10 years is actually considered not bad by most academic standards. The core ideas of evolution via selection, genetics, and population dynamics (the kinds of things taught in any general biology class in high school and college) really haven’t changed much in 25 years.
You may want to find a biology class and learn about the vocabulary, founding principles, and big ideas. Here is a free open source biology textbook, chapter 18 starts the unit on evolutionary processes. And keep watching YouTube! There are tons of good videos aimed at different levels. “Crash Course” with Hank Green is fantastic and the series covers many academic science topics as an entire course. Biology alone has 20 or 30 ten-minute episodes.
Crash Course is the channel I was watching, specifically the Big History series. I LOVE Crash Course, but of course the nature of it is that they can’t get too detailed with any given subject. I kind of wish they drilled down into a couple of things more: 1) evolution of animals during the time between dinosaurs going extinct and the arrival of hominids, and 2) different types of hominids. So that’s the sort of stuff I want to learn about next.
Ah, well this just happens to be something I’m into! There is a NOVA movie about the chicxulub (pronounced chick-zaloob) asteroid that hit Mexico and initiated the extinction of the dinosaurs. It’s called The Day the Dinos Died, season 44 episode 21. It’ll show you the ways scientists use different pieces of evidence to create a timeline of the destruction based on new fossils in South Dakota. Very new and cutting edge. They actually found a fragment of the original asteroid.
At the time, our mammal ancestor was kinda like a squirrel rat, nocturnal and lived underground. It would take 5 million more years before our intrepid grandma would venture out of the ground and inherit the Earth. 65 million years later, mammals are the wonderful animals we see today.
Ok, want your mind blown? There is a book called Evolution by Stephen Baxter. It’s fiction but it tells the story of hominid evolution starting from the Chicxulub asteroid. Each chapter is a segment of the life of one likely ancestor on the road to modern humans over those 65 million years. It’s very well written and puts together many well accepted pieces of evidence in a compelling way.
By the way, physical anthropology is the name of the field that covers hominid and human evolution and is it’s own subject.
Scishow is good for up-to-date info about a variety of scientific fields. If you want to check if your scientific knowledge is up to date (or if you want to keep it up to date), I highly recommend checking them out. As for evolution in particular, I can’t really say. Biology is an umbrella term for a vast number of incredibly niche sub-fields, and even something that would seem straightforward, like evolution, can be broken up into multiple fields of study. For instance, I know people who study evolutionary microbiology, which is the study of how bacteria evolve.
I’m not sure if you’re looking for general knowledge of scientific concepts or if you’re looking for in-depth analysis of leading-edge, niche scientific concepts. If it’s the former, I’m sure that videos from even 10 years ago is probably fine. World-changing breakthroughs don’t happen that often. And while maybe there might be minor inaccuracies, overall it’ll still be accurate enough to get a general understanding. If it’s the latter, you’ll unfortunately have to learn how to read scientific literature
Thanks for the rec! I’m not looking for anything too incredibly detailed, just a teensy bit more in depth than the videos I had been watching. I’ll give SciShow a try!
From my layman perspective, yes the measured gravity would be double it’s original value if measured from the same place.
Gravity is an [edit: inverse squared] function, so it gets weaker at an exponential rate as you move away from the source. But even if it’s a value of 1.0 at Earth’s surface and .02 at some distant point from Earth, doubling Earth’s gravity would double both values to 2.0 and .04, respectively.
Additional question that’s related, if you’d like to try it: I’ve read about vacuum energy/zero point energy - hawking radiation exists because of those theories. From what I’ve read, vacuum energy has the potential for any form of matter but because of the uncertainty principle, less likely to produce higher forms of energy, and thus why most fluctuations produce only virtual particles. My main question then is: so no matter what, all of space ether has matter or potential for matter? If so, should a photon actually collide with a virtual particle it would actually stay in physical existence)?
Thank again
I would assume I’m not interested in any of the associated crackpot ideas some have.
I did make I have made many mistakes, much worse than this one and on many occasions. I would say : don’t be so hard on yourself since it’s important to forgive ourselves.
I do believe the following correction should be made again to your text though :
Gravity is an [edit: inverse squared] function, so it gets weaker at an exponential a squared rate as you move away from the source.
