Grrl Power #1032 – Physics 501
Man, I really hope I got the physics close to right on this.
It’s definitely not obvious, Dabbler. I watched a video on the Electroweak Force, and… basically didn’t understand anything. (I might have been half paying attention and browsing Twitter at the same time, but still.) As far as physics are concerned, there’s simple Newtonian shit and thermodynamics – all that is practically common sense, because that’s the world we live in. Then there’s advanced stuff like relativity, which I think most people “get” in a vague sense until they really start thinking about time dilation and stuff like how gravity and acceleration are really the same thing, then there’s the quantum stuff which is just… “I’ll have to take your word for it, math person.”
Not knowing what/where 95% of the mass and energy of the universe can tempt one to wonder if 95% of what we think we know about physics is wrong. I don’t think that’s the case, I think asking a scientist what we “know” is very different than asking your crazy uncle what he “knows” about lizard people in the government. One’s standard of evidence involves mathematical and observational proofs, the other involves online articles he “skimmed the title,” and a dire lack of knowledge about .mpeg compression artifacts.
One thing you can count on in this comic is that I’ll never introduce Dark Matter as some sort of physical thing used to power starships or anything like that. Yeah, it’s funny in Futurama when Nibbler poops dark matter out in his litterbox, but the term dark matter isn’t talking about some undiscovered element, it’s a reference to unaccounted for mass in macro-level views of the universe. Yes… fine, it might actually be some undiscovered isotope (wildly unlikely) or some form of infectious strange matter or something, but once we know what it actually is, we’re probably not likely to keep calling it dark matter are we? We’ll name it after whoever discovered it like with the Higgs Boson/Field. Hopefully the person who discovers it doesn’t have a dumb last name or we’ll have to call it lipshitzium, or wiglesworthite, feltersnatchium, svejokovsky-eyjafjallajökullium (a Polish woman married a volcano, see?)
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update: It’s done!
210K words of weapon building, dinosaur fighting, harem satisfying, lumberjacking, moderate diplomacing, bad guy chopping action. Also some humor.
New incentive is up! Dabbler decided to get out of the pool, in slow motion (see the bonus comic at Patreon), possibly with added “physics.”
Cue Mele Kalikimaka.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
I’m honestly surprised how well Deus always seems to take Sydney’s Sydney-ness.
He doesn’t seem to get annoyed or anything. Just a quick chuckle and then continues on.
I mean, the dude purposefully play up the Super Villain tropes for the lulz the same way Syd absolutely adore lampooning Super Heroes ones. They exist on the same wavelength.
I ship it
Sydney does like men substantially taller than her.
Soooo…everyone?
That would be almost everyone except for Peter Dinklage and Lucas Jorsten.
Watch their early interactions, they get along pretty well!
Right now Deus reminds me of some of the better university profs I’ve met. The best could roll a wild tangent back into the discussion before you even knew what happened.
Deus shipping Sydney? OMG. On the other hand, once it’s discovered how dangerous he is, and what laws (local and Galactic / Inter-Galactic?), maybe the powers-that-be will assign Sydney to be Deus’ full-time conscience / supervisor. Full-time 7x24x365 even-in-the-bathroom-bedroom-shower-on-the-toilet, etc. They could be handcuffed together. Or maybe he’d be all creepy and want to be attached at the hip, which might be a great way to drive Sydney out of the room.
Her babysitting him would be a fitting punishment for Deus. But it would be a bad punishment for Sydney. She’d be bored in 30 seconds. “All right, I’ve got this criminal figured out, and I can defeat him for eternity, causing the two of us no END of frustration. So . . . what else ya got? Can I be the teacher’s assistant in a 2nd grade classroom? ‘Cause
THAT would be more fun than Deus is!”
Deus fancies himself a high tier super villain, so anti Spider-man type talky hero exercises maube.
I wouldn’t worry too much over comic-book physics explanations of Grand Unified Theory, Dave.
Whatever you come up with, it’s your world, therefore it works.
Don’t hours
It is possible that this stuff is obvious in hindsight. The existence of gravity is obvious to us, but it certainly wasn’t when it was first discovered.
I always find it weird to talk about discovering a concept, like ‘discovering gravity’, it’s not like it was unobserved or didn’t exist before it was ‘discovered’, just more of not thought about or considered as something that’s just there.
English is a very quirky language. All of them are, but English really wants subjects to act and has to stretch for things to just be seen instead of found.
The explanation for how things moved was just wrong for so long, until Galileo Galilei split friction from regular movement. It wasn’t that the nature of things and their movement brought them to a stop over time, but the movement was impeded by various forms of friction, which would slow it down. Galileo used it to explain why the planets could keep moving without slowing down (no friction). Issac Newton formalized it in his Laws of Motion and the friction calculation.
Was friction discovered by Galileo Galilei or did he just define what was already there, but everybody before him did not recognize, or is that really the same thing?
Another example is “the ether”, the invisible substance that (people thought) filled all of space. Somebody had to discover that it didn’t exist.
“The ether” is actually a REALLY good example of religion masquerading as deep thought. The Greeks had this notion that each of the four elements was shaped like a particular regular solid. Four solids, four elements. Then someone noticed that you could connect the center points of a regular solid to form another. Tetrahedron tetrahedron. Cube Octahedron. Dodecahedron ??? Whoops! We now have a fifth regular solid, but not element for it. Our correspondence cannot be wrong, so let’s come up with another element. But who’s going to be believe that? I know, we’ll say is it the “quintessential” element blah, blah, blah. THAT is where the concept of “ether” came from.
Given that the original meaning of the word (still used in astronomy) “occult” was simply “hidden”, and that the pentagram is a nearly universal symbol of the occult, I suspect that it goes back to this fifth regular solid.
Remember kids: if you’re not allowed to challenge it, it ain’t science.
I thought the ether was that there was a fifth (quint essential = quintessential) element which was everywhere, the ether, and the ether wind was what caused the orbit of the planets and celestial movements and pretty much all interaction of light waves (this was before they knew that light is both a particle and a wave). I don’t think it was religion – it was a scientific hypothesis.
The ether was actually disproven scientifically with the Ether Wind Experiment. aka the Michelson-Morley Experiment, in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. It was tested and disproven a second time in 1904, showing that the experiment disproving the existence of luminiferous ether was repeatable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2m_VZJM0Zc
There’s a great retro game called Space 1889 which is a ‘What if’ scifi game of ‘what if the ether wind was REAL, and spaceships were made with this in mind. Really fun game. I highly recommend it.
