Have you ever wondered what it would look like to fall through the event horizon of a black hole? NASA just put out a video showing just that. Amazing! H/T @Phil Plait #nasa #physics #hpc https://youtu.be/chhcwk4-esM?si=D40BDO-f_1bhMnaR
#physics
Lenin and the Art of the Impossible
The Tree of Woe contemplates the impossibility of revolution:
Every rock star began as a long-haired freak in a garage with a dream of a record deal and groupies. Every best-selling author began as a would-be writer being told that no one buys books. Every successful entrepreneur began by faking it until he made it. Every revolutionary began as a nobody. None of them had the odds on their side. Victory wasn’t assured; it wasn’t even plausible; it was so unlikely as to seem impossible! It was all a LARP… until it wasn’t.¹
The reason so many successful actors, musicians, and politicians are narcissists is that in order to become a highly successful actor, musician, or politician, you have to take long shots against long odds. Often the only people who take long shots against long odds are the people who are self-deluded enough to think they’re better than all the others who tried and failed.
People like Lenin.
#Lenin was a #self-deluded #nobody. He was a #loser. He had accomplished virtually nothing with his life except a stint in the #gulag. He was nowhere near as influential as the well-established figures who currently are prominent among the dissident right. He wasn’t even… #NickFuentes.
But Lenin he changed the world. Sure, he changed it for the worse — but he changed it. And so could we.
The advantage we have as #Christian #Nationalists presently subject to the #wicked #madness of #ClownWorld is that we know, as Bob Marley said, #Babylon is going to fall. Its fall is absolutely 100-percent guaranteed, because Clown World is a #rebellion against #God, God’s #Law, and God’s #Creation. It is a rebellion against #morality, #mathematics, #Nature, and #physics, and as such, it cannot possibly be sustained.
It is our job to be the hard place upon which Clown World shatters. Because Clown World is caught between a rock and a hard place, and the rock, being #JesusChrist, isn’t going to break.
Imagine a circular wheel rolling, without skidding, on a flat, horizontal surface. The #locus of any given point on its #circumference is called a #cycloid. It is a #periodic #curve over a length equivalent to the #circle's circumference and has #cusps whenever the point is in contact with the surface (i.e. the two sides of the curve are tangentially vertical at that point).
Interestingly, it is also the curve that solves the #Brachistochrone problem, which means that starting at a cusp on the inverted curve (maximum height), a frictionless ball will roll under uniform gravity in minimum time from the start to any other point on the curve, even beating the straight line path.
#Mathematics #Geometry #Maths #AppliedMathematics #Mechanics #Kinematics #Dynamics #Physics #MyWork #CCBYSA #WxMaxima
The Standard Model of quantum physics. A look "under the hood".
By way of commentary: When I was in high school I was very frustrated by the fact that chemistry seemed like a random hodgepodge that didn't fit together in a nice, perfect, consistent manner like mathematics. What I didn't understand at the time, is that the true description of how chemistry works is quantum physics, and that everything in the chemistry books is just useful approximations of the results from quantum physics, that people have discovered over the centuries. I find now studying chemistry is much more worthwhile, now that I'm going into the subject with the mindset that what I'm learning is a collection of useful approximations of quantum physics, which is largely intractable.
On the subject of quantum physics, what most of us usually see those "Standard Model" particle tables that are done in the style of the periodic table of the elements from chemistry, but again we don't see the actual quantum physics equations behind it. Why doesn't anyone every show us the actual Standard Model equations? Physicists just seem to pull all kinds of principles and effects and assorted magic out of nowhere without showing us the Standard Model equations that it all comes from.
Well, first of all, it's "equation", singular -- just one -- and once you see it, you'll see why people haven't been showing it to you. It's really, really big, it's a differential equation (partial differential equation), which most people don't understand, but even if you do, it's hard to have any intuition as to how a differential equation behaves once it goes beyond 2 or 3 simple terms (at least that is the case for me), and it's full of greek letters and other funky mathematical notation.
And remember, the Standard Model is only half of reality (or what we know of it) -- the other half is general relativity, which isn't represented in this equation.
The deconstructed Standard Model equation | symmetry magazine
https://mastodon.social/@pomarede/112339170146519848 pomarede@mastodon.social - Taylor Swift as an hypermagnetized neutron star
#TaylorSwift #astrophysics #Swifties #neutron #star #neutronstar #magnetar #physics #astronomy #astrodon #meme #science #memes #sciencememes #space #STEM
And now for something completely different
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains The Three-Body Problem
#Physics #Mathematics #Chaos #Newton #deGrasseTyson #Uncomputability
https://spore.social/@minouette/112270075937635916 minouette@spore.social - April 14 has been designated World Quantum Day in honour of Planck’s Constant which can be rounded to h~ 4.14×10−15 eV·s (and some folks write April 14 as 4/14*). Planck’s constant comes up a lot in quantum mechanics; for instance a photon’s energy is h times its frequency). So I thought I would share Feynman Bauhaus.
