No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
One of the Wright brothers said that. It's actually my favorite quote because it always reminds me we have no idea what the fuck we're wrong about.
No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
googles
Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:
Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909
No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.
See? I was wrong.
HUMANS
Thank goodness computers are never wrong. :-P
Hey, they always do exactly as they're told!
Hrm, in that case, now I wonder how they are ever correct!?:-P
As a Software Engineer, I ask myself that question several times per day.
Bc chips are as dumb as rocks, but really really really good at repetition:-).
Easy, think about who decides whether or not they're correct.
Again, humans.
For now... except managers don't want to actually think, yet do want to be in control of even the tiniest aspects of every single fucking thing (see e.g. Boeing planes literally falling out of the sky, against the wishes of the engineers bc the managers figured that this way of skipping maintenance and then covering that truth from federal safety commissioners was "better"... for the sake of their profits ofc), so how soon until their unthinking need to "feel like" they are in control leads them to using computers to control the people, without even those humans who hold the admin rights ever making any conscious decisions?
I suspect that a thinking computer may be correct far more often than an unthinking human.:-D
And thank goodness it's not nearly impossible to convince a computer that it isn't correct when you don't have admin rights.
sudo you're a fucking idiot, computer
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
-- Thomas Watson, president of IBM
I cannot stomach much of it, but it is fun to go back and watch older media related to technology - e.g. the six million dollar man has like spinning tape disks, when computers were entire-room affairs.
So he was right, using the definition at that time, though there was also so much potential for more.
Also it is funny to hear them say that technology would literally make the six million dollar man "better", not just "well again" or "he will have side effects but his capabilities will be far above the norm" or some such. One glance at Google these days, or a Boeing plane, does not inspire me to think of the word "better" than what came before even from those exact companies. Technology moves forward, but I am not so sure that the new is always "better" than the old. It was an interesting bias that they had though, during the cold war and after the moon landing.
"We can improve him."
And I believe tape storage hadn't even been invented when Watson said that. It may have even been pre-magnetic tape entirely because I believe he said it before a computer was actually invented (unless you count Babbage's difference engine). It was a prediction of what the world would need if computers existed if I remember correctly.
And it makes total sense, bc the idea of a "PC" hadn't been tried yet, bc the technology simply wasn't yet up to the task. And yeah I think I remember the same thing about that quote, though who knows:-P.
Anyway, it was hard for computers to be wrong about simple arithmetic operations, but they've come a long way since then, and AIs are now wrong more often than not.
Not all older tech are necessarily worse. An LTO-9 tape can also store 18TB of data per tape. It's still sold today and great for archival.
Other cheaper, less error prone tech usually gets mass market penetration. But I am happy that massive storage niche tech is still there.
Yeah tape is niche, but still serves its particular purpose well!:-)
True. 12h to write the whole 18TB makes it a bit impractical for stuff other than backups. ;)
Well, I imagine the write-once, re-write-never part also may limit its applicability too:-). Then again, for a purpose where the data doesn't need to be constantly changing, like storing a TV show or movie, possibly even music if someone wants to listen to albums rather than randomized songs, it could offer a lot of practical utility to many people.
Oh you can totally erase and reuse the tapes. Depending on the tape software you can also rewrite parts or replace older files with incremental updates. It just really takes a while of rewinding. And the noise it makes is kinda retro...
Hehe, I can just imagine that in my mind...wrrr.....:-P
The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base's 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record.
the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km)
That's 800 miles (1,400 km) longer than the circumference of the Earth. Humans are a trip.
Plus X-37B has flown round the earth for two and a half years on its longest flight. I know it's not really what he was thinking about as it's launched in space from a rocket in orbit but then that just adds even more to the notion tech advancement can be almost impossible to predict.
Wilbur clearly didn't know about in-flight refueling.
It also makes me wonder if trans-atlantic gliding is a feat that could be feasibly attempted with modern technology.
He also isn't talking about airplanes, but airships. Sure plenty of planes make the journey every day, but zero airships do because they really are quite useless for it. Obviously he was wrong becauae a few airships did end up making Atlantic crossings, but they were slow, cramped, and dangerous compsred to ocean liners.
So context matter, you say. This is revolutionary! But it will never catch on.
At a computer trade show in 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC's 640KB usable RAM limit: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
That quote was in the context of the 1981 personal computer market, and in that context is correct.
It’s like a game company CEO saying 12GB of video ram is enough in 2024 so we don’t all need an RTX 4090.
Scientists in the 1800s also proclaimed we figured everything out and science was completed.
*1900s. Max Planck famously pondered whether he should pursue physics or music and was told by his professor that Physics was “done except for a few minor details”. Planck then went on to invent quantum physics to screw over students the world over.
I never though I'd see a resonance cascade, let alone create one!
You'll get the noble prize for this posthumously!
When I first began learning HTML (way before CSS and the modern web), my most engaged moments were when things broke. Way more satisfying learning how to fix them than having it work right away. What a great observation / comment.
As a professional dev my reaction to broken things is more like "ah fuck, not again! I hope it's nothing serious.".
Two hours later: Damn, used an upper case "A" instead of a lowercase "a" in my variable reference
Dave Jones of the EEVblog always says to beginners "I hope your project doesn't work." He thinks it's a much better learning opportunity that way.
This is amazing news. It's like being shown that Neutonian physics are wrong, so now we have the ability to come up with a better model, then massive advancements in technology can occur.
We did find out that Newtonian physics is wrong. Einstein got famous for it and we now use general/special relativity and quantum phsyics.
No, Newtonian physics works just fine. Unless things are too big, too small, too fast, or too slow.
At least that's what a meme I once saw said.
So it works fine on human scales, but for most of the universe it is inadequate. That means it's wrong. Quantum physics and relativity are also wrong since he are unable to reconcile the two, despite them both being the best models we have for their respective scales. We have known for the past century that we have only just begun to understand the universe, and that all our models are irreconcilable with each other, meaning that they are ultimately wrong.
Just because a model is useful doesn't mean it is right.
Agreed, but it leads to people who are less knowledgeable to draw the wrong conclusions.
Basically for just about anything you want to do on Earth Newton works perfectly fine. You can send people to the moon using nothing but Newton. Two big things you need Einstein for is the orbit of Mercury and GPS satellites. So from a pure science point of view Newton is wrong or maybe incomplete. From a regular Joe point of view Newton is dead on.
By proclaiming Newton is wrong, it leads to people concluding that all science is wrong, because there is always someone working on the next iteration. So people think vaccines are dangerous, wearing masks is dumb, herbs and spices cure cancer, global warming is fake and homeopathic shit does anything except remove money from their wallets. Because what do scientists know, they've been wrong all the time in the past.
Newton is not wrong, it's just incomplete for some very niche things. And Einstein fixed all of that so we're all good.
In reality it's good to always be looking to disprove something and create new and better knowledge. But only if that's your job and only for very niche things. We've got the basics down for most things on Earth and there is no reason any regular person should doubt that.
Be careful saying homeopathy only removes money from wallets. Yes it does that but it can be worse. Most of the vials are just water but any with a 1x or 1c designation actually do have some of the herbal element remaining and can cause problems.
By proclaiming Newton is wrong, it leads to people concluding that all science is wrong, because there is always someone working on the next iteration
I've never had sympathy for this line of thinking. Is the average person truly too ignorant to understand that science is a constantly developing process of better understanding our universe, not some set of unimpeachable rules carved into stone tablets once and forever? The fact that science can be updated, changed, revolutionized, is what makes it powerful.
If people need to be 'protected' from that fact, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way science is taught in schools. I can't accept that the average person can't comprehend such a simple idea that would take less than an hour to convincingly communicate.
I’ve never had sympathy for this line of thinking. Is the average person truly too ignorant to understand that science is a constantly developing process of better understanding our universe, not some set of unimpeachable rules carved into stone tablets once and forever?
YES because often times the opposing model is the Bible, which is updated very irregularly and people will form sects over a single differing interpretation of a single passage.
Changing your mind / learning new information can be construed as the super-hated "flip-flop".
Unfortunately, the illogical are immune to logic. No amount of it will be effective.
Yes, the average person is ignorant of stuff that need to be updated once in a while. There is something wrong with the current form of education. And you need to accept that understanding doesn't come easy.
If you can't do that last part, well, there you go. Same thing for the average person.
It's less that Newton is wrong and more like it's an approximation. Things always get more complicated because we are learning more about everything all the time, but for simple day to day things Newton is fine to be used and even taught.
