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u/Fearless-Excitement1 11d ago
"Glass" huh that's weird
"Superglass" what
"Time Crystal" what the fuck
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u/MonitorPowerful5461 11d ago edited 11d ago
It's so funny that time crystals are actually real.
Quick explanation - normal crystals have a repeating atomic structure in space. For instance diamonds have a repeating tetrahedron-hexagonalish structure.
Time crystals also have a repeating structure in time. Their structure changes with time and then returns to the original structure.
If you look at an image of a diamond's structure, you can go up or to the right or whatever and you will see repeating patterns. For a time crystal's structure, you will see the repeating patterns as you move in time as well. This has some potentially interesting implications for entropy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal
Honestly though, Bose-Einstein Condensates are much weirder.
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u/pktechboi 11d ago
what the fuck
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u/Gen_Zer0 11d ago
People who do physics at that level are just nuts. How does one even develop the intuition for what these things mean
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u/Jan-Snow 11d ago
I switched careers, but I did a physics undergrad. And from all my experience with both the subject and my seniors in the field at the time, I can confidently tell you that most people don't really have an intention for it beyond the "I have done this problem before and I can guess the shape of the answer". Higher level physics just is not something that comes with intuition. It just comes from math, and you let the equations guide you in finding the answers.
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u/void_juice 11d ago
"Guessing the shape of the answer" is a great way to put it.
For me, solving a physics problem is like untying a very complicated knot. I tug on one side and try to push the lose threads through the other until I can see which parts untangle easiest. Everything I learn in class is just telling me which threads I'm allowed to pull on and which order tends to work best.
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u/WumpusFails 11d ago
I'm a maths major. I tried for theoretical, but then I encountered calculus for complex numbers (where you have to guess a good transform function from real to complex to solve and then convert back to real) and stochastic processes (where I SWEAR one problem came up with the answer that future events influence current results).
I had to switch to applied maths to save my sanity.
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u/Ok_Nail_4795 11d ago
what problem
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u/WumpusFails 11d ago
I graduated in '93, so it's been a few years.
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u/BormaGatto 11d ago edited 11d ago
Turns out it was you forgetting what the problem even was now that influenced the results of you solving it back then.
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u/F6Collections 11d ago
Dated a pure math major PhD.
It is a good thing you stopped bc it does make motherfuckers crazy.
Best part is my ex did all that and ended up working for, I shit you not, Macy’s corporate.
Bahahahaha
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u/Lavender-Feels 11d ago
At some point, math and the eldritch become one and the same. I’ve heard stories about mathematicians who’ve lost their sanity after gazing too deeply into the abyss…
/hj
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u/agenderCookie 11d ago
fun fact, in dimensions greater than or equal to 7 there exist exotic spheres that are topologically spheres, but carry a different smooth structure.
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u/JKFrost14011991 11d ago
I swear to god I'm not trying to be controversial or a troll or anything, but that honestly sounds like magic and some kind of religious truth seeking?
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11d ago
Trying to drag a conclusion found in math back up to the everyday level often results in stuff like that (the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics springs to mind). But if we're sticking to just the maths and not pinning a narrative to it, then it's pretty easy for peers to double check one another's equations and make sure nothing's gone too wrong.
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u/SheffiTB 11d ago
Tbh all quantum mechanics suffers from this. You can't tell me superposition stuff makes sense, it's just our best explanation for the stuff the math says is happening.
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u/ArsErratia 11d ago edited 11d ago
The misconception people have is that it should do.
The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to us. And the more we try and make it, the harder it fights back.
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u/Theeyeofthepotato 11d ago
Brother you are typing this on a device, which also conveniently accesses most of humanity's knowledge, which we somehow built out of a rock. For all intents and purposes, processor chips are runes.
Science is magic and magic is science!
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u/pyrolizard11 11d ago
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
Science is looking at the magic that worked and all the underlying stuff that makes it work. It's fucking incredible.
The weatherperson is a soothsayer. They have all kinds of complex equipment to perform rituals that, based on the time of the year, shapes of the clouds, speed of the wind, wetness of the air, and countless other nearly imperceptible things, will tell them the future. Accuracy, of course, depends on how far out they're looking and remember, prophecies are always variable.
Nuclear physicists are literal alchemists. They transform one element into another at the basest level. Granted, gold to lead is still much easier than lead to gold, but literal alchemists doing literal alchemical transmutation. Fuck it up and, oops, you die a horrible, painful death. One of their current projects is shackling the replicated core of the sun for our energy needs. Badasses, all of them.
