The government announced at the end of last year that the building phase of Ulaanbaatar metro would begin in June 2026
Now that we are on July, has this materialized?
Before you accuse me of being some kind of Russian troll or anything I've never been to any of these countries and I have no interest in causing any annoyance, I live in the opposite part of Europe and the closest relation that I have with Russia is that a friend of mine has a Russian parent. I'm just very curious about how different languages are spoken in Eastern Europe
In the case of the Caucasus I know that the country with the smallest Russian-native speaking community is Armenia, but somewhat paradoxical, as I can observe in many videos recorded in different Armenian cities, you can see Russian text signs every so often.
I mean, I searched for a random Armenian city (Gyumri) and I found the typical video where a guy walks down the streets of that city with a 4K camera. You can clearly see Russian texts in many streets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX9FTD38tSg)
Also, I invite you to search for images of Armenian train stations and you will see that a lot of signs are in Russian. This would make sense if these would be old signs from the Soviet era, but you can also find modern signs written in Russian
So is it Russian that commonly found throughout Armenia? Or is it just my impression?
And if it is indeed, why is that the case if precisely Armenia has the lowest Russian natives among the Caucasus countries?
Were these physicists open to the idea that laws of physics (even the most fundamental ones) could have been different? So that the laws of physics of our own universe would neither be the only possible ones nor necessary?
Also, were they open to the possibility that there may be other universes or "worlds"? (For example I have read that von Neumann had very similar ideas* to the Many Worlds Interpretation...)
Physicist John Wheeler proposed an interesting idea for the origin of all laws of physics and he summarized it with the catch phrase "Law without law"
In this idea all laws would emerge from a primordial chaos. However in this article (https://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/handle/10803/283538/af1de1.pdf;jsessionid=287D2EF09148986989FF3F442FA83186.tdx1?sequence=1) an interesting critique by another physicist, David Deutsch, is mentioned, in which he said that Wheeler assumed an equal probability for all possible laws, but that is not getting possible laws from pure lawlessness as Wheeler would want, but instead assuming equal probability for all outcomes is in itself a regularity. We would have to assume that all probability distributions could occur
Then, did Wheeler consider this? Did he also consider that all probability distributions could be possible in any of his writings?
I'm "researching" a bit about these towns and from what I've gathered speaking with many lithuanians is that in eastern Vilnius towns and cities there are many speakers of slavic languages like Polish. However, many of them say that the language spoken in these zones is more like a mix of Polish, Russian and Belarussian.
So is Polish spoken as the majority language in the bigger towns like Pabrade and Nemencine? Or is it more like a dialect or a mix between slavic languages (like "tutejszy" or "po prostu")?
In this interesting paper by Edward Witten (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.01791) he says that, while gauge symmetries can be emergent, they are always exact, because an explicitly broken gauge symmetry is not ordinarily a useful concept (see page 6)
However, in this other paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02391), he seems to consider models in which emergent gauge symmetries are "completely broken", instead of being spontaneously broken, indicating that they can be explicitly broken.
Is this the case? Can emergent gauge symmetries be approximate or explicitly/completely broken?