Grrl Power #1032 - Physics 501 (Patreon)

Thanks so much for your support! For serious!

Man, I really hope I got the physics close to right on this.

It's definitely not obvious, Dabbler. I watched a video on the Electroweak Force, and... basically didn't understand anything. (I might have been half paying attention and browsing Twitter at the same time, but still.) As far as physics are concerned, there's simple Newtonian shit and thermodynamics - all that is practically common sense, because that's the world we live in. Then there's advanced stuff like relativity, which I think most people "get" in a vague sense until they really start thinking about time dilation and stuff like how gravity and acceleration are really the same thing, then there's the quantum stuff which is just... "I'll have to take your word for it, math person."

Not knowing what/where 95% of the mass and energy of the universe can tempt one to wonder if 95% of what we think we know about physics is wrong. I don't think that's the case, I think asking a scientist what we "know" is very different than asking your crazy uncle what he "knows" about lizard people in the government. One's standard of evidence involves mathematical and observational proofs, the other involves online articles he "skimmed the title," and a dire lack of knowledge about .mpeg compression artifacts.

One thing you can count on in this comic is that I'll never introduce Dark Matter as some sort of physical thing used to power starships or anything like that. Yeah, it's funny in Futurama when Nibbler poops dark matter out in his litterbox, but the term dark matter isn't talking about some undiscovered element, it's a reference to unaccounted for mass in macro-level views of the universe. Yes... fine, it might actually be some undiscovered isotope (wildly unlikely) or some form of infectious strange matter or something, but once we know what it actually is, we're probably not likely to keep calling it dark matter are we? We'll name it after whoever discovered it like with the Higgs Boson/Field. Hopefully the person who discovers it doesn't have a dumb last name or we'll have to call it lipshitzium, or wiglesworthite, feltersnatchium, svejokovsky-eyjafjallajökullium (a Polish woman married a volcano, see?)