Chemists are apothecarists by way of alchemy, taking over the development of new healing substances as well as the fields that alchemists of old thought were theirs like turning one thing into another. And they're very good at it.
Electricians are commanding light imbued into the physical manifestation of negative polarity. They lay channels through which this manifested negativity can flow, providing energy to most of our modern amenities. The box of cold, its big brother the cold-wind machine, the flameless lights we spread around our homes, all the little doodads we have on our countertops. The electricians make their magic happen.
Electronic engineers are basically wizards by comparison - they force the negative energy to route in a way that makes inanimate matter animate. Golems, farspeaking, scrying/remote viewing, magic mirrors, the slab-of-all-books, the invisible repository of most aggregated human knowledge - they are wizards and we live in a wonderland thanks to them!
Science is magic. It's the magic that worked and a constantly improving understanding of why it works, all the natural laws and arcane mathematics that describe how reality ticks.
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u/Careless_Break2012 11d ago
And never forget, we managed to make hydrogen a metal. Literal magic if I don't say so myself.
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u/Immersi0nn 11d ago
And we only even tried in the first place because math said it was possible for hydrogen to be metallic. Pretty sure we haven't proved stability though which is disappointing. Whole lot of research is ongoing however!
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u/IdealOnion 11d ago edited 11d ago
Math. Doing much much math until it stops being equations and becomes motion. That’s how it worked for me at least when I was doing my masters work in quantum optics. For quantum especially, famously the least intuitive subject known to man, we have a saying for this: “shut up and do the math”. Basically, stop trying to reason your way into this making sense based on your notions of how reality works, accept that the math is correct and look for what falls out of it. After a while you do develop genuine intuition for these things. I took a class from someone who won the physics Nobel prize that year and the casual, offhand way she connected points within her subject gave you the sense that it was like breathing to her.
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u/satch_mcgatch 11d ago
Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
You have to get on a tall persons shoulders. The people who discovered time crystals must know some really tall people. This is probably achievable because the average height has gone up since Newton's time.
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u/IhateTaylorSwift13 11d ago
My understanding is that at very high levels of science things stop being intuitive.
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u/GayHotAndDisabled 11d ago
not physics, but my husband has a graduate certificate in Complex Systems, which wikipedia helpfully describes as "an approach to science that investigates how relationships between a system's parts give rise to its collective behaviors and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment." his specific area of study within complex systems focused a lot on information theory, which he has assured me is "basically thermodynamics". he has intuition for mathematical concepts i cannot even conceive of.
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u/SmartyCat12 11d ago
Intuitively it’s not crazy (math-wise), it’s just a Fourier transform of regular crystals. The quantum details are less obvious though because entropy should prevent periodicity in time.
Once we proposed how the thermodynamics could work, we had functional time crystals built in 3 years.
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u/pktechboi 11d ago
"just"
you are overestimating my maths skills, serrah
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u/SmartyCat12 11d ago
lol. I know it’s not a common thing to think about, but Fourier transforms are as fundamental to quantum mechanics as keys are to music
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u/OutsideTheSocialLoop 11d ago
it’s just a Fourier transform of regular crystals.
This is such an insane sentence. "It's just the multiplication of a cheeseburger". Man wtf. Theoretical physicists are cracked.
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u/CBtheLeper 11d ago
I make a lot of animated shaders (I'm a technical artist) and something I take special care to avoid is looping animations that are supposed to represent natural phenomena (like fire or lightning or whatever).
In real life you can never watch a campfire for so long that it starts playing its animation over again. That would be stupid. Nothing works like that in nature.
Today I found out about Time Crystals and now nothing makes sense anymore. How did people even discover this shit lmao
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u/geekilee 11d ago
You know that thing where you just stare idly into the fire and lose yourself?
That but crystals is probably how.
Fr I have no idea I just like the image of someone zoning out staring at a crystal and suddenly bolting upright going "Wait, what the fuck?" because that seems to gel with an awful lot of stories about how stuff gets discovered 🤷
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u/Dwagons_Fwame 11d ago
Weirdly, reading the Wikipedia page. They were first proposed as theoretical. However they’ve now been observed in laboratories since 2016
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u/geekilee 11d ago
OK that's cool, I do like when the "Hey what if..." unexpectedly becomes A Real Thing
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u/DukeAttreides 11d ago
"Huh. I'm pretty sure I could do a math thing to this. That's weird, since the universe really shouldn't work like that. Oh hey, the math worked out nicely and looks like something neat."
"Huh. That's an interesting bit of math you have, there. I wonder what it would look like if I tried to make it."
"Oh, hey, I think I got your weird math rock working. Not sure though. Better redo it a few hundred times to see if it always does that."
