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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • aberrate_junior_beatnik@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzIrrational
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    8 days ago

    No, by our current understanding there is no length smaller than a Planck length, and any distance must therefore be divisible by an integer. That is, the length is made up of discrete quanta. Pi, or any other irrational number, is by definition not divisible by an integer, or it would be a ratio, making it rational. This has nothing to do with the accuracy or precision of our measures.



  • My only guess as to what this could mean is that since quantum mechanics is quantum, i.e. discrete, the universe therefore cannot be continuous as the reals are. But this is a category error. Just because you could never find an object that is, say, exactly pi meters long, does not mean that the definition of pi is threatened. There’s nothing infinite that we can observe, but infinity is still a useful concept. And it works both ways; just because quantum mechanics is our best model of the universe doesn’t mean the universe is therefore quantum. 150 years ago everyone believed the universe was like a big clockwork mechanism, perfectly deterministic, because Newtonian physics are deterministic. And who knows, maybe they were right, and we just don’t have the framework to understand it so we have a nondeterministic approximation!













  • It could actually be both; the equity group bought it, sold the land to itself (a subsidiary), used rent to extract money from the business as it was going down. Then they sold the business to a Thai company that sourced their shrimp, with Red Lobster buying at a loss. Once the financials got too bad, they had Red Lobster file chapter 11 so its debts were written off, but the equity group & Thai company get to hold on to the money they got through the process. I can’t verify this is exactly what happened, though, take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.