Wtf?!?

[su_liam]

I think it was an April Fools gag that was just so seriously brainy and well thought-out, and just... just... so doggone researched that it came out about four months late and probably a few thousand dollars over budget. These guys have a future as defense contractors...

Still, I found it terribly, terribly entertaining. 2.6 cm...

[torstan]

Well it was published in Foundations of Physics, so it's not an April Fools gag. But yes, 2.6cm is just daft.

[Redrobes]

Being a factor of 2-3 times out in several places could mean something like +/- an order of magnitude here and given that this guy has his estimate two orders more than the previous suggests that this is an extremely imprecise bit of math going on. Being +/- two orders of magnitude out on the amount of watts the sun kicks out is not that big a deal, but here it makes the difference between the biggest animal being a cm high to about 100m.

If you could say with some certainty that the maximum for this planet is within that range tho then it does have a useful purpose if your looking for mammals on extra solar planets. If within two orders of magnitude of precision you could be certain that for a given planet it could only have 1mm sized animals of any shape then it kinda cuts down on what planets it might be worth pointing the life sensing spectrometers or cut down that absurdly woolly equation for aliens in the universe probability.

An odd paper and one I thought was BS to start with.

[tilt]

thanks to torstan for his explanation, I got a little wiser

[su_liam]

In engineering school we had a sort of pollack joke about how a physicist designs a chicken coop. The punchline was, "assume the chicken is spherical."

This does kind of show the pitfalls of working from first principles.

[torstan]

Why idealised situations aren't ideal:
http://xkcd.com/669/

That aside, the fact that they can get to a value within the correct order of magnitude from the size of the proton and the relative strengths of forces is pretty impressive and still has some content. In that case the precise number at the end is irrelevant (and they shouldn't place so much weight on it in the paper).

[RobA]

In engineering school we had a joke about how a physicist designs a chicken coop. The punchline was, "assume the chicken is spherical."

This does kind of show the pitfalls of working from first principles.

from http://www.ece.mcmaster.ca/faculty/n..._PE.htm#joke19

A farmer, an engineer, and a physicist were all asked to build a chicken coop. The farmer says, “Well, last time I had so many chickens and my coop was so and so big and this time I have this many chickens so I’ll make it this much bigger and that oughtta work just fine.” The engineer tackles the problem by surveying, costing materials, reading up on chickens and their needs, writing down a bunch of equations to minimize the cost per chicken, taking into account the lay of the land and writing a computer program to solve the problem. The physicist looks at the problem and says, “Let’s start by assuming a spherical chicken in a vacuum...”.

-Rob A>

[Ascension]

I wonder if I could put a chicken at the center of our solar system and have lil eggs orbit around it....

[tilt]

I wonder if I could put a chicken at the center of our solar system and have lil eggs orbit around it....

Ah.. .there was the connection to mapping *lol*

[Jaxilon]

I wonder if I could put a chicken at the center of our solar system and have lil eggs orbit around it....

Then the Sun is a Chicken and we live on an egg...huh...interesting.

So what about a symbiotic alternate universe where everything is made of different kinds of molecules than ours. Say it uses "exhaust" from many universes including ours and those universes, including ours, use "byproducts" from there? (I use "exhaust" and "byproducts" like x and y because I dont' know what they would be) Sort of like how plants use carbon dioxide and create oxygen to be breathed by us and returned as carbon dioxide? Maybe everything there is huge and the observers there are so colossal our universe is like a plate on their table? Would we fail to observe them and they us because of all that? Perhaps that's more like a linked universe than an alternate one but if it was sufficiently different it may seem intangible and useless.

pfft, I think after reading all Torstan's stuff my brain is just spun out. That or the sun cooked my today which I know for sure happened. Might make a fun game world though.