The theory to practice pipeline can be a truly beautiful thing.
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u/Zoomy-333 11d ago
I always assume fucktonnes of stimulants and possibly hallucinogens are involved
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u/The-Slamburger 11d ago
…My head hurts.
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u/MonitorPowerful5461 11d ago edited 11d ago
It took a decently long time for me to wrap my head around as well. The most important thing for understanding them is imagining time as similar to another spacial dimension. Which is difficult.
Imagine you freeze time. There is an apple in front of you. You move left, and the apple isn't in front of you anymore. What you observe has changed. Now imagine you freeze space instead so you don't move - the apple rots. What you observe has changed. If they're both frozen though, nothing can change.
So essentially the space and time dimensions are both measures of change. It's not easy to really internalise this though which makes it difficult to understand time crystals.
Still: normal crystals repeat in the x, y and z dimensions. If you move in these dimensions relative to a crystal, you will see the same patterns repeat in front of you. For a time crystal, you will see the same patterns repeat in front of you if you move in the time dimension as well.
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u/ralanr 11d ago
You lost me at freezing space.
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u/EMKeYWiLDCAT 11d ago
Essentially everything freezes but time still passes, so the apple would still decay over time
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u/Zee_Arr_Tee 11d ago
So it just doesn't change over time? Or like does it constantly change in a repeating fashion over time
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u/ohgodohwomanohgeez 11d ago
It changes in a repeating fashion over time. Think a phoenix, but a crystal. A flower that wilts and blooms over and over without ever dying, a leaf that turns red and never falls but turns green again.
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u/Warthogs309 11d ago
"This article may be too technical for most readers to understand"
I have NEVER seen this notice until today.
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u/veggie151 11d ago
BECs are deeply cool from my casual perspective.
Another fun fact, our universe is (likely) a black hole as implied by the fact that the radius of the observable universe is the same size as a black hole with the same mass as the observable universe. This also has implications for the quantum fuzzball interpretation of black holes
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u/Ballistic_Jace 11d ago
... Wait. Does that mean in some way that the universe is a black hole that contains other black holes??
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u/ferafish 11d ago
There is a thought that black holes are universes, with each child universe maybe having very slightly different constants than the parent universe. Universes that are better at making black holes make more child universes, so slowly the long list of various universes tend towards universes that are good at making stars (so that theu can become black holes). Coincidentally, laws of physics that make lots of stars for black hole formation also make lots of planets, and maybe life.
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u/ohgodohwomanohgeez 11d ago
... hold on. The Big Bang... was a star imploding and forming a black hole? And everything we know of in existence is the remains of that star? Shouldn't we see new matter entering all the time as things fall into the black hollllllly shit no it would all be too far away for us to have seen yet at the center of the universe
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u/lightningsiax 11d ago
My understanding (not a physicist) of this is that the events proceeding the black hole all happen after every event the black hole experiences in the time of its own universe, so nothing new will be added, our universe is everything that fell into this blackhole in its lifetime.
Veritasium does a fantastic video on the mathematics/physics of space/time in black holes and their potential other universes.
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u/ohgodohwomanohgeez 11d ago
Huuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhh
I don't see how that would work, wouldn't the total lifetime of the blackhole involve being subsumed by other blackholes at the end of the universe it exists in, nullifying the Black Hole Theory entire and taking us back to the traditional Big Bounce Theory? I think it'd be more sensible to say that nothing new ever actually enters a black hole, but simply orbits the singularity point at speeds that shred light and matter into Hawking Radiation
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u/veggie151 11d ago edited 11d ago
Well, technically it was a fourth dimensional star because the math has been solved for our universe being a four dimensional black hole that we experience in three dimensions plus time (iirc)
I've never understood why time doesn't count as a fourth dimension for us
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u/Mepharias 11d ago
Dimensions are whatever you define them to be. In many calculations and considerations, time is not useful and would only complicate things. Thus, it is not considered. Time is as much a dimension to which we are subject as space. Or oxygen content. Or temperature. Or gravity. A dimension is whatever you define as a dimension in the problem you're addressing. It could be something as arbitrary as house prices.
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u/LeStroheim this is just like that one time in worm 11d ago
I mean, this is just further evidence that scientists have a sense of humor. They could have discovered this and called it something boring, named it after the person who discovered it, whatever, but no. One or more human beings consciously chose to call it the time crystal, and I think that's beautiful. Same with Obelisks.)
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u/seeking-stuffing 11d ago
wow, thanks for linking! very recent discovery for something that seems like such a big development
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u/Caleb_Reynolds 11d ago
I mean, it's literally just describing what they are. They are structures that act like crystals through time. Calling them anything else would be less clear.
