Finnish Metal
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I feel like Einsteinâs idea that light was a wave that propagates without a medium is massively underrated in terms of how revolutionary it was at the time when the people thinking back on it are people who grew up in a world where quantum mechanics was both ordinary and the most confusing physics in popular culture. Up until special relativity, there was no such thing as a wave outside of a medium. Sound waves, water waves, earthquakes, guitar strings, slinkies: the wave doesnât exist but for the medium that is moving. Waves were nothing but the dynamics of something rather than existing on their own. In space, no one can hear you scream, precisely because there is no air there to propagate the wave. So, how could light, being a wave, shine through the vacuum of space where there is nothing to jiggle? This puzzle in the face of lots of evidence of light being a wave but in the absence of evidence of anything in particular that itâs jiggling is what led to a whole lot of convoluted work that ended up replicating a lot of the math of special relativity but without the correct description of reality. The idea that there is no medium is so simple that it seems impossible to be revolutionary except what it implies, which is the incredibly mind boggling nature of the quantum world: If waves donât need media, than it would eventually turn out that everything, not just light, is both particles and waves at the same time. As much as Einstein gets credit for beginning the field of quantum mechanics with his explanation of the photoelectric effect (which he actually won his Nobel prize for), and as much as quantum mechanics and relativity as pitted as being in opposition with one another in popular descriptions of physics, special relativity was, in a way, an even earlier hint at the wave/particle duality of reality.
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Cool convo guys thanks
Got me.
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Didnât Faraday already figure out that an changing electric field causes a magnetic field and vice versa? I guess they thought there was some ether that it was acting on?
This business is still confusing to me, a nonexpert. Physicists will at times say light is a wave and at other times particle. Maybe theyâre speaking loosely or oversimplifying, which doesnât help.
In the video below, Feynman goes out of his way, in fact spends half the time preparing the audience, impressing on them that heâs not going to lie to them, not going to tell them stories about ball bearings and springs or whatnot. Heâs going to explain how it really is. You donât like it? Go somewhere else. (Great series of videos btw. Highly entertaining.) He goes on to say starting at ~36:00 that without question, light is a particle.
Without an authority to tell me otherwise, the way I deal with duality is by telling myself that both waves and particles are abstractions that happen to be good models for phenomena in the real world but that the phenomena are distinct from the model. In the case of light, either model works in most circumstances but light itself is not one or the other.
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My 2 cents from a quick review: Faraday had a different idea of what the electric and magnetic fields are than we do now. He understood that electric and magnetic forces propagate with finite velocity, but it was Maxwell that saw that the velocity was the same as that of light. From that knowledge, Maxwell guessed that light was electromagnetic. The idea of light as a wave came from the fact that Maxwellâs equations could be manipulated into the same form as the equations that describe waves. Wookieâs post explains why people thought there must be some medium (ether) that was doing the waving.
My physics days were a long time ago, so I canât contribute anything to that discussion, but I feel the need to notify this thread of my disappointment in the lack of Russian metal bands.
If ever there was a language suited for metal, it is Russian. What is up with mother Đ ĐžŃŃиŃ, @zarapochka?
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If not for the video I would have bet money that this was Weird Al doing a straight cover of MoP.
Maxwell already had light figured out, itâs just no one really listened to what he was saying.
That definitely looks healthish to me. Probably worth the $7.99 per bottle or whatever it costs.
Not totally implausible that could be useful, hydrogen gas-infused water has been shown to reduce inflammation and oxidative stress.
But she should try to make her own by submerging some metallic magnesium or lithium in just regular drinking water.
Iâll never be a billionaire, but if I was I would definitely just start paying poor people yearly salaries for no reason other than to provide them with the means to live in comfort and dignity. In most places 50-100K a year, no questions, is life-changing money for people living in poverty. Rather than having an in-house private hedge fund to manage my familiesâ wealth Iâd just hire a team of people to identify recipients and dole out the money.
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And that mindset is why you wonât be a billionaire. You donât get to that wealth unless you are a borderline psychopath.
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Faraday figured out that a changing electric field would induce a magnetic field, but it was Maxwell who figured out the reverse and how they could propagate each other as waves. But yes, they both thought that they acted on and through some ether. Because what is an electric field anyway? It is something that causes charged particles to move differently, but what is that? An invisible thing that can apparently move objects without touching them, or the fact that jiggling a magnet can cause a light to turn on in an electric circuit that the magnet isnât touching at all is pretty damn weird. At the end of the day, something has to actually push those electrons, and photons being particles with momentum and the mediators of the electromagnetic force were ideas 50 and 100 years after electromagnetism, respectively.
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Shut up and take my money. It looks just like the one in Double McGuffin that I wanted so bad as a kid.