- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
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So, basically, we don’t know that much on anything besides understanding it’s really complex and difficult to figure out.
Not really. It’s all about models - we have for normal stuff, but it breaks apart in extreme situations
So clearly the model is fundamentally wrong… Which is pretty cool, because it means FTL travel, antigravity, or travel between dimensions could be possible
But we know now normal shit acts - we have models that work perfectly for 99% of all situations, and we’re probably not going to stop using them. We understand what happens when you throw an object, and it’s a basic equation up until like mock-2 or 3, where our models stop working and we have to switch them out completely
Can you build a model that works for both? Absolutely. It’ll be closer to the truth even. But it’ll be way more complicated for nearly all practical, human scale situations
At the end of the day, a model that describes reality exactly is almost useless… Without simplifications to ignore everything not relevant, just trying shit live would be easier than calculating the prediction
What I don’t understand is if the goal is to eventually be able to model everything perfectly, if we achieve that goal, doesn’t that just mean entropy is a lie?
This has always been true.
No it hasn’t. Many religions and spiritual texts covered all this stuff in just a couple of pages.
Please do show the spiritual texts which cover general and specific relativity.
The Bible says something about the earth and how it is good and the filament of the sky and something. The Bible that is, at least that’s what I read on the internet. Many fine people on the internet, the best people, but not me, I haven’t said it, but the best people probably. The best people say the earth may be - and I’m not saying it is but they are saying it - they say that the earth may be flat and that doesn’t take much text to cover I have heard.
Actually, we know everything there is happening in solar system. What we don’t know requires energies or distances or times incomparable with human life.
We don’t know why space spawns. We don’t know why the sun’s corona is hotter than its surface. We don’t know why the sun spins faster around its equator than at its poles. We don’t know why shampoo makes strange squiggles when being poured out of its bottle. Just four things off the top of my head.
Relevant alt-text https://xkcd.com/1489/
I know I’m stupid but how do you see the alt text?
On mobile: long press on the comic itself
Know of any way to make Firefox not cut it off?
Does it just ellipsis off (…)?
One tap on the alt text fixes that
Oh nice. It’s some combination of you being awesome and me being stupid for not figuring that out.
I’m glad you can see the alt text! It’s the best part sometimes
Yeah, I’ve been feeling like I’ve only been getting half the experience with xkcd on mobile up to now. Full experience unlocked!
I can’t wrap my head around time being anything other than the measurement of movement, and until someone can prove otherwise, that’s where I’ll be.
I think high level degree holders know a lot more than the average man thinks we know, in fact I doubt the majority of people even know US High school level stuff like that we’ve discovered a gravitational constant and about the inverse square law as it applies to gravity.
The sad reason for that is that it’s a conversation killer. I would love to go back and forth for hours on things like the uncanny similarity between universal gravitation and Coulomb’s law. But, when I speak to someone with a similar background to mine it’s all…work-work-work-how-is-it-applied??, and when I speak to someone without that background it’s all yawns. It’s a shame because in either case I think science is the most interesting topic. It’s just as edifying to dive casually into the philosophy as it is to dive rigourously into the maths. I learn more per unit time from either type of conversation than from studying papers. And, it’s a passion, but one whose expression is stymied either by explaining it in terms of football fields per dolphin or by making it marketable. Interaction with other minds is the most valuable type of learning.
I feel like I may come off as a bit of an elitist writing this, but the problem really is the opposite: I wish more people would get involved!I’m a person without that background and I’ll talk about it. What’s the uncanny similarity you mentioned?
Well that’s lovely, thank you 😊 So Newton’s law of universal gravitation is:
F= G×M×m/r^2
which is simple enough to be able to say it in a sentence: "the force of gravity F on two masses M and m is proportional to their masses and square of the distance between them, r " so the heavier and closer planets/suns/black holes are, the greater the gravitationnel pull.
