RobJLow

Was a maths lecturer, main research interest general relativity. Now retired, rebooting as a classics under^H^H^H^H^Hpostgrad at Warwick University. Still RobJLow (npub1dxf…v5xz) on Twitter: seeing how that goes.

Last Notes

2025-09-28 11:56:25 UTC

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I haven't though about it enough yet either, but it seems pretty plausible that (in the usual spherical polar coordinates) since the connection coefficients are algebraically just the same as before, but there's no Schwarzschild surface event horizon at which t and r swap over which is spacelike and which is timelike, we have a timelike naked curvature singularity at r=0 that things can fall into, surrounded by an asymptotically flat space-time. So if you're reasonably far away from the singularity, gravity behaves pretty much like Schwarzschild, but with some sign changes (orbital precession, angle of light deflection) but if you're close in things are rather different in ways I don't propose to work out before sending this.
And of course, now there's no Cauchy surface or well-defined initial value problem, so a lot of stuff must fly out of the window.

2025-09-18 09:02:07 UTC

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Oops. I wasn't actually *trying* to make a claim that was wrong in as many different ways as possible, but if I had been trying, it would have been a good attempt.

2025-09-18 06:08:11 UTC

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We have to have some faith in humanity, or at least that segment of it that might see that little bit of whimsy. (Though on twitter I'm sure I'd have at least one person yelling that I'm a complete idiot and explaining why it's wrong.)

2025-06-04 06:40:23 UTC

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Yes, you're right, I should never have been impressed by the glibness of LLMs. My mistake, and I'll try not to make it again in future.

2025-06-01 13:23:22 UTC

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A small mistake: it should have been abstract nonsense, not total nonsense.

2025-05-05 18:29:31 UTC

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It looks a bit like earlier stuff of his (which I hadn't initially realized was the same guy), rational trigonometry. It's not that it's wrong, just that it doesn't live up to his claim of being a better way of doing trig. Proof (if proof were needed) that you can be a professional and still be a crank in (at least some aspects of) your own field...

2025-05-05 15:05:36 UTC

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Hype can make it around the world before informed commentary has got its boots on.
(I suspect that these articles are eating and regurgitating each other, without anybody actually looking at his paper.)

2025-05-04 15:16:55 UTC

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Is it nonsense though? I mean, any more than any other strongly finitist approach to maths. I ask because I understand even less about finitism than I've just said, and I said nothing...

2025-03-19 08:13:49 UTC

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I strongly suspect that a poll would show quite a lot of people would prefer a benign dictatorship to a democracy. Of course, that word 'benign' is quite important there.

2024-11-22 19:38:21 UTC

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This is why I have problem with the firewall idea. (I've tried to understand the justification, but all I hear is "mumble mumble boundary conditions mumble mumble and then a miracle happens".)

2024-11-21 18:58:58 UTC

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Just to add some quantitative pedantry, the tidal force due to the sun is about half that due to the moon, which is why spring and neap tides are so different.
(I still remember how surprised I was when I first did the calculation to see the relative sizes of the effects, so now I take every opportunity to share the information, however marginally relevant it might be.)

2024-09-18 20:11:49 UTC

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Yes, I just took a look. It reminds me of my old suspicion that schoolbooks which insist 'there's no such thing as centrifugal force, it's centripetal force' have a lot to answer for. (To be fair, when you start thinking harder about Newtonian mechanics you realise that the elementary treatments do gloss over quite a lot of hard stuff.)