this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Man, 2 full bridge rectifiers in the same meme?
This is either electroboom, or struggling for things to fill a meme

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

By elimination it must be the "what the fuck"

Edit: Yeah, that's it. Someone below mentioned a mercury arc rectifier.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago

Ooo that's exciting. At a glance without paying attention it looked like a reactor with cherenkov radiation

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Fuck it, physics is magic. You study for years to learn the innate laws of the universe and bend them to your will. You know what most people would do if magicians were real people? They'd call them nerds for spending too much time studying and most people would avoid the subject like the plague. Magicians and physicists are the same thing.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago

Every sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

Depends on how good the magic was. If it let you fireball a room full of goblins with a wave of your hand, read minds, lightning people with your fingertips like emperor palpatine, and conjure familiars to do your house work?

All without any manufacturing facilities and minimal capital outlay

I dare say physics would be more popular then

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

But that's never how magic is depicted - it always takes decades of knowledge and learning or powerful enchanted artifacts forged from rare minerals and materials, and rituals which always name a price.

Modern magic can do all those things - if you have the right artifacts, likewise made of precious metals forged by lightning and etched with beams of sunfire and inlaid with gemstones from beyond the sea, fuelled by the ichor alchemically distilled from the remnants of ancient forests and carefully assembled by entire courts of white-robed magi who have each spent decades perfecting their deep knowledge of ritual and arcane lore.

With these artifacts, I can incinerate an entire room with a twitch of my finger upon a staff of fire summoning, read minds with a helm of probing, lightning people with a tiny wand of stunning, and conjure familiar from across the world to do my bidding on my black mirror for the small sacrifice of tiny particles of lightning in a distant runestone.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

My physics teacher is also a magician so you got a point

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Computers are magic.

Circuit boards are basically runes, written in stone and inlaid with precious metals to conduct pure energy around in very specific ways to do pretty much anything we wish.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's sand we carved into patterns and tricked into thinking with tamed lightning.

Then there's RF (radio frequency) which is the DEEP magic.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

As someone who is trying to get Meshtastic to work I feel this. My pocket node can connect to people 50km away, but the base station with the chongus antenna can only connect across town?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I've always told my students that programming is just magic. If you get the right combination of words and symbols, the magic lightning rock will do your bidding.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Quantum Tunneling, Quantum entanglement, statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Imagine thinking there's any situation in which particles appear to move faster than the speed of light.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

When you gotta go, you gotta go.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Spooky action at a distance

Einstein looked into that shit and was like 'nah fuck that homie'

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

And that's not even the worst part. Its theoretically possible,that every single electron is the same.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago (3 children)

The "not a demon" guy is going to have a real bad time.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago

He will not sacrifice an entire room to a deamon. I repeat, it's not a sacrifice of everybody in a room for a deamon.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

Fool me once, shame on… shame on me. Fool me twice? You can’t get fooled again!

Because of the fatal dose of radiation.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

We sometimes conjure fireballs but it's totally from a certain type of invisible gas and also you can't smell the gas but it's definitely there and NOT MAGIC

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Saw a working mercury arc rectifier for the first time recently and those things are wild, definitely don't look "right"

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (7 children)

What's the bottom right image of?

[–] stoy 17 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I thought you might also enjoy its German name: Quecksilberdampfgleichrichter

[–] stoy 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Sounds kinda similar to the Swedish word "kvicksilverbågelikriktare"....

EDIT: After doing some more googling, the proper name for the device in Swedish is:

"Kvicksilverlikriktare"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

and sounds nothing like the hungarian "higanyív szelep" or "higanygőz egyenirányító"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Or its Dutch name:

Kwikdampgelijkrichter

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

The difference between physics and magic is that physics works by describing the forces acting on a system. To predict an outcome, you just progressivly apply those forces over time.

With magic, you just specify the outcome, but not how you get there.

This is how we know that thermodynamics is magic. Conservation laws and Lagrangeans too.

https://xkcd.com/2904/

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Shit gets spooky when you consider proton non decay at its utmost consequences

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Tell us about the spooky, dammit

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Right??? You can't just say something like that and then ride off into the sunset

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (2 children)

As one of my Daughters told the Chair of the Physics department at a large Big 10 collage to switch her major from ME to Physics, "I want know the answer, not guess."

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Weird, because my experience with science and mathematics is that everything I learned only leads to more questions. I personally preferred taking a small chunk of that knowledge and using it to do real-world stuff which was always surprisingly complicated but satisfying. An engineer that "guesses" is not a very good one IMO lol

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

My whole life I thought I'd study mechatronics. I was one of those kids winning robotics comps and getting sponsored to go to global ones and get my arse beat by actually smart people.

Anyway, I switched to physics because "I want to know why".

Ahaha, hahahahaha, aaahshahshshshs oh naive little me. Ha ha ha ha. Now I am an overeducated house wife with a head full of questions. I could have done something useful instead of rocking back and forth in a padded room screaming "but what is time? why does it break all the patterns?"

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (13 children)

Bridge Diodes current regulation are considered physics? I mean, yeah, but about as much as any other science field, right?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

It's electrical engineering if anything

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (4 children)

What's the middle bottom one?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That orb in the middle of the apparatus is The Demon Core, a piece of plutonium produced during the Manhattan Project, for a third nuke which was never needed. So it was used for criticality experiments, which is where those hemispheres come in.

Anyway, in those experiments it was key in a few accidents, which caused the deaths by radiation of several researchers. After the later bout of experiments, the core was scrapped.

A little more reading in case you're interested

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Idk how you can include all this but not the Kyle Hill documentary

https://youtu.be/aFlromB6SnU

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Good point, thanks for pointing to it.

(Also, pro tip: take off that ?si=... stuff from your link, that's tracking tags)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

This is why I always appreciated that Brakebills in The Magicians was basically grad school with better dorm life.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

OK but electromagnetics is totally magic.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

I love mercury vapor rectifiers!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago
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