So, basically, we don’t know that much on anything besides understanding it’s really complex and difficult to figure out.
This has always been true.
To quote someone a lot wiser than myself:
It’s a shame stupid people carry themselves through life full of certainty while the wise ones suffer a life of doubt.
That’s a paraphrase of a famous Bertrand Russell quote. The original is as follows; “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
There’s also the William Butler Yeats corollary; “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
“Ignorance is bliss.”
No, before the scientific method was invented, the religious consensus was that “All is known”.
“It’s all written down in this here book.”
And Aristotle was worshipped to the point where if people knew from personal experience that something he said was wrong, they’d assume their own experience was what was mistaken. And this despite him not having any connection to their religion at all.
One example is that they used to think that objects could only have one force acting on it at a time. This could be the “natural force”, which is what makes objects fall when you drop them, or forces resulting from an action being performed on it. As a result, projectiles would travel straight in the direction they were thrown until the natural force took over, at which point they would fall vertically. Somehow this was still popularly believed (by academics at least) well after the catapult had been invented and used in sieges for centuries. It was believed by people who could throw things and observe how they moved with their own eyes.
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.
😇
If you squint a little, the 7 days of creation in Genesis are relativistic-ish. 1 day to separate light from darkness (photons at 1 microsecond after Big Bang), another to create the sky (opaque universe at 370k years), another to form dry land and create life (earth formed, 9.3 billion years, life at ~0.2by later), etc etc. Anyone with a physics degree able to say what fraction of light speed god must have been travelling to make this happen such that only days passed for them between these events?
Maybe they’re days on a logarithmic scale?
No.
They are literal days.
Our God is King of leading by example.
Also, man was made from the dust of the earth. It was fitting that earth be created before man (also very important for prideful man).
As He did, so we must do.
It is repeated constantly that we have 6 days to work, the 7th to be set apart.
Why?Rabbinical scholars argue about the correct translation of Genesis to this day. So you saying they’re “literal days” is meaningless.
Rabbinical scholars don’t believe many things now:
Then, they believed the prophecy of Daniel and Herod even inquired from them (Herod did not want a rival king, so he ordered all new born infants to be killed. That was why Jesus, Mary and Joseph took refuge in Egypt).
Rabbinical scholars of now don’t believe in Jesus Christ, and what do you want God to do to them?
Rabbinical scholars of now don’t believe in Jesus Christ, and you expect me to believe rabbinical scholars?Exodus 31:16,17
Let the children of Israel keep the Sabbath, and celebrate it in their generations. It is an everlasting covenant between me and the children of Israel, and a sign perpetual. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and in the seventh he ceased from work.Genesis 2:7
Our Lord God therefore formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life, & man became a living soul.
[My comment] Not because Adam was difficult to make.Genesis 2:22
And our Lord God built the rib which he took of Adam into a woman, & brought her to Adam.
[My comment] Wo + man = woman.They are literal days but also have mystical signification.
E.g. The sea (of our earth) can signify worldly people.
Rock can signify Christ.
The sun sometimes can signify Christ.
Stars, candles, salt can signify Christians.
Jerusalem can signify a place.
Babylon can signify a place.
Babylon can signify Antichrist.
All the examples above are different interpretations amongst 4 kinds of interpretation.- Literal (History is found here. Make sure they don’t contradict. Make sure they are not exclusive).
- Moral (you can derive many).
- Mystical (etc.)
- Anagogical (etc.)
Before an interpretation is declared to be held universally, theologians can argue.
A new modern rabbi can even say that 7 days is 2 days and we will begin to argue.
Now we have AI image generation. If something about God is difficult for you, you can think of modern inventions.
Theory of evolution by Darwin and others is surely rabbinically modern.
God chose to create man on the 6th day (days are equally marked), and rest on the seventh.
The sun marks the day for us.
The moon marks the season/month.
Stars mark the year.All these are what helped us arrive at our Gregorian calendar.
If you want me to read your source, please post a link to the rabbinical scholars, because money is capable of damaging a long standing tradition.
You are missing the point. The creation myths were considered complete. Nothing left to be known.
Well yes, people who believe things that aren’t true won’t admit that they don’t know anything. I’m not sure why that’s relevant though.
You stated “this has been always true” to the statement that we have understanding that things are really complex and difficult to figure out. The answer to you was an example that there were times where we did not have such understanding.
…
Not the exact same things throughout human history.
I think their actual point was that incomplete explanations are nonetheless explanations. Still wrong though.
Material things are way below what God planned for man.