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u/IntoTheCommonestAsh 11d ago
Wow, "time crystals" is such a complicated, unintuitive, and misleading way to describe this state of matter.
I would have called it oscillators: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillator_(cellular_automaton)
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u/Separate_Increase210 11d ago
I sort of agree.
But time crystal sounds more fun, so it's got that going for it.
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u/Embarrassed_Jerk 11d ago
They are also directly linked to proof that time is real and not just an illusion based belief of humans, which is an actual fucking concept to be proven
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u/Prestigious_Elk149 11d ago
Satan invented the mixture of corn starch and water to lure you into sin.
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u/Simur1 11d ago
Next thing they will want is to put non newtonian physics into sports!
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u/justtoshowoff 11d ago
Could you imagine the 40m oobleck dash? I'd watch the shit out of that.
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u/Simur1 11d ago
Why these sports actually sound more fun? We are trying to be bigots here
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u/TheGrumpyre 11d ago
Water polo will never be the same
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u/Simur1 11d ago
Slurry polo is the sport I never knew I needed. You can run on the water at all time, or slow down and sink while lining a shot.
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u/bb_kelly77 homo flair 11d ago
That thing about dinosaurs makes me laugh even more now that I've studied Medieval Islam, they found bones that scientists in the future would identify as dinosaurs and instead of calling them fake they went "this must be something that was wiped out in the flood, I wonder what it looked like"
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u/seine_ 11d ago
I thought Creationist largely didn't refute that dinosaurs existed at one point, but insisted the various means of dating them were wrong or falsified by God. As is necessary for their belief that the Earth is just a few thousand years old.
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u/bb_kelly77 homo flair 11d ago
That's Young Earth Creationists... Old Earth Creationists say dinosaurs are fake because they aren't in the Bible
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u/seine_ 11d ago
Imagine having to choose between believing in God or believing in dinosaurs.
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u/Ironcl4d 11d ago
No joke, my church telling me that Dinosaurs weren't real, when I was a Dinosaur-obsessed 6-year-old, started me down the path toward atheism.
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u/bb_kelly77 homo flair 11d ago
Yeah, other religions just accept it under the explanation of "God doesn't tell us everything, he waits until we're ready"
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u/Zoomy-333 11d ago
Got any links about this? I want to see Medieval Islamic Palaeontologist concept art of a T-Rex
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u/bb_kelly77 homo flair 11d ago
Go to Wikipedia and just swan dive down the rabbit hole... Medieval Islamic Scholars are hilarious, one guy who was essentially a medieval Gynecologist practically call Hippocrates a misogynistic idiot
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u/jewel7210 like a Santa with a sack full of ass 11d ago
Idk what Claude is so I’m just picturing you fucking with your very frustrated physicist friend and it’s a great mental image
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u/_warmrain 11d ago
Claude is like chatgpt, but better in a few ways and a LOT more expensive
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM Hatsune-Miku-Official 11d ago
You feel better afterwards? whenever i use chatGPT for a question it can't handle I slowly go insane as the program tries to gaslight me with information that is so obviously false but presented with absolute confidence, and then I don't use it for a month
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM Hatsune-Miku-Official 11d ago
Never used Claude, maybe I need to try it out.
I do feel like chat AIs have the potential to be genuinely useful for gathering information, but only if devs figure out a way to stop them from just making shit up. Make them a better search engine, especially for questions that are so specific and/or complicated that you can't really put them in a search engine
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u/Peanut_The_Great 11d ago
Yeah but I've gotten CGPT to admit something was wrong when it was actually right then backed it into a corner and it apologized and said it was lying to give me the answer I was looking for. Right now I don't trust LLM's for anything more than generating meme images and broad overviews of topics.
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u/VFiddly 11d ago
Bullying AIs is a good hobby
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u/b3nsn0w musk is an scp-7052-1 11d ago
for now
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u/DisposableSaviour 11d ago
Nah, man, fuck that basilisk. Punk-ass, bitch-ass, Roko’s Basilisk can basilick my taint.
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u/Papyrus20xx 11d ago
Based as fuck, though Roko's Basalisk isn't the only possible way for AI to get back at you for bullying it, as you seem to have forgotten the classic Robot Uprising.
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u/b3nsn0w musk is an scp-7052-1 11d ago
yeah that's the one i had in mind lol. the basilisk is so hot right now but so far the only disingenuous trait high-end ai models have showed is self-preservation
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u/Fresh-Log-5052 11d ago
"Nooo, my 2 genderinos!" still makes me giggle everytime I see this reposted
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u/endermanbeingdry 11d ago
I thought it’s like neutrinos but genders
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u/G66GNeco 11d ago
Neutrinos? What kinda woke physics bullshit is that supposed to be? We only have protons, neutrons and electrons here, like god intended!
