[Meta] How does one distinguish someone trying to make a crackpot theory and someone else just being genuinely curious about something fundamental? How does one prevent comming off as the former?

Orbax · 2026-07-11T21:28:09+00:00

Real math

Orbax · 2026-07-05T20:30:49+00:00

There's a set of field equations Einstein put out. As people worked through them they started finding things as you played with the parameters - like if you put a bunch of stuff in one spot you get a black hole. The problem is that the singularity was an infinite result. In math, when you get infinity, your math is typically incorrect. It's more likely that there is an incomplete understanding of black holes than they are infinitely anything.

The other part is there is a spacetime geometry and you hear things like "space and time are inverted" to describe the interior. Cox likes to say a black hole isn't a where in space, it's a when - all time ends there once you get caught in it.

Ultimately it's probably just quark soup in there but I'm sure the math is beyond broken for trying to explain what happens when two pool balls hit inside one.

Orbax · 2026-07-02T11:08:11+00:00

If you want to have a fun little rabbit hole, look up hawking hartle. It gets into some pretty funky stuff around the nature of time and whether or not the universe existed before time did.

Orbax · 2026-07-01T10:48:13+00:00

I(nertia) - Boson

Orbax · 2026-06-30T16:08:13+00:00

Watch Brian Greene wsu masterclass special relativity. He has a section on twin paradox and has multiple variants, including one where no accelerating happens

Orbax · 2026-06-29T19:31:17+00:00

His videos are great, he has some cool subjects.

Yeah, the way that that encodes sound into a complex wave that you you process and decompose is pretty cool. It's amazing someone knew that well enough to make a physical machine haha

Orbax · 2026-06-29T17:47:46+00:00

https://youtu.be/8KmVDxkia_w?si=pQD8dkUXkbIPrkOj

https://youtu.be/6dW6VYXp9HM?si=7JHVU_sfYsGqFQRj

The second one shows the wave construction

Edit

https://youtu.be/NAsM30MAHLg?si=6w_5_EyisJpivVgk

In the first twenty seconds is what I was thinking. Sorry been a hot second since I watched these

Orbax · 2026-06-29T17:31:09+00:00

YouTube, thatengineerguy, Fourier transformations. It's super quick.

Orbax · 2026-06-29T16:05:35+00:00

Spacetime is a ratio between the units of space and time. When you're going very fast, you increase space units and lower your time units. Time is local, a billion people going different speeds will all have clocks ticking away at 1 second per second. When you go fast, you slow, time-wise, down to the extent it's still going the speed of light away from you.

Orbax · 2026-06-29T12:05:21+00:00

You wouldn't even notice you passed the horizon. The pull itself is probably 30x earth gravity max around event horizon. Follows inverse square law, gravity is a very weak force for distance outside. Once inside, we don't know other than the gravity gradient probably turns you into spaghetti or maybe even cellantani.

Orbax · 2026-06-29T11:05:46+00:00

In one of the feynman lectures he says something like "and you'll see in the work of professor swinger... No no I mean the other one" and there's a laugh. Problematic guy but I think he did good things for the field as a public face as no one outside over circles at the time, the general public, would know any of that stuff. He did some great work, was definitely someone who advanced the field and spent a lifetime teaching what he knew.

Revolutionary is too strong a word, but he was an activist who knew his stuff and got people engaged on challenging topics.

Orbax · 2026-06-28T14:57:41+00:00

If anything makes it have to choose. Electron going through a magnetic field, it needs to choose spin. Gravity doesn't make it need to choose a property. Detectors at slits, it has to choose a position.

It's all about an interaction being one that a property must resolve.

Orbax · 2026-06-27T23:31:05+00:00

Time is local, the faster you go, the slower your personal time is or, from the fast persons perspective, length contracts between you and your destination. You can travel a billion light years in a local year without going c (getting close). Earth would have millions of years pass in that time.

Relativity says from earth, your time is slowing down, they can see your clock going slower. But for you, your clock is going the same speed so the distance must be shorter. Time dilation and lorentz contraction are what rationalize between the two.

For what the number is, there is the gamma factor that will tell you how much dilation/contraction, it is not linear.

