As a non-sciencey person, can someone explain the chasm of ignorance?
Most of the “chasm of ignorance” is the stuff we know that we don’t know. We don’t know what dark matter is made of. We don’t know what dark energy is. We don’t know how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity.
We don’t even know if there IS Dark Matter
I am not a scientist, but I do like to watch them on youtube: We’re pretty sure something we don’t know about has a ton of mass. Otherwise a bunch of other stuff doesn’t really make sense, for example the universe should be way way bigger than it is now without something unseen keeping it condensed. So the existence of “dark matter” is about as confirmed as it can be without observing it directly. What we don’t know is what dark matter is, how to observe it, or how it works. But math, as we currently understand it, implies its existence pretty heavily.
Which does in fact mean that our math or understanding could just be wrong. Technically you’re right, we DON’T know if there really is dark matter. But if we assume our current knowledge is correct we can make a pretty reasonable guess about it.
I personally lean towards “we’ve done all this work and it’s incredibly scary that modern observations actually tell us all the work we’ve put in is actually wrong and we have to create brand new formulas again.”
Isn’t it the stuff we don’t know that we don’t know?
I’m not a physicist, but im pretty sure it’s just the gaps in our knowledge like exactly how/why gravity works. And like we don’t know the things we don’t know so it’s all in the chasm.
I will not stand for this Planck erasure! Sure, Einstein and Maxwell are great, but how can you leave off the father of quantum mechanics when a third of the poster is a direct result of his research?
Like we haven’t erased like centuries of research because we found something new
I’ve had this poster in class!
Isaac Newton — ‘To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me’
Dark matter is just the friends we made along the way.
Who would win? All the physicists or one slitty boi?
Cosmology and astrophysics are considered classical? I would expect both quantum physics and relativity to play a major role nowadays.
At least cosmology does use some serious quantum physics, even quantum field theory. Source: took 1 year of theoretical cosmology lectures.
damn you doing philosophy dirty
We have this on the wall in my physics class
Naïve question: Is there a reason why electric and magnetic fields look so similar?
edit: in assuming it’s something to do with direction / polarity?
They’re similar in some respects, different in others; this happens to only show ways they’re similar. Specifically, it only shows dipole (two-pole) fields, with the field lines running from one pole (North or +) to the other (South or -).
But there are also electric monopoles: things that’re only + (e.g. protons) or - (e.g. electrons), which’ll have field lines radiating out in all directions rather than looping back. Magnets are different in that as far as we know, magnetic monopoles don’t exist. Every North pole’s directly attached to a South pole and vice versa. You can get magnets with more than two poles, or even more complex arrangements (e.g. refrigerator magnets normally have alternating North and South stripes), but they’ll always have equal amounts of Northness and Southness, so the net magnetic charge is always zero.
Another (related) difference is that moving electric charges (e.g. electric currents in a wire) create loops of magnetic field. That is, the field line just goes in a circle around the moving charge, rather than from N to S. Since there’s no such thing (as far as we know) as a magnetic charge, that can’t happen with the electric field.
Wow, that’s really interesting - thanks!
Naïve answer: A magnetic field is an electric field moving through time. There’s some matric math that equates moving electric charges to magnetic force, I think Maxwell’s equations? So it’s kind of about direction, but through time.
Very cool poster, thanks!
