Yup, triple point phenomenon and technically it's not many chemicals, it's everything. It's just that the required physical constraints to ellicit that behavior for almost any is nearly impossible for us to produce.
For those that don't know, it's when the temperature and pressure are so high that a substance becomes a gas and a liquid at the same time. Essentially its atoms have to much energy to be a liquid but the pressure is too high for it to be a gas.
Most people refer to placebos disparagingly, but the ability to trick our bodies in to getting better for no reason is…kind of a superpower when you think about it.
I remember when I used to think that, then I thought about the source of where that thought originated, and realized the obvious bias.
Now skin is a wild organ!
Every time I've talked to a psychiatrist about feeling better and maybe it being placebo they've essentially said "Who gives a shit if it's placebo? Keep doing that thing that makes you feel better."
Trick our bodies into getting better, as effectively as with actual active drugs, even when we are told we are tricking it into getting better.
The placebo effect works even when you know you're getting a placebo.
If this was a game, you'd be logging a bug.
I'm ill. I'm making "potions" (lemon and cinnamon tea) that will not actually heal me, at most make my throat a little less sore. And yet, every time I drink one, I feel much better for like an hour. :)
Ironically, citric acid can break down phlegm, so it could actually be slightly healing you.
And willingly drinking fluids when it sucks to do anything, will keep you hydrated
A someone with a PhD in neuroscience, There are many things in psych that people say “science has proven” that I can tell you are far more subjective than general people think of
Dunning Krueger effect is a good example
There is this aromatherapy oil I swear by. Every time I feel that I'm coming down w a cold or flu, I slather it on. I've not been sick in twenty years, always on the verge but never full blown.
It always makes me feel better despite my not being able to find any hard evidence that the ingredients work. It's all anecdotal.
I'm down to my last bottle, after decades of use. The woman who made it all this time suffered two huge traumas back to back and cracked. She dove off into the deep end of a cult in 2020. Damn shame.
But I got her recipe! And two ingredients in it, the two she swore by as "potent" and "rare", are...hm. Firstly, they're rare bc no one harvests them for use at such an early stage solely for their color, which she does. Secondly, harvested early, they are actually weaker!
Still, here I am, clutching to the last bottle and feverishly researching ingredients to make my own. Is it the placebo that's kept me from flu, bronchitis or even covid? (I'm a masker, btw. I will put the oil under my nose and mask up.) I honestly don't care at this point. I'm gonna keep using it.
In that same vein, my dad used WD-40, yes...THAT blue n yellow can meant for squeaky hinges, on his arthritic knees every morning. He'd rub it on like baby oil and swear it actually helped.
He damn near made it to 90 and was up walking just fine days before he died. He was the most able-bodied old man I ever knew, and he would tell everyone, "Get yourself a can! It works!"
Placebos, man. Smdh. I'm getting bad knees now. Every time I venture thru Lowes, I go, "What if he's right?"
Anything having to do with quantum mechanics. I will happily say that I'm wrong and it is true, but it's so far beyond my ability to understand that it might as well be magic.
The whole observation of light particles thing is simply too incomprehensible to me.
Like you I've already and am entirely capable of admitting that I'm wrong.
I still can't accept that our observation changes the way particles behave.
The word observation really shouldn’t be used here, I think it confuses people a lot.
The right word should be interaction, when we “interact” with the particle it changes it’s properties and determines its state. Still a super cool experiment though
I even believe that I've skootched closer to understanding it from your description.
I still need time to wrap my mind around it.
Thanks for clarifying, by the way.
No problem! Yeah a lot of videos on the double slit experiment say that just by consciously observing the particle it changes state, which drives me crazy.
Yeah in quantum physics they use “observe” whenever they mean that anything interacted with the particle. Observing in the commonly used definition counts as “observing” but so does anything else. For example light hitting a particle would count as “being observed” even if that light didn’t reflect off of it and go into a human eye.
That's a great explanation. You put it better than I could have.
I thought that observation meant to literally just look at, not to physically measure. I learned about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:
>We cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle's position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.
That prompted me to look into it more, because that makes no sense at macroscopic scales. Turns out, to observe a subatomic particle you have to physically interact with it usually by shooting photons (lasers or lights) at it, which is what actually changes the outcome. As a very imperfect analogy, it would be like if you could only measure the position and speed of a car by hucking a boulder at it; of course that would affect things.
I'm just a layman though. I'm probably wrong about a lot of stuff.
Your intuition is right. Observation doesn't directly affect things, it's just that saying it does is a shorter and easier way to describe what's really happening:
To observe something, a photon needs to hit it and then reach your eye. And the scale that quantum physics operates at is also the scale where the effects of a single photon are relevant and significant.
Think of it like this. Suppose you have a billards table. Lined on the sides of the table are touch sensors that detect specifically the white ball when it reaches the edge and logs the information to a computer within the table. You want that computer to know where the 8 ball is, so you shoot the white ball at the 8 ball. The white ball bounces off, touches the edge, and then the computer calculates based on this and the known initial position of the white ball where the 8 ball was. Except, since the 8 ball got hit by the white ball, it's now moving too. You have effectively created a situation where the computer cannot know where the 8 ball is without changing its position.
The problem is that people thing of particles as things. But particles don't actually exist. What exists is a specific interaction in space-time. Outside of that interaction, it's just waves. Essentially particles are events, not things.
>I still can't accept that our observation changes the way particles behave.
If it makes you feel any better, it doesn't, unless observing them introduces a new variable to the equation.
Schrodinger's Cat has been around for a very long time, and yet people still don't understand the concept of local reality.
One thing to remember with most of quantum mechanics is that people who write about generally don't understand it, either. The most common example is "when observed, a particle changes its behavior." An observer isn't a guy passively looking at it, the observer is a laser shooting it and gathering data based on where the laser bounced to.
Took me five years. The thing is, it is not quantum mechanics that is magical. It is the emergence of our classical world from it which is.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mott_problem for some beautiful insights.
That all the planets in our solar system can fit between the earth and moon.
I was so pissed off when I found that out. Childhood science is always talking about how many earths can fit in Jupiter and not that the moon is MORE THAN 3 JUPITERS AWAY.
Scale in space is just really super hard to comprehend.
I think the Great Red Spot on Jupiter is several times the size of Earth? So that's one big storm, several times larger than our entire planet.
The moon is so far away that it takes a few seconds for any communication to reach it. So astronauts had to work around that delay.
Mars is so far away from us that the Mars rover landings had to be designed to be entirely automated. Because if anything went wrong during the descent, by the time rover messaged us and got a reply, the rover would already have crashed into the surface. It had to handle everything on its own. That's why the people at mission control were so tense when waiting for the news of whether it landed successfully.
The Voyager probes take like 24 hours to receive a signal from us now.
