♪♫ caek's corner ♪♫

“Superior mirages occur because of the weather condition known as a temperature inversion, where cold air lies close to the sea with warmer air above it,” said David Braine, a BBC meteorologist. “Since cold air is denser than warm air, it bends light towards the eyes of someone standing on the ground or on the coast, changing how a distant object appears.”

He added: “Superior mirages can produce a few different types of images – here a distant ship appears to float high above its actual position, but sometimes an object below the horizon can become visible.”

siiiiiiiick

Same thing causes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights but that flying boat is a particularly insane example

subatomic antineutrino with 1,000 x the energy the LHC can produce detected (indirectly, because it collided with an electron and produced the predicted Glashow resonance) at the ice cube lab on Antarctica - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03256-1

I only understand part of that but it's still fascinating

too bad it's paywalled. my first question was when did that happen? things down there have been very weird for the past year!

ah press release says december 2016

https://www.reddit.com/r/WhereDidTheSiloGo/search?q=subreddit%3AWhereDidTheSiloGo&restrict_sr=on&sort=top&t=all

caek is the "general relativity explains away dark matter" thing bs?

i don't know what the thing is but no, GR does not remove the need for dark matter.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210304145458.htm

saw someone comment "but galactic rotation curves aren't the only evidence for dark matter" which seemed to make sense

yup. they're not even the main evidence at this point, although they were the first.

oooh

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/23/large-hadron-collider-scientists-particle-physics

Nice

Worm Tornado? Has anyone ever seen anything like this? These were out this morning near Maxwell park in #Hoboken. Clearly worms come out after it rains but this is something I’ve never seen! Pc: my 2nd ward neighbor. #wormtornado 😬🤦🏻‍♀️ 🪱 🌪 pic.twitter.com/tWBOMzV5fK

— Tiffanie Fisher, Councilwoman (@Tiffanie_Fisher) March 25, 2021

eldritch

Nossir

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/07/science/particle-physics-muon-fermilab-brookhaven.html

Would it be correct to say that dark energy makes up 68% of the mass of the universe?

i'm out of my depth but ...

yes, assuming 1) energy and mass are equivalent 2) it's appropriate to think of dark energy as energy rather than something more exotic like a negative pressure.

1) is uncontroversially true 2) may be true, but is not uncontroversial given no one knows what DE is, IIUC.

The Dead have a song about this

It was a university challenge question - what makes up 68% of the mass of the universe and (theoretically?) causes the acceleration of its expansion. The second part gives it away but by then you're thrown by the reference to mass. They answered dark matter. Fwiw Wikipedia says its 68% of the energy.

there is certainly no better answer to this question than "dark energy"

I suspect there may be a better question to the answer though

yes

NASA's Parker Solar Probe plunged deep into the Sun's corona & passed directly through streamers of solar plasma. The view out the window was...staggering. https://t.co/LLy8fB2dmZ pic.twitter.com/4fWkHIgmlA

— Corey S. Powell (@coreyspowell) December 15, 2021

i bought a NAS

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, August 25, 2020 2:57 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

i sold it

incredible video is that, just casually staring at the milky way whilst getting directly blasted by a solar flare.

is that the view from bezos' cowboy hat?

I saw it earlier through a Seán Doran RT, his twitter account is very good for hq enhanced Mars and Jupiter photos/vids.

staring at the milky way whilst getting directly blasted by a solar flare yes!

i bought a NAS

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, August 25, 2020 2:57 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

i sold it

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Wednesday, 15 December 2021 20:13 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i hope my girlfriend don't mind it

http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/ is going up in a few years. that's a 6m mirror. going to be a pretty big deal iirc.

― caek, Wednesday, March 3, 2010 8:14 AM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

"Oh noes, we forgot to take off the lens cap!"

lol "a few years". i'm not sure how late it actually ended up. five years?

