What's a scientific fact that sounds made up but is 100% real?
2mon 2d ago by lemdro.id/u/claim_arguably in askscience
There are more hydrogen atoms in a single molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system.
:P
For now…
I think I read somewhere we nearly were a binary star system with jupiter as the second star, if not for the rest of the gasses formed saturn which also made sure that jupiter moved out.
I remember briefly hearing that speculation but then PBS Spacetime putting that theory to bed by explaining that (IIRC) Jupiter would have to be much more massive for it to have had a chance at becoming a brown star.
Thanks
you mean the galaxy, a solar system usually has 1 star.
And a water molecule has 2 hydrogen atoms...
Yeah and how many hydrogen atoms are there in a SINGLE water molecule?
Woosh!
If memory serves, binary star systems are more common but the statement was specifically on the system around Sol
Some have more than one, and no solar system has zero stars, so the average is greater than one.
What about when the stars degrade into a dwarf?
All the planets in the solar system can fit between the earth and the moon
Australia is wider than the moon. If earth had the size of a football (soccer), the moon would be about 7m away. If the sun had a diameter of 1m, Neptune would be 5.6km away. In that scale model, the next star would be placed in the outer planets. Space is insanely big.
I’m confused what you mean by wider. As far as I can tell Australia is about 4000km wide and the moon’s circumference is about 11000km
EDIT: it’s late and I am dumb, I take it you mean the moon’s diameter! 3474km
7 meters?
I looked up the circumference of a football and it said about 70cm. As the moon is about 10 times the circumference of the earth away, that'd put the moon at 7m away.
Diameter or circumference?
A 70cm diameter soccer ball (>2 ft across) would be kinda fun. Except headers the CTE would be even worse!
All Very true facts. I admit I was and am still taken aback by the measurement and extrapolation of linear distances using... circumference.
Yeah it’s a weird way to make the distances sound shorter than pi*(a measurement we all can visualize).
You could calculate it more accurately, of course. But the relationship between earth's circumference and the distance to the moon is roughly 1:10, purely by coincidence, making it easy to calculate an estimate when scaling earth up or down.
That's insane when you really think about it.
I doubt we'll ever leave our system
If you count Voyager, we already have.
Otherwise ... Yea, I'll be surprised if society in general even makes it to 2100 unscathed.
Voyager is fantastic, but it’s still way, way closer to the solar system than anything else.
An excerpt from Wikipedia:
At this rate, it would need about 17,565 years to travel a single light-year.[78] To compare, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, is about 4.2 light-years (2.65×105 AU) distant. If the spacecraft was traveling in the direction of that star, it would take 73,775 years to reach it. Voyager 1 is heading in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.
Yes, and they are still on a galactic orbit, not a solar orbit. They are, unquestionably, the first things we're sending off, regardless of whether they arrive anywhere substantial.
This is why I don't get excited to hear about the discovery of 'Earth-like planets' 182 light years away.
30 years ago we didn't even know for sure if planets around other stars was a common thing and had no expectation we'd actually know their chemical compositions
Bad news with the AMOC modeling yesterday. 2100 is starting to seem optimistic...
And murcury is the closest planet to all of them!
Gonna need a fact check on this one.
Are we counting the gas of Jupiter or just the solid core? Same for the others
Actually, Jupiter doesn't have a solid core the way you think! The gases just get so dense at the core that it starts to behave like a solid. You couldn't, like, blow away all the clouds and have some rock to wander around on.
I assumed the hydrogen had become condensed into a crystal solid? Or at least, that's the current theory
Whole planets. You do have to cant Saturn because the rings don’t fit
they're ephemeral anyway
thats why you just flip Saturn so the rings unobtrusively stick up and down and not horizontal
Sharks are older than trees
Sharks are older than fire.
Sharks existed before there was enough O2 in the atmosphere to sustain a fire.
What. The. Fuck.
The real facts are in the sub-comments
They must have been really hungry for a long time before their staple diet of attractive people on beaches arrived :D
They are also older than the rings of Saturn.
Also trees existed before bacteria did. So when a tree died it just fell over and sat there for a while. Never decomposing
The earliest trees evolved around 400 million years ago.
The ancestors of bacteria were unicellular microorganisms that were the first forms of life to appear on Earth, about 4 billion years ago.[23] For about 3 billion years, most organisms were microscopic, and bacteria and archaea were the dominant forms of life.
It'd be remarkably fortuitous if bacteria evolved to break down wood before wood existed.
Yeah, I was quick in writing that comment
that isnt true, there was no decomposing fungi, bacteria that evolved yet at the time of the carbiniferous peroid, and those "tree" were actually gigantic gametophytes(posessing half the chromosomes) of early bryophytes. the actual first tree dint evolve til after that peroid.
Wild fires must have been insane.
Toads swallow food with their eyes. When they snag some food into their mouth they close their eyelids, and their eyes go inside and help push food down the throat before coming back up to the front of the head.
Sounds like a usefull skill for the next all you can eat buffet.
