510

Call me SKEPT1KAL (mander.xyz)

submitted 5 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] will_a113@lemmy.ml 47 points 5 months ago

He’s not wrong…

[-] Alteon@lemmy.world 21 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'm fairly certain it's a meme. Pretty sure I saw this exact thing with a Hawk Tua as the person being quoted.

Edit: A meme on the science meme community? For reals?

[-] will_a113@lemmy.ml 10 points 5 months ago

Oh definitely a meme, and a heavily recycled one at that :)

[-] fossilesque@mander.xyz 3 points 5 months ago

Haha, I love non sequitur humour.

[-] Gork@lemm.ee 13 points 5 months ago

Are string theorists... braneiacs?

[-] Agent641@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago

He should discuss it on TAWK TUAH

[-] FuckyWucky@hexbear.net 6 points 5 months ago

fair

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

If we ever find the cosmic strings, I wanna see someone plucking them to play Stairway to Heaven. Perhaps doing so will create a literal stairway to actual heaven.

[-] BB84@mander.xyz 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Unfortunately cosmic string and string theory are different things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_string says

Not to be confused with String, the subject of String Theory.

[-] MidWestKhagan@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 5 months ago

What kind of string we talking about? Nylon? Kevlar?

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Btw, does string theory consider zero point energy? I get the impression that both, quantum mechanics and string theory, just ignore that phenomenom.

[-] itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 5 months ago

What do you mean? Zero point energy comes up as a result of quantum mechanics, why would it be ignored?

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 6 points 5 months ago

Guess i need to refresh that knowledge.

[-] dragonfucker@lemmy.nz 2 points 5 months ago

Zero point energy is the stuff Syndrome uses to toss Mister Incredible around, right?

[-] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

[+] passiveaggressivesonar@lemmy.world -20 points 5 months ago

The same was true of relativity

[-] eestileib@sh.itjust.works 49 points 5 months ago

The relativistic model was demonstrated to better describe the transit of Venus than Newtonian mechanics. It had been quickly proposed as a good test, was generally accepted as the crucial experiment, and all of this happened very fast.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 28 points 5 months ago

Another one was GPS: They had prepared two sets of maths for the satellites, Newtonian and relativistic. They started operating them with the Newtonian model, and the satellites went out of sync, nothing really worked. Then they flipped the switch to relativistic, and everything worked flawlessly.

Even before that they took an atomic clock, put it on a plane, and flew it around the earth to later compare to one that stayed on earth. They differed by the expected fraction of a fraction of a millisecond.

Neither of those two could be done right when Einstein proposed relativity, but experiments like that could already be envisioned, "move a sufficiently precise clock sufficiently fast and compare it to a stationary one" is kind of a no-brainer. That's not the case with string theory, noone has any idea how to test any of it.

OTOH, physics shouldn't feel bad about that stuff. E.g. number theory is notorious for results which are considered useless even by the people formulating them, only for an application to appear a century or two later.

[-] passiveaggressivesonar@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Source?

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 13 points 5 months ago

It was actually Mercury, and Einstein himself proposed it.

[-] passiveaggressivesonar@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

Thank you, I've got a lot of reading to do

[-] eestileib@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 months ago

Primarily, Frank Watson Dyson and Arthur Stanley Eddington.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment

[-] passiveaggressivesonar@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

I've got some reading to do, thank you.

I was under the impression it wasn't proven until space probes proved light redshifts near the sun when pointed at earth or the gravitational wave discovery

[-] eestileib@sh.itjust.works 6 points 5 months ago

Yeah the funding necessary for large scale gravitational wave research wouldn't have been forthcoming unless everybody had been convinced GR was the best description available for decades.

Einstein predicted gravity waves but didn't expect we'd ever have the technology to measure them.

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 31 points 5 months ago

Special Relativity was the theory to explain the results of the Michelson Morley Experiment from 20 years earlier that everyone else ignored because it made them uncomfortable and didn't want to do the math.