count_of_monte_carlo

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

There isn’t a link in your post, but it looks like you’re referring to this preprint. The article has been published in a peer reviewed journal paywall warning.

This is a review article, so it isn’t proposing anything new and is instead giving a summary of the current state of the field. These sorts of articles are typically written by someone who is deeply familiar with the subject. They’re also super useful if you’re learning about a new area - think of them as a short, relatively up-to-date textbook.

I’m not sure how you’re interpreting this review as an alternative to the standard model of cosmology and the Big Bang. Everything is pretty standard quantum field theory. The only mention of the CMB is in regards to the possibility that gravitons in the early universe would leave detectable signatures (anisotropies and polarization). They aren’t proposing an alternative production mechanism for the CMB.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

So unfortunately the article they reference by Parker is paywalled. I have access but can’t share it easily. The article is essentially the foundation of quantum field theory in curved space time - in other words the genesis of the standard cosmological model. Cosmological particle production in an expanding universe isn’t an alternative to the Big Bang, it’s an essential part of it.

Leonard Parker’s work is summarized on his Wikipedia page. You can also read an interview with him on the arxiv

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Haha it’s in the title: “Cosmological Particle Production: A Review”. Also the journal it was published in is for review articles: Reports on Progress in Physics. Mostly though the abstract promises to give a review of the subject.

Another indication is its lengthy (28 pages) with tons of citations throughout. If someone is doing new work, citations will mostly be in the introduction and discussion sections.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

how people very knowledgeable on the current paradigm cannot see (most of times historicaly) that a paradigm shift is about to happen ?

I’m not sure I’d agree with that assessment. Generally a new model or understanding of physics arises because of known shortcomings in the current model. Quantum physics is the classic example that resolved a number of open problems at the time: the ultraviolet catastrophe in black body radiation, the photoelectric effect, and the interference pattern of the double slit experiment, among others. In the years leading up to the development of quantum theory, it was clear to everyone active in physics that something was missing from the current understanding of Newtonian/classical physics. Obviously it wasn’t clear what the solution was until it came about, but it was obvious that a shift was coming.

The same thing happened again with electroweak unification%20and%20the%20weak%20interaction.) and the standard model of particle physics. There were known problems with the previous standard model Lagrangian, but it took a unique mathematical approach to resolve many of them.

Generally research focuses on things that are unknown or can’t be explained by our current understanding of physics. The review article you linked, for example, details open questions and contradictory observations/predictions in the state of the art.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Unfortunately for me, there is no community at Lemmy dedicated to the history of science

I agree! The history of science is often even more interesting since you get both the science and the personalities of all the people involved, plus the occasional world war in the mix. It’s a shame there isn’t an “askhistorians” type community here.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

This falls a bit outside my wheelhouse but I believe the answer is no. The established symmetries in particle physics are all associated with the quantum mechanical state of a particle (charge, parity, etc) and to my knowledge there isn’t an “information” quantum number.

The closest you might get to this is quantum information theory, where information is encoded in other physical characteristics (spin, parity, energy, etc). In this sense information is more of an emergent phenomenon than a fundamental property.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

First a caveat: An object with mass can’t move at the speed of light, but it could move at speeds arbitrarily close to that.

The most successful model of gravity isGeneral Relativity, which treats gravity as a curvature of 4-dimensional space time. Gravity’s influence travels at the speed of light. There’s a classic thought experiment that sort of answers your question: what would happen if the sun was teleported away? The answer is the earth would continue to orbit around the spot the sun was for 8 minutes, and we would continue to see sunlight for that same amount of time since that’s how long it takes light to travel that distance. Then after 8 minutes the sun would disappear and the first “lack of gravity” would reach us, and things would be bad for earth :(

The fact that gravity travels at the speed of light actually leads to an interesting phenomenon: Gravitational waves If a massive object rapidly accelerates (or decelerates), for example a star sized mass moving quickly and then coming to an abrupt stop, it will emit a ripple in space time called a gravitational wave that will travel outward at the speed of light.

It was big news about a decade ago when gravitational waves were first detected by LIGO, a series of large interferometers that look for expansion/contraction in spacetime. Their first detection was the collision of 2 black holes; as the black holes spiral around each other and eventually merge, they emit oscillating waves with increasing frequency. They made a cool video showing how the frequency increases by converting it to sound.

