VoterFrog

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

The observable universe is constantly expanding as the passage of time allows light to reach us from more and more distant parts of the universe. So it's less "we don't know what's outside" and more like (to a certain extent) "we have to wait and see." And there's nothing we've seen to indicate that these external regions that are being revealed are anything but more of the same kinds of things in our inner region of the observable universe.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The important thing in the balloon analogy isn't what the balloon is expanding into, it's just that every point on the balloon is drifting away from every other point.

One thing to consider, though, is that space may not even be a real physical thing. Maybe location is just a property of things, like mass or electrical charge. It could just be an inherent value that adjusts and influences other things according to the laws of physics. Maybe it's less that "space is expanding" and just that "the location property of everything is constantly diverging." There's no need to worry about what anything is expanding into because our conception of space may just be a mental construct.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I would think you'd have to instantaneously accelerate because incremental acceleration doesn't work the way we typically think it does at high speeds.

If you're moving at 99.999% the speed of light relative to Earth, anything close to your speed is going to be moving quite slowly relative to you. When you accelerate some more, the change in speed relative to those close things is much larger than the change in speed you experience relative to Earth (it gets smaller and smaller as you approach light speed). But as far as I understand, there's no such thing as moving at light speed relative to Earth but not relative to other sub-light speed things. You'd have to instantaneously move at light speed relative to everything (every sub-light speed thing).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's still an unsettled question if we even do

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ooh, great one. Here are my picks for each panel:

  1. "The Weave"
  2. Sharpiegate
  3. Vaccine/Covid Denialism
  4. Ukraine Blackmail
  5. Election Denialism
  6. January 6th
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Well, famously, they're waves and particles. The double slit which way experiment will only set off the detector in one slit, as if it was a particle. Yet, without a detector it will interfere with itself as if it were a wave that passed through both slits.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

You're right. But the thing that's interesting about the double slit experiment though is that it works on only a single photon. It's as if all the traffic was created by a single car. So classically you might not think that the single car should care if the freight truck is heading down a different lane than the car but in QM it does, because the car is in a superposition of occupying several lanes.

I'm probably driving the analogy straight into the ground of course

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What are you trying to see exactly? There's this video done with polarizers: https://youtu.be/unCXuRXpEhs Of course, it's not an instant on/off but having an instant on/off doesn't really change anything.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wikipedia has a whole list of citations on this very sentence lol.

There is near unanimous consensus among economists that tariffs are self-defeating and have a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Tariffs are a net negative. Always. The things produced will not be competitive on the global market, if they were, we'd already be making them. The higher prices always destroy more jobs than they create. Retaliatory tariffs destroy even more jobs. The higher prices drive down demand and make the working class consumer poorer. Always.

There's no economic upside to tariffs, over any time horizon. They create a small number of jobs in a specific sector at a very expensive cost. Some politicians might decide that the enormous economic cost is worth it for other reasons, but a net positive they are not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Because the uncertainty in the measurement is related to the wavelength of a photon used to make the measurement and smaller wavelengths (higher frequencies) lower that uncertainty but are more energetic.

PBS Spacetime has an excellent video on this very subject.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

To accurately measure the size or location of something requires energy. The more precise the measurement, the more energy is required. The amount of energy required get the precision below the Planck length would literally create a black hole.

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