Gravity curves the spacetime around it. We have a hard time visualizing what that looks like in three dimensions, but you can think of a massive body as bending spacetime inward toward itself. Being so massive, black holes bend spacetime to extremes. The curvature is so great that, for an object within the event horizon, there is no trajectory in spacetime that will take you outside the black hole. Rather, spacetime is so curved that all trajectories into the future converge on the singularity at the heart of the black hole.

They don't, and GUT theorists have been struggling to find experimental confirmation for a long time.

That said, the standard model is incomplete in ways that GUTs might address, and that keeps the dream alive.

No. Hawking radiation is pretty well-understood. It's just regular ol' photons.

Yeah, for that reason I'm doubtful that Trump will actually see the inside of a prison cell. Even a straightforward case like the Stormy Daniels thing could be stretched out to two years pretty easily. Trump is 76 (77 in a few months), and nature abhors 300-pound septuagenarians.

That said, it's enough for me that he spends the rest of his life dodging process servers and sitting in courtrooms/lawyers' offices, burning his supporters' money all the while. At this point, any sentence would be a pittance compared to the harm he has caused. So at this point, I just want the process to be as personally miserable as possible while causing the maximum amount of damage to his party and his base.

A tale as old as time. People say that we don't fund education in America, but the fact is that we dump money into our schools. The problem is that so much of that money is gobbled up by private enterprise before it can ever hit the classroom (or, God forbid, the teachers' bank accounts). Training, security, software licenses, etc. etc. etc.--schools are an absolute cash cow for private enterprise. And legislatures and districts both are eager to foster these relationships.

So it's no wonder that we see a pilot program for a potentially massive public outlay to solve a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Why undertake measures to address gun access and mental health when you can address the problem by committing the schools to funding an open-ended arms race against some prospective school shooter?

>Like prices for everything else in the world is going up right now so would that cause my insurance rate to increase?

Essentially this.

Risks are pooled in the insurance world. Your premium will rise or fall (lol) depending on the cost to pay claims associated with your pool. The frequency of accidents, break-ins, etc. in your market will determine how high the premium is, along with the cost of covering those events. When the costs associated with mechanical and body repair rise (as they have), the premium will rise as well.

To begin to approach quantum mechanics, you have to accept that on that very tiny scale, the world does not behave in a way that's intuitive to human experience. Everything you see and interact with as a human is in truth just some macro-scale approximation of an incomprehensibly number of complex relationships formed at unthinkably small scales. So with your human intuition set aside, you're ready to wade into QM.

For purposes of your question, it's probably best to start with the double slit experiment, which hails from the 19th century. I'll trim the fat to keep the ELI5 short, but definitely google videos about this experiment to gain a deeper grasp of what it shows and why that's important. But essentially, the double slit experiment shows that photons (light particles) can behave both as particles and as waves. Photons seem to act particle-like when you squeeze them through a narrow slit, but on the other side, it starts to interfere with itself in a wave-like fashion. This was puzzling, and took us a while to figure out.

In the 1920's, the Heisenberg and Schrodinger you've probably heard about got together and kind of cracked the code behind this strange quantum behavior. Heisenberg pieced together that there is an inherent uncertainty when you try to measure a particle's momentum and position. You can get an arbitrarily highly precise measurement on one of them, at a proportional sacrifice to precision on the other. This is the Uncertainty Principal. At the same time, Schrodinger developed his famous equations, which described quantum systems not in terms of discrete particles, but as single "wave functions." A wave function is sort of a probabilistic expression that describes all of the potential states a quantum system, accounting for this uncertainty. The wave function is a sort of sum of all these potential states, weighted by their probability. In that way, the wave function comes to approximate (very, very precisely) the "superposition" behavior of quantum systems, wherein the system behaves like a mix of all potential states it could take. Schrodinger's equations described how such systems evolve in this probabilistic fashion, and experimentation has justified him time and again.

Now, to return to your question, physics is much less concerned with answering "what things are" at a fundamental level and much more interested in answering "what things do." So we can only really answer the first question in terms of the second. To that end, we see that, at a fundamental level, the universe does not behave classically, but instead its constituent particles behave according to the everywhere-at-once oddity of QM. So we can say that fundamental particles are not simple points of mass or energy--they behave according to a much deeper and more vibrant structure.

This is a really unfair and narrow-minded thing to say.

PCP is hard to come by in Tallahassee, so it would be meth.

Best answer, IMO. It's better to think of the big bang emerging from a state where space and time have no scale. That seems to be what our models tell us anyway. When we say things like "our models break down before the big bang," that's because at t=0, our various measurements of distance and time become nonsensical (infinite, undefined, negative when they can't be negative, etc.). You hear that state described in a lot of ways--a cosmological event horizon, an exotic form of symmetry, a singularity, and so on--but it seems to me that all those describe a state where time and space just sort of fall away.

