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Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

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571–580 of 839 posts

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#571

Human Biology, particularly the "bigger scale" things like joints & ligaments. I have arthrtic knees, and I'd like a better understanding of how joints work, and where the various clicks, pops and swellings come from. It's easy to find really simple things, but harder to understand "how things go wrong".

This won't help with everything you asked for but there is neat piece of software called Complete Anatomy that helped me with this sort of thing.

It renders an interactive model of the human body and you can toggle different layers, from bones to nerves, to various layers of muscles and ligaments. It also contains animations of treatment exercises/stretches, surgeries and highly detailed models of various biological components.

It helped me understand my injury and why certain exercises help. It's paid software but it comes with a free trial.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#572

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…

This podcast episode has an amazing explanation by one of the top researchers in the field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX5t8EivCaM

The basic idea is that by making the amplitudes of the qubits destructively interfere with each other in certain ways, you can eliminate all of the wrong answers to the question you're trying to answer.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started to read the first one but his insistence that Many Worlds is true was too frustrating. Many Worlds Theorem seems specifically useful at saying "the variables aren't hidden because everything before wavefunction collapses actually plays out in different worlds. But, we specifically have no way of proving that theory. So now we're back to the essence of the original question - if these things seem random why…

Well, I'd recommend to read the whole series. It's not so bad as it sounds. There are so many steps from where you are to appreciating the utter weirdness of Bell's experimental result. Not the weirdness of any theory (or an interpretation, which Many Worlds actually is) but of the basic experimental result. If you are properly amazed by it, rejecting MWI or any crazy-ish borderline-conspiracy theory seems suddenly a…

Why isn't the MWI another form of hidden variables (a supremely non-parsimonious one at that), where the hidden variable is which of the many worlds you happen to inhabit?

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#574
post #217

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…

Since no one has listed it yet, please check out https://quantum.country/ It's by Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen, and it is excellent. Have fun!

Yes! How come this isn't higher up in the list? This is one of the best pieces of education I've ever seen. Absolutely wonderful.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#575
post #217

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…

Since no one has listed it yet, please check out https://quantum.country/ It's by Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen, and it is excellent. Have fun!

This deserves to be upvoted all the way to the top!

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#576
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only has direction + magnitude right? (±h/4π)e_i for some unit vector e_i. So it can be written as a vector? No?

It's a vector. madhadron doens't know what he's talking about. (To be excruciatingly precise, it's a ray in Hilbert space. But that's close enough to a vector for the purposes of HN comments.)

> madhadron doens't know what he's talking about.

Not sure why you're saying this when you end up saying pretty much what madhadron said, i.e.: "To be excruciatingly precise, it's a ray in Hilbert space"

I get that madhadron doesn't explain themselves but still... There's some irony here.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's interesting how powerful and clarifying this model of its-all-just-atoms-bumping-into-atoms is. It's interesting how many people take science courses, but don't really get this. In the context of Covid19, I see so many people wearing PPE, but failing to act as though they understand that the actual goal is to prevent this tiny virion dust from entering your orifices. Like wearing gloves and a mask, but then…

Masks are for keeping your own particles from spreading far, not the other way around.

As stated, this is not the whole truth. Please stop spreading this myth. This particular myth may actually cost lives.

https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/n95-mask-surgical-preven... https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/coronavirus-pollution-ma...

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#578
The cosmic inflation. Yes, the universe is smooth but how is that enough to justify this unimaginable expansion? There seem to be no proof or possible experiment yet the scientific community apparently accepted this theory with its abrupt start and abrupt end, only secondary to the big bang itself in its scale and energy.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 10 pounds trust is used to overcome the airodynamic friction, when the plane is in high speed. Because the "way" around the wing is longer on one side compared to the other this create a lower pressure on one side, and higher on the other. This pressure both lift and push the plane up. If there was zero friction you would hold the plane up with zero thrust ;) I build this at school, using the same principle: http…

The problem with this description is that you don't need a fancy shaped wing to fly, a flat board will work. Aerofoils provide better efficiency but are not required.

Don’t agree, unless you only did read the first 1/4 of my comment?

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#580

Has someone that thought they were taking LSD ever turned into a permanent schizophrenic zombie or in a mental institution, or is it all urban legend. If someone that didn't know they were predisposed to mental illness, is it applicable to dismiss their experience in order to maintain how safe LSD is? If any of this is true, are there any sources aside from "my friend's friend's brother took too much and now he is...…

The answer to this is really easy. Go to any mental institution and get to know the patients. An institution where they are allowed out, but are still in an enclosed area. A majority of the patients will have had some sort of heavy drug use in their past. Sure, whats causation and whats correlation, but its pretty clear that drugs cause mental breaks. How do I know this? I have mental illness in my family and have sp…

> Sure, whats causation and whats correlation, but its pretty clear

What? How is it clear? As you wrote yourself, correlation is not causation.

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