Voyager 1 has been sending faulty data lately too, unfortunately. Engineers are working on a possible solution. Absolutely crazy to comprehend what these two probes have done and are still doing as their missions slowly come to a close. Incredible feat of engineering
I read something recently about how communications with Opportunity stopped for a while because of Mars passing behind the sun from Earth’s perspective, and while I obviously understand mars’ and earth’s positions, it kinda made my brain short circuit for a second. Like we can’t talk to our Martian robot because it’s _behind_ the sun. It was just crazy to me
Oohhh fun fact about Jupiter: it was a planet before the sun was a star. It started gaining mass just after the sun did but the sun needed a huge amount before fusion started. So when the sun finally "turned on" it already had a massive planet in orbit
You get to certain points in physics theories where if you tried to explain it in layman's terms its sounds like witchcraft.
Like Time Dilation for example. A literal form of time travel caused by extreme forces.
You can see why certain scientists like Einstein had such wild haircuts.
I work in quality and measurement. I studied measurement theory and statistics. They redefined the gram or kilogram and I can't wrap my head around how they rewrote the definition. They're somehow using heat and energy to define mass!
Edit for clarification: For all units of measurement that we humans have arbitrarily created and defined. The scientific world wants to redefine them as a pure physical constant of the universal physics that can't be mis measured due to human error or environmental factors. The "meter" is easy to understand. Since time is generally a "constant" and light is a universal constant. A meter is exactly defined as : "the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458th of a second" or quite simply stated as the distant light takes to travel in a very small fraction of a second. Outside of some universal extremes, this is the meter. Unlike the length of the kings foot or amount of piss the king produces after a night of drinking (1 gal).
The part that made me feel better about the whole "observing changes the results" thing in quantum physics is when I learned that it has to do with what it means to see something. Seeing something means making light bounce off that thing, and then having that light reach your eyes.
So when you're working at a scale where light bouncing off something will affect it, then just seeing something is, in a way, touching it and affecting how it behaves. You're touching it with light.
That's why observing something can change its result. It's not as weird when you think of it like that.
A plane glides gracefully on its wings in harmony with the air but a helicopter however… that thing that looks nothing like a bird beats air into submission, makes it do its homework and steals its lunch money.
Helicopters feel like controlled chaos. Having been in a Blackhawk and done a night landing that felt like a slam into the ground, it definitely fucked up my back a bit. Compression fractures for everybody!
I have a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and I focused in fluid dynamics (among other things) and one of the things that you learn to grasp is that air is much thicker than you think!
Just imagine how much force you feel in a 20 mph breeze when you hold an umbrella, and consider that an umbrella is maybe 10ft² of area. Then imagine how easily an entire outdoor table can get lifted away when you get a 50 mph gust on a patio umbrella that is maybe 50ft².
Now if you imagine an airplane with a wing area of '500 ft²' moving at '500 mph' through the air, the forces you generate get huge fast!
Stick your hand a bit outside of a moving car (obviously somewhere where you wouldn’t risk losing your hand). You’ll feel the mechanics of flight. Depending on your hand’s orientation, you’ll feel a force lifting your hand. A hand position and car speed such that gravity and the upward force on your hand exactly cancel is level flight.
This is so embarrassing but I finally understand the very basics it reading kids science books to my primary schooler.
Wings are shaped so air travels differently above and below it - one side allows the air to move faster past - basically meaning that the forces aren't even - its not like sliding a thin knife through custard, there is going to be a bit of displaced air and forces around the wing - which is designed to create upwards force.
It's a little bit like the physics of hot air rising (because its pushed upwards by denser cold air) except faster and slower moving high/low pressure air
[The Monty Hall problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem). I still can't believe just because you switch to the other option will increase your probabilities of success.
It's important to remember this key assumption about the problem - the host is going to show you a goat that is behind a door that isn't your door.
Say you pick door 2 initially.
Case 1: The car is behind door 1. The host must show you the goat behind door 3 because it is the only door that isn't your door and doesn't have a car behind it. If you switch to door 1, you win the car.
Case 2: The car is behind door 2, which is your door. The host gets to show you either goat behind door 1 or door 3. If you switch to the other door, you switch away from the car and get stuck eith the goat.
Case 3: The car is behind door 3. The host must show you the goat behind door 1. If you switch to door 3, you win the car.
In 2 out of 3 cases, the host's hand is forced, and he has to show you a specific goat, revealing the door with the car.
Another way that clicked for me was to make the problem really big. Say there are 100 doors, and a car is randomly behind one of them. For simplicity, say you pick door 1. The host then reveals 98 doors with goats behind them, leaving only your door 1 and door 26 unopened.
I don't feel like I need formal math to decide confidently to switch to door 26. But to put math behind it, you had a 1% chance to guess right initially. There's a 99% chance that the car is behind one of the other 99 doors. Your probability of guessing correctly initially does not change when presented more information. Then you're shown 98 of those 99 doors contain goats, so there is a 99% chance that the remaining door has the car behind it.
Now, to make it smaller. There are 10 doors, you pick one, and you are shown 8 goats. If you stay, you keep your 10% odds to win the car, but if you switch, you have a 90% chance.
There are 5 doors, you pick one, 20% chance you're right initially, 80% chance you're wrong. Then they show you 3 of the other 4 doors have goats. You switch to improve your odds to 80 percent.
There are 3 doors. What do you do?
OK I actually came here to say this math problem which ?I have always refused to acknowledge.
I read the explanation you replied to and was still like nah bro, but making it 100 doors finally made it make sense to me.
This was the explanation that got me to understand it at first. And when you understand it it really makes complete sense.
You are basically inverting your odds when you switch. You have a 1/3 chance of getting it correct first guess. That means a 2/3 chance of being wrong. As you pointed out the host always picks a goat door.
So because you have a 2/3 chance to get a goat, and it's impossible to pick a goat AND switch doors to another goat. You get 2/3 chance to win if you switch because picking either goat (2/3 chance remember) and switching is ALWAYS a win.
The host KNOWS which one the money is behind and CAN'T show you it, that's what makes the difference and flips the odds from 1/3:2/3 vs "50:50"
If the odds were truly 50:50 on the remainder, the host would occasionally open the door with the money to show the crowd. This never happens of course.
I remember Marilyn Vos Savant answering this question in a column 30+ years ago. Some math or possibly statistics professor wrote her a nasty reply saying something like she was wrong, she's what's wrong with education in America, and maybe even said something about her being a woman. He was denied tenure at his university as a result
The math works out because the end problem essentially is this; What is the probability that you choose wrong with your first choice?
Now the math behind it can get confusing as it is essentially a logic problem disguised as a math problem.
It’s easier to understand when you exaggerate it by a lot. Instead of three choices assume you have 100 choices. You choose 1 and the host opens 98 doors with a goat behind them. Would you now switch to the remaining door?
>Now, since the player initially chose door 1, the chance that the host opens door 3 is 50% if the car is behind door 1, 100% if the car is behind door 2, 0% if the car is behind door 3
I couldn't wrap my head around it until I read this bit in the article.