Edit: And I'd liken the question "how big was the universe before the big bang" to "how long did the pre-big bang universe exist before the big bang?" They are kind of both senseless questions to ask about the state of the universe at that point. They both presuppose that the universe at that point had such properties, but that doesn't appear to have been the case.

It is a contract entered into (before marriage) between spouses that dictates the division of the couple's property in the event they divorce.

There are also "post-nuptial" agreements which are the same thing but signed after the wedding, while the individuals are married.

Same speed, c.

>"He started prepping the weapon and something came over me," Tsay recalled. "I realized I needed to get the weapon away from him. I needed to take this weapon, disarm him or else everybody would have died."

The "something" was the immense gravitational field exerted by his balls.

Once it crosses that $350-ish million mark, the jackpot starts increasing nine figures per drawing. Those jackpot billboards are the most effective marketing in existence.

>Edit...I was under the impression that it was thought at least POSSIBLE to survive INside the event horizon of a large enough BH, hence my question above

You are correct, under certain conditions. You've gotten a lot of categorical answers essentially saying that you'll spaghettify once you hit the event horizon. This is not the case for sufficiently large black holes (say, galactic core black holes). Once you're talking millions of solar masses, you could pass through the event horizon comfortably (and maybe even without knowing it).

The total gravitational forces at the event horizon are indeed enormous, but that doesn't necessarily matter too much for something that's already free-falling into the black hole. What spaghettifies you isn't the total gravitational force, it's the gravitational gradient, i.e., the difference in gravitational force across a given distance. As you get closer and closer to the center of the black hole, the gradient steadily increases, to the point that the force at one end of a macro-sized object (say, an astronaut) is dramatically stronger than the force at the other end. It's that gradient in the gravitational force that squishes things, but where that happens relative to the event horizon is entirely a factor of the black hole's mass. For supermassive black holes, that point lies comfortably within the event horizon. For solar-mass black holes, it can actually begin outside the event horizon.

Now, to get back to your question: if it's possible that something can pass through the event horizon without being instantly crushed, why can't we tie/bolt/weld a camera to something sturdy outside the event horizon and make observations that way? We could chain it to a big rock some arbitrary distance away, but that's not going to do us any good. Remember: once something crosses the event horizon, there's no speed it can travel to get back out, and no energy you can expend to push/pull it out. (And any photons traveling up the wires from the camera likewise don't move fast enough to escape.) So in very short order, either your chain will break or the whole structure will be yanked right into the event horizon.

That depends on which theory you subscribe to. For example, conformal cyclical cosmology does not require a Big Crunch (but does require mass decay, which is not a trivial assumption).

I DNF'd Ulysses on my first couple of attempts. It took a companion copy of Ulysses: Annotated and a whole-ass grad school class for me to follow through.

DNF'd American Gods and I don't know when I'll pick it up again. I prefer novels when I read fiction and as good/weird as it was...it isn't a novel.

idk how what you've described isn't a commentary on American society/values/etc. given the incredibly specific context we're given.

I think you're right that it's not about the money or women for Gatsby exactly, but about his freedom to dream and pursue those dreams in order to achieve (or at least attempt to achieve) his ultimate self.

But this isn't Gatsby's story exactly. It's Nick's story. And Nick's story is one of a man deeply in the closet, who looks at Gatsby as an aspirational proxy for himself. He is fixated in particular on Gatsby's romance with Daisy because it represents (to him) Gatsby's romantic devotion to a woman--something which Nick himself is incapable of possessing. Nick's infatuation with Gatsby is an infatuation with the man Nick desperately wants to be--which all the social pressures of his time tell him he wants to be--but which he cannot achieve.

For me what does it is neutron stars, which give us hilarious concepts like nuclear pasta. Like, how absurdly high was the universe when it decided to make these bad boys? "Hey if we keep gravitying I bet we can get just one big nucleus lmaooo'

IMO, what makes a good coffee table book is something that's appealing/accessible enough that it's going to get picked up and used to kick off a conversation. It can be about anything - it's the engagement that's important.

I think photography books are solid, and I have done a few in the past. But I get better results from "weird" stuff. Right now, I leave out my annotated copy of the Voynich Manuscript which is just so bizarre and fun to look at that people can't help themselves. I used to leave out a scrapbook that some dude put together in the 1880's. He made it from a conveniently coffee-table-book-sized lock & hardware catalog. It's like 200 pages of newspaper clippings from across the country, with a preface about the guy (who I gathered was a disabled eccentric) and why he put it together (which is far from clear). It was by far my best coffee table book because 19th century papers were BUCK WILD, but I ultimately retired it due to its condition.

I also mentioned elsewhere in the thread that I've accidentally left out some D&D books before, and people will flip through those pretty reliably.

Honestly, I accidentally left out my PHB, DM Guide, and Xanathar's during a party and they got more use than any coffee table book I've had.

D&D books have a ton of art and flavor text. If your guests are nerds or nerd-adjacent, they'll most likely flip through it and find something to talk about.

Which is, itself, a coffee table. So you may want two copies.

