41–50 of 107 posts
Every detection capability humans have uses EM. From eyeballs to x rays to red shift. Step 1 is making a new detector, then we talk about unknown unknowns.
We measure neutrinos and gravitational waves as well. It's much more difficult though.
Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…
This comment reminded me, with a smile, of Scott Alexander's Unsong: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/unsong-available-in-paperba...
> If dark energy really is Einstein’s constant, the standard model portends a bleak future: The universe will keep speeding up, forever, becoming darker and lonelier. Distant galaxies will eventually be too far away to see. All energy, life and thought will be sucked from the cosmos. The laws of thermodynamics pretty much guarantees this anyways does it not?
Still, we’ve got a little while to go before star formation can no longer occur. Some estimates put the star formation period from 1 to 100 trillion years. I’d be more concerned about our collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy in four to five billion years.
Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We measure neutrinos and gravitational waves as well. It's much more difficult though.
For gravitational waves we still rely on EM radiation as it's measured by comparing perpendicular lasers through interferometer.
Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…
This comment reminded me, with a smile, of Scott Alexander's Unsong: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/unsong-available-in-paperba...
Hn has no spoiler tags but one of the really big things to me is this https://gist.github.com/IanCal/d9667ae9c6ce15315191a36c6b3af...
Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…
Call it professional bias, but I like to think about it as a big VM. If for some reason, things go awry, the (said) programmer will hit the pause button, then diligently go to the last valid snapshot, fix the bug and then get things going again. If this isn't desired, fixing the current mess is also an option. The time required for fixing bugs isn't really an issue in this case, he can take as long as he likes.
No, the many-worlds interpretation shows that our universes are merely containers with copy-on-write behavior :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[BUG #3451249] Unlimited resource drain caused by conscious blobs of particles (a.k.a humans) invoking recursive thought patterns over their own existence. Workaround: ponder function can return a feeling of existential dread accompanied by increased weights for headache "sensation", causing blob to terminate process. Estimate: M Label: Backend
I reckon we're just a bug and Colin doesn't even know about our existence.
Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's basically a particle physics threshold, because in particle physics you tend to do many, many experiments (usually you're doing thousands a second). It's hard to get something that certain in astronomy, where you've only got one universe to observe.
It is also an informed threshold. FTL neutrinos where, IIRC, above 6 sigma and nobody believed it was true, while there were strong rumors that Higs had been found well before it hit 5 sigmas.