ShaunaTheDead

Yeah I figured it maybe also had something to do with the distribution of matter throughout the universe. We assumed when we made predictions of the distant past that the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies were the same mass as they are today, but if they were less massive then it might help explain why black holes didn’t gather as much material into it’s orbit as we would have thought.

I think you’re right though that it has more to do with the negative pressure that space and the black holes seem to exert although I must admit I don’t really understand what that means or how you would get a negative pressure from a black hole or from space.

I saw a paper on here recently that basically said they’ve explained dark energy through what they called “cosmological coupling” of black holes. Basically, black holes absorb space over time, and since space has a base level of energy and energy is kind of a form of mass then the black holes are gaining mass over time and so they are less massive in the past than they are today. I don’t 100% understand why that explains dark energy, but it is a very new paper and as far as I know hasn’t been peer reviewed yet, so who knows!

Here’s the paper: https://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/2023/02/first-observational-evidence-linking-black-holes-to-dark-energy/

Light is pretty fucky. Like taking the shortest route to it’s target through TIME! What the fuck light?!

“dark” in scientific terms just means unexplained. We’re very, very, very, and I cannot stress this enough… VERY sure that dark matter and dark energy exist, but they will remain “dark” until we discover what they are/what’s causing the effects that we see. Aether was just unfounded non-sense that was based on practically nothing.

For example, carbon dating took discoveries including counting tree rings to determine a tree’s age, the origins of all the radiation on Earth – spoiler: it was the Earth itself, but also cosmic rays which was the important bit, nuclear half-lives and creating a chart of specifically useful half-lives for historical dating, the discovery of a rare isotope of carbon which can only be made by cosmic rays (carbon-14) as a near perfect clock for human timescales, how to build a sensor that can read faint carbon-14 radioactivity while filtering out all the radioactive noise from the environment, making another chart of expected radioactive readings based on geographical location including the depths of the ocean, and of course not to mention all of the archeological data used to calibrate all of the charts and devices used in the process.

I believe their reactions might be slightly different depending on the person, but if you simply asked them if it made the comment made them uncomfortable they’d say yes 100% of the time.

No, it’s about your relationship to that person. Are you on friendly terms? Are they comfortable around you? Do you have some kind of established rapport?

Or are you a complete stranger making a weird comment about another strangers physical appearance out of nowhere?

The teacher’s meaning is clear, which is the purpose of language. Mickey’s just being a grammar nazi.

Being excited about being wrong because either way it’s information

This literally is the basis of science that I think a lot of people misunderstand. Science doesn’t prove anything conclusively. What scientists try to do is disprove the leading theory and when they can’t, it adds to the pile of evidence that increases the likelyhood of the leading theory being correct. Even things that we’re very, very, very sure are correct are still like 99.99999999999…% confirmed.

A good example that’s often used to show how it’s more important to try to disprove a theory rather than trying to prove it is the existence of black swans. It was long thought that all swans were white and every time someone saw a white swan, that idea was reinforced. But when someone actually went out of their way to go looking for a black swan, they found a bunch of them!

The easiest way to tell the difference is that monkeys have tails and apes don’t. Chimps are definitely apes and I’m not sure what OP is getting at.

I really think that consciousness is just a combination of Narrow AI – that is, AI that is only good at a very specialized task. For example, we have a part of our brains specifically to process the raw data from our eyes, that’s a Narrow AI designed for that express purpose. When you combine all of the AIs that would be necessary for sight, smell, taste, touch, etc, as well as maintaining bodily functions, immune system, and other autonomic systems, you’ve essentially got an AI that can run a body.

However, at the point, that body would rely purely on instinct and only react to it’s environment. Add one more layer of Narrow AI whose purpose is to extrapolate the given information and make educated guesses and you’ve got the potential for intelligence. Because now you’re not just reacting to the environment but you’re actively thinking of how you can use all of those other Narrow AI that control your body to shape your environment, which is the basis of intelligence.

I’m going to take a guess because again I’m not an astronomer or a physicist, just a lay person and an enthusiast.

What Dark Energy does can basically be boiled down to anti-gravity. It’s not exactly that, we’re not really sure what it is, but that’s what effect it has, it’s repulsive in the same way that gravity is attractive. The theory is that space is expanding and the more space between things (like galaxies) the faster they will move away from each other. It’s also been getting faster since the Big Bang.

