Beer Question #2
Sometimes people who are autistic-spectrum have difficulty parsing the implicit meaning of speech, including intonation and body language. Songs are chock-full of conflicting expressions like “Yeah oh no no yeah” and “Oh whoah oh”. This actually drives me nuts when I hear it—I think “make up your mind! Is it yes or no?”
Do autistic-spectrum individuals have trouble interpreting lyrics like these? How does it change their experience of music?
Beer Question #1
One of my professors, Arjendu Pattanayak, used to defer hairy questions in class with “That’s a beer question—meaning, buy me a beer at the pub, and we’ll talk about it.”
In that spirit, I will buy anyone who can explain this as many beers as it takes:
In general relativity, spacetime curvature is proportional to the stress-energy tensor T. T’s components are basically four-momentum density and flux, which are characterized as “momentum” and “energy”. Photons count. So do other particles with with four-momentum. Does anything else contribute? Electrostatics? The vector potential? The strong nuclear force? What is it that makes something contribute to T?