User:Reversedragon/sci1

25-1

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antiparticle 20-21 opposite directions across some field?

balance of nature 30 a mature forest contains aging trees and grows slowly

black holes 45-47 basically unconnected to universe 45 teeny black holes 10^-33 cm 47

black-body radiation 48-49 can a perfectly absorbing body store infinite energy?? 48 nope - atoms can't absorb or emit all wavelengths, causing some to leak out 49

quantum leap 51 discrete change in orbitals

boltzmann constant 54 statistical mechanics; (1/2)mv^2 = kT point this to the search for 137 oh yeah boltzmann gave up and died by suicide 54 accurate models of the world are not guaranteed to be accepted by anyone just because they are correct. hearing this, existential materialists will nod their heads; moral philosophers and Gramscians should be very worried

brewster's law 58 light takes the shape of electro-magnetic fields; polarization is the way the electric field points

brownian motion 59 showed there really are countable atoms

degeneracy pressure of electrons 69 stops white dwarfs from collapsing if they are below Chandrasekhar limit

Cherenkov radiation 77 when you outrun light inside glass you create a light boom

chronology protection conjecture 78 anthropic principle for time "if time is a dimension--" it might not be though, quantum fields can be interpreted as dimensions, but on that dimension activity moves stochastically Giratina is one of the only accurate portrayals in fiction of "extra dimensions", because it is a fanciful portrayal of quantum fields having two directions that separate the domain of matter from antimatter, and the Distortion World is intended to be separated from the regular world by its characteristics. if it were perfectly accurate it would destroy trainers the moment they walk in, of course, but a creature made of antimatter is not actually that weird if it was somehow surrounded by antimatter hadrons, skies, and platforms.

competitive exclusion principle 85 differential resource utilization 121 natural resources are slotted; extirpation appears to depend on the question of successfully finding a slot competitive exclusion of species, due to amount or slotting, doesn't occur because they form niches this is not necessarily an ironclad physical law but the pattern keeps recurring

complementarity principle 86-87 beam of electrons behaves as a wave, cannon of electrons behaves as a particle /sometimes/

complex adaptive systems 88 complex system: system with many interacting agents, can be as basic as a pile of sand complex adaptive system: system in which agents can take in stimulus and respond "emergent properties ... don't appear gradually" - I'm not sure that's true for all complex systems, because of things like neutron decay where the first small change has to occur before the big one ever does. I think this is clearer if you study non-adaptive systems before the properly adaptive ones

compound motion 89-91 motion vectors can be broken down 89 this is a cool one, because it shows how everyday movement may resemble quantum field dimensions. really things are connected, but sometimes it works out just fine to mathematically separate each aspect because every direction is a process

Compton effect 92 photon-electron interactions take energy and angle from incoming photons at once an x-ray beam going through a crystal is a Feynman diagram

correspondence principle 98 quantum equations do properly predict larger scales, just a bit inefficiently versus coarse-grained classical equations this principle is so damning for any argument we can't predict complex adaptive systems. atoms are complex systems. quarks are complex systems. nobody finds it impossible to predict hadrons.

open / closed universe 99-101 dark energy: material cause of expanding universe pushing against gravity 100 two thirds of the energy in the universe is dark energy dark energy was thought to be described by the cosmological constant, but that is not clear any more some hypothesize that dark energy can be properly termed a force - the quintessence hypothesis

curie point 106 temperature affects the magnetic fields of atoms

determinism 116 planets move Mercury; emergence is difficult

deterministic chaos 118

diffraction 122

dispersion 123

zero-point energy 403 a minimum energy makes the uncertainty principle not a problem. why?

triune brain 407 haeckel style concept that brain shape recapitulates phylogeny. interesting word usage - in another sense _don't_ we have at least three brains?

turing test; Chinese room 409

uniformitarianism; The present is key to the past 411 sure is confusing that geologists say this and astrophysicists say the laws of the universe had to develop, huh

vital force 415 in the 1800s, people thought there was a unique Element to living substances, as interesting as Water, Fire, Light, or Darkness. well, sort of..... we call it carbon

Zeno's paradox 419 there is a transition from infinitesimal numbers to numbers we can measure where infinitesimals are discarded. calculus limits were required to comprehend numbers infinitely, but physical things aren't really infinite, important to remember

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RD commentary/ science A to Z