Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

gogusrl

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Yeah, the reaction requires specific conditions and if those change it just stops. No boom, no radiation, no nothing.

Deathwing, I'm pretty sure wikipedia (or some guy on youtube) can explain it a lot better than I ever could.
 

Kedwyn

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Interesting article.

The thing I don't get about nuclear fusion being viable is that with a star the compression force is gravity which is 'free' energy for the star. Any kind of fusion reactor on earth will need to replace a star-sized amount of gravity with something else. In this case they're using lasers and the article seems to indicate that the energy used to power the lasers isn't included in the reaction input.
There was another article that I read on it, I can't seem to find it, that talked about how its not even 1% of total output of power to what is used to create the reaction.

IIRC, and let me say I'm ignorant on this stuff, but the biggest thing is the reaction itself; the energy it created was more than than what went into the fuel but excluding the catalyst.

In short, we have a long long way to go.


EDIT: I read it wrong.

"Nuclear fusion would be worthwhile only if it produces more energy than it uses, and the results were far from that. The hydrogen fuel did emit more energy than it absorbed from the lasers, an experimental goal. But the fuel took in only about 1 percent of all the energy produced by the lasers. So the apparatus is still far short of producing more energy than it requires to operate."
 

Big Phoenix

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Can someone with a physics background explain why or if it is impossible for a reaction like this to chain uncontrollably and result in the implosion of the planet?
Fusion reactors are pretty safe. The second pressure/heat drops from the reactor being breached the reaction is shutdown.
 

Kedwyn

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m.livescience.com/43403-test-you-science-smarts-quiz.html

The results of those simple questions... I can't believe people would get some of those wrong.

There's room for improvement in the United States when it comes to science literacy.

The average American scores 6.5 correct answers in response to these 9 questions covering basic physical and biological science, according to the results of the 2012 General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center.

Want to know how you stack up against the average American? Answer the same questions and check your results below.

1. The center of the Earth is very hot. True or False?

2. The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. True or False?

3. Does the Earth go around the sun, or does the sun go around the Earth?

4. All radioactivity is man-made. True or False?

5. Electrons are smaller than atoms. True or False?

6. Lasers work by focusing sound waves. True or False?

7. It is the father's gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl. True or False?

8. Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria. True or False?

9. Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals True or False?

Answers:

1. True (84 percent of Americans got this right)

2. True (83 percent)

3. The Earth goes around the sun. (74 percent)

4. False (72 percent)

5. True (53 percent)

6. False (47 percent)

7. True (63 percent)

8. False (51 percent)

9. True (48 percent)

Those survey results were included in the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators, a huge federal report released this month by the National Science Foundation detailing the state of science education, research and industry in the country.
 

Dyvim

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I dont get either that your not realising the article you linked even missed to quote question 8 (i guess) and therefor provided only 9 question for 10 correct answer checks, oh the irony.
 

Caliane

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I dont get either that your not realising the article you linked even missed to quote question 8 (i guess) and therefor provided only 9 question for 10 correct answer checks, oh the irony.
yeah. antibiotics dont kill virus or bacteria.

Garlic does. duh.
 

iannis

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7, 8, and 9 are pretty wtf.

The antibiotics question itself, just to phrase the question that way, displays a subtle ignorance. For a science literacy test I don't think you should write such lazy questions. Same thing for the fathers gene question, but that one is more forgivable.

And the evolution question is a TRUE wtf.
 

Tuco

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Yeah, I don't get how 75% of people are wrong. Clearly this is how the universe works:
Orlando-Ferguson-flat-earth-map.jpg
 

Szlia

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My answer for the earth and sun question was neither or both.

Btw, what is Prof. Ferguson's explanation for the travel times in what we erroneously call the southern hemisphere?

EDIT: As to why you can't see Argentina from the US, wikipedia tells us that "in the cleanest possible atmosphere, visibility is limited to about 296 km."
 

Kedwyn

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I dont get either that your not realising the article you linked even missed to quote question 8 (i guess) and therefor provided only 9 question for 10 correct answer checks, oh the irony.
I don't know how but I copied it from my phone and I think there was a formatting error. If you go to the link it is correct. I updated the spoiler. Not sure how it copied incorrectly I likely had something highlighted and dragged it accidentally when scrolling or something. I fixed the pasting error.
 

Skanda

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Got to admit I didn't remember #7. The answer to #3, or more accurately the percent of people who got that wrong, just makes me want to go on a killing spree.
 

Dyvim

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I don't know how but I copied it from my phone and I think there was a formatting error. If you go to the link it is correct. I updated the spoiler. Not sure how it copied incorrectly I likely had something highlighted and dragged it accidentally when scrolling or something. I fixed the pasting error.
Nope they screwed up on their end and ninja corrected the site, you copy pasted the wrong non updated version before.
 

