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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • This one is a little different. On the first week of some college introductory economics class, the teacher was basically just reading from the textbook we all had, some historical figure who was a member of the “Council Of Seven” or something like that, when a student raised her hand - “Ma’am, what was the Council Of Seven?” - the teacher paused, and said - “Can you bring it tomorrow, as assignment?” - and actually giggled. This was in the 90s, pre-internet, looking up something like that was not a trivial task.

    The teacher might have thought she was being cute and/or deflected her own shortcomings, but the actual effect was that we immediately lost all respect and trust for her, no one ever raised a hand again in her class, we all immediately went into rote robot mode for the rest of the semester, disengaged on a gut level.





  • This makes spiders only the second known arthropod species, after bees, to sense and use electric fields.

    But birds use the magnetic field to navigate, correct?

    Because humans don’t feel Earth’s electric field, its role in biology is often overlooked.

    Speaking of the magnetic field, there is purportedly an Aboriginal group in Australia that uses a subjective form of orientation terminology baked into their language or syntax, that forces their speakers to maintain an intricate and complex awareness of their surroundings and place in them.
    Anyway… these people seem to be able to sense fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field, for example - they can tell when a solar storm is hitting the atmosphere.








  • All I know is that when matter and antimatter particles annihilate, what that usually means is that they become photons, so that their rest mass - what we usually mean when we say matter itself - is gone, having turned into pure energy, mainly gamma rays I believe.

    The other part that you allude to, has to do with how at the quantum level, processes are time-symmetric or time-reversible, look exactly the same if you view their behavior forwards or in reverse, you cannot tell which way it’s going. Antimatter behaves just like matter, but from our perspective like an egg un-breaking, or a car un-crashing, or an ice cube un-melting.

    What’s puzzling me is how photons, other bosons like gluons or majorana particles are supposed to be their own anti-particle, how does that affect their time-related behavior and interactions with themselves and other particles, I have no idea… at least not yet.
    In fact, I hadn’t even thought about this strange question until just now, and I love it!






  • I’m going to copy-paste the exact relevant bit here:

    For each neutrino, there also exists a corresponding antiparticle, called an antineutrino, which also has no electric charge and half-integer spin. They are distinguished from the neutrinos by having opposite signs of lepton number and chirality. As of 2016, no evidence has been found for any other difference.

    I knew about the chirality difference, that there are no right-handed neutrinos nor left-handed antineutrinos (or something along those lines, breaking what was thought to be a fundamental parity or symmetry), but what puzzled me was that I thought the charge difference was the one big fundamental difference between matter and antimatter, and suddenly tonight the neutrino question popped into my head. At the very least I knew that it’s not a mass/negative mass type of difference.

    Now as for that bit that says “opposite signs of lepton number”… I’d never even heard of this concept or characteristic, until right now.



  • niktemadur@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzScIence
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    24 days ago

    “What the hell are you kids doing down there in the basement, that you need these more specific units?”
    “Um… nothing, sir. Everything is quite all right, quite all right.”
    “Hrumph! Very well then, I shall be in my study. And do try to keep the bloody racket down, for chrissakes!”
    “Yes sir, thank you sir, goodnight sir… Whew… that was a close one!”




  • niktemadur@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzCat
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    27 days ago

    As close to nothing as something can be and still exist… as far as we know.
    That mass is so small, and behaves so strangely (it fluctuates), that the theories say the neutrino does NOT get its’ tiny fluctuating mass from the Higgs Field.

    And if that ain’t a mind-blower of what is at the very edge of human knowledge and understanding of reality, I don’t know what is.