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

I was shoulder deep in primary source material (#4) on real-time fuzzy search and wasn’t able to make heads or tails of where everything fit. Until I found a #3 overview that referenced most of the primary sources and put them in context. That paper was worth its weight in gold!

Do you have any tips for how to quickly find these #3 materials in other spaces?

I've begun to grok so much about how law _practically_ works by listening to Popehat's All the President's Lawyers podcast.

Basically you get an educated layperson asking a veteran criminal lawyer questions, usually around the First Amendment, always related to current events. The lawyer (Ken White) explains in practical terms what is likely to happen and why.

Double slit experiment. There's a lot out there detailing what happens but relatively few explanations go into why observing the state of a photon results in it "choosing" one slit over the other. I suspect many come away with the impression that it's magic despite there being a reasonably simple explanation for what's going on.

Add a clock on each baseball.

Turn "clock + baseball" into a light of increasing brightness.

That's what nature sees.

It's easier to speed up your clock so you get an extra second, move, and slow down your clock than just move.

Einstein did not differ between a mass's gravity and "wanting to move in a straight line unless acted on by another force."

Before Einstein, Planck proved an object needs energy before glowing the next color, from red to orange for instance. Einstein came along and said you have a start, you have an end, you have a particle.

The photoelectric effect requires photons of a minimal wavelength to produce a voltage in material. The photon sees the material all at once. No matter how many photons of a lesser energy you fire, no electricity until you hit that wavelength.

Not differing between gravity and inertia allows Einstein to talk in terms of photons instead of clocks changing.

Today our questions involve reality and locality. Do we transfer heat into everything at once? Or does heat go one way, and we can't trace it without smudging the trail.

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So my view of gravity is "something already exists". We got to account for it. If we want to generate something from nothing, we have to convince everything out there.

What stumps me:

Can we convince everything out there something exists? If so doesn't it just pop into existence if everything agrees something should exist there? What happens when we do? Does whatever pop into existence give us an accurate picture of everything out there?

If so, does everything that's out there just part of the material here? Galaxies precipitate in existence if we leave the Hubble on too long. They are only real when humans from Earth touch down on them.

I think this goes against the basis of the scientific method. There is a reason why they say everything is a hypothesis and nothing is every proven. Anyone can propose an alternative model explaining something you call proven; you calling something proven does not inherently make that explanation correct.

This is not mutually exclusive with being against the attacks on science. Just because we shouldn't treat things as proven doesn't mean we can't come to a general consensus on a topic and act as if it was true. Climate change is real. Evolution is real. Don't inject yourself with bleach. Having a small number of quacks say 'its just a hypothesis and actually god is responsible for climate change and evolution' without any evidence doesn't change the general consensus and doesn't mean we have stop everything until we prove the negative.

Ultimate I think most of us agree in principle. Most of what we're discussing here is minor semantic differences in vocabulary.