Assuming a spherical earth, if you doubled its mass but kept the radius the same then the gravitational force on the earths surface would be twice that of the current earth.
As long as you keep the earths mass reasonable, you’re in the realm of Newtonian gravitation. Newton’s law of gravitation depends linearly on the mass of the attracting source. So doubling the mass doubles the gravitational force.
At 1 billion solar masses (firmly in the not-reasonable mass range for the earth), you’d need to consider the formation of a black hole. The Schwarzschild Radius for a 1 billion solar mass black hole (aka the event horizon) is almost 20 astronomical units or 2 billion miles. So in that case you wouldn’t be able to measure the change in gravity as you’d be within the event horizon of a black hole.
At an intermediate mass there might be some general relativity effects that could alter the linear relationship between earth mass and gravitational force as measured on the earths surface, but I’m not sure what that would be. If you were to measure earths mass from a large distance, then it should follow Newtonian dynamics and behave linearly with mass.
A field is a value assigned at every point in space. It is not “made of waves”. But if the field is perturbed by an acceleration, then the perturbation is propagated as a wave.
Simple analogy: every point in the sea has a “depth”. That’s like a field. If a motorboat creates a wake, the “depth” changes temporarily. You see that change as a wave.
The other answer is correct, it’s not really accurate to say that gravity is made of waves.
In physics, a field is a physical quantity that has a value for each point in space and time The most accurate model for the gravitational field is general relativity, however for many cases it’s sufficient to just use Newtonian Dynamics. In GR, changes to the gravitational field propagate at the speed of light in a vacuum, c. It’s possible to create gravitational waves by rapidly accelerating a massive object, which occurs in inspiralling black holes or neutron stars. But the gravitational force pulling the pair of black holes together isn’t made of waves; the black holes are minimizing their gravitational potential energy as defined by the gravitational field.
force fields are made up of waves (as is everything?),
I wanted to address this since I think you might have a common misconception. Particles (photons, electrons, quarks, protons, neutrons, etc) are described in quantum mechanics using a wavefunction. But this doesn’t make these particles “waves”, they are still quantum mechanical particles. They simply don’t have a defined location (if using a spatial wavefunction, you can also work in an alternative basis like energy or momentum). If the particle interacts with something on the classical scale, it’s wavefunction will collapse to a single point where the location is defined.
So I’m not a virologist by any stretch, but I do work with computer systems as a profession and think there’s a comparison to be made.
In replicating any given bit of data there’s always the potential for errors. With computer systems there a checks in place but for living systems no so much. The more complex the data amd the more times it replicates the greater the raw chamce to have a particluar bit in the code get scrambled.
So if you have a fadt breeding bug that’s a longer string of RNA than some other the chamce for variants is greater. For viruses, lethality is a byproduct rather than a feature, but since the virus itself has no cognition or control over the outcomes of these fliped bitsthere is an entirely random chance that any given error in the code will either be beneficial, neutral, or deteimental to the propagation of the virus.
To get to what I think is the original question here of ‘did humans create this condition’ I would suspect the answer is no then. For comparison, we still have the ‘common cold’ which changes with the year but there’s never been a vaccine of any meaningful sort issued for it. This particular parent corona virus started off with an abnormally high mortality rate compared to other similar class viruses but seems to have shifted in the last several itterations to a less dangerous (at least in the immidiate semse, long term maybe not) but more rapidly and readily spread form.
Gravity fields are just potentials, as gravity requires at least two bodies, right?
If the universe only contained one body of irrelevant mass, without anything else to interact with it would just sit there. Further there would be no time, as there would be no change.
If Earth’s mass were to double, all gravitational relations, including potentials, would also increased but it’s not exactly double as the equation should also account for the other body or bodies masses.
I’m not a scientist, I’m just smoking weed on a sunday. I’m hoping some actual smart people can explain this like I’m high.
If Earth’s mass were to double, all gravitational relations, including potentials, would also increased but it’s not exactly double as the equation should also account for the other body or bodies masses.