Caliane

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Got to admit I didn't remember #7. The answer to #3, or more accurately the percent of people who got that wrong, just makes me want to go on a killing spree.
7 is worded oddly.
my first response was no. but caught myself.

Two XX chromosomes can't make a male. a male child can only come from the fathers Y.
The SRY gene on the Y chromosome.
"
Fathers genes can also make FEMALE children too though. So I think the wording is backwards. A male childs sex is determined by the fathers gene: true of false" would cause less confusion.


Of course a few others have some technicalities too. Sun is moved by the Earth and other gravity wells. The actual orbit of the Earth is not the sun, but instead the gravimetric center of the solar system. Which moves, and so do the Sun itself. Also the speed of Gravity is the speed of light, so we are actually orbiting around the point where the gravimetric center was 8.5 minutes ago or so.
 

gogusrl

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An amazing analysis found in the comments section of a./ articlediscussing the possibility that we live in a simulation :

Quantum physics seems to be the ultimate proof that the universe is a simulation.

The universe, intuitively, seems to be analog and continuous. That "feels" right to us. But quantum physics shows that it is actually discrete. But that is exactly how computer simulations work! They use very small time scales to make things appear continuous. We know that below certain time scales, things are essentially random. This is consistent with a computer simulation. You can't accurately simulate something that happens in less time than one "frame" of time. There is a whole area of mathematics that deals with how tomake simulations work accurately[wikipedia.org] given the limitation of discrete time scales.
The same happens with physical sizes. Below thePlanck scale[wikipedia.org] the universe starts to break-down and become random. This is exactly how things would work if the universe was using binary arithmetic. Suppose that every particle in the universe has a coordinate. You can represent it's position over a vast scale, but only with limited accuracy. The plank scale is that limit, and it indirectly tells us how many bits are in the coordinate field of each particle. When we try to measure the position of something accurately, we find that the position becomes random. And if you try to measure it's speed to more resolution than one "frame" of time, it becomes less accurate. Worse-yet: the only way we can measure the position or speed of a simulated particle is by comparing it to another simulated particule, which introduces yet more error. We are ultimately limited by the accuracy of the simulation.

One side-benefit of this is that we have an awesome source of stastically predictable randomness. Quantum computers are actually using the randomness of the simulator to take advantage of cpu-cycles that are "outside" of our universe. Within the simulator, we can only build a computer that is so fast. But if we find a way to tap into the computing power of the simulator, like by using the side-effects of one of it's built-in functions, then we can compute a result faster than anything we can do ourselves. It is like calling into "native code" while we are running in the interpreted bytecode.

Another indication that we are in a simulation is that quantum physics shows us that wave functions collapse when we observe them. That makes sense: why should the universal simulator waste time calculating quantities that are not currently being measured? Imagine a vast number of inputs, a vast number of calculations that produce outputs, and a smaller number of observers of those outputs. You can easily optimize away things that are not being observed. But we found a way to notice the side-effect of not calculating certain values. It's like a side-channel attack on an encryption algorithm. You can tell how many bits of a password are correct even without the output by seeing how long it took to calculate, or how much power the computer consumed.

I wonder if the designers of the simulator didn't know that we could see these kinds of side-effects, or if they are too difficult to fix. Either way, we are seeing side-effects of some of the shortcuts and optimizations.

Perhaps one day one of the programmers will look over at their printer and find a little note from someone way down here inside the simulation. If you could hack a few words outside of the system, what would they be?

mind-blown-2.gif
 

Deathwing

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Sorry, your second spoiler should have been:

whoa-300x223.jpg


I'm not going to comment on the first spoiler because I read it and then felt like I needed to read it again. But nothing felt profound, I kinda felt like I was being overloaded with concept and jargon rather than revelations.


Or maybe I'm just dumb(cue Izo).
 

BrutulTM

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Dude takes a gigantic conclusion that is not in evidence and cherry picks a few things that may or may not be consistent with that conclusion. It's interesting to think about, but my mind remains unblown.
 

iannis

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It strikes me as some backwards thinking. Literally, not in the insulting you fuck your sister way. The simulation tool works because it mimics the reality it describes? Astounding. You've found God, I guess. No need to keep looking.

It's taking out all of the millions of progressive steps and being shocked that a set of mathematical tools which are intended to predict behaviors... are actually able to predict behaviors. That says far less about the tool than it says about the men who built it.

I had a chemistry teacher in high school who used to say, "h2o is amazing. No life could exist on this planet without it!". And he was right, and he was a really great teacher, and he had great passion. But my quibble was always that if h2o didn't exist as a medium for life then there are only 2 other possibilities: some other medium exists for life which we could then say the exact same of, or else no medium for life would exist and we wouldn't be remarking about what a strange and spectacular thing the medium in which it exists is.

It seems like the same sort of thing.

It's a neat enough observation, but it's not exactly convincing as an argument or even indicative of much of anything besides what is already obvious.