Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

this makes sense, since otherwise there should have been some new world diseases that posed atleast a modicum of threat to europeans. but there wasnt anything even close to what even the runner-up pathogens did to the natives, let alone small pox

Quantum gas goes below absolute zero

Wolfgang Ketterle, a physicist and Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who has previously demonstrated negative absolute temperatures in a magnetic system, calls the latest work an “experimental tour de force”. Exotic high-energy states that are hard to generate in the laboratory at positive temperatures become stable at negative absolute temperatures — “as though you can stand a pyramid on its head and not worry about it toppling over,” he notes — and so such techniques can allow these states to be studied in detail. “This may be a way to create new forms of matter in the laboratory,” Ketterle adds.

...

Another peculiarity of the sub-absolute-zero gas is that it mimics 'dark energy', the mysterious force that pushes the Universe to expand at an ever-faster rate against the inward pull of gravity. Schneider notes that the attractive atoms in the gas produced by the team also want to collapse inwards, but do not because the negative absolute temperature stabilises them. “It’s interesting that this weird feature pops up in the Universe and also in the lab,” he says. “This may be something that cosmologists should look at more closely.”

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temperature is a weird damn thing.

What I know is that when they're using that term in the lab it's not quite the same thing as when you use it to say "it's fucking hot, what's the temperature out here anyway?"

Says wikipedia on the subject, "A system with a truly negative temperature on the Kelvin scale is *hotter* than any system with a positive temperature."

Fucking weird indeed.

Some intern a few billion years ago used a fucking 32 bit single and now we have to deal with the overflow it for the rest of eternity. Great.

I think I need to read this a couple of times, but wanted to leave it here...

Scientists Have Confirmed a Brand New Form of Matter: Time Crystals

But are they self perpetuating?

They're using energy input to create and measure them. Is the energy input required for their continuance? It seems like they should be, but if the article states it I missed it.

iannis said:

But are they self perpetuating?

They're using energy input to create and measure them. Is the energy input required for their continuance? It seems like they should be, but if the article states it I missed it.

Click to expand...

I am too stupid to respond to this

It might be a really retarded question. They say that the rest state oscillates. That might be the answer to my question.

It takes energy to make one of these things, and apparently they didn't really think you could make one but woop there it is. But after you've made it does it stay made? Or does it eventually wobble over like a spinning top? There's nowhere for it to wobble TO though, if it's the rest state. Time symmetery just means (from my understanding) that when you pick an arbitrary 0, the same rules need to apply to 1 as to -1. Terms have to balance. It has to work forwards and backwards. If you know where the planet IS, and you know the laws which govern its orbit, then not only do you know where it will be within a particular range and timeframe, but you also know where it was the exact same way. This little thing isn't exactly symmetrical like that.

They're poking it with lasers to see how it oscillates and it doesn't wobble right.

So obviously there's something going on there that hasn't been accounted for.

Edit: There's plenty of processes that aren't time symmetrical. You can burn a piece of paper, but you can't unburn it. So it's not like this thing is voodoo magic. But, in the rest state, it still moves. And that's kinda weird. It skirts the line between thing and process. It can also, apparently, only exist in highly artificial (for us) circumstances. But maybe these conditions exist of their own accord in some places. And maybe these composites form where they do.

The dinosaurs died a cold, dark death, new study shows
Sounds entirely survivable.
Was always told a 6 mile wide meteor was a global killer. Ya it wouldn't be pretty but we are not exactly dinos walking around needing to feed every day either.
Filtration, food storage and heat source and I'd assume you would be good if you survived the initial blast( 1/2 world roughly I assume ).
Not everyone has that but enough could find or already have supplies and the means to carry on for the up to 3 years before things slowly evolved back to normal.

Olebass said:

The dinosaurs died a cold, dark death, new study shows
Sounds entirely survivable.
Was always told a 6 mile wide meteor was a global killer. Ya it wouldn't be pretty but we are not exactly dinos walking around needing to feed every day either.
Filtration, food storage and heat source and I'd assume you would be good if you survived the initial blast( 1/2 world roughly I assume ).
Not everyone has that but enough could find or already have supplies and the means to carry on for the up to 3 years before things slowly evolved back to normal.

Click to expand...

You'd need supplies for more than 3 years, three years is just the time where the average temperature of the earth was below freezing.

