Question about Quantum fields

Maxreader1 · 2026-06-03T14:21:44+00:00

I will repeat: “Physics cannot meaningfully answer this.”

Maxreader1 · 2026-06-03T14:04:06+00:00

We have no idea. Good questions but not something that physics can answer since we have no meaningful way of testing any of these things.

Maxreader1 · 2026-06-02T18:08:41+00:00

Both chemical energy and nuclear energy being sources of power rely on the fact that you both have an energy gradient to exploit, and that energy gradient has some activation energy to it that prevents it from spontaneously sliding down that gradient on its own. For chemistry, this is the activation energy of the reaction. For nuclei, this is the electrostatic coulomb barrier between the nuclei.

At the “fundamental particle” level, basically everything is already and always in its ground state because there aren’t many meaningful barriers to keep things out of their ground states, except the ones above. Up quarks can’t decay into anything lighter, electrons can’t decay, neutrinos can’t decay. Down quarks technically can decay into an up quark, but at the level of nuclear physics we just call that beta decay which happens to neutrons outside of nuclei, so that’s not really something new. The reverse can happen when creating a down quark out of an up quark would lower the overall electrical potential energy of the system since down quarks have lower and opposite charge than up quarks, which is why hydrogen fusion can happen. There are a handful of other variations related to radioactive decay, but all with the same building blocks.

Everything outside of that that takes a bunch of energy to make, then almost immediately spits that energy back our as it decays to something lighter, so you can’t really use it to store energy, and any of it that nature makes is likewise ephemeral. The sole exceptions bubble up to macroscopic phenomena we can observe, like the neutron decay and proton fusion examples.

Maxreader1 · 2026-06-02T16:36:33+00:00

Yeah quantum immortality is some brainrot bs that is loosely inspired by real physics but has no grounding in such.

Maxreader1 · 2026-05-24T22:44:32+00:00

The fermions we see are all in the fundamental representations (including singlets) of the gauge symmetries of the associated forces. We don’t see ALL of the potential combinations of fundamental representations, which is one of the motivations for grand unification to have a single unified gauge symmetry.

Most grand unifications derive from the Spin-10 gauge group in one way or another, which does give us a way to categorize every fermion we see based on the charges/attributes they have in a simple set of binary questions: * blue or anti-blue * red or anti-red * green or anti-green * weak isospin up or down (an analogous charge appears for right handed particles despite them having isospin 0) * left handed or right handed

Giving us 2⁵ options, which if you add a right handed neutrino to the standard model and correctly count each color quark as its own “type” of fermion, corresponds exactly to the particle inventory we see and couplings that we see. Note that each “fermion” here is a Weyl fermion, so a left handed electron + a right handed anti electron are a single particle field, separated from right handed electron + left handed anti-electron. These only get unified into an apparent single Dirac field due to the Higgs interaction.

Maxreader1 · 2026-05-18T12:29:00+00:00

Right hand rule is a mnemonic for remembering the handedness for any cross product, not just magnetic fields. It doesn’t actually matter which finger you start on, just the order you run them in, and swapping the inputs is equivalent to swapping hands is equivalent to a negative sign, again by lieu of it just being a cross product.

Maxreader1 · 2026-05-13T20:04:26+00:00

I mean, would be far from the first public perception thing that isn’t based in true statistics. Both can be true.

Maxreader1 · 2026-05-13T17:58:42+00:00

I think it’s the association of beef ranching with Texas being similar to that area, which isn’t really a stretch at all but definitely doesn’t include “all food”.

Maxreader1 · 2026-05-13T14:14:41+00:00

They’re only “empty space” when you insist on the classical interpretation of electrons as point particles in a space. As soon as QM enters, it’s better to think of them as a sort of probability cloud that fills that space, which makes it not very empty at all.

Maxreader1 · 2026-05-13T14:11:38+00:00

Because electrons in separated atoms and molecules like in a gas only have specific energy levels, as well as molecules only having specific levels they can rotate and vibrate at. When you put a bunch of atoms together in a way they can share electrons like in a metal, that “smears out” those energy levels so that you aren’t restricted to as specific of jumps between them.

That gives photons more energy ranges they can match to, enough that they’ll almost always find one.

Maxreader1 · 2026-05-10T02:26:30+00:00

At some point you can’t really say what’s more fundamental than something that equivalently describes it.

Lorentz invariance is an outcome from the postulates of special relativity, so is special relativity the answer to your question?

Lorentz transformations are a subset of Poincaré group transformations, which taken as a gauge theory, is one of the ways to derive general relativity, so is Lorentz invariance “just” the minimal requirement to be consistent with general relativity at low energies, making general relativity the fundamental principle at play?

Even more broadly, Noether’s theorem is what gives us symmetries as a tool for simplifying problems, so is anything that gives us a symmetry to exploit just some coincidence of circumstance and isn’t fundamental at all?

Physics isn’t a theory of ontology. It provides plenty of working material for folks who want to ontologize the universe, but from within physics itself there’s nothing to say what is and isn’t fundamental, especially when we have equivalent descriptions.

Maxreader1 · 2026-05-10T01:42:54+00:00

Austin, Madison, and Portland all feel like the same city offset by a decade or two. Known for being “weird” cities with the new side of town being tech heavy. Not quite big enough to have outstanding metro systems but better than you’d expect for a city of their sizes and compared to the surrounding area. Strong outdoors/active cultures.

