I'm broken as hell, but I really hope people with more discretionary income are able to support them financially <3
That made me smirk considering who launched and funds Quanta: the Simons Foundation.
James Simons is the founder of hedge fund: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies and also reponsible for: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chern%E2%80%93Simons_theory
Quanta naturally covers research that is funded by Simons Foundation. There have actually been many big news that Quanta has not covered or pretended didn’t exist when writing other articles. It’s a PR arm of Simons Foundation.
Also the writers are decent, but all of the scientific-to-lay explanations and analogies are coming from the researchers, if that wasn’t obvious. They are just paraphrasing since they can’t just write blocks of verbatim quotes or such.
Also yeah, the writers get access to researchers as a part of the funding.
I mean as a mathematician I also can't always wrap my head around their analogies, but I don't think that is always an issue on my part. I am somewhat of the belief that there is an inherent amount of complexity that can't really be diminished for a lot of these concepts, and "dumbing it down" too much may not be a good.
Their visualizations seemed especially helpful here. I am curious, though-they allude to this discovery relating to modeling phenomena like fluid perfusing porous materials. Are precise values of constants like this “backbone exponent” a practical barrier to that sort of modeling, or is this a more basic discovery that’s satisfying just in the sense of the completeness of human knowledge?