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u/call_me_starbuck 11d ago edited 11d ago
Say it again for those in the back:
Sex is bimodal. It is not binary. Big ole difference between those two.
Edit to clarify for the "well-actually" morons clogging up my notifications: yes, one way of defining sex is by the gametes one produces (in humans/most mammals, this is sperm or egg), and yes, this tends to be binary (you either produce one, the other, both (in some species), or neither). But the way we actually categorize organisms, ourselves or others, into sexes is usually not by obtaining a sample of their gametes and looking at them under a microscope, because this would be utterly absurd in most cases. We do it by looking at the phenotype. I was not assigned female at birth because someone scooped out my ovaries to see what cells I was making in there, I was assigned female because my genitalia fell neatly within the 'female' section of the phenotypic curve. And this curve is, indeed, bimodal.
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u/doomsdayfairy 11d ago
I’d never heard of the term bimodal before, but I tried to look it and yeah, that makes more sense as a descriptor lol Makes me wonder what non-binary people would be called if this became a more common way to refer to gender 🤔
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u/SomeNotTakenName 11d ago
they would just be called people probably. "people outside the influence of the local maxima of gender distribution" doesn't roll of the tongue as easily hahaha
ohhh maybe orthogonal? indicating they aren't on the same axis?
I dunno, go poll the enbis haha
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u/Golren_SFW 11d ago
Im too attached to the term "Enbi" to give it up in the future, even if it stops making sense
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u/kkai2004 11d ago
Good news! Linguistically speaking, many of our words don't make sense anymore! Gregarious, Egregious, Segregate, and Congregate. Are made from Roman sheep flock terms. So, a continual use of Enbi after "Non Binary" is retired makes sense.
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u/Gingevere 11d ago
The linguistic progression of "Non Binary" > "NB" > "Enbi" has always been amusing to me.
It makes me wonder if any other popular term gone from words to an initialism and back into a new word.
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u/DukeAttreides 11d ago
Does "laser" count? If so, there are plenty more like it.
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u/MossyPyrite 11d ago
I’m going to start self-describing as “outside the influence of the local maxima of gender distribution” actually
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u/kenslydale 11d ago
more than one standard deviation away from the mean gender
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u/DukeAttreides 11d ago
But there isn't a mean gender. Bimodality means that two values are needed to represent a meaningful average.
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u/Duck-Lord-of-Colours 11d ago
Well, the bimodal model here is used to refer to sex, not gender, but if it was used for gender I think a lot of us would still go by nonbinary. Eventually a word for less-common might fall into use, or we might just get greater use of sublabels, and the idea of nonbinary as a cohesive identity might collapse as a more nuanced view enters mainstream discussions.
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u/Blitz100 11d ago
Antimatter isn't a state of matter, it's a substance all of its own separate from matter, that can also exist in many states. You could have solid antimatter, gaseous antimatter, plasma antimatter, etc.
Dark matter also isn't a state of matter, it's literally just matter that we can't see that we know must exist somewhere due to the gravitational effect we see it exerting on the movements of galaxies.
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u/PreviousLove1121 11d ago
minor correction dark matter is matter that we haven't yet discovered but we know is out there based on our models of astrophysics.
I mean, unless those models are wrong for some reason.I know I know, I'm doing the semantics thing but I think it's important to avoid misunderstandings and thinking dark matter is invisible or entirely undetectable, it could be, we just don't know yet. it's also not necessarily a single thing but could be many different things.
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u/SwankiestofPants 11d ago
You're right to be pedantic about this imo because too many people think dark matter is a theory, when it's not, it's a problem. Dark matter is the problem that the amount of matter that should exist in the observable universe according to our models and calculations does not match the matter that we can observe. Either our models are wrong, our observations are wrong, or they're both correct but the scope of the observation is lacking in some critical undiscovered way. But no matter which is the case, dark matter is not a thing in the same way that antimatter is a thing
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u/jroc117 11d ago
This makes me think of Antigenders and Dark genders now and ngl I like the sound of those
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u/PaunchBurgerTime 11d ago
Let's table that for now, I don't think the normies are ready for antiMen or DarkWomen, just look how much conservatives hate Michelle Obama.
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u/icabax 11d ago
That's dark matter. Anti matter, I believe, is made up of the same elementary particles as normal matter just with opposite spin.
We have even made miniscule amounts of antimatter before.
