This video illustrates the magnitude of wealth inequality in the U.S.
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Iâm sorry this happened to you. Trumpâs ability to divide people seems to have darkened the world. It does work both ways. I admit to avoiding people who embrace Trumpâs views. Many of them have revealed themselves to be selfish, greedy, and unkind to anyone not like them at a pathological level.
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Although the person in question loathes Trump, s/he seems to have gradually started to subscribe to some of the ideas held by the ânew rightâ, and has started to defend the reasons why USians voted for Trump, and the reasons the far right is gaining foothold here. Although I can regard some of the talking points legitimate, the reasons given and solutions suggested by the far right are, imho, not.
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I learned that while religious freedom for everyone is equally enshrined in the Constitution . . . some religions are more equal than others.
I was recently doing volunteer work at a hospital, and a patient who was a Wiccan was denied a visit from Wiccan clergy.
If this seems outlandish, please see below:
The politicians are deciding which religions they like and which ones they donât . . . and they donât distinguish between Wiccans and Satanists.
I actually sent an email to the Satanic Temple, and Iâll probably join so I can engage in political guerrilla warfare (which I use as a metaphor for aggressive political activism, not as a justification for violence).
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Will be cool if you edit that to âphotonâ.
I just figured out that I must not overuse AI. It is taking away my friends creativity and problem solving. They even think chatgpt is concious. I tried to convince them its just a code but they wonât listen. Anyways I m learning modular synthesis and i recently felt in love with Sunvox. I want to become a master at sunvox.
Also I want to read something like sherlock.
If you have some mysterious stuff, reply that shit.
I learned that JavaScriptâs idea of what constitutes a view, and SQLâs idea thereof, behave completely differently.
Time dilation has always fascinated me. Apparently itâs not linear, that is, at 50% of the speed of light, time dilation isnât 50%, in fact itâs still negligible. In fact itâs not very significant until you get pretty close the speed of light. I forget the exact numbers but itâs something on the order of 85 or 90% before it starts really shortening experienced time for you as the traveler.
Yeah they are great at trolling and creating conundrums for believers. I love the way they use the equal protection clause for things like putting a statue of Baphomet wherever some Christians want a statue of Moses in a public space (in one case they requested that it be put toe-to-toe with Moses). The fundies invariably withdraw their request as more trouble than itâs worth to defend.
Similarly to counter ârelease-time Bible classesâ, they created a âSatan Clubâ for children. If the Bible study is permitted, so must the Satan Club. Works quite well; I donât know that they actually ever had to run such a club for children, but they had a lot of fun creating the lesson materials.
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The Lorentz factor is what you use to calculation time dilation.
1 / sqrt(1 - (v^2 / c^2))
It only applies to objects with mass, because objects without mass, like photons, travel at c, and when v = c, this equation is undefined (division by zero). So for the special case of massless objects travelling at c, time stops completely.
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I know enough about physics to understand that time stops at light speed . . . except that I wonder about a supposed inconsistancy.
Neutrinos are massless and travel at the speed of light, yet I hear that there are 3 varieties of neutrinos, and that a neutrino oscillates between these three varieties while it is in existence.
So the question occurs to me: If time is frozen in place for the neutrino, then how can it change its state at all? How can something change if time doesnât pass?
See below:
Neutrinos are not massless. They have a very small mass, perhaps one millionth of the mass of the electron, but mass nevertheless.
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Ok, then how can they travel at the speed of light?
The closer an object gets toward C, the greater its mass.
Below is the formula for the increase in mass due to relativistic velocity.
If a neutrino was moving at 99.99999% of the speed of light, I would expect it to have a significant mass.
If I took an electron and converted most of the mass of the Universe into energy and used this energy to accellerate this single electron, it would still be traveling at (very slightly) less than C, and it would have a mass equal to whatever portion of the Universe that I turned into energy to accellerate this electron.
It seems to me that a neutrino either travels at the speed of light with no mass, or must have a significant mass if itâs traveling near the speed of light.
