Pushing the Standard Model
Jan. 6th, 2022 05:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithHere's a review of physics from 2021.
I keep waiting for people to find gravitons, but honestly, I'm kind of glad they haven't. As much damage as they've done with other scientific advances, they don't need graviton technology where fuckups can crack a planet's crust or fling a space station across the galaxy.
I keep waiting for people to find gravitons, but honestly, I'm kind of glad they haven't. As much damage as they've done with other scientific advances, they don't need graviton technology where fuckups can crack a planet's crust or fling a space station across the galaxy.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-07 12:27 am (UTC)Of course, the fact that the universe *is* here argues that it's damn hard to do that.
But we're still stuck with the fact that every year the IQ required to end the world drops....
Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-07 01:07 am (UTC)Yes, there are a variety of ways to end a universe...
>> Of course, the fact that the universe *is* here argues that it's damn hard to do that. <<
... fortunately, most of them are uncommon and hard to reach. But it is, ultimately, sort of like a bubble, and bubbles can pop; also, the expansion phase is followed by a contraction phase so things can reset.
>> But we're still stuck with the fact that every year the IQ required to end the world drops.... <<
Yeah. That's really not good. Especially when you consider how much of the current damage is being done by a bunch of far-flung idiots and people who are just trying to survive. It's not an orchestrated destruction.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-07 05:15 am (UTC)That way we won't have all our eggs in one basket.
Also what we'll learn about closed ecologies will be needed to terraform earth. :-(
If we can get over that hump (and regardless of how folks feel about Branson, Bezos, et al they *are* working on getting us off this rock) then destroying humanity gets a lot harder.
Silly thought. Folks who think the California agriculture inspectors at the border are a pain will be unpleasantly surprised at the inspections they'll get if they visit a colony that still has a somewhat unstable ecosystem!
Not so silly thought. In a widespread interstellar civilization there are going to be horror stories about colonies that accidentally killed a critical link in the local ecosystem before they could get a sufficiently large "terran" ecosystem established.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-07 05:44 am (UTC)Well, that would be some use against a cracked planet, and possibly even a flung space station, but not against decrystalizing the universe. We're nowhere near what it would take to even try salvaging that.
>> That way we won't have all our eggs in one basket.<<
Always a good plan.
*ponder* You know what we could do now? Bank some stuff on the Moon and Mars. Information at minimum, biological samples would be better. Resources for colonists if we're lucky, refugees if not.
>> Also what we'll learn about closed ecologies will be needed to terraform earth. :-(
Yyyyeah. No, actually, we've already seen that the best thing we can do here is back the fuck off. Not even a nuclear disaster was harder on wildlife than humans. You want to fix something in the biosphere, just keep everyone well away from it.
Humans are terrible at that.
>>If we can get over that hump (and regardless of how folks feel about Branson, Bezos, et al they *are* working on getting us off this rock) then destroying humanity gets a lot harder.<<
*shrug* You rarely see more than one type of genius per person. It can happen, but it usually comes at the cost of even more weird shit. Because the human brain is finite and just not really all that big when it comes to storing something as massive as a soul. If you want to upgrade one area, you're going to have to throw out something else -- maybe a lot of somethings. I have a linguistic coprocessor that does things other people insist are impossible. I also have the shareware version of the memory module that normal people use for names-faces-dates-etc. instead of their nice factory model. I wouldn't trade it. And I'm pretty sure those guys wouldn't trade whatever they tossed for what they wanted to pack into this life. People should STFU and let them work. So they're assholes, so what? Most genii are. We need genii, the popular people aren't doing jack to save us.
>>Not so silly thought. In a widespread interstellar civilization there are going to be horror stories about colonies that accidentally killed a critical link in the local ecosystem before they could get a sufficiently large "terran" ecosystem established.<<
There are colony failure horror stories in every settled space. Including Earth: "Croatoan."
One of my favorites is "The Catch." <3 whimwham trees. If that doesn't teach people not to plant invasive species, nothing will.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-08 07:59 pm (UTC)I recall reading something about using the Moon as a naturally occurring cryogenic site - it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to have freeze-dried embryos or seeds, instead.
>>*shrug* You rarely see more than one type of genius per person. It can happen, but it usually comes at the cost of even more weird shit. Because the human brain is finite and just not really all that big when it comes to storing something as massive as a soul. If you want to upgrade one area, you're going to have to throw out something else -- maybe a lot of somethings. I have a linguistic coprocessor that does things other people insist are impossible. I also have the shareware version of the memory module that normal people use for names-faces-dates-etc. instead of their nice factory model. I wouldn't trade it.<<
I suppose that the overlapping skillsets allow us all to access more information - if we can interact fluently and balance out all our different skillsets.
