Robert McNees

@mcnees
8.8K Followers
387 Following
5.1K Posts

Physicist and professor at a school on the north side of Chicago. Black holes, quantum gravity, cosmology. Rocky Top, Tar Heel. Science, dogs, lake photos. Faves are spooky action at a distance, boosts are Lorentz transformations to another inertial frame. Opinions are mine, not my employer’s.
#Physics #BlackHoles #Gravity #SciComm #Dogs

Level 14 Prof of Physics, Neutral Good, S:11 I:16 W:15 D:11 C:12 Ch:11, HP: 68, THAC0: 11, Equipment: Vorpal Chalk, Periapt of Tenure, Tweed Jacket (Cursed)

Webhttps://jacobi.luc.edu/index.html
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Google Scholarhttps://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Xv-faY4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
mcnees.github.iohttps://mcnees.github.io/about/
Show threadRobert McNeesJun 14
Brb, scouring the internet for a replacement for my old Ximian tee shirt.
Show threadRobert McNeesJun 14
Pretty sure this is the year of Linux on the desktop.
Robert McNeesJun 14
I found a box of CDs with laptop archives from ~2003 that I thought were lost. They include a bunch of gtk2 and metacity themes that are making me very nostalgic for the old gnome desktop!
Robert McNeesMay 27
Back on my nonsense.
Show threadRobert McNeesMay 21

I don't know if the implication is that Rudberg introduced the notation; I can't check because I don't have access to a copy of the thesis.

The notation is normally associated with Penrose, who completed his dissertation in 1957 but wasn't yet working on relativity afaik.

Show threadRobert McNeesMay 21

This is either a lovely little coincidence, or a very thoughtful bit of poetic notation, I don't know which.

I saw it mentioned in the context of Hans Rudberg's 1957 thesis "The compactification of a Lorentz space and some remarks on the foundation of the theory of conformal relativity."

Robert McNeesMay 21

Relativists use a script letter ℐ with + or - to denote the two light cones comprising the conformal boundary of Minkowski space. ℐ is a script "I" so it is pronounced "scri."

Today I learned that the Polish word "skraj," pronounced about the same way, means "edge," as in a boundary.

"skraj lasu" means "edge of the wood."

Robert McNeesMay 20

what

https://www.reddit.com/r/Weird/comments/1tidtfw/im_a_land_surveyor_and_i_just_found_an_organ/

Robert McNeesMay 16
Good morning. #bloomscrolling
Robert McNeesMay 11
Robert McNeesMay 10, 2023

“There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas."

Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was born #OTD in 1900. She used quantum mechanics to decode the spectral lines of stars and deduce their elemental composition, concluding they are mostly H and He, and was the first woman to be made full professor and department chair at Harvard.

Image: Harvard Observatory