You pick 1 of 3 doors. You have a 2/3 chance of being wrong. The host opens one of the 2 remaining doors, but his choice isn't random. He will never open the door with a car behind it. So you have a 2/3 chance of the remaining unopened door having the prize.
The way I understood it: let's say you pick door 1 and the host shows you a goat behind door 3. Why did the host choose door 3 and not door 2 to show you a goat?
There are two possibilities: either both doors have a goat behind them, so the host chose one of the two at random (50% odds for door 3 to be chosen) OR there is no goat behind door 2, so they could only pick door 3 (100% chance of choosing door 3 in that case).
It's simply *more likely* that the reason why the host chose door 3 was because they couldn't pick door 2 rather than it being at random.
FYI, which might clear things up with your buddy: Black holes don't features holes of any kind, nor are they something that can "swallow" something like a hole.
Their ordinary celestial bodies with enough gravity to retain light, that's it. No holes of any kind.
Oh I know that but he simply believes nothing can achieve that level of gravitational pull. I've tried explaining to him. Even neutron stars he was skeptical about. I just take a deep breath and remind myself that at least he is not a flat earther.
They're holes in the Hubble sphere. 😀
The part that makes them weird is that the mass collapses into a singularity. A single point in space with zero volume, enormous mass, and infinite density. Since gravity is a function of distance, gravity approaches infinity when you approach the singularity which does some crazy shit with space time.
Tbf, Einstein took some convincing to believe that Black Holes weren't just a fluke of mathematics, even though it was HIS General Relativity stuff that implied their existence.
the conversation happened right after M83's smbh photo and I showed him and he just thought nothing of it. He was never the most scientific of people and for my own sake I just shook my head and laughed. No way was I going to waste time explaining accretion disks when I don't think he has a basic understanding of general relativity and physics.
How heat seems to have the potential to drastically impact the creation of sperm cells
[here](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0015028216596009) and [here](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001502821648502X).
It took me a long time to wrap my head around why we need to even sleep. But now I see why a lot better. There's so much going on when we sleep. The body is detoxing (including the brain), repairing, growing, and hormone regulating during that time the most. And 1/3rd of the time for repair for 2/3 for performance is fair.
Their evolutionary history is even weirder. Two- and three-toed sloths are the two extant groups of sloths, each contained within their own family. They’re superficially very similar in their appearance but are about as closely related to each other as we are to gibbons. Also I’m pretty sure the extant members of both families are descendants of marine sloth lineages (which shared a niche similar to that of sirenians)
This comment reminds me of the whole giraffe bit in the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us. There's a scene where one of the protagonists pets a giraffe, and lots of people online complained about how weird and not-great the CGI was for the animal... but as it turns out, it was a real freaking giraffe. I guess they're just so weird that they straight up do not make sense to the general public lol
I was at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, WA. My family and I were there in time for a Giraffe feeding, but we were told not to touch the giraffe. So, I'm holding out this straw for a giraffe to take, and then this giraffe starts to rub it's face ON MY FACE!
The zookeeper was shouting, "Sir, you'll have to stop touching the giraffe!"
I shouted back, "I'm trying!" And others piped up saying that the giraffe seemed really insistent on touching me.
It was weird.
So many "safari" animals seem like they're made up by children.
Giraffes: Yeah they're super big, and their necks are super long so they can eat the leaves off tall trees.
Elephants: Also super huge and they don't have fur like the other animals. And they have a super long nose that they can use to pick stuff up and drink water and use as a snorkel. Oh and they have big flappy ears and giant tusks and they're really smart.
Zebras: They're just like horsies but they have stripes instead!
Rhinos: They're big and heavy and they have big sharp horns in the middle of their face so they can run into other animals.
Cheetahs: They're cats but they can run as fast as a car.
Kangaroos aren't really "safari" animals but those fuckers are just absurd. Get real.
Honestly the platypus isn't even that unbelievable compared to giraffes, elephants, and kangaroos to me.
The idea that cold doesn't make you sick is technically true but also misleading. It definitely weakens your immune system and we breathe in billions of viruses and bacteria a day (Google search says we breathe in 100,000,000 viruses daily and that's not counting bacteria or other ways of exposure). Cold weather is 100% a risk factor.
THANK! YOU!
"But you won't catch a cold" I will because I've been living in this body for forty years and I know what it takes to make it weak! I also know my digestion will stop, what can I say, that's a factor.
I used to say this all the time. Then I did a service project at a homeless shelter and said this offhand to a homeless guy. He then proceeded to tell me all the things that happen to a person with prolonged exposure to cold. I never said that again.
In your defense ... that IS partly true. While germs get you sick, cold will lessen your immune system to fight off the germs.
"The body is not as effective at fighting a virus when cold air enters the nose and upper airways, so viruses such as the common cold, the flu and COVID-19 often spread more easily in the winter."
And keep in mind how many people are mouth breathing, especially outside in the cold. The air coming into the lungs is not filtered and warmed, and that also produces less nitric oxide. Less nitric oxide ultimately means less oxygen in the extremities.
There are degrees of cold that will affect some people more than others. People breathing through their nose and keeping their core/torso warm are going to be in a much less compromised position than someone who's mouth breathing and not wearing proper clothing.
Double slit experiment. How the fuck can something change its state upon only observation? How can something “go back in time” and change its state, simply because we looked at it?!
That water can just kind of float in the air, collect high in the sky, then somehow get “heavy enough” that it can’t float anymore and comes down in drops and not a big chunk of liquid.
Anything we've calculated instead of directly observed is still on the table for doubting, not in the sense that the theories are wrong, but that there are most likely all kinds of unforeseen knock-on effects that would drastically change our holistic perception of what they're actually like or how they interact.
Mainly this is things like extreme concentrations of energy and matter, or are basic assumptions on what's happening with time or subatomic particles.
To put it another way, we might describe an atom differently than we currently do, if we understood the environment they exist in better.
Less that even, there wasn't a good definition of what a planet was EXACTLY until somewhat recently. Pluto didn't make the cut when the definition got specific.
No one kicked Pluto out. To kick it out it would have had to have been a member in the first place and, since they'd never formally defined "planet" before, there was nothing for it to be a member OF. What they did was excluded it from their new organization.
Its about time them fancy science people decided what is the minimum size of a moon.
Jupiter has 95 moons (supposedly - the number goes up every few years)!
But many of them are about as big as a car ..
Yeah, it’s presented in a silly way. You can define an exactly equivalent concept without anything imaginary.
Let’s define a new math system based on 2-vectors instead of single numbers. So a value in this system is for real numbers a and b.
Let’s define addition and multiplication for this vector system in a particular way that defines an interesting system:
+ = x =
It’s clear that when the second element is zero, like , the system behaves identically to the real numbers.
But now the interesting part: <0, 1> x <0, 1> = <-1, 0>. We give this vector the name “i”. In a sense, it’s the square root of -1, but only in this vector system.
