Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone!

I've been a lurker on these forums for quite a while, so I figured it was time to start mingling. I do a little mining for fun and I'm planning on playing btc poker in the future. I want to get involved more though.

I study physics at a dutch university and what I would really like is to leverage that knowledge to earn some btc. I will post on the marketplace here on the forums later. What I am wondering about is if there is any interest for the knowledge of a physicist in the bitcoin community. I have some experience tutoring upper level high school physics and mathematics, so I could offer that. I would even be willing to do homework and related problems, under certain conditions. One last idea would be answering more general question about physics and the universe.

If you are interested in such a service OR  you have some input to give OR you just want to say hello back, please leave a message :)

Have they found a unit for 137 yet?

I've been waiting forever for that.

The fine-structure constant is unitless. It is just a number like 3 or pi. Units are not found, they are agreed upon. We use units to communicate direct measurement results from experiments. We can measure the fine-structure constant, but not directly. We infer it from other data.

you are mining how many are you running your rig

Hi and welcome fellow bitcoin peer; and fellow science geek.  :)

You mention mining for fun. I hope it is fun for you because mining has become a "go big or go home" game. Still could be interesting and informative.
Cheers

Hi. I haven't bought a rig or anything. I have a pc which is always on (whether it mines or not) and has a decent graphics card. I mine altcoins, which should work to about $20-$40 per month. I pay a fixed rent with electricity included, so I'm not really losing anything except for a graphics card that is aging faster. It is just for giggles mostly, but I also want to understand all aspects of bitcoin, so in that way it does have some value for me.

I do thank you for the warning.

Sure. I don't want to be discouraging, I just see a lot of new accounts here thinking they are going to get rich off their Dell PC. Sadly, those days are gone. But mining as a learning tool is always profitable.
Now if your basement tinkering produces a quantum super-position hasher, please do PM me. lol

I do not know how far your physics relates to engineering applications, but I know for a fact that ASIC development will be a big thing in the Bitcoin space for a long time to come. It has to guarantee the steady price increase over the next 100-127 years of transaction verification and coin generation. Making these chips smaller and more energy efficient might be your best out.

why does the predicted mass of the quantum vacuum have little effect on the expansion of the universe?

Interesting that you mention this. While I am not training to become an engineer, I am moving into the field of nanophysics. I should read up on modern mining techniques.
Your question boils down to: why are our theories of gravity and particles not compatible? No one knows, and I certainly won't be the first to know. It isn't for a lack of trying though, as amazing hypotheses such as string theory, quantum loop gravity and what not, have essentially been developed to answer this question. None of them can be considered as true physical theories as of yet, though, as they are not falsifiable at the moment.

I am not a credible source on these issues, but I think that we will need new methods to reason about reality if we want to answer questions of this kind. There have been interesting developments in this area. As an example, I have recently found out about categorical quantum mechanics (you can find enough on google and arxiv.org if you dare [arXiv:quant-ph/0510032, arXiv:1009.3786]), which suggests a novel method to think about "state" and "change" and has the ambition to unify many scientific disciplines. My gut insinct (which is worth less than an educated guess) is that it is is proposals of this kind -- but not necessarily CQM -- that will really expand our understanding of the universe.