501–510 of 591 posts
Had to re-read the Title for a sec. I thought it was referring to Proton, the compatibility layer software.
Well, the natural proton not only was first, but means first (from Greek πρῶτος) So I think we can give it prior ity on that one :)
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Then I’ll ask why can’t you use protons as electricity?
It is posible if you remove the wires. In a CRT monitor, you have a ray of electrons that travel in vaccum and it is electricity outside wires. With a similar device, you can create a ray of protons and have also electricity with protons instead of electrons. Another posibility is to use a water solution with acid. A part of the electricity is made of H+ that are just protons. (Actually, each proton is atached to a w…
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>It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of the gaps" critique originated - what is this actually referring to? Are we just talking about like, pagan polytheistic explanations of natural phenomena? What serious Christian or Buddhist thinkers using religion to explain things like weather or medicine are being ref…
> I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of the gaps" critique originated - what is this actually referring to? A rare point of agreement between Nietzsche and the evangelist Henry Drummond was that the Christian apologetic approach of "ah, but that hasn't been explained yet, so it must be God's will" to all the discoveries of the Enlightenment wasn't a very impressive one. Not least because of the tend…
“The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form.” I’m getting really tired of hazy probability distributions and waves that only collapse and materialize when observed. I 100% accept that QM is a useful tool to model our current understanding based on increasingly sophisticated observations, but I fundamentally don’t believe that…
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> I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of the gaps" critique originated - what is this actually referring to? A rare point of agreement between Nietzsche and the evangelist Henry Drummond was that the Christian apologetic approach of "ah, but that hasn't been explained yet, so it must be God's will" to all the discoveries of the Enlightenment wasn't a very impressive one. Not least because of the tend…
Well, a lot of things don't square well with evolutionary biology, which is why the field is in crisis.
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That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexity in matter, we wouldn't be here to point out how seemingly-perfect it seems. (If you subscribe to a multiverse interpretation, perhaps most of the infinitely many other possible universes are dead and void.)
I'm not very sympathetic to the view that we're very lucky to be in this universe. That said, there is an interesting response to the anthropic principle response, which I'll mention here just because I think it's interesting to think about what's wrong with this objection: Suppose you and I were living in a totalitarian state. The state decides that you and I are to be put to death. They drag us into a field, and a…
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https://youtu.be/36GT2zI8lVA Richard Feynman on why questions
That video really annoys me. He's right at one level but totally wrong at another. Yes, you have to explain everything in terms of things people can understand and if they don't know much you can't give a correct explanation... but also, if you actually try, people can understand a lot more than he's pretending they can. Not at a technical level, yeah, but intuitively, it is possible to get general understandings way…
His first instinct was to be a dick about it, then he sort of softly walked that back using an excuse about it being a long explanation. In the end, he gave a good answer, he just had to first pretend that it was a pain because of how smart he is and how much he understands.
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I'm not very sympathetic to the view that we're very lucky to be in this universe. That said, there is an interesting response to the anthropic principle response, which I'll mention here just because I think it's interesting to think about what's wrong with this objection: Suppose you and I were living in a totalitarian state. The state decides that you and I are to be put to death. They drag us into a field, and a…
A small note: the anthropic principle doesn't make us "lucky" to exist in a universe that supports life, quite the opposite. The probability of life coming to existence in a place (universe, celestial body, whatever) that doesn't support it is zero. The fact that we exist in a place that supports life is simply due to the probability of it happening here is >0, therefore we're here only because statistics determines…
I just had a really stupid thought, after finishing reading the article. So, the electron is an elementary particle, right? Compared to the proton, the electron is "simple", yes? Despite this difference in complexity, an electron has a charge of -e and a proton has a charge of +e. They are exactly complementary regarding charge (if I am understanding right, I am not a smart person). my question is... why? why must pr…
Why does light decay quadratically and not linearly? Why are the laws of physics algebraic at all? Why did the Big Bang happen? Ask enough why's and get to: we just don't know. Turtles all the way down.
The big bang is a "scientific myth" - a story that describes the creation of the world in sciency terms.
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I don't know the actual answer, but from my understanding of QFT the answer is going to be roughly this shape: Charge is not actually a quantity on the real number line; it's more of a "count" of something. Not sure what exactly. The "topological defect" model of charges in 2d is a decent analogy though, in which a charge can be e.g. a count of how many vortices there are in a field which are oriented in a certain di…
Is there a reason why we say quarks have fractional charge instead of having just +-1 or +-2? And Then electron and proton would have -3 and +3?
It's a fraction because we simply decided it was easier to describe an electron's charge as "e" and quark charges as being a fraction of that. It's entirely by convention.
We could've just as easily have described, like you mentioned, a quark to have either +-q or +-2q charge and electrons have -3q (where q=(1.602176634×10^−19)/3 C). We just happened to find electrons significantly before. It's also convenient as we don't see free quarks so every charge we see in the universe is a multiple of e, there's no advantage to going smaller than that.