Ah crap you’re totally right, I got them mixed up. I guess I’ll blame it on Alzheimer’s, if only fake research had cured it by now.

Let’s wait until the results have been replicated. Parkinson’s research got majorly burned by that somewhat recently.

edit: got it wrong

This is really neat! I hope this paves the way for the miniaturization of other kinds of particle accelerators. It would make particle physics significantly cheaper and easier to set up.

My read of the article is that this will not do that. This appears to be a novel technique for measuring information about quantum objects (specifically microwave photons) in an indirect way. What are the implications of that? Hard to say. But it probably won’t lead to any insights or discoveries in fundamental physics.

What about it? The outcomes of the experiment are unintuitive but repeatable.

There aren’t any paradoxes in QM that I know of (purely within QM, there is a paradox between it and GR concerning black holes). A paradox means that a framework allows for two or more completely contradictory outcomes to occur, implying that the framework is flawed/incomplete. There’s nothing contradictory within QM atm. It does predict seemingly contradictory things, but these have all been experimentally verified, proving that they actually aren’t contradictory, our everyday intuition just doesn’t apply at quantum scales.

One arguable shortcoming of QM is that it only describes how things behave (the mechanics part of quantum mechanics), not how the underlying phenomena arise. Like, we know what happens to particles when you entangle them, but we still don’t fully understand what entanglement is. We’ve verified that it propagates faster than the speed of light, but we don’t know why. It would be like us understanding how things move under the influence of gravity but not knowing what gravity itself is (which we do know thanks to GR).

I’m far removed from my materials science days and can only barely grasp what this article is saying. Here’s some layman’s definitions for those wishing to read the article:

coercivity - a measure of a material’s ability to withstand an external magnetic field without becoming demagnetized itself

permeability - in contrast to coercivity, it is a measure of how magnetized within an external magnetic field a material will become

anisotropy - from the greek “an” meaning “anti, not the same, without, not equal” and “tropikos” meaning “orientation, direction, to turn”. Essentially meaning that a material’s properties are not uniform/the same in all spatial directions. In context, likely referring to a material having much more pronounced magnetic fields within some orientations than others wrt their crystal lattice structure

genetic algorithm - a computational technique whereby multiple configurations are simulated, and a subset of the “best performing” configurations are sampled and then randomly tweaked to try and incrementally improve those configurations, the ultimate goal being to arrive at an optimal solution to a problem

So in full context, the researchers attempted to use a computer to identify a chemical compound that would produce a maximal magnetic field without the need for expensive, hard to acquire rare earth elements.

Can I just take a moment to say how awesome it is that we live in times where “astrobiological” can be used in a serious scientific context, rather than mere science fiction?

Right, but then that tiny fraction starts getting other ideas…ideas like “if I can discredit my political opponents’ message while broadcasting my own far and wide then no one can stop me from inflicting my hate upon the world”. And they’ll hide behind the First Amendment along the entire way, claiming that you’re the one trying to silence them. You cannot have reasoned, measured discussion with hateful racists. If you give them an inch they will take a mile, then tell you you’re the oppressor for simply wanting even half of that inch back.

You could, but imo it’s different when there’s kids involved. No one forces you to have kids, and until they can fend for themselves they are wholly dependent on others for care. If you’re absolutely miserable and/or their welfare would improve with you out of the picture then so be it, otherwise you have an obligation to them to see them through to at least self-sufficiency.

Unless you were just telling a joke, in which case sure.

It actually isn’t technobabble. As the other poster said, Q is a factor that represents the ratio of power produced to power consumed. Q=1 represents perfect break even, not needing extra external power but also producing no net power.

The trick with a lot of fusion literature is that how Q is defined is kinda relative. It tends to get defined in terms of the ratio of power released from the fuel to power needed to ignite the fuel. This is undoubtedly a critical milestone to achieve, but it also ignores all the extra power to run all the extraneous systems e.g. cooling and electromagnetics. When that is all properly factored in, Q as typically defined has to be closer to 20 or so in order to generate net power.

Imo fusion research is worth investing in, it will be the ideal energy source until we can get to the point of constructing a Dyson swarm around our sun. But I’ve had to concede that there’s way more progress that’s still needed, we probably will not have commercial fusion plants within our lifetimes.

But then it won’t process data over 25GB in size.

Elon: “No I don’t think I will.”