That would bring new meaning to "eyes bigger than your stomach"
It's always fascinating for me to learn about the totally unexpected and "creative" solutions evolution "comes up" with, real or simulated.
Time derivatives!
- Rate of change in position is called velocity
- Rate of change in velocity is called acceleration
- Rate of change in acceleration is called jerk
- Rate of change in jerk is called snap
- Rate of change in snap is called crackle
- Rate of change in crackle is called pop
And if I recall correctly
- Rate of change in pop is called lock
- Rate of change in lock is called drop
When the fuck could those possibly be useful? 😆🙃
Not sure about anything past crackle, but minimum snap trajectory is widely used in efficient path planning for quadcopters.
I can't even comprehend what something beyond jerk means in reality or how to even produce it by physical means
Well these are higher order derivatives, so they do have physical meaning but the latter ones are increasingly abstract and subtle from our normal earthly perspective.
If you think of a stable and perfectly circular orbit, that's a steady and constant acceleration. Then if you thrust to make it elliptical, you're changing the acceleration which can be measured as jerk. But then if that thrust itself is variable, you can measure its changes as snap. And then of course the rate of how much you change that is crackle, and so on.
If I was working with those concepts, I'd just start using numbers.
Like, acceleration is v2, jerk is v3, and so on.
These are n th order mathematical derivatives so I'm pretty sure physicists do something very similar to that whenever n matters.
IIRC the James Webb had/has max snap, crackle and pop tolerances. Not sure about these two.
They aren't useful. It is just scientists memeing. Any research that involves anything past jerk would be esoteric.
Getting them just right is important for driverless cars learning to brake in a way that feels comfortable to humans
In aerodynamics I guess
This explains the sounds when I move to get up, these days.
Is it snap? You might have to slow down your rate of jerk
I hope it's not it Canonical might sue them.
Wait, what. 🤩
Don't forget jitter, now!
Which one is jitter?
Jitter is a technical term for latency variations between Internet packets over time.
High jitter is bad for VoIP and online gaming and potentially streaming if the jitter is caused by packet loss and retransmits.
None of those, but I think a series of irregular jerks could be considered jitter.
So trump, elon and hegseth form a jitter?
I only know jitter as irregularity in data flow (e.g. network packets).
Jerk is sometimes called jolt though. Both terms seem fitting to me. Supposedly in roller coaster design, having too much jerk/jolt can be quite unpleasant for riders. Which kind of makes sense, if the acceleration varies too wildly I could see that making me sick.
I only know jitter from electronics as well, but it could be applied in mechanics as well. Iirc, jitter is the irregularities in the intervals in a periodic signal, like data transfer. But jitter will be present in anything with a period, it doesn't have to be digital signal. A jerk is a single action, so there is no period and there can be no jitter. A series of jerks could have a seemingly regular period, but when measured more accurately, the intervals between jerks will have small variances: jitter. Hence why imo a series of irregular jerks could be considered jittery.
Noone ever uses it that way though and I'm not even sure that I phrased it correctly, but because of the word "jerk" I find it a mildly fun play on words.
If you took all the DNA from every cell of one person and laid it in a straight line they would die
Relevant xkcd: How long would you survive with no DNA?
Red grapefruits were originally created by planting yellow grapefruit near a radioactive source with the express purpose of creating mutations in the plant.
Commies! They're in your fruits!
Commies and fruits have been bedfellows for a long time.
From what I read, red grapefruit like Ruby Red existed naturally, but the atomic mutations only made them more red / not fade over time.
Radioactivity and chemical mutagens are normal methods of creating new traits in crops. That's how new varieties of fruits, grains etc. are often created. Nobody knows what exactly it does on the genomic level, usually. And then people complain about modifying a specific gene by targetted tools...
Absolutely, there are thousands of cultivars that were created via mutagenesis (and all of them qualify for organic food, because this isn't GMO for some reason)
But quite few followed the old "chuck some cobalt in a circle of crops and see what happens" method they used for grapefruit.
So that's where Oxygen Not Included got the idea from.
Something like a fifteenth of all humans who have ever lived are alive today.
Carrying capacity of agriculture goes brrr.
And then a century of low child mortality on top of that.
The moon is currently drifting away from the Earth. Eventually, that will make total eclipses impossible, so enjoy them while they last.
Fast forward a few billion years, and the Sun begins to swell up, engulfing the closest planets. At some point, the atmosphere of the Sun could begin to cause drag on the Moon, slowing it down. If so, the Moon begins to crash down on Earth. Once it reaches the Roche limit, it gets shredded into kwazillion bits, and the Earth will have rings, just like Saturn.
There a more hydrogen atoms in a single molecule of water, than there are stars in the entire solar system.
Told that joke to my daughter. Didn't understand it. Fine, hydrogen, atoms molecules... thought one for a 10 y/o with no particular interest in science.
But then I asked how many stars our solar system had.
Answer: "I don't know"
Asked with emphasis on "our solar system".
