181–190 of 839 posts
Hawking Radiation. I know just enough to know that the story of "anti-particle of virtual pairs happens to always fall in the hole" is a Lie Told To Children, but the explanations seem to go straight from there to rather dense math and I've never wrapped my head around it.
Quantum Physics. Still can’t wrap my mind around multiverse being a simpler explanation then the future holds data we won’t have in the now.
As for the multiverse, I don't know enough to talk about it. I just know it's one of the possible interpretations of quantum mechanics. Note that the various interpretations are generally considered more philosophy than science, and have no (or very little) practical implications. I would suggest ignoring all analogies and not looking too deeply for interpretations, and instead focus on basic concepts like "What is a quantum state?" and "How do I compute measurement outcomes?" which are super well understood and the same under all interpretations.
You can think of the various interpretations of QM as different software methodologies, scrum, agile, waterfall, etc. just stuff people like talk about endlessly, but ultimately irrelevant to the code that will run in the end.
Quantum Computers. Not like I'm five, but like I'm a software engineer who has a pretty decent understanding of how a classical turing machine works. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say "qubits are like bits except they don't have to be just 1 or 0" without providing any coherent explanation of how that's useful. I've also heard that they can try every possible solution to a problem. What I don't u…
Why bicycles stay upright. For every authoritative-sounding, in-depth explanation, there is an equally plausible, yet conflicting and contradictory alternative.
I'll downvote myself
vertical alignment in CSS
/s
Flight. Apparently "air flows faster on the top side of the wing, lowering the pressure" is an incomplete explanation; I even heard we don't completely understand why it works (?!?).
I've been informed that I'm part of the problem. Comment removed, sorry for the trouble, folks!
100% completely false.
Imagine you have two particles of air, and they are immediately adjacent to each other. Suppose now that one goes above the wing, and one goes underneath. In your example, the particle going upward goes further in the same amount of time.
But ask yourself this: Why do the particles of air have to arrive at the same time? What mechanism from physics requires that they meet up again at the far end of the wing?
Then ask yourself this: If what you described is true, then how do aircraft fly upside down?
I would like to understand how cellular biology processes actually work. Like, how do all the right modules and proteins line up in the right orientation every time? Every time I watch animations, it seems like the proteins and such just magically appear when needed and disappear when not needed [0]. Sometimes it's an ultra-complex looking protein and it just magically flys over to the DNA, attaches to the correct sp…
The issue with these animations is that they're getting rid of all the thermal noise. In reality, single proteins are flying around the whole length of the cell many times a second, just from their thermal motion. And when processes like DNA transcription happen, they're not like a regular conveyor belt -- a fraction of the time the machine will even accidentally run steps in reverse ! However, if any of this were sh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if you're uncomfortable with LIGO, you're in good company. Once a whole decade went by in physics where people couldn't agree if it would work in principle or not. And it is true that a lot of common explanations are bad (e.g. "it's just a ruler" is not complete by itself because "why doesn't the light get stretched too?"). Nonetheless, today we have a variety of independent explanations. Maybe you'll find this…
Would you say it's accurate to say LIGO is a big interferometer measuring changes in lengths of the arms due to gravitational waves, with some extra analysis to figure why it still works even though the light waves get stretched? Or is OP correct that such an explanation means I "don't have even a slight understanding of how it works" and a correct explanation must "involve higher spatial dimensions (not time)?"
Part of the popular confusion around how LIGO works is the freedom in coordinates: there are different, perfectly good definitions of space and time you can use, and the explanation sounds different in each one. So people can get them mixed up. For example, my previous paragraph makes sense in "transverse traceless gauge", but not in others.
I'm not sure what GP was referring to with "higher spatial dimensions".
Wave function collapse. As far as I can tell there is no discernable difference between a particle whose wave function collapsed (perhaps via measurement with another entangled one) and one that hasn't.