cynar @ cynar @lemmy.world

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5

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1,089

Joined

2 yr. ago

Wakefield wasn't anti Vax. He was against the MMR jab specifically. He was also invested in one of the alternative vaccines, and faked data to make money.

His (false) message got garbled crossing the pond, and gained traction in America as a general anti Vax movement.

There is also the fact that European armies rarely sat idle. If they existed, they were often deployed against each other.

Hopefully the last 75 years of peace has broken that cycle. Most European nations focused on tactical capabilities, over strategic ones, letting America play hammer to their scalpels. If Europe builds an full military then finding the balance between individual and federation armies will be the challenge.

What is a particle, what is a wave? QM entities are neither. They are a 3rd thing. A quantised wave is the term my university professor used as a short hand. The nature of that wave is described by the Schroeder equation + its constraints. Certain interactions will bound it heavily, and so make it look particle like, others emphasise the wavelike properties.

You require the maths to actually do anything useful with it, but not to get the basic concepts. It's no different to the rest of physics, in that. E.g. you can understand the concepts of orbital mechanics, without being able to calculate them.

While I'm rusty as hell, my physics degree was actually focused quite a lot into QM.

It's perfectly possible to get a reasonable understanding of what's going on without going head first into the maths. There are definitely areas however that we don't have a good conceptual model of yet. For those, the maths definitely leads the way. 90% of QM is comprehendible with relatively little maths. You only need the maths when you start to get predictive.

QM entities are quantised waves. You can make a wave look very close to a particle quite easily, a particle can never behave like a wave.

Dumping the mental short hand of particle interactions is one of the main reasons most people can't get their heads around it.

So why are you so upset with us trying to fix it?

I personally find the anti science, anti learning crowd has gone from amusing, to annoying, to terrifying.

I disagree with it being hard to comprehend. The maths is an absolute bitch, but the basic premise is fairly simple. Everything is (quantised) waves. The rest clicks, once you get your brain to accept this. Everything else is a consequence. Those consequences can lead you down deep dark tunnels, filled with evil maths and mind bending results, but the basic idea is simple.

I have a bit of an issue with memes that are actively misleading.

On a completely unrelated note, I recently got an air fryer. They're awesome! 😎

That is part of what bugs me.

Quantum mechanics isn't magical or unknowable. It's just an area of physics where some of our base assumptions/approximations break down. It's not even that hard to wrap your head around, it just seems most people don't want to try.

So was "Donald Trump for president" and look at the damage that has caused.

Perception and observation are different things. Air molecules can be "observers" when looking at electrons etc.

This sort of comic always bugs me. Observation in QM is not the same as observation in layman terms.

Best think of it as hit it and watch the pieces fly. When you get small enough, you can't approximate out the impacts. It's akin to studying road traffic by sending an overloaded freight truck the wrong way and counting tires that hit the verge. It might also affect the current traffic's motion.

Orbits are all about speed, not height. To deorbit, you need to reduce your speed at the highest part of your orbit. This will lower the lowest part. You jump off the back. You would need to jump FAR harder than your legs are capable of though.

Unfortunately, the sheer speed will kill you, without shielding. As you hit the air, you are going so fast, the air can't get out of your way. You compress it ahead of you, that heats it up. It gets hot enough to melt most metals. The air will cook you, long before you get slow enough to use your parachute.

For comparison, terminal velocity (max speed you reach falling) is around 200km/h. Orbital velocity is 7km/s or around 25200km/h.

The glue gets weaker when it's heated. They use the same film for oven meals as well. It comes off fine when you finished heating, but it's a pain in the arse when cold.

Europe is moderately self sufficient, but only for tactical level operations. No-one wanted to break the understanding on strategic level capabilities.

Europe has a long pattern on that front. Large scale militaries rarely sit idle for long. With multiple nuclear powers in play, that genie has been kept mostly bottled up for 75 years.

It's also worth noting that I don't think the UK, France and Germany (previously Prussia) have ever been on the same side in a large scale hot conflict. Figuring out how to do it, without it imploding in 20 years is a challenge. The original plan was NATO, but Russia has managed to neuter that via Trump.

That's part of the reason a moon base could be viable. The sun outputs a reasonable amount of helium 3, which is great for fusion reactions. Unfortunately it tends to sit at the top of our atmosphere and get blown away again. On the moon, it gets captured by the dust in collectable quantities.

I never said it wasn't useful, just a very low efficiency reactor. Then again, if it was better, it would burn out faster, which would be bad for life on earth.

We left the union (an action I fought hard against). We are still part of Europe (geographically ) however.

Even the core only has an output of 200-300W/m^3.

The amusing thing is that the sun is actually quite a shit fusion reactor. It's power per unit volume is tiny. It just makes it up in sheer volume. A solar level fusion reactor would be almost completely useless to us. Instead we need to go far beyond the sun's output to just be viable.

It's like describing one of the mega mining dumper trucks as an "artificial mule".