Demimasc (he/him/his or they/them/theirs)

Universal expert: somehow, no matter what I post, my username always checks out :)

Sometimes I have to be away from the internet for days or weeks at a time. If I’m not responding, that’s probably why.

  • 16 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 4th, 2023
  • library_patron@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoExplain Like I'm Five@lemmy.world•ELI5: The standard model of quantum physicsEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ll lead with an apology: I got ambitious. You said you wanted to know about particles; I wanted to say a lot about them, so I guess I wrote a book.

    Also a disclaimer: I only had physics through undergrad. My source is Sections 1 through 3.1 in Baez, J., & Huerta, J. (2010). The Algebra of Grand Unified Theories. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 47(3), 483–552. if you want to consult something more reliable.

    Introduction

    If you look inside a bakery, you will find lots of different ingredients—flour, sugar, butter, milk, eggs, and so on. By combining these ingredients in different ways, the baker can make all kinds of different breads and desserts. To make the kind of food they want, the baker has to understand their ingredients, how much of each kind to use, and how to combine them.

    In the same way, we know that everything in the world can be made out of different kinds of very tiny ingredients called elementary particles. By combining these particles in different ways, we can create all kinds of stuff. But to make the stuff we want, we have to understand the elementary particles and how they affect each other, just like the baker has to understand their ingredients and how they go together.

    There are over one hundred different kinds of elementary particles that we know about and maybe more that we don’t. We could just memorize them all, but scientists think it’s better to look for patterns. Think about when you were learning addition: its easier to learn that zero plus anything is always the same thing than it is to memorize 0 + 0 = 0, 0 + 1 = 1, 0 + 2 = 2, 0 + 3 = 3, and so on. Scientists do the same thing; they find patterns. Eventually they wrote down all of the elementary particles that they had discovered and all of the patterns they were really sure about. They called this knowledge “The Standard Model”.

  • library_patron@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What do these buttons actually do?
    5·
    1 year ago

    The grey link button takes you to the comment in the same instance as you are currently using.

    The rainbow pentagon button takes you to the comment in the hosting instance (which may be the same if you’re browsing a local community).

    I don’t know many situations where one would actually click on them—maybe the latter is useful if you’re worried that federation is being slow and you’re not seeing votes or replies through your local instance. But the two links can be useful to copy (by right-clicking, or long-pressing, or whatever you do to copy links in your browser/app), the former if you want to show somebody else what a comment looks like through your home instance and the latter if you want to link to a post/comment normally.

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