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“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” -George Box
My advanced E&M professor said “Imagine a sphere of radius zero. Trust me, it works.”
“…Imagine a sphere of radius zero.”
and a spherical cow. imagining lots of spherical cows helps quite a bit.
Radiating milk equally in all directions, of course.
Which constantly stays as a stream but looses density with r^2 (while still being a liquid!)
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
I swear quantum physics is magic and made up!
+1/2 h and -1/2 h
Fucking hate the people that insist on using only half of the number as if it was a real value. At least say you are working with natural unities or something.
" - How far is your house? - Oh, it’s just 5!"
Except in this context the question is “how many blocks away is your house?” Where “5” is a completely valid response
Or how about - “Walk around the block TWICE and it’ll be right there, you can’t miss it.”
You sound like my professor
" - How far is your house? - Oh, it’s just 120"
FTFY
If we theorize that the universe is like a computer program, then maybe the Universe has several layers of abstraction and we only can access our current layer, therefore forever having an incomplete model. If something external to our layer is affecting it, it would probably be impossible to know.
Quantum mechanics (and spin) isn’t really mysterious or inaccessible, it’s just not intuitive.
How about dark matter and dark energy.
The idea behind dark matter is pretty easy to understand and not that mysterious. Something doesn’t interact with the EM force so it’s just invisible and passes right through things. Since there’s plenty of examples of field specific quanta, it’s not really an out there idea.
Angular momentum of particles requires math and theories that require too much effort for me to understand them.
So in short, it all make sense in math, but when you try to convert it into actual words it doesn’t make sense or it’s so difficult to understand that unless you know the math you can’t understand.
Precisely! Language is a tool we use to understand the world around us and english simply lacks the vocabulary to describe many aspects of physics that the language of mathematics has
The name was too cool. If they called it something super long like Non-electromagnetic interacting granular happening (NEIGH) we would all say it’s too confusing and I don’t understand, as opposed to “I get it and it must be wrong for reasons so simple a layman has thougnt of them.”
Actually that does have a confusing name: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. WIMPs. Yes, really.
It’s a common misconception that Dark Matter = WIMPs because it’s the leading theory right now. Dark Matter really just means “whatever happens to be the cause of certain cosmological measurement discrepancies” even if that cause isn’t in any way “matter” at all. It’s a very misleading name.
Additional variables introduced to make current theoretical models fit the observed data.
I highly recommend the YouTube channel pbs spacetime if you want a good explanation. It goes slightly more in depth than other channels which is what I like but its not math heavy. They have series to slowly build up knowledge as playlists too.
You can absolutely know if something external is affecting it. Dark matter and energy might be such a thing. What you might not be able to tell is how those mechanics arise, you’ll only know the aggregate result on your layer.
Now everything is clear. Thanks!
The closest representation is that cliche television shot where someone’s thinking really hard and equations fly around their head.