To give you an idea, the ice age was 12 degrees colder than today, they're saying the meteor made the earth 79 degrees cooler than it was.

Chances are agriculture wouldn't be possible for 15 years maybe longer. Hunting/gathering would be impossible because the game and edible plants would likely all go extinct. There would probably not be enough preppers with a 15 year supplies of nonperishable food to maintain a genetically viable population.

We'd be fucked.

Valishar said:

You'd need supplies for more than 3 years, three years is just the time where the average temperature of the earth was below freezing.

To give you an idea, the ice age was 12 degrees colder than today, they're saying the meteor made the earth 79 degrees cooler than it was.

Chances are agriculture wouldn't be possible for 15 years maybe longer. Hunting/gathering would be impossible because the game and edible plants would likely all go extinct. There would probably not be enough preppers with a 15 year supplies of nonperishable food to maintain a genetically viable population.

We'd be fucked.

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Oh no doubt nearly everyone would die but as a species it sounds survivable. Movie science is bad but that line all life would cease to exist not even bacteria would survive was supposed to have been from climate/world scientists from Armageddon. Knowing that we would likely know in advance of the arrival, supplies to sustain enough people to carry on could easily be handled for 15 years. It'd be a pretty empty world though once conditions improved enough to come out, but it wouldn't be the end of all mankind. Just most of it.

I guess the real question is how big wouldn't be survivable.

Oh with enough foreknowledge and preparation you could have a government created gigantic closed greenhouse system which could grow its own food for a sustainable population, run by nuclear power so you're not to worried about fuel running out.

Obviously I was thinking you meant that ordinary people could survive it with saving up food and waiting it out.

Valishar said:

You'd need supplies for more than 3 years, three years is just the time where the average temperature of the earth was below freezing.

To give you an idea, the ice age was 12 degrees colder than today, they're saying the meteor made the earth 79 degrees cooler than it was.

Chances are agriculture wouldn't be possible for 15 years maybe longer. Hunting/gathering would be impossible because the game and edible plants would likely all go extinct. There would probably not be enough preppers with a 15 year supplies of nonperishable food to maintain a genetically viable population.

We'd be fucked.

Click to expand...

A genetically viable seed population is surprisingly small.

You can see it with livestock. Start with a sister/brother pair. Within about 3 generations the worst of the immediately fatal inbred traits are selected out. And humans are different, but not that different. One woman doesn't have a litter, sure. But ten wives do.

Ulitmate doomsday scenario? The species could survive. Not would, just could. What we think of as Civilization would be irredeemably destroyed. We started the from hunting gathering in a plentiful environment. They'd be starting from subsistience agriculture in a hostile one. So even if the monkey lives on, what comes out the other side of that we probably would not recognize. It would be alien.

Olebass said:

The dinosaurs died a cold, dark death, new study shows
Sounds entirely survivable.
Was always told a 6 mile wide meteor was a global killer. Ya it wouldn't be pretty but we are not exactly dinos walking around needing to feed every day either.
Filtration, food storage and heat source and I'd assume you would be good if you survived the initial blast( 1/2 world roughly I assume ).
Not everyone has that but enough could find or already have supplies and the means to carry on for the up to 3 years before things slowly evolved back to normal.

Click to expand...

Dinosaurs were already going extinct before the event, too.

Valishar said:

You'd need supplies for more than 3 years, three years is just the time where the average temperature of the earth was below freezing.

To give you an idea, the ice age was 12 degrees colder than today, they're saying the meteor made the earth 79 degrees cooler than it was.

Chances are agriculture wouldn't be possible for 15 years maybe longer. Hunting/gathering would be impossible because the game and edible plants would likely all go extinct. There would probably not be enough preppers with a 15 year supplies of nonperishable food to maintain a genetically viable population.

We'd be fucked.

Click to expand...

Vertical farming and LEDs+Nuclear (Or fossil) would make it sustainable for some segments of the population. The vast majority would die though, whether other humans would kill the survivors is anyone's guess. More than half the planet is subsistence so you're talking 4 billion deaths easy the first year.

On the whole though, if humans didn't fuck it up, as a species we could survive it even if we didn't prep--our technology is capable of survive such conditions now for even sizable populations. The question is more about whether desperation as masses die would fuck it up.