atomicthumbs

remote sensing practicioner

gregarious canid. avatar by ISANANIKA.


Website League address
@wolf@forest.stream
send me an email
atomicthumbs@wolf.observer
twitter but hopefully i only post photos there in the future
twitter.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter!! this one will let me tell you where i go
buttondown.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter rss same thing
buttondown.com/atomicthumbs/rss
Website League (centralized federation social media project)
websiteleague.org/
Push Processing (Website League photography instance)
pushprocess.ing/
88x31 button embed code
<a href="https://wolf.observer/88x31"><img src="https://wolf.observer/images/wolf-88x31.png" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"></a>
forest.stream (general admission website league instance)
forest.stream/
bluesky (probably just for photos)
bsky.app/profile/wolf.observer
this will be a cohost museum someday
cohost.rip/

atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

Once you learn enough physics you start to understand that basically nothing is fixed in place, stuff can be two completely different things simultaneously and behave accordingly, things on a small scale aren't made of a specific number of things and don't stay in place from moment to moment (and "moment" is an indescribably small amount of time), stuff just regularly becomes each other, there's all sorts of shit flying around that doesn't exist in a practical sense, objects are just a loose collection of phenomena, electrons in an atom are more of a generalized feeling than a point unless you look at them REALLY hard, everything is just weird little kinks in a thousand kinds of field, protons are made of an uncountably high number of quarks and antiquarks (but with three more quarks than antiquarks), shit just randomly pops into existence and vanishes for no reason all the time everywhere, space is foamy instead of smooth, and so on.

it's weird


atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

scientists will tell you there are three quarks inside a proton until you prod them, because they don't want to have to explain what valence quarks and sea quarks are to someone without a base understanding of QCD

the faster a nucleon goes, the more quarks it has in it, and the more mass, and the more energy. it gets denser. pushing protons faster is how scientists look deeper into things; of course faster protons have an easier time colliding with each other, because they have more stuff inside them to collide with. the conclusion is that a proton has an unlimited number of quarks inside it, and the harder you look the more it has. those sea quarks are constantly vanishing and reappearing on an impossibly short timescale. it's all just little clouds of indefinable stuff joggling about and there's nothing we can do but accept that and try to figure out why

the mass of the three valence quarks in a proton is about 1% of the mass of a proton. the rest of it comes from the energy of those quarks, the gluon field making them stick together, and the sea quarks


atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

It's called Fermilab E866/NuSea because you look at the results and feel nuseaous


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in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

The way I always explained it as a TA to freshmen taking babby's first quantum course was that it's not that something (say, an electron) is two entirely different things simultaneously, but that it is simply the thing that it is, and we, due to prior experience with other sorts of things, attempt to reconcile that it has some properties in common with other things.

in reply to @atomicthumbs's post: