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

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

#771

Post by rawgabbit »

rsp1984 wrote: post #603

Macroeconomics. Central banks are "creating" a trillion here, a trillion there, like nobody's business. But what are the consequences? What is the thought process that central bankers have gone through to make these decisions? Also why, exactly, are they buying the exact assets that they are buying (govt. debt, high-yield bonds, etc..) and why not others (e.g. stocks or put money into startups)? And then, what happen…

- Consequences of creating a trillion? Economic policy is largely driven by political necessity. During the Great Depression, FDR's policy was based on Keynesian economics. Keynes aside, FDR tried everything to alleviate the suffering of the people, because the danger was not in implementing the wrong policy, instead the danger was in doing nothing. Later, the "Austrian" school of Monetary theory was popular where it prescribed increasing the money supply to pump up a troubled economy. During the last financial crisis, Obama's administration prescribed "Quantitative Easing" where the government bought the junk to keep the big banks solvent. The big banks were "too big to fail" and had to be rescued. The consensus of the last ten years is that "Quantitative Easing" restored the financial health of the elite and the corporations, but the middle class is still left behind.

- Assets that they are buy? The idea is to keep the banking system solvent and to prevent a domino effect where the liquidation of one big bank will result in a run on other banks. The big banks got into trouble because they took depositors money and invested in junk which went belly-up. The federal government insures everyone's bank deposits; if the banks went bellied up the FDIC would have to pay out. Better that the banks stay solvent.

- There are cases like Greece defaulting on its international loans. The EU forced Greece to agree to an austerity plan lowering Greece's payments if Greece changed its national spending which is deeply unpopular in EU and Greece. But there is no other alternative. Well the alternative is what happened to Weimar Germany after WWI: hyperinflation, economic destruction, and the longing for a savior.

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

#772

Post by iiv »

vmception wrote: post #734
rsync wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." Tangential, and not an answer to your question, but if you're like me, you will be fascinated to learn that there is a drug (MPPP, synthetic opiate) that if cooked incorrectly yields "MPTP"[1] which will give you Parkinsons. As in, forever. You take this drug (at any…

so therefore it stands to reason that other substances can exist that rewrite your mind to make you ineffective at other behaviors

I mean, not really.

1. There is one substance that rewrites your mind.

2. There is more than one substance that rewrites your mind.

Are very different postulates.

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

#773

Post by aeternum »

Lichtso wrote: post #560
aeternum wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with wave-particle duality is that most of us think about it backwards. The universe is actually made of quantized fields. Both particles and waves are imprecise models/approximations. There's no such thing as a particle, instead there are just excitations of this field which we cannot measure with complete accuracy.

> Which we cannot measure with complete accuracy I very much dislike this phrasing, because it suggests that it is just us that are not capable of building an apparatus to enable us to do so. Imagine a gear transmission or a lever: You can transform distance into force and vice versa. It is up to your choosing if you want to go with more speed or more force by changing the point along the lever, where your transmissi…

Good point

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

#774

Post by aeternum »

tabtab wrote: post #713
cousin_it wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's no way to understand quantum computing without first understanding some linear algebra, specifically tensor products. How ten 2-dimensional spaces give rise to a 1024-dimensional space, how the Kronecker product of three 2x2 matrices is an 8x8 matrix, and so on. If you're comfortable with that, here's a simple and precise explanation of quantum computing: 1) The state of an n-qubit system is a 2^n dim…

What about some kind of interactive simulation, kind of like playing with a graphing calculator? People tend to relate to things better by tinkering and playing with parameters to observe the impact on results. Analog experimentation is how we learned most Newtonian physics.

IBM has an amazing tool for this. Not only do they have a great simulator, but you can enter a queue to run your program on their real quantum computer:

https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/

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

#776

Post by aeternum »

grecy wrote: post #769
superfrank wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Anyone selling an option determines the price (same as a stock). You can sell an option yourself for any price if you so desire. If there is an influx of buyers, the will purchase the cheapest first, but as they do, those that remain available are at a higher price. This is why people say that demand increase price.

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

#777

Post by itcrowd »

inopinatus wrote: post #652
CamperBob2 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't buy anything beyond what I stated. Those papers are exercises in violating Occam's Razor. Your quantum model makes more sense. :) When you learn to ride a bike, you're simply training the feedback mechanism. Much like a PID controller, your brain has to keep track of the amount of error and null it out with proportional and integral terms (at least). Once those constants are dialed in, it's "just like…

Occam’s razor is for hypotheticals. You’re rejecting an actual physical demonstration, by a reader of engineering dynamics and vibration at Cambridge. The feedback mechanism you’ve described is likely correct, and also a complete furphy, since the central nervous system is not part of the bicycle. All of which is par for the course and rather confirms the point, viz. that people will happily hold forth on any explana…

Great discussion, I agree with inopinatus who, if I am not mistaken, supports my position that the science is not quite out on this topic yet. Many explanations exist, none seem to be all-encompassing.

That being said, it doesn't answer the question posed in this forum: "What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?"

Instead, it answers the question: "What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone could explain?"

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

#778

Post by CamperBob2 »

itcrowd wrote: post #777
inopinatus wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam’s razor is for hypotheticals. You’re rejecting an actual physical demonstration, by a reader of engineering dynamics and vibration at Cambridge. The feedback mechanism you’ve described is likely correct, and also a complete furphy, since the central nervous system is not part of the bicycle. All of which is par for the course and rather confirms the point, viz. that people will happily hold forth on any explana…

Great discussion, I agree with inopinatus who, if I am not mistaken, supports my position that the science is not quite out on this topic yet. Many explanations exist, none seem to be all-encompassing. That being said, it doesn't answer the question posed in this forum: "What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?" Instead, it answers the question: "What scientific phenomenon do you wish some…

I guess my question on this specific topic would be, "What aspects of bicycle operation are not adequately explained by gyroscopic action under the control of a human rider?" That would give us a good basis for inquiry into other possible principles.

Sure, a bike could work some other way, but my point is, it doesn't need to. Anyone who has ever picked up a hard drive should understand how a bicycle remains upright. What else is there to know? It's not like an airplane wing, where the "obvious" conventional wisdom is inadequate, misleading, or incomplete.

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

#779

Post by 8bitsrule »

Low, medium, and high-frequency radio waves (below 30MHz, wavelengths longer than 10 meters) are a form of EM radiation. Which means that an antenna is 'transmitting' low-energy, long-wavelength photons. (Which gets us into the whole wavicle question.) But the signal from a radio station appears to be continuous.

So: how to picture this? Is the signal made of discrete 'photons' overlapping, or combined somehow? Or is it that the 'wave-like' aspect of these photons is so predominant at these frequencies? (I've grappled with this one for a long time.)

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

#780

Post by vlasev »

AareyBaba wrote: post #401
IAmEveryone wrote: post #360

Earlier 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…

Yeah, you often send commands several beats in advance. And then there's some lag too, because muscles are fairly viscous and take a bit of time to start up. You're basically dancing in the future, because you are behind. I think we just run pre-baked programs (from a lot of practice) and adjust their timings on the fly every few beats or a bar.
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