The term’s been used more than once, and your version seems to be drawing bits from at least two of them. Easily done, when the same term gets recycled so much.
The Greeks thought of Ether as being a fifth philosophical element, extending the set of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. The basic four in varying proportions made up our world and everything in it, while Ether entered the mix for things in the heavens. I don’t know for sure that planetary motions were attributed to its movements, but it would fit.
Fast-forward a few millennia, and physicists are discovering that light acts like a wave in certain circumstances. (We’re still well before the later experiments that also proved it to act like a particle in other circumstances.) The experience of the time was that a wave is an oscillation in a fluid, so if light is a wave then there must be some fluid for it to be a wave in. And that fluid must permeate all of space, otherwise starlight wouldn’t get to us. So some bright spark decides to allude to the ancient term rather than coin a fully new one, and calls this fluid the ‘Luminiferous Ether’. That’s the one that was disproven by the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Meanwhile, while the physicists argued over whether light needed a transmission medium and therefore a Luminiferous Ether, chemists were synthesising ether by the bucketload and doctors were using it regularly. It’s the term for a particular type of linkage (C-O-C) between bits of an organic molecule molecule, and also the common name for a specific solvent (diethyl ether, CH3-CH2-O-CH2-CH3) which was one of the first anaesthetic gases used for surgery.
And yes, that solvent has been detected in interstellar dust/gas clouds.
I prefer ‘defined’ to ‘discovered’ as a descriptor of the process of common enlightenment towards natural phenomena and the forces that govern the workings of the universe.
In most cases it’s not so much ‘discovering the concept’, more ‘discovering how the concept works’. And usually then discovering that the version that you were familiar with is actually a special case of something more complicated, like how Relativistic physics converges on Newtonian physics for the special case where there aren’t any extreme speeds or masses involved.
It absolutely is. But there’s something so incredibly important that they *are* aware of that they’re *completely* ignoring that’s *vital* to tying all eight of the fundamental forces together in one convenient grand theory. Until they recognize what they’re missing, the whole gravity thing will continue to elude them.
Good shoutout for PBS Spacetime. That shit is great at explaining things in a way that make me think, at the same time, “O I get it” and “Wait what?”
Wait… it’s not 11am yet… but new comic… what’s going on!?
It’s usually up when I wake up around 7 a.m. eastern.
The US is in DST, but Europe isn’t
Forget Unified Field, somebody explain why we mess with the clocks twice a year.
Idea is to better align clock-based schedules to give people an extra daylight hour in the evening after work. Also some arguments that this saves energy on lighting/heating because more people would be outside – the evidence for this is mixed but given the number of countries that adopted DST during the 70s energy crisis it was probably a major reason for it.
And you do have to wonder why DST is summer-based… Most places that endure true winter already have insanely long days in Spring-Summer, so why is DST NOT in Winter when an extra hour in the afternoon would be welcome?
And we should note that the only people who might benefit from DST are city-dwellers. Rural and infrastructure workers cannot do very much at all before sunrise without expensive lighting and heating setups.
You can get a true idea of the downsides of DST by looking at the PRC: China has only one timezone, Z+80:00. However, around 85% of the population lives EAST of Chonquing. Beijing is about 116º East.
Of interest, Western Australia has half an hour of DST baked in. The 120º East longitude runs about 500Km east of Perth, directly through Mt Short near Ravensthorpe. Political parties that mandate DST to “bring us into closer union with the East Coast” tend to spend a LOT of time in the wilderness.
Changing the clock isn’t going to affect how much time there is in a day. Or the amount of sunlight.
How much do those rural or infrastructure workers care what the clock says?
I’m trying to post a reply, but all I’m seeing is a 500 Internal Server Error which wants me to email a non-existant address.
Me too
@DaveB – It is fairly obvious that your fame has caught up with your server, and you mi-i-i-ight want to take it down for a day.
If both Pander and myself have 500 Internal Server Errors, then it’s happening to others as well.
Maybe I shouldn’t speak for Pander, but — what the hell — we both understand the server is like a car: from time to time it MUST HAS TO be taken off the road for service. It’s a bit like the relationship between myself and the dentist. I DON’T like going there, but I know that if I forgo the pain and suffering it WILL be MUCH worse than if I go now.
As the dentist told me: “This won’t hurt a bit”. He was right, it didn’t hurt him at all.
You can blame the Earth’s elliptical orbit and its axial tilt for the nightmare that is the Equation of Time.
And be thankful sundials have been resigned to garden furniture.
“You can blame the Earth’s elliptical orbit and its axial tilt …”
YESSSS, aren’t they wonderful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They gave us the Sahara AND the Australian Central Desert!!!!!!
Praise your Deity for Nature’s glorious harmony!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We mess with clocks twice a year because… long story.
First, there were businesses that kept their employees working for as long as possible. This goes back to at least feudalism and probably started happening the moment someone became dependent for their survival on the goods they received in exchange for their labour.
Second, trade was invented making it useful for businesses to coordinate production schedules.
Somewhere in between two and three governments came into power. Wars started happening.
Third, clocks were invented, taking over the coordinated production schedules regardless of sunlight.
Fourth, some businesses noticed that since they started following clocks they were regularly working in the dark so they had to invest in light sources.
Fifth, most governments finally figured out that creation is more profitable than destruction. So they started to promote trade. Businesses increased their lobbying budget.
Sixth, businesses lobbied governments to stop the seasons from messing with their production schedules. Unexpectedly, the governments came up with a somewhat workable solution: Daylight’s saving time. This made it easier for businesses to have coordinated production schedules without having to put effort into figuring out how to deal with a seasonally dependent length of the workday, or even worse: The added costs of light sources.
And there we are: We now need to mess with clocks twice a day, causing lots of sleep-deprivation related traffic accidents, and generally making everyone grumpy until they adapt. We would all like to go back, but that would be hard and expensive, and the real dominant species on our planet, businesses, haven’t been motivated enough to lobby for a change.
And yet the United States Senate just unanimously voted to stop messing with clocks.
Which shows how irrelevant and/or hated Daylight Savings Time is in modern society. Getting the Senate to unanimously agree on anything is practically unheard of.
Yep. Surprising, when so many of them seem either completely insane, or so utterly captive to tribalism that they’d vote against something just because the other side supported it. Rare too, for the interests of the American people to have any relevance, though perhaps this is just one of those rare instances where the interests of the people and the businesses actually align.
