Here’s the part where I get lost.
How is that possible?
That’s not even the brain hurty part. Imagine the double slit on a grand scale: we are measuring photons from a faraway quasar behind a galaxy, and the galaxy can gravitationally lens those photons to us by two different paths. An instant before a photon arrives on Earth, you make a decision; look at each path independently, or insert a beamsplitter and interfere the two paths together. If you do the first, you get “particle”-like behavior (two separate images of the quasar). But if you do the second, you see a “wave”-like interference pattern. But did the photon take both paths or only one? Did your decision affect the photon’s motion from millions of years ago?
This is called “Wheeler’s delayed choice” experiment, and opens up a whole Pandora’s box of extensions (quantum erasers, what happens if an alien observed the photon before you, etc).
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Worrying about annuities and yields and the future value of money when you have HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS is a perfect example of why our species is so fucked.
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Because it behaves like a wave. :)
I was just interested from a math perspective. It’s not a problem I will ever face.
I embrace jack-it July to offset no nut November.
I’m just glad everyone made it through Eat-Ass August without getting Polio.
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Sir, this is the physics room, not a Charles Schwab.
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That’s cheating. July has more days. Gotta be June.
I have a lot of memories from the day I saw Back to the Future for the first time, for some reason.
https://twitter.com/DocBrownLloyd/status/1588579736686854144
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“Mental illness or narcotic addiction?”
“That’s a tough choice.”
According to the WSJ, the man on the left from the duo “Yellow” (Dieter Meier), who brought us the baritone refrain “Oooooh Yeeeaaah,” has parlayed this song via royalties and further investments as of 2017 to a net worth of $175 million.
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Is this a loss meme
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Wow! I guess one hit really is enough.
Up to now I’ve managed to avoid joining the physics discussion because I’ve realized we don’t have a common framework to talk about it. We don’t really agree on what things exist or on what ideas to use to explain interactions between those things.
Like even something as seemingly simple as the idea of empty space is problematic because Einstein came along and said that empty space contains energy, and so is not empty. We keep talking about it as though we share the same understanding of what empty space is when we don’t. This is frustrating and hard to avoid.
As another example, we use the word particle, but particles are abstract mathematical objects. They don’t exist in the real world. They don’t occupy space, for instance. You might say that’s a pedantic objection, and we really mean “particle-like”, and it’s fine to refer to electrons and quarks as particles and these things are real and fundamental. But someone else might come along and say, no, fields are more fundamental, and particles are just resonant excitations of the field. But then yet another person might say that fields, like particles, are abstract mathematical objects that don’t exist in the real world. So round and round, which is bad enough, but a lot of the time we don’t even realize we have different points of view.
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As a former philosophy of science guy who avoided phil of physics but had to read some bas von frassen and such, I’m always puzzled by many worlds people, including Sean Carroll, who I think is generally very reasonable (except exaggerating the importance of bayesianism). If there is no conceivable causal relationship with other worlds then they do not exist in the strongest sense possible of nonexistence.
There is literally no difference between zero other worlds and infinite other worlds.
This is awesome.
Just had the most stressful 2 hours of my life. Absolute whiteout blizzard with shear ice roads. Took 2 hours to drive home when it normally takes 20 minutes. Never got above 30km/h (18 miles/h).
My shoulders are on fire from clenching.
Saw hundreds of cars in ditch.
Fuck.
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