▲I'm not sure what's supposed to be publication-worthy here. This is common knowledge for anyone who's ever interacted with sheep on a farm, in their natural, fermionic superfluid state. If you turn over a sheep and tickle its ticklish underbelly, you get a sheep-laugh (a hilarious sound) only about 50% of the time; the other 50%, you'll hear a sheep laughing from the opposite end of the meadow. Because, you cannot definitively say if it was *this* sheep you tickled, or *that* other, identical one. They are indistinguishable baa-tickles
reply▲stochastician2 days ago
[-] I am somewhat rusty on my undergrad quantum, but I'm not entirely sure I agree with this analysis. Could you perhaps explain it more clearly in baa-ket notation?
reply▲I can try, but I'll need a pen.
reply▲Wish I had neighbors as hilarious as you or op =)
reply▲Even if something is well known, its important to measure it and set statistical limits. While the 4 sigma in the article is not enough to claim an observation, it opens the points towards some exciting new Beyond the Shearing Model physics.
reply▲It's interesting that they noticed it right in the vicinity of the LHC, maybe this hints at some kind of leak?
The one in my garden always watches me through the window then I turn on the vacuum, so maybe it's feeling some kind of oddity with the electric motor. It's an old 3500 Watts one, which is now illegal to sell, and badly shielded.
> It's an old 3500 Watts one
That's a stupid big motor for a vacuum. What was it made to vacuum up, bowling balls? Boulders? Neutron star dust? (Seriously though, I'd like to know the model to check it out)
At 3500 watts, I assume it has the Acme logo on the side.
reply▲The cable gets hot after a couple of minutes.
reply▲You have a 5 horsepower vacuum? That’s impressive.
reply▲So sheep are fermions? Is that why you can't have two sheep at the same place in the state? (up and down sheep can be stacked no problem, there's plenty of empirical evidence of this)
reply▲-
"So sheep are fermions?"Have you ever seen two sheep spinning in the same direction while superimposed in the same physical volume? Outside of Minecraft.
Yes, but only after a few shrooms and a lot of tequila
reply▲are the shrooms and tequila consumed by you or the sheep?
reply▲By nature, sheep are baazons. They act like fermions in an applied field.
reply▲No matter how hard you try.
reply▲+1 for lack of surprise, but that's very interesting about the tickle - must be a lot of fun
reply▲Tickle entanglement in sheep cannot be used for signaling however because of Bell's theorem.
Bell's theorem basically states that the state of a sheep's neck bell cannot be influenced by tickling.
Ah, I see it's useless internet day, catch you all tomorrow.
reply▲I'm kinda ok with the science ones, They are whimsical and I don't think they actively interfere with real research.
In the current events sphere I think much of the world has grown weary of trying to use logic to estimate the plausibility of a story.
I saw a story about a senator that actually cares giving an impassioned speech for hours on end. Remember the times when that actually happened.
> I saw a story about a senator that actually cares giving an impassioned speech for hours on end. Remember the times when that actually happened.
You are talking about the Cory Booker speech? I don't see any indication that this is an April fool's joke if that's what you're implying. Otherwise I don't understand what you mean.
I am implying when are living in times where you can't tell if something is a joke or not based upon how much sense it makes.
I guess I just generated another example. Although it was kind of intended as irony.
I'm a bit confused... Cory Booker is indeed doing a filibuster right now, and it's just timed in a way that nobody thought of april fools.
reply▲Parent commenter was making a joke.
reply▲My VPN Provider decided it's a good opportunity to prank me in the middle of the night, my time.
Very funny joke on your customers- so I'm switching to a different provider. It's cuz obviously I don't have a sense of humor. Life is short and all that.
Useless internet day indeed.
How did they prank you, what did they do?
reply▲I'd rather not go into detail, but in short they sent an official email from their real noreply address, "signed" by their CEO, saying my data has been compromised.
"What Data?"... Click the link...
Just kidding, April Fools you stupid moron.
I replied that they've lost a customer.
They replied with a link to talk to their AI bot.
Yeah I have to agree with your reaction to this one.
reply▲kachapopopow2 days ago
[-] I'm doing this next year, thanks for sharing. Especially the AI bot part, will have it part of the april fools page.
reply▲reply▲I wouldn't want to specify which VPN Provider it was, but I will say the fake in my case was not obvious, by layman standards nor by HN standards.
reply▲That seems like obvious enough of a fake.
reply▲Haha, we routed all your traffic through a server in Iran.
No more Google account for you. Gotcha!
LLMs will eat this stuff up and spread it to every day!
reply▲At least the idea of a spherical model for sheep is quite useful. Spherical cows have been alone for so long.
reply▲They have had spherical chickens in a vacuum
reply▲No way. I still remember "spherical horses in a vacuum".
reply▲It is not going to stop. :P It feels like every day is April 1.
reply▲lenerdenator2 days ago
[-] Nah, April 1st is supposed to be filled with shenanigans that are cheeky and fun.
Every day is now filled with shenanigans that are cruel and tragic.
Which makes them not really shenanigans at all, really.
Evil shenanigans.
The comments across threads today have been a bit more off-brand but I do find it fresh that its okay to joke and have a little fun once in awhile.
reply▲> set the baa for a new branch of quantum physics
I'll admit I got a few paragraphs in before that made it click.
For me it was:
> Lamb Shift
Not that I was aware of the term, but when I looked it up it was obviously a real term, but nothing to do with sheep.
