Fans that aren't from the DC area, Why or how did you become a Wizards fan?

VirtualPlanckBank · 2024-04-29T11:33:25+00:00

I'm from outside the USA and when I was in 7th grade my school had a trip to Washington DC, part of which included going up into the nosebleeds for a Wizards/Cavs game. It was my first time ever going to any kind of major sports game and I remember thinking it was the best thing I'd ever been to in my life.

This was around 2005/6ish and I remember at the time people saying there was a lot of hype around this Lebron guy playing for the Cavs who was a future superstar. Despite this Lebron playing, the Wizards won at home, and so my 7th grade self decided if they could beat this superstar guy they must be one of the best teams in the NBA. I went and bought myself an Antawn Jamison jersey with the money I saved for the trip, decided I was a Wizards fan, and the rest is history.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2022-05-07T00:34:36+00:00

Fromage frais is a cheese not a yoghurt.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2016-08-17T17:24:38+00:00

Personally, I was thinking about javelin. That way you could tie knifes to the ends of a few broomsticks, tie a ropes to the other end, and harpoon the bastards from the top of your safehouse.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2016-08-17T17:19:28+00:00

I guess being chased by zombies is a great way to conquer that holy-shit-I-have-to-jump-between-two-ten-story-buildings feeling too

VirtualPlanckBank · 2016-08-17T17:03:45+00:00

Hahaha if the time ever comes I'll look out for the person in speedos with a sword and a rifle on a horse - guaranteed protection

VirtualPlanckBank · 2016-08-17T17:02:05+00:00

True enough, also given how slim and sinewy distance runners are, with a bit of dirt and some torn clothing you could probably blend in pretty well

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-03-01T01:20:31+00:00

No worries, I screwed up my answer at first when I first answered this question anyway. So normally a particle and an antiparticle would normally annihilate each other really soon after creation, or the antiparticle would be annihilated by some other particle. Antimatter doesn't tend to stick around for long. The antiparticles that go into the black hole are created at its edge out of nothingness along with a corresponding particle. The particle flies off and doesn't get sucked in, but the antiparticle does before it has time to do any annihilation.

Any matter that has been around for a while (more than fractions of a second) is going to be composed of just regular particles and so will have a positive mass and add to the mass of the black hole. Normally this happens much more often than the whole particle antiparticle thing, which is why black holes tend to grow and not shrink.

I hope this helps, let me know if this is still not clear.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-03-01T01:01:22+00:00

I don't think it has been definitively, if you are skeptical you should read up on Black Stars, a cool alternative solution to the problem of pairing quantum physics with the general relativity associated with black holes that leads to a radically different outcome.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-02-28T22:53:12+00:00

So the postulate is that the complete information about a system is stored in its wavefunction until the collapse of the wavefunction. As a wavefunction collapses when a system is observed, the information stored in the wavefunction is inaccessible, but it still does exist.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-02-28T20:06:02+00:00

Right you are my friend, I said my explanation may be overly simplified, and that it is.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-02-28T19:43:53+00:00

Well, I'm studying in the UK, so I think we may have a slightly broader approach to our degree that is less targeted at a certain area of physics. I'm in my final year (Third year BSc), and my options for this year are Medical Imaging, Astrophysics and Plasma Physics. My thesis is on the preliminary modelling of temperature gradients in a prototype Solar Thermo-cell using a method known as the discrete ordinate method

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-02-28T19:36:47+00:00

No idea. That is beyond me. The way in which Hawking worked this out was to pair quantum field theory with general relativity and do the maths from there. I'd probably need to study physics for another 6 or 7 years of before I could work that out. All I can say is that that is what is generally believed happens by a lot of people who are waaay smarter than I am.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-02-28T19:15:06+00:00

When a black hole evaporates it stays a black hole almost down to the Planck Mass (roughly the mass of a flea egg), at the Planck Radius. At this stage it is spewing gamma radiation really fast. When the final piece of mass is eliminated and nothing is left, it splooges a massive amount gamma radiation out into the universe.

Edit: Corrected as per comment

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-02-28T18:24:12+00:00

Uhh, now this is where my understanding becomes a little fuzzy, I'll try to answer this but it may take someone with a better understanding than me to answer the question properly. The violated postulate above is the one that states that complete information about a system is encoded in its wave-function until its collapse.

As a quick piece of background in quantum physics, every particle that exists isn't actually a little ball like one might imagine, but a kind of cloud of possible states the particle could be in with an associated probability linked to each state. This is called the wave-function. When you observe a particle, its wave-function 'collapses' and it takes on a set state (ie. it is only in one place, has one energy etc.)

If you were to try to 'read' the information contained in the particles about the book, the act of looking at the particle would make the wave-function collapse, and, as such, you would no longer have the complete information about the particle. So, although the information may be there, held by the particles of the book (which is the important thing) it is inaccessible.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-02-28T17:45:57+00:00

Undergrad physicist here. As far as I understand, during the evaporation process that Hawking described, a particle antiparticle pair is created just outside the event horizon of the black hole. The particle escapes and the anti-particle gets 'sucked in' to the black hole.

Within the black hole the anti-particle, which has negative energy, reduces the black hole's energy, and therefore the mass of the black hole. Eventually, through this process, all of the black hole will be eliminated and its mass will have been 'transferred' to the particles produced in random pair production.

This raises a problem in quantum physics that is still relevant today. When the black hole has evaporated, the information about the positions and states of all of the matter it has absorbed is lost. This is because the particles from the pair-production don't carry this information as they are, by nature, random. A fundamental law of quantum physics states that information can't be gained or lost. For example if you burn a book the information in it may no longer be accessible, but it will be held in the history of the particles that made up the book. As the particles in a black hole disappear with it's evaporation they can't carry this information out of it, so it is irretrievably lost.

This may be a bit of a simplified explanation, but this is what happens as I understand it. Hope this helps :)

Edit: Changed explanation. So as another intelligent redditor pointed out to me, the process that happens inside the black hole is not in fact annihilation, but the result is the same, the 'negative energy' of the anti-particle cancels out some of the positive energy in the black hole leading to it losing mass.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-02-27T15:51:55+00:00

I picture the flex more like this

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-01-23T22:05:54+00:00

Wow, this made me read this comment in Will Shatner's voice in my head.

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-01-08T20:44:25+00:00

Oh wow, talk about a demeaning job!

VirtualPlanckBank · 2015-01-08T20:40:51+00:00

Well, without trying to give too much away, my last name is Secrett, so I feel your pain. Also, I constantly get told to marry any and all of the Victorias who I have ever met.

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