#talked to a physicist about it

[un-ionizetheradlab]

It makes me so uncomfortable to see people post blatantly anti-Jewish content and then turn right around and stan Jewish historical figures. Like, do they hate us or love us?

[contagious-watermelon]

Why do I keep seeing transmascs and trans men insisting or implying that all trans men are "female socialized," or "understand the female experience," or "navigated the world as a woman." Because yeah, sure, that can be true for some people. especially if you weren't gnc at all as a kid and didn't crack your egg until well into adulthood, it makes sense.

But they don't stop at saying they had that experience. It always comes with an addendum that trans men, as a group, all can relate to this experience. I don't know about the entirety of my demographic, but I never got even a little bit of what some of them talk about. I didn't even believe that women were scared of going out at night until I kept consistently seeing them say it, online or wherever, for years. I never realized catcalling was a thing until I saw some women complaining about it on reddit.

But they posit it as some sort of, you're safer than cis men, right? You know what it's like? Which, on top of being patently, demonstrably false in the case of myself and many other trans men, holds some unpleasant and often outright hostile implications about trans women. And they always deny it, but if you can't even conceptualize someone like me who grew up gnc, and never got the bulk (or any?) of whatever we consider to be 'female socialization,' what does that say about what you think trans girls went through, growing up? I don't want to speak for them, as I've never experienced that firsthand, but I can guarantee that (if you're even a little bit obviously trans) people don't treat you like a cis kid of the opposite gender. By and large, they don't get treated like cis boys.

It just makes me mad that we're taking this inaccurate framework that (ever so conveniently) puts trans people into the box of our assumed birth gender, and trying to fancy it up and use it with a faux-progressive veneer; never mind the way that transphobes use it to bar trans women from being athletes, or using the bathroom, or having access to any gendered resources they need. It would be bad enough to try and dust it off and use it even if it were largely accurate, due to the aforementioned connections to outright transphobia, but it literally is patently false. Not in all cases, obviously, but why are we trying to revamp this untrue, inaccurate generalization and pretend that we can make it 'trans-inclusive?'

[breadandblankets]

steph and duke hang out a lot while steph is in college, between classes and her apprenticeship with leslie, through that duke gets roped into helping out enough that his first aid skills get a workout

turns out in a medical setting having a guy who can tell u what's wrong on the inside without having to order imaging is really helpful!

having the signal as your radiologist would also kick ass tbh

[thevalleyisjolly]

They should make a Star Trek-themed educational TV series where real scientists dress up as Starfleet officers, pretend to beam onto an alien planet with one or two attributes related to their field of study, and then explain the science behind those things.

[vv-ispy]

Ships that could have worked out if it wasn't for one (1) thing

[maeamian]

I find "If you follow the time metric of any given atom, it is unknowable and pseudo random" to be an entirely unsatisfying answer to the question of "What day of the year is the anniversary of the big bang?" The answer does not actually answer the question in question but because it contains a lot of big words it looks like it does.

Time metrics of everything vary depending on what sort of gravitational field they're in, something that we have an incredibly successful model of in general relativity. The question of how old the universe is does not depend on questions of "how has a specific atom experienced it" it is a question about how old the universe is, which is much better defined by understanding things like the expansion of spacetime and inflationary cosmology rather than trying to apply general relativity principles to a bunch of quantum particles, those two domains famously do not play well together.

I actually think that the person who said, effectively "Our uncertainty about the exact age of the universe is significantly larger than one year, so there is no reason to believe that the anniversary of that is a known or possibly even knowable quantity." was demonstrating a lot more understanding of the question by asking it than someone who wanted to have Maxwell's demon slap a bunch of clocks on atoms as a way of measuring it.

[lonesomedreamer]

do you ever think about what a gargantuan and lasting influence a silly little series of no-budget tv morality plays from the 60s that was canceled after three seasons (and would have been canceled after just two and thus would never have been syndicated, if not for an impassioned letter-writing campaign by fans) had on real-life science/technology and get really emotional about it, or—

[blondiest]

midday thought apropos nothing. if i could get everyone to understand one thing and one thing only about physics it would perhaps be this:

there is no widely agreed-upon interpretation of quantum mechanics.

there are many different ways that physicists interpret the wave function / uncertainty / probability thing and new interpretations pop up all the time. the copenhagen interpretation or some variation thereof is what gets taught the most in classes, but there is absolutely no consensus even on many of the fundamental questions that are naturally raised by the well-established & well proven mathematical theory that is quantum mechanics.

[buggbuzz]

i havent had a migrane this bad in like over a year i hate my eyes i hate my eyes i hate my eyes god forbid they're able to withstand 1 single lumen bro

[honeyyglaze]

I’ve dreamt of the same person 4 nights this week

[faaun]

shaking of leaves by into it over it is genuinely one of the top songs of all time

[catspouse]

why is there tumblr drama about that play i want to have sex with

[235uranium]

all of science will alter your perspective and even unsettle you but physics has a tendency to take every reasonable assumption you make and mutilate it

[supercantaloupe]

i used to be really good at and into science and math stuff in high school especially chemistry but since spending four years at university getting the world's most useless degree (BA music) (not even performance emphasis) (point and laugh) i haven't really done anything stem since then apart from the worst required physics 101 class in the galaxy so now instead of being smart and doing actual experiments in the lab myself i microdose science by watching chemists on youtube do shit like trying to make a fast food hamburger as flammable as possible