Originally planned to launch 2007, then in 2005 they pushed out to 2013.

christ

yup, but a lag of 15 years wouldn't even register on a geologic time scale

Fuck, the mirror is foggy. I repeat, the mirror is foggy. Mission failure.

we're 3-4 months away from knowing if it all works iirc

camera pans up to reveal a giant eye staring into the telescope

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdfUSNzc0Xk

was looking for a more detailed story about the one of the early engineering images from JWST and ended up on phys.org. good site!

two delightful stories

https://phys.org/news/2022-03-gaia-snaps-photo-webb-l2.html
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-asteroid-impact.html

Gaia snaps photo of Webb at L2

best spacecraft friends

maybe not useful for caek, but the sixty symbols youtube channel did just post a little bit of discussion about the calibration image.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbj8pMfK9Ek

I wrote a paper with that guy!

cool! i had wondered if he was someone you'd run into before

good livestream

At their worst, the Nautilus dive streams are fascinating. At their best, you watch new species being discovered live. Particularly recommended if you enjoy space launches. https://t.co/VcjPcWKmCT

— Charlie Loyd (@vruba) March 23, 2022

hi caek, nice corner!

feel free to ignore any or all of this, which starts the chilling words, "i have a comment and then a question"

the comment is that the james webb telescope ("the webb?" <-- a question inside the comment) has helped me understand, more concretely, some familiar old ideas about relativity and time travel in a more concrete way. i've understood that the light that we see from distant objects like stars are images of a previous time, since the light emitted has to travel for years (a "light year", if i may coin a phrase) before it reaches us. but i never really thought about the ramifications of capturing the light of more distant stars than ever before. it's just "light" but it's also an image of the distant, distant past.

that got me thinking (yes this is still the comment - i am seriously replicating a real life "comment and then a question") about what it means to travel along the path of that light, back toward the origin of the star, realizing that in a way it would be like accelerating into the past. if you stood on earth and received the light at normal speed (light speed), you experience the past of that distant star at a steady, human/earth rate. but when you begin to travel into the light, your experience of their past happens more rapidly - it's all in there, it's just more compressed (?). and that, if you could travel against the light quickly enough, you experience all of the billions of years of its history in the time that it takes you to travel from earth to the star.

and then (comment!), in the other direction, that you could could effectively freeze one's experience of time by "riding along" the path of the distant star's light at the exact same speed, always seeing it in the same way. and that in a sense you could "reverse" time if you could move even faster than the speed of light, and traveled back to an earlier form of the light/image. it's cool that the images from the webb make that kind of idea of more understandable and real (at least to me).

*loud booing from a 4th year grad student*---alright alright so here's my question! jfc.

all of that got me thinking about where the origin of the big bang is supposed to be, and how seeing more distant stars could help us understand our own galaxy's position in the universe. i've had the idea that the big bang is in the "middle", with matter generally heading outward ever since. that might be wrong in itself, i don't know. [coughs directly into mic, saliva sounds]. would the webb's ability to see farther than ever before provide additional data about the previous celestial coordinates/paths of existing stars/objects that we already knew about? is it possible to "see" that an existing galaxy briefly obscured another galaxy or affected its gravity/path at some point in the past?

i don't know, you can disregard and ad lib freely, i'll take my answer off the air, thank u caek

"if you could travel against the light quickly enough, you experience all of the billions of years of its history in the time that it takes you to travel from earth to the star."

"effectively freeze one's experience of time by "riding along" the path of the distant star's light at the exact same speed, always seeing it in the same way."

these things are not possible, because, however fast you go, in whatever direction, light travels at the speed of light relative to you. that's special relativity baby.

"the webb's ability to see farther than ever before"

i think you're a bit confused about the way in which it is true. imagine a sailing boat. the webb telescope doesn't see further by moving the horizon away from us. things still drop below the horizon when they drop below the horizon. the webb allows us to see further by having better eyesight. i.e. at a given distance, the webb can see fainter things than existing space telescopes. in the case of telescopes, the horizon is set by the speed of light. it is essentially the speed of light x the age of the universe away from us. no innovations in telescope design will ever change this.

if I may throw some of my thoughts in the air here

what we see is long gone - it either doesn't exist anymore or it's far away from where the light started its travels (point at the Sun: you're wrong, you're pointing at where it was 8 minutes ago)

the big bang happened everywhere. the whole universe was there when it happened. (/it's still happening)

thanks caek!

i do want to say that for a brief time, i felt like i could barely understand time travel and how it might work, and in that moment i was standing on the shoulders of nincompoops

Time does slow down for you the faster you travel though (i.e. In your subjective experience, external events speed up). This is the probably the second easiest way to travel forward in time, the first being cryogenic freezing (pending first successful thawing of human subject).