You could also say it's important from a historical perspective, learning how we got from Newton to bigger and better things is important too.
I think you communicated it well in two paragraphs.
You see this thinking in science too. Dark matter has always struck me as an awful solution to a model breaking down. It's basically "the numbers don't add up so let's add a fudge factor to make it say what we want". But you're generally considered a kook for questioning it now. People will spout a bunch of big words and hope you shut up if you do.
It's called dark because we can't see it, and matter because it interacts gravitationally. There is nothing wrong with the term and the model of it even if we don't fully understand what the hell exactly it actually is and most importantly why it actually is. It's literally how science works. We don't know what the hell quantum probabilities and all the weird particles and fields mean on a metaphysical level either but QFT is the most tested and predictively powerful theory of science ever made. Is it complete? No, we may even never find the theory of everything. But it doesn't make our discoveries wrong.
Dark matter has been supported by various observations and is the best explanation we have. It's not the most widely accepted model just by pure faith, you know.
I have to admit I never liked it too much myself, but what do I know? There is an alternative theory, but it has its own problems.
I think it's more a matter of, "We know there's something that's causing an effect, but we can't see it or fully explain it... yet." There's something in the science and observations that's just not lining up the way it should. There are some ideas that have floated around that say that dark matter isn't necessary, it's just a misunderstanding of one factor or another, but nobody has really been able to nail the question yet, so it persists.
It’s more than that. There’s something that doesn’t add up, but if we assume the answer is “dark matter”, we can make predictions about it, that can guide us toward proving or disproving. Similarly, if we assume it’s one of the other theories, we can make predictions on what it must be like.
Dark matter is most straightforward because we understand best how matter acts. How much more matter do we need for the observations to make sense, based on current understanding? Ok, what could that matter be that acts gravitationally but we can’t see? How can we detect that?
I agree with the essence of your point but personally I’d never use the word “wrong”, only incomplete. Seems weird to call Newton’s laws “wrong” when the only reason that we are willing to accept GR is that it reduces to Newton.
All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
I prefer mine:
literally every model is a metaphor and not a true representation of the actual phenomenon it’s modeling.
The map is not the territory
Why use many words when few will do?
I personally think that “all models are wrong” does nothing to stop people from simply thinking in terms of practical inevitabilities, when it’s actually extremely important to understand that figuring out what’s “actually going on” was never even the concern of science in the first place.
It's not so much that it reduces to Newtonian predictions but that at human scale and energy levels the difference between Newtonian and general relatively is so small it's almost impossible to tell the difference.
What you’re describing is literally what it means for general relativity to reduce to Newtonian mechanics. You can literally derive Newton’s equations by applying calculus to general relativity. In fact, if you ever get a physics degree, you’ll have to learn how to do it.
It's inaccurate, not wrong. Framing things in right and wrong misrepresents scientific progress in a way that leads to ridiculous conclusions like some post-modernist post-truth philosophers came up with.
In fact, Lord Rutherford said that "ALL models are wrong, but some are useful" 🙂
While we're talking about scientific nobility...
"In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting."
-- Lord Kelvin
Conversely, just because a model is wrong doesn't mean it's not useful.
Isaac Newton made some incorrect assumptions. In most situations on earth the error is small enough to ignore (you don't need to worry about time dialation to calculate the projectile path of a thrown rock), but there's depreciencies in the cosmos (like mercury's weird precession). So in a sense, elementary mechanics never was correct, but it was the best humanity had for awhile until Einstein's relativity and it's still useful in many not-extreme contexts.
Really, until we actually find dark matter, we can't say for sure that relativity is correct either, but that's just science.
I thought we may have found dark matter already, but we lack the ability to measure it and confirm?
We noticy it's effects on baryonic matter, but have no known way of detecting dark matter itself. It's a bit like how a fisherman can know that there is a large fish in the pond by the giant splashes and ripples in the water, but he can't catch it because it has zero interest in any lures or bait he uses.
Now that there is an understandable analogy.
I think the best way to say it is, relarivity can reduce to Newtonian at small (but not sub atomic) scales, or that Newtonian mechanics are incomplete
I'd like them to look for repeats of galaxies. Galaxies that may be the same but slightly different or in different parts of the universe. If the universe was its own black hole we might see like a sort of kaleidoscope effect
The trouble with that is the difference in time. Since the light has to travel such a vast distance, multiple images of the same galaxy will show different stages of maturity. Even the stars will have been recycled. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ever demonstrate that two galaxies separated by billions of light years are actually the same galaxy in a curved Universe.
I believe that would be a Torus-shaped universe that could produce that effect, basically a donut where space loops back in on itself. I think it's something that's been considered, though it sounds as if there's no evidence for or against that idea, and it's not considered likely.
Dangerous way of putting that since we have so many easily weaponized idiots who will carry that water, a better way to say it would be "our understanding of neutonian physics is incomplete at the moment"
I agree, it is more accurate that way. English is not my first language, so I missed that detail. In South Africa, we also don't have a significant anti-science movement, so it does not always occur to me naturally. The scientific approach is generally well respected and understood here.
We have a very limited view of the universe so it's no surprise that our theories are often wrong or incomplete. The beauty of science is that when a theory proves inadequate, it gets replaced with a more complete one.
yeah, but it's always a shitshow when someone brings alternate theories to the big bang. it's almost like back in those days when they burned people for suggesting the earth may be slightly less flat than expected.
That's because alternative models like MOND or string theory end up breaking more things than they solve. Fixing the leak in your roof is great, but doing so by breaking the living room wall isn't really an acceptable solution.
In optimization problems, you can get stuck at a local maxima. It looks like any direction you go makes things worse. But the only way out of that is to try something that does make things worse and try refining from there to see if you can get to something better. Maybe that living room wall does need to come down in the process.
Isn't string theory basically dead at this point?
It works perfectly as long as you assume there are a bunch of extra spatial dimensions that can't be seen...
Don't dare question dark matter in front of a physicist.
It's always funny to me when people bring up how science was wrong in the past, as evidence for why we shouldn't trust it now.
You know what replaced the bad science? Good science.
Or rather, we replace the bad science with the best explanations we can offer, right now.
I'll take the plumb pudding model over "deity did it, stop asking questions" any day, because you can still do something useful with it.
Doesn't even matter if our understanding is wrong and will be updated later.
Science is the best philosophy 💪
I've always liked the adage: science doesn't tell us what's true, only what isn't.
We don't know the best way to treat cancer, but we know leeches don't work.
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'” --Isaac Asimov
TIL Columbo was the ultimate scientist.
"Oh, just one more thing..."
The scientific spirit at work!
The Hubble constant seemed determined not to be constant.
Sounds like a quote from the Hitchhikers Guide
Get your freaking towel and get outta here, man!
Now that's a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is
The Hubble Suggestion just doesn’t sound the same.
I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.
-- Arthur Dent, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Series.
Sounds more like Arthur knew...
Maybe
Maybe there's something seriously wrong with the Universe? Why is it always US who are wrong?
Hey, it's me, the Universe. I just wanted to say, this is no longer working for me. And if it makes you feel better, sure it's not you, it's me. Please don't call.
The universe is, frankly, a complete shitshow.
I've heard this has made many people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move
I mean it's got some valid points but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
I like to think that whenever we discover something new, the universe just got an update and we discovered the patch notes.
It seems odd to me that the universe would be expanding at the same consistent spherical shape.
I've seen plenty of explosions and they never look like that.
The big bang, which consisted of literally all matter in the universe would surely be no different.
Except it’s not that they are finding the expansion rate is different in some directions. Instead they have two completely different ways of calculating the rate of expansion. One uses the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The other uses Cepheid stars.
The problem is that the Cepheid calculation is much higher than the CMB one. Both show the universe is expanding, but both give radically different number for that rate of expansion.
So, it’s not that the expansion’s not spherical. It’s that we fundamentally don’t understand something to be able to nail down what that expansion rate is.
It’s because CMB stopped for coffee, obviously.
(That was a great explanation, btw.)
It just wraps around, like a videogame. Duh...
Just to confirm, the expansion is the same in different directions under both methods of measuring?
Under the CMB method, it sounds like the calculation gives the same expansion rate everywhere. Under the Cepheid method, they get a different expansion rate, but it’s the same in every direction. Apparently, this isn’t the first time it’s been seen. What’s new here is that they did the calculation for 1000 Cepheid variable stars. So, they’ve confirmed an already known discrepancy isn’t down to something weird on the few they’ve looked at in the past.