In a version of reality with supers and supernaturals I’m sort of surprised that two plus two is always four.
That’s the beauty of mathematics. It’s intrinsically supernatural, see e.g. the “mass duplication” paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox
As a mathematician, I can COMPLETELY confidently state that there is no physical realization of the Banach-Tarski construct. It’s not mass that you can duplicate. Is Hilbert’s hotel with the points in a couple of balls.
The transition from Sexy Billionaire Supervillain to Intro to Theoretical Physics 301 teacher is odd but not unwelcome
I wonder if Deus has any tweed coats.
301? It seems more like 499h to me. I mean what he’s covering right now could be 301, but he’s just confirming a basic understanding of the necessary principles.
I find it interesting that Theoretical Physics 499h professor has a smaller X scar than Sexy Billionaire Supervillain. Is the scar supposed to be sexy? Or is it a suggestion that professors are somehow less supervillainous?
LESS supervillainous? Well, they try not to do the supervillainy during school hours…
the scar is defenitely sexy, and professors are in no way less supervillainous just look the amount of super villians with phds: Doc octopus, Hugo strange,Doctor doom, scarecrow, mr.freeze (weird that he doesnt go by dr.freeze), harley quin, poison ivy, hush, Dr.ligth(the dc one not megaman), Doc. Sivana and The Crime Doctor
God dam your physics joke at the end how could that be the thing that made me laugh
It Obvious the answer is 42.
we just need to know what the question is.
Gravity is more of an effect than a force, and more of a push than a pull. The trick is to understand that Spacetime is a field, from which all other fields derive their energy. A black hole event horizon is what happens when local spacetime runs out of available energy. Black holes are hollow, not singularities.
Then why is Gravity considered one of the Four Forces of the Universe?
Because in most macroscopic situations, it acts like a measurable force, sort of like electromagnetism, but with only one direction, not two. In fact, Newton’s gravity formula and Coulomb’s electric force formulas are laid out exactly the same, but with different values. We now know that both of these formulas break down in very fast, very heavy, very small or supercharged situations and we need more complicated mathematics to explain them. This also applies to the exact definition of a force in those situations as well.
It’s because gravity is an expression of thermodynamics, not of mass attracting mass because reasons. The universe is an energy system, and gravity is how the universe is eliminating potential energy. You have to look at its behavior as a process of energy, not matter. Yes, matter is energy, but to the universe it’s all energy.
How is a black hole hollow? It is literally formed from compressed matter.
The matter and energy are compressed until there is no energy left in spacetime to draw from Past the zero energy level, nothing can exist, so it doesn’t. Thus, you get a hollow sphere with a skin of maximum density, not a nonsensical, physics-breaking singularity of infinite density. This also allows the black hole to rotate and, you know, move. (Each field governs a fundamental force. Spacetime governs momentum/velocity.)
What cannot exist, does not.
You are assuming the space inside a black hole is the same as the space outside a black hole. Space only exists the distance between two points is present. If you have only one point, you have no space. Non-dimensional points exist out side of space.
The space inside a black hole exists, but it is very, very different from normal space, as it has no energy and no time. Having zero energy means a lot of “normal” things, like quantum foam, don’t happen. It is a true vacuum with absolutely nothing in it, no matter, no energy, no time. With no time, distance sort of becomes meaningless, although it still exists. (The function is continuous but not smooth.) You could very well argue that it is a hole in spacetime.
The normal rules of physics hold only when the energy of spacetime (total potential energy) does not equal zero. It cannot be less than zero, nor more than the maximum value. (This explains cosmic inflation in the early universe, by the way.)
Panel two is adorable. XD
I’m a bit iffy, because the addition of literal magic means that we’re optimistically probably closer to 45%, if not 25% or 10% of how the universe operates.
I also suspect that’s what Dabbler’s referring to, the fact that we haven’t taken any of the myriad forms of magical energy and matter into consideration in our current understanding of the universe and it’s operations, so of course we can’t understand how the connections made through magical energy work.
Ok,the threat factor on Deus just went up,because not only does he sound smart enough to talk about this stuff, he smart enough to point out whatpoint out what they and he doesn’t know.
I would assume that when he bought the mass fabricator that he was smart enough to purchase their high school physics textbook as well.
hmm… my antivirus is having trust issues with the vote incentive page…
Yes, everybody with anything claiming to be an effective security suite should be having a problem.
See my post on #1031, it’s the last post on the first page, there’s a link to a Dropbox image. Unfortunately, it will require somebody to actually walk over to where the site is hosted and physically shove some person’s nose in the mess. SysAdmins routinely bin messages about non-performance in case they have to do some work for once.
Having been a sysadmin, perpetually inundated with many issues to work on, all different, I can tell you that it can just as easily be a case of “the message got swamped” or “issue triaged out”, or even “not gotten around to reading the inbox yet”. I don’t know about topwebcomics but it’s probably run on the side by a non-professional. Some of these are enthousiastic, a very few take the job seriously, some, less so.
As to the actual problem, a cursory look doesn’t reproduce it for me. Might be a quirk (pki is full of these) with the browser and/or a missing alternative host declaration. But seeing how the actual incentive picture is hosted here instead of at topwebcomics, maybe something else is going on. A fucked-up redirect maybe? I don’t know, just throwing out possibilities to check.
If you feel like it you might dig into it, you could do a write-up with easy explanation that’s easy to check that’s really the issue (you do want to be sure the right issue gets fixed the right way, no?), with a fix easy to implement and easy to verify it got properly fixed.
Lots of “easy” in the description, lots of work for you to make it easy. If you’ve ever heard “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one”, the object of this exercise is a short-but-complete problem report. It would show you just what sort of work system administration done properly entails. Few do it properly, which creates even more work.
Thank you for that @Nope.
The problem seems to be that the certificate was prepared for http;;;topwebcomics.com and works perfectly when I try it, BUT the address given in Grrl Power is httpS;;;topwebcomics.com and fouls out. It’s causing problems because having only the image to click on — even though the address is shown in my status bar — we don’t see the little *s* and why would we worry anyway? Aren’t all URLS supposed to be encrypted?
How many people have the hyperlink show in the status bar anyway? Pale Moon uses a user-pref to enable that…
And, just to test, http://www.topwebcomics.com/vote/11940 DOES work, the encrypted version does not.
