61–70 of 189 posts
Science doesn't "prove" hypotheses - it disproves them. For this to work, a hypothesis must be falsifiable. Most pseudoscience (and religion) makes non-falsifiable claims, meaning they are incompatible with scientific discourse. This simple observation is a powerful tool in any bullshit-detection kit. Once produced, a scientific hypothesis of any merit will be attacked vigorously with experiments until enough parties…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum
This quote blew my mind:
"The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated."
I immediately went out and bought Greg Egan's "Schild's Ladder" after find out he'd used this as a plot device.
Science doesn't "prove" hypotheses - it disproves them. For this to work, a hypothesis must be falsifiable. Most pseudoscience (and religion) makes non-falsifiable claims, meaning they are incompatible with scientific discourse. This simple observation is a powerful tool in any bullshit-detection kit. Once produced, a scientific hypothesis of any merit will be attacked vigorously with experiments until enough parties…
Popper knew this, by the way. So the inverse to the trap you point out here is the claims that "if not falsifiable, then unable to be true/useful", which is just as specious.
TA: The flux is S for an infinite sheet.
Me: How? We have S for this side plus S for the other which yields 2S!
TA: For an infinite sheet, there is no other side.
Me: O_O
"diamonds are forever"
It's appealing to believe that a crystalline structure, a pretty one too, might exist until actively changed.
Diamonds are not forever. What 'blew my mind' is that diamonds are the result of compression and very slowly decompressing. That slowly over time the outer layer leaves that state and turns to dust.
Glass is a 'liquid'
I'm much less sure about glass, I'm not even sure that science is sure about glass. Apparently one process for making glass in the old days involved something blowing and spinning discs of it to produce nearly flat segments. When installed the artisan making the window would place the thicker end down for stability or some other reason. I'm not positive if glass is a liquid or not, but the reason many people might think it's a liquid is that intentional selection bias when fitting the panes of glass.
The whole concept of glass possibly being a liquid though changed the way I perceive solid, liquid, and gas states. Those labels better reflect much more temporally localized potential change and interaction than they do to uniquely describe matter.
BTW, if there is an expert, is glass actually a liquid or a solid?
Not science, but Mathematics - That there are more ways to arrange a deck of 52 cards than seconds that have elapsed since the big bang took place. Thousands of similar questions on reddit for anyone interested- https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=science+fact+site%3Areddit....
I think "mind blown" is an accurate description when I first saw the Hubble Deep Field image: https://hubblesite.org/contents/articles/hubble-deep-fields I already knew that "the universe is incomprehensibly large", but seeing how many entire galaxies there were in a random dark patch of sky was eye opening to me.
Don't know exactly why, but thinking about the vastness of the universe always cheers me up. Thanks for sharing :)
My hypothesis is that he has narcissistic tendencies so pondering the vastness of the universe only highlights his own insignificance. I've noticed similar reaction from people who visit a large city for the first time and get a sense of how small they are in the grand scheme.
Electrons in a copper wire do not travel at the speed of electricity. Not even close. Electricity travels at nearly the speed of light. Electrons themselves travel like molasses: "In the case of a 12 gauge copper wire carrying 10 amperes of current (typical of home wiring), the individual electrons only move about 0.02 cm per sec or 1.2 inches per minute (in science this is called the drift velocity of the electrons.…
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/semiconductors/chp...