No, because those mutations happen anyways. Mutations are random.
And the mutated versions would still spread the same.
Besides, viruses don’t want to kill people, a dead host isn’t a host anymore. If it kills too fast, it doesn’t spread. So there’s evolutionary pressure for a virus to not kill or even significantly harm it’s host.
That’s why viruses that killed a shit ton of people centuries ago are either not around anymore, or just a small nuisance.
Vaccines just speed that up so it takes months/years instead of decades/centuries
The mutations may still happen, but if they have to compete against those who don’t have the mutation and lose, then they’ll die out. So the question is whether this competition for resources happens or not.
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.
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)
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.
So, I’m not a virologist, so I can’t answer about viruses. But I am a bacterial microbiologist, so I can talk a bit about pathogenic bacteria. Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes, kind of.
It really depends on what the vaccine is targeting and what the pathogen is. My favorite pathogen is Streptococcus pneumoniae, the leading cause of pneumonia. So let’s look at it from that perspective. There are vaccines for S. pneumo, but the vaccines only target certain stains of S. pneumo. And every 5 or so years, we make a new version of the vaccine because the types of S. pneumo that are causing disease keeps shifting. If the vaccine accounts for type A, then type B starts to cause more disease. If the vaccine accounts for types A and B, then type C starts to cause more disease. If the vaccine amounts for types A through C, then type D starts to cause more disease. Repeat ad nauseum.
So yes, we can cause shifts in pathogen populations through vaccines. This is evolution, in its strictest definition. That being said, there’s a lot of caveats. First, that doesn’t mean that vaccines are bad. Maybe we want to shift the population (for instance, toward a milder form of the disease). Or maybe it doesn’t strictly matter if the shift occurs (if we can just keep making new vaccine versions, a la S. pneumo).
Second, even though vaccines may be shifting the population, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work. The S. pneumo vaccine significantly decreased infection and mortality from pneumonia. And while a lot of people still die from pneumonia today, it’s nothing compared to the mortality before modern medical science.
Third, it really depends on the vaccine. Specifically, how hard is it for the pathogen to mutate that portion that the vaccine is attempting to mimic? There are certain proteins that are more difficult to mutate than others. For instance, there are certain proteins that are involved in binding to and attacking the host. These proteins tend to be somewhat difficult to mutate, since mutating those proteins tend to also make the pathogen less efficient at attacking the host. If the vaccine trains the immune system to recognize these proteins, it can be really difficult for pathogens to evolve away from these proteins. Not to say that it’s impossible for pathogens to evolve anyways (pathogens are surprisingly tricky), but a well-designed vaccine, along with good adoption in the population, can significantly hinder a disease.
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!
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.
Any composite particle can have an antiparticle counterpart if you replace all of its constituent particles with antiparticles (e.g. anti- up and down quarks in the case of protons and neutrons).
Lol, but, for other readers, charge isn’t the only property that has an anti-component when making up anti matter.
Positrons are just the most easily explained and are what people are probably most familiar with.
Saying “electron but with a positive charge” satisfies the curiosity of most people who are smart enough to ask the question but don’t want to write a dissertation.
Plus, PET scanners take advantage of positron/electron annihilation to do their imaging, and that happens all over the world every day.
Which is kinda weird because where else in the world but medical imaging are regular people confronted with actual modern physics. Sure, semiconductors, but they don’t actually have to confront that.
Anyway, I do prefer to say “magic” rather than explain how an MRI works for a lot of people.
Absolutely. Sound waves are vibrations. Vibrations can be transmitted to other materials. Like electrical conductors, some materials conduct sound better than others. The amount of energy in sound is pretty low, so it’s not going to create a lot of heat or light, unless we’re talking about sound levels that would be dangerous to not only hearing but would cause death.
No, they don’t annihilate. The electron will scatter off the other particle, though any differences in charge will of course affect the scattering. For example, an electron and a proton could become bound to make a hydrogen atom, but this couldn’t happen with an anti-proton. Any nuclear reactions (specifically electron capture) would be affected too.
In the case of free anti-neutrons, there’s a chance the anti-neutron could decay into an anti-proton and a positron. If this were to happen during the collision with an electron, the electron could potentially annihilate with the positron.
Yes, sound is the collective motion of particles in the form of a compression wave. As these waves propagate through a material and scatter off boundaries and inhomogeneities in general, they become less ordered and eventually indistinguishable from random atomic motion (i.e. thermal energy). However, in addition to this, sound waves can radiate away when in atmosphere. In the case of spacecraft, they can only dissipate into thermal energy and can therefore persist much longer. This is actually a problem engineers have to deal with, as unwanted vibrations can cause issues. There’s research looking into addressing this by using materials specifically designed to be highly absorbent to sound waves at particular frequencies (i.e. the collective motion of atoms at particular frequencies rapidly decays into random thermal motion).
Ok, that makes sense. I expected it to be kinetic into thermal.
But then in a place like the ISS with all the people all the time, does it mean extra heat inside? What would happen if you played loud music? I mean vacuum does not the heat away from you quickly, and there’s nothing to take the kinetic energy. After years of people talking and beeps beeping, where did it go?
I don’t have a great answer for you why, but heat must be radiated away from space ships faster than you might think. They have heaters on them to keep them warm. Think Apollo 13 when they turn off all their power, and it gets cold.
The ISS is traveling through a decent amount of atmosphere still, hence they need to boost their orbit occasionally. That atmosphere is probably plenty to dissipate WAY more heat than sound creates.
That doesn’t explain deep space ships… But they do clearly radiate heat, if not slowly. But probably faster than what little heat sound creates. (Also think of the cooling phase that James Webb space telescope went through)
Heat can transfer through conduction (basically thermal diffusion through physical contact), convection (bulk motion of matter, like gas or water flow), and radiation. For a spacecraft in low Earth orbit, the pressure is considered ultra-high vacuum, so you basically only have radiation to dissipate heat. Near room temperature, this would be mid-infrared light. The energy in everyday sound waves is very small, so body heat, on-board instruments, sunlight, and perhaps even IR emission from the Earth would be much more important contributors to heat build-up. However, regardless of the heat sources involved, there will always be some equilibrium temperature where the energy going into the system equals the energy radiating away.
To keep things comfortable for the crew on the ISS, there are passive and active systems to regulate the temperature [1]. For dissipating excess heat, large radiators are used. These are basically panels with a large surface area in order to maximize emission of thermal radiation. A closed-loop system is used to circulate fluid, which collects and transfers heat to these radiators. Water is used for some parts, but others have pipes on the outside that use ammonia to prevent freezing. The radiators themselves can be retracted or deployed as needed.
[1] Memi, E. G. “Active Thermal Control System (ATCS) Overview.” (2006): 19.
I’ve played a few games set in space and some of them have, in their quest to explain differences between the fiction and reality, a “simulated sound” system so you can still hear in space; would something like that actually be possible in real life? 🤔
In principle, you could have a system designed to image your surroundings (using cameras, LIDAR, etc) and perhaps some kind of machine learning algorithm to predict what kind of sound would be expected if the events around you were occurring in atmosphere. I imagine this could work well for simple things like a tool hitting a piece of metal, but would be probably run into issues when the events are affected by the lack of atmosphere or give little or no visual indication that they are occurring. And, of course, you wouldn’t be able to “hear” anything outside of the view of your imaging system.
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