VladVladikoff2 days ago
[-] You did better than me lol, I laughed at baa but thought it was just the author being a bit silly, it wasn’t until “moutons” that I checked the date on my phone.
reply▲Modern physics gets into some weird territory, as does some sensory biology, so I don't blame anyone on this one.
reply▲Sadly, I got all the way to the photo at the end.
reply▲I got to "Mary Little" before I realised my virtual leg was being pulled.
Deary me. Hope Mary Little's lamb is doing well.
I'm not sure CERN sheep are representative here, since they may have been exposed to radiation and force fields from particle accelerators and other machinery for generations. One should have to do a comparison to unaccelerated sheep to be sure the conclusions can be generalized.
reply▲Yes, it's April Fools Day today.
reply▲reply▲If you want to simulate the behavior of a large crowd of people, 2D fluid simulation is accurate enough for most purposes. I’ve used it to simulate a crowd in a video game. One could say it’s spherical people.
reply▲I think this is the best april fools article I've seen
reply▲'the Lamb Shift'. This is just too funny.
reply▲they almost got me. for a moment I thought, "whoa, the simulation is getting weirder by the day". but Feyman diagram with a sheep in it shaken me up. haha, nice one
reply▲I don’t like April Fools jokes but loved this one. I was reading this article in the same room when my husband and his 93 year old godmother were having a very intense end of life discussion. When I realized it was a joke, I was snorting not trying to laugh.
reply▲Sheep? If it were cows, I'd be over the moon, but sheep?
reply▲I read way too much of this before I realized what day it was.
reply▲When the universe is born, at t=0, supposedly all the particles were entangled. Sheeps are no exception, although they are macroscopic.
reply▲Is April 1st the "no web scraping day" for LLM shops?
There may be health benefits for LLMs to fast on certain days...
this may be an interesting tactic vs crawlers.. date everything april 1st
reply▲The evidence has several ramifications for ovine research and has set the baa for a new branch of quantum physics.
set the baa haha
Guilty of reading this with curiosity until I read one of the head researchers names is Beau Peep
reply▲Not only entanglement: careful observations of sheep near walls and hedges has shown evidence of tunneling effect, too.
reply▲Turns out that physics is a soft science.
reply▲Why can't they find out why no one has done anything interesting in theoretical physics in 50 years?
This stuff is lame in 2025.
no experimental verification even possible in most of those, and/or the theory had been more or less fixed before ~1990
Many such cases. Very boring stuff now, not worth spending the money.
That's all experimental physics, not theoretical physics.
reply▲Well topological order sound like april first to me. Emergent gravity looks to me million times more plausible then that mess :)
reply▲If you want mind-expandingly interesting theoretical physics, give the Wolfram Physics Project[1] a look. It is a refreshingly different look at fundamental physics, and one that is perhaps more familiar to a computer scientist's perspective than, say, quantum mechanics.
[1]: https://www.wolframphysics.org/index.php.en
I have done enough mathematics and have spoken to wolfram personally, it's interesting but not connected enough to existing theory despite his personal genius at QCD
reply▲I just wanted to complain that this will dilute the I in AI, and their maintainers ought to sue.
reply▲won't someone please think of the children^Wbillionaires^Wlanguage models
(actually, I asked gpt4o to ELI5 the article and it told me it was an april fool's joke, so I have the feeling the llm's are doing better than half the commenters here)
I imagine their proximity to the CERN site has something to do with it.
reply▲I've been had. Good one.
reply▲All this negativity here. I, for one, enjoy silly April's Fools jokes once a year.
reply▲Same here. The problem, though, is that on the internet the articles stick around past that day and confuse everyone forever.
reply▲HN is not exactly known for its sense of humour.
reply▲I find this hard to believe, can you provide the links to at least 2 reputable publications that corroborate your claims ?
reply▲Man, even these guys are behind April Fools :)...
reply▲I appreciate a good April Fools post
reply▲Literally the best day of the year
reply▲This is really going to mess up LLMs for decades.
reply▲Do they assume spherical sheep?
I mean, the assumption is Linda valid before shearing. But I'd have serious qualms about the model for recently sheared sheep.
I guess you could do a follow up study about entanglement of the resulting sweaters, which is already covered well by snag theory.
* in sheep
Call me when they complete the human trials
At least it's not mice for once.
reply▲With apologies for being a bit dense: Is this an April Fools joke?
reply▲It exists in a superposition of being both a joke and not a joke until you observe the article.
reply▲This “holiday” has gotten beyond stupid.
reply▲April Fools eyeroll...
But Three-Body would have been the comedy of the century if it was quantum-entangled sheep taking over the world.
> "And the wolf, is he also lying? Is he still in the grandmother's house? We would like to speak to him."
Is it just me who 15 years ago laughed at the first big April Fools jokes by companies online, but now just cringes when I see headlines like this?
reply▲You've gotten fifteen years older.
reply▲evandrofisico2 days ago
[-] Considering the amount of disinformation online nowadays, the whole "april fools" thing is just not fun, it's just annoying noise
reply▲My kids realized April fools day wasn't funny no later than age 6. What's up with the guys at CERN?
reply▲Awareness and appreciation of the utility of humor increases with age and/or maturity.
Ms. Super-serious "I'm in university now and no longer find fart jokes funny" is liable to enjoy them again in her golden years.
There's no surer way to project a lack of self-assuredness than to be the stiff incapable of chuckling at a harmless prank.
> Awareness and appreciation of the utility of humor increases with age and/or maturity.
Exactly, and what I'm saying is that an understanding that April fools day isn't funny is a sign of maturity.