So, the conflict here is likely down to our understanding of ether the CMB or Cepheid variables.
I wish the article had broken it down the way you did. Thanks!
Ah ok. Thanks for the correction.
The only thing spherical is the visible universe from earth that we can see. Both in time and distance. Due to the expansion of space that volume is increasing.
The entire universe could be infinite and take on any number of infinite shapes. Our local universe could be completely different from the rest of the universe and we'll never be able to know..it's wild.
Recent experiments trying to determine what the curvature of space-time is in the visible universe has concluded that it's pretty much flat
But it's entirely possible that we're just on a very very very large (infinite?) curved surface of spacetime that just looks flat to us..
I would bet on it in fact. It makes logical sense to from my perspective.
I'm no way an expert in this, but I've been told it's wrong to think of the expansion of the universe like an explosion where everything moves away from a single point, but rather that the space between each object is expanding, comparing it to the way the surface of a balloon expands (if you were to paint multiple dots on the surface of a balloon they would all move away from each other when you inflate the balloon), though I like to think of it as yeast bread expanding since that's 3d.
Have you considered the universe may actually be a torus instead of a sphere, eg: bagel-verse?
Yes that sure is an option, but it doesnt fit in my pastry-centric theories of the universe.
Spherical? We don't know if the universe is of finite size.
As far as we know, it could just as well be infinite, and the expansion happens everywhere.
Everything is relative so the only thing we know is that the distance between galaxies increases. But we don't know if there's a “border” of the universe or not.
The big bang (if it is still a valid theory) would have been unlike any explosion you have ever witnessed. The big bang was not an explosion of only matter, since time and space were both created during this event as well.
Really, calling it an explosion is not right in the first place. It's one of those unfortunate cases of bad naming in science, another being 'The God Particle' (which was originally supposed to be The Goddamn Particle.) Physicists prefer using the word 'expansion.'
I feel (intuitively (which is almost certainly wrong)) that it's expanding like a fluidic wave. Think lighting a gasoline puddle on fire.
Yay! We are learning something new!
This is what I was very very excited for. The Hubble photos were more exciting because they’re visual spectrum. The James web is all about discoveries.
But moooom, I hate learning new things
TLDR: Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. We can now confirm it's not measurement error.
It's not a matter of where we look, it's the method we use to calculate the expansion. The 2 methods to calculate the expansion rate give us different results. For a good explanation, here is a YouTube playlist of videos by Dr. Becky Smethurst where she discusses & explains the "Crisis in Cosmology": https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn
Oh. Well. That's. Terrifying?
Uh, why?
I'm afraid of things I can't understand.
You can make a religion out of that!
don't worry, we're expanding with it!
I'm not expanding! It's just my big bones, y'know!
Over and over again. That scope is really opening things up.
It was the same for the Hubble telescope back in the day (and still!)
Good riddance, the answer can never be too simple.
The human need for 'constants' may already be too simple. Gravity for example is treated as a constant value in Physics but is actually variable.
I might have missed something, but AFAIK, gravity is the same everywhere. Bigger things, bigger gravity, sure, but two equal things in different locations don't have different gravitational attraction
Your understanding of what constitutes "Physics" (tip: it's not a bunch of kids in a classroom) tells me that we can safely ignore your opinion.
see also : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law Hubble tension
In the 21st century, multiple methods have been used to determine the Hubble constant. "Late universe" measurements using calibrated distance ladder techniques have converged on a value of approximately 73 (km/s)/Mpc. Since 2000, "early universe" techniques based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background have become available, and these agree on a value near 67.7 (km/s)/Mpc. (...)
(...) The most exciting possibility is new physics beyond the currently accepted cosmological model of the universe, (...)
Can someone give me the spark notes I started reading but I'll never get through that or probably even understand all of it
As I understand it, there are two measures of cosmic distance/expansion rate in which we are pretty confident.
One is using supernovas as a measure. Since one kind of supernova has very particular characteristics, it is easy to calculate the distance. It is like knowing that everyone has the same kind of candle, if you see a bunch of lights around you, you could make certain assumptions about how far they are from you by how bright they are. Also, with more precise measurements, we can use the doppler effect to know how fast they are moving. We have observed the area around or Galaxy and have come up with a very precise measurement for how fast the universe is expanding.
The other measurement is by looking at the cosmic wave background. This is the "first" thing we are able to see after the big bang. I don't really understand the details of this one, but scientists have also been able to calculate the expansion rate of the universe very accurately with this radiation.
As we have done more experiments to measure these two numbers, instead of converging on the same number, the results are actually diverging. Recent results have even made it so the error bars no longer overlap.
So, we have some big questions -
Are our measurements wrong? There are no strong candidates for alternative understandings of how we measure things, so we don't really know how.
Are the expansion rates at the beginning of the universe and current times different? Maybe, but again, we don't have any theories for why.
Does the Universe expand at different rates in different places? Maybe, but again, we don't have any strong candidates that we can test.
All of this is called the Hubble Tension. It is probably one of the biggest questions in cosmology currently.
Thanks this is both an uncomfortable and exciting thing to read.
Basically,
Everything you know is wrong.
Black is white, up is down, and short is long
And everything you thought was just so important doesn't matter. Everything you know is wrong. Just forget the words and sing along. All you need to understand is, everything you know is wrong.
I wish I had more upvotes for the random Yankovic!
It's simple, imagine you've got two smart friends that both have an opinion about a TV show you didn't watch - you can't tell who is right but the fact they disagree suggests they might be wrong when they say you can't have flying cars and time travel.
Do all parts of a growing, living creature expand at the same speed?
In America, our guts grow way faster than our brains, bc that's where we do most of our thinking. :-D
Ohhh that makes sense! You have some REALLY smart people over there!
Damn straight - it has it right there in our flag (the red is bacon 🥓)!
Holy fucking shit. How have I never seen that version of your flag before? That other one is so boring why isn't this one flying everywhere?
Bold of you to presume that it isn't!? :-P
And if you think that's something, wait till you see our history books:
And our newspapers:
(save us from ourselves?)
Well damn! No wonder you guys are so patriotic! I think I might be a bit jealous of your freedom and your news industry.
(Wish I could help 😞 I'm just up here in this other little North American country. The really cold one. Just wishing someone saves you from yourselves before that stink moves too far up and gets embedded in the carpet. Unfortunately we've been getting more and more whiffs of it in the past couple years. We may need help too.)
Yeah, it's spreading all over the world. Again. Except this time we seem to be for rather than against it, for some reason? :-(
Well it sure is how it seems depending on where you look. Just gotta hope that a majority of people haven't lost their mind yet.
I dunno, I feel like I have lost mine at least:-).
Btw in case it is fun, here is a video from John Oliver about authoritarianism.
Stay strong! (and warm if at all possible:-)
Unfortunately that link doesn't seem to work in Canadia but I'll look it up. I love John Oliver.
Did you know that because your feet are closer to the gravitational center of the earth your head ages faster than your feet?
I did, I have no grey hairs on my feet.
Gonna go ahead and add "how much farther did my head travel than my feet due to the curvature of the earth" to my list of weird statistics I want an answer to
It would take something like a million years for your head to age more than a second. It's a fun thing to tell people though lol
A bat should be less affected by this uneven aging due to the whole sleeping upside down thing. They still spend some time upright so it balances out a little better than what you'd see with most of us who generally stay somewhere between prone/supine and standing up throughout the day.
It's like the stars when observed at veryx2 far distance they start to behave weird. Blinking a bit faster than normal this might cause the reason for much faster expansion when calculating. Entropy suppose to be improbable right but at far distance all those improbable they probably all eventually add up. Just my thought anyway.
Have you ever had a dream that
That you, um, you had, you'll, you would
You could, you do, you would you want you
You could do some, you...
You'll do, you could you, you want
You want him to do you so much
You could do anything, do anything
Have you ever had a dream
You could do anything, do anything
Have you ever had a dream
You could do anything, do anything
Perfect!
Lmao
Anyone here an expert on Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity (STVG), Tensor-Vector-Scalar Gravity (TeVeS) or f(R) gravity?
I took an undergrad course in stargazing, so I'm basically an expert in... whatever that is...
Prof was a big spectroscopy nerd, so we mostly focused on that.
What I gather from this article is that we still don't know what dark energy is. We haven't for decades. So the new telescope has failed to enlighten us about a mystery that's been around longer than half of the users here.
