#science???

[sneverussape]

hmmm does polyjuice change your dna or blood type?

i was wondering about this because i considered how polyjuice potion may work, and for you to change to another person merely by imbibing a potion that contained genetic material of someone else to catalyze its property to change…wouldn’t that imply your dna and blood etc may change too so that you can actually be a copy of that other person? would your magical signature also change?

it’s an interesting thought.

[eightlivs]

24 August 2020

I’m getting the hang of that CAD program. Fucking command line bullshit. Give me macros instead and I’ll be happy.

Anyway, now that I can actually do some PROPER work, we’re getting busy checking and re-checking things before we order or machine the more customized parts, which means a lot of simulation testing and triple-checking our work.

That’s not the most important thing right now, though.

I just finished something that I’ve been working on for a while, and right as my beam time request got put through at Brookhaven, no less. (I put in a beam time request for another collider to run an experiment for me. Ended up not going with SLAC. Turns out I had some strings left to pull at Brookhaven’s laboratory, and hey, all the better, because their collider is better suited for this kind of work.)

Oh, it feels good to be running experiments again. Even if they are a pain in the ass sometimes.

Anyway, a quick rundown, since this IS technically a report log: I’m simulating my OWN collider with a computer program called an event generator, while comparing the simulations to real results. Check this out:

That’s a graph showing how many photons were found at a given energy for the first simulation.

But you know what I’m realizing? I’m going to need a monumental amount of testing to get anywhere, and - well, I’ve got to do it all by myself.

This is... um. This is going to take a long time. Last time, setting up and analyzing runs enough to get new information wasn’t even something we’d gotten to yet, and that’s with an entire COMPANY at my disposal. Unless I’m ridiculously lucky, this may take years even AFTER THE COLLIDER IS BUILT.

I don’t want that. Fuck. Fuck. I’m tired of this. It’s one fucking thing after another, isn’t it. Windows and Linux workarounds, C++, MC formats not working, more MC formats not working, more workarounds, python not working, compilers not working, incorrect variables, run after run after run of incorrect programming, fucking VERTICAL DATA instead of HORIZONTAL like FORMAT YOUR SHIT RIGHT PLEASE, and collider bullshit, and collider setbacks and - I JUST - FUCK.

...okay.

Okay. Hmm.

It’s fine, all right? I’ve just been programming for too long. My eyeballs feel like they’re going to roll out of my skull. The amount of work that it takes just to program, analyze, troubleshoot, and reprogram a single event generator run is not small, okay? We’re talking hours or days PER RUN. And, I mean, it kind of sucks that I can’t tell anybody about this - they’d think I was bonkers. It makes you feel kind of weird, knowing you’ve only known anybody on the whole planet for a period of less than two years.

But, you know, back to the grind. I’ve got more work to do. Catch you all later.

Oh, before I sign off, I’m updating my experiment record - it’s that little link at the right, under the OFFLINE status. The one I just finished working on is tests 12A-D - yes, 12, it’s taken me twelve groups of runs to get this fucking thing right.

I’m going home.

Footnotes: Oh wow. Okay. It may not look like it, but I’ve been working on this since APRIL. That graph up there? That’s not something I found or made up. It’s an actual graph of results from a real simulation run with an actual collision simulator.

One of my fave things about this blog is that it’s based on REAL science, and it’s challenged me to learn new things. I knew Liv was going to have to start doing collision experiments at some point, and I naively ignored the fact that she’d be getting, you know, RESULTS - until I had the idea to simulate them myself. So I installed the program over the course of a week or two - it’s not very user-friendly in a non-programmer type of way - and I’ve been experimenting with it on and off since April. I ran Liv’s final test results last night, which is what you see up there. One thing: I cannot claim any of these results are actually sensible; I am, after all, literally self-taught, and I am not actually a physicist!

Pretty cool, huh. The program I’m using is called PYTHIA - it’s what is called a Monte Carlo event generator. Each particle interaction result is called an “event,” and Monte Carlo refers to a mathematical method of using algorithms and random sampling to get results. It’s really useful in this instance because there’s a level of probability-guessing that has to be done when figuring out what a particle - or particles - will do. Particles are very all-over-the-place little things, so randomness helps simulate that.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is a real thing! They’re based in NY and they have a collider called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC. RHIC results in some really GORGEOUS photos, like the one here.

[littlekiwifrog]

YAY SCP stuff! always been a fan of it. Thanks for the lovely post!

Thank you!! I’ve been getting into SCP lately and learning about each one is like opening up a present under a christmas tree with like 4000+ presents. 

Love all my new, anomalous children. 

[endreal]

I read an article a while back that in a study of people eating almonds, participants who chewed their food more were able to process more of the nutrients and healthy fats from the almonds than people who chewed them less.

