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Re:Mathematicians try to understand how CS proof solves Conn... by choeger on Friday April 17, 2020 @03:52AM (#22897063)
The analogy holds. For a 2x2 matrix the error bound is obviously quite large, but you still know it exists. Physics do not allow you to simply modify the temperature of a point. Thermodynamics prevent that.

Now the interesting question is, does the conjecture follow from the model itself? Apparently not. But I do neither understand the model nor the proof.

Re:Mathematicians try to understand how CS proof solves Conn... by shoo on Friday April 17, 2020 @05:16AM (#22897443)
> Physics do not allow you to simply modify the temperature of a point. Thermodynamics prevent that.

gotcha - in terms of the analogy, the temperature distribution cannot be any arbitrary distribution with a finite average (i.e. a finite L2 norm) --- including those pathological cases e.g. the temperature is 0 everywhere except at one point x where it takes the value 1 ---- no, the temperature distribution has to have some minimum smoothness structure, meaning that if you adjust the temperature at a single point, you have to also locally adjust the temperature of neighbouring points enough for it to make a difference to the overall global average temperature over the entire space.

for intuition, the animation on the wikipedia "heat equation" page is a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation

When you plug initial conditions into the heat equation, over time it evolves to be smoother.

Re:Mathematicians try to understand how CS proof solves Conn... by thaumasiotes on Friday April 17, 2020 @05:12AM (#22897424)
But, according to the article, the Connes conjecture applies to all infinite matrices. There's nothing strange about modifying the value of one entry in a matrix.