I would think that lightspeed and any amount of mass are inconsistent with each other.
So I admit to being confused.
Do neutrinos violate General and Special Relativity? I donât think so.
So I guess Iâm lost and/or misunderstand something.
Or maybe I think I know more than I really do.
If so, this wouldnât be the first time I ran my mouth and looked stupid.
BTW, if neutrinos have mass, does this mean that there are enough neutrinos zipping around the Universe to account for the âdark matterâ that everyone is looking for if we add up their masses?
I donât know, but what I am certain of is that this dark matter business is seized on by a lot of woo-ists these days in the same way that they like to drop terms like âquantumâ and âvibrationâ without really understanding what theyâre on about. An idiosyncratic panentheist on another forum likes to claim every chance he gets that since dark matter makes up most of the universe (hardly a proven and vetted scientific theory to begin with) that science doesnât know anything about most of the universeâs structure (and, of course, somehow HE does).
I get tired of this constant God of the Gaps posturing. To the extent that we donât yet know X, we just admit it and withhold drawing conclusions until we DO know X. We donât use X as a justification for Y.
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I agree with you when you mention being tired of the God of the gaps arguments (if we want to dignify this reasoning by calling it an argument).
If we always use the phrase âit must be because of Godâ every time we donât understand something, then women would still be dying after childbirth from sepsis instead of doctors washing their hands . . . because such deaths are âGodâs will.â
All of your questions are good questions and many of them still donât have answers, even 70 years after neutrinos were first detected.
As far as I know, neutrino masses are very tiny compared to the electron, and they travel at speeds close to, but not exactly at the speed of light. Precise neutrino speed measurements are difficult, and all of them made so far indicate neutrinos travel at a speed very very close to c, but it hasnât been ruled out that they travel at exactly c.
Hereâs an interesting article that popped up in Nature on Monday:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00296-9
Iâll leave you with a quote by Feynman: âIf you think you understand quantum mechanics, you donât understand quantum mechanics.â
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I wonder if I have a simple idea that may more precisely measure a neutrinoâs velocity, and also to âcatchâ more neutrinos than burying huge tanks of water in salt mines.
Itâs my understanding that neutrinos penetrate mass without being absorbed very often because mass is mostly empty space, and a neutrino doesnât stay in the vicinity of an atom long enough to interract and get captured.
If we have a linear particle accellerator that is spewing an energetic beam of, maybe, positively charged uranium nuclei, would the neutrinos that are traveling paralell to this beam stay in the vacinity of the uranium nuclei for a longer period of time?
I equate this it with boat race across a lake.
If a passenger on a speeding boat goes past a stationary boat and throws a ball, the chances are that he or she will miss.
Ifâhoweverâa slow boat and a fast boat are racing paralell toward the finish line, a passenger in the fast boat will be more successful at throwing the ball toward the slower boat, as they will be close to each other for a longer period of time than if the fast boat was passing a stationary boat.
Have neutrinos been detected by the changes that they cause in the beam of a particle accellerator?
No, you got this wrong. Neutrinos can penetrate mass(*) (even massive mass, like the earth) undetected/without interacting with it because neutrinos are electrically neutral, have extremely small mass, and interact via gravity and the weak interaction (which has a very short range). And thatâs why it is so difficult to measure their interaction. From the Wikipedia page on neutrinos:
A neutrino (/njuËËtriËnoĘ/ new-TREE-noh; denoted by the Greek letter ν) is an elementary particle that interacts via the weak interaction and gravity.[2][3] The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is so small (-ino) that it was long thought to be zero. The rest mass of the neutrino is much smaller than that of the other known elementary particles (excluding massless particles).[1] The weak force has a very short range, the gravitational interaction is extremely weak due to the very small mass of the neutrino, and neutrinos do not participate in the electromagnetic interaction or the strong interaction.[4] Thus, neutrinos typically pass through normal matter unimpeded and undetected.
(*) as in huge lumps of mass, though most of it is empty space.
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Thank you for clarifying this.