Conversation
Notices
-
1. the universe is expanding / big bang happened2. black holes existpick one. i don't understand how when the universe began it didn't just immediately collapse into a black hole given that all the mass in the entire universe, our galaxy and every other galaxy was confined to a tiny point
-
@lain @augustus view from the outside goes to one or the other extreme exactly because it's outside, would saycan't have nuanced opinion without knowing anything about the topic in question
-
@augustus I still think that general scientific thinking is the way forward but the public image of institutional science as all-knowing or even just scientific is completely wrong and abused for "trust the science" nonsense.
-
@lain >nothing makes sense>introduce magic black box to correct your modeldamn i love science
-
@augustus because of the inflaton field, duh
-
@lain @augustus "scientists say X". the response options are yes, no, dinnae, and the third is an attitude has to itself be trained, feels, and anyways not always that applicable, as in cases that prompt "the public" for immediate response (vaccine stuff etcbeen pulling notes for a section on this in book alsobest answer would be lurk moar, but we need people to have stable lives and good educations for that. science education is great, but that has also the problem of elevating celebrity people, who then have conflicts of interest and and are often out of the loop on actual research. science needs "better stories" to be more approachable to people, like this really neat project at usc saw the other day, a new, more immersive way to model biochem stuff. but stories are also very dangerous, hiding things that don't fit the narrative. etcand there's the whole straussianism question too, of course. lying obviously breaks trust and is a really bad plan in the long run, creating an ignorant populace. but telling the truth to an "ignorant populace" also can go very wrong, like actually getting people killed, and so once you have a frenetic people in panic mode every direction is downhillhow to reduce fraud / conflict of interest etc in the research itself and improve quality is obvs a whole separate discussion. there are problems both in academia (insufficient rigour, publishing for its own sake, chasing the money) and commercial (sure-bets please, actively repressing things potentially dangerous to future income) etc, and the ideal mix seems to be the old bell-labs, arpa model with real specific problems and goals to achieve, lots of prestige to pull in serious people, and limited oversight with good funding etc, but that's kind of out the window given "neoliberal" efficiency management stuff
-
@shmibs @augustus you can't have an extreme opinion either, if you can't judge something you can have no (justified) opinion at all.
-
@lain @augustus situations with bell labs and arpa are more nuanced that that also, of course, like these little unexpected pockets of neat stuff living in the behemoth
-
@augustus it's not that complicatedsay you have three bits of stuff, one in the middle and two on either side (see picture). A pulls B one way, C pulls B the other way, and the net result is that B doesn't movenow let's say you have either an infinitely large universe or a closed finite universe that loops back on itself (things general relativity supports). then you could imagine this space being homogeneously filled with little bits of stuff everywhere, so they'd all be pulled in every direction at once, with the net result being nothingfor stuff to clump up, you need to have some pre-existing density irregularities. the denser part will slowly, slowly collapse and pull in stuff around it; this is what you see happen in giant clouds of gas that become stars. this requires the clumps of stuff be not moving around very much, though, or you'll have density irregularities randomly moving around to different places, and again the net force will basically cancel out. so the idea is that these early bits of stuff were also super-heated, racing around all over the place and also too energetic to bloop together into stable atomsthe cmb (cosmic microwave background) does seem to directly support the idea that things were hot and cooled down, suddenly letting out a burst of light everywhere at once when previously light wasn't able to travel without plonking into somethingdoodle.png
-
top ddg result explanation:>The event occurred everywhere in space, not actually a point. In particular, the energy was uniformly distributed everywhere. The net gravitational potential was therefore near zero, and there was no one point to which everything could collapse. Furthermore, since stuff was everywhere, there was no expanse of vacuum (in a flat spacetime, no less) outside the collapsing region. And furthermore, things were moving rapidly, were in a highly excited state, and were not in thermal equilibrium (until inflation hit, and then things were too diluted and causally disconnected to collapse en masse).this makes absolutely zero sense to me and sounds to me like one of the writers of Lost after being cornered by an angry fan
-
@augustus super-early universe stuff is of course theoretical / tentative, but some parts seem better supported than othersre: inflation (the proposed extremely fast expansion of the super early universe, followed later by the slower expansion that seems to be going on now) people like to point to how matter is distributed in the universe and comparing it to like quantum effects, being magnified way up. can't comment on that personally obvs, but it's at least interesting to think about
-
@shmibs I don't know if this is true or not, but it definitely made sense to me, thanks
-
@augustus writing about now, yeh, this "intuitive understanding" side of things feels like it's not used enough in teaching, could help in a lot of places. feynman was big on it, obvs, and there's also this book on thermodynamics i found the other day a guy called Robert Hanlon wrote, trying to explain things the same wayhttps://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=F8F281F9552B5EFE15CA02C8AB62E9D7
-
@shmibs the part about uniformity preventing clumping is super intuitive. but yeah inflation seems super suspicious to me
-
@shmibs >Copernicus – the Return to a Sun-centered Universemy nigga Aristarchus finally getting the due he deserves
augustus pugin ?
バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
lain
All senooken JP Social content and data are available under the 