4 ms·

You sense spacetime directly too. It's what holds you do this planet we inhabit. I think atomic phenomena may feel somehow more familiar because it takes far l

You sense spacetime directly too. It's what holds you do this planet we inhabit. I think atomic phenomena may feel somehow more familiar because it takes far less energy to make them dynamic than it does for gravitational phenomena. If we were somehow huge beings made of binary stars or something, gravity would probably be the very familiar force and atomic phenomena almost inconceivably small to you.

jodrellblank 6y ago
Atomic phenomena are almost inconcievably small to me. There's around a hundred trillion atoms in a human body cell, and around a hundred trillion cells in a human body, plus or minus an order of magnitude or two. It's astonishing to me that people in the early 1900s could measure and calculate the charge on an electron, or that Marie Curie had to process tons of pitchblende to purify micrograms of Radium - and could, and did. Or that Rutherford could say where most of the mass inside an atom is, and split the nucleus of Nitrogen atoms - 1/1000th of the size of the whole atom - and tell what was happening down at that scale - using the technology of 1917.
- kamaal 6y ago
  As a kid I read the whole Michelson–Morley experiment in a public library. It was a quite a peek into how the science of that era was done. Basically you start with some base information(axioms and postulates), then you gather some experimental evidence for those axioms and postulates. You establish some rules on which your experimental and observational universe works. Then what follows is volumes and volumes of Math. If Im not wrong relativity itself was developed over a decade. And I'd assume it took tons and tons iterations, retries and tweaking to make it work. Where common people like us get lost is looking at Symbol manipulation directly. At that stage Math scares the day light out of us. The right approach is to start with your own axioms, postulates, truths and symbols and start working from there. This is really like some newbie seeing a super massive code base and thinking it could be outside their reach to ever work with such a thing. But if you look at it carefully. All there is to it is loops, condition statements, operations, variables and basic abstractions.
drran 6y ago
Spacetime is defined as [x,y,z;t] - 4d array of data. > You sense spacetime directly too. It's what holds you do this planet we inhabit. Nope.

jodrellblank 6y ago

Atomic phenomena are almost inconcievably small to me. There's around a hundred trillion atoms in a human body cell, and around a hundred trillion cells in a human body, plus or minus an order of magnitude or two. It's astonishing to me that people in the early 1900s could measure and calculate the charge on an electron, or that Marie Curie had to process tons of pitchblende to purify micrograms of Radium - and could, and did. Or that Rutherford could say where most of the mass inside an atom is, and split the nucleus of Nitrogen atoms - 1/1000th of the size of the whole atom - and tell what was happening down at that scale - using the technology of 1917.

kamaal 6y ago
As a kid I read the whole Michelson–Morley experiment in a public library. It was a quite a peek into how the science of that era was done. Basically you start with some base information(axioms and postulates), then you gather some experimental evidence for those axioms and postulates. You establish some rules on which your experimental and observational universe works. Then what follows is volumes and volumes of Math. If Im not wrong relativity itself was developed over a decade. And I'd assume it took tons and tons iterations, retries and tweaking to make it work. Where common people like us get lost is looking at Symbol manipulation directly. At that stage Math scares the day light out of us. The right approach is to start with your own axioms, postulates, truths and symbols and start working from there. This is really like some newbie seeing a super massive code base and thinking it could be outside their reach to ever work with such a thing. But if you look at it carefully. All there is to it is loops, condition statements, operations, variables and basic abstractions.

drran 6y ago

Spacetime is defined as [x,y,z;t] - 4d array of data. > You sense spacetime directly too. It's what holds you do this planet we inhabit. Nope.