I think the simple Newtonian version is: Break down each gravitational relation (A and B pull on each other) in it’s components: A pulls on B, and B pulls on A. If you double the mass of A, this has two effects:
A pulls on B twice as much
B pulls on A the same, but needs twice as much force to achieve the same acceleration (a = F / m)
So I have a follow up question, let’s say someone has 20cm long hair, all of them are that long, we don’t see 5/10cm hair still growing to get to 20, I’m confused, how does that work?
Have you ever seen someone’s arm after they have a cast taken off? Your arm hair is short because it’s being rubbed off by random interactions with things (rubbing against shirts you take off/put on, your body, general use). A person with a cast on their arm protects those hairs, and when they finally get the cast off, they look like a werewolf.
It’s weird how often I get comments from people days later, who think they know what they’re talking about about, but are missing a piece that explains it.
If you’re going to comment on old threads, try asking a question. I probably would have explained for you and you could have learned something.
That was 3 hours later, not really old besides he’s correct: hair doesn’t grow differently because of it’s lenght but because of it’s placement on the body.
I’m trying to understand what you’re proposing here, so I have a few questions.
3d interference pattern of gravitational waves would create rogue waves at specific points in SpaceTime that would create matter and the CMB.
What is the source of these gravitational waves? Binary black hole mergers, neutron star mergers, something else?
How would rogue gravitational waves create matter?
How would rogue gravitational waves produce the cosmic microwave background?
Creation of matter and gravity fields, at net zero energy would increase the expansion of the universe.
What do you mean by “net zero energy”? Is it that this process of creating matter and gravitational waves would also conserve energy somehow? How would this increase the expansion of the universe?
The perfect black body curve of the CMB would result from the exponential expansion of the universe.
How does the exponential expansion of the universe produce the black body CMB? In the standard big bang model, photons are emitted during the recombination epoch and have a very uniform black body temperature since the matter that emitted them had been in thermal equilibrium prior to expansion. These photons are then extremely redshifted by the expansion of the universe.
in my post there is a link for a powerful source of these waves but any source is good enough.
How would rogue gravitational waves create matter?
Here I use an analogy with the waves in the ocean that were discovered to create very strong unexpected phenomenas. When a field is strong enough it can create matter. So, it would be something similar to Hawking radiation or creation of electron positron pairs from gamma rays.
What do you mean by “net zero energy”?
I was most impressed by a single fact of physics that all energy in ordinary matter is equal to the negative potential gravitational energy of that matter.
How would this [creation of matter and gravitational fields] increase the expansion of the universe?
I read somewhere, maybe quantum gravity theories, where one creates the other, so I would have to search it again, unless someone here can help me.
(…) black body CMB?
Please notice that inside another comment in this post I have addressed that question.
The gravitational wave background you linked is extremely weak, it took decades of measurements of pulsar timing and complex signal processing to even see hints of it. In general, the gravitational force is so much weaker than the other forces that it can be ignored except on very large scales. So I’m not seeing how a rogue gravitational wave would produce sufficient energy density for creating matter via pair production or some other mechanism. You would need extremely large amplitude gravitational waves, which would require some even more energetic mechanism for generating them. Maybe this is something you can work into your model?
I was most impressed by a single fact of physics that all energy in ordinary matter is equal to the negative potential gravitational energy of that matter.
I’m not sure what you mean by this, could you point me to a reference where you saw this statement?
I will come back here to answer your questions one at a time … )
By the integration over an exponentially expanding universe of the fluke electromagnetic radiation created locally. Maybe matter is created as neutrons that decays into hydrogen atoms which would then radiate something.
Photons emitted from radioactive decays have specific wavelengths. Even with Doppler broadening blurring it out, I don’t see how integrating over all decays at all distances would produce a black body spectrum.
The black body spectrum shape is actually really hard to produce through another mechanism. In fact, before the discovery of quantum mechanics attempts to calculate a black body spectrum with classical mechanics failed at short wavelengths. This problem was called the ultraviolet catastrophe.
Maybe this is what would falsify my proposal… unless maybe that fluke local radiation could start at the maximum energy of the black body curve ? I will try to look into this.
There was no expansion in the steady state model while, in this new model, it’s easier to explain the perfect black body curve of the CMB.
In addition to CMB being tough to explain, the distant universe is different — for example, quasars are far away/old. You would expect them to be more evenly distributed in a steady-state theory.