Since then LIGO and VIRGO (similar European collaboration) have detected multiple gravitational waves from the collision of black holes and neutron stars. So not only are gravitational waves a neat validation of general relativity, they’re actually being used to do astronomy.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Hah tell me about it. The 2017 neutron star merger happened while I was writing a proposal for an experiment where the physics was sort of related. So of course I completely reframed the proposal around that event, and it got funded! And that was just a few years ago, right?

Man I really need to publish the results of that project…

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Certainly! You can see discrete emission lines from the ionized air molecules, which only occurs because of quantum physics. I realize that’s not what you’re asking though.

I did a quick calculation and for a plasma torch (~27000 Kelvin) and assuming air molecules, the average velocity of the plasma ions would only be like 6000 m/s. That’s 0.001% the speed of light, so you aren’t going to see any relativistic effects.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Sorry, physics can be cruel sometimes :(

This is probably a dumb question, but if we eliminate the hydrophobia caused by rabies, would it increase the survival rate of active rabies?

I’ve been learning some about rabies and learned about rabies causing hydrophobia. This is just a theory, I’m not saying I know anything about this topic to be knowledgeable, but if we could get someone with rabies to not fear water, could they survive?

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

The Milwaukee Protocol is a treatment plan that is essentially a more advanced version of what you’re asking. The patient is put in a medically induced coma and then given antivirals and IV fluids, which avoids the issue of hydrophobia.

It got a lot of press because one person survived on it (a big deal given that rabies is a death sentence once symptoms appear) but this success hasn’t been reproduced with other patients. A paper on the protocol has a remarkably blunt title: Critical Appraisal of the Milwaukee Protocol for Rabies: This Failed Approach Should Be Abandoned.

Why are the graphs for the distribution of light from the Sun as a function of (a) frequency and (b) wavelength not exactly reversed? ( www.wtamu.edu )

I thought that the frequency of light was directly inverse to the wavelength by a constant. In other words, I assumed that graphing the frequency of light as a function of wavelength would be a straight inverse line. Because of that, the graphs for the distribution of light from the sun as functions of frequency and wavelength...

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

The x-axis range spans the same region of “photon energy” space in both plots. The data starts at about 280 nm in the first plot, which is 1000 THz (the maximum value in the second plot).

The stretching effect caused by working in different x-axis units is because the units don’t map linearly, but are inversely proportional. A 1 nm wide histogram bin at 1000 nm will contain the histogram counts corresponding to a 0.3 THz wide region at 300 THz in the frequency plot. Another 1 nm wide bin at 200 nm will correspond to a 7.5 THz wide region located at 1500 THz in the frequency plot.

You can get a sense of how this works just by looking at how much space the colorful visible light portion of the spectrum takes up on each plot. In the wavelength plot, by eye I’d say visible light corresponds to about 1/6 the horizontal axis scale. In the frequency plot, it’s more like 1/4.

That normalization is necessary because otherwise exactly how you bin the data would change the vertical scale, even if you used the same units. For example, consider the first plot. Let’s assume the histogram bins are uniformly 1 nm wide. Now imaging rebinning the data into 2 nm wide bins. You would effectively take the contents of 2 bins and combine them into one, so the vertical scale would roughly double. 2 plots would contain the same data but look vastly different in magnitude. But if in both cases you divide by bin width (1 nm or 2 nm, depending) the histogram magnitudes would be equal again. So that’s why the units have to be given in “per nm” or “per THz).

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

A quasiparticle is more of a useful concept for describing the behavior of systems than it is a distinct object. In the example you cite, phonons are a convenient way of describing how vibrations are transmitted in matter. The fact that phonons are “quantized” is more accurately just emergent behavior from the system of atoms or molecules, a consequence of the fact that the atoms have quantized vibrational states.

As an analogy, consider a ripple in a pond. The ripple appears to be a real, distinct thing. You can describe it with math (as a wave) and predict its behavior. But it cannot exist separately from the water in the pond. The ripple is an emergent phenomenon in water, a quasi-object. It only exists as a collective behavior of the water molecules.

By definition quasiparticles cannot exist in a vacuum.

[Solved] Trees supposedly take 30 years *before* they absorb CO₂. Why?

I often hear science-adjacent folks stating that a tree needs to be 30 years old before it starts absorbing CO₂, usually paired with the statement that it’s therefore pointless to start planting tons of trees now for slowing climate change....

