Latest Space Missions (& Other Science Stuff)

It would not let me give you more than one heart for that, but here you go anyway:
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Time to run… :dash: :athletic_shoe:

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I’ve a favourite song lyric that sums it up pretty well too, all pulling at the same thread ultimately.

“If someone say’s they know for certain; they’re selling something, certainly.”

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Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely

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Sabine Hossenfelder is a no-nonsense particle physicist who tells science how it really is, not the hype you get from most science editorials. Here’s her video about how over-hyped quantum computing is:

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I enjoy some of her videos and has a relaxing delivery but her belief in determinism leans heavily on the side of there being no free will. To the point where she’s saying the results of particle colliders and quantum experiments must be wrong because right now all the “errors” are pointing to free will being an actual thing.

I did my best to keep it to her science views and not get political ’ ^ _^ Lets just say I have some friends she insulted, quite a bit :smiley:

Truth be told, she could science me under the table and I’ve no idea how anything works, but sometimes she does step on toes.

Comparing quantum computing to the woes of Nuclear Fission is a massive stretch I must say ’ ^ _^

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What with particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, and atom bombs, we’ve got a pretty good handle on nuclear fission.

It’s nuclear fusion she refers to, and we are having problems with that. We can make it happen, but we can’t bottle it.

If we could make fusion work, it could be the answer to everything - space travel, planetary colonisation, atmosphere decarbonisation, the oil crisis… It potentially offers unlimited clean, free, energy. it could solve the lot. But we can’t contain it.

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Think I need to get my ears checked XD

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https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2305762120

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They kind of lost me when they said that dark stars were extremely bright.

They then go on to assure us that dark matter is its own antiparticle, and therefore capable of energetic self-annihilation, which is what provides the heat to power these super-massive stars without fusion.

The last time I looked, we weren’t even certain dark matter exists - and we know absolutely nothing about its properties. So the dark star proposal seems very speculative - in fact, just this side of fantasy.

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Oh, we’re pretty certain it exists. Its effects are observable all over the place. To put it in the words of acollierastro, “Dark matter is not a theory, it’s an observation”.

We don’t have a clue about what it actually is, that’s the problem. And that’s where all the theorising comes in, covering the range from “that’s so obvious we’ve already tested and disproven it” to “I’m afraid we’d need to rewrite all of physics to somehow fit that in there”…

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In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s a lack of observation. For galaxies to behave the way they do, there ought to be a lot more mass around than we can see. Therefore (we theorise) there must be a lot of mass we can’t see. And because we can’t see it, we’ll call it dark matter.

But we can’t see it. Nor can we touch it, feel it, taste it, or smell it. We have no instrument that can detect it. We can only infer its existence from its supposed influence on other things.

It’s one thing to say “Based on our observations, and the current state of knowledge, we can’t think of anything else that would cause these effects”. It’s quite another thing to say “Based on our extremely limited observations, and zero knowledge of the substance in question, we firmly declare this is a fact, and not a theory”.

When a physicist walks out of his lab with a bag of dark matter, it becomes a fact. Until then, it’s a theory.

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But that’s pretty much what they are saying. It’s “We’re observing the effects of more mass than we can see, and we measure different amounts of mass with measurement methods that work by measuring light and those that work without measuring light (both of which have so far been reliable), ergo there’s mass we can’t see. Let’s call it… uh… dark matter?”.
And that’s essentially the state of the science right now, if you cut out sensationalist “science” journalism. That’s basically what that video is saying that I posted.

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When ever Sabine is recommended in the youtube algorithms and I click one, i end up focusing on the way she speaks and start looping this Goldmember scene in my head. I’m nuts tho

Quantum computers are somewhat overhyped, check this out… Another level aka living computer chips.

Id like copies of my brain to play with using a non invasive interface to communicate.

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How dense is the universe when measuring photons ? Some measurements suggest the answer is… 420 photons per cubic centimeter, and 69 photons per cubic millimetre.
As the universe supposedly expands, those numbers shrink while we currently do not know what is filling the void. is it Dark matter? I duno.
Maybe there were many big bangs, and we cannot exist within another. Universes could be like bubbles in a bubble bath, popping in and out of existence. Dark matter could be like the water where the universe bubbles form on.

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Looks like The Riddler is up to his old tricks again

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Well, God definitely has a sense of humour, I guess… :rofl:

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Do you know this old story Flatland that is trying to explain spatial dimensions? It’s about a 2D square that can look into a 1D world, but struggles to understand visitors from our 3D world. We can fully stand “outside” their Flatland in a dimension that is not perceivable by them. They cannot even describe our “ever changing” shape, while at the same time, we can easily look into a flat world, and influence it from the outside.

Reminds me of all that unfindable dark matter / energy influencing our measurements from somewhere. :person_shrugging: :smirk: Alas, slightly hard to verify. :joy:

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I sometimes try to think outside of three dimensions. Mathematicians and Physicists tell me these dimensions exist, but we can’t perceive them.

I find it impossible - I have no frame of reference. I find it quite daunting to think that there’s much in the universe I can never know, because I’m the wrong sort of animal. My brain, my mind, and my senses, are only designed to cope with a very limited spectrum of reality.

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