Answer: "Infiite number of stars"
Asked how many stars are in out living room
Answer: "Zero"
Asked how many stars are on our planet
Answer: "Zero"
Me thinking we are on track and that she understood the scoping error in her first assessment asking the original question again with emphasis on sun (in german its sonnensystem, I.e. sun system, so it makes sense)
Answer: "Zero"
Lovely seeing extrapolation in real live.
I'm sorry, you are raising an AI.
Heehee, you're clever.
Good one
At least read the top comment before you write the exact same thing.
Sorry I don't have it sorted by top :p
There's 10⁹ living cells in a gram of surface soil, and in 20 km depth that reduces to 10⁶ cells per gram, but they're still alive and actively metabolizing down there! eating rock, mmhm tasty rock oh yeah! :p
they have cell turnover rates of hundreds of years though, so they age very slowly and multiply very slowly due to energy shortage.
Life uhh.... find a way.
I wonder if they ever check samples from like meteors, asteroids or moon rocks for evidence of that kind of organism.
Yes, it’s done often.
Thank you for posting that, i had no idea
Fundamentally everything and everyone, even nothing, is made of the same fields of invisible...stuff. We can measure them in very accurate detail. We are all connected. We are all ripples and waves in those fields. Everything is. If only you could see the entire spectrum of light, you would see one of those fields.
All I can see when I look in your eyes are the waves of love that connect us.
Apt username
E: Invalid operation username
Blue birds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?
It's like no matter what we do we will go extinct
Pigeons make milk.
Wow! It's controlled by the same hormone as in mammals: prolactin.
I figured this might surprise people. 😁
For the record though, I would like to discourage people catching pigeons and squeezing them to add milk to their hot morning beverages.
Unless it's a mourning dove. In that case, the homonym allows for it.
You just made me realize that people holding birds that can lactate in captivity for their milk isn't an impossible scenario.
Haha. 🐦🥛
I have nipples. Can you milk me?
I'M OLD GREGG
Fine. Bend over so i can reach your prostate.
Yes?
Another reason why birds could not be real.
Male ducks have a corkscrew penis almost as long as their body. Female ducks have vaginas that corkscrew in the opposite direction, with false endings. Ducks do not have consent, so nature found a way.
The rape labyrinth
Trump branded hedge maze
Does the male spin his body around in an impossible way until he's fully inserted? Or does he just shove it straight in, painfully eviscerating her?
Even better! They just kinda fire out and expand like a balloon you'd use for a balloon animal.
Wait..m have you never seen the spinning ducks on the lake before?
The chip on my shoulder wants to rattle off a litany of facts related to women's health, but I imagine this was intended to be a lighthearted post so I'll grab my popcorn and wait to see what others share
You can't just tease us like that and not deliver...
I wanna hear all of them!
Chainsaws.
I fuckin knew it!
Women are more likely to have auto immune diseases due to having two copies of every X chromosome gene, and something related to the complex biological machinery involved in getting a woman's immune system to not kill developing foetuses.
Thank you for reading the room. And sorry women's healthcare sucks.
Clouds.
- polar stratospheric clouds play an important role in creating the ozone hole
- the highest clouds on earth are about 80 km high
- in the mid-latitudes most rain is cold rain, that means it leaves the clouds as ice and melts on the way down
- pure water droplets without an aerosol inside (cloud condensation nucleus) freeze at about -40°C, sea salt aerosols make cloud droplets freeze at about -38°C, …
And there’s much more to be found.
Snakes have two dicks.
"Hemipenis"
See also: Brodozer and Pavement Princess.
I mean... Everyone who's scrolled on e621 for 2 mins knows this
So there are two mes inside me. One of them looked up what that is and then promptly told the other me not to.
Like a... bifurcated one similar to their tongue or they have two in different parts of their body? And do females also have two holes? Are snake threesomes a thing?
So many questions!
If snake make male and female both had 2 genitals, you could create an infinite sex chain.
They're Klingons?
There's more ships in the ocean by weight than there's fish.
[edit]
See my other comment below, probably more accurate to say the total weight of all ships is around the same as the total weight of all ocean fish.
And there's far more biomass of farm animals than what we'd usually think of as "wildlife".
Human chemical plants now do most of the nitrogen fixation in the nitrogen cycle, too.
Humans have taken over the biosphere.
There are more aeroplanes in the ocean than ships in the sky.
By how much?
(And how do we know this?)
From an old XKCD What-If, which put it at 2.15 gigatons ships vs 2 gigatons fish. But that uses quite old numbers.
Looking at up to date data from the UN there's 2.4 gigatons of ships. Note that this is dead-weight tonnage, so fully loaded. Empty is probably more like ~0.5 gigatons, so it'd depend on how fully loaded the ships are.
And a quick search turns up this paper which references several estimates for fish biomass form other papers, which would put fish biomass somewhere between 0.4 and 4.9 gigatons depending on estimate.
So I put it too strongly saying "more", it'd be more accurate to say fish biomass and ship mass is within the same order of magnitude. Also note that it's only fish, not like plankton, shrimp, etc.