🧵1/n
#linocut #printmaking #physics #Bauhaus #quantumMechanics #FeynmanDiagram #penguinDiagram #particlePhysics #sciart #WorldQuantumDay
Edward Frenkel: Infinity, Ai, String Theory, Death, The Self
String theory takes a spanking :)
So first of all, correct, the beautiful ideas came out of string theory. But that was not the original promise of string theory. The original promise was to describe the physics of this universe, unify all forces of nature, the three forces, electromagnetic, strong and weak described by the standard model and quantum theory of gravity. This has not happened. And now we hear that actually was not such a big deal. It's actually such a big thing. We've learned so much more.
It's like, you know, I tried to think of a good analogy. It's like, remember Moses? He took Israelites out of Egypt. Mm hmm. And he told them that he will lead them to the promised land. Yes. So imagine Moses after 40 years of wandering in the desert, you would say, you know, guys, you know, this idea of a promised land is not such a big thing. Look how much we've learned. We've learned about the desert. We've learned so much about the sand.
[Interviewer: That's a great analogy.]
Who cares about the promised land? What do you think would people say to him? And yet here we are. This is called, by the way, you mentioned this expression, moving the goalposts. This is not moving goalposts. This is going to a different stadium. It's starting to play a different game. Like you used to play soccer at one stadium. Then you go to another stadium. You start playing baseball and you say, no, we are playing soccer. We're still playing soccer. Yes, yes, yes. Stating that your original goal is not meaningful.
It did not work out. It did not work out. How about just starting with that? It did not work out unequivocally, not by saying the next 10 years [it will].
A #mini-planet orbiting in the frigid #outer reaches of the #solarsystem has a #Saturn-like #ring of #dust and #debris that #defies the rules of #physics, a new study has #revealed.
The planet in question is called #Quaoar and it's the #seventh largest of the known #dwarf #planets of which #Pluto is the #king. #Discovered in #2002 and about 697 miles wide (1,121 kilometers), Quaoar is one of the so-called #trans-Neptunian objects, small planets orbiting #beyond the solar system's outermost planet #Neptune.
Residing in the #KuiperBelt, the doughnut-shaped ring of rocky and icy debris in the outer solar system, Quaoar is a proud owner of its own #moon, the 100-mile-wide (160 km) #Weywot. And a recent observation campaign revealed that it also has a ring of material in its orbit.
That by itself wouldn't be so special. The gas giant Saturn is known to possess a whole series of rings. #Jupiter, Neptune and #Uranus also have some. One other trans-Neptunian object — #Haumea — has been found to have a ring, and the space rock #Chariklo that orbits between #Saturn and #Uranus also has one. So what exactly sets Quaoar's ring apart?
Related: Dwarf planets: science & facts about the solar system’s smaller worlds
Quaoar's ring is at a very unusual #distance from its parent body. In fact, before astronomers discovered Quaoar's ring in observations from several telescopes conducted between 2018 and 2021, they had thought that it was impossible for a ring to exist at such a distance. With a radius of about 2,420 miles (3,885 km) from Quaoar's center, the ring is too far away from the dwarf planet that its gravity should no longer be able to keep the material dispersed. Instead, it should coalesce under its own gravity and form another moon, just like Weywot. By not having done that, the ring has breached what astronomers call the Roche limit, the first known ring around a #celestial body to have done so.
"What is so intriguing about this discovery around Quaoar is that the ring of material is much farther out than the Roche limit," Giovanni Bruno, an astronomer at Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and one of the authors of the paper, said in a European #Space Agency (ESA) statement. "As a result of our observations, the classical notion that dense rings survive only inside the Roche limit of a planetary body must be thoroughly revised."
The ring was discovered during a series of occultations, essentially eclipses, when Quaoar passed between Earth and several more distant but much brighter stars. When an occultation occurs, the light of the background star temporarily dims. The effect is only visible to very sensitive telescopes and is frequently used to detect exoplanets orbiting stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which is why ESA's exoplanet hunter Cheops was among the telescopes watching these Quaoar occultations.
When astronomers analyzed the data, they realized that apart from the main dip in the background stars' brightness, they could detect two smaller drops. Since drops occurred before and after the main occultation, respectively, the researchers thought that Quaoar must be surrounded with a ring.
Several Earth-based telescopes also observed the occultations with similar results, but Cheops' data were particularly valuable as they proved that the odd dimmings were not caused by the effects of Earth's atmosphere.
https://www.space.com/mysterious-ring-around-dwarf-planet-puzzles-astronomers