Man (Body + Soul) was meant to be like God (NB God is not material) (in a good way).
The Bible is not meant to be a physics textbook.
Nevertheless, God owns everything. So things were talked about here and there…The Bible also isn’t meant to be real. It’s a compendium of stories all put into one book, with tons of different writers. It’s akin to The Odyssey and shouldn’t be taken literally. Zeus didn’t come to Earth as a golden shower to impregnate Danae, and Jesus didn’t come back from the dead. They’re just fables.
Deal if you show me the scientific texts that covered these in 500bc since you think we’ve always know how complex this is.
If your point was that religions have oversimplified complex science to the point that people thought they fully grasped it, then I agree with you. Otherwise I have no idea what you are trying to say.
I never made that claim, so how can I show you something I never claimed in the first place?
Got 'em lol
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?
Please expound on that.
Maybe it’s not a well thought out idea… But to me, if you can accurately model to predict everything down to the subatomic levels then where is the entropy?
Maybe I don’t understand the basis of entropy.
I’m not sure how to answer exactly, so here’s a brain dump of my understanding of entropy
Entropy is basically the tendency of energy to equalize into a lower energy state, converting a portion of the difference into heat, a portion of which escapes into the universe. It’s a statistical thing - it’s a general tendency that becomes predictable at the huge number of particles involved in anything near the human scale. Like compressed air - every atom is moving at a certain speed in a random direction (we model this with temperature)
If you pop a balloon, the air rushes out because there’s more stuff to bounce off in the area of the balloon being popped, and less in the less dense surroundings. So, on average, the air bounces outwards, and the pressure (another model describing density + kinetic energy) equalizes.
Now, if you have liquid air that is being actively cooled, air molecules bouncing in are going to transfer energy into the liquid, and be captured. The liquid is also going to heat up a bit, and the hotter it is, the more molecules are going to fly out. We usually model this with temperature + pressure, but gravity plays a big role too.
So normally, entropy likes to average things out and prefers randomness - it applies to all sorts of things, like how potential chemical energy likes to be released into kinetic energy over time.
But then look at the Earth - we have pressure waves in the air constantly. We say that’s because energy is being added to the system via heat from the sun, and it can even create these systems that turn these pressure waves into vortexes that can make ice in a hot place
And then you look at stars - diffusion finally clicked for me after I sat in on a physics class explaining pulsars. They pulse out through this random diffusion, then pulse in due to gravity pulling them back in.
Then we can look even further - stars pour out energy through fusion, and scatter themselves far and wide, seeding the next generation of stars. We thought that was just the initial energy of the big bang converting to lower energy states, but then you have dark matter and energy that we invented to explain the gap in the models… Now we think maybe the laws of physics might be less universal than we thought, or maybe higher dimensions are interacting with the universe
Entropy is just another model - things generally transition to lower energy states, and convert their energy to heat… But there’s endless cycles that do the opposite. Entropy is a pretty compelling tendency in a closed system, but those don’t actually exist - it could be that there’re larger and larger cycles that oscillate between local entropy and the generation of local regions of higher energy
Entropy doesn’t disappear if we can nail it down the subatomic - it’s just statistical behavior of. It might disappear if we go the other direction - what if every black hole spawns a new universe? Can you just go down the rabbit hole infinitely, creating smaller and smaller energy differentials through new universes? Maybe if we get deeper into quantum mechanics we’ll find that infrared energy spontaneously transitions into hydrogen, which forms into new stars, keeping the cycle going forever
Entropy is a very useful model though, maybe it disappears over large enough scales, but ultimately it most certainly exists on a local level - complex, dynamic things will break down to form simpler things, and energy temporarily reverses this process, but in doing so a portion is converted to heat, and a differential is required to turn heat energy into something more complex like electricity or chemical energy
So practically, I’d say the answer to your question is no, entropy is a very useful model regardless of what more we might learn, but in a truer sense who knows? We don’t understand physics nearly as well as we think.
I think there’s a new wave of physics that will break a lot of our assumptions over the coming decades - we’re finding more and more gaps in our models, which is a very exciting thing
The trick is that the more closely you model things the more energy you need to expend to compute the model, and a computer can not perfectly model itself (it’s a data compression limit + zeno-like process overhead), so therefore you still increase unmodeled unknown entropy somewhere even if you have one closed system carefully controlled
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Not really, OP’s image is somewhat misleading. The truth is that we’re constantly trying to improve our understanding of physics and some theories are not completely correct but they often provide a way for future scientists to dig deeper and figure it out. Then with new knowledge, new hypothesis can be suggested creating a gateway to deeper understanding of some concepts further down the timeline.