Biologist: “define what you mean by ‘fish’.”
ducksandruns sorrynotsorry
https://medium.com/illumination/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-fish-eca048dd6163
Not every category of animal has to be based on phylogeny, you freak!
JK, love you! /puts on Clint's Reptiles.
In or on?
Well those would have gone on my bucket list, but then towards the end, as I was searching for them to name the chemical responsible;
He and his team are still trying to identify the chemical compound responsible for the hallucinations in L. asiatica. Current tests suggest it is not likely related to any other known psychedelic compound. For one, the trips it produces are unusually long, commonly lasting one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours, and in some cases even causing hospital stays of up to a week. Because of the extraordinarily long duration of these trips and the chance for prolonged side effects such as delirium and dizziness, Domnauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself.
A few days to a week? I'm very much reconsidering.
The universe and everything in it is mostly empty space.
The Milky Way and Andromeda are on a direct collision course and in all probability there won’t be a single star collision at least on the first pass.
I'm sure you're also referring to empty atoms too heh
Yep. Most of us is nothing.
And the mystery is consciousness, how and why.
80% of the neurons in your brain are in your cerebellum
the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics
It mostly sounds fake, because it's never explained very well.
Just the fact that something can be correlated more strongly than anything classical but also not allow signaling might be. I don't know, I find it hella confusing, even if you can show that pretty straightforwardly without any actual quantum mechanics.
QM is a lot easier to understand when we stop pretending a theory that only gives you statistical results somehow has no relevance to statistics. Every "paradox" can always be understood and resolved by applying a statistical analysis. If you apply such a statistical analysis to entangled systems, let's say you have two qubits with their own bit values b1 and b2, you find that if you apply a unitary operator to just b1, there are cases where the way in which this stochastically perturbs b1 has a dependence upon the value of b2.
You could not send a signal to b2 by perturbing b1 because perturbing b1 has no effect on b2, rather, the way in which b1 stochastically changes merely depends upon the current state of b2. You might think maybe you could send a signal the other way. If b1 depends upon b2, then you could perturb b2 to alter b1. But the dependence is always symmetrical, such that if you apply a stochastic perturbation to b2 the way in which it will change will depend upon the value of b1, and so it becomes a vicious circle.
It is non-local in the sense that the way in which one changes depends upon the value of the other far away, but not in the sense that perturbing one locally alters the value of the one far away, and the dependence is always symmetrically mutual, so there is no way to signal between them.
Not a fact. If it was, the de Broglie-Bohm theory wouldn't work.
The fact that you can make predictions without one or the other doesn't mean that either, or both, don't conribute to equally powerful predictive models.
But it does mean the duality is not logically necessary.
Honestly, I'd've thought it meant the exact opposite.
Well in de Broglie-Bohm you have a particle and a wave as separate but connected entities. That can't be a duality (which requires two equally valid but mutually exclusive descriptions).
As it is normally explained, it's definitely fake. There is no reason to believe particles turn into waves when you're not looking and turn back into particles when you look, and believing this demonstrably leads to irreconcilable paradoxes. Dmitry Blokhintsev was correct that the particles are just particles, and the "wave" is a property of its stochastic dynamics over an ensemble of systems. The wave is part of the nomology: it tells you how the particles stochastically behave in the aggregate, but the particles are still particles at all times. Ontologically, they are particles. Nomologically, their stochastic dynamics in an ensemble of systems converges to wave-like behavior.
Pluto is smaller than Russia
Edit: this fact seems to rely on a contested measurement for pluto. I guess it would still be true if we look at volume but that's kinda weird.
What
Edit : apparently, counting surface areas, it's wrong, but by surprisingly little
Maybe the factoid first became popular when the USSR existed
I see 17 million sq km for Russia, and 16 million sq km for Pluto.
Idk I saw something like 17.1 for Russia and 17.4 for Pluto
Yeah it seems that Pluto got bigger since I learned this fact, and AI summary is also out dated
Edit to add: I hope it's obvious I meant our estimate of the surface area of Pluto increased, not that I think Pluto is growing.
Out of curiosity, if they had Ukraine–would they then surpass it?
Entropy is a record of everything that's ever happened in the universe. The units for it are Joules per Kelvin.
How did you come upon this interpretation?
That's an interpretation from physics in the context of information theory. Leonard Susskind's Black Hole War explains some of these concepts, and I researched it further for a project getting my B.S. in physics. It's been a while but I'll do my best to break it down.
Imagine that a murder has happened and the murderer wants to cover up the crime. The gun and body contain physical information that the cops could use to reconstruct the murder, so the killer throws them in the river.
Why is the river useful to the killer? Because it's a chaotic (entropic) system that contains a bunch of particles doing all sorts of things. The information contained in the gun isn't actually lost or destroyed, it's just made harder to access by mixing it with this "junk" information. Likewise, the blood of the body mixes with with the water and is diluted to the point of being impossible to find, but the it isn't actually destroyed, it's just mixed in.
