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Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Hey Journals, at least the good stuff makes Arxiv.org!

Critics in my last post claimed:
Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo.
Well thank heavens. What would research be like if we didn't have articles published on hep-th on what is "The Height of a Giraffe":
A minor modification of the arguments of Press and Lightman leads to an estimate of the height of the tallest running, breathing organism on a habitable planet as the Bohr radius multiplied by the three-tenths power of the ratio of the electrical to gravitational forces between two protons (rather than the one-quarter power that Press got for the largest animal that would not break in falling over, after making an assumption of unreasonable brittleness). My new estimate gives a height of about 3.6 meters rather than Press's original estimate of about 2.6 cm. It also implies that the number of atoms in the tallest runner is very roughly of the order of the nine-tenths power of the ratio of the electrical to gravitational forces between two protons, which is about 3 x 10^32.
How gravity effects our brain size:
On the basis of a static support condition depending on the tensile strength of flesh rather than bone, it is reasoned here that our size should be subject to a limit inversely proportional to the terrestrial gravitation field g, which is itself found to be proportional (with a factor given by the 5/2 power of the fine structure constant) to the gravitational coupling constant.This provides an animal size limit that will in all cases be of the order of a thousandth of the maximum mountain height, which will itself be of the order of a thousandth of the planetary radius. The upshot, via the (strong) anthropic principle, is that the need for brains, and therefore planets, that are large in terms of baryon number may be what explains the weakness of gravity relative to electromagnetism.
Journals, what would be the fate of High Energy Theory if we couldn't enjoy high energy physics papers like these! Man, why does everyone need to be a critic?

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