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Hi there! Can you please remove the word “retarded” in your first sentence? This word is now generally considered a slur, which runs afoul of rule 6 “Use appropriate language and tone. Communicate using suitable language and maintain a professional and respectful tone.”

Can sufficiently energetic EM waves of a specific frequency affect weaker EM waves of a different frequency?

My initial thought is “no,” since our eyes, being receivers for specific wavelengths of EM radiation, can’t see frequencies like infrared, no matter how bright. Likewise, my cell phone’s WiFi and cell modules don’t conflict with each other (as far as this layperson can tell, anyway)....

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

I second the other poster’s suggestion to look into nonlinear optics. A really common application is frequency doubling, also known as second harmonic generation, which doubles the energy of the photons. So an 800 nm laser (red) can be converted to 400 nm (green) with this method.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) actually uses frequency tripling of the laser pulses right before they enter the target chamber. That’s pretty wild, I had intended to look up NIF to give a high profile example of second harmonic generation, I hadn’t realized they were actually doing third harmonics.

Another optics-based phenomenon that I think maybe strays too far from the intent of your initial question, but is too cool not to share, is laser Wakefield acceleration. A very high power laser pulse will push electrons out of its path in plasma or materials via the ponderomotive force. This charge separation creates electric field gradients on the order of billions of volts per centimeter, which can accelerate electrons or other charged particles to relativistic energies. So you can start with a green laser pulse and wind up producing gamma-ray beams, either by slamming the electrons into a stopping material or by Compton scattering other low energy photons off the relativistic electrons.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

But in order to do that photon actually needs to be created and travel from one particle to another.

The electromagnetic force is mediated by virtual photons. These don’t exist as free particles, such as a photon emitted by a light source, but only as an intermediate particle. Because they’re only intermediate states, virtual photons can have non-physical energies (so long as they’re within the uncertainty principle), resulting in some having an effective mass. Suffice it to say virtual photons are quite distinct from real ones! Technically, I believe you could have some of the basic features of the em force (namely attraction/repulsion by 2 point charges) with just virtual photons. Things get tricky once charges begin accelerating though, as this leads to the emission of real photons.

If Higgs works in a similar way also being a boson

The short answer is, it doesn’t. The Higgs Field gives mass to fundamental particles. Existing in that field causes certain particles to have mass due to their coupling to the field. The W and Z weak gauge bosons gain mass through electroweak symmetry breaking, quarks and leptons gain mass through a different coupling. I realize this is a very unsatisfying answer as to “how” the Higgs field creates mass, but the mechanism involves some complex math (group theory and non-abelian gauge theory), so it kind of defies a simpler explanation. Regardless, it’s through interactions with the Higgs field (which can exist without any Higgs bosons around) that fundamental particles gain mass. The search for the Higgs boson was just to confirm the existence of the field, because while the field can exist without Higgs bosons present it must be possible to excite it sufficiently to create them.

Going back to your original question: these particles have almost certainly been created “naturally” in high energy collisions between particles and matter. Nature can achieve much higher energies than our particle accelerators. The highest energy particle ever observed was a cosmic ray. However, Higgs bosons are extremely short lived, with a lifetime of 10^-22 seconds. So whenever they’re created, they don’t stick around for a meaningful amount of time.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Per rule 9, please provide a source for the statement that gluten is a “synthetic or semi-synthetic organic polymer”.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Per rule 9, please provide a credible source for the statement “Gluten doesn’t appear in nature on its own”

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

This comment is on the edge for rule 6 “Use appropriate language and tone.” I’d appreciate it if you’d edit the language to be more professional.

Thank you for providing a source in your comment!

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

The source provided by another user gives a definitive counter argument.

From the article: “ The wheat kernel contains 8%–15% of protein, from which 10%–15% is albumin/globulin and 85%–90% is gluten (Fig. 1).1 Gluten is a complex mixture of hundreds of related but distinct proteins, mainly gliadin and glutenin. Different wheat varieties vary in protein content and in the composition and distribution of gluten proteins.”

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Im dealing with all rule breaking behavior. The unsourced comments have now been removed as the user is unable to provide a source to backup their claim. The comments that break civility rules, including this one, are also being removed.