The universe I propose is very old, so, it is not uniform.
No, the steady-state model (the Hoyle-era model, not ancient eternal cosmologies) included expansion — Einstein had earlier proposed a static universe, but it turns out that’s not stable.
The fact that the universe has different features at different ages is a problem for continuous (non-big-bang) models. Why would e.g. radio sources be more common far away and not nearby? For a continuous/steady-state type theory, far away stuff should be the same (yes it’s older, but that doesn’t matter, since it’s steady state).
Not sure what you mean by self coherence causing “rogue wave” interference which leads to a CMB, and how exponential expansion causes perfect blackbody radiation. But a good exercise would be to play with the numbers to see how you can come up with 2.7K, and see what that suggests about e.g. the density of galaxies in the observable universe.
Also check out more modern “quasi-steady state” theories from the 90s.
Whoops, I was updating my comment while you were responding to it. My edit answered your question ?
Also : “3d interference pattern of gravitational waves would create rogue waves.” But, what I mean by “if self coherent” is simply the question : is my model self-coherent.
This link was amazing. Thank you so much and it seems I need to dive deeper into quantum mechanics.
This was honestly the answer I was after. Have you read about Black Hole cosmology? I’m not certain how probable it is to be true, but it’s extremely interesting and along with Roger Penrose’s own eon theory, it seems likely that the universe is cyclical.
I haven’t read Roger Penrose’s theory yet, but a lot of my intuition is pointing to something like a cyclic big bang (akin to a universe of energy being released from a back hole-like origin) before eventually evolving into a big crush and repeating the cycle. I need to read Roger Penrose’s theory to compare it to my intuition. 
But quantum mechanics seem to have the answers on how antimatter/baryon matter is formed through the relationship of fields and quanta energy vibrations.
I though I saw your avatar before and we have indeed crossed paths before and seem to be on the same cosmological discovery. You seem very pragmatic in your comments. How has your research on a non-big bang origin developing? Seems I have some catching up to do on Penrose - what are your initial thoughts?
Yes we had a nice exchange five or six days ago in your post : Beyond the Darkness - Dark Matter: A Baseless Hypothesis?
I am not a physicist and I don’t work in this field. I just read since many years and I made my mind about what was going to be successful and what was not.
My best prediction so far was that JWST was going to see the same type of galaxies very far away as those in the local universe. (at least partially verified) I made that same prediction when Hubble telescope was put into orbit. Back then physicist started doubting their theories.
I was most impressed by a single fact of physics ...…that all energy in ordinary matter is equal to the negative potential gravitational energy of that matter. Because of this I am scanning all I read for clues for a mechanism where matter could be created from gravitational field …something like Hawking radiation. For the same reason I am also looking for evidence that the universe could stand for a much longer time since the CMB. This would be the case for a universe that would be exponentially expanding. Suppose the accelerating rate of expansion double each 10 billion years or so. Then, if you go in the past every 10 billion years the rate of expansion is smaller and smaller exponentially decreasing and the universe is extremely old.
I have so many more ideas but I don’t want to make a wall of text.
Observably and experimentally, it’s so hard to test powerful gravity fields. But theoretically, if we could confine and increase a portion of matter into a far more dense state, we should be able to create increased gravity - I think that’s possible, but it would take insane energy and you’d have to control it to a point that it doesn’t turn into a giant explosion; seems very probable and should be conducted in space…just to be safe.
But, is your thinking that if we have a net zero energy universe, it should not have a big bang, or just that a net zero may have originated differently from a big bang? I’m just curious.
if we find a mechanism that continually creates matter in the universe we don’t need a big bang. Creation of matter and gravity fields, (net zero) could somehow increase the expansion of the universe. 3d interference pattern of gravitational waves would create rogue waves at specific points in SpaceTime that would create matter and the CMB.
Oops ! I just defined a new cosmological model 😄 !
Please follow developments here : https://lemmy.ca/post/3539374 lemmy.ca/post/3553583
I had to rebuild completely my post (questions and answer) from other users also, because some moderator, at “ShowerThoughts”, deleted the post while it was in progress.