I have no way to test for the existence of httpS;;;topwebcomics ‘cos I’m too lazy to disable everything and then try to remember what I touched afterwards :[
AAAAANNnnnddd… topwebcomics gives itself an *s* when we land on it… But we discover it’s using “Let’s Encrypt” which may or may not induce bugs like we’re talking about now… And I have no idea how “Let’s Encrypt” does its business and even less interest in finding out.
Once again, I have to say there is no way in Hell we need to fear the Rise of the Robots if this is the highest technology we can summon, and also we’ll never get off this planet in time to avoid the Great Red Giant Roast if we don’t cobble together a BETTER internet sometime yesterday.
There were a bunch of people in academia with wild plans to “reinvent the internet”. Might try and see if they’re still looking for collaborators. Forgot their project’s name though.
It helps if you discern “the internet” from “the world-wide web”. The former lets net-connected computers (“hosts”) exchange messages (“packets”). The latter uses the former (and a whole lot more than just that) to build a conceptual “web” of hyperlinked documents. They’re related, one builds on the other, but they’re not the same.
HTTP and HTML are building blocks for that “world-wide web”. They suck in various interesting ways. It’s the “big tech” (online advertising companies really, specifically google) that pushed hard for “encrypt everything” until it became a “thing to do” among the web-set.
There are asshole-ISPs (mainly in the US, mainly with telco background, unsurprisingly) who, in a gross violation of the gentleman’s agreement that underpins and enables the internet to function without a central authority, take replies to customers’ web-requests and inject or replace adverts with their own. In response, google, being an advertising company, pushed hard for “encrypt everything”, to thwart that attack on their revenue streams.
I’m old-school enough that I don’t care that much about encrypting unsensitive public information like this website, and my ISP isn’t that bad (or I’d walk away, making a stink), and I have adblockers so I don’t see much of any ads in any case.
Adding encryption to HTTP begets HTTPS (aka HTTP/SSL; SSL now named TLS does the encrypting, and decrypting). Between making a connection and asking for the page (or whatever else) it will negotiate an encrypted connection. This needs a (PKI, X.509, a fantastically bad fit for this purpose and a stupid idea to start with) certificate from a “trusted” Certificate Autority. “Trusted” means “present in the list of trusted CAs”, which is in your browser and managed by your browser maker, or occasionally by your OS and hence managed by your OS vendor. *You* don’t really get to trust much, it’s setup to be hard to deal with. Probably not deliberately, going by Hanlon’s Razor.
Let’s Encrypt is such a Certificate Authority, that is they issue the certificates needed to, among other things, encrypt the connection between your browser and whichever webserver uses their certificates. They’re a non-profit and issue certificates for free. Both http://www.grrlpowercomic.com and http://www.topwebcomics.com use a Let’s Encrypt certificate.
Notice that you only need certificates if you use encrypted connections, ie http-with-s, rather than merely http-no-s.
All this to say that “a certificate prepared for http-no-s colon-slash-slash http://www.topwebcomis.com” makes no sense to me. But because you need no certificate for the no-s-case, it’ll function with no certificate just fine, if setup to function like that. These days websites that do use https are often setup to accept http-no-s connections then whatever you ask they’ll redirect to just the same but with http-with-s in front.
It looks like asking for http-no-s topwebcomics.com automatically redirects to http-with-s http://www.topwebcomics.com. You can check this with a command-line http client and use its spider mode, it will show you the “no, go look *there*” message, among other things.
The certificate does have a “DNS-name=www.topwebcomics.com” entry in it somewhere. (Click on the lock and ask for the certificate details. Then look under “Certificate Subject Alt Name”. As you can see, this is not particularly insightful to use. For some reason webbrowser developers are unable to offer anything useful here.)
From your screenshot, it looks like pale moon balked over http-with-s to topwebcomics.com without the www in front. The topwebcomics operator can’t really avoid the balk-screen by merely taking connections to http-with-s topwebcomics.com-no-www and redirecting to http-with-s http://www.topwebcomics.com because it’ll hit before the redirect takes place.
DaveB can fix this by adding a www. to the vote incentive link.
But notice that some browsers will apparently just eat the error (I didn’t see any) by adding that http://www., which they’ll easily do just as they used to add .com speculatively to a word with neither in the address bar, before browsers started sending your input to their preferred websearch instead. Strictly speaking, both could be wildly different websites so papering over the difference silently is a security risk. But anyway.
Alternatively you’d ask the topwebcomics operator to add a second DNS-Name entry to the certificate, this time without the www. IE the certificate would have to sport two of those, one with, and one without www.
Daaave! Since you’re getting to moderate, please drop all the auto-inserted http-colon-slash-slash crap.
I didn’t realize adding the “www.” would fix the missing image problem. Thanks!
“Man, I really hope I got the physics close to right on this.”
Listen carefully, and you’ll hear some thousands of faint-ish echoes of this observation rattling down the Halls of Time… Me? I’ll stick with Newton for a while longer, at least we all know it works.
It still works, most of the time. That is why we still teach it in high school physics. But in volumes of high mass or in high speed reference frames, in the extended spaces of galaxies, and other extreme conditions, Newton’s laws are not good enough and we need things like Relativity and Quantum mechanics to explain things.
Well, when my car carries enough fuel and can travel fast enough to get to the moon, I’ll consider leaving Isaac.
“How Does the Universe Work?” By Deus Ex Machina
How Does the Universe Work? By Deus Ex Machina!
The importance of punctuation.
It could be that gravity, time and information are related emergent properties, rather than fundamental forces.
As far as I can understand the incoherently voluble devotion to what used to be “facts”:
Information will always be an “Emergent property” :P
Time is a fully mis-represented description of the distance between any two events and has no relationship to Space :)
And Gravity *seems* to be a force generated by events invoving two or more lumps of matter in close-ish proximity to each other.
It follows that since Dark Matter is non-Baryonic (!), then maybe we need to rethink Fred Hoyle’s novel in the light of Schlock.
Posted at 07:56 your time.
Let me try to improvise an explanation of reality.
In the beginning, there was only probability.
Then a part of probability collapsed into causality.
From causality was born a boolean that determines which of the two events was the cause and which was the effect. A temporal direction if you will.
Time is the count of how many of these booleans you need to get from one event to another. If there is no causal (meaning: interaction) chain from one event to another, then time does not apply to them. To repeat: Time requires interaction.
Now that we have multiple events (since each single one of those booleans is a single event), we can combine events into macro-events, for example an atom. To understand the relation between two atoms you could of course count the booleans to figure out the time between the atoms, but you could also count something bigger, like the number of atoms between them. This allows you to do something cool: Rather than only observing, you can predict the time between causal relations that haven’t happened yet!
