61–70 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 have done some amazing things in spite of what appears a crippling limitation.
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Don't confuse accelerated expansion with the cosmological constant. Accelerated expansion's origin is most likely the cosmological constant aka dark energy, but they are not the same thing. The cosmological constant itself arises naturally (kind of how an integration constant emerges for indefinite integrals) when you derive the field equations of general relativity. It is basically a geometric degree of freedom inhe…
I'm not sure where you got that I'm confusing something. For what's it worth, my name is in the author list of that paper.
Why do people still waste time and money on these post hoc theories of Dark Matter / Dark Energy, which were invented to explain anomalies in the conventional cosmological model like galaxy rotation curves? We neither have direct evidence nor do we not have alternative explanations - to the contrary. They shouldn't even qualify as scientific theory, since they are neither falsifiable, have no predictive power or are…
> 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.
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We measure neutrinos and gravitational waves as well. It's much more difficult though.
In the end, to be fair, we measure both of them with photons (quite literally – GWs with laser interferometry and neutrinos by looking for Cherenkov flashes).
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In the end, to be fair, we measure both of them with photons (quite literally – GWs with laser interferometry and neutrinos by looking for Cherenkov flashes).
OK, but when I stepped on the scale this morning, I used photons to read what it said. That doesn't mean that I'm detecting EM rather than gravity.
I guess my point was that when we peer to the skies and detect EM radiation at various bands, that's also just a proxy for something else that we're actually interested in. The photons aren't interesting in themselves, it's what we can infer about them by following the causal chain backwards. In that sense, it doesn't matter whether the photons are produced on Earth or a billion parsecs away.
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…
[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
Should I rebase on your workaround?
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.