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Weary Light
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y agoArticle was hard to follow. This is more comprehensible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light in particular, is there any advance on this from Wikipedia? > a number of falsifying observations have shown that "tired light" hypotheses are not viable explanations for cosmological redshifts. I don't think that this is sufficiently rigorously addressed by this handwaving from the article: > I can imagine a scenario in which a star is invisible because it is vibrating in a mode which is out of sync with our own.
- nixtaken 7y agoI think the wiki lacks impartiality and that the handwaving in the article was done by a German PhD in physics with an eye to helping people develop intuition. If a vibrating star is always moving towards or away from the detector at greater than the speed of light, you won't see it.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago1) what is a vibrating star? 2) "always moving towards or away from the detector at greater than the speed of light" -> what does that even mean. 3) "vibrating in a mode which is out of sync with our own" is the kind of vague meaningless phrase more often heard in new age mysticism, not science.
- nixtaken 7y agoA vibrating star is a star that is literally moving back and forth relative to an observer. That doesn't sound like new-age mysticism to me. With "vibrating in a mode which is out of synch with our own" it looks like she is translating physics jargon into more colloquial terms. A physicist would instead say "oscillating in a mode which is out of phase with the motion of the detector". A teacher would explain the concept in terms of a child being pushed on a swing. If you are pushing at exactly the wrong time during every swing, there will be no energy transfer. When there is no energy transfer, you are blind to each other. The jargon of science is one of her bugbears and she is trying to demystify it.
- EliRivers 7y agoThat doesn't sound like new-age mysticism to me. It sure does. That's classic new-age mysticism. They love hand-wavy energy modes and vibrations. If it had the word "quantum" in it, it'd be ticking all the boxes. Maybe it's an unfortunate case of a non-native English speaker not realising that these terms are commonly hijacked by bullshit artists. To suggest that some stars are invisible because they emit EM radiation that simply can't interact with anything on this earth is an incredible statement that requires a lot more than just "I can imagine".
- pinkfoot 7y agoIndeed: stars don't emit radiation per se, the trillions of atoms absorbing and emitting quantised photons do. So, a) they would have to be made of something other than the normal atomic matter normal stars, planets, and rocks, and people are made of b) be normal Hydrogen, Helium, etc. but with completely different quantum mechanical behaviour. Just sitting their in isolated regions of space - right next to normal matter. Grade-A bollocks.
- nixtaken 7y agoI think the idea rests on the notion that the stars all obey the same physical laws and are made of the same types of atoms, but that the timing of the motion of atoms in distant stars is not synchronized with our own. I like to think of the physics of synchrotron light in this context. When a particle accelerates, as in an atomic clock, it emits light.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago> think the idea rests on the notion that the stars all obey the same physical laws and are made of the same types of atoms, but that the timing of the motion of atoms in distant stars is not synchronized with our own. yes, we get that. The idea that this somehow causes "you won't see it" ... well it's an idea. An idea found in new-age mysticism. It's not science of any kind.
- EliRivers 7y agoAh, I see. Based on this deleted comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268682 you are Kirsten Hacker? And here you are, with more of the same. On reflection, this is starting to feel less like a coherent argument and more like you're perhaps in a very open-minded, exploratory mental state right now. Jesus, that sounds condescending of me (for which I apologise - text as a medium is tricky to express this clearly; it's not meant as a passive aggressive putdown and if I'd had this context earlier I'd have simply said nothing), but perhaps this thread is better served by cessation.
- nixtaken 7y agoThink of me as her publicist. And the article that was flagged in your link was a good one.
- grzm 7y agoWith respect to submissions, you might want to review the HN guidelines. All of the submissions I've seen have had heavily editorialized submission titles, which is counter to the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nixtaken 7y agoThanks for the tip. I'm new here.
- ablation 7y agoBorderline incomprehensible, as are many of the (what appears to be) author's posts in this thread. You'd be far better off reading the Wikipedia entry rather than picking through this meandering, pseudo-mystic prose.
- nixtaken 7y agoShe is a German Ph.D. in physics with 3200 followers and over 2.5 million answer views on Quora. Her posts are regularly upvoted by respected physicists and she is known for writing unusually clear explanations of complicated topics. https://www.quora.com/profile/Kirsten-Hacker https://www.quora.com/profile/Kirsten-Hacker
- ablation 7y agoThis information has no effect on my experience of this article.
- wodenokoto 7y agoRegularly writing clearly does not prohibit one from writing unclearly.