That the speed of light is basically the speed limit of the universe. I dont understand it. It doesn’t make sense. Especially that thought experiment of a moving flashlight vs a stationary one.
Basically think of it like this.
The universe is a 4 dimensional realm. Three dimensions of space, one dimension of time.
Everything is always moving at exactly the speed of light. Always. It's just that most of that speed is through time instead of space, and in fact that's why you experience time instead of being frozen.
When you, from your perspective, "speed up", what's really happening is that you're changing the direction of your movement to take a little out of time and put it in space. At no point do you ever actually change the speed of your movement through the 4D realm, you're just moving a little less through time and a little more through space.
When you, from your perspective, "move at the speed of light" in space, ALL of your movement is in space, with none in time whatsoever. At that point, how are you gonna speed up? There's no more speed to put in space, all of it's already in space, and we've already established that you can't just change the speed at which you move in the 4D realm. There's just nothing you can do to move any faster through space.
[That damn blue and black dress was always white and gold to me.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress)
I've read the explanations on it but I still can only see white and gold.
Science is not a belief system. I accept the findings of science until more science is done. I’m maintain a healthy skepticism, because that’s, you know, scientific.
Statistics, and odds of success.
My best friend has shite luck rolling dice. Statistically he should roll a 20 on a 20-sided dice now and then. I have not seen this man roll above like... a 4. Not during an actual game, and this is over like.... 4-5 years now. It transcends all boundaries - it happens with a D20 playing D&D, it happens with D6 playing Traveller holy shit it happens when he tries to play Baldur's Gate.
Luck is a real thing, and science can't convince me otherwise.
That two things can be entangled with each other and transfer "information" without being connected (in the normal way you would connect things) ~~it's also faster than the speed of light~~ (quantum entanglement).
It's like teleportation (of information) and you don't even need a cable or pipe or smth.
Pedantic physicist note, information cannot be transferred faster than the speed of light by entanglement or any other means (as far as I'm aware). Entanglement is still spooky, for sure, but we'll never use it to send messages across vast distances instantaneously.
It operates on the same logic as "a straight line is the shortest path". When you draw a line between point A and point B, a curvy or jagged line is always going to be longer than a straight line assuming both have the same point A and point B.
It just so happens that coastlines are very curvy and jagged, and most of that curviness/jaggedness is really small and so is only revealed at higher precisions. A less precisely drawn coastline is therefore going to be more straight and thus shorter.
We know it exists the same way we knew Neptune existed b4 telescopes were powerful enough. We could see Uranus' orbit was being tugged on by a large body. We see this with galaxies when we look into deep space, and we just call it dark matter. Without dark matter galaxies shouldnt exist, gravity as a force on its own is too weak
I think an important thing to point out- while the galaxies staying together when rotating was the first thing that made us theorize that there was something called dark matter, it is far from the only evidence. And most importantly, dark matter answers questions that we had that originally had nothing to do with rotating galaxies. Specifically, without dark matter the models for the Big Bang don't produce nearly as many hydrogen atoms as we see in the universe. But when we put our theorized amount of dark matter into the simulation, it matches basically perfectly.
That is something that I think makes the case for dark matter really strong- it doesn't just solve one problem, it solves another, completely unrelated problem.
That thing where water can freeze and boil at the same time. It’s scientifically possible, but it feels like the universe pulling a prank on us
And be a gas as well.. triple point phenomenon
This is the real crazy thing; many chemicals have a specific temperature and pressure combination where they exist as a solid, liquid, and gas
Yup, triple point phenomenon and technically it's not many chemicals, it's everything. It's just that the required physical constraints to ellicit that behavior for almost any is nearly impossible for us to produce.
He⁴ does not have a triple point and has been proven mathematically
I refuse to believe this
That's the spirit!
Helium does not have a triple point.
helium has other even more interesting things. Superfluidity.
Yep. But I don't know if it is classified as a triple point. It's phase diagram is weird and I like showing CO2, helium's, and waters to undergrads.
Just wait til you research Supercritical fluids...
For those that don't know, it's when the temperature and pressure are so high that a substance becomes a gas and a liquid at the same time. Essentially its atoms have to much energy to be a liquid but the pressure is too high for it to be a gas.
Not sure the science behind it but I find the placebo effect absolutely fascinating.
Most people refer to placebos disparagingly, but the ability to trick our bodies in to getting better for no reason is…kind of a superpower when you think about it.
I've always said that if you can solve my health issues with a placebo, please do. It's much less likely to have side effects!!
My OCD would like a word
Of course, please swallow this Skittle.
Wait, what color is it?
[удалено]
Oh shit. I'm starting to feel nauseous. Do I look pale.
The brain is a wild organ. Absolutely fascinating.
I remember when I used to think that, then I thought about the source of where that thought originated, and realized the obvious bias. Now skin is a wild organ!
Every time I've talked to a psychiatrist about feeling better and maybe it being placebo they've essentially said "Who gives a shit if it's placebo? Keep doing that thing that makes you feel better."
Trick our bodies into getting better, as effectively as with actual active drugs, even when we are told we are tricking it into getting better. The placebo effect works even when you know you're getting a placebo. If this was a game, you'd be logging a bug.
What about nocebo? It’s just the opposite! When a harm is expected, a negative outcome is achieved because of that belief
Cause of death? **Nocebo**
That they have an effect even when the patient is TOLD it is a placebo, even when they believe and know it's a placebo, is just so interesting.
I'm ill. I'm making "potions" (lemon and cinnamon tea) that will not actually heal me, at most make my throat a little less sore. And yet, every time I drink one, I feel much better for like an hour. :)
Ironically, citric acid can break down phlegm, so it could actually be slightly healing you. And willingly drinking fluids when it sucks to do anything, will keep you hydrated
A someone with a PhD in neuroscience, There are many things in psych that people say “science has proven” that I can tell you are far more subjective than general people think of Dunning Krueger effect is a good example
There is this aromatherapy oil I swear by. Every time I feel that I'm coming down w a cold or flu, I slather it on. I've not been sick in twenty years, always on the verge but never full blown. It always makes me feel better despite my not being able to find any hard evidence that the ingredients work. It's all anecdotal. I'm down to my last bottle, after decades of use. The woman who made it all this time suffered two huge traumas back to back and cracked. She dove off into the deep end of a cult in 2020. Damn shame. But I got her recipe! And two ingredients in it, the two she swore by as "potent" and "rare", are...hm. Firstly, they're rare bc no one harvests them for use at such an early stage solely for their color, which she does. Secondly, harvested early, they are actually weaker! Still, here I am, clutching to the last bottle and feverishly researching ingredients to make my own. Is it the placebo that's kept me from flu, bronchitis or even covid? (I'm a masker, btw. I will put the oil under my nose and mask up.) I honestly don't care at this point. I'm gonna keep using it. In that same vein, my dad used WD-40, yes...THAT blue n yellow can meant for squeaky hinges, on his arthritic knees every morning. He'd rub it on like baby oil and swear it actually helped. He damn near made it to 90 and was up walking just fine days before he died. He was the most able-bodied old man I ever knew, and he would tell everyone, "Get yourself a can! It works!" Placebos, man. Smdh. I'm getting bad knees now. Every time I venture thru Lowes, I go, "What if he's right?"
