• Maxxie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 days ago

    What do you mean no advances in the last 70 years?! In the last decade scientists detected gravity waves and imaged an actual real black hole. Also they’ve been steadily chipping at quantum gravity, give it a couple decades they’ll get there.

    unless we cancel all the funding

    • saimen@feddit.org
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      3 days ago

      Aren’t the first two things just experimental proves of Einsteins relativity theory from over 100 years ago?

      I don’t know about quantum gravity though.

          • Maxxie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            2 days ago

            As a layman who’s into physics it took me like a decade to understand what is “wrong” with them. No educational string theory video is prefaced with “Hey this is an old unprovable theory that is essentially dead in the water, but it has some cool math tricks and is fun to think about” as they should be.

            • 1ostA5tro6yne@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              2 days ago

              PBS Spacetime’s approach was a pair of videos titled “Why String Theory is True” and “Why String Theory is False” and between them that pretty much put it to bed for me. cool math, cool worldbuilding, call me when they make a testable prediction. until then it goes on the scrap pile with aether and phlogiston.

  • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    Gravity is just a side effect of the fundamental laziness of all things. Causality moves slower near mass, so it’s kind of relaxing to move towards it. That’s why everyone does it.

    PS: There is actually a SciShow Spacetime video about gravity being an emergent property instead of a fundamental force. And no I didn’t get this from ChatGPT, I’m just that dumb when it comes to advanced physics haha.

  • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    57k a year is a decent salary if you live in the UK.

    A seasoned postdoc could expect to make 55K max. A professor a bit more.

  • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    This is wholly inaccurate. We do know what causes gravity; time dilation near matter (at least for smaller objects like the Earth). What we don’t know is why gravity, because we have yet to produce a model that matches both quantum effects and cosmic behaviors like gravity and dark matter/energy.

    “Quantum gravity” is the general term for what solution would describe something that ties these two universes of behavior together. The process of decoherence isn’t terribly well understood as far as carrying effects clear from particle scale to cosmic scale.

    Even then, some of the mathematical explanations from current models are plausible, but unproven.

  • Almacca@aussie.zone
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    3 days ago

    I find it quite marvellous that the universe contains unexplainable stuff like this, actually.

    • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      Unexplainable yet. We may be able to understand how Gravity works.

      But of course you are right, there are absolutely things that can not be explained. It is (very probably) impossible to explain why our nature constants are the way they are or why forces act the way they do. The easiest answer to why they are the way they are is to say “They are this way, because if they would be a little bit different we could not ask this question”. This sentence implies, that we live in some form of a multiversum and that there are multiple universes existent (in which form doesn’t matter) but it is impossible to detect them.

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        No, there actually are explanations for the effects as they exist in mathematical models. The problem is we do not yet have one single model that matches both quantum effects like superposition and cosmic scale effects like gravity and dark matter/energy.

        There is almost certainly some truth in those mathematical explanations, simply because it’s unlikely that something that is 99.99% provably correct has no truth associated with it.

        The problem is, it needs to be 100%, with proven and confirmed experiments, not 99.99% correct, before scientists will call it a “solved” problem.

        Also the anthropic principle does not prove or disprove multiverses.

      • Snowclone@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        It came from the Labratory of The Mind, yes, the work was entirely metaphysical, but here’s the wierd part. They used that mental experimentation and applied it to real life action, and it worked. It’s like imagining you have a magic carpet for years then you stand on one and it starts flying. It began as imagination of the world around us, then when checked against reality. It works. Someone figured out that if something was passing around a sun. A planet, that it would dim the light at regular intervals. They checked, it did, that’s the only reason we know there’s planets outside our solar system. Someone checked the lumens of stars and found the data matched the theory. We use the color variations of stars in a similar way to detect more data. It’s quite remarkable. A recent discovery in gravity is that while gravity is a ‘‘constant’’, it actually fluctuates from place to place, I’m not sure if anyone figured out why yet, but if and when, how they find out, will be their imagining a reason, imagining how to check, checking in real life, and getting the data on if it’s right or not.

        • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
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          2 days ago

          A recent discovery in gravity is that while gravity is a ‘‘constant’’, it actually fluctuates from place to place,

          I guess you are referring to the c9ncept of dark matter?

          To anyone who does not know what dark matter is:

          Dark Matter is the “solution” for differences in the real gravitational force a star has and how much gravity it should have based on calculations. Dark matter basically is matter that does not interact with light in any form (and therefore can not be detected) but still emits gravity.

          • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            Not “gravity a star has,” but the motion of stars around/near galaxies. It is the general motion of groups of massive objects that hints that there is a lot more mass ‘around’ most (not all) galaxies than what matter we observe could possibly account for.

            The ‘not all’ part is critical, because it points to something actually being there as opposed to the theory of gravity or relativity breaking down at larger scales.

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Made up, and then confirmed with experimentation against actual reality.

        Let’s not pretend science is literature with extra steps. It’s a process whos aim is to confirm things in a way that removes all possible alternative explanation or influence. A good experiment completely and fully removes the human element.

  • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    It is what make it risky to jump from the Burj Kalifa, at least on the last meter.

    • Match!!@pawb.social
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      4 days ago

      And yet, jumping from the Burj Khalifa at 1m off the ground is not very dangerous, so it’s not the Burj Khalifa that’s doing it

      • dave@feddit.uk
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        3 days ago

        And even if you jump from higher up, it’s the ground that does it, still not the Burj Khalifa.

    • nomecks@lemmy.wtf
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      3 days ago

      Wouldn’t the electromagnetic force be what makes jumping from the Burj Khalifa risky? It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop.

  • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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    4 days ago

    While reading this I had a sudden flash of inspiration in which I saw clearly exactly how gravity works, but then when I started typing I forgot again. It’s quite frustrating