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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?

#821

Post by ksnape »

aeternum wrote: post #774
tabtab wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Excellent! Thanks so much for this!

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

#822

Post by ksnape »

ruggeri wrote: post #463
arkanciscan wrote: post #173

Quantum 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…

I found Quantum Computing Without The Physics epicly helpful. https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.03684 It explains in terms a computer scientist can understand. As in: it sets out a computational model and explores it, regardless whether we can physically realize that machine. Hope this helps!

Not sure if it has helped anyone else, but it did me!

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

#823

Post by yigithan »

Morphological development of organisms. Mainly, how do cells form the shape of the organism and how do they specialize to different type of tissues? How do cells know where they are? What is the mechanism that puts the constraints on the shape of the body? I can understand mitosis but the rest from there is magic.

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

#824

Post by ur-whale »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #642
ur-whale wrote: post #548

Why does quantum mechanics need complex numbers ? Every time I read an introductory QM book / article, the complex numbers just come out of nowhere and no one bothers to explain how that makes any kind of physical sense.

Imaginary numbers, pretty much everywhere in physics, represent an extra dimension. e^ix results in a unit vector spinning around.

Thanks for your answer, but that doesn't really cut it for me. For example, if complex numbers are so "natural" at modeling rotations, why don't they show up e.g. in Maxwell's equations ?

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

#825

Post by rootbid »

izuchukwu wrote: post #729
0xff00ffee wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: there isn't an easy answer. Yet. (Give QC another 50 years). Proof? Just look at all the replies you got: each one is dozens of pages of complex (imaginary) math, control theory, and statistics. The hardest part of QC is exactly what you described: how to extract the answer. There is no algorithm, per se. You build the system to solve the problem. This is why QC is not a general purpose strategy: a quan…

This feels like the high-level missing piece in my understanding of its use. Do you know any resources that expand on QC’s effective potential more from this point of view?

IMO one of the effective potential of a QC is `Secure Encrypted communications`. There is a research project named QUESS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Experiments_at_Space_S...).

This project involves a minisatellite (capable of generating entangled photons in space) to establish a space platform with long-distance satellite and ground quantum channel, and to carry out a series of tests about fundamental quantum principles and protocols in space-based large scale

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

#826

Post by thr0w__4w4y »

opinion-is-bad wrote: post #164
Dutchie85 wrote: post #71

Why does time slow down/go faster with movement compared to another object. The well known example that if you travel into space you'd gain let's say 5 years and people on earth 25 in the same time or so. I just don't get it and I can't find any logic explanation. For instance: Two twins who came to live exactly at the same moment in the year 2000 and both die on their 75th birthday at the same time. One travels into…

All things in the universe have four measures of velocity. Three of these are easily observable to us in terms of x, y, and z movement. To understand time dilution we need to realize that we are also physically traveling through time. The total velocity of our vector will always be equal to the speed of light constant, c. You can think of something that has no physical movements as moving forward in time at the speed…

> The total velocity of our vector will always be equal to the speed of light constant, c. You can think of something that has no physical movements as moving forward in time at the speed of light. As x, y, or z increases the magnitude of t will decrease so that the speed of light constant is always achieved.

I've gone decades without hearing it explained that clearly and simply. Thank you (sincerely).

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

#827

Post by mncharity »

abecedarius wrote: post #811
mncharity wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common theme there is constrained proximity. To give random chance more of a chance. My favorite illustration was a video of simulated icosahedral viral capsid assembly. The triangular panels were tethered together to keep them slamming into each other. Even then, the randomness and struggle was visceral. Lots of hopeless slamming; tragic almost but failing to catch; being smashed apart again; misassembling. It w…

Coincidentally I'm previewing PBotC just now. It looks really promising. Do you know roughly when the new edition is expected? Or if you have any favorite books on how things work at that scale, I'd be grateful for the pointer. (I've read a popular book by David Goodsell and am halfway through a somewhat deeper one.)

> PBotC [...] when the new edition

No idea, sorry.

> favorite books on how things work at that scale

I've found the bionumbers database[1] very helpful. Google scholar and sci-hub for primary and secondary literature. But books... I'd welcome suggestions. I'm afraid I mostly look at related books to be inspired by things taught badly.

The bionumbers folks did a "Cell Biology by the Numbers" book... the draft is online[2].

Ha, they've done a Covid-19 by the numbers flyer[3].

If you ever encounter something nice -- paper, video, text, or whatever, or even discussion of what that might look like -- I'd love to hear of it. Sorry I can't be of more help.

[1] https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/search.aspx [2] http://book.bionumbers.org/ [3] http://book.bionumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/SARS-C...

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

#828

Post by jppope »

Balgair wrote: post #423
jppope wrote: post #387

Why is it that the smartest people in various fields constantly need reference materials, but medical doctors never look anything up?

They look things up constantly , you just don't see it because it's typically very boring and not a good use of time for you or the MD. They get symptoms from you and then will go off to research. Also, a broken arm or strep isn't very difficult to figure out. ~80% of visitations are fairly simple. The site most MDs use is here: https://www.uptodate.com/home

thanks for the reference. I'll taking a peek.

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

#829

Post by Can_Not »

memset wrote: post #293

Crypto 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,…

> I get tired of the circular “don’t roll your own crypto unless you’re qualified”

It's not circular, it's a simple flowchart.

Are you writing an app or are you trying to invent more advanced crypto?

"writing an app" -> dont roll your own crypto

"invent more advanced crypto" -> go learn and research crypto history, math, etc..

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

#830

Post by Can_Not »

7thaccount wrote: post #254
vmception wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never really understood what happened really when the guy fell inside it in Interstellar and how come he started seeing all those photos. I just accepted it as Hollywood bs. Coupled with people saying "but they had scientists on staff! they talked with scientists that makes it so cool and accurate, lets ignore that other part"

Well I think there are two things here. Yes, they had black hole experts work on the film and even generate the film's blackhole images (iirc) from Kip Thorne plugging in relativistic formulas into Mathematica. That is probably what your friends are referring to. Of course, any Hollywood science fiction movie also has some make believe in it. In this case the inside of the blackhole allowing him to communicate with h…

The movie's hype around "scientifically accurate" made the nonsensical low effort copout about offscreen wizards casting 6th dimensional time travel spells even more infuriating.
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