Yes, we still don't know what dark energy is, but the article doesn't directly mention that.
The new telescope has failed to enlighten us
I would argue the opposite. It's entire purpose is to enlighten (gather EM data) and its done this to a higher accuracy than Hubble.
It's just job is not to explain the measurements. That's ours.
Yay!
Why couldn't this still be "big bang"? Look at a grenade for example. When it explodes, a shock wave expands from it in a near perfect sphere, but the fragments previous packed inside of it explode out at different speeds depending on their mass.
If you were in the center of that explosion, measuring the speed of fragments traveling away from you, they'd travel at different speeds. Only the initial shockwave would be constant.
This problem is not AT ALL about the geometrical shape of the expansion of the universe. It's about 2 different formulas that should give the same result for the rate of the universe, but give different results. I don't blame you, the article title is extremely misleading.
This is more like you measure the fragment speeds with both a laser and with radar, and get different readings off the same fragment.
Maybe because the speed of things is not the same thing as the speed of space expansion.
From my limited understanding, the discrepancy comes from the two ways to measure the universe's expansion: calculation from cosmic microwave background and calculating a cepheid variable, which uses pulsating stars (pulsars?)
Isn't it more likely that one, or both, ways of measuring are wrong? As in, they're not useful for measuring the universe's rate of expansion?
Isn’t it more likely that one, or both, ways of measuring are wrong? As in, they’re not useful for measuring the universe’s rate of expansion?
Now, scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the observation is not down to a measurement error.
I'm trying to understand the distinction you are making. Could you elaborate?
Not a scientist but the article seems to mean that they checked that the tools themselves had no defects giving incorrect measurements.
This comment seems to be questioning the methodology of how we measure the rate of expansion so tackles a different aspect of the conversation.
But that's about as much as I can contribute haha
Pretty much this. In a (hopefully) more direct metaphor, are we sure we're using a ruler to calculate the length of a line, and not using a ruler to calculate the temperature of a paper?
I think the distinction is between arguing that there's a discrepancy because the measurement is bad, or because the measurement doesn't measure what we think it measures.
Is the theory right and we have a measurement error, or is the theory flat out wrong?
The model is wrong. Get hype
One day science will reach the Orphic understanding of the origin of the Cosmos.
Well, maybe at least this version:
Next after them, Epicurus introduced the world to the doctrine that there is no providence. He said that all things arise from atoms and revert back to atoms. All things, even the world, exist by chance, since nature is constantly generating, being used up again, and once more renewed out of itself—but it never ceases to be, since it arises out of itself and is worn down into itself.
Originally the entire universe was like an egg and the spirit was then coiled snakewise round the egg, and bound nature tightly like a wreath or girdle.
At one time it wanted to squeeze the entire matter, or nature, of all things more forcibly, and so divided all that existed into the two hemispheres and then, as the result of this, the atoms were separated.
Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion book 1 chapter 8
Very fun in the context of Neil Turok's CPT symmetric universe theory as an explanation for the baryon asymmetry problem, so its discussion of matter being squeezed and then splitting into two which divided the particles may end up on point even if incorrect in their interpretation regarding the atmosphere.
We're just inside a cosmic space octopus, pretending we understand... With limbs of the CSP expanding as it moves through timespace.
And we, the cells inside a cell inside the octopus, like to believe ourselves enlightened.
I love space because it humbles even the most confident and intelligent members of our apish species.
What are the different rates? How much variance is there?
From memory it varies between about 67km/s per megaparsec to 74km/s per megaparsec.
Also it's really weird to describe something in terms of km/s when you look at an area over millions of lightyears
Those are weird units indeed :
(1 km /s) / 1 mega parsec =
(1000 m/s)/(10^6^ x 3.0857×10^16^ m) =
1/3.0857×10^19^ seconds =
1/978 x10^9^ years.
So, when we multiply by the rates (which are either 67 or 74) we get :
1/ 14.6 giga years or
1/ 13.2 giga years
... basically ( 1/ "age of the universe").
Meaning physical observation disagree about the age of the universe ...or the theory is faulty.
We abandoning materialism yet?
Not til we got them sweet, sweet asteroid mineralz. Parties responsible for that will dictate the direction humanity goes, imo
It's almost like cephid variable measurement is a shitty metric for measuring universe expansion because you're not actually measuring the edge of the universe just the rate of travel of two objects.
How can you measure the edge of the universe? Firstly anywhere you hold the tape you are in the universe secondly its expanding faster than the speed of light which is a limit for movement without space not the expansion of space.
Seeing the universe expanding at different rates could just mean we're not as close to the center as we thought, and the parts further away from the center are moving faster. That's my layman's hypothesis though
We're not thought to be at the center at all.
We're at the center of what we can see. But that's just a limit of the speed of light and the age of the universe. The universe almost certainly goes beyond what we can see. And there's no way of knowing how big the universe is beyond that.
It's like being on a ship in the ocean. You can see the horizon is 20miles in every direction. That doesn't mean you're in the center of the ocean. You're only in the center of what you can... Sea
There is no center of the universe fwiw, there is no middle everything is expanding out from. Just a substrate that exists everywhere that inflates
That's what I believe as well. AFAIK from what we know the universe could be infinite or simply bigger than the observable part. But I think the only reason people default to assuming that it's finite is that infinity is hard to grasp and that illustrations of the big bang show a point and then disks of expanding size. People assume that means the universe is a sphere but nothing contradicts what you say so there's no reason not to believe that it's infinite.
It's fun to think it might just start going backwards or something because we have literally no idea what is actually happening, like it's very possible we'll never actually be able to see or measure anything outside the universe but there could be all sorts of things going on.
It's a decent testable hypothesis. If there were a center. Which seems obvious in the familiar mechanical way of say a firecracker. It certainly has a center with debris going every direction from that point.
However (to use a problematic oversimplification): what if the universe has a similarity to the surface of a balloon being blown up, where is the center?
Wherever you put your finger, the whole rest of the surface of the balloon is expanding away from that point. One center point is earth. Every other place in the universe also appears to be a center.
When looking at the evidence, data from telescopes and such, describing the expansion of the universe is closer to the balloon surface theory than the firecracker theory. Even though the firecracker theory is easier to comprehend.
When people are talking about the center they mean the relative center, in other words, our point of reference. This definitionally is where we are as the observer.
There is no center.
Yes there is and it is me.
Can I have some money?
Loose the centre assumption and you are there.
Our section of the universe is not as uniform as it should be.
Is it capitalism? Please let it be capitalism.
Do you ever take a break from the political stuff? Seriously man…. Take a rest.
I hope not, politics define almost every single moment of our existence. It's like physics, but with more assholes.
I didn’t know you cared.
About you? I don’t. But I care about all the others that have to be annoyed by this shit. This isn’t a political post. How about taking a break and just enjoy things for what they are instead of your usual attempts to manufacture arguments.
Says the person who took the bait 😆
You think this was me taking bait? Nope. This is just calling out a troll.
Shill*
They consistently parrot russian and chinese talking points under the guise of being objective
Gotta be careful what you call them. They can get you banned.
They have, in certain places, anyway. They are never alone, either. But i believe it is hyper important to have these conversations in the open. It is important to be aware of who is influencing people towards what ends as well, of course, but we must also be ready to call them out in the commons here along with the methods they use. Theyre much craftier than they were in 2016, presumably bc the left is that much harder to co-opt than the right.
Oh I absolutely agree. 100 percent. And I do the same. But I’ve paid the price for it.
Given the fact that my upvote for u keeps ur comments scores at 1, id say it seems ur lightly paying the price via downvotes now :p
Again, calling attention to the problem helps, imo.
Right on. Yeah, making people aware that they’re here to disrupt and use bad faith bullshit to try and convince people to not vote absolutely needs to be called out- and frankly, I’m amazed that mods allow this bullshit under “free speech” rules.
I’m not here to advocate that Biden is a great choice, but I’d never side with the MAGA hats in any way in order to make a point about the political system in America.
One of the Wright brothers said that. It's actually my favorite quote because it always reminds me we have no idea what the fuck we're wrong about.
googles
Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:
See? I was wrong.
HUMANS
Thank goodness computers are never wrong. :-P
Hey, they always do exactly as they're told!
Hrm, in that case, now I wonder how they are ever correct!?:-P
As a Software Engineer, I ask myself that question several times per day.
Bc chips are as dumb as rocks, but really really really good at repetition:-).
Easy, think about who decides whether or not they're correct.
Again, humans.