Suppose we could freeze time and examine that river down to the particle level. If we found a single particle of blood, we could look at it's position and momentum, and that of every particle it interacted with, and we could trace it all the way back to the body (this might be easier to understand if instead of a river, we say the water is crystal clear and uniform). Obviously, this isn't something that could be done feasibly, but theoretically, there's no reason you couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again.
When you put two liquids in a flask and shake it, the information of precisely how you shook it is contained in the particles in that liquid. Every particle now has a story: before, they were sitting around with all their particle friends but then the shake happened and everyone wound up in a slightly different location because of the precise way that the shake affected them as opposed to their neighbors. The information about the shake is there in the particles in the flask.
To say that a system is more entropic is to say that more physical events have happened in that system. The particles become more dispersed because more things have happened to them leaving behind physical impressions that become harder and harder to trace back as the amount of things that have happened to that system increase, because there's more information to sort out. This is where we can think of entropy as "a record of everything that's ever happened."
Still with me? Ready for extra credit?
Can physical information ever actually be destroyed, erased from the universe entirely, as opposed to just being scrambled? That's the question at the heart of one of the biggest unresolved paradocies in the modern understanding of physics: The Black Hole Information Paradox.
If you commit a murder on a spaceship and then fly that spaceship into a black hole, is there any way, even theoretically, to recover the information of what happened on that spaceship? Has the information merely been scrambled like the body in the river, or is it truly destroyed and erased from the universe entirely? If it is just scrambled, then where is that information contained?
This is what Susskind's book I mentioned before is all about. Stephen Hawking once maintained that the information was completely erased, while Susskind argued that this was incompatible with quantum mechanics and the second law of theromodynamics, that by erasing information, entropy was being decreased in a closed system. Hawking later changed his position and conceded that he'd been mistaken. Today, it's believed that the information is scrambled, but what nobody knows is where the information is contained, and every proposed solution seems to contradict some fundamental aspect of our understanding of physics.
what nobody knows is where the information is contained
I expect such musings to be an affront to the other fellow who commented to answer my question by saying that information is conserved microscopically and not macroscopically but, if you'll hear me out, has anybody looked into the possibility that the amount information retained by the ... carrier ... about some specific event approaches zero as it undergoes more interactions and acquires new state/information pertaining other events? That is, the system retains everything, but no single part holds a non-increasingly negligible trace. So while, theoretically, you could hunt down participants in all of its interactions and deduce meaningful evidence about its history, the technical act of doing so is practically impossible because the problem of discernment grows with the age of every other carrier within some volume; making it intractable or, at least, wasteful to the extent possible. Could this agree with what is usually meant by "entropy tending to disorder"?
All that said, I often think this way of speaking of entropy is somewhat unhelpful in that there are many forms of entropy and not all should obey the second law. Some are constants, others vary with measurement, most are mutually unrelated, and some are in disguise. Take position entropy. One way to look at it is to see how many things are in the universe at different locations; if you count all that up you have a measurement (aka volume); maybe divide by the number of things for comparability's sake and would you look at that? It's density. Another chap chimes in saying something to the effect of "can't fool me, position entropy's just ħ/2Δp summed over all event participants". Call me pedantic, but it's not obvious that these measurements must agree; but they're both physically and thermodynamically significant. Honestly, i really don't know, but when i look at the 2nd law, i really wonder if that's the whole picture. Does entropy really contain history or is it just a byproduct of the generation of information?
So while, theoretically, you could hunt down participants in all of its interactions and deduce meaningful evidence about its history, the technical act of doing so is practically impossible because the problem of discernment grows with the age of every other carrier within some volume; making it intractable or, at least, wasteful to the extent possible.
When we're talking about things like following blood particles back through a river, we have fully left behind the realm of practicality and wastefulness. Information can be scrambled well beyond the point of making recovery feasible, but we're talking about whether it theoretically exists.
One way to look at it is where the "cut-off" point would be. While the blood is streaming away from the body, we can see exactly where it's coming from. What makes us lose track of it are the limitations of our instruments.
If you can find a trace of blood and reconstruct where it was even a second ago, then there's no reason (apart from the practical ones) you couldn't repeat that process and get the location a second before that, and so on.
All that said, I often think this way of speaking of entropy is somewhat unhelpful in that there are many forms of entropy and not all should obey the second law.
I don't think there's any way of getting around the second law, period.
Take position entropy. One way to look at it is to see how many things are in the universe at different locations; if you count all that up you have a measurement (aka volume); maybe divide by the number of things for comparability’s sake and would you look at that? It’s density. Another chap chimes in saying something to the effect of “can’t fool me, position entropy’s just ħ/2Δp summed over all event participants”. Call me pedantic, but it’s not obvious that these measurements must agree
Ngl, you lost me. Like I said, I'm rusty with this stuff.
Wild guess, as not-OP: Information is conserved at the microscopic level, while it's really not macroscopically, and entropy is (the logarithm of) the missing piece. Ergo, it contains a record of everything that's happened that's no longer directly visible.
