Only a Sith!
Comment on I must con(FeS₂), this sparked a laugh
mrsemi@lemmy.world 2 months agono science teacher would ever say that.
Careful with those absolute statements there buddy. I was told the same by a teacher, who challenged the class to come up with natural examples of either straight lines or perfect circles. He talked about how such things cannot exist because at high enough resolution/magnification there will always be interruptions.
Your own example of light traveling in straight lines doesn’t account for the fact that photons are waves and absolutely do not travel in straight lines.
nehal3m@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It travels in a straight line, just not in every dimension. Look at a waveform from above, it’s a straight line.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oh sure, bring evidence into it 🙄 lol. Um, how about sound waves?
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Sound waves are compressive waves, they radiate spherically (in principle, turbulence in the medium is going to make them slightly irregular)
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
imgcat@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
that’s just silly
PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Is it inaccurate?
imgcat@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
plain wrong
PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Apparently it is
Klear@piefed.world 2 months ago
In that case that Pyrite proves nothing.
Derpenheim@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
But photons are also particles.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 2 months ago
they do tavel in a perfectly straight line though.
space time is curved, not the light path.
SystemDisc@feddit.org 2 months ago
False because they are affected by gravity, even if ever so slightly
Maldreamer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
But isn’t the gravity bending the space, so the light itself is travelling straight but seems curved to the observer?
SystemDisc@feddit.org 2 months ago
Hmm, I’m not actually sure. Are we also ignoring refraction and reflection because the path is straight between those? If we’re talking discrete photons, you may be correct about each segment in its path being perfectly straight, but I’m not a theoretical physicist.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 2 months ago
gravity isn’t a force, it’s the curvature of space-time itself.
light follows a perfectly straight line through vacuum. the space itself isn’t straight.
like drawing a straight line on a flat paper, if you roll the paper, that line is still straight within it’s medium.
SystemDisc@feddit.org 2 months ago
Makes sense to me. Thanks
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
What about the fact that light bends around corners? Notably the interference pattern when shining light through a slit?
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Stop being mean to light by making it choose what slits to go through.
it has choice anxiety.
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Ah, sorry for the confusion, I was referring to the single-slit experiment, I wasn’t giving light a choice.