One time I read an econonerd mentioning “purchase power dollars” or some shit like that, basically adjust by a big mixture of how many bananas/gasoline/burgers/etc you can buy with in each region.
I’ve said it a few times on this site, but I cannot stress it enough :volcel-kamala: do not go to grad school
Lmao I love that so much
Tbf evolution is waaaay simpler than gravity. “Things that are better at reproducing and surviving reproduce and survive more” is pretty self explanatory
I’m like a failed version of the guy on the right who learned that we don’t need to solve gravity we need to build communism.
I remember doing this project for a proposal for how to make biofuels more economically efficient in order to outcompete oil :marx-joker:
fair enough honestly, real joker hours.
i’m currently “working” on my thesis on my work on a telescope camera, might just exit after the summer though honestly.
Without revealing too much to a bunch of operators at Langley, what’s wrong with your physics experience? That sounds like neat work
The standard line about pure mathematics is to give examples of times when toy math or recreational puzzle problems were discovered to have massive applications in fields like encryption or engineering. But for every Euler’s Theorem that finds a purpose, there are thousands of papers about quantum fruit loops.
I always think about how weird it is that science has been utterly incapable of figuring out what gravity even is and how it truly works. We have mathematical models, like general relativity, that describe what gravity does on large scales, but those are simply predictive models and don’t necessarily describe the underlying reality of it. We know this because those models eat absolute shit when the gravitational field is extremely strong, like in a black hole.
i dont think it’s that weird that we’re struggling with things that are waaaaaaay beyond human experience.
gravity for roughly human sized objects travelling at human-achievable speeds is “solved”, no?
quantum-batshit is far from us, and thus hard. billions of years of expanding space is similar.
Honestly, part of the problem is the development of science during the 20th century to be mechanistic rather than dialectical and the total idealism of modern science research in the last 20 years.
“What is space” and “what is time” are more metaphysical questions than physics ones. Doesn’t mean they’re not worthy of study and analysis! It gets weird when you talk about what a photon experiences, lol, it follows from time and length dilation that they don’t “observe” any time and their origin and destination are overlaid.
Dialectics applied to the physical world is how we get how evolution actually works (punctuated equilibrium) or hints how quantum mechanics probably works (pilot wave).
Definitely strays into philosophical territory when you ask what something really is, but I tend to think there actually is a difference in many cases. This case specifically because general relativity is factually incomplete owing to its inability to reconcile with the standard model even before you get into the philosophy of it.
And I’m not a physicist so my opinion isn’t very well informed, but the standard model has so many free parameters that can only be derived experimentally that I can’t help but think we’re dealing with epicycles all over again. That goes quadruple for string theory and the absurd number of vacuum permutations.
I think it’s the difference between having a model that explains why a thing is happening vs a model that simply predicts what will happen without truly knowing why it did. Approximating the output of a black box vs looking inside and understanding it’s mechanisms