If I push this atom, I can make it bump into that other atom! It often takes a different amount of time though, and I want a way to express that in atoms instead of time, so I say that atom A is 50 atoms away from atom B by dividing the farthest I’ve pushed an atom by the least far I’ve pushed an atom before it interacted with another. Cool! Let’s call this distance. Now, distance obviously emerges from time but I still like using it.
Sometimes atom A doesn’t hit atom B at all. Actually, that happens quite frequently, it is really annoying. And it gets worse as the distance between A and B increases!
I’ve tried rotating the atom and I’ve tried changing the angle I push the atom at but neither really changes the probability of hitting atom B. Until I decided to combine the two and push atom A in one direction, and simultaneously rotating the direction of my push and pushing atom A again. Now we’ve got two more spatial dimensions: Angle and second distance. I just haven’t figured out how they can help, in fact I can mathematically reduce them to a single angle and push. Oh well, at least I’ve proven the existance of angles, even though they don’t have a result.
I get a lot better results when I allow some time between first push and second push. Now I can influence the probability of hitting atom B! Cool!
So, we’ve got three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, that should be plenty to explain gravity: Gravity is what happens when there is a causality gradient between two events. The first arbitrary distance unit (let’s call them atom-lengths) between my orbit event and my crash event contains more causality booleans than the second atom length, which contains more than the third, and so on. The question now is what caused this gradient to appear? When I look towards my crash event I see that there have been a lot of events unrelated to me happening there, and a lot of events are continually happening there as well. It looks to me like all those crash events exhausted the boolean supply. That is a testable hypothesis: We just have to look for a place with more events, at some point the causality gradient becomes so steep you can no longer get closer to the crash event. Oh hey, black holes.
Coincidentally Space Time just released a new vid on going back on this subject, and to be honest, I did not understand it, but I think those unified forces used to be together but are now separate ?
https://youtu.be/esayi49OAk4
They’re unified but only at temperatures that are sufficiently high. Believed to be 10^15 K ie 1000 trillion K, which probably hasn’t existed anywhere since the very early universe. Below that they act as separate forces.
Heh. I watched that episode too. It’s a good series, tho it definitely benefits from a rewatch to help grok things.
Ok, I just found this comic like last week and have binge read the whole thing until now. I just have to say, the amount of detail in each persons persona, attitudes, history, and general nuances is amazing! The simple things make it soo much better like the first time they went out to the club and Dabbler just casually kicks her boots off in the booth trying to be as flirty as possible even when no one but Sydney was around. Though I do have a question regarding Dabbler, does she gain different levels of tantric energy via each persons personal kinks? Like if she was around someone who enjoyed say bondage or a foot fetish, she would gain more energy by someone enjoying their kinks rather than just vanilla sex?
I would assume that the amount of energy would relate to how much the participants were enjoying their activities, not so much on what was being done.
Hello and welcome!
I think as far as tantric energy goes, kinks are just a means to an end, but if that kink makes someone that much more excited, then yeah, it probably produces more energy.
Speaking about the vote incentive, I could get used to seeing Xuriel (aka Dabbler) walking out of a pool like that towards me. She does have really beautiful heterochromatic eyes.
> once we know what it actually is, we’re probably not likely to keep calling it dark matter are we?
Cosmology Ph.D. here. I think we actually will, because “dark matter” is an apt description of how it behaves.
I think the biggest source of confusion on the topic is that some people think it’s “dark” because we don’t understand what it is. That’s not the case, it’s “dark” because it doesn’t emit light. This will not change once we know the particle composition, so no real reason to call it something else.
I also want to point out that “dark matter” is not ONE thing. It’s a description of a kind of matter that behaves in a certain way (doesn’t interact with the electromagnetic force nor with the strong force, but it does with gravity and possibly with the weak force). In fact, we know for certain that dark matter is not just one particle, because for all intent and purposes *neutrinos* ARE dark matter. Just not the type of dark matter that makes up the vast majority of the mass of the universe.
Your point about neutrinos is exactly why we’d probably stop calling it dark matter. We know what the neutrino is, and we don’t call it dark matter, despite sharing the properties of what we call dark matter.
We refer to neutrinos as a specific kind of dark matter. I think Gand’s point is the set will still be referred to as “dark matter” even as we come up with terms for specific types of it.
I’m not sure I’m convinced. I feel like, if we get a theory of why it doesn’t interact with electromagnetics and can cause some formerly “light” matter to stop interacting with electromagnetics and can cause some formerly “dark” matter to start interacting with electromagnetics, it feels likely we’d rename it based on that mechanism. But it’s also possible that Gand is completely correct. I do feel like there would at least be a discussion about possibly doing one versus the other, and some people would choose to staunchly support whichever option wasn’t picked by the majority.
It doesn’t interact with electromagnetism because it’s not electrically charged, same as it doesn’t interact with the strong interaction because it doesn’t have a strong charge (“color”).
So far we have no indication that any kind of matter can switch from “light” to “dark” and viceversa.
Why they don’t have an electromagnetic charge or a color is another matter entirely, like why particles have the mass they have. There is not a discourse about it because frankly, we haven’t the faintest idea.
I sense an uptick in orders of John Kakalios’ book The Physics of Superheroes.
Ummm. DaveB old son, we have a problem.
The comic is fine, it’s right up there with Schlock, Drive, Freefall, Girl Genius… But I don’t join in the forums on those, just follow the plot-lines. However, the forum *is* a fairly integral part of Grrl Power, and without it I probably would not have got this far.
The problem is (for me at least, though I figure everybody’s having the same problems) that with a response time measured in tens of minutes, it’s almost impossible to have a decent conversation. For example, I replied to @braininthejar at 06:28 your time, and I’ve only just received the new page at 20:33 my time, that’s 07:33 your time.
I have eliminated trans-Pacific woes. They don’t exist, there are no cables being molested at the moment, or if they are then patching a new connection is really efficient.
Please, talk to us. If it’s funding for a better server solution, we can probably help. Or maybe finding a WordPress guru, or even moving to a different forum-ware. But please tell us.
@gorblimey, Which Girl Genius forum do you follow? Reddit? Wikia? or ???
You’re saying the comments are being slow to respond when you post something? I’m not seeing that behavior, but it wouldn’t shock me to hear that it’s the case. The comic has over 400K approved comments at this point. I’m no database expert but that seems like something that might bog down a server eventually.