For now... except managers don't want to actually think, yet do want to be in control of even the tiniest aspects of every single fucking thing (see e.g. Boeing planes literally falling out of the sky, against the wishes of the engineers bc the managers figured that this way of skipping maintenance and then covering that truth from federal safety commissioners was "better"... for the sake of their profits ofc), so how soon until their unthinking need to "feel like" they are in control leads them to using computers to control the people, without even those humans who hold the admin rights ever making any conscious decisions?
I suspect that a thinking computer may be correct far more often than an unthinking human.:-D
And thank goodness it's not nearly impossible to convince a computer that it isn't correct when you don't have admin rights.
sudo you're a fucking idiot, computer
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
-- Thomas Watson, president of IBM
I cannot stomach much of it, but it is fun to go back and watch older media related to technology - e.g. the six million dollar man has like spinning tape disks, when computers were entire-room affairs.
So he was right, using the definition at that time, though there was also so much potential for more.
Also it is funny to hear them say that technology would literally make the six million dollar man "better", not just "well again" or "he will have side effects but his capabilities will be far above the norm" or some such. One glance at Google these days, or a Boeing plane, does not inspire me to think of the word "better" than what came before even from those exact companies. Technology moves forward, but I am not so sure that the new is always "better" than the old. It was an interesting bias that they had though, during the cold war and after the moon landing.
"We can improve him."
And I believe tape storage hadn't even been invented when Watson said that. It may have even been pre-magnetic tape entirely because I believe he said it before a computer was actually invented (unless you count Babbage's difference engine). It was a prediction of what the world would need if computers existed if I remember correctly.
And it makes total sense, bc the idea of a "PC" hadn't been tried yet, bc the technology simply wasn't yet up to the task. And yeah I think I remember the same thing about that quote, though who knows:-P.
Anyway, it was hard for computers to be wrong about simple arithmetic operations, but they've come a long way since then, and AIs are now wrong more often than not.
Considering we now have a "CD" that stores 125TB of data ( https://www.livescience.com/technology/electronics/new-petabit-scale-optical-disc-can-store-as-much-information-as-15000-dvds ).
Not all older tech are necessarily worse. An LTO-9 tape can also store 18TB of data per tape. It's still sold today and great for archival.
Other cheaper, less error prone tech usually gets mass market penetration. But I am happy that massive storage niche tech is still there.
Yeah tape is niche, but still serves its particular purpose well!:-)
True. 12h to write the whole 18TB makes it a bit impractical for stuff other than backups. ;)
Well, I imagine the write-once, re-write-never part also may limit its applicability too:-). Then again, for a purpose where the data doesn't need to be constantly changing, like storing a TV show or movie, possibly even music if someone wants to listen to albums rather than randomized songs, it could offer a lot of practical utility to many people.
Oh you can totally erase and reuse the tapes. Depending on the tape software you can also rewrite parts or replace older files with incremental updates. It just really takes a while of rewinding. And the noise it makes is kinda retro...
Hehe, I can just imagine that in my mind...wrrr.....:-P
I love this response!
It was a very fitting time to be wrong lol
You were wrong, which proves your point correct. Good job being wrong and right at the same time.
Oh, and to provide numbers:
https://www.distance.to/New-York/Paris
That's 5,837.07 km.
As of the moment, the longest flight by distance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_GlobalFlyer
That's 7.1 times the Paris-to-New-York flight distance.
As for time:
The longest flight by time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager
That's 800 miles (1,400 km) longer than the circumference of the Earth. Humans are a trip.
Plus X-37B has flown round the earth for two and a half years on its longest flight. I know it's not really what he was thinking about as it's launched in space from a rocket in orbit but then that just adds even more to the notion tech advancement can be almost impossible to predict.
Wilbur clearly didn't know about in-flight refueling.
It also makes me wonder if trans-atlantic gliding is a feat that could be feasibly attempted with modern technology.
He also isn't talking about airplanes, but airships. Sure plenty of planes make the journey every day, but zero airships do because they really are quite useless for it. Obviously he was wrong becauae a few airships did end up making Atlantic crossings, but they were slow, cramped, and dangerous compsred to ocean liners.
So context matter, you say. This is revolutionary! But it will never catch on.
At a computer trade show in 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC's 640KB usable RAM limit: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
That quote was in the context of the 1981 personal computer market, and in that context is correct.
It’s like a game company CEO saying 12GB of video ram is enough in 2024 so we don’t all need an RTX 4090.
And then Stable Diffusion showed up
I think the context was for computers at the time.
That one is apocryphal if I remember correctly, but even if he did say it, at the time it was pretty much true.
Scientists in the 1800s also proclaimed we figured everything out and science was completed.
*1900s. Max Planck famously pondered whether he should pursue physics or music and was told by his professor that Physics was “done except for a few minor details”. Planck then went on to invent quantum physics to screw over students the world over.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-56594-6_11
"except for a few minor details". Understatement of the millennium.
lol
Thank you for the correction! That's such a great little story
And 100 years later, in one generation, humans land on the moon.
The most exciting result of scientific discovery is "well that's odd."
-Science
Peer review is "Hey. You seeing this shit?"
More like "Chat, is this real?" imo.
I still say that’s one of the ugliest sentences ever written.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle
"Oh no... Oh no... Oh shit... RUUUUUUUUUN!!!"
https://youtu.be/M75VLQuFPrY?si=RvhGffDSKG3943sA
I never though I'd see a resonance cascade, let alone create one!
You'll get the noble prize for this posthumously!
When I first began learning HTML (way before CSS and the modern web), my most engaged moments were when things broke. Way more satisfying learning how to fix them than having it work right away. What a great observation / comment.
As a professional dev my reaction to broken things is more like "ah fuck, not again! I hope it's nothing serious.".
Two hours later: Damn, used an upper case "A" instead of a lowercase "a" in my variable reference
Dave Jones of the EEVblog always says to beginners "I hope your project doesn't work." He thinks it's a much better learning opportunity that way.
This is amazing news. It's like being shown that Neutonian physics are wrong, so now we have the ability to come up with a better model, then massive advancements in technology can occur.
We did find out that Newtonian physics is wrong. Einstein got famous for it and we now use general/special relativity and quantum phsyics.
No, Newtonian physics works just fine. Unless things are too big, too small, too fast, or too slow.
At least that's what a meme I once saw said.
So it works fine on human scales, but for most of the universe it is inadequate. That means it's wrong. Quantum physics and relativity are also wrong since he are unable to reconcile the two, despite them both being the best models we have for their respective scales. We have known for the past century that we have only just begun to understand the universe, and that all our models are irreconcilable with each other, meaning that they are ultimately wrong.
Just because a model is useful doesn't mean it is right.
Agreed, but it leads to people who are less knowledgeable to draw the wrong conclusions.
Basically for just about anything you want to do on Earth Newton works perfectly fine. You can send people to the moon using nothing but Newton. Two big things you need Einstein for is the orbit of Mercury and GPS satellites. So from a pure science point of view Newton is wrong or maybe incomplete. From a regular Joe point of view Newton is dead on. By proclaiming Newton is wrong, it leads to people concluding that all science is wrong, because there is always someone working on the next iteration. So people think vaccines are dangerous, wearing masks is dumb, herbs and spices cure cancer, global warming is fake and homeopathic shit does anything except remove money from their wallets. Because what do scientists know, they've been wrong all the time in the past.
Newton is not wrong, it's just incomplete for some very niche things. And Einstein fixed all of that so we're all good.
In reality it's good to always be looking to disprove something and create new and better knowledge. But only if that's your job and only for very niche things. We've got the basics down for most things on Earth and there is no reason any regular person should doubt that.
Be careful saying homeopathy only removes money from wallets. Yes it does that but it can be worse. Most of the vials are just water but any with a 1x or 1c designation actually do have some of the herbal element remaining and can cause problems.
I've never had sympathy for this line of thinking. Is the average person truly too ignorant to understand that science is a constantly developing process of better understanding our universe, not some set of unimpeachable rules carved into stone tablets once and forever? The fact that science can be updated, changed, revolutionized, is what makes it powerful.
If people need to be 'protected' from that fact, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way science is taught in schools. I can't accept that the average person can't comprehend such a simple idea that would take less than an hour to convincingly communicate.
YES because often times the opposing model is the Bible, which is updated very irregularly and people will form sects over a single differing interpretation of a single passage.
Changing your mind / learning new information can be construed as the super-hated "flip-flop".
