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[Spehss _]

> implying they don't think it's a punishment from god for the gays

That doesn't mean "they" are alerted that the bioweapon is actually a bioweapon though. It's just an act of a vengeful god, not the creation of a shady backroom organization of people that wants to destroy the world for whatever reason.

People can't do shit if it's an act of a vengeful god, but if people are responsible it would be theoretically possible to find the people responsible and get revenge for using the bioweapon. They just have to find irrefutable proof that the bioweapon is actually a bioweapon made by the shady backroom organization.

That actually makes sense. I'm scared now, simply because all the evidence points toward "no reason to be scared."

This is how conspiracy theorists start. Make sure you have a tin foil hat handy and remember to buy water filters.

[martinuzz]

No, no don't buy waterfilters. Don't you know that the government installs tracking devices in all survival kit gear? Turning your tinfoil hat upside down and filling it with coal should work. Remember to remove the coal before putting it back on.

[hops]

Just get the filter with the correct bonding angle.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

I don't get it. Should I get it?

(Of course I get the xkcd, I'd be ashamed if I didn't.)

[hops]

It's somewhat obscure, but I know that it's memetic in some circles. Basically, there's this certain company that really likes to advertise their dumb water filter in scientific magazines, mainly Popular Science and Scientific American, and they keep claiming that their water filter will you water molecules with the "healthy" bonding angles which will make you less likely to get cancer and other illnesses. So on places like r/science if scientific quackery show up people start making jokes about bonding angles. i.e. "That new age treatment didn't work because she meditated with the wrong angle."

[forsaken1111]

I had no idea that there were science memes

[hops]

I had no idea that there were science memes

Well, "meme". More like an in-joke between people who read English-language science magazines, really.

[forsaken1111]

Random Aside: I don't know if we've talked about it here before but I just read about the delayed-choice experiment again and I'm just trying to wrap my brain around the fact that photons somehow consider every possible path along their trajectory before resolving their position

[Starver]

I had no idea that there were science memes

There both are and are not science memes, at least until someone tries to see what they are...

[Reelya]

Random Aside: I don't know if we've talked about it here before but I just read about the delayed-choice experiment again and I'm just trying to wrap my brain around the fact that photons somehow consider every possible path along their trajectory before resolving their position

Personally, I think resolving the understanding of this could be related to sorting out quantum relativity.

Photons are traveling at the speed of light, meaning they should experience time and space dilation. A quote here from another site: "the spacetime distance of the path travelled by a photon (through vacuum) is zero". Perhaps we need to view a "photon" not as a "thing" but as an instantaneous (to light) energy-discharge event from one place to another, with the intervening space shaping the discharge. That's one of the things which makes interpretation complex: the logic of time and space themselves break down when you're dealing with speed-of-light objects. It's kinda common sense once you think about these things in relativistic terms. We just haven't gotten our heads around the fact that photons are fundamentally a relativistic phenomena as well as a quantum one.

[forsaken1111]

Random Aside: I don't know if we've talked about it here before but I just read about the delayed-choice experiment again and I'm just trying to wrap my brain around the fact that photons somehow consider every possible path along their trajectory before resolving their position

Personally, I think resolving the understanding of this could be related to sorting out quantum relativity.

Photons are traveling at the speed of light, meaning they should experience time and space dilation. A quote here from another site: "the spacetime distance of the path travelled by a photon (through vacuum) is zero". Perhaps we need to view a "photon" not as a "thing" but as an instantaneous (to light) energy-discharge event from one place to another, with the intervening space shaping the discharge. That's one of the things which makes interpretation complex: the logic of time and space themselves break down when you're dealing with speed-of-light objects. It's kinda common sense once you think about these things in relativistic terms. We just haven't gotten our heads around the fact that photons are fundamentally a relativistic phenomena as well as a quantum one.

The part that really got me was imagining the same experiment but on a galactic scale. A photon from another star, or from the creation of the universe itself, considered all possible collisions and routes that could ever occur before resolving itself. It really underlines what you said, their own space-time distance is zero. In other words, photon don't care about that 10 billion year trip across space, it already knows where its going and where it will end up. Its already happened, as far as the photon is concerned. We're just stuck out here watching it in macro time.

[Putnam]

Photons are traveling at the speed of light, meaning they should experience time and space dilation.

This is exactly wrong. To be exact, it's wrong to say that photons experience anything, not because of any philosophical bull regarding definitions of "experience" but because they don't have any valid frame from which "experience" can be defined at all.

[Egan_BW]

so like whoa man
what if you were a photon

[Max™]

Future
--------/ ### H ### D
-------/ #### E ### R
------/ ##### R ### A
Now ###### E ### G
------\ ###### # ### O
-------\ ###### B ### N
--------\ ###### E ### S
Past

You can follow an observer and note what they're doing from the past as they move along to the future, you could follow an observer as they wonder how they shoomped some great distance across the universe into dragonland.

If you're massive and traveling along the diagonals between "timeland" and "dragonland" then you're by definition moving at the speed of light, have infinite inertial mass, and infinite time dilation: no witty journal quips are going to come out of the universe-brightening wreckage when you hit something, you wouldn't be able to measure time between hitting c and hitting whatever poor planetary system you obliterate.

Applying that to what a photon would experience is... weird, since the whole "infinite time dilation" thing kicks in due to the specification of a massive observer moving at c.

A body without rest mass at c doesn't quite fit the same "what would x experience" framework, if you want to go down a series of fun rabbit holes along that hypothetical sheaf though, you could do worse than follow Wheeler and Feynman and wonder if an electron experiences itself jumping back and forth through time, interacting with itself in a gigantic fustercluck? Probably not, but it is a neat thought experiment!

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Code: [Select]

Future
--------/ ### H ### D
-------/ #### E ### R
------/ ##### R ### A
Now ######### E ### G
------\ ###### # ### O
-------\ ###### B ### N
--------\ ###### E ### S
Past
You can follow an observer and note what they're doing from the past as they move along to the future, you could follow an observer as they wonder how they shoomped some great distance across the universe into dragonland.

If you're massive and traveling along the diagonals between "timeland" and "dragonland" then you're by definition moving at the speed of light, have infinite inertial mass, and infinite time dilation: no witty journal quips are going to come out of the universe-brightening wreckage when you hit something, you wouldn't be able to measure time between hitting c and hitting whatever poor planetary system you obliterate.

Applying that to what a photon would experience is... weird, since the whole "infinite time dilation" thing kicks in due to the specification of a massive observer moving at c.

A body without rest mass at c doesn't quite fit the same "what would x experience" framework, if you want to go down a series of fun rabbit holes along that hypothetical sheaf though, you could do worse than follow Wheeler and Feynman and wonder if an electron experiences itself jumping back and forth through time, interacting with itself in a gigantic fustercluck? Probably not, but it is a neat thought experiment!