Have you considered switching to disqus or similar to manage it? That would also allow us to be notified of responses to our comments, instead of getting an email when anyone comments on the whole page.
That has been suggested before, and if I remember correctly it was considered unlikely due to the sheer quantity of legacy comments that would have to be transferred from the current system to the new one. Plus various compatibility issues, whereby some of the third-party systems are considerably less robust than the inbuilt one in terms of simply not working in certain browser/OS combinations.
My recommendation is Simple Machines ( https://www.simplemachines.org/ ), which has never failed to work on any of my boxes, and is used practically everywhere.
A good database can easily manage millions of comments without slowing down a bit. I doubt the software powering this site has the level of tuning needed for that, though — far too many developers’ ideas of scaling is “it can handle a dozen comments? Good enough for me.”
@DaveB, I’m trying to reply to your post “March 17, 2022, 2:56 pm”, but the system is throwing a “500 Internal Server Error”, and telling me to
“Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@grrlpowercomic.com …”. Alas, the “webmaster@” is also giving a “Your message could not be delivered for more than …”, and we don’t have any other contact methods.
Not if the database is properly designed and maintained. And there are a lot of easy (well, for ME, anyway) tricks that one might play if the database ever did get slow. I’m pretty certain that there is something else going on. Hour long delays to see posts (which have been a thing for years) are almost certainly not because of a slow database.
I did a tracert the other day, home to Grrl Power. Here are hops 6 through 10:
6 226 ms 227 ms 227 ms ix-hge-0-0-0-15.,ecore1.,lvw-losangeles.,as6453.,net [64.86.197.96] Tata Communications,Ltd, LOS ANGELES CA
7 217 ms 217 ms 217 ms 4.68.111.53 Level 3 Parent, LLC, Monroe LA
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 278 ms 277 ms 277 ms dreamhost.,bear2.,washington111.,level3.,net [4.4.89.158] Broomfield CO
10 277 ms 276 ms 277 ms iad1-cr-1.,sd.,dreamhost.,com [208.113.156.208] Brea CA
11 and 12 are also Brea CA, so don’t count. But entering the USA from Sydney at Los Angeles, then LA, someplace, CO and CA again, that’s troubling. I’m NOT saying it’s the source of long (tens of minutes) delays, but transcontinental hops? Come ON!
So (ignoring the tracert), what else other than database issues could cause these delays?
Comments sometimes post immediately, and sometimes they take a while to show up. It’s pretty random. I just wish there was an easier way to keep track of new comments. The RSS feed can’t keep up.
I’m too seeing comments slow to being added, sometimes. But seeing as pages load fairly quickly, that indicates against general database overloading. And no, 400k comments is not particularly large for a decent RDBMS. It may need some tuning.
What can help is some careful inspection, checking for slow queries, and speeding them up in some way. This can be as simple as having the RDBMS “explain” the slow query to you and figuring out where to drop an extra index.
As a hunch, maybe the wordpress update b0rked up something beyond the page header. You may want to look at their release notes to see if they mention anything database-related.
I’d advise against going with disqus as they bring in a lot of crap, and have rather trigger-happy anti-spam measures. They also annoyingly slow down archive trawls for the end-user. I for one will no longer be posting if disqus comes in. This is not a threat to you. I’ve had enough trouble with them that I will not deal with them again. I have them generally blocked in the adblocker and so will no longer see any comments, or their adverts, and so on.
Oh, I do have one feature request: This commenting system could use a “parent” link, say next to the “reply” link. It can be a bit of a chore to figure out just what a comment is replying to if large comments come before it. And if there’s an explanation of what tags can be used and how to prevent automatic replacements like adding http-dot-slash-slash to certain things, that’d be swell.
gorblimey: Don’t say “tracert”. It’s “traceroute” on systems that don’t have eight-dot-three braindamage. It really isn’t (==is very unlikely to be) the network, because pages with comments load fine and that is actually quite a bit more data that needs to come out of a database than the data that needs to go in for adding a comment. Unless there’s some application caching going on, and if that’s the case, we may be seeing a delay in updating cached pages. Which again isn’t the back-end database, but a caching system put in front of php, which is the scripting engine upon which wordpress builds.
DaveB: I’d move checking for a page caching system being slow on the uptake up on the list of things to check for.
“Don’t say “tracert”. It’s “traceroute” on …”
Sometimes I am incredibly lazy. :P
I wonder how many caches these pages can be found in? I mean, does my browser must have to go all the way to Brea or even Texas to get the comic? And how much effort is made to keep caches up to date?
Your browser typically has a local page cache. ISPs used to run “invisible” caching proxies on their networks to save uplink traffic costs, but https mostly put paid to that. Large serverfarms might run “reverse proxies” in front of their webservers, also to do load balancing, and those may or may not cache. Those all do their thing based on parameters (“headers”) sent along with webrequest-replies, telling them how long to leave between checking for a new version of the page.
Then there exist CDNs and the breaking-the-‘web silliness that is cloudflare, that may or may not be involved. I’d guess not, for this website.
I was talking about an application cache. That is, wordpress is written in php, and running the script to produce a page with all its associated other script files to load and database queries to run can get a bit of a drag. Now observe that the script generates the page anew for every incoming webrequest but most of the time the result will be identical to the previously generated results, so that is a lot of work essentially wasted. So add another cache: It sits in the webserver or between webserver and scripting engine, and keeps the results from running the script for serving to the next requester. How it does its thing depends a bit on the specific software used, if any.
The trick isn’t so much how much effort to expend, they should expend as little as possible because it’s extra work. Caches exist to do less work overall, though they add complexity. It’s more making sure the caching software notices or is notified that the cache has gone stale and to expend the work to refresh. And with the wordpress update subtly breaking things like the page top, well, it could be the staleness signal no longer gets through in all cases.
NB all I know is that wordpress is involved, and some sort of update that broke something, not whether any actual application caching is going on. So this is finest armchair troubleshooting, worth what you paid for it.
:)
It’s pretty obvious that our understanding of gravity is severely lacking, as general relativity cannot be reconciled with quantum mechanics – as yet.
I personally expect the eventual reconciliation of the quantum realm with all the known forces to eliminate the need for the “corrections” to cosmology. Both dark matter and dark energy are simply that, corrections to make the equations AS WE KNOW THEM NOW balance out.
