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It’s always bugged me that science claims there are trillions of neutrinos going through me, yet can hardly detect them with a nearly trillion dollar machine and a doctorate. Then there’s dark energy, which just seems like a lame excuse for saying “we don’t know”. Nobody says what goes through my body but me! (I’m being funny, y’all! Happy holidays!)
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~crawford/PSG/PSG21/204_97_L21....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s interesting that you class dark energy (the thing accelerating universal expansion) as, “We don’t know,” but don’t put gravity into that same category. They are both aspects of general relativity that we have failed to integrate with our other most successful fundamental theories, but if you asked an average person on the street I’m sure they’d put them in very different categories of understanding, as you did.
The thing with gravity is that it is kind of easy to detect, even for a layperson, while dark energy and dark matter haven't been detected at all, by anyone, but only used as mathematical devices to make indirect measurements of large scale structures align with our models. So, it isn't only the "average man on the street" that thinks there are good reasons to put them in very different categories of understanding.
The mouseover-text is the important bit: "Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand." "Is it the weak force or the strong--" "It's gravity."
That's even though it's the one with the simplest equations.
It’s always bugged me that science claims there are trillions of neutrinos going through me, yet can hardly detect them with a nearly trillion dollar machine and a doctorate. Then there’s dark energy, which just seems like a lame excuse for saying “we don’t know”. Nobody says what goes through my body but me! (I’m being funny, y’all! Happy holidays!)
It’s always bugged me that science claims there are trillions of neutrinos going through me, yet can hardly detect them with a nearly trillion dollar machine and a doctorate. Then there’s dark energy, which just seems like a lame excuse for saying “we don’t know”. Nobody says what goes through my body but me! (I’m being funny, y’all! Happy holidays!)
> seems like a lame excuse for saying “we don’t know”. Dark matter/energy aren’t excuses, they’re labels for things that behave like matter and energy but whose nature is unknown.
Asking because in 3 Body Problem it’s seen as a “civilized” way to communicate compared to radio waves.
It’s always bugged me that science claims there are trillions of neutrinos going through me, yet can hardly detect them with a nearly trillion dollar machine and a doctorate. Then there’s dark energy, which just seems like a lame excuse for saying “we don’t know”. Nobody says what goes through my body but me! (I’m being funny, y’all! Happy holidays!)
In all seriousness, I found myself wondering about those numbers before; but consider that there's on the order of 10^27 atoms in your body. So, if we assume a trillion neutrinos in your body, that indicates that for each neutrino in your body, there are 10^15 atoms - that's one part per quadrillion! A machine capable of detecting neutrinos in your body would need to be _unimaginably_ sensitive, before even consideri…
It's pretty easy to detect 14 W of typical forms of radiation at those scales! If it were light, it would be equivalent to the light put out by something like a laptop screen, spread out just a bit. You can see something like that with your eyes from a kilometer away!
Would there be any good reason or theoretically practical way to use neutrinos for communication? Asking because in 3 Body Problem it’s seen as a “civilized” way to communicate compared to radio waves.
Seems like the exact opposite qualities of something you'd want to use for communication.
Would there be any good reason or theoretically practical way to use neutrinos for communication? Asking because in 3 Body Problem it’s seen as a “civilized” way to communicate compared to radio waves.
Would there be any good reason or theoretically practical way to use neutrinos for communication? Asking because in 3 Body Problem it’s seen as a “civilized” way to communicate compared to radio waves.
Neutrinos are produced by radioactive decay, and they interact very weakly with ordinary matter, making them extremely difficult to detect. Seems like the exact opposite qualities of something you'd want to use for communication.
Would there be any good reason or theoretically practical way to use neutrinos for communication? Asking because in 3 Body Problem it’s seen as a “civilized” way to communicate compared to radio waves.