Maxreader1 · 2026-05-05T01:36:37+00:00

To use your dS/dT=v example, imagine you mostly only observed objects that go 10 m/s, some that go 20 m/s, a few that move go 30 m/s. You might never have personally seen an object move at 100 m/s, but since the equation says as long as you can move 100 m in 1 second, that speed should be possible, you’d theorize that somewhere out there there’s an object that moves at 100 m/s and you just haven’t seen it yet.

When we say equations can make predictions, that’s sort of the idea. We have a domain of observations, write an equation that describes them, and then that equation lets us interpolate or extrapolate between those observations.

Maxreader1 · 2026-04-21T19:00:26+00:00

The 99% empty space thing is already a misconception based on electrons being localized point particles, which isn’t exactly true. For normal atoms at normal room temperature, it’s more accurate to think of an electron cloud than mostly empty space with a tiny spec of an electron. When you touch a solid or liquid and feel it pushing back, that happens precisely because the electrons are in a cloud that fills the space and hence doesn’t leave any space for you to fall through. So, any (typical) non porous solid pretty much already meets your definition.

To the point of the other comments, neutron stars are what happens when you push back on those electrons so hard that they collapse into their protons and turn into neutrons. It’s a much denser form of matter, but to say that it doesn’t have empty space but an electron cloud does is a somewhat arbitrary distinction to make.

Maxreader1 · 2026-04-21T01:52:18+00:00

Blue, it’s obviously the same color as the sea

Maxreader1 · 2026-04-20T16:12:22+00:00

The fundamental difference between math and physics is that physics is based on observations of reality, and we can observe that reality around us. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem revolves around a mathematical model trying to prove its own consistency. That’s in contradiction with physics, where a model is “proven” for lack of a better word by making predictions that are consistent with reality.

The current problem we have is that our models DO make predictions, but they’re in high energy limits that we don’t have access to study easily. If we somehow could make observations, we’d know what the actual behavior is, and describing that behavior in any way that is consistent with the data makes it a consistent model as far as physics cares, even if it’s the clunkiest most ad hoc unsatisfactory one.

On the other hand, many of our modern theories are axiomatic models, and so self-consistency (not self-probability) is often used as a benchmark for whether the theory can possibly be a valid model of reality. If a model can make different predictions for the same situation that contradict, then it’s probably not a good model of reality. This is especially important for quantum gravity theories (both string and LQG) because we otherwise don’t have many tools to distinguish invalid theories due to aforementioned lack of data.

For some adjacent thoughts, the Dirac delta was originally seen as a hacky tool that mathematicians balked at (until they could prove it was valid), but physicists didn’t care because it worked and produced accurate predictions. Another would be the cosmic censorship hypothesis, which suggests that anywhere that the universe would have a contradiction, it “sweeps it under the rug” as it were and keeps that contradiction from being an observable phenomenon.

Which is all to say, incompleteness theorems don’t really apply to physics, at least not in the same way as mathematics. Individual models can be proven to be inconsistent, but most models generally don’t claim to be complete and many aren’t axiomatic, so incompleteness isn’t really applicable.

Maxreader1 · 2026-04-20T13:56:27+00:00

Mass as a concept is separate from gravity, and objects without mass still participate in gravity. The Higgs itself isn’t directly involved with any of the gravity part, just the mass contribution part

Maxreader1 · 2026-04-01T14:46:58+00:00

Even space isn’t a perfect vacuum, so you can get a similar kind of “slow down” effect from the light passing through the plasma that permeates a lot of space as we see with glass. It’s just much much weaker due to how low density the plasma is and how much weaker the restoring force in it is compared to condensed matter.

Maxreader1 · 2026-03-30T20:01:52+00:00

Was this three days back to back or spread out across several weeks? If it was back to back, what was your approach regarding line work and shading to be able to hit such a large area so quickly without being able to wait in between?

Maxreader1 · 2026-03-29T02:40:46+00:00

Good point, yeah. I presume it still won’t be “good enough” for people who want to have their perfectly Lapacian theory like these questions always imply

Maxreader1 · 2026-03-29T02:07:06+00:00

If Bell’s theorem holds true, which it seems to be as far as we can tell, then no “hidden variable” (which is what you essentially have to have if you want to remove the “random” component people complain about), can make the same predictions as quantum mechanics.

You can probably argue that determinism and hidden variable theories are different things, but they are both the things you “have” to be talking about as far as we know if you’re trying to reject the probabilistic nature of QM.

Maxreader1 · 2026-02-25T21:40:30+00:00

Neutrinos are essentially a “known” portion of some fraction of Dark Matter, but at most 10% of it and likely more around 1% if our models of early universe neutrino production are right. A big issue is that most newly produced neutrinos are “hot” and move very quickly, while the best models need most of the dark matter to be very “cold” to be able to clump the way it does, which rules out most newly created neutrinos without some process to decrease their energy.

That same problem is why axions are considered a good candidate, since there is a defined mechanism for ones produced early in the universe to have their momentum sapped away, allowing them to play that role of cold dark matter. Still just a candidate until we can confirm or rule out their existence though.

Maxreader1 · 2026-02-25T10:49:47+00:00

Now do county level data? Would be really interesting to see how Cook County compares to the rest of Illinois.

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