Unfortunately, the illogical are immune to logic. No amount of it will be effective.
Yes, the average person is ignorant of stuff that need to be updated once in a while. There is something wrong with the current form of education. And you need to accept that understanding doesn't come easy.
If you can't do that last part, well, there you go. Same thing for the average person.
It's less that Newton is wrong and more like it's an approximation. Things always get more complicated because we are learning more about everything all the time, but for simple day to day things Newton is fine to be used and even taught.
You could also say it's important from a historical perspective, learning how we got from Newton to bigger and better things is important too.
I think you communicated it well in two paragraphs.
You see this thinking in science too. Dark matter has always struck me as an awful solution to a model breaking down. It's basically "the numbers don't add up so let's add a fudge factor to make it say what we want". But you're generally considered a kook for questioning it now. People will spout a bunch of big words and hope you shut up if you do.
It's called dark because we can't see it, and matter because it interacts gravitationally. There is nothing wrong with the term and the model of it even if we don't fully understand what the hell exactly it actually is and most importantly why it actually is. It's literally how science works. We don't know what the hell quantum probabilities and all the weird particles and fields mean on a metaphysical level either but QFT is the most tested and predictively powerful theory of science ever made. Is it complete? No, we may even never find the theory of everything. But it doesn't make our discoveries wrong.
Dark matter has been supported by various observations and is the best explanation we have. It's not the most widely accepted model just by pure faith, you know.
I have to admit I never liked it too much myself, but what do I know? There is an alternative theory, but it has its own problems.
I think it's more a matter of, "We know there's something that's causing an effect, but we can't see it or fully explain it... yet." There's something in the science and observations that's just not lining up the way it should. There are some ideas that have floated around that say that dark matter isn't necessary, it's just a misunderstanding of one factor or another, but nobody has really been able to nail the question yet, so it persists.
It’s more than that. There’s something that doesn’t add up, but if we assume the answer is “dark matter”, we can make predictions about it, that can guide us toward proving or disproving. Similarly, if we assume it’s one of the other theories, we can make predictions on what it must be like.
Dark matter is most straightforward because we understand best how matter acts. How much more matter do we need for the observations to make sense, based on current understanding? Ok, what could that matter be that acts gravitationally but we can’t see? How can we detect that?
Mmmm, Earth Newton...
I agree with the essence of your point but personally I’d never use the word “wrong”, only incomplete. Seems weird to call Newton’s laws “wrong” when the only reason that we are willing to accept GR is that it reduces to Newton.
I prefer mine:
Why use many words when few will do?
I personally think that “all models are wrong” does nothing to stop people from simply thinking in terms of practical inevitabilities, when it’s actually extremely important to understand that figuring out what’s “actually going on” was never even the concern of science in the first place.
It's not so much that it reduces to Newtonian predictions but that at human scale and energy levels the difference between Newtonian and general relatively is so small it's almost impossible to tell the difference.
What you’re describing is literally what it means for general relativity to reduce to Newtonian mechanics. You can literally derive Newton’s equations by applying calculus to general relativity. In fact, if you ever get a physics degree, you’ll have to learn how to do it.
It's inaccurate, not wrong. Framing things in right and wrong misrepresents scientific progress in a way that leads to ridiculous conclusions like some post-modernist post-truth philosophers came up with.
In fact, Lord Rutherford said that "ALL models are wrong, but some are useful" 🙂
While we're talking about scientific nobility...
"In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting."
-- Lord Kelvin
Conversely, just because a model is wrong doesn't mean it's not useful.
Some relevant reading: The Relativity of Wrong, by Isaac Asimov.
I think OP knew that. He was just repeating what he read in a meme.
Isaac Newton made some incorrect assumptions. In most situations on earth the error is small enough to ignore (you don't need to worry about time dialation to calculate the projectile path of a thrown rock), but there's depreciencies in the cosmos (like mercury's weird precession). So in a sense, elementary mechanics never was correct, but it was the best humanity had for awhile until Einstein's relativity and it's still useful in many not-extreme contexts.
Really, until we actually find dark matter, we can't say for sure that relativity is correct either, but that's just science.
I thought we may have found dark matter already, but we lack the ability to measure it and confirm?
We noticy it's effects on baryonic matter, but have no known way of detecting dark matter itself. It's a bit like how a fisherman can know that there is a large fish in the pond by the giant splashes and ripples in the water, but he can't catch it because it has zero interest in any lures or bait he uses.
Now that there is an understandable analogy.
I think the best way to say it is, relarivity can reduce to Newtonian at small (but not sub atomic) scales, or that Newtonian mechanics are incomplete
I think that's the point they were making.
I'd like them to look for repeats of galaxies. Galaxies that may be the same but slightly different or in different parts of the universe. If the universe was its own black hole we might see like a sort of kaleidoscope effect
The trouble with that is the difference in time. Since the light has to travel such a vast distance, multiple images of the same galaxy will show different stages of maturity. Even the stars will have been recycled. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ever demonstrate that two galaxies separated by billions of light years are actually the same galaxy in a curved Universe.
I believe that would be a Torus-shaped universe that could produce that effect, basically a donut where space loops back in on itself. I think it's something that's been considered, though it sounds as if there's no evidence for or against that idea, and it's not considered likely.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/07/21/why-the-universe-probably-isnt-shaped-like-a-donut/?sh=11e56b426e60
My money is on a dodecahedron.
Dangerous way of putting that since we have so many easily weaponized idiots who will carry that water, a better way to say it would be "our understanding of neutonian physics is incomplete at the moment"
I agree, it is more accurate that way. English is not my first language, so I missed that detail. In South Africa, we also don't have a significant anti-science movement, so it does not always occur to me naturally. The scientific approach is generally well respected and understood here.
We have a very limited view of the universe so it's no surprise that our theories are often wrong or incomplete. The beauty of science is that when a theory proves inadequate, it gets replaced with a more complete one.
yeah, but it's always a shitshow when someone brings alternate theories to the big bang. it's almost like back in those days when they burned people for suggesting the earth may be slightly less flat than expected.
That's because alternative models like MOND or string theory end up breaking more things than they solve. Fixing the leak in your roof is great, but doing so by breaking the living room wall isn't really an acceptable solution.
In optimization problems, you can get stuck at a local maxima. It looks like any direction you go makes things worse. But the only way out of that is to try something that does make things worse and try refining from there to see if you can get to something better. Maybe that living room wall does need to come down in the process.
Isn't string theory basically dead at this point?
It works perfectly as long as you assume there are a bunch of extra spatial dimensions that can't be seen...
Don't dare question dark matter in front of a physicist.
It's always funny to me when people bring up how science was wrong in the past, as evidence for why we shouldn't trust it now.
You know what replaced the bad science? Good science.
Or rather, we replace the bad science with the best explanations we can offer, right now.
I'll take the plumb pudding model over "deity did it, stop asking questions" any day, because you can still do something useful with it.
Doesn't even matter if our understanding is wrong and will be updated later.
Science is the best philosophy 💪
I've always liked the adage: science doesn't tell us what's true, only what isn't.
We don't know the best way to treat cancer, but we know leeches don't work.
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'” --Isaac Asimov
TIL Columbo was the ultimate scientist.
"Oh, just one more thing..."
The scientific spirit at work!
The Hubble constant seemed determined not to be constant.
Sounds like a quote from the Hitchhikers Guide
Get your freaking towel and get outta here, man!
Now that's a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is
The Hubble Suggestion just doesn’t sound the same.
It's called Webb-constant now.
Dogulas knew:
-- Arthur Dent, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Series.
Sounds more like Arthur knew...
Maybe Maybe there's something seriously wrong with the Universe? Why is it always US who are wrong?
Hey, it's me, the Universe. I just wanted to say, this is no longer working for me. And if it makes you feel better, sure it's not you, it's me. Please don't call.
The universe is, frankly, a complete shitshow.
I've heard this has made many people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move
I mean it's got some valid points but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
I like to think that whenever we discover something new, the universe just got an update and we discovered the patch notes.
It seems odd to me that the universe would be expanding at the same consistent spherical shape. I've seen plenty of explosions and they never look like that. The big bang, which consisted of literally all matter in the universe would surely be no different.
Except it’s not that they are finding the expansion rate is different in some directions. Instead they have two completely different ways of calculating the rate of expansion. One uses the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The other uses Cepheid stars.
The problem is that the Cepheid calculation is much higher than the CMB one. Both show the universe is expanding, but both give radically different number for that rate of expansion.
