why are physicists doing the equivalent of teaser trailers now lol
I swear, this type of reporting probably hurts science outreach more than it helps. As typified by this thread, when a scientist builds up a hype train for some announcement, the average person is going to get excited thinking about the big questions. Aliens, time travel, quantum gravity, etc.
More often than not the real announcement ends up being totally inscrutable to the average person. A lot of the time it isn't totally conclusive either, leading to later refutations that get not even a fraction of the media exposure. A big one recently was the report of phosphine on Venus that implied the existence of microbial life, later determined to be a false alarm months after the media circus.
It all just makes people so jaded to science reporting in general.
Chill comrade killjoy. People can still hear about how space aliens stole my dog and vaguely defined racialized mystics have uncovered the secret to immortality on tiktok. Let the scientists have their fun.
Probably scientists are just unable to keep shit to themselves until the results are ready to officially announce, they probably let it leak before all the analysis is done or reviewed or something
Looks like it's something with low-frequency gravitational waves, and the people involved are doing more measurement than theory. I'll guess they discovered a particularly wacky dark matter object. Maybe they found something weirder or more fundamental though.
Also, one of the scientists involved says it's aliens, but she's clearly a born shitposter.
she's clearly a born shitposter.
Lovely, we’ve now reached the stage where even scientists aren’t free from the brain rot.
The scientists have literally never been free of the brain rot, newton was a currency pervert who had people executed on behalf of the Treasury for making counterfeits or debasing the coinage. Fucking monsters since forever.
I'm gonna guess it's about galaxy formation, that seems to be a focus of their gravitational wave thing. It might adjust some stuff in our understanding of cosmic history but I'd be very surprised if it's about really close-to-the-big-bang stuff, which is what a lot of people think of as foundational
The account for the NanoGRAV organization listing them/them pronouns is pretty funny
what, do they have a physics direct or something? physics fighter pass reveal? physics teaser trailer? is oppenheimer dropping a new hit single? did they announce a marie curie mii costume
Cajun cookin' with smoked ghost pepper (scoville rating 9001) take: would be preferable to some sort of symmetry of fundamental particles
New particle detected that turns out to not actually exist two days later and everyone forgets about it
Steins;Gate have convinced me if time travel existed we'd be eternally fucked.
And all it costs is the price of a few bananas, a stellar electricity bill, a SMS bill, and possibly 5.7 billion lives (depending on which greek alphabetical branch of worldlines you're in) to do it.
The Vulcan Science Academy has determined time travel to be impossible x 50
Brian Greene is sentenced to death and string theory is erased from history
I'm going to guess they found a new type of particle or something and it's all very impressive but won't meaningfully affect my life
It better be more than that. The last few major experimental discoveries in fundamental physics have been "axtually the standard model is fine, we don't need to meaningfully extend it". Like as much as I find string theory and SUSY theories strange and confusing, the fact that high energy physics has been getting away with at most coming up with new particles for like 40 years is kind of depressing.
"Everything is made of tiny vibrating strings " -statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged
Well, scientists also always say that the Standard Model doesn't seem to be complete, there is stuff that is unaccounted for. Not just dark matter/energy, even basic interactions between quantum mechanics and gravity are mostly a mystery.
Saw some reporting on a paper that claims fluctuations in the mass field account for dark energy and dark matter and cosmic expansion. Would tie a neat bow on that whole thing if true, and resolve the cosmological catastrophe (the measured and predicted energy level of space differs by 120 orders of magnitude)
I was almost certain that you meant a factor of 120 because being off by 10^120 doesn't make any sense. Then I looked it up. Holy shit.
Yeah, reality straight up doesn't make sense in ways that have unfathomable implications.
is this the same thing or related to the false vacuum hypothesis?
Different thing. The false vacuum hypothesis says that there's a base level of vacuum energy, but getting there costs energy to surmount some barrier, which means the universe is sitting somewhere above "true" vacuum energy. If true vacuum energy is achieved anywhere, then it will propagate out at the speed of light and drop everything at its interface into the new vacuum while using the released energy to continue propagating. Basically an unstoppable firewall moving at the speed of light, irreversibly replacing the universe behind it with an unrecognizable new one.
The vacuum catastrophe is a difference between what theory predicts the vacuum energy level should be and what we measure it to be. Theory says it should be so dummy high that the universe is unable to expand, and we observe its expansion accelerating, so the energy must be basically zero.
Isn't this what bill Unruh and his student wrote up several years ago though?
Intelligent alien life almost certainly exists, but the ftl travel required to visit each other is likely impossible, and our bubble of radio signals hasn't traveled all that far.
It also seems far fetched that they could master that kind of travel only to eat shit and crash on earth, but maybe these alien programs are led by the equivalent of the sub ceo guy.
but maybe these alien programs are led by the equivalent of the sub ceo guy.
lmao
the ftl travel required to visit each other is likely impossible
related to this, I was under the impression ftl does not actually permit backwards time travel, although I get that there are other objections. for years my go-to reason to dismiss ftl was always that it allowed backwards time travel and grandfather paradoxes
Ignore capitalist pessimistic paradoxes, embrace soviet time travel
I was under the impression ftl does not actually permit backwards time travel
Do you have more information on this? My understanding was that, from the perspective of relativity, traveling faster than light was actually identical to traveling backwards in time.
I’m on my phone and don’t have a link off the top of my head but tldr events can appear backwards in some reference frames but you yourself can’t actually go back and interact with your own past.
*I think Sabine Hossenfelder has a vid about it
related to this, I was under the impression ftl does not actually permit backwards time travel
Depends. Accelerating yourself faster than light is impossible. But folding/bending space and then travelling at below-FTL speeds in that warped space is completely possible. Thus - warp drive.
Your point only applys to other galaxies.
Even with current drive tech we could colonize the galaxy in under 2 million years. So if there are aliens in our galaxy they should be younger than that.
Given the timescales involved it seems too much of a coincidence that we apered so close to each other. So its posible we are first.
seriously. feels like it's so appealing to people because it's the only way they can imagine escaping capitalism
I care about aliens, but the "bacteria in Europa" type not "green man from Mars" type.
My bet is that there is no wave/particle duality -- only waves made of waves so small they look like particles
No, I don't know what I'm talking about.
You know the state of physics for the average person is such that if someone smart told me this I would believe it 100%.
I learned about the double slit experiment and don't get it, so I'd also probably take that at face value.
"Look like particles"
puts on redditor hat
😏 this guy thinks you can 'see' the tiniest waves and doesn't know that we can't observe them directly or they get scared and hide.
this is the correct answer.
this is always the correct answer.
Aliens are boring
Not if you're horny for the chance to fuck one.
DOOOOOOOOOOON'T!
