Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 839 posts

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

#31

The Coriolis Force

Drag a marker with a constant radial velocity (from your perspective) across a spinning disk. It'll trace out a curved line, so from the perspective of an observer on the disk, an acceleration must have been present.

The full 3d Coriolis force is more complicated than that (eg accounting for the Eötvös effect): The spinning disk example only gets you to the -2vω term (where v denotes radial velocity and ω angular velocity).

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

#33
Gravity wells. I only realised in my 20s that the only reason satellites can orbit the Earth without crashing into the ground is by going sideways really, really fast. So as they inch closer to the ground, they also travel parallel to the ground fast enough so that they stay approximately the same height from the ground.

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

#34
post #27
post #26

Fermat's theorem: a^n + b^n = c^n For n > 2, why are there no integers a, b, and c that satisfy the equality?

One of my advisors in college said "The proof takes about 10 years of graduate mathematics to understand".

Is there really no intuitive way to communicate the answer to that question without needing 10 years of grad math? I find that to be somewhat hard to believe

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

#35

Non-interactive zero knowledge proofs. ZK proofs have a number of good explainers, mostly using graph colorings. Non-interactive versions, however, require quite a bit more than that explanation allows - and despite asking experts, I still haven't found a good, basic explanation.

Maybe the blog of Prof. Matthew Green of JHU is of use. Specifically, the two-part series about zero-knowledge proofs. Part II discusses non-interactive ZK proofs. Part I is really required to grasp the extension to non-interactive ZKP's, so you may need to read that first. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/01/21/zero-kno...

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

#36
post #27
post #26

Fermat's theorem: a^n + b^n = c^n For n > 2, why are there no integers a, b, and c that satisfy the equality?

One of my advisors in college said "The proof takes about 10 years of graduate mathematics to understand".

It's not my specialty, but there are easier proof today. Probably 5 years of graduate math is enough ;).

@GP: I'd recommend to try to read an understand the proof for N=3. (And why that approach does not extend to bigger N.) It requires only undergraduate level math and it is much much much easier. It uses very different tools, so it will give you very little insight of the general proof, but it will give you some taste of the problems of the proof.

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

#38
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my advisors in college said "The proof takes about 10 years of graduate mathematics to understand".

Is there really no intuitive way to communicate the answer to that question without needing 10 years of grad math? I find that to be somewhat hard to believe

If there were a simple and intuitive way to communicate the answer then I would suggest that we probably would have figured it out in our 300+ years in which this was one of the most famous unanswered questions in mathematics.

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

#40

Quantum Mechanics, and why we need interpretations of it.

There are two broad reasons for having interpretations. First, because the results contradict our intuitions, and there's no agreement on which ones are sensible to abandon. Second, because there are experiments that we can't perform now (and maybe ever), so there's room for different hypotheses. This would lead to different theories, not just interpretations, but often these ideas are lumped together.
Post reply on HN