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.
Actually, we know everything there is happening in solar system.
Oh really?
Then I’m sure you can tell us where we can locate Planet 9, or even if Planet 9 exists.
https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/the-case-strengthens-for-planet-9/
Easy, it’s right over there. Next question, please
It’s gestures wildly at sky there, of course.
maybe whats left of it is our moon?
That’s one of the most confidently idiotic things I’ve read in a hot minute. Congratulations.
It’s actually a pretty decent list of unanswered questions. The more we know the more we learn new questions.
Like why there’s anything at all when the matter and antimatter should have annihilated itself.
Or if there’s positive or negative curvature to space time at the (open or closed universe)
Or what is dark matter and dark energy.
Or unifying quantum physics with general relativity.
And so on.
That’s the point. It’s not accurate that we always knew how complex these were. The more we learn, the more we learn how complex these things are. The example of spiritual explanations is the most reductive and frankly that is where our understanding started. This conversation has really devolved here in typical Lemmy fashion.
Spiritual stuff? Maybe I missed that somewhere? I just saw the blurb in the physics book.
Children are typically born with no knowledge of the physical world and spiritual explanations.
@Imgonnatrythis mentioned ‘spiritual explanations’.
Many things were revealed to Moyses by God Himself.
St. Paul was wrapt to the third heaven.
Also in the book of Job, we see God speak in first person.
Also there are prophets.
You are marvelled at what we can do with matter. You little knowledge of what man can do with God.
In our modern day, we had the Dancing Sun of Fatima (Our Lady of Fatima).
The answer is 42, guys.
Yes, yes, I’m quite sure, it’s 42!
The question is if it will still be 42 when we look away.
Double slit got us by the balls on this one 😒…
Unexpected factorial
How many roads must a man walk down?
I highly recommend the book “We Have No Idea” by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whitesom. Great explanations of what we know about the universe (with hilarious comic illustrations) and a profound message of just how much we don’t know.
Thanks for this recommendation! I love books that show me how little I truly know about anything.
Like all of Randall Monroe’s books (xckd guy).
Any more book recommendations?
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! I’ve read it twice, apparently I needed to be reminded of how much I didn’t know. 😉
Tide goes in, tide goes out… You can’t explain that.
But if I have to then I’ll do it live!
Oh my god why did you have to remind me that this awful creature exists?
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?
The moon is a decent fraction if the Earth’s mass. It has been a while since I calculated it but I recall the “shared gravitation centre” is actually outside the Earth.
Doesn’t that also technically mean that the earth’s movement technically wobbles fully inside and fully outside it’s orbital line?
Does the earth and moon orbit a gravitational center that they share?
Yes.
Does that center revolve around the sun?
No, it revolves around its shared centre with the sun. Things get complicated fast in gravity with more than two objects involved.
How imperceptible is this, considering the shared point is likely inside the earth given the difference between its mass and lua’s?
It’s how we can detect exoplanets. Well, we can tell there must be these and these planets based on the star’s wobble dunno if we can do the same for moons of planets: It would certainly work in principle but our instruments might not be good enough.
Does the earth and moon orbit a gravitational center that they share?
https://www.skymarvels.com/gallery/Vid - Earth-Moon Barycenter.htm
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!
Lol, I thought it just another mumble. Without your comment, I would had pass it of.
There’s also https://m.xkcd.com/1489 where you can short tap on “(alt-text)” if your browser makes it difficult.
And gravitational stuff. We kinda know it does it, but not how to do anything about it.
Surely that’s “heavy stuff”?
And maybe also “big stuff”. I suppose those two overlap quite a lot?
A nebula is one exception
I thought that meant black holes
How about something simple: Why does gravity feel the same as acceleration?
You can’t feel gravity. What we feel really is acceleration, the acceleration of the earth pushing us up against gravity.
Because of relativistic frames of reference.
Standing on a surface in a gravity well means you’re being constantly pushed out of an inertial frame, by not allowing you to follow a geodesic path in spacetime, and the same effect happens under acceleration.
Just re-saw this episode a couple nights ago. It’s still the greatest episode of Doctor Who (It’s Season 3, Episode 10, Blink).
Great science fiction. Great closed-loop time travel. Great horror. Everything that makes Doctor Who great.
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’m going to take your definition just a step further and say it’s a measurement of causality specifically.