So, it’s not that the expansion’s not spherical. It’s that we fundamentally don’t understand something to be able to nail down what that expansion rate is.
It’s because CMB stopped for coffee, obviously.
(That was a great explanation, btw.)
It just wraps around, like a videogame. Duh...
Just to confirm, the expansion is the same in different directions under both methods of measuring?
Under the CMB method, it sounds like the calculation gives the same expansion rate everywhere. Under the Cepheid method, they get a different expansion rate, but it’s the same in every direction. Apparently, this isn’t the first time it’s been seen. What’s new here is that they did the calculation for 1000 Cepheid variable stars. So, they’ve confirmed an already known discrepancy isn’t down to something weird on the few they’ve looked at in the past.
So, the conflict here is likely down to our understanding of ether the CMB or Cepheid variables.
I wish the article had broken it down the way you did. Thanks!
Ah ok. Thanks for the correction.
The only thing spherical is the visible universe from earth that we can see. Both in time and distance. Due to the expansion of space that volume is increasing.
The entire universe could be infinite and take on any number of infinite shapes. Our local universe could be completely different from the rest of the universe and we'll never be able to know..it's wild.
Recent experiments trying to determine what the curvature of space-time is in the visible universe has concluded that it's pretty much flat But it's entirely possible that we're just on a very very very large (infinite?) curved surface of spacetime that just looks flat to us..
I would bet on it in fact. It makes logical sense to from my perspective.
I'm no way an expert in this, but I've been told it's wrong to think of the expansion of the universe like an explosion where everything moves away from a single point, but rather that the space between each object is expanding, comparing it to the way the surface of a balloon expands (if you were to paint multiple dots on the surface of a balloon they would all move away from each other when you inflate the balloon), though I like to think of it as yeast bread expanding since that's 3d.
Have you considered the universe may actually be a torus instead of a sphere, eg: bagel-verse?
Dodecahedron. Fight me
Yes that sure is an option, but it doesnt fit in my pastry-centric theories of the universe.
Spherical? We don't know if the universe is of finite size.
As far as we know, it could just as well be infinite, and the expansion happens everywhere.
Everything is relative so the only thing we know is that the distance between galaxies increases. But we don't know if there's a “border” of the universe or not.
The big bang (if it is still a valid theory) would have been unlike any explosion you have ever witnessed. The big bang was not an explosion of only matter, since time and space were both created during this event as well.
Really, calling it an explosion is not right in the first place. It's one of those unfortunate cases of bad naming in science, another being 'The God Particle' (which was originally supposed to be The Goddamn Particle.) Physicists prefer using the word 'expansion.'
I think it gets more spherical the larger it gets. The initial explosion from nukes are fairly spherical if you look at the old film. https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2010/09/28/130183266/abomb
One of the images from that slideshow begs to differ.
I like the donut universe.
https://www.livescience.com/the-universe-might-be-shaped-like-a-doughnut-not-like-a-pancake-new-research-suggests
There's some interesting ways of understanding "dark energy." This is just one.
I feel (intuitively (which is almost certainly wrong)) that it's expanding like a fluidic wave. Think lighting a gasoline puddle on fire.
Yay! We are learning something new!
This is what I was very very excited for. The Hubble photos were more exciting because they’re visual spectrum. The James web is all about discoveries.
But moooom, I hate learning new things
TLDR: Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. We can now confirm it's not measurement error.
It's not a matter of where we look, it's the method we use to calculate the expansion. The 2 methods to calculate the expansion rate give us different results. For a good explanation, here is a YouTube playlist of videos by Dr. Becky Smethurst where she discusses & explains the "Crisis in Cosmology": https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn
Oh. Well. That's. Terrifying?
Uh, why?
I'm afraid of things I can't understand.
You can make a religion out of that!
don't worry, we're expanding with it!
I'm not expanding! It's just my big bones, y'know!
Over and over again. That scope is really opening things up.
It was the same for the Hubble telescope back in the day (and still!)
Good riddance, the answer can never be too simple.
The human need for 'constants' may already be too simple. Gravity for example is treated as a constant value in Physics but is actually variable.
I might have missed something, but AFAIK, gravity is the same everywhere. Bigger things, bigger gravity, sure, but two equal things in different locations don't have different gravitational attraction
Your understanding of what constitutes "Physics" (tip: it's not a bunch of kids in a classroom) tells me that we can safely ignore your opinion.
Yay, progress!
But maybe the measurement methods are not correctly understood either, as profen by the brightness of white stars used to determine age, lately.
The
cakeBigBang is a lie.original source :
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad1ddd
see also :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law
Hubble tension
In the 21st century, multiple methods have been used to determine the Hubble constant. "Late universe" measurements using calibrated distance ladder techniques have converged on a value of approximately 73 (km/s)/Mpc. Since 2000, "early universe" techniques based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background have become available, and these agree on a value near 67.7 (km/s)/Mpc. (...)
(...) The most exciting possibility is new physics beyond the currently accepted cosmological model of the universe, (...)
Can someone give me the spark notes I started reading but I'll never get through that or probably even understand all of it
As I understand it, there are two measures of cosmic distance/expansion rate in which we are pretty confident.
One is using supernovas as a measure. Since one kind of supernova has very particular characteristics, it is easy to calculate the distance. It is like knowing that everyone has the same kind of candle, if you see a bunch of lights around you, you could make certain assumptions about how far they are from you by how bright they are. Also, with more precise measurements, we can use the doppler effect to know how fast they are moving. We have observed the area around or Galaxy and have come up with a very precise measurement for how fast the universe is expanding.
The other measurement is by looking at the cosmic wave background. This is the "first" thing we are able to see after the big bang. I don't really understand the details of this one, but scientists have also been able to calculate the expansion rate of the universe very accurately with this radiation.
As we have done more experiments to measure these two numbers, instead of converging on the same number, the results are actually diverging. Recent results have even made it so the error bars no longer overlap.
So, we have some big questions -
All of this is called the Hubble Tension. It is probably one of the biggest questions in cosmology currently.
Thanks this is both an uncomfortable and exciting thing to read.
Basically,
Everything you know is wrong.
Black is white, up is down, and short is long
And everything you thought was just so important doesn't matter. Everything you know is wrong. Just forget the words and sing along. All you need to understand is, everything you know is wrong.
I wish I had more upvotes for the random Yankovic!
It's simple, imagine you've got two smart friends that both have an opinion about a TV show you didn't watch - you can't tell who is right but the fact they disagree suggests they might be wrong when they say you can't have flying cars and time travel.
Do all parts of a growing, living creature expand at the same speed?
In America, our guts grow way faster than our brains, bc that's where we do most of our thinking. :-D
Ohhh that makes sense! You have some REALLY smart people over there!
Damn straight - it has it right there in our flag (the red is bacon 🥓)!
Holy fucking shit. How have I never seen that version of your flag before? That other one is so boring why isn't this one flying everywhere?
Bold of you to presume that it isn't!? :-P
And if you think that's something, wait till you see our history books:
And our newspapers:
(save us from ourselves?)
Well damn! No wonder you guys are so patriotic! I think I might be a bit jealous of your freedom and your news industry.
(Wish I could help 😞 I'm just up here in this other little North American country. The really cold one. Just wishing someone saves you from yourselves before that stink moves too far up and gets embedded in the carpet. Unfortunately we've been getting more and more whiffs of it in the past couple years. We may need help too.)
Yeah, it's spreading all over the world. Again. Except this time we seem to be for rather than against it, for some reason? :-(
Well it sure is how it seems depending on where you look. Just gotta hope that a majority of people haven't lost their mind yet.
I dunno, I feel like I have lost mine at least:-).
Btw in case it is fun, here is a video from John Oliver about authoritarianism.
Stay strong! (and warm if at all possible:-)
Unfortunately that link doesn't seem to work in Canadia but I'll look it up. I love John Oliver.
o7 <3
Oh that's weird. If it helps, here's another link that my phone automatically translates the above into: https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=RyyrDneVyLze3rWE&v=ximgPmJ9A5s&feature=youtu.be. Anyway it's just the word "Authoritarianism". Enjoy!:-)
Did you know that because your feet are closer to the gravitational center of the earth your head ages faster than your feet?
I did, I have no grey hairs on my feet.
Gonna go ahead and add "how much farther did my head travel than my feet due to the curvature of the earth" to my list of weird statistics I want an answer to
It would take something like a million years for your head to age more than a second. It's a fun thing to tell people though lol
A bat should be less affected by this uneven aging due to the whole sleeping upside down thing. They still spend some time upright so it balances out a little better than what you'd see with most of us who generally stay somewhere between prone/supine and standing up throughout the day.