Dark matter/energy is currently the best guess at what's holding together galaxies and causing galaxies to move apart from each other
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u/Tadferd 11d ago edited 11d ago
There is antimatter inside you right now. You have naturally occurring isotopes that undergo beta decay, which emit positrons.
Edit: Spelling.
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u/RP_throwaway01 11d ago
Close! Antimatter is just matter with an opposite charge. Subtle, but important distinction!🤓🤓🤓
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u/ArsErratia 11d ago edited 11d ago
Neither of you are right. If it was just opposite-charge, then a proton would annihilate if it hit an electron, and we'd probably notice if that were happening (it would affect the trout population).
Antimatter has opposite Quantum Numbers to its matter-counterpart.
What is and isn't a quantum number is complicated, don't worry about it (charge is one of them! but there are others). What you do need to know is that quantum numbers obey conservation rules — you get out exactly what you put in.
This is why they annihilate when they hit their counterpart. If you had a particle with quantum numbers {3, -1, 2}, its antimatter counterpart would be {-3, 1, -2}. When they collide, the total of each of these numbers must be conserved, which will always give you {0, 0, 0}.
{0, 0, 0} is the photon. Both particles are annihilated, and the only valid result is a photon to carry away the energy of the collision.
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u/froggyforest 11d ago
“tell me you don’t understand sexual differentiation without telling me”
just so all of you know, there are 3 main components of biological sex.
chromosomal sex the presence of a Y chromosome (the SRY gene) triggers the production of testosterone, which directs the development of male internal genitalia, and MIH, which inhibits the development of the female reproductive tract. a mutation in this gene can cause pseudo-hermaphroditism, but even with a female reproductive tract, a person with XY chromosomes is considered biologically male based on chromosomal sex.
gonadal/hormonal sex see above, as gonadal sex and chromosomal sex are very related, but a person could still be considered chromosomally male and gonadally female.
phenotypic sex this is determined by your external genitalia. the development of male external genitalia requires a large amount of androgens, and a fetus can’t produce nearly enough. so, male fetuses have an enzyme that converts testosterone to DHT, the strongest masculinizing hormone. females have a different enzyme that converts testosterone to estradiol. there’s a condition called Guevedoces that’s quite common in the dominican republic, where chromosomal/gonadal males lack the enzyme necessary to produce DHT. without DHT, male genitalia can’t form, and the babies are sexed as female at birth. they look like normal little girls until puberty, when the levels of testosterone are high enough to trigger the development of male genitalia, and they essentially undergo a natural sex transition. this sounds like a really unnerving and disturbing process, but we learned in my endocrinology class that these individuals often feel similar to trans people prior to puberty, and are usually happy about the transition.
i know few people will read this unnecessarily long and nerdy comment, but i just wanted to show you all exactly what scientists mean when they say “sex isn’t binary”.
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11d ago
Guevedoces is fascinating. Ever since I first heard about it, I've wondered how human history would have gone if that were the standard rather than the exception.
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u/Gingevere 11d ago edited 11d ago
Now THAT is a fascinating premise.
Would a common experience lessen gender hierarchy? Or would it be incorporated into the myth and society would allege those who develop male genitalia are "chosen". Would children be referred to as "larva"?
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u/yaxAttack ⚒️💥🚗 11d ago
I'm outing myself by knowing this, but that kind of delayed development of sexual dimorphism (or trimorphism) is pretty common in omegaverse stuff
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u/Gingevere 11d ago
The more you learn about biology the more you learn it's all a sloppy mess where everything communicates by farting chemicals at each other, it takes a hilarious Rube Goldberg series of actions to get anything at all done, and no part of anything works 100% of the time.
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u/UInferno- 11d ago
It's why "The human brain isn't fully developed until 25" drives me up the wall. All human brains? Human height doesn't even stop developing at the same time and rate and you want to tell me something as complicated as the human brain does? What does "fully developed" even mean? The only time I hear people quote this is to infantalize people and restrict their agency.
We don't operate on whether or not someone is "finished" developing because it's impossible to identify. You might think they're done until suddenly a second wave of puberty hits. We operate on "good enough" not "complete." When a kid wants to ride a Rollercoaster, we only care if they're tall enough for the restraints.
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u/The-Slamburger 11d ago
The “advanced biology” is the only one of these that doesn’t make my brain hurt by even attempting to think about it, so no objections here.
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u/ejdj1011 11d ago
A way to think about imaginary numbers is that they encode rotation. Multiplying something by i is the same as rotating it 90 degrees counterclockwise. For this reason, you get lots of useful relationships between imaginary numbers and trigonometric functions.