Isn’t literally everything a measurement of causality?
yes, struggler
The slap was worth it.
A definition I saw recently that I like is that time is the direction of entropy. You follow time one direction and you get the big bang where everything is chaotic and happening, and in the other direction you get the heat death of the universe, where everything has settled into a base state and nothing’s happening.
Do you mean, like reverse time? From my understanding of the concept of entropy, it strives to a maximum, meaning maximum disorder, by your definition the big bang.
Or maybe do you have link where I can look into it? Sounds interesting
I wish I had a link, I think acollierastro talked about it briefly in one of her videos but I think it was a sidebar on something else so I have no idea which one. It was just one of those things where I heard the statement and it clicked on some weird intuitive level.
I probably used “chaotic” inaccurately, but entropy strives towards maximum disorder in that there is energy holding things together and that energy won’t hold forever. The big bang was basically a big explosion where a whole lot of order was imposed on the universe, for example by forming particles, and since then there’s this general trend towards things falling apart. Energy can be used to fuse a particle, but left alone that particle will eventually fall apart, even if it’s not moving. That’s entropy. So time is that quantity where, given enough of it, things fall apart.
Does that make sense? I have no idea if I’m explaining it properly, my physics background is super scattered.
Entropy is a measure of a number of distinct possible configurations that result in an equivalent outcome.
It’s pure statistics. Given time symmetric laws of nature and a state that can be achieved by a relatively small number of configurations, in the absence of potential barriers, the system inevitably approaches a state that’s achievable by a larger number of configurations. Simply because an elementary change is more likely to fall into the latter mode. Thus, arrow of time emerges.
There seems to be a slight misunderstanding here: If you imagine the “moment before” the big bang that is a state where the entire universe is compressed into a singularity, which necessarily has no entropy, because it can only have one state. Once the universe started expanding, you get a whole lot of disorder, because, while you are forming particles (introducing order) those particles are moving away from each other at relativistic speeds. The available volume for the particles (the volume of the universe) increases extremely rapidly, meaning you have more possible microstates than if all particles were compressed into a point.
entropy
To me that’s more of an emergent property of large numbers of particles moving from higher to lower energy states. Like temperature is just the velocity of an atom when you have lots of atoms moving and interacting.
I’m not sure that’s quite right in the sense that entropy is still meaningful on the level of individual particles—phenomena like proton decay, for example. But yeah, fundamentally it’s an emergent property from the way energy works, and on a grand scale that tendency is a way to view time.
proton decay
A proton isn’t an individual particle but made up of quarks. If a proton decays (which hasn’t been observed) it’s still a transition from its component quarks to lower energy particles.
That is the scientific definition as well is it not? Time didn’t exist before movement.
If it did, how could you tell?
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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!
Edit: the responses to this have made my day you guys. This is why I left Reddit.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!
You mentioned a mathematical explanation for why it’s so common. Got any further reading on that? It’s mind blowing that the math for calculating planetary movement and atomic behavior is exactly the same formula, with different variables. Do you have any theories on why inverse square law is so common?
I think inverse square laws are so common because they apply to situations where the distance of one object from another (a one dimensional line) is used to calculate the force potentially felt at any point across the surface of a sphere (a TWO dimensional surface) at that distance.
But then you also have the strength of magnetic fields that follows an inverse CUBE relationship. The simple way I model this in my head is that magnetic dipole fields kind of fill a three dimensional volume with curved field lines, as opposed to gravity or electric charge where the “lines” go straight out, and at any specific distance the total strength of the omnidirectional field is spread throughout that two dimensional surface of a sphere of the same radius.
4D thinking. That’s where my brain says “no more”
The Wikipedia page is a good start. In a nutshell:
Since the surface area of a sphere (which is 4πr2) is proportional to the square of the radius, as the emitted radiation gets farther from the source, it is spread out over an area that is increasing in proportion to the square of the distance from the source. Hence, the intensity of radiation passing through any unit area (directly facing the point source) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the point source.
There’s a good visualisation of that explanation which is the banner picture on the Wikipedia page.
I don’t have any better theories than the existing ones, for sure! But there is an underlying pattern that goes deeper even than that law - the principle that physical objects follow the path of least resistance links these laws and many many others.
This is actually really cool. I have no idea about any of it, but I remember watching a documentary a long time ago that said certain mathematical patterns repeat all over nature. What you said seems similar to that.
I get it…but at the same time I also get why you’re not going to be the life of the party with material like that.
