Consciousness. How is it possible that the thread is up 5 hours and ctrl-f consciousness returns nothing?
Consciousness has no properties, it can't be studied scientifically.
Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
761–770 of 839 posts
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#762Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to be rude, but given current daily attacks on science and the scientific method, I can't let this stand - I think your meta intuition represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It is simply wrong to think that scientific questions can never be definitively settled. Clearly there are some hypotheses that have been difficult (and may be impossible) to prove, for example, Darwin's idea that nat…
> I think your meta intuition represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It sounds to me like the grandparent is 100% correct. > It is simply wrong to think that scientific questions can never be definitively settled. They made no such claim, speaking of intuition . > Clearly there are some hypotheses that have been difficult (and may be impossible) to prove, for example, Darwin's idea that natur…
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
Amen.
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#763Quantum 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…
Nobody understands quantum mechanics. Lots of people know how to apply it. I don't think quantum technology is going to go anywhere until physicists revamp the theory & the pedagogy in a way that makes it comprehensible. I say this as someone who passed 2 semesters of graduate QM.
> I say this as someone who passed 2 semesters of graduate QM.
THat's funny because my EE math concentration was on advanced calculus. I took two semesters of a-calc and got A's, but I only know how to compute a Jacobian and apply it, not its origin story. It's a very weird feeling to understand the motions but not the ... depth?
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#764I wish I could get a clear explanation of why faster than light travel breaks causality. I have seen the math but intuitively I am having trouble grasping it especially when you have only two reference frames (most explanations will use three reference frames to show the violation)
The simplest answer is that events that happen further apart in space than in time can be observed in different orders depending on the frame of reference. If an effect can happen before its cause, causality is violated. The three-reference frame example is the easiest, because you can start with a frame where two events, A and B, happen simulateously. A reference frame (say, a spaceship), flying along a line in the…
Isn’t cause and effect mediated by forces that travel at the speed of light? Simultaneous events cannot be in a causal relationship, no?
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#765Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#766I don't know if this would be my "one question" if I could ask the most brilliant minds in science, but something that always bothered me: When I took physics they basically said "at first scientists were disturbed by the fact that magnets imply that two objects are interacting without any physical contact, but then Faraday came along and said 'the magnets are actually connected by invisible magnetic field lines' and…
I'm a physicist specifically working with magnetic systems, but I have very little pre-graduate teaching experience, so take this attempt to answer the question with a grain of salt. The reason some people regard Faraday's original explanation of the eponymous law (it is worth noting that at the time it was widely regarded as inadequate and handwavy) as illuminating is because Faraday visualized his "lines of force"…
That Feynman snippet was so awesome. Flawless. Thanks for sharing it.
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#767Earlier quoted context omitted.
I studied bioinformatics and found the standard textbook, Albert's "Molecular Biology of the Cell"[0] to be one of the most captivating books I've read. It's like those extremely detailed owners' manuals for early computers, except for cells. The amount of complexity is just absolutely insane. My favourite example: DNA is read in triplets. So, for example, "CAG" adds one Glutamine to the protein it's building[1]. The…
"The distance from brain to leg is too long, for example, to accurately control motion from "central command" As a dancer, I have been fascinated by that fact. It means that dancers do not dance to the beat as they hear it - it takes too much time for the sound to be transformed by the ear/brain into an electrical pulse that reaches your leg. Instead, all dancers have a mental model of the music they dance to that is…
You can clap your hands to a calibrated delay from the previous beat that you heard (predicting the next beat before you hear it). This is analogous to the principle of a phase-locked loop, which gradually adjusts an internal oscillator until it matches an external frequency. That internal oscillator can emit a beat just before the real one, offset just enough to cancel all the delays in the processing path.
This only works if the beat you're hearing is sufficiently stable.
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#768Earlier quoted context omitted.
> artistic Yeah. One might for example reduce reinforcement of the big-empty-cell misconception by briefly showing more realistically dense packing, eg [1], before fading out most of it to what can be easily rendered and seen. But that would be less "pretty". Prioritizing "pretty" over learning outcomes... is perhaps a suboptimal for education content. > better But still painful. Consider those quiet molecules in pro…
david goodsell's pictures are fantastic. I used to work down the hall from him!
Agreed; cool, seems a neat guy. And much of his work is CC-BY, thus great for open education content. Hmm, the Wikimedia Commons capture of his work seems to be missing quite a bit. Oh nifty, there's now an interactive version of his 2014 "Molecular Machinery: A Tour of the PDB".[1]
[1] https://cdn.rcsb.org/pdb101/molecular-machinery/ [] http://pdb101.rcsb.org/sci-art/goodsell-gallery [] http://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/motm-by-date [] https://cdn.rcsb.org/pdb101/molecular-machinery/
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does it work with futures? My understanding is that I buy a contract for 100 shares at a future date of my choice. So let's say stock XYZ is currently trading at $20, and I buy a futures contract for $100 for Jan 1st 2021. I don't have enough money sitting around to buy those 100 shares, so let's say XYZ is trading at $200 by Jan 1st 2021, That means I have a contract where I can buy 100 of them at $100 and immed…
What you're describing is more like options, but futures and options both work in a similar way to what you described, but futures have an underlying commodity that you have an obligation to take possession of (such as barrels of oil) options on the other hand give you the right to buy the underlying stock, but you have no obligation to do so. So if I have a futures contract for 1000 barrels of oil for $10 a piece, w…
Thank you very much for this detailed reply.
and yes, I absolutely was meaning to ask about options, not futures (I know so little, I used the wrong word!)
How do options get priced?
i.e. if I look in my online brokerage thing I can buy XYZ for $100 on Jan 1 2021, but what if I want to buy it for $125 on Jan 1 2025?
Who decides what dates and prices are set?
Can I just go insane and get options on AAPL for $3000 (or $2) in 2030?
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#770Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Tardigrades: No comment. >The immune system: The most awesome thing ever. It's actually two systems. One called the innate that we have in common with most forms of complex life, and the adaptive immune system, something we've only seen manifested in jawed vertebrates. The innate immune system is a set of cellular signals/behaviors that are triggered by cells being exposed to damage and or stress. These responses ar…
Thanks for a detailed writeup, which seems for the most part in agreement with my understanding technically. But then you kinda tried to summarize janeways in a few paragraphs, and that means no one who doesn't already know immunology is going to find it helpful. In fact, Janeway itself tries to summarize their book in the first chapter and that chapter goes on for 50 pages iirc. Some fundamental concepts that might…
I haven't heard of Janeway's, and I apologize for the lack of proofreading. The immune system is one of the most fascinating things I've ever deep dived into. So I can get a bit ramble when the chance to ramble occurs.
There are so many odd facets of it with interesting implications; like did you know exposure to sex hormones actually contributes to the atrophy of the Thymus over time? This is posited to have some relation to the increased likelyhood of developing autoimmunity 0roblems as we get older.
Also, not all T cell lines undergo adverse selection in the Thymus. There is a smaller population of more autoimmune sensitive cells that develop and specialize in the extremities. It is theorized this is evolutionary selected for because there is a tradeoff between being able to develop to a wide variety of pathogens, and being free of auto immunity. So you keep a small group of possibly autoreactivr immunity cell lines just in case. This is theorized to explain the prevalence of autoimmunity issues in the extremities being relatively common.