AmalgamatedIllusions

AmalgamatedIllusions , 10 months ago to asklemmy in What is a hobby you enjoy, but seems too quirky or obscure to bring up in most conversations?

[email protected] or [email protected]?

I never posted my pens on r/fountainpens before, but I maybe I should here.

AmalgamatedIllusions , 10 months ago to askscience in Sound in space

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.

AmalgamatedIllusions , 10 months ago to askscience in Sound in space

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.

AmalgamatedIllusions , 10 months ago to askscience in What happens if an electron collides with an antimatter particle that is not a positron?

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).

AmalgamatedIllusions , 10 months ago to askscience in Sound in space

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).

AmalgamatedIllusions , 10 months ago to askscience in What happens if an electron collides with an antimatter particle that is not a positron?

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.

AmalgamatedIllusions , 10 months ago to asklemmy in What's some really unpopular opinion you have?

I feel like it’s best to ease people into illusionism rather than hit them with a statement like “consciousness isn’t real”, which they will almost certainly misunderstand and reject if they aren’t versed in the philosophy of mind (hence why it works well for this thread). As a teaser, I like the statement, “You are conscious, but not in the way you think you are”, i.e. their consciousness is not phenomenal in character. What that means exactly is a lengthy discussion, but it gives an opportunity to emphasize the aspects of consciousness that actually matter and to potentially offset things like moral status over to them. For most people, morality hinges on phenomenality, so you have to replace it with something before they can accept illusionism (in my opinion).