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.
Man, I fell off reading this just before the fight with Big V(Vehemence or whatever) and yesterday I binged the entire thing till just now, man…so much happened in 60 days but most of it happened in 5, when I picked this back up I was kind of hoping it was maybe finished or a month or so away from finished so I could binge the rest from beginning to end and while my love for Sydney did not change, in fact I love her far more than I did those years ago when I first started, I gotta say I may have to fall off for maybe 5 or 6 MORE years so I can have another absolutely euphoric binge of 500 to 600 more pages.
Just re-binge it every couple of years. Really fun working through the whole comic again if you read it page-by-page as it gets released.
With a regular read through you’re more likely to read author commentary too. Getting his notes and thoughts on stuff related to the comic is useful.
Also potentially useful are reader comments on how X relates to something that happened 5 years ago, usually with a link.
As someone who knows a very very little about almost everything in physics… sounds good to me.
That top right panel is one of the best ones in the comic series. It is so well done.
I have long maintained that as the number of people and amount of time spent trying to figure something out both increase, the likelihood that it was something stupidly simple all along also increases.
Yeah, you got the physics pretty much spot on. While a lot of the math is over my head (probably more accurate to call it over my laziness level) the basic concepts are pretty easy to visualize, if you have a four dimensional geometry kind of brain. (Anyone can learn to do it, some of us just have a slightly easier time doing so.)
Let me guess. It’s slood, isn’t it?
They haven’t figured out how to marry gravity to the others because it’s not a force, it’s geometry. In my opinion the idea of marrying it to the others is bizarre to begin with. We’ve known this since Einstein and what people made of his work, but people, for some reason, still wanna insist it’s a force and should be married to the electronuclear forces. It’s just the inverse to mass/energy that allows stuff like the zero-energy universe theory to work.