I just love long rail trips, often do Switzerland-Tunis via Palermo to see my in law family. Best trip ever was Tbilisi-Zurich via Batumi, ferry to Odessa Kyiv and Vienna.
I have worked half of my life in both fundamental and applied science, I know how this work. In particular you can refuse jobs you deem unethical.
Why not funding energy transition research for instance. It’s know to science for half a century we’ll cook to death if we don’t phase out fossil fuel energy.
And by know, I mean there’s literally millions of papers on the topic.
> a project in collaboration with the oil and gas company Exxon Mobil
I find it a bit dark that, at a time people, crops, forests and biomes are dying due to extreme heat caused by the fossil fuel industry’s reckless behaviour the last 50 years, the said fossil fuel industry funds research on exotic rheology.
When I was doing my phd, around 2 decades ago, I was often going to the library’s compactus to fish for a Phys Rev from the 80s. Back then papers were sparse and expensive. But the quality!
The Higgs boson is 3 papers, 6 authors and 6 pages in total!
At the end of my phd, 30++ pages slop papers were the norm.
Nowadays, well..
The paper by Higgs was one page. The guy probably published less than a hundred pages in his career.
One reason that made me abandon a career was the disgust caused by the publishing frienzy.
agreed, when you start needing the the hodge star, diff form loose quite a lot of their interest.
i'd add it's quite nice in string theories for RR fields and coupling to D-branes, where writing 10 anti-symmetrized indices quickly gets annoying.. and topological field theories..
from a theoretical physicist point of view, i find GA don't add much to the standard tooling ppl use, i.e. Lie algebras, Clifford and (sometimes) differential forms. while it's always nice to have a formalism that "hides indices", in most cases (for (super-)gravitation at least) just writing tensor/clifford/lie indices is just much faster and less error prone.
i used to use differential form for gauge theories, einstein-cartan gravitation and ramond-ramond fields.
also, in a paper, we used O(D,D) clifford algebras/spinors to represent differential forms, which worked quite well in our very specific case (appendix A)
Well congratulations, you just stated the equivalence principle that led Einstein to GR (you need special relativity and a bit of maths and you’re there)!
I have a good friend who’s in the “hi end desktop cnc” bizness (with some very cheap models). Asked why he doesn’t do 3D printers (he designed plenty) and he told me the market is SO competitive and products so cheap it’s impossible to compete.
Designing a controller for his machines and as much as I would love to put the thing as OH, I don’t even think of it.
I’m doing a bit of BREP for GIS and even in 2D with line segments only the problem is really non-trivial, a lot of edge (pun intended) cases to take care of. Type system helps enormously, so probably rust will be a win here (I think I saw a project along those lines).
That being said, for CAD (personal usage) I switched from Fusion 360 to Freecad 1.0 with almost no project and the latter is an order of magnitude faster.