Submitted 22 hours ago by xkcdbot@lemmy.world [bot] to xkcd@lemmy.world
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/mantle_model.png
Title text:
Mantle plumes explain Hawaii, Yellowstone, Iceland, the East African Rift, the Adirondack uplift, the Permian extinction, the decline of Rome, the DB Cooper hijacking, and the balrog in Moria. Those little hills of sand in your yard are caused by antle plumes.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: xkcd.com/3141/
Is this fucking loss?
Loss has 4 panels
I meant more specifically each chamber or whatever. That last one looks like it. Everything does these days
I… I don’t understand what the joke is here. Not even the explainxkcd mentions any kind of humor outside of the alt text. What am I missing?
It’s implying that every time we don’t know why there’s land somewhere we don’t expect geologists are just like “uhhhh mantle plume”
The alt text is the joke this time
Ah so they're like the dark matter of astrophysics, or the religious ceremonies of anthropology
There are so many ‘cult objects’ in anthropology that are probably just sex toys.
Like land bridges before tectonic drift
The voodoo of geology, they can wait for almost everything else...teehee
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
This is how I feel about the double slit experiment.
Lights not a wave and a particle depending on whether you observe it. Something else is going on, that’s bullshit.
OboTheHobo@ttrpg.network 20 hours ago
Ehh, its a bit more than that.
Its a particle in that we know they are quantized into single photons. As in, it is impossible to observe half of a photon, or any non-intefer number of photons, and one photon can only be observed in one place. This makes it like a particle.
But its a wave in the way it behaves - it can interfere (not just with other photons, with itself), and its movement can only be described through wave functions that can even take seperate paths at the same time, according to how waves propogate.
And, there are ways in which rhey act like particles no matter how they are observed, and same for wavelike behavior
Worth noting: “observation” is just physical measurement. You have tk keep in mind that observating something fundamentally requires interacting with it - in order to look at an apple, photons must bounce off of it, which is a physical interaction. On the quantum scale, these interactions cannot be ignored.
Also also: this isn’t just photons, everything is like this. It may not align with how we observe things on a microscopic scale, but this is fundamentally how the universe works.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Wow, I think this answered my first before I asked it. So yeah, I was wondering about that double slit experiment, I’ve seen it demonstrated with photons and visible light, but do the principles demonstrated by the experiment actually apply to other particles? In the right environments, do atoms behave similarly?
Cethin@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
The problem is the word “observation.” Most people interpret that to mean a person look at it. This isn’t the case. What it means is if it interacted with something where knowledge of its position is required. If this happens then the waveform collapses and a specific position is set. Before then it doesn’t have a fixed position and the position is described as a probability distribution.
lemonskate@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
You’re right that light is not “a wave and a particle depending on whether you observe it”. Instead, light is a quantized field. It is a field because it exists at every point and allows for wave-like behavior such as superposition and interference (both things seen in all fields, like waves in water or radio, etc.). But it is quantized because when the field interacts it does so via photons which can only exist in integer quantities. This quantization of interaction of the underlying continuous field gives us all the “weirdness” we see. Okay, not quite all of it, there are still even weirder parts of quantum mechanics, but it does explain the double slit experiment.
dragonfucker@lemmy.nz 13 hours ago
Still doesn’t explain how superpositions can collapse from interaction. Drag doesn’t believe it, drag thinks they stay in superposition and whatever interacted with them is also in superposition now.
four@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
I’m with you on that one. I don’t care what the scientists say, there’s no way quantum physics is random, we just don’t know where to look yet. And entanglement? Nah, you made this one up.
Anyway, I didn’t get into a university, but I’m not bitter about it, no.