Which honestly says more about what temperature is than about entropy or information. (It can be defined as energy per entropy)
98.62% of the uranium-235 in the Little Boy bomb was blown apart before fission. That leaves 1.38% that actually fissioned. That was 0.7 grams of U-235, about the size of a bb and the weight of a butterfly that destroyed Hiroshima.
Shows you how much energy is required to be matter
That is wild. I can not imagine how devastating the nukes of today are in comparison.
The universe is jerking it
Quantum mechanics
A. Spooky action at a distance
B. Schrodinger’s cat
C. God does play dice
D. One of the most well tested theories in science
E. Is the underpinning for semi-conductors and lasers
The people who deny reality exists ("Schrodinger’s cat") do so specifically because they want to preserve locality (no "Spooky action at a distance"), because Bell proved in 1964 that physical reality is not compatible with locality. If you accept that reality is not local ("Spooky action at a distance") then there is no reason to deny realism ("Schrodinger's cat").
Piranhas and Sharks being "dangerous" actually came from a bunch of conmen starving them and thowing a cow into the water infront of Teddy Roosevelt
The sun feels warmer when it's farther away. (I'm not completely sure if this only happens in the north hemisphere)
It does. In the southern hemisphere, their summer corresponds to the part of earth's orbit where the sun is slightly closer. But the sun's change in distance from the earth is insignificant compared to which pole is pointing towards the sun and which is pointing away. This has a way greater effect on temperature.
If you do not vote, you support political parties that you do not agree with at all.
Wrong community.
Which science class did you learn that science fact in? Chemistry? Physics?
I mean, there is such a field as political science.
Yeah, and "Communication" is a major, too. Point? I expect you also hold that Statistics isn't blatant sorcery, too?
bayesian magic.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" —Clarke's Third Law
No need to get it twisted over a cheeky reply, dude. I'm just having a little goof, okay?
Right back atcha, my dude. 😝
Support? No.
Accidentally help gain traction/control? Yes.
I do not support the weeds taking over my garden. Though failing to fight them will still result in weeds all over my garden.
"support" has multiple definitions. My chair supports me.
Someone standing on my shoulders is being supported by me whether or not I like the situation.
If we take your chair away, you fall. If we take you away, the person standing on your shoulders falls.
What happens if we take a non-voter out of the picture? Does that change the outcome in any way?
That's neither scientific or real.
Maybe? One-vote margins have happened, but they're pretty rare. The basic idea of strategic voting is also obvious to most people, if not some Lemmy kinds of people.
You could say that you're not not supporting them, at least. Some parties hope for low turnout.
This isn't political science, it's actual science. Get lost.
It's more like you support the one party who the majority of voters support.
You cant say that on Lemmy! You'll be banned for EleCtOrALiSM!
This will then injure the feelies of every lefty waiting on their couch for door dash to bring them a politician they really super like, but can't contribute to finding. That, of course, cannot stand.
Edit: We should also note that this type of behavior may summon at least one teenage European to sagely say "every American is complicit!" in a way that is most helpful.
Glass is absolutely a solid, the term amorphous just refers to the structure being non-crystalline. It's still a solid tho.
I was taught glass is a supercooled liquid. If you look at window panes that are over 100 years old they are thicker at the bottom than at the top because they slowly flow down due to gravity.
We were taught wrong. That is an artifact of how the glass was made.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-fiction-glass-liquid/
That article doesn't contradict what I was taught, just that the reason for the melted appearance of old glass isn't due to this state, as that would take longer than the universe has existed to reach that effect, but due to old glass making techniques. We weren't taught wrong, just given the wrong timeframe for it to happen. Doesn't change the fact that glass isn't a solid. Don't know why my original comment is currently negative. I guess I'm taking the down votes earned by my chemistry teachers back in the 90s.
Does room temperature glass deform to fit the shape of its container? That is the definition I remember from 7th grade, and it doesn't seem to qualify glass as a liquid at room temperature and pressure.
According to Wikipedia, the glass transition temperature for soda lime glass is 573 °C (1,063 °F) . This is the point where it goes from its glassy, amorphous solid state to the rubbery, viscous liquid state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_transition
From Wikipedia:
The glass–liquid transition, or glass transition, is the gradual and reversible transition in amorphous materials (or in amorphous regions within semicrystalline materials) from a hard and relatively brittle "glassy" state into a viscous or "rubbery" state as the temperature is increased.^[2]^ An amorphous solid that exhibits a glass transition is called a glass. The reverse transition, achieved by supercooling a viscous liquid into the glass state, is called vitrification.
Two-dimensional, schematic, representation of the lattices of quartz (a), silica (b), and of silica based glasses (c).^[1]^
The glass-transition temperature Tg of a material characterizes the range of temperatures over which this glass transition occurs (as an experimental definition, typically marked as 100 s of relaxation time). It is always lower than the melting temperature, Tm, of the crystalline state of the material, if one exists, because the glass is a higher energy state (or enthalpy at constant pressure) than the corresponding crystal.
[...]