We also assumed that black holes didn’t gain much mass unless they absorbed a large body of matter or had an accretion disk – They do gain mass through Hawking Radiation but that’s pretty minuscule. So I think this study has to do with the distribution of matter throughout the universe and the amount of matter in galaxies.

If black holes have always been as massive as they are today then we would assume that everything would be much closer together and the super massive black holes at the center of galaxies would have gathered more matter than they currently have. So we made the assumption that there must have been some kind of repulsive force that spread everything out. Instead the black holes had less gravitational force than we assumed and so it explains why they didn’t gather more matter into their orbits and everything spread out across the universe in the way we observe it today.

Again, I’m just guessing based on my limited knowledge. If an astronomer wants to jump in here, please do!

This is craaaazy astronomical news if true! I’ll try to summarize from my limited understanding as I’m not a professional.

First of all, this article is about Dark Energy, at it’s basics Dark Energy is an unknown force which is why it’s called “dark” and it was named after scientists couldn’t explain why the universe (or spacetime specifically) was expanding as quickly as it is. This paper is the first piece of observational evidence that might “shed some light” on where Dark Energy comes from. From what I can gather, it says that through observing lots of supermassive black holes at the center of loads of galaxies, they’ve determined two things if this observation is correct: black holes don’t have a singularity at their cores, and that black holes gain mass by “cosmological coupling” as they put it.

First, a singularity means that math breaks down, it usually means that it tends toward infinity and the equation can’t be solved. With black holes, it usually means that spacetime itself collapses down infinitely into a single dimension, which is pretty hard for us to understand and breaks a lot of physical laws like Einstein’s equations.

Second, “cosmological coupling” they explain is that as the space expands, the black hole also expands. In very simple terms, lets say the black hole has a diameter 2 LY (light years) in space. If after say a million years space expands enough that 2 LY now is equivalent to 1 LY before then the size of the black hole is essentially 4 LY now when using the old universe’s definition of what a LY is.

Edit: I forgot to mention that because the black hole is essentially “absorbing” spacetime it must gain energy because spacetime does have energy even though we consider it “empty”.

Because of Einstein’s famous equation e=mc^2 we can determine that energy is basically equivalent to mass, and since the black hole is getting extra energy from this “cosmological coupling”, it’s also gaining mass.

I think the most basic TL;DR I can give then is: black holes are sort of “absorbing” spacetime as it expands and gaining energy while doing so which in turn leads them to gaining mass. This extra mass has now been shown through observation to account for and completely explain the origins of Dark Energy.

With that said… THIS PAPER IS BRAND NEW AND HAS NOT BEEN PEER REVIEWED! This is not a discovery yet, it’s way too early to say anything conclusive.

Looks like an article paid for by Epic.

Here’s a repost of what I said the last time the Steam vs Epic Games Store “debate” was brought up:

My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let’s be honest. They have many ties to China’s Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.

There’s also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don’t know.

As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.

Plus, any good will that they’ve purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They’ve been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They’re going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.

They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they’re fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it’s projected that they won’t be profitable until 2027, which means they’ll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.

I imagine that your brain probably goes into sleep mode while your body is trying to recover from something extremely traumatic to try to preserve resources. And if it looks like you’re going to die anyway then there’s no reason to keep preserving resources and the brain needs to run full-tilt to see if it can come up with a solution quickly.

Forget Einstein’s theories, there are literally people out there that think 1+1=2 is wrong and have a 500 page paper “explaining” why.

Look up pictures of chiton (the name of the creature in question). It’s nearly impossible to find a picture that looks like the shell itself are the eyes, yet in the article featured front and center is a picture of a chiton with a shell that happens to look like bug eyes.

I still don’t know WHY they have eyes all over their shells even after reading the article. It’s a pretty click baity title, but I guess it worked on me so they won this round.

Okay, I thought that they were like clams and the picture at the start of the article was showing a row of eyes between the fuzzy/spiky stuff on the side but after looking them up, that shiny part between the fuzzy/spiky stuff in the picture is it’s shell. The eyes are tiny specs between all the fuzzy/spiky stuff.