These are my favorite science memes because they make me feel a little what boomers feel. I saw an article about a particle I’ve never heard of called “Axions” and I have had it up to here with all these newfangled particles.
Axions are super cool, they solve two longstanding questions in particle physics (they are a potential dark matter candidate and solve the Strong Charge-Parity problem) and are named after a brand of soap because they clean up the standard model of physics, I shit you not. I am about to finish my PhD in particle physics and spend a lot of time studying the types of detectors being used to look for dark matter (axions, wimps, etc), as they are adjacent to the detectors I use in my field of neutrino physics.
named after a brand of soap because they clean up the standard model of physics Ah, scientists, so silly. One of my favourite silly names in my field is naming the gene that causes fruit flies to be extra susceptible to alcohol “Cheap date”
It’s either that or the Sonic Hedgehog protein (and the inhibitor “Robotnikinin”)
I am proud of silly naming traditions. I named one experiment I worked on godXilla and the other I work on is named CRAB (hoping I don’t doxx myself letting that out lol)
dark matter is in fact a mental illness and does not exist
and einstein was wrong
To me its tragic that the smartest human to exist in living memory had his societal, socialist worldview swept under the rug by the capitalist pigs. We acknowledge he laid the groundwork for our understanding of physical reality itself, but sure lets pretend he didn’t know what he was talking about with regard to improving our relatively simple by comparison exploitative inter-monkey social systems.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Albert_Einstein
He was almost killed in the Holocaust too. That’s why he fled to the US.
Einstein disagreed with probabilistic quantum field theory, which is a teachable moment that we all have limits to our capacity to understand.
Dark matter is a factor in multiple scientific models, which in turn are simulations of reality. We only know so much about the real and have to take guesses (often very accurate guesses we routinely risk our lives on). Some of cosmological guesses involve mass with no detectable signatures, id est dark matter.
What is dark matter? We don’t yet know. Can something else be otherwise throwing our numbers so that it seems like there’s dark matter? Sure.
That’s not insanity, but an unknown, dark matter may yet reveal itself (become less dark) or it may go the way of aether and phlogiston.