Please report rule 9 violations so that we can act on them.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

This isn’t exactly my area of expertise, but I have some information that might be helpful. Here’s the description of the frame selection from a paper on a lucky imaging system:

The frame selection algorithm, implemented (currently) as a post-processing step, is summarised below:

  1. A Point Spread Function (PSF) guide star is selected as a reference to the turbulence induced blurring of each frame.
  1. The guide star image in each frame is sinc-resampled by a factor of 4 to give a sub-pixel estimate of the position of the brightest speckle.
  1. A quality factor (currently the fraction of light concentrated in the brightest pixel of the PSF) is calculated for each frame.
  1. A fraction of the frames are then selected according to their quality factors. The fraction is chosen to optimise the trade- off between the resolution and the target signal-to-noise ra- tio required.
  1. The selected frames are shifted-and-added to align their brightest speckle positions.

If you want all the gory details, the best place to look is probably the thesis the same author wrote on this work. That’s available here PDF warning.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

I’m glad to see this question has sparked a lot of discussion, but I’d like to remind everyone to please include a credible source for your answer.

Rule 9: Source required for answers.

Provide credible sources for answers. Failure to include a source may result in the removal of the answer to ensure information reliability.

Is it possible that monozygotic twins are quantum entangled at conception?

Feels like a shower thought, but I seriously want to know if there are any implications, because it seems like identical twins are able to sense, understand, and almost be extensions of each other - finish each other’s sentences/thoughts. Some even claim to be able to sense their twin when they’re separate. Hard to believe,...

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

That’s not really how quantum entanglement works. When particles are entangled, their quantum mechanical states cannot be described independently. So you couldn’t write down a waveform for just one particle and have it correctly describe reality, you would need the waveform of the entire state and therefore all entangled particles.

As a consequence, certain physical observables can be highly correlated between the particles. For example, if the spin of the overall entangled state of 2 particles is 0, then the spin of 1 particle will be exactly opposite the spin of the other. But these spins are only defined upon measurement (interaction with a system that is deterministic), and at that point the entangled state is collapsed. There’s no mechanism for transporting information while maintaining an entangled state.

Ignoring this fundamental issue, it still wouldn’t be possible to maintain an entangled state between particles in a pair of twins for any practical amount of time. Maintaining coherence in qubits (entailed bits) is one of the big challenges in quantum computing. If the qubits interact with the environment it breaks their entanglement. Even just thermal vibrations will destroy the state. So typically qubits are held at near absolute 0 in a dilution refrigerator. Even still, the longest a qubit has been kept coherent is 5 seconds.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Does Thorlabs still package random snacks in their orders? Some lab snacks would offset the sting of a $30k pricetag by a tiny bit.

Niche Gravity Theory?

There’s a good many gravity theories, some that don’t even try to explain the why, only the how and other’s that involve some particle like the graviton. But anyone know if there’s any based on the energetic vibrations of our known particles with mass (those within protons and neutrons)? In other words, gravity’s space...

count_of_monte_carlo Mod , (edited )

Alternative theories of gravity are like alternative theories of medicine, they tend to be thoroughly invalidated and none are anywhere near as effective as the mainstream theory. As the wiki article you linked notes:

However, such models are no longer regarded as viable theories within the mainstream scientific community and general relativity is now the standard model to describe gravitation without the use of actions at a distance.

General relativitiy is one of the most tested, validated theories in physics. It is incredibly successful, not just describing the attraction of massive bodies but also describing frame dragging (solving a longstanding mystery on the retrograde motion of Mercury that Newtonian gravitation couldn’t explain), and predicting gravitational lensing and gravitational waves, both of which have been observed since and are perfectly described by GR.

An alternate model should attempt to solve a problem in the current leading one, for example giving a more fundamental explanation, or working at different scales where the current model fails (quantum gravity theories, for example). A good alternative model will also give results that are consistent with all existing observations, which is one area that every alternative theory of gravity I’m aware of fails. What problems in GR are you looking to resolve with an alternate gravitational model?

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Assuming a spherical earth, if you doubled its mass but kept the radius the same then the gravitational force on the earths surface would be twice that of the current earth.

As long as you keep the earths mass reasonable, you’re in the realm of Newtonian gravitation. Newton’s law of gravitation depends linearly on the mass of the attracting source. So doubling the mass doubles the gravitational force.

