this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
960 points (98.8% liked)

Science Memes

11161 readers
2700 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Ahh... hmm. In some ways it is literally inaccessible, because we can't observe it directly. All of our experimental (e.g. real) subatomic knowledge comes from smashing particles into each other at near-light speed and observing the bits that come out, which is somewhat like dropping a smartphone off the Empire State building and trying to figure out how it works by picking up the broken pieces off the sidewalk. We can probe the structure of molecules with electron microscopes, but there are no tools for directly observing anything smaller than that. We draw conclusions for how smaller things behave through inference.

And frankly, the entire concept of spinors and the relationship to observed properties like electron charge is pretty mysterious, and nobody really understands wave-particle duality, that's just the best explanation we have for what we observe.

[โ€“] niktemadur@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

Also as Heisenberg found, at a certain point things get blurry not because our instruments don't have the technical capabilities, but because what we are looking at is fundamentally blurry.