And that sounds awesome, but how the heck do you chew almonds (up to) 40 times? Like, I eat almonds almost every morning as part of a futile attempt at a balanced breakfast, and I thought it would be interesting to “replicate” this experience and I swear the nuts are atomized after like 25 chews. How many nuts were these study participants eating in one go? (I generally only grab 4-7 in any given handful) Do they just have particularly inefficient teeth? Do I have Very Large molars? Do I not actually know how chewing works?

There are so many unsatisfying questions (and I can’t remember where I read the article to provide a link)

[checkurselfb4umachuwreckurself]

Question that is 100% not just me avoiding the episode:

what’s that

[eightlivs]

22 April 2020

The collider teardown is DONE. Nearly fifteen months of work on this fucking thing and we haven’t even BUILT anything yet.

I’ve been REALLY busy, though. Speed of light being different kind of implies a LOT of other things are different, too. Or - well - the light speed thing might be gravitational, but look, I’m not fucking Roemer, okay?

You want to hear something weird about gravity?

So... There’s four fundamental forces in quantum mechanics. Gravity, electromagnetism, and two others that are called the “weak force” and “strong force.” (Weak force causes radioactive decay while strong force holds atomic nuclei together.)

Gravity’s powerful, right? I mean, it moves PLANETS.

NOPE! It’s deadass the weakest one by, like, a SEPTILLION. You’ve got three values around the same magnitude, and then one that’s a SEPTILLION off. Why? Nobody fucking knows.

This is called the hierarchy problem (or part of it, at least). Been pestering the fuck out of physicists for decades. It’s one of the big things my collider was supposed to investigate, actually. It DID investigate it and even PROVED some stuff about it before it got, you know, blown the fuck up, and I got blamed for it, now can’t officially publish the research, yadda yadda. Spiders are assholes. What’s new.

One solution to the hierarchy problem is suggesting another aspect of space outside of what we can access. Literally, a direction TOTALLY outside of “up/down left/right forward/backward.”

Where is that direction? Oh, you know. Another dimension.

“Wait a minute, other dimensions?” you say? Hm, it’s almost like I had an actual scientific vision in mind when building this collider instead of pulling it out of my mad-scientist ass! And not “dimensions” as in “parallel universe.” No. The universes are all separated BY this extra dimension. Floating in it.

ANYWAY, if you’ve got extra dimensions going on, then... you can kind of think about it as if what we see of gravity is only part of the total.

Breaking that down mathematically requires quantifying how many extra dimensions there are, and how big. They’re not INFINITE.

In my original universe, the math checked out with 1 large extra dimension, accounting for size. But in this one, TWO are required, or the math just... doesn’t make any sense. At all. The collider shouldn’t even WORK with only one extra dimension in this universe.

But the two universes are supposed to be separated by the SAME single extra-dimensional space, according to literally every other theory I know.

In short: what the fuck.

Anyway, I know this is already a long report, but one more thing: that bizarreness that you get with gravity if there’s extra dimensions? It lets you make micro black holes in colliders. Basically: you get a micro black hole in a collider? Congrats! You’ve got experimental proof that large extra dimensions exist!

AND GUESS WHAT.

Actually, hold on. Where the fuck is it. I know I saved it. FUCK. How do I get the picture off my glasses?

THERE. THERE IT IS. THERE. THAT’S A FUCKING MICRO BLACK HOLE. IN MY COLLIDER. I mean, it was BUILT to MAKE micro black holes. I fucking PROVED extra dimensions exist, you assholes, and NOBODY WILL LET ME - JUST - I put half my LIFE into this. LET ME FUCKING PUBLISH IT.

In summary, that original collider was a fucking gorgeous piece of work and it didn’t deserve what it got.

Footnotes: Okay! Yay quantum mechanics! The four fundamental forces in quantum mechanics are indeed what Liv lists off here. The hierarchy problem IS an actual thing, too, and it’s quite fascinating.

Quite possibly my favorite thing so far, though, is that the large extra dimensions theory? THAT’S REAL. That’s an ACTUAL potential solution to the hierarchy problem, and CERN’s LHC has even looked for micro black holes as evidence! Honestly, depending on which version you subscribe to, you could have up to 26 different dimensions. Standard M-theory supports about 11.

Lastly, that picture is of a decay of a micro black hole in Liv’s collider - or, well, in her universe it is. Here, it’s just something I sketched out very quickly, HEAVILY based off of some of CERN’s simulations of what a micro black hole might look like! Mine probably wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, but, you know. It looks cool.

Also, Liv’s “Roemer” reference is to a Danish astronomer who was the first to measure the speed of light by measuring eclipses. Dude had pretty clever technique.

[thatonegirlzoey]

So, question for y'all over here who are also caffeine gremlins. Do y'all ever drink too much caffeine and transcend to a new plane of existence or am I just disassociating?