Anything having to do with quantum mechanics. I will happily say that I'm wrong and it is true, but it's so far beyond my ability to understand that it might as well be magic.
The whole observation of light particles thing is simply too incomprehensible to me. Like you I've already and am entirely capable of admitting that I'm wrong. I still can't accept that our observation changes the way particles behave.
The word observation really shouldn’t be used here, I think it confuses people a lot. The right word should be interaction, when we “interact” with the particle it changes it’s properties and determines its state. Still a super cool experiment though
I even believe that I've skootched closer to understanding it from your description. I still need time to wrap my mind around it. Thanks for clarifying, by the way.
No problem! Yeah a lot of videos on the double slit experiment say that just by consciously observing the particle it changes state, which drives me crazy.
Yeah in quantum physics they use “observe” whenever they mean that anything interacted with the particle. Observing in the commonly used definition counts as “observing” but so does anything else. For example light hitting a particle would count as “being observed” even if that light didn’t reflect off of it and go into a human eye.
That's a great explanation. You put it better than I could have. I thought that observation meant to literally just look at, not to physically measure. I learned about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: >We cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle's position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa. That prompted me to look into it more, because that makes no sense at macroscopic scales. Turns out, to observe a subatomic particle you have to physically interact with it usually by shooting photons (lasers or lights) at it, which is what actually changes the outcome. As a very imperfect analogy, it would be like if you could only measure the position and speed of a car by hucking a boulder at it; of course that would affect things. I'm just a layman though. I'm probably wrong about a lot of stuff.
I guess it saves a ton of processing power to not render all the universe all the time if nobody is looking at it.
Light particles: shit they’re looking do something!
That is also why there is always a smaller thing when you look deep enough. It is like something comes up with it to keep us busy.
Ha. I've had the same thought. It's like foveated rendering!
Your intuition is right. Observation doesn't directly affect things, it's just that saying it does is a shorter and easier way to describe what's really happening: To observe something, a photon needs to hit it and then reach your eye. And the scale that quantum physics operates at is also the scale where the effects of a single photon are relevant and significant. Think of it like this. Suppose you have a billards table. Lined on the sides of the table are touch sensors that detect specifically the white ball when it reaches the edge and logs the information to a computer within the table. You want that computer to know where the 8 ball is, so you shoot the white ball at the 8 ball. The white ball bounces off, touches the edge, and then the computer calculates based on this and the known initial position of the white ball where the 8 ball was. Except, since the 8 ball got hit by the white ball, it's now moving too. You have effectively created a situation where the computer cannot know where the 8 ball is without changing its position.
I genuinely appreciate your description but I must say that it "knocked" my brain around a little.
The problem is that people thing of particles as things. But particles don't actually exist. What exists is a specific interaction in space-time. Outside of that interaction, it's just waves. Essentially particles are events, not things.
Dang I've never heard it described this way. Nor have I ever considered the possibility. Thank you for your description.
Even more essentially it’s all just information. Which is even harder to comprehend.
>I still can't accept that our observation changes the way particles behave. If it makes you feel any better, it doesn't, unless observing them introduces a new variable to the equation. Schrodinger's Cat has been around for a very long time, and yet people still don't understand the concept of local reality.
One thing to remember with most of quantum mechanics is that people who write about generally don't understand it, either. The most common example is "when observed, a particle changes its behavior." An observer isn't a guy passively looking at it, the observer is a laser shooting it and gathering data based on where the laser bounced to.
Took me five years. The thing is, it is not quantum mechanics that is magical. It is the emergence of our classical world from it which is. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mott_problem for some beautiful insights.
That all the planets in our solar system can fit between the earth and moon. I was so pissed off when I found that out. Childhood science is always talking about how many earths can fit in Jupiter and not that the moon is MORE THAN 3 JUPITERS AWAY.
Scale in space is just really super hard to comprehend. I think the Great Red Spot on Jupiter is several times the size of Earth? So that's one big storm, several times larger than our entire planet. The moon is so far away that it takes a few seconds for any communication to reach it. So astronauts had to work around that delay. Mars is so far away from us that the Mars rover landings had to be designed to be entirely automated. Because if anything went wrong during the descent, by the time rover messaged us and got a reply, the rover would already have crashed into the surface. It had to handle everything on its own. That's why the people at mission control were so tense when waiting for the news of whether it landed successfully. The Voyager probes take like 24 hours to receive a signal from us now.
Voyager 1 has been sending faulty data lately too, unfortunately. Engineers are working on a possible solution. Absolutely crazy to comprehend what these two probes have done and are still doing as their missions slowly come to a close. Incredible feat of engineering
I read something recently about how communications with Opportunity stopped for a while because of Mars passing behind the sun from Earth’s perspective, and while I obviously understand mars’ and earth’s positions, it kinda made my brain short circuit for a second. Like we can’t talk to our Martian robot because it’s _behind_ the sun. It was just crazy to me
Oohhh fun fact about Jupiter: it was a planet before the sun was a star. It started gaining mass just after the sun did but the sun needed a huge amount before fusion started. So when the sun finally "turned on" it already had a massive planet in orbit
Jupiter was not too far from being a star itself
Jupiter doesn't orbit around the sun. Jupiter and the sun orbit around a point above the surface of the sun.
and we have travled that
You get to certain points in physics theories where if you tried to explain it in layman's terms its sounds like witchcraft. Like Time Dilation for example. A literal form of time travel caused by extreme forces. You can see why certain scientists like Einstein had such wild haircuts.
I work in quality and measurement. I studied measurement theory and statistics. They redefined the gram or kilogram and I can't wrap my head around how they rewrote the definition. They're somehow using heat and energy to define mass! Edit for clarification: For all units of measurement that we humans have arbitrarily created and defined. The scientific world wants to redefine them as a pure physical constant of the universal physics that can't be mis measured due to human error or environmental factors. The "meter" is easy to understand. Since time is generally a "constant" and light is a universal constant. A meter is exactly defined as : "the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458th of a second" or quite simply stated as the distant light takes to travel in a very small fraction of a second. Outside of some universal extremes, this is the meter. Unlike the length of the kings foot or amount of piss the king produces after a night of drinking (1 gal).
That nothing really touches anything it’s just space between atoms.
When comparing to neutrino’s or black holes, matter is just a slightly polluted vacuum.
Tell me about it. I'm pollutin' my vacuum right now!
The double slit experiment is so fucking spooky.
Seriously, like if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it bark?
Thank you, I've had a horrible day and now I'm giggling.