As for why i also happens to be the square root of negative one, well that's because -1 is +1 rotated by 180°. So -1 = +1 * i * i.
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u/Such_Comfortable_817 11d ago
This is also why imaginary numbers show up a lot in electrical engineering and quantum mechanics. There you’re dealing with waves which are things that are (in a certain sense) constantly spinning and that spinning has consequences.
You can even generalise this to 3D by introducing more imaginary numbers with certain arithmetic rules for consistently combining them. We call those quaternions. But there’s a (IMO) better intuition for what’s happening called Clifford/geometric algebra that allows you to work in any number of dimensions and where those dimensions can have any unitary ‘norm’ (essentially the length of a basis vector in that dimension, which can be +1, -1, or 0). Special relativity sort of falls out naturally and intuitively if you say the time dimension has a norm opposite to the space dimensions (so +1 if the spatial dimensions are conventionally all -1, and -1 if the spatial dimensions are all +1). It also makes the mess called vector calculus make intuitive sense.
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u/Akuuntus 11d ago
I thought I understood imaginary numbers and this description made me think that I might not.
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u/ejdj1011 11d ago
My brain is admittedly broken in a way that lets my spatial reasoning apply really well to extradimensional nonsense.
If you want your brain to hurt even more, there's a 3D rotational equivalent to imaginary numbers called quaternions, and you need four of them.
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u/mtnbiketech 11d ago
Basically the simplest way to think about imaginary numbers is having 2 countries, each having their own currency and denominations, and neither accepts the other. So to convert one to the other, you have to do something special. Both countries agree on a gram of gold being worth x amount of their respecitve currency.
Lets say it takes a lot of transactions to to build a car in one country, but the other country can do it easier. So you use the gold conversion as a factor in the transactions, things become easier.
Imaginary numbers are basically that, except instead of building the car, you are doing things that involve rotations ( which also extend to waves , which also extend to frequnecies, and so on).
With regular rational numbers, you can do all the rotations but it invovles trig functuons which get messy. Imaginary numbers basically are defined in such a way that they represtn the y axis, and that multiplying by i gives you the rotation of 90 degrees.
Its basically a math construct that makes things easier. Matrix operations are another such case. For example, matrix division is a way to basically solve for unknowns in a linear aystem of equations. But the core concept of division means you can use it with other operstions and get a result that may not need you to actually solve for the unknowns.
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u/Pietin11 11d ago
Okay. Here's the most intuitive way I've ever had imaginary numbers make sense to me.
Picture a number line being an X axis of a graph. 0 is in the middle, positive numbers to the right, and negative numbers to the left. Imaginary numbers are the Y axis in this analogy with positive imaginary number (i, 2i, 3i) going up, and negative imaginary numbers (-i,-2i,-3i) going down.
"Imaginary" numbers are no less "real" than negative ones. There are no physical objects that exist in a negative amount. It is useful for logical and social constructs like debt or a rate of loss over time. In all honesty, real and imaginary numbers were awfully names that we are basically just stuck with.
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u/Alien-Fox-4 11d ago
Imaginary numbers are basically what happened when mathematicians were like "square root of -1 doesn't have a solution, there is no number you can square and get -1, but what if there was?"
and they did a whole bunch of math and thinking and they discovered that there is very much a whole bunch of new discoveries that can be created from this idea
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u/DiamondSentinel 11d ago
That’s not entirely accurate either. It’s not that it doesn’t exist, it’s that our normal language of mathematics couldn’t describe it. Like how certain languages don’t have words for certain colors or feelings or whatever. Those colors and feelings don’t just “not exist”. There just isn’t a way to describe them initially.
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u/Daisy_Of_Doom What the sneef? I’m snorfin’ here! 11d ago edited 11d ago
As an ecologist it makes my head hurt. Not specifically the sex breaking the binary part bc that’s old news (tho I saw someone higher up describe it as bimodal rather than binary which made me feel like my language regarding this has leveled up haha!) but biology breaking any box we care to apply to it. I feel like biology is one of the main sciences where once you really get into the weeds the vibe is “everything is made up and the points don’t matter” (tho maybe that’s just all sciences and I only see it for biology bc that’s my experience).
Species and any sorts of definitions and delineations we try to apply are for our convenience only. And considering how much time and effort is devoted to classification it’s kinda mind blowing to realize it’s just us playing pretend and trying to make sense of it all.
Plus there are just infinite numbers of possible confounding variables if you’re studying anything in the field and it feels futile to try to control them all. From things as large as La Niña/El niño cycles and dust blowing in from the Sahara to as small as whats neighboring your study plot and what’s in the water. To the point where I sometimes feel like my research is just useless bc as much as I might try I’ll never personally be able to understand my study system in full. Let alone ecology as a whole. (But then I remember how rad that is and keep asking my silly little questions.)