You might be interested in Dirac large numbers hypothesis, where the mass of the universe depends on the age of the universe. That kind of would be a hint for matter being continually created.
Agreed, this is the most on topic post we’ve had for a while.
We both think my post was on topic, unfortunately, ShowerThoughts moderators deleted it !
Generally, conservation of energy applies in a closed system, so [it] wouldn’t apply at the creation of the system.
Plus we can’t (yet) be sure what caused the Big Bang if it happened.
Nice 😊 !
I’ve always liked the idea that matter, space and time are the way we observe the interactions of fields. So gravity waves make an interesting idea as to how part of it might work
Now we need a physicist and a mathematician, which obviously, I am not.
I wish that science channels would stop using the term “fabric of space” because the term is meaningless (or not well defined). What is probably meant when “fabric of space” is mentioned, is the abstract geometrical concept of manifold: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold
So what we are talking about are coordinates and distances between those coordinates. And I’d consider it unlikely that coordinates and their relations could spawn matter by themselves.
Edit: another commenter linked me to zero point energy, and with its relating links, that seems to give me the answers I was after. 
I was trying not to write too much but I guess it’s hard to ask without more context.
I’ve been reading about how antimatter results from particle accelerators and high energy collisions in space. But in layman terms, when these high energy collisions occur, are we simply allowing released energy to form into antimatter?
My understand is when electrons and protons have extreme collisions or forced too close within extreme gravity, they form neutrons or other particles (including photons). These are examples of matter into energy into matter. But are the “blueprints” that tell energy how to form into baryon matter in the energy (that is, does quantity and/or power cause the resulting state), the strong/weak fields influencing it, or some other mechanism?
I’ll try to address your questions in reverse. For the second question, the formation and structure of hadronic particles such as baryons or mesons is dictated by the fundamental forces. Specifically, the weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions between the quarks that make up the hadron. Gravity is too weak to play a role on this scale.
It’s important to remember that protons and neutrons aren’t elementary particles, they’re composed of quarks. A particle composed of 2 up quarks and a down quark in its lowest energy state is a proton. 2 downs and an up in the lowest energy state is a neutron. Elementary particles such as quarks are identical to other quarks of the same type - every up quark could be swapped for another up quark with no effect on the system. So a proton, composed of quarks in a specific energy state, will be indistinguishable from another proton. There doesn’t need to be a blueprint somewhere to define a “proton”, it just emerges naturally from the fundamental forces and elementary particles.
For an example on a more familiar scale, consider chemical reactions. By making or breaking atomic and molecular bonds you can have an oxidation reaction like fire, or generate electricity in a battery, change the color of a substance, etc. All of those distinct emergent reactions are governed by the electrons in atoms, whose energy levels and interactions emerge from quantum electromagnetism.
These forces also dictate how the composite particles can be reorganized, for example allowing a decay to occur. A free neutron will eventually undergo beta decay into a proton, an electron, and an anti-electron neutrino. This is allowed because the mass of the proton and electron (and neutrino, though it’s mass is currently unknown and experimentally consistent with 0 for this case) is less than that of the neutron. So the beta decay produces a lower energy state. The Feynman diagram for the leading order term in the decay mechanism describes it as being mediated by a W- boson.
This segues into your first question. It sounds like you’re thinking of high energy colliders like the LCH, where beams of protons or even lead nuclei are collided at high energy. These collisions produce a quark gluon plasma where quarks are no longer confined by color charge. It’s basically a superfluid soup of quarks and gluons. As it expands and cools, quarks become color confined again and consolidate into composite particles (hadrons), including some exotic and very unstable ones that quickly decay into more stable configurations. Some of these initial hadrons or their decay products will be formed from antimatter quarks. However, any reaction mechanism that creates or destroys antimatter will create or destroy the same amount of matter. This statement ignores CP violation, which is a small effect in this case, though essential for creating the matter dominated universe we live in.
The strong force between quarks is so strong that the energy needed to “separate” the quarks exceeds the energy needed to produce a quark-antiquark pair. This mechanism converts energy into matter, but the only “blueprint” is “minimize the energy of the system”, and creating a pair of quarks to stick to the initial pair that’s being pulled apart achieves this.
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