Einstein's (summarized) quote, "Time is a persistent illusion"
Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
671–680 of 839 posts
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#672Electricity.
What is it? Is it related to electrons? I thought it was?
If the plug in my house is AC then why is one wire "hot" and one "neutral?" (on plugs in North America at least) if there is a ground wire then why are plugs polarized? Why do some things come with a three prong plug and others don't?
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#673Crypto and practical security. I get tired of the circular “don’t roll your own crypto unless you’re qualified”. How does one become qualified? I don’t feel like I know how to evaluate many of the arguments people make for or against technologies people argue about on HN, such as Signal or different password managers. I feel like “security through obscurity” is a bad thing, and “layers of security” are a good thing,…
Spring had made "Understanding Cryptography" available for free https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-04101-3
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#674Has 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...…
> 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? My good friend took "something" once (hard to tell what the dealer is selling you) and ended up in a mental institu…
What was he expecting to have taken?
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 interview is so good! What a dick, but what a teacher!
What I see at the beginning of that video is somebody who doesn’t want to spend the energy answering a complex question. Then, in the process of dismissing the question he gets drawn in and can’t help himself from really getting into it.
I don’t know anything about Feynman beyond vaguely associating his name with science, but watching this makes me want to seek out more from him.
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#676Quantum 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…
you're in luck my friend. Perl has had a quantum computing module since the late 90s: https://metacpan.org/pod/Quantum::Superpositions As far as I can tell this one still outperforms all existing "hardware implementations".
The first 'meetup' I went to some 20 years ago was on this module!
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be my intuition too. But if you go down almost any "this crisis won't cause inflation because..." rabbit hole on hacker news, you should see multiple unopposed claims that defaults lead to deflation through the destruction of money. I'm pretty ignorant in this field, and usually I've been a day or so behind the posts (missing the window to press for more information), but I feel like there's definitely som…
Here's how I would think of that: Suppose I'm a bank, and I lend you $10 to buy apple tree seedlings. You spend all $10 on seedlings as promised. The person who sold you the seedlings has $10. You have the seedlings. I have an expectation of getting $10 in the future, presumably from your sales of apples. Because most people repay their loans, I'm confident I'll get the $10 back, and being a bank, my business is lend…
So in this case the business did not create as much wealth as intended (it produced apples which turned out not to be needed as much they had originally planned).
The default is a side effect of that outcome, not its cause.
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#678The periodic table.
Can the properties of the elements be computed from the first principles of particle physics, or do you need to observe the atoms in real life to figure them out? For example, some isotopes are stable and others have a finite half-life. Can you know beforehand or you have to observe the decay? Can you compute exactly the mass of each atom without measuring it? Can you know compute its electronegativity? Etc.
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#679Why does my bread last for a while and then go bad? Or is it constantly going bad and I just haven't hit critical mass of mold for me to notice?
Correct. Mold will grow where there is food for it to grow, like bread. It will divide and grow exponentially, up to a point. That fact of exponents where they seem slow at first and then really rocket away? That's why mold seems to just appear overnight.
So it might be a fair statement to say that when I eat fresh bread there's already a molecular amount of mold already on it?
Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took 300ug of LSD recklessly on a particularly bad day for me, in a particularly uncomfortable setting. Well, that night went bad. Really, really, life-alteringly bad. For the first time, I had a bad trip. And not like, some mildly uncomfortable thoughts. I got a bad feeling in my stomach from the moment I dosed, and I knew something was going to be different this time. As I started to come up, the bad feeling and…
Holy. That sounds intense, to say the least. A part of me likes to experience this, even though you made it abundantly clear, that it did not have a positive impact on your life.
"ego death" is a common aspect of acid trips and the experience seems to come down to your willingness to relinquish control. this reads like what was described. if you were to look up that term you'll see others that will feature similar features - with or without pain, with or without worry.
not having a reliable way to know exactly what you took can amplify the anxiety, when your brain starts filling up with seratonin and whites everything out just like people on their deathbeds report, are you supposed to let go? when your sense of self has been obliterated and the next moment you are in the body of another mammal lost and confused in the forest for an entire lifetime before being transported back into your body and only a minute has gone by - but your trip is to last another 9 hours, should you fight it? Distinct neural networks in your mind that never communicate are now connected, vestigial components of the mind are now being expressed, are you being replaced in a firmware dump and flash?
a lot of people have a friend with them to guide them through an acid trip because trips can be steered with sounds and words, simple chimes, melodies.
would it have helped? very hard to say. but as the author wrote, the bad day and uncomfortable setting did not help. It is similar to a dream state (just radically more intense), where the things on your mind and also happening around you can affect the direction of your dreams.