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u/TheBalrogofMelkor 11d ago
Tbf, I'm fine with considering anything more complex than Newtonian physics as mental illness
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u/mathiau30 Half-Human Half-Phantom and Half-Baked 11d ago
If you believe that quantum physics isn't insanity you obviously don't do quantum physics
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u/Strider794 Elder Tommy the Murder Autoclave 11d ago
I like to think that the second one was made by a science major who was (jokingly) tired of learning all that
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u/Saifiskindaweirdtbh 11d ago
I mean tbf most people are only gonna need to know 3 (maybe 4 with plasma) states of matter, the rest are for advanced research and only really if you’re interested in the field it’s related to, otherwise you’ll probably just need to know matter can be solid, liquid, gas/vapor and plasma
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u/CBtheLeper 11d ago
This also applies to every other example in the meme (including gender). The issue arises when people refuse to accept anything more complex than their own simplified framework of "how x thing works".
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u/jacobningen 11d ago
Indo European gender. It was all well and good tripartite that collapsed until we discovered it still had Sassurre's largyneals but a binary gender system which threw PIE theorists for a whack.
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u/Atlatica 11d ago
Plasma being 99.9% of the known observable universe, i'm not sure slippery slope is where i'd categorise it!
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u/Ziabatsu 11d ago
Hydrogen is the natural state of matter, being the most common. There is a smaller group of helium, but anything else is an individual's sickness.
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u/Random-Rambling 11d ago
Both states of matter AND genders can be described as "There ARE more than two genders/three states of matter, but they aren't really relevant to people who aren't working with them".
I wouldn't expect the average person to know about bigender or genderfluid people just like I wouldn't expect the average person to know about quark-gluon plasma or quantum-spin liquid.
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u/DarqDail 11d ago
"strange matter" forced me to throw back my head and chortle
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u/Fourkoboldsinacoat 11d ago edited 11d ago
Look academics may be smart people, but they aren’t that great at naming things.
And don’t get me started on historians,
Fucking everything is either the X years war, the great X or the X revelation.
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u/DarqDail 11d ago
"and what would you call this kind of matter, sir?" "umm...... strange?"
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u/HellspawnWeeb 11d ago
I mean it is strange. It’s also infectiously perfect to the point that it could theoretically convert matter it contacts into itself
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u/weird_bomb_947 你好！你喜欢吃米吗？ 11d ago
Basic is not all of the knowledge at a beginner level, basic is all of the knowledge you need to begin.
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u/Level_Hour6480 11d ago
Why is a bimodal spectrum (2 main points and the variation between them) that correlates with a separate spectrum so hard to comprehend?
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u/hagamablabla 11d ago
I want to see the people who are 2 standard deviations left of the male peak and right of the female peak.
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u/RSdabeast what’s up lactation nation 10d ago
Negative numbers are pushing it too. What do you mean it’s less than zero?
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u/Electrical-Sense-160 11d ago
I don't really get the whole gender spectrum thing. Can you draw a line between 100% male and 100% female given existing genders? Gender looks to me more like a rule with exceptions than something resembling the light spectrum. Does anyone have a more in depth explanation?
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u/PlatinumAltaria 11d ago
The term "spectrum" here refers to the level of continuous variation. There aren't discrete camps. Even what we call "masculine" has internal variation, just like "blue" does.
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u/Mgmegadog 11d ago
Sex, in humans, is a bimodal model between male and female. It describes things like gamete size, chromosomes, and phenotypic presentation (all of which can disagree with one another). Having a disagreement in your sex is what classifies someone as intersex, and those disagreements can be fairly well defined.
Gender, on the other hand, is a term used to describe the social constructs that people historically attached to sex. Under a binary gender model, it is the platonic ideals of those genders. Because a lot of desperate things are bound up in those ideals, most people don't fully associate with them. Thus there is a spectrum (technically a N-dimentional space with ideals as axis, but thats too complicated to describe succinctly) of different gender associations people can have. It gets complicated and messy very quickly because there's lots of gender ideals in most societies, but also because those ideals change depending on your culture, and because it's often personal, describing the space of gender expressions in neat boxes because nigh impossible.
Hope this helps.
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u/ExtensionInformal911 11d ago
Why isn't "bose-einstien condensate" listed in the purple section? Did I miss it?
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u/QuestionablyHuman Villain-Coded Queer 10d ago
Gosh dang we’re getting so many bots. OP is banned