I think a big part of this is because it’s already a super, super niche topic, but then you’re adding the extra layer of wanting to stick to a largely theoretical/conceptual tone of discussion, ruling out most of what few were still interested when you started into the topic. And once you’re that far down the rabbit hole, I feel like there’s going to be hyper specific topics that dominate, and unless your conversation partner not only has that knowledge but also wants to have that conversation…well the conversation isn’t really going to happen at all.
It’s also a very brain-power intense set of topics for a leisure time get together where most people have the goal of not having to think too hard on anything.
You’re absolutely right, I see that. It’s why I used to eagerly lecture all of my friends about physics when I was studying it, but now I pretty much never really talk about it except on clear nights when I can name stars and talk a bit about them.
Most people are stupid boring and unthinking for the majority of their lives. It’s very hard for those with special interest to find others, let alone others with the same special interest.
Fuck the fact that modern society has made most people stupid boring and unthinking, and caused die-hard intellectuals and academics to feel lonely.
Fuck it bro I’ll listen. I don’t have a degree or anything so I probably won’t understand much though.
What’s nothing like? Before the big bang, there was nothing. What the fuck colour was it? How does that even work? I think about this all the time.
You and me both. I love documentaries and when I get on a space kick, I think about this a lot. What did it look like? What’s nothing? My brain can’t fathom literally nothing. It had to be some sort of something. Almost makes me want to say that the universe does have a creator, but in that case, where’d the creator come from? (My favorite creation myth is that the Goddess danced and galaxies spun off on her dress. Makes as much sense as any of the others.)
Also: if there was nothing, then what went bang?
Just as important, why did it go bang?
Not to open an entirely different can of worms, but aside from the presence or lack of an actual character in the role, religious and scientific theories on the beginning of everything are similarly unfulfilling.
“First, there was nothing. Then a thing happened, and there was something!”
It’s the same for the beginnings of life. We know loads about the conditions before in happened and after it happened, but nothing about that all important instant when it happened.
Fur the big bang’s genesis, I like the thinking that small pockets of potential started to form, since a pair of opposed charges is sort of the same as nothing. But that does go along the lines of “nature abhors a vacuum” type of thinking, which has been comprehensively proven wrong since it was popular. Also it doesn’t explain one of physics greatest mysteries: why is there so much matter and no antimatter. If things came into existence in opposing pairs, we should see equal amounts of both
I’d assume black, no? Just total, unending, absolute darkness? Space is mostly vacuum with unimaginable distances between anything, and that empty, void space is basically pockets of the nothingness that existed before the big bang, so I’d (with my limited experience) assume something similar.
Though how it works? Yeah I have no fucking clue man, it’s basically incomprehensible isn’t it? Just the absence of existence. If I remember right, I heard at the time that all the matter of the universe was condensed into a singular point, and the big bang was basically that exploding, but it’s hard to imagine that it was the only thing that existed, and that there was nothingness beyond it.
You ever wonder if human minds just biologically aren’t equipped to understand or comprehend this stuff? Same way ants can’t possibly fathom the existence of radio waves or apes can’t understand trigonometry or how it works?
You ever wonder if human minds just biologically aren’t equipped to understand or comprehend this stuff? Same way ants can’t possibly fathom the existence of radio waves or apes can’t understand trigonometry or how it works?
I’m disinclined to believe that if for no other reason than I’m sure similar things have been said many times throughout human history about any number of subjects that were then much more fully explored and understood. Anatomy, biology, genetics, etc. all seemed to be fields that were “mysteries too far beyond human comprehension”…until they weren’t.
Absolutely. I am completely convinced of the fact that there is knowledge that we can never possess simply because our minds aren’t capable of understanding it. I mean nobody understands quantum theory. Some people can do the maths and make the right predictions etc, but they have absolutely no idea what’s really going on. I think that’s at the boundary of our understanding. Which means there’s other stuff being the boundary, and other stuff way way beyond the boundary. But, I think that in the same way you can explain general relativity to a child in simple terms, if we produce AI that can grasp higher concepts, it could explain it to us.
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)
I think we got the fast stuff under control (special relativity), when you mix it it with like small stuff (quantum field theory), and I guess big stuff (general relativity), it is also OK, but mixing it with anything more than that causes a problem.
This is from science abridged beyond the point of usefulness right? I have that book.
Edit: yes it is
Shit’s on fire, yo. But does that fire only produce positive vibes or are there like 90% bad vibes, you know, bro?
Motion is indeed, tricky. - Zeno of Elea
He was just obsessed with cutting things in half
1.2 Appendix