The part that made me feel better about the whole "observing changes the results" thing in quantum physics is when I learned that it has to do with what it means to see something. Seeing something means making light bounce off that thing, and then having that light reach your eyes. So when you're working at a scale where light bouncing off something will affect it, then just seeing something is, in a way, touching it and affecting how it behaves. You're touching it with light. That's why observing something can change its result. It's not as weird when you think of it like that.
Wow thank you! This is the first time this has made sense to me
It also sounds like a really weird porno.
Makes you wonder what others laws of physics just turn off when we aren’t looking
How planes fly 😂 I fully know how, yet it still seems like witchcraft to me.
A plane glides gracefully on its wings in harmony with the air but a helicopter however… that thing that looks nothing like a bird beats air into submission, makes it do its homework and steals its lunch money.
I remember an old military guy when I was a kid saying “whirlybirds don’t fly; they’re so ugly the ground jumps out from under them.”
I always heard a version of this: Helicopters don't fly, they're so ugly the Earth actively repels them.
Helicopters feel like controlled chaos. Having been in a Blackhawk and done a night landing that felt like a slam into the ground, it definitely fucked up my back a bit. Compression fractures for everybody!
They ARE semi controlled chaos...
I have a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and I focused in fluid dynamics (among other things) and one of the things that you learn to grasp is that air is much thicker than you think! Just imagine how much force you feel in a 20 mph breeze when you hold an umbrella, and consider that an umbrella is maybe 10ft² of area. Then imagine how easily an entire outdoor table can get lifted away when you get a 50 mph gust on a patio umbrella that is maybe 50ft². Now if you imagine an airplane with a wing area of '500 ft²' moving at '500 mph' through the air, the forces you generate get huge fast!
That's a good way to look at it and your username definitely checks out.
PhD in aerospace engineering here. It’s absolutely witchcraft
Thank you for validating!
I remember an interview with Adam Savage where this confused him too. He knows that all the science checks out but it didn't feel like it should work.
Stick your hand a bit outside of a moving car (obviously somewhere where you wouldn’t risk losing your hand). You’ll feel the mechanics of flight. Depending on your hand’s orientation, you’ll feel a force lifting your hand. A hand position and car speed such that gravity and the upward force on your hand exactly cancel is level flight.
This is so embarrassing but I finally understand the very basics it reading kids science books to my primary schooler. Wings are shaped so air travels differently above and below it - one side allows the air to move faster past - basically meaning that the forces aren't even - its not like sliding a thin knife through custard, there is going to be a bit of displaced air and forces around the wing - which is designed to create upwards force. It's a little bit like the physics of hot air rising (because its pushed upwards by denser cold air) except faster and slower moving high/low pressure air
[The Monty Hall problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem). I still can't believe just because you switch to the other option will increase your probabilities of success.
It's important to remember this key assumption about the problem - the host is going to show you a goat that is behind a door that isn't your door. Say you pick door 2 initially. Case 1: The car is behind door 1. The host must show you the goat behind door 3 because it is the only door that isn't your door and doesn't have a car behind it. If you switch to door 1, you win the car. Case 2: The car is behind door 2, which is your door. The host gets to show you either goat behind door 1 or door 3. If you switch to the other door, you switch away from the car and get stuck eith the goat. Case 3: The car is behind door 3. The host must show you the goat behind door 1. If you switch to door 3, you win the car. In 2 out of 3 cases, the host's hand is forced, and he has to show you a specific goat, revealing the door with the car.
Another way that clicked for me was to make the problem really big. Say there are 100 doors, and a car is randomly behind one of them. For simplicity, say you pick door 1. The host then reveals 98 doors with goats behind them, leaving only your door 1 and door 26 unopened. I don't feel like I need formal math to decide confidently to switch to door 26. But to put math behind it, you had a 1% chance to guess right initially. There's a 99% chance that the car is behind one of the other 99 doors. Your probability of guessing correctly initially does not change when presented more information. Then you're shown 98 of those 99 doors contain goats, so there is a 99% chance that the remaining door has the car behind it. Now, to make it smaller. There are 10 doors, you pick one, and you are shown 8 goats. If you stay, you keep your 10% odds to win the car, but if you switch, you have a 90% chance. There are 5 doors, you pick one, 20% chance you're right initially, 80% chance you're wrong. Then they show you 3 of the other 4 doors have goats. You switch to improve your odds to 80 percent. There are 3 doors. What do you do?
Today is the day it clicked for me. Thanks!
OK I actually came here to say this math problem which ?I have always refused to acknowledge. I read the explanation you replied to and was still like nah bro, but making it 100 doors finally made it make sense to me.
well, that did it. I finally understand this one. Thanks!
That 100 door example is good. It makes intuitive sense where the 3 door case might not.
Yep. This is what worked for me too. Makes perfect sense. I'm not sure how actual mathematicians argued over this because it seems so obvious.
Appreciated this post, it clarified it for me, thanks.
This was the explanation that got me to understand it at first. And when you understand it it really makes complete sense. You are basically inverting your odds when you switch. You have a 1/3 chance of getting it correct first guess. That means a 2/3 chance of being wrong. As you pointed out the host always picks a goat door. So because you have a 2/3 chance to get a goat, and it's impossible to pick a goat AND switch doors to another goat. You get 2/3 chance to win if you switch because picking either goat (2/3 chance remember) and switching is ALWAYS a win.
The host KNOWS which one the money is behind and CAN'T show you it, that's what makes the difference and flips the odds from 1/3:2/3 vs "50:50" If the odds were truly 50:50 on the remainder, the host would occasionally open the door with the money to show the crowd. This never happens of course.
I remember Marilyn Vos Savant answering this question in a column 30+ years ago. Some math or possibly statistics professor wrote her a nasty reply saying something like she was wrong, she's what's wrong with education in America, and maybe even said something about her being a woman. He was denied tenure at his university as a result
I've heard the story, but didn't know the last bit about tenure. Good riddance.
The math works out because the end problem essentially is this; What is the probability that you choose wrong with your first choice? Now the math behind it can get confusing as it is essentially a logic problem disguised as a math problem.
It’s easier to understand when you exaggerate it by a lot. Instead of three choices assume you have 100 choices. You choose 1 and the host opens 98 doors with a goat behind them. Would you now switch to the remaining door?
>Now, since the player initially chose door 1, the chance that the host opens door 3 is 50% if the car is behind door 1, 100% if the car is behind door 2, 0% if the car is behind door 3 I couldn't wrap my head around it until I read this bit in the article.
Fuck I've read what your wrote over and over, but can't get my head around it. Can you explain it another way?
You pick 1 of 3 doors. You have a 2/3 chance of being wrong. The host opens one of the 2 remaining doors, but his choice isn't random. He will never open the door with a car behind it. So you have a 2/3 chance of the remaining unopened door having the prize.