It's like the stars when observed at veryx2 far distance they start to behave weird. Blinking a bit faster than normal this might cause the reason for much faster expansion when calculating. Entropy suppose to be improbable right but at far distance all those improbable they probably all eventually add up. Just my thought anyway.
Have you ever had a dream that
That you, um, you had, you'll, you would
You could, you do, you would you want you
You could do some, you...
You'll do, you could you, you want
You want him to do you so much
You could do anything, do anything
Have you ever had a dream
You could do anything, do anything
Have you ever had a dream
You could do anything, do anything
Perfect!
Lmao
Anyone here an expert on Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity (STVG), Tensor-Vector-Scalar Gravity (TeVeS) or f(R) gravity?
I took an undergrad course in stargazing, so I'm basically an expert in... whatever that is...
Prof was a big spectroscopy nerd, so we mostly focused on that.
What I gather from this article is that we still don't know what dark energy is. We haven't for decades. So the new telescope has failed to enlighten us about a mystery that's been around longer than half of the users here.
Yes, we still don't know what dark energy is, but the article doesn't directly mention that.
I would argue the opposite. It's entire purpose is to enlighten (gather EM data) and its done this to a higher accuracy than Hubble.
It's just job is not to explain the measurements. That's ours.
Yay!
Why couldn't this still be "big bang"? Look at a grenade for example. When it explodes, a shock wave expands from it in a near perfect sphere, but the fragments previous packed inside of it explode out at different speeds depending on their mass.
If you were in the center of that explosion, measuring the speed of fragments traveling away from you, they'd travel at different speeds. Only the initial shockwave would be constant.
This problem is not AT ALL about the geometrical shape of the expansion of the universe. It's about 2 different formulas that should give the same result for the rate of the universe, but give different results. I don't blame you, the article title is extremely misleading.
This is more like you measure the fragment speeds with both a laser and with radar, and get different readings off the same fragment.
Maybe because the speed of things is not the same thing as the speed of space expansion.
From my limited understanding, the discrepancy comes from the two ways to measure the universe's expansion: calculation from cosmic microwave background and calculating a cepheid variable, which uses pulsating stars (pulsars?)
Isn't it more likely that one, or both, ways of measuring are wrong? As in, they're not useful for measuring the universe's rate of expansion?
I'm trying to understand the distinction you are making. Could you elaborate?
Not a scientist but the article seems to mean that they checked that the tools themselves had no defects giving incorrect measurements.
This comment seems to be questioning the methodology of how we measure the rate of expansion so tackles a different aspect of the conversation.
But that's about as much as I can contribute haha
Pretty much this. In a (hopefully) more direct metaphor, are we sure we're using a ruler to calculate the length of a line, and not using a ruler to calculate the temperature of a paper?
I think the distinction is between arguing that there's a discrepancy because the measurement is bad, or because the measurement doesn't measure what we think it measures.
Is the theory right and we have a measurement error, or is the theory flat out wrong?
The model is wrong. Get hype
One day science will reach the Orphic understanding of the origin of the Cosmos.
Well, maybe at least this version:
Very fun in the context of Neil Turok's CPT symmetric universe theory as an explanation for the baryon asymmetry problem, so its discussion of matter being squeezed and then splitting into two which divided the particles may end up on point even if incorrect in their interpretation regarding the atmosphere.
We're just inside a cosmic space octopus, pretending we understand... With limbs of the CSP expanding as it moves through timespace.
And we, the cells inside a cell inside the octopus, like to believe ourselves enlightened.
I love space because it humbles even the most confident and intelligent members of our apish species.
What are the different rates? How much variance is there?
From memory it varies between about 67km/s per megaparsec to 74km/s per megaparsec.
Also it's really weird to describe something in terms of km/s when you look at an area over millions of lightyears
Those are weird units indeed :
(1 km /s) / 1 mega parsec =
(1000 m/s)/(10^6^ x 3.0857×10^16^ m) =
1/3.0857×10^19^ seconds =
1/978 x10^9^ years.
So, when we multiply by the rates (which are either 67 or 74) we get :
1/ 14.6 giga years or
1/ 13.2 giga years
... basically ( 1/ "age of the universe").
Meaning physical observation disagree about the age of the universe ...or the theory is faulty.
We abandoning materialism yet?
Not til we got them sweet, sweet asteroid mineralz. Parties responsible for that will dictate the direction humanity goes, imo
It's almost like cephid variable measurement is a shitty metric for measuring universe expansion because you're not actually measuring the edge of the universe just the rate of travel of two objects.
How can you measure the edge of the universe? Firstly anywhere you hold the tape you are in the universe secondly its expanding faster than the speed of light which is a limit for movement without space not the expansion of space.
Seeing the universe expanding at different rates could just mean we're not as close to the center as we thought, and the parts further away from the center are moving faster. That's my layman's hypothesis though
We're not thought to be at the center at all.
We're at the center of what we can see. But that's just a limit of the speed of light and the age of the universe. The universe almost certainly goes beyond what we can see. And there's no way of knowing how big the universe is beyond that.
It's like being on a ship in the ocean. You can see the horizon is 20miles in every direction. That doesn't mean you're in the center of the ocean. You're only in the center of what you can... Sea
Kurzgesagt's latest video actually covers this. I found the hypotheses they covered pretty interesting.
I sea what you did there. Whale done.
There is no center of the universe fwiw, there is no middle everything is expanding out from. Just a substrate that exists everywhere that inflates
That's what I believe as well. AFAIK from what we know the universe could be infinite or simply bigger than the observable part. But I think the only reason people default to assuming that it's finite is that infinity is hard to grasp and that illustrations of the big bang show a point and then disks of expanding size. People assume that means the universe is a sphere but nothing contradicts what you say so there's no reason not to believe that it's infinite.
It's fun to think it might just start going backwards or something because we have literally no idea what is actually happening, like it's very possible we'll never actually be able to see or measure anything outside the universe but there could be all sorts of things going on.
It's a decent testable hypothesis. If there were a center. Which seems obvious in the familiar mechanical way of say a firecracker. It certainly has a center with debris going every direction from that point.
However (to use a problematic oversimplification): what if the universe has a similarity to the surface of a balloon being blown up, where is the center?
Wherever you put your finger, the whole rest of the surface of the balloon is expanding away from that point. One center point is earth. Every other place in the universe also appears to be a center.
When looking at the evidence, data from telescopes and such, describing the expansion of the universe is closer to the balloon surface theory than the firecracker theory. Even though the firecracker theory is easier to comprehend.
When people are talking about the center they mean the relative center, in other words, our point of reference. This definitionally is where we are as the observer.
There is no center.
Yes there is and it is me.
Can I have some money?
Loose the centre assumption and you are there.
Our section of the universe is not as uniform as it should be.
Is it capitalism? Please let it be capitalism.
Do you ever take a break from the political stuff? Seriously man…. Take a rest.
I hope not, politics define almost every single moment of our existence. It's like physics, but with more assholes.
I didn’t know you cared.
About you? I don’t. But I care about all the others that have to be annoyed by this shit. This isn’t a political post. How about taking a break and just enjoy things for what they are instead of your usual attempts to manufacture arguments.
Says the person who took the bait 😆
You think this was me taking bait? Nope. This is just calling out a troll.
Shill*
They consistently parrot russian and chinese talking points under the guise of being objective
Gotta be careful what you call them. They can get you banned.
They have, in certain places, anyway. They are never alone, either. But i believe it is hyper important to have these conversations in the open. It is important to be aware of who is influencing people towards what ends as well, of course, but we must also be ready to call them out in the commons here along with the methods they use. Theyre much craftier than they were in 2016, presumably bc the left is that much harder to co-opt than the right.
Oh I absolutely agree. 100 percent. And I do the same. But I’ve paid the price for it.
Given the fact that my upvote for u keeps ur comments scores at 1, id say it seems ur lightly paying the price via downvotes now :p
Again, calling attention to the problem helps, imo.
Right on. Yeah, making people aware that they’re here to disrupt and use bad faith bullshit to try and convince people to not vote absolutely needs to be called out- and frankly, I’m amazed that mods allow this bullshit under “free speech” rules.
I’m not here to advocate that Biden is a great choice, but I’d never side with the MAGA hats in any way in order to make a point about the political system in America.