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

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

#1
I've been studying viruses lately, and have found that the line between virus/exosome/self is much more blurry than I realized. But, given the niche interest in the subject, most articles are not written with an overview in mind.

What sorts of topics make you feel this way?

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

#5
How can metric expansion of space redshift light? Doesn't that violate conservation of momentum, since the redder light has lower momentum?

And adding on to that: Will light inside a box redshift? If I weigh the box (i.e. weigh the light inside the box), then wait a bit for the light to redshift, then weigh the box again?

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

#7

Quantum Mechanics, and why we need interpretations of it.

Why Quantum Mechanics I have no idea.

Why interpretations: There is an experiment you can do that is hard to explain: Either particles are able to somehow influence each other faster than light (non-local), or the particle somehow doesn't exist except when interacting with some other particle (non-real).

Try this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs the AHA moment in the video comes when you realize you can entangle the light and that adding a filter by one stream of light somehow causes the other stream of light to also be influenced.

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

#10

Another frustrating one - what is heredity? If it's possible to inherit something due to a shift in behavior (i.e. it's a cultural change that leads to a biochemical change), how does that connect neatly to mendalian inheritance?

Are you talking epigenetics? It's relatively closely related to mendelian inheritance. At a high level view, if genes are present in your genome that aren't "on" in a previous generation, but due to changes in behavior become more active, then in a future generation that gene could be expressed more. It's not that the genes have changed their code, they are just flipped on or off.
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