Coulomb’s law is:F= k×Q×q/r^2
which is pretty much exactly the same as you have probably noticed: "the force of electrical attraction F on two charged particles Q and q is proportional to their charges and the square of the distance between them, r "
So the exact same rule applies to planets and atoms. Their behaviour can be explained in the same way. It’s called an “inverse square law”, it’s got a name because they happen everywhere. And it’s just, like… Why? Why does the universe work that way? You’re not really encouraged to ask that sort of question as a science student, because it “goes nowhere” and doesn’t lead to actionable results. But I think it quite spooky. There are loads of weird results like that in science and maths (see quantum theory for abundant examples!) but it’s unusual to be able to sit and think about it. There is, for the inverse square law, a pretty elegant mathematical explanation for why they’re so common, but it doesn’t quite scratch the itch for me, it just raises more questionsEdit sorry for text wall. This is probably why I shouldn’t do this!
I dunno, it’s an inverse square. Are we going to get excited each time something has a linear relationship to another thing? What makes the inverse square so special?
In my field of work (molecular biology) anything with a linear relationship gets exciting! I got an R^2 of .9968 last week that had me jumping for joy.
Bertrand’s theorem states that stable orbits are only possible for one single inverse distance relation (in classical mechanics): inverse square
If the law is not inverse square (or harmonic oscillator), there will be no long lasting orbits, no galaxy clusters, no galaxies, no star systems, no planet and moon pairs.
If the electrostatic force wasn’t inverse square, electromagnetic force would look much different. No gauss law would be possible.
Inverse square relationship is really neat
There’s a lot of things which are required to be exactly as we observe them to be for our surroundings to work out as we observe them to be. If they weren’t we wouldn’t be here to observe, or, at the very least, we’d be quite different.
Also as to other universes: Who says that any random universe with other laws ties together objects based on their mass. For all we know their attractive force could be relative to photon emissions and elves keep the orbit stable by strategically shining torches at the sky (ok that’s not that likely evolutionary speaking but we’re talking physics).
That’s why it’s interesting that inverse square is in electrostatic and gravitational forces only. Weak and strong force don’t follow inverse square. And we don’t see the highly complex organization inside the nucleus that we see outside it (otherwise we’d have stable orbits inside the nucleus as well)
1.2 Appendix
Motion is indeed, tricky. - Zeno of Elea
He was just obsessed with cutting things in half
Can’t explain better than this🤯 Repost in !science_memes@mander.xyz
I have been thinking that is impossible for ANYTHING to understand EVERYTHING. Because ANYTHING will always be a part of EVERYTHING, and you need EVERYTHING to understand EVERYTHING.
Any system will always be a sub-system of some other system.
Also I’ve been thinking about something I read: “The more close or deep we see, the more it seems to be nothing there”. I think it was related to subatomic particles, which seems to be just fields of energy instead of matter or something like that.
I’d appreciate if someone wants to share a few comments or thoughts about this with me.
Copernicus deserves a mention. Galileo’s problems resulted (in part) from him being a proponent of Copernicism after the church had declared it heresy.
Heliocentrism was suggested by Copernicus and Galileo built on that, including developing physics to the point where he couldn’t believe otherwise.
The heliocentric models predicted the orbits worse than epicyclic geocentric ones and that is the reason Galileo was told to shut up, the court transcript is like 99% science and then a single subordinate clause saying “it also contradicts the bible”.
Galileo insisted on circular orbits which was his downfall, ironically “because circles are perfect and god would furnish the universe perfect”: That kind of religious language while also being worse science than what was already established did him in. Kepler, based on Brahe’s data, was the first one to get a heliocentric model right and more accurate than the epicyclic ones.
Also earth doesn’t revolve around the sun. If anything both revolve around their shared centre of gravity but really it’s a matter of your frame of reference. Paraphrasing Archimedes: Give me a fixed point in the universe and I will move all your models.
The sun. Does the earth and moon orbit a gravitational center that they share? Does that center revolve around the sun? How imperceptible is this, considering the shared point is likely inside the earth given the difference between its mass and lua’s?