[qqweebird]

i love my major i love geology/geologineering and paleontology but i hate how… loosey goosey this field is about precision… like obviously they are good diligent scientists but most applications of this study are so large scale that like, decimal points either arent going to make a difference or you literally *cant* in good conscience claim a result to that precision. and when i was mapping in wyoming last summer so much of my job was “just write down what you think is true to your best logical conclusion and if someone disagrees they can go climb the mountain themselves”

[corbinite]

Disclaimer: not a physicist, I just like to listen to physicist

ok so everybody who has any interest in physics with 52 minutes to spare go watch acollierastro's video "string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard" because it has some excellent insight into (one facet of) why science communication is so difficult now and why so many people distrust science and equate it with magical thinking, but also I have my own little tidbit to add to the equation and it's about the observer effect, which is where observing a phenomenon changes its outcome

Unlike acollierastro's video, this isn't about a hypothesis that doesn't follow the scientific method, because the observer effect is a real thing that we can test and demonstrate unlike string theory. Rather my problem is with how the observer effect is taught to lay people. And when I say how it is taught to lay people I mean on *every* level. If you are not a practicing physicist and you don't actively search out information on this subject, you definitely have completely the wrong idea of what the observer effect is. Hell, even if you do search out information you probably have that same wrong idea

See the way we're all taught about the observer effect in highschool and on, frankly, social media, is that if you are studying the behavior of matter on the subatomic level, it will act completely differently depending on whether you are "watching" it happen or not

and that sounds like magical thinking

So you ask your professor what that means because the bit about the observer effect in your AP Chem textbook really only has that one line, and maybe a blurb about how it was discovered which doesn't offer much insight to a highschooler. But the teacher doesn't really have anything else for you, they just say "yes it's true, watching subatomic particles changes how they behave!" and you just kind of have to accept that that's the answer

So a lot of people go through highschool and their adult life hearing this and they go one of two ways. Either they think "that's ridiculous, that sounds like Toy Story, physics is just a bunch of humans coming up with ideas and seeing what sticks and apparently what sticks is just whatever is the most attention grabbing" (physics is not about ideas it's about math all the way down), OR, they think "wow, the human mind really is incredible, our brains can literally change reality, can you imagine what we could achieve if we used 100% of our brains instead of 10%? We're in a simulation, reality is divine geometry, the particles know we're watching" it goes on. And it just doesn't get corrected

And you end up with two camps of people who either reject or think that they embrace science, but either way they think that physics is a bunch of people coming up with ideas to explain the world when it's not, that's how mythology works, physics is math. Einstein didn't predict relativity by thinking hard about it and having the right ideas, he predicted it through math, the math came first. Physicists aren't just a bunch of people making things up to stay relevant, nor are they a bunch of gnostics recieving divine inspiration from above. They're goddamn mathemeticians and experimentalists. They do math, see what the math predicts, then set up a plan for how to test that math (see acolierastro's video for a more thorough explanation of what makes a theory of physics a theory of physics)

And this ties into a lot of other cases of poorly explained concepts in science that have people asking "but how do they know that? Scientists are just making things up/the universe is magic" but the observer effect is probably the most likely to push people into magical thinking (others are the fact that we know about earth's internal structure because we can use sonar to measure it, we know about the big bang and the accelerating expansion of the universe because we can use the speed of light and the doppler effect to measure not only how celestial bodies are moving right now but how they were moving in the past and track that through time, and we can observe that distant galaxies are moving in ways that would indicate that they contain more matter than we can observe and that yet unknown phenomenon has been dubbed dark matter which is an admittedly overly mysterious name)

Anyway I should probably circle back to the observer effect, so let's ask what it means to observe something. Well, on our macro scale, observing something usually means seeing it. But in order to see something, light has to hit it, cause a momentary disturbance in the energy of the thing's electrons, eject back out from the object, and go into our eyes. Observing could also mean to hear something, but in order to hear it it has to bump into air molecules or other matter and send rippling physical vibrations out. We could smell it! But to smell something, volatile particles have to leave that thing (slightly reducing its mass), enter your nose, and slot into your olfactory receptors. You could touch it! That one's self explanatory. What do all of these things have in common? That object you are observing has to interact with the world around it in order for you to observe it. Whether it is interacting with light, the air, or your actual fingers, the object you are observing has to effect and be effected by the outside world around it. If something is completely inert, and not currently interacting at all with light or other matter or gravity or electromagnetism or etc, you cannot observe it. So how do we observe particles at the scale necessary to demonstrate the observer effect? With lasers

With lasers

We shoot lasers at it

That certainly does something to the thing we're observing

And that doesn't have to be the only way to observe matter at subatomic scales. But there is not any way to observe matter without interacting with it, either directly or indirectly. It isn't that our consciousness effects the outcome, it isn't about us. When physicists say that observing something changes its behavior, we are not always the observer, the observer could also be a nearby atom which "observes" the particle in question by creating interactions between them. Nothing to do with conscousness

The observer effect, very roughly, means that while a particle or system is not interacting with anything, it behaves probabilistically, but when interacting with its environment, that probability solidifies into an outcome. If And to be clear: that's still wild! It doesn't mean that there's a magical universal consciousness, and it doesn't mean that "particles break the laws of physics when we aren't looking at them", especially because we do already have extremely robust and experimentally testable models for how unobserved systems behave, so it's not breaking the laws of physics, it's confirming them!

So yeah, all this to say, modern science is not a competition for who can come up with the best ideas or who can be blessed with the most enlightened perspective. If something cannot be observed measured or tested then it is not a scientific theory or even a hypothesis it is just a thought. And thoughts are great! But thoughts are not physics. And we need better science education that does a better job at simplifying complex topics nondestructively