Submitted 1 year ago by dyen49k@kbin.social to [deleted]
Weird how magic and mystery stops being magic when scientists have words for it.
One day we’ll discover the afterlife, but we’ll just call them “Post-Human Conciousness Wells” or something, and insist it totally isn’t the same thing as that ancient superstition.
Cmon, you wanna tell me the world is purely material when our math literally uses imaginary numbers to make sense of things?
Imaginary numbers are merely a poorly named mathematical construct used to reconcile the empirically observable phenomena of nature (e.g., summations of waves). They’re the means by which we achieve mathematical closure under exponentiation. You could call them whatever the F you want, so long as they could be used to represent vectors in the complex plane.
What reason do you have to believe in anything outside of material nature?
Up to the introduction of quantum mechanics imaginary numbers where only ever a theoretical tool and any calculation in electromagnetism, mechanics or even relativity can be done without them.
Also, any measurement you can make will always result in real numbers because there is no logical interpretation for imaginary measurements (a speed of 2+i m/s doesnt really make sense)
There’s a really good science fiction novel by Robert Sheckley called Immortality, Inc. where scientists in the future have discovered that there is an afterlife, but the only way to ensure you get there is a medical procedure and you can only do that if you can afford it. That’s just the beginning, there’s a huge amount of worldbuilding, but that’s the main theme of the book.
actual theoretical physicist here: "imaginary numbers" are just poorly named, there's nothing imaginary about them. You might as well use 2D geometric algebra to do the exact same job (treating real numbers as scalars and imaginary numbers as pseudoscalars)
Math is a tool of the mind to describe our world, imaginary numbers is only a extension of that tool to allow us to go beyond what mathematical logic prevents us to do, while still getting in the end a real number. Math, despite being powerful, is a flawed tool, so getting around its flaws by creating things like imaginary numbers isn’t absurd and doesn’t make the result any less real at the end.
On the other hand, I don’t think calling everything we don’t understand “magic” or the new trending words “supernatural” and “a miracle” and give god or anything else (like karma) credit for it would be more clever. Back then, we didn’t understood the concept of thunder and interpreted it as god’s wrath. Now, we understand it’s a transmission of electricity from the negatively charged clouds to the neutral ground through ionized particles in the air. I don’t think that scientists now, despite referring to the same phenomena, are talking about the same thing as we did a long time ago.
So no, no scientist will discover the afterlife “but we’ll just call them “Post-Human Conciousness Wells” or something, and insist it totally isn’t the same thing as that ancient superstition.” as it won’t be.
Quantum mechanics, as far as we know, requires imaginary numbers.
Math is a tool of the mind to describe our world, imaginary numbers…
There’s actually some controversy on that one:
On the other hand, I don’t think calling everything we don’t understand “magic” … and give god or anything else (like karma) credit for it would be more clever.
i think quite a few theologians would agree with that point
If you think it to the end, existence of an aftlerlife would be evidence that we run in a simulation.
Friend of mine (who is dead now ironically enough, and damn, I miss him), wrote a story about this. Where the dead show up on some random planet in the Andromeda Galaxy, in their prime, one that’s infinitely large and does the minecraft thing where it generates as you go, and contains the means to do pretty much anything except for leave… with them just showing up in the Capital City of the planet if they die again, which cannot be done of natural causes here.
The dead initially think it’s Heaven, but then they notice “Heaven” is being powered by a Dyson Sphere, eventually they connect enough of the dots to realize that their world is a simulation.
The protagonist is the grandchild of one of the deceased who wound up here after testing experimental teleportation technology, turns out the simulation brought him there to inform him why teleportation technology shouldn’t be invented.
Eventually the grandchild goes back to Earth, agreeing to keep this a secret, for fear that if people knew about this it would create “Dyson Sphere cults” and would encourage people to commit mass suicide, just “dying to get there”
We have cats that can be alive and dead at the same time. Perfectly normal, no magic involved.
And we can make you age slower than your twin brother, just go on a very fast space trip. Still no magic needed. It’s totally legit
We can make a single ray of light hit a wall and go through two or more windows at the same time, then interfere with itself. No magic, just don’t look too closely at the windows or it stops working.
We can also make two perpendicular polarizers stop blocking all light by adding more polarizers in between them. Also not magic, but the brightening is not linear, don’t ask why.
Okay imma need an explanation for the middle bottom and bottom right panels, what are they?
Also love the idea that magic is just science we haven’t explained yet. Most of us would be burned s as witches in the past based on our current knowledge
Middle bottom is the demon core, an extremely radioactive orb
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
And anyway, he’s the newest physics demon
3.5" in diameter, and 14 pounds. That seems very odd.
Solely based on knowledge, yes. In practice most of us wouldn’t be able to create a half working lamp from raw materials.
"I call it..._FIRE!!!_ Oh. Shit. You already have that. I don't really know any others."
This is also why at see inventions emerge almost at the same moment from people who don’t share knowledge.
A lot of invention is material science.
Even if I know enough to make a modern computer from raw materials, I’m not going to find the necessary industry to refine those raw materials correctly in the 1400s.
The middle bottom is the demon core, and I guess the bottom right is a reactor of some kind
The Cherenkov radiation gives it away that it’s a reactor of some sort.
I haven’t seen this before, unless it’s a nuetron breeder.
The bottom right one looks like a mercury arc valve: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-arc_valve It reminded me of an old Phoyonicinduction video youtu.be/QY6V2syGnZA
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/QY6V2syGnZA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I have a habit of calling things ‘technological magic’ because that’s what it is in my mind. The fact that the universal laws and logic exist in such a way to allow things like computers or the huge complexity of living things and AI matrixies is nothing short of miraculous when you think about it.
