A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
Honestly physics is super simple when you realize nothing makes sense.
And I'm being completely serious. Once you actually truly realize, that the universe is just a total fuckin mess that basically runs on the strongest luck engine there is, it all starts to make perfect sense.
Once you understand the chaos, the order begins to form.
being a fantasy novel nerd i like to think of physics as simply being our magic system.
Do you have some fantasy novel recommendations? I'd also like to read some but don't know what I should read.
Jackal among snakes
Beware of chicken
Downtown Druid
He who fights with monsters
12 miles below (arguably more scifi but eh)
Primal wizardry
Delve
The great core's paradox
Here be dragons: book 1 of the Emergence series
Apocalypse redux
Dear spellbook
There are (or were) all on royalroad though some have been stubbed and are now only available on stuff like kindle iirc.
Wow! Wonderful. I'm gonna dig into some of these soon!
Thanks!
Physics is just us categorizing the relationships between different observed phenomena. "Explanations" are fun, and many can be true at certain scales, but getting deeper into any specific phenomenon is just a rabbit hole that leads to more and more "we don't know why it does that, it just does and it works in our models."
Exactly my point!
You can't get caught up in the why, because at our current understanding, there is no why.
There only is.
Magnetism was my introduction to giving up the "need to know why".
Why does one pole attract another? It just does.
It just does.
Move on.
Fucking magnets.
oh man if I ever met a magnet in a dark alley
👊🤬👊
it's position
Yes, it is.
Superposition
All of them.
Come on this is not complicated. To imagine electron spin, think of a ball that is rotating. The election is the ball, except it's not really a ball, and it's not rotating either.
I just figured that it's based off perspective. If you look at a spinning ball horizontally vs vertically.
Either that or is just spinning both ways at once, kinda like Earth and it's atmosphere can go two different directions despite being the same planet.
I think it's more that they used an existing word for a concept that has nothing to do with its original meaning, or only in an extremely abstracted sense. This is certainly true of quark flavours and colour.
Wait, so they all taste the same?
Yup! Curd cheese.
Trump better be doing the ballet.
That's nothing, quarks have a fucking flavor
Oh yeah?!! Well so do neutrinos! Electron, Muon, Tau!
And it has nothing to do with quarks and chromodynamics! Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charmed!
Here's a grand idea: make everything as confusing as possible, with repeating or similar terminology for different things! Superstrings and Cosmic Strings!
Black licorice quarks are the worse
Of course. The word is borrowed from a German dairy product.
Not like from those ancient and malfunctioning replicators. Now where the hell is Rom...?
There might only be one, ever.
Mom says it's my turn with the single universal electron!
I asked for an electron for Christmas and Grandma got me an electron NEUTRINO 🙄🙄🙄
These gifts are getting out of hand. How did she keep it under wraps in the first place?
This is actually the first time I'm hearing about single electron theory, but I feel validated now that I'm learning about it. I have for a long time believed that the universe is made of a single photon, since photons exist outside of time. Then, if electrons are made of a "pair" of entangled photons, since every photon is the same photon, it would follow that every electron is also the same electron. And one could assert that quarks are just entangled electrons and positrons in various ratios and combinations. Which in my mind leads to the conclusion that all of time and space and matter doesn't actually exist and we are just imaginary mathematical figments.
Welcome to quantum field theory! There is a single field for every type of particle in the standard model, but electrons are not made of photons.
Not in the current standard model, for sure. Or is there a reason empirically why they simply can't be.
Some properties of the electron are not present in photons, such as the lepton number and the electric charge.
It's possible to create an electron positron pair out of a couple of high energy photons, but that is also true with many other elementary particles.
For a good intuitive introduction to this topic, i suggest Feynman's book QED https://www.amazon.ca/QED-Strange-Theory-Light-Matter/dp/0691164096/
It's a short read, and explains how positrons can be seen as electrons going backwards in time!
That sounds super interesting! Can't read it until I get home (am on vacation at Disneyland right now) but in about a week's time I hope you don't mind if I reply with my updated understanding, and maybe a question or two.
I made a comment a while back (on my alt account) about how the origin of the universe can be expressed as a simple formula: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/3303086
So, I'm curious if that viewpoint will shift at all with a better understanding of electron positron interactions. It kind of makes sense to me that the universe and the antiverse are stacked on top of each other but with time pointing in opposite directions. But I'm sure I'm oversimplifying Feynman's theory and I'll have to read his reasoning to really understand.
That sounds super interesting!
It is! Although it only deals with the day-to-day working of electromagnetism (quantum electrodynamics), but this explains the working of everything in our current life apart from nuclear power station and fusion in the sun's core.
The text was written before we developed the model for nuclear forces (strong and weak), so it doesn't touch that subject. We know now that sound and weak interactions work in a very similar way to QED, with extension for notre charges.
Up and down in what direction, electron?!?
Up and down on what direction?!?
Relative to A'Tuin
My favourite quark is the hubwise quark, closely followed by the widdershins quark
Actually a good point, tho. And also a good thought: If there is no special direction, what would be up? And that's where quantum mechanics gets even weirder: It's either up or down in the direction you measure.
It's either up or down whatever the direction.
If you measure 100%up-0%down then you rotate your frame of reference by 90°, you automatically get 50%up-50%down... (iirc)
It's weirdly teasing us like that!
Just in case it wasn't clear you can't measure anything other than "100%" up or down spin. The quantum state of it being 50/50 is described by 1/sqrt{2} times the up and down vector, when you measure it you have a probability of getting either result calculated by the square of the absolute (||psi||^2) that way you avoid getting a complex probability.
btw I was too scared to try in case it doesn't but can I use LaTeX in Lemmy comments? $\psi$ Edit: No LaTeX doesn't seem to work and btw I didn't study this so it might be taught differently at uni. This was explained to me in/for the context of quantum computing.
True! Thanks for the clarification, it's been a while since i played with the maths of quantum physics!
After you measure a spin as 100% up, the state will be close to that for a while, si the next measurement has higher chance of being up, with this probability slowly decreasing with time.
I think that assuming the particle has no (extra?) energy it's state does stay the same. That is of course not possible in real life though but the <20 millikelvin in some quantum computers get pretty close.
Also I think nobody says they measure it as 0/100% up, They just say up or down in my limited experience.
Does anyone have any good resources on quantum mechanics? (Most of my information comes from a few professors) There's some useful stuff on chem libretexts (I think that's what it's called) for simple wave functions, but it doesn't seem perfect.
I have old college textbooks in my library, Cohen-Tannoudji. I'm not sure about online resources though...
At least in the Stern-Gerlach experiment it's relative to the magnetic field.
Yeah, quantum mechanics lingo: measurement = interaction
They did the double slit experience with whole molecules comprised of 2000 atoms and it worked.
Matter waves also exist and are very cool
If nobody is observing me, I behave totally differently as well.