A small increase in gravity (we’re talking miniscule here) over distances of 100,000 light years above the simple “r^2” combined with an equivalent miniscule decrease below r^2 over millions of light years, IOW, a slight hump and tail off below the r^2 would totally do away with both dark matter and dark energy. That is how I expect the final equations to work out.
I feel validated by the jokes/puns in this page.
Also the vet incentive link is telling me it isn’t secure and might be a bad link to a page impersonating “top web comics”. can someone check that out?
Someone posted about that above, I might have fixed it. Give it a try.
YAYYYYYYYY! :) It works! Hurray for DaveB!!!!!!!!
Electromagnetism and the weak force are only unified at the ultrahigh temperatures of the early universe(wikipedia sez 10^15 K or 1000 trillion K).
…why yes I did watch yesterday’s PBS Spacetime episode which covered this subject. It’s good stuff and reasonably accessible, tho having watched previous episodes probably helps; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esayi49OAk4
If you really want to get into the mind-blowing territory, look up some of the articles (and/or YouTube videos) on gravity being a function of time. It’s fun stuff, but it reminds of of ST(DS9)’s Miles O’Brien moaning that “Temporal physics gives me a headache.”
Everything is obvious in hindsight.
And often the best progress is made with Ideas or solutions where you can only say:
How did I not think of that sooner?
{insert your Deity here} gave humanity the two most awsome gifts ever: Death, and 20-20 Hindsight. Use them wisely.
Dave, your explanation of the interrelationship of the four forces comports with what I know so I would say you are pretty close to spot on.
Is Dabbler poking Sydney in the head with her hoof or stroking Sydney’s head with her hoof? This is weird, even by this comics stands.
I think it’s an “oh stahp” poke, the use of her leg being required because her torso is rocked back in mirth. But yeah, mostly it just reminds me of how Xuriel has digitigrade feet.
Personally, I think gravity is just an expression of thermodynamics. We have a matter bias because we’re matter, but the universe is an energy system and matter is just solidified bits of energy. Gravity is just the elimination of potential energy from the universe, converting it to waste heat via kinetic impacts or bleeding it away in black holes. This is why it can’t be married to the other two. It’s a Canadian girlfriend that we all assume exists because we see how matter moves. In order to eliminate all it’s potential energy, energy would have to be expended, furthering the distribution of heat energy across the universe.
Basically, gravity is entropy trying to get all the matter in one point so it can’t fall anymore while getting all the energy equidistantly spread out everywhere else.
The Air Force Academy doesn’t offer degrees in Criminal Justice. In the Air Force there is no specific degree required to be assigned to either Security Forces or the Office of Special Investigations. There is no law degree either because there are no JAG officers below the rank of Captain and every USAFA graduate starts as a Second Lieutenant.
What is required of all USAFA graduates is a strong enough load of science courses to qualify even the English majors (or in my case, the Political Science majors) to receive a Bachelor of Science degree. Not enough to understand theoretical physics at this level, but not complete ignorance either. Max’s understanding level is about right, except that her current job probably introduced her to more than she’s letting on here.
It’s Dave’s universe and in Dave’s universe the USAFA has degrees in Criminal Justice. The USNA could have classes in Underwater Basketweaving that are Prerequisites for SEALS because doing intricate things underwater and planning ahead for eventualities.
OK, so for Dave’s universe he’s worried about getting the theoretical physics right, the AF ribbon methodology right, and a host of other things right…but this, this one thing, is what he doesn’t care about getting right.
You’re so helpful for pointing this one exception out.
This is a reminder that the belief in Dark Matter stems from celestial bodies following paths that do not make sense in Euclidean space. If space is Non-Euclidian, there is no need for Dark Matter.
Umm… do we tell him?
Yeah, lets.
General Relativity directly implies that the universe is non-Euclidean. If you can see the same supernova in more than one direction (and we recently spotted one in at least twelve directions), then Euclid has definitely left the building.
Dark matter isn’t called “dark” because we don’t know what it is; it’s called dark because it doesn’t interact electromagnetically, i.e. it doesn’t emit or absorb light.
Dark energy, on the other hand . . .
IIRC, Gravity isn’t a ‘force’ so much as an effect of the warping of spacetime, which is why it is so hard to wrap your head around it and include it in a general theory. It is simply our observation of how things move with respect to a spacetime that is not flat. Sufficient mass can cause dimples in spacetime, which we observe as gravity wells. Much like how ‘centripetal force’ is nothing more than an expression of momentum on a lateral vector, it isn’t a ‘force’ in its own right, it is merely an observable effect of a force being applied to it.
Consider, if you will, moving in a ‘straight’ line on a globe will end up describing an arc. You think you’re going in a straight line, but the object you are orienting yourself to (the earth) isn’t flat, therefore neither is your trajectory. Same concept, projected into three-dimensional space.
No. Gravity is indeed a force. One of the four fundamental forces and the first to break away from the others, which theoretically caused the big bang. One theory involves that gravity started to leak into other dimensions, breaking up the balance in whatever predated the bing bang which caused the initial explosion. Then electronangetism broke awak from the strong and weak nuclear forces, which made those last two separate as well. College physics was a while ago for me tho. :)
No. Right now, our most accurate model of gravity is that provided in the general theory of relativity… which Shneekey basically summed up – it’s not a force, it’s curvature of spacetime by mass.
No, it literally is a force. Gravitational force. The fact that it causes the curvature of spacetime by mass does not change the fact that this curvature is caused by a fundamental force – that being GRAVITY.
In short – gravity is not a curvature of spacetime. Gravity CAUSES the curvature of spacetime to happen. There would be no curvature of spacetime by mass without gravity, but that does not make it the same thing.
You’re running under the older models. That used to be the given accepted understanding, however that has since been brought into question with respect to causality vs causation. It is generally considered more accurate to say that the curvature of spacetime causes an effect we perceive as gravity, rather than the reverse.
This is also why there is no ‘graviton’ particle that we have observed, and no way to interact with gravity from any of the other observable forces. Because it isn’t the force, it’s the effect. We’d have to figure out how to start screwing with spacetime to affect gravity (although we can simulate gravity in a free-fall state by applying 1g acceleration ‘upwards’ either through spin or through kicking on the engines). If we can figure that out, we can start doing wormhole stuff (basically punching a hole in a spacetime wrinkle to get from Point A to Point C without traversing the hill of Points B which follow the curvature of spacetime). That also brings up a bunch of really awkward questions about how one might go about doing that, what ‘angle’ we would need to get purchase on it, and what consequences such actions might have.