At 1 billion solar masses (firmly in the not-reasonable mass range for the earth), you’d need to consider the formation of a black hole. The Schwarzschild Radius for a 1 billion solar mass black hole (aka the event horizon) is almost 20 astronomical units or 2 billion miles. So in that case you wouldn’t be able to measure the change in gravity as you’d be within the event horizon of a black hole.

At an intermediate mass there might be some general relativity effects that could alter the linear relationship between earth mass and gravitational force as measured on the earths surface, but I’m not sure what that would be. If you were to measure earths mass from a large distance, then it should follow Newtonian dynamics and behave linearly with mass.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

The other answer is correct, it’s not really accurate to say that gravity is made of waves.

In physics, a field is a physical quantity that has a value for each point in space and time The most accurate model for the gravitational field is general relativity, however for many cases it’s sufficient to just use Newtonian Dynamics. In GR, changes to the gravitational field propagate at the speed of light in a vacuum, c. It’s possible to create gravitational waves by rapidly accelerating a massive object, which occurs in inspiralling black holes or neutron stars. But the gravitational force pulling the pair of black holes together isn’t made of waves; the black holes are minimizing their gravitational potential energy as defined by the gravitational field.

force fields are made up of waves (as is everything?),

I wanted to address this since I think you might have a common misconception. Particles (photons, electrons, quarks, protons, neutrons, etc) are described in quantum mechanics using a wavefunction. But this doesn’t make these particles “waves”, they are still quantum mechanical particles. They simply don’t have a defined location (if using a spatial wavefunction, you can also work in an alternative basis like energy or momentum). If the particle interacts with something on the classical scale, it’s wavefunction will collapse to a single point where the location is defined.

If you try to model a quantum mechanical particle as either a classical point-like particle (single point in space) or a classical wave you will fail. Before quantum mechanics was discovered lots of very smart people tried and failed to use just waves or point-like particles. Quantum mechanics, using wavefunctions, is consistent with the fundamental nature of reality as far as we can tell.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

I’m trying to understand what you’re proposing here, so I have a few questions.

3d interference pattern of gravitational waves would create rogue waves at specific points in SpaceTime that would create matter and the CMB.

What is the source of these gravitational waves? Binary black hole mergers, neutron star mergers, something else?

How would rogue gravitational waves create matter?

How would rogue gravitational waves produce the cosmic microwave background?

Creation of matter and gravity fields, at net zero energy would increase the expansion of the universe.

What do you mean by “net zero energy”? Is it that this process of creating matter and gravitational waves would also conserve energy somehow? How would this increase the expansion of the universe?

The perfect black body curve of the CMB would result from the exponential expansion of the universe.

How does the exponential expansion of the universe produce the black body CMB? In the standard big bang model, photons are emitted during the recombination epoch and have a very uniform black body temperature since the matter that emitted them had been in thermal equilibrium prior to expansion. These photons are then extremely redshifted by the expansion of the universe.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Thanks for responding!

Photons emitted from radioactive decays have specific wavelengths. Even with Doppler broadening blurring it out, I don’t see how integrating over all decays at all distances would produce a black body spectrum.

The black body spectrum shape is actually really hard to produce through another mechanism. In fact, before the discovery of quantum mechanics attempts to calculate a black body spectrum with classical mechanics failed at short wavelengths. This problem was called the ultraviolet catastrophe.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

The gravitational wave background you linked is extremely weak, it took decades of measurements of pulsar timing and complex signal processing to even see hints of it. In general, the gravitational force is so much weaker than the other forces that it can be ignored except on very large scales. So I’m not seeing how a rogue gravitational wave would produce sufficient energy density for creating matter via pair production or some other mechanism. You would need extremely large amplitude gravitational waves, which would require some even more energetic mechanism for generating them. Maybe this is something you can work into your model?

I was most impressed by a single fact of physics that all energy in ordinary matter is equal to the negative potential gravitational energy of that matter.

I’m not sure what you mean by this, could you point me to a reference where you saw this statement?

Could the fabric of space be the origin of baryon matter?

I’ve been doing a bit of searching for theories on the origin of baryon matter (including antimatter of course) and some seem to hint at quantum particles spawning from the fabric of space (but doesn’t seem to theorize on how this happened) but not many focus on hypothesizing how all forms of baryon matter ether: was the...

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

I’ll try to address your questions in reverse. For the second question, the formation and structure of hadronic particles such as baryons or mesons is dictated by the fundamental forces. Specifically, the weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions between the quarks that make up the hadron. Gravity is too weak to play a role on this scale.

