Particle physics is so dumb
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/health/brain-injuries-consciousness-awareness.html
Potentially tens of thousands of people with brain injuries who are completely unresponsive are aware enough to hear someone say, “hey we’re gonna track your brain activity for a study. spend the next several minutes imagining you’re playing tennis” and have their brain scans show the same thing that comes up when they scan healthy people with the same directions
Horrific if true. Start pumping in some podcasts to these coma wards immediately, until we figure out what the hell is going on
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I believe it. Hell we got data that people can have consciousness while we do CPR when they’re dying.
Isn’t that just locked in syndrome? Which has been known for a long time. My understanding was that these days they always check for brain wave changes when pricked and talked to.
Can’t read the article to see what is different here.
The patients in this study were diagnosed as nonresponsive or in a persistent vegetative state, for 8 months. 1 in 4 were able to match brain patterns with the control group
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On a podcast last week, Nate said Enrico Fermi and others at Los Alamos worried the Trinity test might destroy life on Earth and other planets. No way that’s true. I’m going to fret but there are limits.
I think they did think about it, but their math did not suggest it would happen. It was kinda like how some people thought we might create a black hole when they turned on that big ass particle accelerator.
They (Edward Teller, anyway) thought there was a possibility of starting a chain reaction in the atmosphere that would destroy life on Earth. But afaik nobody thought it could affect other planets. I’ve read histories of the project and biographies of most of the bigshot physicists and I don’t know of anyone saying anything like that even as a joke. It seems absurd. Like, if you’re on Mars, worst case you’d see two suns in the sky for a while but that’s about it.
But maybe I’m wrong. Sean Carroll, who definitely should know, didn’t bother to correct him. If anyone knows of a source backing up Nate’s statement I’d be very interested in seeing it. I’ve googled and found nothing.
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I don’t think theories about strange matter that coverts all matter to strange matter when they interact existed at that time as that is the only way an experiment on earth can impact life on mars and eventually the entire universe.
Even turning earth into a black hole won’t impact life on mars.
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Really? Would not have guessed this.
Mass stays the same. Even the moon would just continue to orbit a tiny black hole that orbits the sun. The creation itself will generate radiation but I don’t think it would be significant compared to the Sun because of the sizes involved.
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I don’t think this is correct. I think it would likely affect the gravitational orbits of at least anything within 1 AU from Earth
Nope, like dutch said the mass would be the same so the gravity would be the same in this hypothetical situation where the earth was condensed into a black hole.
Not a physicist, but even though the mass stays the same wouldn’t the distance from some of the mass differ and thus it would have slightly less gravitational pull? For instance the moon is x distance from the surface which weighs so much and x+y from the core which also weighs so much and x+y+y from the opposite surface. In the case of a black hole it would just be x+y from the entirety of the mass. Would that not have any impact?
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No. I’ll let others elaborate
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I think I was correct, but maybe not for the exact reasons I thought
That person needs a physics degree.
Here is the equivalent question of the sun suddenly turning into a black hole not impacting the orbits of the planets:
https://esahubble.org/videos/hubblecast43g/
The only impact earth turning into a black hole would have is that there would no longer be tides and tides do have an impact on the moon.
x center of mass of the earth stays the same. x+y and x-y as mass on the surface cancel each other out as that is how we get the center of mass. Black hole ends up at the center of mass location not on the surface.
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It is complicated, but yeah, it’s not as simple as it’s the same. I think it’s fairly easy to prove this. Say you take all the particles on Earth and condense them to a point mass that is 4000 miles away from you (that’s the radius of the Earth). You have a certain gravitational attraction that is the sum of the attraction of you to every particle in that condensed point. Now imagine you took one little point particle away from that condensed block and put it one inch below your feet directly in line between you and the rest of the particles. You’ve just increased your attraction in that direction because the attraction between you and that particle is greater than it was before you moved it.
But, your attraction to the center of the Earth is pretty complicated because it’s the sum of your attraction to every particle, but they are all in different directions from you. Moving all those particles to being all in the same direction would increase your attraction, but then moving some of them further away would decrease it, but then you’re moving more than half the particles closer to you, so surely you would have a greater attraction to the point mass Earth.
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I think that just shows that your attraction is in the direction of the center of mass, not that the magnitude is the same.
(the difference would be negligible for Mars or any object far from Earth relative to the radius of Earth - but non-zero.)