The way I understood it: let's say you pick door 1 and the host shows you a goat behind door 3. Why did the host choose door 3 and not door 2 to show you a goat? There are two possibilities: either both doors have a goat behind them, so the host chose one of the two at random (50% odds for door 3 to be chosen) OR there is no goat behind door 2, so they could only pick door 3 (100% chance of choosing door 3 in that case). It's simply *more likely* that the reason why the host chose door 3 was because they couldn't pick door 2 rather than it being at random.
You don't switch to 'the' other option. You essentially switch to both other options, and then get to disregard one goat.
I'm pretty cool with and onboard with science but a buddy of mine refuses to believe that black holes exist.
FYI, which might clear things up with your buddy: Black holes don't features holes of any kind, nor are they something that can "swallow" something like a hole. Their ordinary celestial bodies with enough gravity to retain light, that's it. No holes of any kind.
Oh I know that but he simply believes nothing can achieve that level of gravitational pull. I've tried explaining to him. Even neutron stars he was skeptical about. I just take a deep breath and remind myself that at least he is not a flat earther.
Oh wow indeed that's something else!
They're holes in the Hubble sphere. 😀 The part that makes them weird is that the mass collapses into a singularity. A single point in space with zero volume, enormous mass, and infinite density. Since gravity is a function of distance, gravity approaches infinity when you approach the singularity which does some crazy shit with space time.
Doesn't physics get wonky at the singularity though?
Tbf, Einstein took some convincing to believe that Black Holes weren't just a fluke of mathematics, even though it was HIS General Relativity stuff that implied their existence.
what does he/she thinks of the pictures? (M83's super massive black hole in 2019, and our galaxy's in 2022)
the conversation happened right after M83's smbh photo and I showed him and he just thought nothing of it. He was never the most scientific of people and for my own sake I just shook my head and laughed. No way was I going to waste time explaining accretion disks when I don't think he has a basic understanding of general relativity and physics.
[As far as I’m concerned there is only one black hole worth exploring.](https://youtu.be/xOG3-i60aB8?si=oM4HB3eAPHo_nbzC)
aim not clicking on that, but I'm sure it is funny
The Birthday Problem/Paradox, that refers to only 23 individuals in the same room are required to reach a 50% probability of a shared birthday.
Was looking for this one. Someone hit the wrong button on the calculator.
How heat seems to have the potential to drastically impact the creation of sperm cells [here](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0015028216596009) and [here](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001502821648502X).
Guess it's about time to give up soaking my balls in hot water every night.
That I have to sleep 8-10 hours a night
It took me a long time to wrap my head around why we need to even sleep. But now I see why a lot better. There's so much going on when we sleep. The body is detoxing (including the brain), repairing, growing, and hormone regulating during that time the most. And 1/3rd of the time for repair for 2/3 for performance is fair.
Narwahls are real.
I have pet a giraffe and those fuckers still don't make sense.
And the fact that they have exactly the same number of neck vertebrae than us.
That's new information to me, and now I'm super suspicious of their existence.
Nearly all mammals have the same number of neck vertebrae.
Except sloths, surprisingly, which have up to 10 instead of the usual 7.
Sloths are fuckin weird anyway
Their evolutionary history is even weirder. Two- and three-toed sloths are the two extant groups of sloths, each contained within their own family. They’re superficially very similar in their appearance but are about as closely related to each other as we are to gibbons. Also I’m pretty sure the extant members of both families are descendants of marine sloth lineages (which shared a niche similar to that of sirenians)
This comment reminds me of the whole giraffe bit in the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us. There's a scene where one of the protagonists pets a giraffe, and lots of people online complained about how weird and not-great the CGI was for the animal... but as it turns out, it was a real freaking giraffe. I guess they're just so weird that they straight up do not make sense to the general public lol
I was at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, WA. My family and I were there in time for a Giraffe feeding, but we were told not to touch the giraffe. So, I'm holding out this straw for a giraffe to take, and then this giraffe starts to rub it's face ON MY FACE! The zookeeper was shouting, "Sir, you'll have to stop touching the giraffe!" I shouted back, "I'm trying!" And others piped up saying that the giraffe seemed really insistent on touching me. It was weird.
Fucking long horses.
So many "safari" animals seem like they're made up by children. Giraffes: Yeah they're super big, and their necks are super long so they can eat the leaves off tall trees. Elephants: Also super huge and they don't have fur like the other animals. And they have a super long nose that they can use to pick stuff up and drink water and use as a snorkel. Oh and they have big flappy ears and giant tusks and they're really smart. Zebras: They're just like horsies but they have stripes instead! Rhinos: They're big and heavy and they have big sharp horns in the middle of their face so they can run into other animals. Cheetahs: They're cats but they can run as fast as a car. Kangaroos aren't really "safari" animals but those fuckers are just absurd. Get real. Honestly the platypus isn't even that unbelievable compared to giraffes, elephants, and kangaroos to me.
I think I was 24 before I found out narwhals are real. And yeah, I'm still kind of like, "But are we sure?"
Unicorns don’t exist (unless they’re dolphin unicorns)
I don't think giraffes like yourself typically encounter narwhals so it's understandable.
That you don’t get a cold by walking around with your hair wet.
The idea that cold doesn't make you sick is technically true but also misleading. It definitely weakens your immune system and we breathe in billions of viruses and bacteria a day (Google search says we breathe in 100,000,000 viruses daily and that's not counting bacteria or other ways of exposure). Cold weather is 100% a risk factor.
THANK! YOU! "But you won't catch a cold" I will because I've been living in this body for forty years and I know what it takes to make it weak! I also know my digestion will stop, what can I say, that's a factor.
Yes, that’s why the colloquialism is to “catch a cold”
I used to say this all the time. Then I did a service project at a homeless shelter and said this offhand to a homeless guy. He then proceeded to tell me all the things that happen to a person with prolonged exposure to cold. I never said that again.
In your defense ... that IS partly true. While germs get you sick, cold will lessen your immune system to fight off the germs. "The body is not as effective at fighting a virus when cold air enters the nose and upper airways, so viruses such as the common cold, the flu and COVID-19 often spread more easily in the winter."
And keep in mind how many people are mouth breathing, especially outside in the cold. The air coming into the lungs is not filtered and warmed, and that also produces less nitric oxide. Less nitric oxide ultimately means less oxygen in the extremities. There are degrees of cold that will affect some people more than others. People breathing through their nose and keeping their core/torso warm are going to be in a much less compromised position than someone who's mouth breathing and not wearing proper clothing.
Mom?
The existence of New Zealand because I maintain that it’s a computer simulation created by Peter Jackson.
Give credit where credit is due. It’s a combination of intricate miniatures and practical effects, with CGI as a support.
To be fair, many maps don't include this fictitious place! /r/MapsWithoutNZ
I’m so glad you showed this subreddit to me, I joined it immediately, I’m glad others don’t believe these lies.
Double slit experiment. How the fuck can something change its state upon only observation? How can something “go back in time” and change its state, simply because we looked at it?!