It’s important to remember that protons and neutrons aren’t elementary particles, they’re composed of quarks. A particle composed of 2 up quarks and a down quark in its lowest energy state is a proton. 2 downs and an up in the lowest energy state is a neutron. Elementary particles such as quarks are identical to other quarks of the same type - every up quark could be swapped for another up quark with no effect on the system. So a proton, composed of quarks in a specific energy state, will be indistinguishable from another proton. There doesn’t need to be a blueprint somewhere to define a “proton”, it just emerges naturally from the fundamental forces and elementary particles.

For an example on a more familiar scale, consider chemical reactions. By making or breaking atomic and molecular bonds you can have an oxidation reaction like fire, or generate electricity in a battery, change the color of a substance, etc. All of those distinct emergent reactions are governed by the electrons in atoms, whose energy levels and interactions emerge from quantum electromagnetism.

These forces also dictate how the composite particles can be reorganized, for example allowing a decay to occur. A free neutron will eventually undergo beta decay into a proton, an electron, and an anti-electron neutrino. This is allowed because the mass of the proton and electron (and neutrino, though it’s mass is currently unknown and experimentally consistent with 0 for this case) is less than that of the neutron. So the beta decay produces a lower energy state. The Feynman diagram for the leading order term in the decay mechanism describes it as being mediated by a W- boson.

This segues into your first question. It sounds like you’re thinking of high energy colliders like the LCH, where beams of protons or even lead nuclei are collided at high energy. These collisions produce a quark gluon plasma where quarks are no longer confined by color charge. It’s basically a superfluid soup of quarks and gluons. As it expands and cools, quarks become color confined again and consolidate into composite particles (hadrons), including some exotic and very unstable ones that quickly decay into more stable configurations. Some of these initial hadrons or their decay products will be formed from antimatter quarks. However, any reaction mechanism that creates or destroys antimatter will create or destroy the same amount of matter. This statement ignores CP violation, which is a small effect in this case, though essential for creating the matter dominated universe we live in.

The strong force between quarks is so strong that the energy needed to “separate” the quarks exceeds the energy needed to produce a quark-antiquark pair. This mechanism converts energy into matter, but the only “blueprint” is “minimize the energy of the system”, and creating a pair of quarks to stick to the initial pair that’s being pulled apart achieves this.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

I might be missing something, but how would this new model reproduce the CMB? The cosmic microwave background is a black body spectrum with an extremely uniform temperature in all directions. The localized fluctuations in temperature are only a very small shift to the average.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Any data is sent at or below the speed of light. Solar storms are charged particles (mostly protons) being ejected from the sun and eventually hitting the earth’s magnetic field, causing disruptions in the field (and potentially cool auroras).

Since these storms are just particles traveling from the sun to the earth, they travel slower than light speed, so our distant sensors can warn us in advance at/near the speed of light. This won’t work if the sun were to instantly disappear or change color though, that information would travel at light speed and the probe signals would arrive at the same time.

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Not exactly a scientific debate, but among the general public there was strong opposition to the idea that rocket engines would work in space, where there’s “nothing to push against.” Famously, the New York Times editorial board mocked Robert Goddard (the rocket scientist that now has a NASA space flight center named after him) in a 1920 article:

“That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

Image of the editorial

The New York Times eventually formally retracted that op ed, on July 17th, 1969 - while the Apollo 11 crew was already en route to the moon. The retraction is pretty funny:

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.

Retraction source

count_of_monte_carlo Mod ,

Hi, could you expand on your question (or questions) in the main post? The more clear your questions are, the easier it’ll be for someone to address them. Thanks!

count_of_monte_carlo Mod , (edited )

/r/askscience was one of the highlights of Reddit - I’d love to help establish a similar community here in /c/askscience. I especially liked that posts and followup questions were rewarded for being inquisitive, and that off topic/inaccurate responses were removed. Posts on topics I’m familiar with were filled with scientific information, and I learned a lot from posts on topics outside my area of expertise (also the ones in my area of expertise, to be honest).

I have a science background (nuclear physics) and lots of experience communicating with remote collaborators. I’m fairly active on lemmy (on another account, I created this one to be my semi-professional one) and would generally have no problem checking the site at least 3 times a day. And I have no issues with mod coordination over Discord.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • All magazines