I get that gravity as a force is still being taught in both high school and lower-end college courses, so I understand your confusion. However, as of this moment, it is generally more accepted that gravity is the effect caused by curvature of spacetime.
” It is generally considered more accurate to say that the curvature of spacetime causes an effect we perceive as gravity, rather than the reverse.”
I believe you are incorrect.
If Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of the universe, which therefore existed BEFORE spacetime, then it can not have been created FROM spacetime. It’s the other way around. Spacetime’s curvature exists because of gravity.
“This is also why there is no ‘graviton’ particle that we have observed,”
1) The lack of a graviton particle has no bearing on if gravity is or is not a force. It’s quite obviously a force. Electromagnetism on its own does not have a particle either, but it’s a force. The strong and weak nuclear forces also do not have particles on their own. They’re still forces. It’s when you COMBINE different fundamental forces that you get particles, although gravity is and has always been slightly different than the ot her three fundamental forces, which is obvious because it’s was the first force to break away from the other three, theoretically causing the big bang. But theoretical physicists do know that it was the first force to break away. They just don’t know why or what happened before that point in time, or even if time was a thing before that point, since conventional physics seems to break down before 10 to the -36 seconds after the big bang (the Grand Unification Epoch, aka the Planck era, when the force of gravity separated from the electronuclear force).
2) We also do not know if there is or is not a graviton particle, just as we do not know if there is or is not a tachyon particle. We barely understand how photons work even, since they are both particles AND waves. In fact, the fact that we can’t find a graviton particle makes it MORE likely, not less, that gravity is a force. If there WAS a particle, that would be an argument AGAINST it being a force, and instead being something caused by some other force.
“(although we can simulate gravity in a free-fall state by applying 1g acceleration ‘upwards’ either through spin or through kicking on the engines).”
Gravity is, very simply put, the force of attraction between all matter. It doesnt need to itself be matter to do this. If it was, it would not be a force.
“and no way to interact with gravity from any of the other observable forces.”
That is the entire point of the grand unification theory. If you find a way to join gravity with the electronuclear force, you’d basically be reverse engineering the point which predated the big bang during the Grand Unification Epoch before the planck time.
“If we can figure that out, we can start doing wormhole stuff (basically punching a hole in a spacetime wrinkle to get from Point A to Point C without traversing the hill of Points B which follow the curvature of spacetime).”
Wormholes are a very generalized concept. There are theoretically many different ways to create something that gets you from one point to another instantaneously, all of which would be considered wormholes, such as folding spacetime. None of them actually have been shown to be possible (yet) though with modern science. Honestly, most of the theories on HOW to make a ‘wormhole’ involve gravity as a primary factor, including in fiction – Sliders, Star Trek, Stargate, etc.
“I get that gravity as a force is still being taught in both high school and lower-end college courses,”
Also upper-end college courses. Because it’s taught at all levels, actually. Since it’s a fundamental force. I tend to go with what scientists like Max Planck believed when it comes to the scientific view of the fundamental forces of the universe.
“However, as of this moment, it is generally more accepted that gravity is the effect caused by curvature of spacetime.”
By whom?
This then raises the question, why does mass curve spacetime (if not via gravity)?
My favorite intuition is that mass doesn’t cause spacetime curvature, mass IS spacetime curvature (i.e. nothing but wrinkles and knots in the spacetime), from which the properties of what we consider “mass” thereby arise.
That sounds like… a very good idea, especially as it fits with the “gravity as a force” generated by “time as a field” interacting with bodies of matter.
Bu-u-u-u-t, you do need to differentiate between matter and mass. OK, mass doesn’t just happen, so — in a colloquial sense — mass is matter. Sort of. However, interpretating the gurus, it would seem that mass is a property of matter. At least in Newton’s universe, which seems to be somewhat more important in the quantum arena than was first imagined.
So would a massless neutrino (https://neutrinos.fnal.gov/mysteries/mass/) be matter at all?
Going by the article you just cited, there is a small probability that any neutrino would have no mass. But we have to accept that “small” is probably in the region of 1×10^-1000 or less.
So as my reading on the matter (which benefits from never having seen the inside of a University lecture theater) leads me to understand, Mass is a property of Matter. Thus if the lump has mass, it is therefore matter. However. There are those that will claim — maybe correctly — that photons and gluons must be considered as matter, but we are in really hairy territory here, without a compass or chart. Better stay holed up in the pub, your head will recover from alcohol poisoning but not from quantum mechanics.
“But we have to accept that “small” is probably in the region of 1×10^-1000 or less.”
A neutrino is not 1×10^-1000 or less. Once you get to 1x 10^-34 meters, that’s already 0.0000000001 yoctometers, and at that point you’re at the theoretical quantum foam’ and ‘quantum string’ level. Anything below that is the Planck Length, which is 1.6×10^-35. It’s the smallest possible length where space-time and gravity remain valid. Anything beneath that makes measurements of length no longer have any actual meaning because quantum effects completely dominate.
Here. This is a good website to give you an idea about what I’m talking about:
https://htwins.net/scale2/?fbclid=IwAR3TZQ_PkKBCHM5tU2jwHJluTxbjzfgEctNS9osdUcid_dxOHGgj9XWhl0A
Btw, a neutrino is between 1 and 10 yoctometers in length (ie, between 1×10^-23 meters and 1×10^-24 meters).
Oh dear. Ummm. OK, you’re tired, probably decaffeinated, and we have not been anywhere near punny enough. But you still need to concentrate on the detail, where the devil lives.
“Small” as in “small probability”. No units supplied, as in “region of 1×10^-1000 or less.” So, not a measurement.
I do hope that Fermi can get some meaningful data on neutrino mass, as this is Very Important.
I keep getting Internal Server Error.
Neutrinos do have mass. They’re about the lightest thing in the universe above the quantum level, but they have mass. About 1/500,000th the mass of an electron.
Oh, and some high energy neutrinos are larger than that as well, slightly smaller than a bottom quark, which is bigger than 1 zeptometer, but smaller than 1 attometer.
We now know that Max attended the United States Air Force Academy….(and I thought she never rose above the rank of airman in the USAF…!)
Two big thumbs up on the Dabbler pinup, Dave. It’s probably the best one you’ve ever done, up to this point.
Deus begins to explain something by expressing that he’s not really certain how it works…
Goblin Dabbler is adorable and I hope that we run into her again somewhere down the line.
Deus’s Science Corner.