Despite the change in the physical properties of a material through its glass transition, the transition is not considered a phase transition; rather it is a phenomenon extending over a range of temperature and defined by one of several conventions.^[4]^^[5]^ Such conventions include a constant cooling rate (20 kelvins per minute (36 °F/min))^[2]^ and a viscosity threshold of 1012 Pa·s, among others. Upon cooling or heating through this glass-transition range, the material also exhibits a smooth step in the thermal-expansion coefficient and in the specific heat, with the location of these effects again being dependent on the history of the material.^[6]^ The question of whether some phase transition underlies the glass transition is a matter of ongoing research.^[4]^^[5]^^[7]^^[when?]^
[...]
Thus, the liquid-glass transition is not a transition between states of thermodynamic equilibrium. It is widely believed that the true equilibrium state is always crystalline. Glass is believed to exist in a kinetically locked state, and its entropy, density, and so on, depend on the thermal history. Therefore, the glass transition is primarily a dynamic phenomenon. Time and temperature are interchangeable quantities (to some extent) when dealing with glasses, a fact often expressed in the time–temperature superposition principle. On cooling a liquid, internal degrees of freedom successively fall out of equilibrium. However, there is a longstanding debate whether there is an underlying second-order phase transition in the hypothetical limit of infinitely long relaxation times.^[clarification needed][6][18][19][20]^
In a more recent model of glass transition, the glass transition temperature corresponds to the temperature at which the largest openings between the vibrating elements in the liquid matrix become smaller than the smallest cross-sections of the elements or parts of them when the temperature is decreasing. As a result of the fluctuating input of thermal energy into the liquid matrix, the harmonics of the oscillations are constantly disturbed and temporary cavities ("free volume") are created between the elements, the number and size of which depend on the temperature. The glass transition temperature Tg0 defined in this way is a fixed material constant of the disordered (non-crystalline) state that is dependent only on the pressure. As a result of the increasing inertia of the molecular matrix when approaching Tg0, the setting of the thermal equilibrium is successively delayed, so that the usual measuring methods for determining the glass transition temperature in principle deliver Tg values that are too high. In principle, the slower the temperature change rate is set during the measurement, the closer the measured Tg value Tg0 approaches.^[21]^ Techniques such as dynamic mechanical analysis can be used to measure the glass transition temperature.^[22]^
[...]
Glass is a "frozen liquid" (i.e., liquids where ergodicity has been broken), which spontaneously relax towards the supercooled liquid state over a long enough time.
Glasses are thermodynamically non-equilibrium kinetically stabilized amorphous solids, in which the molecular disorder and the thermodynamic properties corresponding to the state of the respective under-cooled melt at a temperature T* are frozen-in. Hereby T* differs from the actual temperature T.^[27]^
Glass is a nonequilibrium, non-crystalline condensed state of matter that exhibits a glass transition. The structure of glasses is similar to that of their parent supercooled liquids (SCL), and they spontaneously relax toward the SCL state. Their ultimate fate is to solidify, i.e., crystallize.^[23]^
On the scale of millions of years, everything flows.
Well, if it is a type of glass, it will flow until it is able to cool enough to crystallize
No matter how much you cool a glass, it won't crystallise. You have to go over the glass transition temperature and cool down slowly enough for crystals to form. In the case of silica glass, that's not going to happen, though, because it's a "strong glass former" - it doesn't crystallise unless you do something pretty extreme.
Ah OK, I thought on geologic timescales it would separate out and form back into quartz, etc at STP but I'm happy to be wrong and learn something new.
There are Roman glass artifacts that are older than any window panes that haven't moved a millimetre.
The old windows panes being thicker at the bottom is just a combination of the fact that old glass wasn't very even, and that when you put a pane into a window, chances are that the thickest side will be at the bottom, because that feels right to a craftsman.
You were taught wrong. It's from how the glass was made, and sometimes it's thicker on top, or on the sides, depending on how it was installed. Glass doesnt sag.
“Glass is the same as a solid it’s just different than a solid.”
Seriously? Why are you being pedantic?
Because the thing being solid has nothing to do with the structure being crystalline or not. You are confusing two unrelated different things.
Sure, that’s why it has a different name. I’m moving on now.
Did you even read the article you posted yourself? The first sentence is:
In condensed matter physics and materials science, an amorphous solid (or non-crystalline solid) is a solid
So it's absolutely a solid. The reason for the name is because the structure being non-crystalline gives it interesting properties and is something that doesn't usually happen. For most substances there is at least some sort of repeating or self-organising structure.
With another state of matter, for example gas or liquid, the structure can't be seen as it's constantly changing. Structures might form and then go away. Only when transitioning into a solid the structure becomes fixed. For most materials this is some kind of pattern or repeating structure, with amorphous materials it's essentially random without any structure. So by definition these are solids, otherwise the structure wouldn't be there at all.
You didn’t even post the entire sentence that goes on to describe why it’s different than a solid. You are like the media cherry picking a sound bite to try to make somebody look bad. Wow… I genuinely don’t understand the desire to be this pedantic.