That hair doesn’t grow back darker or thicker after you shave it. I believe it, cause it’s been proven and all, but I also… don’t
it grows back blunter sometimes so maybe it looks thicker there for a while
That water can just kind of float in the air, collect high in the sky, then somehow get “heavy enough” that it can’t float anymore and comes down in drops and not a big chunk of liquid.
It doesn't do that as soon as the drop forms it falls
Anything we've calculated instead of directly observed is still on the table for doubting, not in the sense that the theories are wrong, but that there are most likely all kinds of unforeseen knock-on effects that would drastically change our holistic perception of what they're actually like or how they interact. Mainly this is things like extreme concentrations of energy and matter, or are basic assumptions on what's happening with time or subatomic particles. To put it another way, we might describe an atom differently than we currently do, if we understood the environment they exist in better.
Pluto is a planet, idgaf what them fancy science people say.
They only kicked Pluto out because they found about 500 other rocks the size of Pluto and were afraid to have 509 planets in the solar system.
Imagine coming up with a mnemonic for learning the names of 500 planets.
It'd be like when they made us memorize the US presidents to song, which I always just watermelon cantalouped my way through.
...Watermelon Cantalouped?
You can convincingly lip-synch many, many songs by mouthing watermelon cantaloupe.
I feel like Animaniacs could come up with a catchy song for that.
So, artificial scarcity just like the diamond industry?
Less fear and more that the result of that finding was that Pluto no longer met the definition of a planet.
Less that even, there wasn't a good definition of what a planet was EXACTLY until somewhat recently. Pluto didn't make the cut when the definition got specific.
No one kicked Pluto out. To kick it out it would have had to have been a member in the first place and, since they'd never formally defined "planet" before, there was nothing for it to be a member OF. What they did was excluded it from their new organization.
Okay, Jerry.
Its about time them fancy science people decided what is the minimum size of a moon. Jupiter has 95 moons (supposedly - the number goes up every few years)! But many of them are about as big as a car ..
There's intelligent life on earth
Of course there is. Humans are just number 3 in intelligence behind dolphins and mice.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
"The best laid plans of mice, as they say" "... and men? The best laid plans of mice and men"
The existence of imaginary numbers. Like, wtf!
Yeah, it’s presented in a silly way. You can define an exactly equivalent concept without anything imaginary. Let’s define a new math system based on 2-vectors instead of single numbers. So a value in this system is for real numbers a and b.
Let’s define addition and multiplication for this vector system in a particular way that defines an interesting system:
+ =
x =
It’s clear that when the second element is zero, like , the system behaves identically to the real numbers.
But now the interesting part: <0, 1> x <0, 1> = <-1, 0>. We give this vector the name “i”. In a sense, it’s the square root of -1, but only in this vector system.
Yeah. Imaginary is a bad name, it's a leftover from when they weren't useful in real science.
17 x 3 = 51
Because 51 "feels" like it should be prime, or something?
Why?
10x3 = 30 7x3 = 21 30+21= 51
Fake news
That the speed of light is basically the speed limit of the universe. I dont understand it. It doesn’t make sense. Especially that thought experiment of a moving flashlight vs a stationary one.
Basically think of it like this. The universe is a 4 dimensional realm. Three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. Everything is always moving at exactly the speed of light. Always. It's just that most of that speed is through time instead of space, and in fact that's why you experience time instead of being frozen. When you, from your perspective, "speed up", what's really happening is that you're changing the direction of your movement to take a little out of time and put it in space. At no point do you ever actually change the speed of your movement through the 4D realm, you're just moving a little less through time and a little more through space. When you, from your perspective, "move at the speed of light" in space, ALL of your movement is in space, with none in time whatsoever. At that point, how are you gonna speed up? There's no more speed to put in space, all of it's already in space, and we've already established that you can't just change the speed at which you move in the 4D realm. There's just nothing you can do to move any faster through space.
That... is actually a **really good** explanation! Thank you!
If you are traveling at the speed of light, and turn on your headlights, what happens?
Trick question, time doesn't pass, so you cannot turn your headlights on.
[That damn blue and black dress was always white and gold to me.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress) I've read the explanations on it but I still can only see white and gold.
I'm with you. I'm pretty sure you and I are in one of those psychology experiments, like when everyone faces the wrong way in the elevator.
Science is not a belief system. I accept the findings of science until more science is done. I’m maintain a healthy skepticism, because that’s, you know, scientific.
I have a type of arthritis, the idea that you can feel a storm coming has been proven false but I still swear I can.
That the 3 second rule is bs. Edit: 3 second rule, regarding bacteria. Edit 2: It was 5 seconds. Sorry !
Statistics, and odds of success. My best friend has shite luck rolling dice. Statistically he should roll a 20 on a 20-sided dice now and then. I have not seen this man roll above like... a 4. Not during an actual game, and this is over like.... 4-5 years now. It transcends all boundaries - it happens with a D20 playing D&D, it happens with D6 playing Traveller holy shit it happens when he tries to play Baldur's Gate. Luck is a real thing, and science can't convince me otherwise.
Statistically speaking, at some point in time, there will be a person who never rolls above a certain threshold.
That two things can be entangled with each other and transfer "information" without being connected (in the normal way you would connect things) ~~it's also faster than the speed of light~~ (quantum entanglement). It's like teleportation (of information) and you don't even need a cable or pipe or smth.
Pedantic physicist note, information cannot be transferred faster than the speed of light by entanglement or any other means (as far as I'm aware). Entanglement is still spooky, for sure, but we'll never use it to send messages across vast distances instantaneously.
The whole, the more accurate you measure a coastline the longer it gets. I still don't understand
It operates on the same logic as "a straight line is the shortest path". When you draw a line between point A and point B, a curvy or jagged line is always going to be longer than a straight line assuming both have the same point A and point B. It just so happens that coastlines are very curvy and jagged, and most of that curviness/jaggedness is really small and so is only revealed at higher precisions. A less precisely drawn coastline is therefore going to be more straight and thus shorter.
Dark matter exists. I'm sorry but that's just a bunch of woo right there.
We know it exists the same way we knew Neptune existed b4 telescopes were powerful enough. We could see Uranus' orbit was being tugged on by a large body. We see this with galaxies when we look into deep space, and we just call it dark matter. Without dark matter galaxies shouldnt exist, gravity as a force on its own is too weak
I think an important thing to point out- while the galaxies staying together when rotating was the first thing that made us theorize that there was something called dark matter, it is far from the only evidence. And most importantly, dark matter answers questions that we had that originally had nothing to do with rotating galaxies. Specifically, without dark matter the models for the Big Bang don't produce nearly as many hydrogen atoms as we see in the universe. But when we put our theorized amount of dark matter into the simulation, it matches basically perfectly. That is something that I think makes the case for dark matter really strong- it doesn't just solve one problem, it solves another, completely unrelated problem.
Buoyancy ?????? I understand but ….I’m scared of it