Dear sci-fi writers,
You can't be weirder than reality. I dare you.
@LexYeen Is this in response to something in particular?
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@Felthry I looked up Oganesson and saw that it was formerly thought to be a gas under normal conditions, but now the prediction is that it's a solid due to relativistic effects.
And that just made me go "...nature is weirder than anyone realizes."
@LexYeen relativistic effects are also why mercury is liquid!
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@Felthry This reality never fails to astound me.
@LexYeen the alt text on https://xkcd.com/1489/ is just, emblematic of how *weird* physcis is
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@LexYeen also the fact that electromagnetism and the weak force are actually the same thing. and it's suspected the strong force and gravity are also actually the same thing, it's just that the universe hasn't been hot enough for them to be the same thing since a femtosecond or two after time started
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@LexYeen or maybe time didn't start and was going before then too, in some vastly different form. who knows! lots of physics kind of breaks when you bring zeroes or infinities into it. Maybe time will change again at some point in the future.
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@LexYeen Maybe it already has! inside an event horizon, time swaps places with the spatial dimension pointing inward towards the black hole. does that mean every black hole is another universe that's formed from ours? maybe! i have no idea, cosmology is weird
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@Felthry This entire universe could be a tiny pocket of stability in a foam of raw chaos for all we know, and I find that beautiful.
@LexYeen oh yes also also despite being probably the same thing, our best current explanation of gravity (general relativity) and our best current explanation of literally everything else (quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics) just flat out *do not* play well together. as in, trying to do the math spits out things that are blatantly nonsensical and i don't mean huge numbers i mean actual nonsense, nothing converges, infinities everywhere
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@Felthry I've always dreamed of what might happen to society once someone figured out how to reconcile that.
@LexYeen it's probably going to need new math to figure it out though
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@Felthry That is so cool. Well, metaphorically. The early universe was quite hot, after all.
I fucking love science.