All I originally said was not a true solid. If you’re seriously going to take me to task on that ELI5 explanation then you need to reevaluate your priorities.
Alright, tell me in your words why it isn't a true solid?
Because like the other dude said, it's like saying an HD TV isn't a true TV because it's HD. It makes no sense at all.
“Tell me something I’m already going to dismiss.”
No. Now go away.
Alright, just don't go saying shit like "Boohoo this place is just like Reddit" when you post nonsense and get down voted for it.
No, it’s just assholes being assholes that are making it like Reddit…
I didn’t post nonsense. If you honestly think that you would explain to a child that glass is a solid and just leave it at that then you’re touched. Leave me alone for real.
Better than telling them incorrectly that it is a liquid.
Chemistry is a series of models approximating how the universe truly behaves. In the model of states of matter, glass is a solid, not a liquid or gas.
As the child learns more, they will learn that this original model was incomplete (but not wrong), and the universe has many more wonders. They'll learn about non-neutonian fluids like "ooblek" that flow like liquids, but act like solids when force is applied, and amorphous solids with glass transitions instead of phase changes, about how water is one of the rare chemicals where the solid is less dense than its liquid form, and how cool that is, about crystalline structures and the discovery of the structure of DNA, about how plasma is a 4th stage of matter, beyond solid, liquid, and gas, about the role pressure and temperature plays in state transitions, and how materials may have many different types of solids possible at different temperatures and pressures, like carbon, about how neutron stars exist and are their own type of matter, about how black holes are weird, matter and energy are fundamentally interchangeable, etc etc etc.
When did I say it was a liquid?
You said "Glass is not a true solid" and "If you honestly think that you would explain to a child that glass is a solid and just leave it at that then you’re touched. Leave me alone for real."
Honestly I'm not sure what you get out of not accepting that glass is solid. Not sure why you keep replying.
You didn’t answer my question.
When did I say you said Glass was a liquid?
I think we'll have to agree to disagree about glass.
Better than telling them incorrectly that it is a liquid.
Right. I didn't say you said it was a liquid.
Now you are just being a troll.
Solid means it can deform elastically under shear stress, or equivalently can hold it's shape indefinitely under shear. Crystal means the atoms are arranged in a repeating lattice. Glass is both solid and non-crystalline.
It'd be pedantry, if that didn't also match our intuitive understanding of solids. What you said implies to people that glass might have fluid-like properties.
No, it does not imply that it has fluid like properties. The sentence that I posted simply implies that there’s something different about it than a normal solid.
I mean, there's no real way for any of us to prove it will be interpreted one way or another, even if the rest of us are sure. So, in the name of not being a pedant, I guess you can see it that way.
It's not a "false solid", which would be the antonym. Glass is not an ordinary solid, I guess that would be true.
What is It with pedantry In this thread for real? So because I said true and not ordinary, everybody’s gonna take me to fucking task? This was supposed to just be a fun thread about interesting scientific facts. It is a scientific fact that glass is different than other solids, which is what I said. I’m not understanding why everybody has to be an asshole. But I’m fucking done with it.
That article never says amorphous solids are liquids, and repeatedly says they're solid. Your claim is like saying modern TVs aren't true TVs because they're really HD TVs as if HD contradicts the TVness of something. It's just nonsense.
I never said they were liquids either… just not true solids. More like saying that CRT’s are different from flat panels.
Anything that's not a true x isn't x at all, it just resembles it. That's why the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy is a fallacy. For example, 'bugs' that aren't 'true bugs' aren't bugs at all, they just look enough like bugs that laypeople would call them bugs despite being a different kind of insect (or if the layperson is being especially flexible with what they're calling a bug, potentially not even an insect). Saying glass isn't a 'true solid' is literally the same as saying it's not a solid, but with the added implication that lots of people get it wrong. There's also a common myth that glass is really a slow-moving liquid. You said something that is literally the exact opposite of the truth in a thread about scientific facts that sound up but are 100% real, and landed on something that gets commonly repeated as a surprising fact, so of course people are going to correct you.
I think you might actually be thinking of the Pitch Drop Experiment?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment?wprov=sfla1
No.
Honestly, I probably won’t post anything like this again. Lemmy is turning into Reddit way too much.
Deleted
It is. Glass is truly solid. It is an amorphous solid, meaning it has no repeating crystalline structure, unlike most other solids, which is pretty cool!
I am the sexiest person you have ever met in your life.
Hi Sarah!
Heyyy!!!
To whom?
Everyone who has met me.
No.
Chances are I've never met you
It's been a week, did you forget me already???
Facts
Why do people ask questions like this?
Why do you lack basic curiosity?
I don't. I'm also not asking broad-ass questions like "how long is a string?"
These are reddit-style click bait engagement questions.
That's okay. We're not on reddit and just have a lighthearted chat without corporate interests in it.
Always find it weird when people on social media whine about engagement farming tbh
They want to hear something really surprising but true.
Listicles?