• Member Since 28th Oct, 2012
  • offline last seen 3 hours ago

Pineta


Particle Physics and Pony Fiction Experimentalist

More Blog Posts441

  • 4 weeks
    Eclipse 2024

    Best of luck to everyone chasing the solar eclipse tomorrow. I hope the weather behaves. If you are close to the line of totality, it is definitely worth making the effort to get there. I blogged about how awesome it was back in 2017 (see: Pre-Eclipse Post, Post-Eclipse

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    10 comments · 165 views
  • 12 weeks
    End of the Universe

    I am working to finish Infinite Imponability Drive as soon as I can. Unfortunately the last two weeks have been so crazy that it’s been hard to set aside more than a few hours to do any writing…

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    6 comments · 175 views
  • 15 weeks
    Imponable Update

    Work on Infinite Imponability Drive continues. I aim to get another chapter up by next weekend. Thank you to everyone who left comments. Sorry I have not been very responsive. I got sidetracked for the last two weeks preparing a talk for the ATOM society on Particle Detectors for the LHC and Beyond, which took rather more of my time than I

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    1 comments · 164 views
  • 16 weeks
    Imponable Interlude

    Everything is beautiful now that we have our first rainbow of the season.

    What is life? Is it nothing more than the endless search for a cutie mark? And what is a cutie mark but a constant reminder that we're all only one bugbear attack away from oblivion?

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    3 comments · 229 views
  • 18 weeks
    Quantum Decoherence

    Happy end-of-2023 everyone.

    I just posted a new story.

    EInfinite Imponability Drive
    In an infinitely improbable set of events, Twilight Sparkle, Sunny Starscout, and other ponies of all generations meet at the Restaurant at the end of the Universe.
    Pineta · 12k words  ·  51  0 · 887 views

    This is one of the craziest things that I have ever tried to write and is a consequence of me having rather more unstructured free time than usual for the last week.

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    2 comments · 164 views
May
3rd
2020

Survival Probability · 12:06pm May 3rd, 2020

Any fans of Daring Do and the Inexplicable Artifact want to learn more about the mysterious ancient hieroglyphs that puzzled Daring Do and Twilight Sparkle in that story?

Do you, like Pinkie Pie, learn through musical intervention?

If so, take a look at this lecture:

To offer a bit more explanation, for those who are still confused, this is deriving the equation for the probability that a neutrino of energy E, created as an electron neutrino, is also an electron neutrino after travelling a distance L (the 'survival probability'), assuming neutrinos can oscillate between two flavours. If you have read the story you will know there actually three neutrino flavours, but that makes it bit difficult to fit all the maths in a short clip.

The underlying story is the Solar Neutrino Problem - why early neutrino experiments failed to detect the number of neutrinos that should be produced by the sun according to the Standard Solar Model (by John Bahcall). It was shown by later experiments (SNO and Super K) that they were changing to another flavour. As explained in this old post: Pony Adventures in Particle Physics: Twilight, Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash visit Sudbury, Ontario and shed light on neutrinos

Comments ( 6 )

What’s even more impressive than reciting/lip-syncing the derivation to music is that he’s simultaneously writing it on glass — backwards.

5255283
This must be somehow connected to neutrino helicity and parity violation in the weak interaction.

5255283
5255470

The rapping physicist writes forward while lipsynching. The audio is prerecorded and the video is flipped horizontally. This is videotrickery. "Because Science" is flipped horizontally too:

As an aside, in school, when the teachers got all excited that the brain could turn the visual field right-side-up, my response is that the image is the way it is to the brain with no flipping required. Visual processing is extremely complicated, but the teacher makes a mountain out of this molehill of a nonissue.

5256432

The rapping physicist writes forward while lipsynching. The audio is prerecorded and the video is flipped horizontally. This is videotrickery.

I stand corrected — turns out he has a “behind the scenes” video posted, as well, that clearly shows what you’ve described.

Still, it would have been at least 20% cooler if he’d written backwards. :twilightsheepish:

5256900

Given that scammers could try to take advantage of one, one should learn the tricks. Luckily, we have Captain Disillusion:

Those videos taught me quite a few tricks as well as somethings which I figured must be tricks, like landing pingpongballs in wineglasses across the room, which are real skills.

5255470
...that is both funny and an increfibly nerdy joke. Had to refresh my own learnin' to get it.

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