>>And I'm pretty sure those guys wouldn't trade whatever they tossed for what they wanted to pack into this life. People should STFU and let them work. So they're assholes, so what? Most genii are. We need genii, the popular people aren't doing jack to save us.<<
I don't really like the flavor of jerkishness that involves someone essentially flaunting extravagant survival fulfillments while failing to provide for the survival needs of their followers. To be fair, that probably has a lot to do with my own upbringing and individual life experiences, and how those things have shaped my values. And the et all folks are probably acting ethically by their values...which mismatches (or seems to mismatch) enough with mine to cause error messages. And some of my annoyance is at society at large, which pushes all of us around like chess pieces on the gameboard...
...I guess I like the idea of exploration and scientific advancement...but not when it feels like it's being paid for at the expense of people's wellbeing. So go forth! Explore, advance! Do your great works! But try not to shred or stomp other people while you're working.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-07 12:55 am (UTC)I suspect the problem with Gravitons and finding them, is that they don't actually exist. There is a case to be made that the reason the Standard Model and Special Relativity don't reconcile is that the SM describes particles, and SR is describing a distortion or stretching in space/time, which only behaves somewhat like a force, but isn't really, and thus it doesn't have a particle to act as it's mediator.
Of the fundamental forces, gravity is a different animal really.
Except that gravity kind of does have gravitons. Down at the Planck scale of the universe even the fabric of space/time is 'granular' or quantised. So, a gravitational distoritian behaves as if it is made up of particles or wavelets... basically, virtual particles that don't exist, but reality behaves as if they do. (boojums, not quarks if you like)
Of course, I could be wrong, but that's how it seems to me. Not sure if that advances things however... which is probably just as well as you say. Because one of the things you could do with gravitions is create some nifty wormholes with fairly little power.
Which doesn't sound bad, until you realise you could open a 1cm wormhole connecting outer space with the inside of someones skull. Death by slurrrp!
Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-07 01:11 am (UTC)They're probably closer kin to photons than anything else: wavicles, which can behave like a wave or a particle depending how you try to measure them.
>> Which doesn't sound bad, <<
Only to someone with little imagination. You can also suck the air out of a room. That's before getting into the hazards of suddenly increasing or decreasing the pull of gravity.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-07 01:18 am (UTC)The problem with sucking the air out of a room, is that most rooms aren't air-tight. (although I can see why that would slip your mind.)
Mucking about with the local field might be possible. But Planets have honking big fields that would take a LOT of energy to fiddle with, even on a small scale. I don't think you could do more than reduce or increase a small area by a barely measurable percentage.. at least, not with the power our tech level makes available. Hence why really small wormholes would be more likely at first. Another reason why venting rooms isn't likely to be practical. I mean, you could, but it would take a really long time. (although, tiny wormhole and a high pressure air line would one way of getting fresh air into somewhere that needs it.)
And yeah, Wavicles probably, just virtual ones that don't exist, but everything around them behaves as if they do.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-07 02:43 am (UTC)1) You don't need to remove anywhere near all the air from a room in order to drop below human breathing capacity. People need oxygen to climb Mt. Everest.
2) Sudden changes in pressure kill humans very effectively. It takes surprisingly little change and time for someone to get lethally bent.
Granted, this won't work in a large space or highly ventilated space. But even a casual glance at fire science shows that many rooms are sufficiently isolated to sustain substantial differences of pressure, temperature, gas/smoke, etc. Poor homes will be more permeable, wealthy ones better sealed for heat efficiency, and places like labs or government buildings have excellent to airtight sealing.
>> Mucking about with the local field might be possible. But Planets have honking big fields that would take a LOT of energy to fiddle with, even on a small scale. <<
You just need to connect gravity with electricity and magnetism. We already have decent control over the attract/repel functions with electromagnetism.
>>I don't think you could do more than reduce or increase a small area by a barely measurable percentage.<<
The planet-cracking accidents are things like that time a guy released a ton of radiation because he was holding two halves of fissionable material apart with a screwdriver. It's not so much the human generating the power, as controlling something that has or could have the power ... and at the bleeding edge of science, they don't always even know what that is.
>>And yeah, Wavicles probably, just virtual ones that don't exist, but everything around them behaves as if they do.<<
*laugh* You just described the whole of existence: little whizzing bits of energy pretending really hard to be things. Solid matter isn't solid at all, but it behaves as if it is.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-07 05:26 am (UTC)It's just that the equations are *different* for gravity. Don't recall details, it was a long time ago, and involved stuff like tensor calculus.
The late Dr. Robert Forward described a bunch of ways we *could* play with gravity that aren't that far outside the box.
Mostly a matter of engineering problems. Mostly needing to create hyperdense matter and stabilize it. Likely doable, but a major pain.
Check out his book Indistinguishable from Magic
Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-07 06:01 am (UTC)They're forces, but they also involve electrons. I mean, come on, a universe isn't a simple thing. A cone can look like a cone, or an oval or a parabola or a dot depending on how you slice it. Just because something looks like one thing from one angle, doesn't mean that's necessarily what it "is."
>>Check out his book Indistinguishable from Magic<<
LOL good title.