I mean, geodetic interferometers already exist and can measure very small deviations. Give them arms the length of the observable universe and they will increase in accuracy, not decrease in accuracy.

If you constructed a circle with the radius of the universe, then measured its circumference and radius measurement accuracy would easily be able to tell the difference between a real circle and a mathematical circle. That is because neither the perimeter of circle will nor the diameter of the circle will be through in empty space. They will be near enough to matter to measure detectable deflections.

From your measurement of pi, we can deduce that you live in an anti-de Sitter space, so all the string theorists will now be sending you emails to test out their theories.

Overly snarky response: Uhhhm. Have you been asleep since, what, 1915 or something? We have extraordinary evidence, and everyone has accepted it, in so far as I know.

Less snarky response: the path on which light moves is the universes instantiation of a straight line. It is “the (locally) shortest path between two points”, the same definition you learned in geometry class. Yet in our universe, two straight lines can intersect each other twice. This is because our universe has at least some local curvature, meaning it is locally non Euclidean. In order to have a mathematically perfect circle you would need to live in a universe without any matter or energy, and with certain other properties.

The universe is non-Euclidean, so no circle made in the actual geometry of the universe actually has the ratio of pi between its circumference and diameter.

Is that the part you are confused about, or did I write something else badly?

[finding people who don’t know that we live in non Euclidean space these days is like finding people who think the sun goes round the earth. But I guess if people can’t be bothered to learn 350 year old mathematics, they also can’t be bothered to learn 100 year old physics. Oh well.]

One thing to be aware of is that if you actually made a circle and measured its radius and circumference you wouldn’t get pi. Not because your measurements would be off, but because the universe does not follow the assumptions mathematicians used to define pi—namely Euclidean geometry. Pi is mathematical, not physical. If real circles and real diameters don’t give you pi that is a problem for the universe, not a problem for mathematics.

I did use a lot of words to say “I don’t know” didn’t I.

🤷‍♂️ because when we flip all their quantum numbers we still call them a photon? They have no charge, so if you flip their charge they still have no charge. They have no color, so if you flip their color they are still colorless, etc. The ability of a particle to interfere with itself is a general property of all particles, because all particles are probability waves, so this isn’t special to a photon.

The majority of Hawking radiation is composed of photons, and photons are their own anti-particle. But black holes should radiate just as many positrons as electrons.

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Ah, yes. Only my company can possibly do this task, and your decision not to trust my company to perform this task means you won’t have anybody at all do it ever. 🙄

And the first time I used nmap on my college network, a professor called up the help desk to report that he had been port scanned.

Then my freind at the help desk told me not to run nmap again and to wait until after dark to pull all the reel to reel tapes out of the dumpster….

I think the line between needing corporate approval for your music, and needing government approval for your music is a blurry one, and it is difficult to judge what actually happens from the outside. The people who grant the corporate approval play golf, do drugs, and get hookers with people in government, so the government could have politely asked the capitalists to ban the act. Let’s not undersell the deep alignment between corporate and government power.

I think this is a fundamentally different way of thinking that we have. The way to win at betting is to have a better distribution than the other guy. You don’t need to have high confidence about any particular outcome, you just need to recognize when the distribution of odds differ from the true odds. Strong favorites in a low information environment indicate a chance to make good money. Sure, any given low information environment, like a papal conclave, may occur infrequently, and you could lose money on any one event, as is the nature of betting, but if you can recognize when the market is likely to be wrong you can extract money from it. Really, that is the only way to extract money from it.

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In situations like this it may make sense to just bet on all the underdogs. The market is highly overconfident in its information, you think the market’s information is crap, so you just bet against the market by taking the underdogs.