physicswizard

physicswizard t1_jdgprjx wrote

Greg Egan is really good for this. He has a couple books where the whole premise is "what would happen if we changed the laws of physics?" For example, his "Orthogonal" series takes place in a universe where the metric of spacetime is Euclidean (in our universe it is Minkowski), meaning there's no fundamental difference between space and time. This changes the way that many things work like the nature of light, electomagetism, thermodynamics, and space flight. In the appendix he has legit equations and derivations to back up the stuff he is describing. It's all very impressive and a little mind-bending, and I'm a physicist myself!

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physicswizard t1_iwmcubu wrote

The advancement of science is very much an international effort nowadays. People from all over the world collaborate on scientific projects together if they have the knowledge and desire to do so. However, some countries can't contribute as much resources to certain efforts due to many reasons including funding (small, poor countries don't have the budget), lack of expertise (one country monopolizes a single field because all the experts congregate there, or there is a brain drain from less developed countries), politics (some USSR/USA scientists/engineers were forbidden to collaborate during the cold war for national security reasons).

So everyone contributes what they can typically, just some are limited in what they can do alone.

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physicswizard t1_iwmas17 wrote

There are several different types of detectors in use, with each one specialized to detect specific particles or measure specific quantities, so the answer varies. Look up "silicon trackers", "hadronic/electromagnetic calorimeters", and "muon detectors" for some examples.

In general, the particles radiated by the collisions register "hits" with multiple detectors, and based on the trajectory of these hits and the energy deposited at each one, you can figure out the properties of the particle that made them (e.g. charge, momentum).

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physicswizard t1_iwlyj3k wrote

Hash functions are designed to be easy to perform, but difficult to undo, and multiple inputs could map to the same output. As an analogy, think about adding two numbers. It is simple to say 2+3=5, but if I gave you the number 5 and asked which two numbers I added together to get that, there are multiple answers. Now imagine the operation is even more complicated than addition, involving bit shifts, elliptic curves, etc.

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