory is one that is fundamentally reversible (and linear)....
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Doing the experiment in a deep space probe would help in isolating it, but still we would need to interfere the whole probe, not only the signal getting back to us. And that is quite hard if the probe is...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  (and Greg 723) The Second Law and decoherence are intimately related. When a computer calculates a+b (and probably the brain as well) it does delete information. By Landauer's principle this information is rejected as heat to the environment, increasing the...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  This is precisely how people propose to do the test: once we have a working quantum computer, use it to simulate a lab doing the measurement, and interfere the two resulting branches. This should be possible to do in the...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Yes, this is what I'm saying. With the added twist that the Many-Worlds prediction for the experiment is deterministic, so it can be falsified in a single shot, whereas the Copenhagen prediction is not, so it can only be falsified...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  To people wondering about how to test the Copenhagen versus Many-Worlds interpretation: there is the famous Wigner's friend gedankenexperiment. The setup is that you have the friend inside an isolated laboratory, and Wigner outside. The friend then measures some particle...