Not an expert but I imagine it’s the ocean depth. If the atmosphere above determines the temperature, and the ice at the surface acts as an insulator, the deeper parts of the ocean don’t get cold enough to freeze.
Thanks for the post. Went to Quanta Magazine, read “we do not honor ‘do not track’ requests” and decided to find somewhere better to read up. Thanks again tho
Caution: This comment contains mildly infuriating party tricks.
Curious. This reminds me of the "Your tongue knows what things you look at will feel like" meme that did the rounds a while back. (If you missed it, it was literally that phrase, possibly with some kind of image.)
Reading the article, it also reminds me of the body confusion trick of moving the right foot around in a clockwise motion while trying to write the letter O a few times (which most people write anticlockwise). Most people will inadvertently reverse the rotation of their foot.
(Make necessary changes if you're left handed and/or write your O's clockwise.)
Or the two hands equivalent: Pointing away from yourself, move the tips of the index fingers around in a clockwise or anticlockwise motion, keeping the fingers parallel. Then, continuing the rotation, turn the hands inwards so that they point towards each other. If they're now both going over and away or over and towards, one of them has changed direction.
Taking oral dmt while engaged in Buddhist practice taught me a lot about how conscious experience is formed. At least experientially.
What’s going on in the nervous system I’m no expert on. But it’s more than brain chemistry. Without the rest of the nervous system, including the second and third minds (the heart and gut are packed with nerves, and “mind” in Buddhism should be translated as heart/mind), we’d just be a brain in a box.
For sure. They tend to do a good job communicating tricky science and math concepts as well. They interview experts in a coherent way, tend to take the time to properly set up the background for topics, and the writers there seem to really care about getting things right rather than being sensational. They’re one of my favorite sites for stories about math and science honestly.
I haven’t had a chance to read the article linked in this post yet, but I’ll be sitting in an airport in a few hours (I really need to go to sleep now) and I’ll look forward to reading it then!
*Billions (13,000+ million). Based on our current understanding and their close proximity to each other in the early universe, most of them would have likely merged and many/most may be now at a size where it would take a google years to evaporate. The extremely small ones that did not merge may have already evaporated.
So I will read through some of this and try to come back with something worthwhile to say.
Update : I read some more and most of that is just out of my reach. The only paragraph I kind of understand somewhat is this :
(…) conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) theory.[67] In this theory, Penrose postulates that at the end of the universe all matter is eventually contained within black holes which subsequently evaporate via Hawking radiation. At this point, everything contained within the universe consists of photons which “experience” neither time nor space. There is essentially no difference between an infinitely large universe consisting only of photons and an infinitely small universe consisting only of photons. Therefore, a singularity for a Big Bang and an infinitely expanded universe are equivalent. [68]
What’s the implication then of Penrose’s idea? That no matter the trajectory of a universe some sort of “big bang” singularity is inevitable, or at least is so for many more trajectories than previously thought.
I read through these and try to understand them but mostly I don’t like those theories, because (in part) more and more there are disparities between them and observations.
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) is very smooth ; if there was black holes in there I guess we would see (huge) unevenness.
Hummm, or at least, that stupid LCDM would lead to such an expectation. … that model also put CMB at : 400 000 to 500 000 years after the BBang.
and most distant visible galaxies (and black holes) at : 330 000 000 years after BB.
if we go by this number we have a few hundred million years to produce such big things out of something very smooth.
if we used a different model we could have much more time.
Here’s an interesting adjacent paper. The size of black holes formed is (obviously, in hindsight) limited by the cosmological horizon in a standard big bang model, so they would have to form late. Late enough to conflict with CMB measurements, and the authors have to introduce a weird distribution of spacial curvature to compensate.
Yeah, LCDM isn’t looking so hot these day. I wonder who’s looked at singularity-free theories that might allow a sizeable black hole to already exist before inflation.
The title of that paper is :
“Supermassive Primordial Black Holes From Inflation”
I have read about inflation since many years and it is viewed increasingly as impossible and falsified.
I don’t work in this field. For me this is just a hobby. Are you a physicist ?
No, I’m not a physicist, but I think you might be mixing the term up with something else (phantom energy maybe?). Inflation is a critical part of the standard big bang cosmology; it’s (thought to be) how things got so smooth in the first place. See the wiki here.
Under this very article you provided you can read, at criticism :
At a conference in 2015, Penrose said :
“inflation isn’t falsifiable, it’s falsified. … BICEP did a wonderful service by bringing all the Inflation-ists out of their shell, and giving them a black eye.” (…) Penrose’s shocking conclusion, though, was that obtaining a flat universe without inflation is much more likely than with inflation – “by a factor of 10 to the googol power!”
Please read about this guy :
Roger Penrose (…) mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics.
I read much more than the average person about it and my experience & education allows me to know how scientific research works. The fact is, not only inflation but Lambda CDM is dead.
With all due respect to Penrose – who is indisputably brilliant – in probability when you start to say things like, “X is 10^10^100 times more likely than Y,” it’s actually much more likely that there’s some flaw in your priors or your model of the system than that such a number is actually reflective of reality.
That’s true even for really high probability things. Like if I were to claim that it’s 10^10^100 times more likely that the sun will rise tomorrow than that it won’t, then I would have made much too strong a claim. It’s doubly true for things like the physics of the early universe, where we know our current laws are at best an incomplete description.
I think what’s also great with Penrose is that he doesn’t care about money or politics, which are major factors guiding what other physicists will say.
He already proved himself and doesn’t need to argue about pity things. He can even allow himself to make some jokes about 10^(10^100) or talk seriously about it… I wouldn’t know.
Finally, if I add the immense chance of talking to him this wouldn’t be my preferred topic.
Penrose is also pretty controversial. I didn’t know he was dead-set against standard cosmology but I’m not surprised.
Most cosmologists still assumed it up until JWST started throwing spanners into the works. Notice the tone the Wiki article takes, it uses words like “believed” instead of “proposes”. I’m curious what Penrose prefers.
Edit: It looks like he prefers his own Weyl curvature hypothesis, which I’ll have to read up on. This is his subfield so he gets to have big ideas.
I wouldn’t say that he is the leading authority, but he is a well known researcher in atmospheric and ocean sciences. His book is the go to book for graduate studies in the subject, so he is well versed in the topic.
The driver injecting energy in this system is heating from the Sun. The boundary on the surface between where the heating is happening and where it isn’t is constantly moving West.
Other than that, there may be some interesting connection between quantum topology and Kelvin waves, but I doubt it is of practical use.
quantamagazine.org
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