In terms of the bottom middle: that’s the demon core. Science Thor (a.k.a. Kyle Hill) does awesome videos on nuclear and radioactive stuffs which can explain it better than I could.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/aFlromB6SnU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
samw, what is the bottom right??
Cherenkov radiation. Look it up on youtube for a video of a experimental reactor making some.
Mercury arc valve, an old method of converting AC electricity to DC.
I don't know if I should be proud or not that I recognise a FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER
I only know this because of ElectroBoom
I mean, I’m relieved I recognize that one since I actually studied electrical engineering and I should remember these kinds of things.
I heard that in his voice
Is that the quadrant of diodes is?
Yes.
It’s something I’ve been proud to recognise and when electroBOOM did his piece on it, I was glowing with pride.
But the basic FBR there creates pulsating DC, for steady DC, you need capacitors, to trim the peak voltage and fill in the dips.
Though, if you have three phase, with each phase on a FBR, and combine the DC output, it’s pretty steady on the output because of how three phase works (no capacitors needed), and I think that’s pretty cool…
Seriously though, three phase AC is really interesting in how it functions.
Single phase only
We can totally explain how the universe works. It’s random! But it’s already not random! We can explain why, but you won’t understand it. Not magic!
It’s not random, you can’t simulate the universe with a 1d10… you need ∞d10 to get the right probability distribution for each throw. Luckily it adds up to a 1d10 when you throw an actual 1d10, just don’t ask why.
Magic is just what you don’t understand. Everything is a mechanism. Even if there was magic, a human soul, the afterlife, God, it would still operate under certain logical rules and principles. Eventually, unless there was something keeping us from obtaining knowledge, we would be able to apply science to magical forces. Science will eventually understand everything it is possible to understand, which might honestly be everything.
Yeah people used to think this way. But the Halting Problem proved that not everything in mathematics is solvable. If we can’t solve every mathematical problem, there’s gonna be things in science that aren’t solvable either.
Sorry for upsetting your belief system, but it’s simply not possible for us to know everything. Just one of those quirks of life, it’s been mathematically proven that not everything can be proven.
Halting Problem
Goes for me into the same bucket as proofs of god.
I never said we’d be able to understand or prove everything, just that there is some logic underpinning reality. It might be that some things are fundamentally unknowable, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist to be known, just that we’ll never know it.
I also don’t get what the halting problem proves about reality. It might be possible that infinities or unresolvable results are real, so long as we can still exist. The cosmological principle proves that we have to live in a reality that it is possible for us to exist in, otherwise we wouldn’t be here to observe it. So long as the infinities or uncomputable problems don’t prevent our existence, it might represent reality. If the equation doesn’t allow us to exist, then it doesn’t represent reality.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
Arthur C. Clarke
My favorite is: we know how old the fucking universe is just by looking up at the night sky.
We know that the universe was much denser and close together based on measurements, but cannot truly see the beginning. We think it’s most likely that the big moon in the sky most likely came from another planet hitting ours, but we don’t know exactly how the collision went down. Science is our best understanding, not some absolute source of knowledge. Our interpretations are often incorrect and updated accordingly, and even the most accurate theories are known to be an incomplete understanding. Until we understand everything, science is the search for knowledge, rather than knowledge itself.
We’ve got a pretty good idea of how the Proto-Earth vs Theia collision went down, though that is pretty recent.
Stop!!! Get those partial derivatives and upside down triangles away from me! I don’t want to see those abominations I learned in my electrical studies.
But, but, the Euler-Lagrange equation is really cool!
very smart to avoid the triangle, it gets so scary
This is good shit lmao
Yeah I fucking love this
Needs pictures of quantum locking and the rope trick
Roll 2d10 to synthesize technetium.
Technetium sounds like a name for the cool new superscience material in Iron Man’s ARC Reactor that makes Tony Stark get a last resort dark side superpower, not the 43rd element on the periodic table… I already called dibs on naming an armored superhero Technetium though, sorry!
where spherical metal cow?
Did you check the frictionless vacuum?
FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER!
I went to study physics and can confirm it’s all magic. I was onto them so I had to leave for my safety, because they guard the secret fiercely.
We finally found you! Rattle 'em, boys!
god i love those big old tube AC converters
Black magic design smith chart.
Doesn’t matter if it’s science math or God. It’s all the same shit to me. The things I have words for and the rest is poetry… How much do you appreciate that little mechanism? How do you experience physics? That’s up to you. Life is weird af and gots lots of soul IME.
JhonnyTheJeccer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Also light is not sentient, i knows when it is being measured and does different things, but its not sentient DO NOT WORRY!!!1!1!!!1!
yiliu@informis.land 1 year ago
Ahh, it’s no big deal. I know it sounds magical, but there’s probably some humdrum explanation…you’re probably just popping in and out of different universe in the multiverse whenever you observe a particle, or something mundane like that.
0nXYZ@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Boooooooring
PixxlMan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
(things often behave differently when you blast them with high powered lasers)
MajorHavoc@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And the high powered laser itself is behaving strangely.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
If we setup to disprove that light is particles, no luck, it’s a particle. If we setup to disprove that light is a wave, no luck, it’s a wave.
I understand there’s some reasonable quantum explanations, but many of those have some very weird implications. Last time I tried to wrap my head around it, we were still working on disproving whichever of the quantum theories we can disprove. That’ll be nice because it’ll likely rule out a lot of silly theories, while leaving an equally silly but probably true, theory standing.