So the concept you're digging down is known as the "base" of a number system.

Numbers do not need to be denominated with any particular symbols. We choose those kind of arbitrarily. There have been a lot of number systems that have emerged from different cultures over time, and the ones that stand the test of time do so because they are useful and efficient for communicating information. The Babylonians used a sexagesimal (base 6) system, which did all right for a while, but was ultimately replaced (like virtually all number systems of antiquity) by our current base-10 numerical system, courtesy of the Hindu-Arabic tradition.

So what does it mean for something to be base 6 rather than base 10? In our base 10 system, you know that each digit represents one of ten possible values (0 - 9). In base 6 it's the same, just with fewer values (0 - 5). When you roll over to the next digit in base 10, that next digit represents some power of 10 (10, 100, 1000, etc.) When you roll over to the next digit in base 6, the next digit represents some power of 6 (6, 36, 216, etc.). So, to write the value of "ten" in base 10, we write "10" (1 in the 10's digit plus 0 in the 1's digit = ten). To write the value "ten" in base 6, we write "14" (1 in the 6's digit plus 4 in the 1's digit = ten).

So why did base 10 win out against everything else? Well, in the end, it's useful and easy to work with for a human, for a lot of reasons. It's an even number, so we can halve it easily. We have ten fingers usually, so that makes counting in base 10 sort of intuitive. The value also finds a sort of sweet spot where it can be used to efficiently compute and communicate information. The lower in base you go, the fewer values each digit holds, so a number in a lower base will often take more digits to write than the same number in a higher base. That means higher bases can represent values more efficiently (i.e., with fewer digits) and the computation of numbers (which is traditionally done digit-by-digit, if you're doing it by hand) can be done with fewer steps in a higher base as well. Of course, human calculators don't want too high of a base because then we have to have a deeper library of symbols/values for each digit of our numbers. That makes the scheme more difficult/laborious to learn, and the more symbols you add, the more you rely on nuances in those symbols to distinguish them from one another (which isn't ideal if you're dealing with human calculators).

So to circle back and answer your question, 9 is the "last" value because we use base 10, and we use base 10 because it's a great balance of efficient and intuitive, as time has proven.

Spoiler alert: he's been using taxpayer money to fund campaign theatrics the whole time!

IMO, if we find total randomness in the CMB, that's just as interesting.

The deep structure is what makes theories like Conformal Cyclical Cosmology more compelling for me. The idea there is that the conditions of the late-stage universe (post-mass-decay and black hole evaporation) conform to those of the earliest moments of the big bang in all regards except the scale of the space. In other words, if you take the late stage universe and squeeze down the scale of spacetime, you get the something that looks a lot like the early big bang. And if Penrose is right, that might not be such a difficult hurdle to overcome, since scale and space kind of fall out of the picture in the late-stage universe anyway, and there's no particular reason it should be strictly preserved from one aeon to the next. (Some information within spacetime could be preserved, however - notably gravitational waves should survive from one aeon to the next, and perhaps some radiation as well.)

If all this is right, even just kind of conceptually right, that would point to a structure underlying the "reality" of spacetime that is preserved from one universe to the next.

Well, it's absolutely unintuitive. It's helpful if you understand where Donald Hoffman is coming from. He's a cognitive psychologist who has spent most of his career studying perception and consciousness down to the "what IS reality" level.

Hoffman's general premise is this: the world as we know it--the senses and observations and even the thoughts we have about them--aren't really reality. They are approximations of reality constructed by our brain, which serves the function of an evolutionary advantage. In other words: our perception of the "real" universe is a highly abridged, compressed, and edited slice of reality.

The actual, objective reality is whatever is going on with quantum mechanics, relativity, et al. We obviously don't see/touch/smell all of that. Those things work and function in ways that--while highly organized and predictable scientifically--are almost totally unintuitive to any human being. And surely Hoffman is right about that much.

This article asks the reader to take one more upward step of abstraction. Just as the "reality" we perceive is an abridged and smoothed-out shadow of the particles and systems all around us, Hoffman proposes that all those particles/systems/bodies/forces we observe in spacetime are all, themselves, "projections" of some mathematical object. In that case, the "fundamental" core of reality isn't spacetime or anything in it, but something else entirely, that exists (at least mostly) outside of our 4-dimensional spacetime.

The mathematical object in this case is known as the Amplituhedron. In simple terms, this is a geometrical object in which the constituent points describe particle interactions. Prior to 2005 or so, the math to do the calculations for very simple particle interactions was very labor-intensive. (Think hundreds of pages of calculations for a system with fewer than ten particles.) But with the discovery of this Amplituhedron method, those calculations could be greatly simplified.

Now, we could debate all day about whether this Amplituhedron is "real" or not. But that's kind of semantic. Whether it's real or not, the science points to a deep mathematical structure underlying spacetime. Hoffman's argument is that that structure is what's fundamental. Everything we observe is just a constituent part of that object brought to life in spacetime.