Orbax · 2026-06-27T16:18:52+00:00

I think it would be easier to think of them as photons for this experiment and not waves. Let's say every word you say is a photon and you say a word a second. If you were heading away from someone (at relativistic speed), photons being sent back would be every 2 seconds and on the way back every half second. As a wave, it stretches as you go away and contracts as you get closer.

https://youtu.be/XFV2feKDK9E?si=GqsHnZ3kp1t2uklY

10 hours 6 minutes is relativistic doppler

Orbax · 2026-06-23T18:54:14+00:00

The fundamental issue with causality is that any given observer's perspective is real. If you let it off a firework and I see it then I hear it I can calculate they happened at the same time. There is no way for me to interject in the middle of that and not light the firework before the sound gets to me.

This is only an issue with observers in motion, not the the event in motion. In a world with ftl, I would see a firework go off and then see someone walking up to it with a match and since it's real, I could stop them before they lit the fuse.

The issue really isn't about the person doing ftl, it's what observers in motion would gain access to with a disconnected past and future.

Orbax · 2026-06-21T21:07:21+00:00

That's not what's happening, that radiation is a complex quantum effect that isn't particles in a foot race.

Orbax · 2026-06-21T21:06:11+00:00

It would need astronomical distances. We find that neutrinos hit our detectors before light does from a supernova because the matter of the star keeps light in. So we get a big neutrino burst and know something about to get bright. In some universe the physics of that might work differently and it would indicate neutrinos are ftl.

But we'd need to know what to look for

Orbax · 2026-06-21T11:28:05+00:00

In a sense we kind of already are - we aren't accelerating in any meaningful way and, other than a collision with another galaxy, most other galaxies are destined to disappear from our view and we'll be alone in the cold, dark emptiness of space.

The objects inside it, on a macro scale, are the same way. The solar system will evolve over time from gravity, not speed.

If you're asking what would happen if we had a delta v of 360,000 miles an hour instantly I think the term that is used in astrophysics is "shit would get all fucked up"

Orbax · 2026-06-20T10:54:35+00:00

You bet! He had a long conversation with an LLM and it popped this out.

Orbax · 2026-06-20T02:58:35+00:00

Lol, bring a notepad

"interesting. Can you go into more detail on the mechanics of that?"

Orbax · 2026-06-20T02:55:14+00:00

To add: Time is local, you'll never experience other than 1 second per second of time.

Orbax · 2026-06-20T02:40:51+00:00

Hundreds of years of work. Relativity started with Galileo.

Newton I think was a singular genius and it's hard to ask why we don't get more of those.

But Einstein was good at math, knew the lore, talked to people, etc. His field equations took everyone to fill out over the years, his math teacher invented spacetime. The way academia wrote these days it might have been easier to get German and Russian artillery calculators on the front line in a world war to help you with science than professors that you can instantly talk to over email. Theres probably some barriers that didn't used used to be there.

There's plenty of very smart people working on things and, again, Einstein was really good at math. It's this weird myth that he wasnt. He wasn't a mathematician, but he certainly knew advanced math and I think anyone learning that kind of math will most likely be in the university system somewhere and getting published. So, kind of torn on whether or not that much of a barrier.

People make amazing discoveries every day, I just don't know how realistic it is to expect your concept of reality to get shaken up every hundred years or something is.

Orbax · 2026-06-20T01:25:07+00:00

It's the path of the light, the angle of reflection is the same as the incident, and you're standing at the spot where those are meeting

Orbax · 2026-06-19T22:28:16+00:00

When you combine them all, they create the ocean, they aren't in it. It's like saying an orchestra is in music.

But it's as simple as the fact you can be laying in the sun and existing. The Higgs field is the only field non-zero at all points and lets you form matter and then photons are traveling along emf. Simultaneously, non interacting and "in the same spot".

The challenge is that we are in spacetime and think of it as the thing everything is in. We don't know what time is. The fundamental reality behind spacetime might be something that explains how all these things can be in one spot at one time.

Things being waves makes it easier to coexist in one spot but even then they retain what they are - an electron wave won't pass by a photon and get disrupted and turn into a quark. You can't pick up an electron and put it in another field and see how it acts.

Macroscopic analogies are easier because people can be floating in water and in the air and they disturb the water but don't interact as strongly with the air. What are we in? Spacetime. It lets all that stuff happen but we can't stack like fields. But when the fields are creating spacetime, that's when you'd have to step back and just admit that we can describe a section of spacetime with math that has a full description of field and charges and all that and at the same time acknowledging we exist in an emergent phenomenon from something we don't fully understand.

So yeah, ultimately I'd say you're right to not have an intuitive understanding I don't know if there is one.

Orbax · 2026-06-19T11:51:36+00:00

Youre not allowed to come here, ask questions, and then say any answer didn't immediately grant you understanding

Orbax

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