hubblestudies - Tumblr blog

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Orion, Earth, and the Moon via NASA https://ift.tt/hdDIkMB

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some last minute reading notes for modern physics

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being smart has never stopped me from being a complete fucking idiot

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One of the greatest causes of Acting like a Dumb Clown Disease is what I'm gonna call Engineer Brain. It's when you're really good and smart at one thing, so you start to think that you're really good and smart at everything. This little voice in your head is a liar, and it wants you to be cringe where people can see.

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trying to keep up with my calc class while I'm stuck at home with covid

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It's the duty of each and every one of you to lie to your local astrology enthusiast about your birthday so that they'll start self-assuredly parsing your personality and behavior through whatever star sign you lied about. It's dishonest work and we've all got to do it.

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last two weeks of the semester in between thanksgiving and finals moodboard😜

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How other physics students prepare for finals: makes flashcards, does problem sets, reviews past homeworks, studies

How I prepare for finals: cry, buy an age 11-13 boys bedspread that has astronauts on it, cry, buys a book about the physics in star wars, watch movies from my childhood so I can regress back to a time when I wasn't a pure ball of unadulterated stress, watch voltron (for the 5th time)

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I don’t study because I want good grades. I study so I can get into grad schools with pretty buildings <3

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Pleiades over Half Dome

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Women and trans people are most likely to experience harassment, according to the research, which comes as physics as a discipline attempts to grapple with equity and inclusion issues.

The study’s authors found that the two biggest factors that influence a person’s decision to leave physics are the overall climate of the organization they belong to and more specifically observing exclusionary behavior. “Nearly everybody I know who is LGBT+ in physics has left, to be honest,” says Tim Atherton, associate professor of physics at Tufts University and co-lead author of the study. “We’re talking dozens and dozens of students and faculty. I can empathize with the experiences of the study’s participants from some of my own experiences.” “People feel shunned, excluded, and they were continually having to readjust and twist themselves to fit into the physics community,” says Ramón Barthelemy, assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah and co-lead author of the study. “LGBT+ people are inherently a part of this field. If you want physics to be a place that anyone can participate, we have to talk about these issues.” According to the American Physical Society, 15% of early career scientists identify as LGBT+. and while a number of previous studies have explored challenges faced by physicists with regards to gender and race, this study sought to expand understanding of the impact of these barriers through a survey of the experiences of 324 people in physics across the LGBT+ spectrum. It will appear in the journal Physical Review of Physics Education Research. The coauthors themselves come from a wide range of institutions, backgrounds, identities, and career stages and sought to understand the lives of the larger LGBT+ physicist community from their own perspectives.

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"If you want to be a physicist, you must do three things -first , study mathematics, second, study more mathematics, and third, do the same."

Arnold Sommerfeld

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I’ve said this before but compared to physicists, biologists fit the mad scientist stereotype Way More from what I’ve seen

physics papers mostly just consist of people finding better ways to do math whereas I was literally just reading a bio paper that was essentially just “we starved yeast and then gave it a bunch of sugar and it fucking exploded from metabolizing too much. here’s how it went down”

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Alright strap yourselves in. Quantum mechanics is here is blow your mind and it will not be denied. Now you might think you’re not interested in quantum mechanics, but this isn’t really about quantum mechanics it’s about what to do with our flicker of consciousness and stuff. So an object is considered to be “real” if it exists with definite properties independent of observation. It is “local” according to the principle that objects can only be influenced by their surroundings. One property many particles have is spin, which is measured as “up” or “down”. If you know the spin of a particle and break it into two particles, you know their spins will always complement each other because their sum is known — the particles are entangled. SO GET THIS: You entangle a pair of particles. You separate them. When you measure them, one particle’s spin will ALWAYS be up and the other down, 100% of the time, even when they’re lightyears apart !! You might think that’s just because they inherited these properties when they separated, but their quantum states are random not consistent: you do not know the particle’s spin until you measure it. in fact they do not HAVE a definite state until measured, and are considered to exist in multiple states because of quantum superposition. So as soon as you measure an entangled particle, the other one INSTANTANEOUSLY collapses into the opposite spin. as if telepathically, like it KNOWS. And we know no information could have travelled between the particles because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. It’s wÈïṞḏ™️

And this observer effect isn’t just some anomalous glitch exclusive to this experiment. When you pass photons one by one through a plate containing two slits onto an observed screen, an interference pattern is created on the screen due to the wave nature of light — the light wave passes through both slits simultaneously and interferes with itself. BUT, if you monitor the photons passing through the slits, they are always found to be passing through either one or the other, and the interference pattern disappears. because it’s only absorbed at the screen at those two discrete points, exhibiting particle, not wave, behaviour. it changes its behaviour based on whether there is detection! So a particle can be described as either a wave or particle before measurement. Wave-particle duality! Where the particles are detected is probabilistic; you can never predict their behaviour for certain. again, quantum superposition.

So anyway by measuring an entangled particle you can somehow influence the quantum state of the other entangled particle, both by collapsing its state and doing so instantaneously. This is bewilderingly uncomfortable right, because it throws everything we know about classical physics out the window. Well it was also uncomfortable to Einstein, who couldn’t accept that quantum mechanics was the full story of reality, and proposed there must be hidden variables that we haven’t yet discovered. But no one could test this theory, UNTIL decades later when John Bell devised an experiment to test for hidden variables. In the years since, this eponymous Bell test — the separated entangled particles experiment with extra detector settings — has been conducted many times and increasingly rigorously. ruling out loopholes. enlarging the distance between entangled particles. And every single time, quantum mechanics proved triumphant. even when a cosmic Bell test was done based on stars hundreds of light years apart! This is what won the Nobel in physics. There are no hidden variables. Particles can be connected, entangled, no matter how far apart they are !¡!

THEREFORE. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? two things: Objects are NOT only influenced by their surroundings AND objects do NOT have definite properties/states unless measured. Are you hearing this? OBJECTS ARE NOT LOCALLY REAL.

So deeply contrary to our everyday experiences that we didn’t really probe into this realm until like a hundred years ago. It doesn’t affect our everyday lives; we don’t need to know about quantum entanglement to survive or live happy lives, but we still WANT TO KNOW. We still wonder. How fucking phenomenal is that. In love with this relentless pursuit of truth and desire for knowledge unique to our species. Floored by the dedication of these physicists who kept digging at this despite the pessimism and dismissal of hordes of people, despite the it’s-too-hard-so-just-leave-it pressure. We too are just particles that lumped together and evolved into consciousness, but every day we use that consciousness to search for meaning, even when that quest may reinforce our own fragility and futility.

And I wouldn’t trade that for anything in this unreal world.