Weird Science

The Ozzman said:
Are they implying -1 is not in the set of real numbers?
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I don’t believe so. It seems to be a formalism in which operations using real numbers give way to imaginary values:

By repeatedly extending the real numbersto create larger systems — the complex numbers, the quaternions, the octonions — in which we can add, subtract, multiply and divide, we lose a little familiarity with each step. Along the way, we may also lose touch with what we think of as real. But what we gain are new ways of thinking about the world. And we can always find a use for that.
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sqrt(-1) is a complex number, not real.

sqrt(-1) * sqrt(-1) != (does not equal) -1 thus it's complex

this board needs LaTex support :(
 
https://www.quantamagazine.org/frau...389976173&mc_cid=299d427b84&mc_eid=d876fb4325

This is fucked up.

Based on her complex measurement, which can come out as either YES or NO, she can infer the result of the measurement made by Bob’s friend. Say Alice got YES for an answer. She can deduce using quantum mechanics that Bob’s friend must have found the particle’s spin to be UP, and therefore that Alice’s friend got tails in her coin toss.

This assertion by Alice necessitates another assumption about her use of quantum theory. Not only does she reason about what she knows, but she reasons about how Bob’s friend used quantum theory to arrive at his conclusion about the result of the coin toss. Alice makes that conclusion her own. This assumption of consistency argues that the predictions made by different agents using quantum theory are not contradictory.

Meanwhile, Bob can make a similarly complex measurement on his friend and his lab, placing them in a quantum superposition. The answer can again be YES or NO. If Bob gets YES, the measurement is designed to let him conclude that Alice’s friend must have seen heads in her coin toss.

It’s clear that Alice and Bob can make measurements and compare their assertions about the result of the coin toss. But this involves another assumption: If an agent’s measurement says that the coin toss came up heads, then the opposite fact — that the coin toss came up tails — cannot be simultaneously true.

The setup is now ripe for a contradiction. When Alice gets a YES for her measurement, she infers that the coin toss came up tails, and when Bob gets a YES for his measurement, he infers the coin toss came up heads. Most of the time, Alice and Bob will get opposite answers. But Frauchiger and Renner showed that in 1/12 of the cases both Alice and Bob will get a YES in the same run of the experiment, causing them to disagree about whether Alice’s friend got a heads or a tails. “So, both of them are talking about the past event, and they are both sure what it was, but their statements are exactly opposite,” Renner said. “And that’s the contradiction. That shows something must be wrong.”

This led Frauchiger and Renner to claim that one of the three assumptions that underpin the thought experiment must be incorrect.
“The science stops there. We just know one of the three is wrong, and we cannot really give a good argument [as to] which one is violated,” Renner said. “This is now a matter of interpretation and taste.”
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This is really fascinating. As someone who's mesmerized by black holes, I'm absorbed:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-black-hole-interiors-grow-forever-20181206/

The relationship between a black hole’s surface area and its information content has kept quantum gravity researchers busy for decades. But one might also ask: What does the growing volume of its interior correspond to, in quantum terms? “For whatever reason, nobody, including myself for a number of years, really thought very much about what that means,” said Susskind. “What is the thing which is growing? That should have been one of the leading puzzles of black hole physics.”

In recent years, with the rise of quantum computing, physicists have been gaining new insights about physical systems like black holes by studying their information-processing abilities — as if they were quantum computers. This angle led Susskind and his collaborators to identify a candidate for the evolving quantum property of black holes that underlies their growing volume. What’s changing, the theorists say, is the “complexity” of the black hole — roughly a measure of the number of computations that would be needed to recover the black hole’s initial quantum state, at the moment it formed. After its formation, as particles inside the black hole interact with one another, the information about their initial state becomes ever more scrambled. Consequently, their complexity continuously grows.
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Contemplating the relationship between spatial size and informatic complexity... this is just a mind fuck.
 
I honestly can't even. And also how complexity appears to spit in the face of actual spatial presence--that computational interaction can somehow make more out of space than is actually there. It's insane.
 
Titan may yield clues to the development of complex chemistry on other moons and planets, including Earth, he explained. “People use Titan to think about a ‘pre-biotic’ Earth – when nitrogen was more prevalent in the early Earth’s atmosphere.”

I'm really interested in Titan lately:

New findings, published in the journal Astrobiology, suggest that large craters are the prime locations in which to find the building blocks of life on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

Titan is an icy expanse covered by organic molecules, with liquid methane lakes enshrouded by a thick, hazy atmosphere of nitrogen and methane that begs the question: why isn’t there life on this strangely Earth-like world? Perhaps it is the balmy –179 degrees Celsius (-300 degrees Fahrenheit) temperatureon the surface that would likely prevent any biochemical reactions from taking place. But is there any place on Titan where there might be hope that biomolecules, such as amino acids, could form? One team wanted to find out.



"Titan is a bizarro world Earth, where ice takes the place of rock and there are rivers of gasoline..." - Dr Catherine Neish
 
Fascinating. I knew sand was used to make glass and concrete, but you really don't think about the astronomical amounts required to sustain urban development and growth.

We're quickly approaching the limits of how much growth geological raw materials and fossil fuels can sustain. The years between now and 2050 are going to be interesting.
 
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You would think that some company could make a hybrid material to mimic the properties of sand but be much stronger. No idea though as I sucked at chemistry and physics.
 
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This is why body horror is and always will be more genuinely horrifying than the supernatural or most other horror styles.

722c767d3473cd4c2ee184b097a506c3.jpg

A Cereal Leaf Beetle after being parasitized by a parasitoid wasp which lays its eggs inside the larva of the beetle. The eggs hatch within the larvae and begin to feed on the beetle while it is still alive, before they burst out and kill it.
 
I'm pretty sure.

Also, the body horror angle is spot on. Ichneumonidae reproduction inspired H.R. Giger's Alien designs, and in general body horror engages anxieties of parasitism. It's unsettling to think our bodies are subject to forces our minds can't control.
 
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