We have figured out big stuff and small stuff very well! And if it weren't for the little fact they share the same universe, it would be very good general theories.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
785 points (98.9% liked)
Science Memes
17369 readers
940 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
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- 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
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
No way I live long enough for us to get to a Grand Unified Field theory. :(
Anything in particular you want to know about that only a GUT might provide? or do you just want to see what it looks like?
I wanna know! No real reason, but I also partially like seeing the world metaphorically burn, and a new theory would definitely throw out some wrong assumptions we did _somewhere, sometime _.
load more comments
(10 replies)
Yeah, when this meme was first cycled around over 20 years ago I didn't like it then, I like far, far less now in an age of science denial and every fukkin headline on every fukkin major media site feed saying shit like "SCIENTISTS BAFFLED OVER NEW DISCOVERY OF UNKNOWN SIGNALS" or "SCIENTISTS HORRIFIED BY DISCOVERY THAT BREAKS THE LAWS OF NATURE" and so on.
This shit is the reason we have an anti-vaxxer with no qualifications leading the most powerful nation's health and human services. This is the shit that feeds people deciding that horse-dewormer is as good as the accumulated knowledge of centuries of study and data. This kind of over-simplification is why we won't see a dozen scrapped space missions and why people spit on scientific data about how helping people with their gender identity helps prevent suicide and on and on and on.
We have to make knowledge "cool" again, and I have no idea how to do that.
This meme was circulated about 20 years ago by my reckoning.
It was clever back then, it's far less entertaining now in an age when people are discarding science and factual knowledge wholesale.
We have very, very good models of each of those "things" listed. We have such good models for it, that even since this meme first made rounds, we have created new kinds of telescopes that can see gravity, we have created computers that can calculate using individual particles in superposition, we have built tools to view the edge of space and time and have imaged the event-horizons around black holes and we have created conditions close to beginning of the universe in labs and discovered new particles that validate decades or centuries of theorizing.
These models only break down in extreme environments or when they intersect in certain conditions. But by "break down" we don't mean "scientists throw their hands in the air and become flat-earthers" we mean "we are missing some key data" to make different fields of science work together.
We still lack verification on right-handed neutrinos and the exact wave function for helium.
There are likely areas we will never have any greater insight on and phenomenon that will never be explained, but my point is just that people use these kinds of short-attention-span quips to go on to say that we don't know for sure about climate change and vaccines and such.
Recognizing our knowledge is limited does not mean we believe the earth is flat or that we have no reason not to believe it is not. Attempting to say that everything is pretty much explained just increases the confidence of someone believing in the flat earth, as that is very clearly false. There's a bunch of things we can not explain and there's a bunch of things that in theory we can explain and forecast, but in practice we can not. Go ahead and do some quantum mechanical calculations to describe a system with more than 3 electrons with the nuclei of the atoms moving...
Recognizing our knowledge is limited does not mean we believe the earth is flat or that we have no reason not to believe it is not. Attempting to say that everything is pretty much explained just increases the confidence of someone believing in the flat earth, as that is very clearly false. There's a bunch of things we can not explain and there's a bunch of things that in theory we can explain and forecast, but in practice we can not. Go ahead and do some quantum mechanical calculations to describe a system with more than 3 electrons with the nuclei of the atoms moving...
Attempting to say that everything is pretty much explained just increases the confidence of someone believing in the flat earth
Except that's a completely made-up idea of how this goes. I have a lot of experience in this area... the idea here being explained is that there is a very real growing wave of anti-intellectualism, and this is not growing in the fields of science, but dumbasses who spend all their time online listening to cranks like Eric Weinstein or Anti-vaxxers who lean on the idea that we can't "calculate a system with 3 electrons" as evidence that since science doesn't know how to do X, then why should we believe that there's an accurate model for Y?? and people who don't KNOW anything about the topic connect with that rhetoric because it appeals to feelings, not reason.
People do not fucking turn anti science because someone who knows science tries to explain science any more than this kind of "change in values."
And nobody says that. I immediately know that someone is constructing a whole straw universe when someone claims anyone representing science ever claims "everything is pretty much explained" because that's not how science WORKS. it's just a word that means a process... we look at shit, we come up with ideas for why that thing is like that, then we do tests to see if that model works, and we collect those successes as facts. It's a process that doesn't even claim to "explain" anything.
"We just throw darts in the dark now and see if the math still maths. If it does, we create a new field of theoretical physics."
Gravity too
Also magnetism
As one of the great scholars of our time has said:
"Nobody knows what a magnet is."
I think it's in the list as "heavy stuff".
I took that to mean singularities
Turbulence can go to hell and take Reynolds numbers with them
A-fuckin-men brother
Turbulence seems to be to be deterministic chaos, that if we had perfect resolution, and unlimited processing power, we could predict turbulent flow with precision.
This is old. We got turbulence now at least.
Edit: i mean the discovery of turbulence calculation about 10, 15 years ago.
I thought that referred to the navier stokes millennium problem
Look I ain't calling you no turbulance, if you need help, call 911.
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
— George Box
I prefer not to reference deceased scientists & philosophers because it makes me appear old. I prefer to only acknowledge the wisdom of contemporaries such as Jordan Peterson & Neil DeGrass Tyson so people don't think I'm elderly.
/s
(This is how I feel when kids say they're embarrassed about liking 80s music)
At first I was like, what? That is not funny!
But then I saw the /s and I was like, HOLY SHIT IS THE BEST JOKE I'VE EVER HEARD!!
The more we learn, the more we learn that we need to learn.
I'm still on phlogiston.
I3 atlas has entered the chat.
No it hasn't. It broke up around the sun. It's a rock with ice and shit.
I saw some Ai generated videos saying it broke up but there are amateur astronomers filming it as we speak. You are saying it broke up but still looks the same, or? Because sometimes I dont understand if "broken up" means what I think it does. To me it should be gone if that happened?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZCQFAokJQE
There are still daily articles from Loeb talking about it. This one is from a few hours ago:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/magnificent-images-of-jets-around-3i-atlas-e4ad8acc723c
There are clear pictures of multiple nucleuses after it passed the sun, which is entirely common for comets, they are loosely held together balls of rock and ice. Some crackpots (Avi Loeb specifically) are now pushing the media-grabbing narrative that this is just the "spaceship now turning on its thrusters" despite no real dramatic, unexpected changes to its velocity or behavior.
We have observed some unusual properties from the comet, but this is more like "unusual for a long-range comet" and not "OMG ALIENS." This is likely because it originated in another part of the galaxy a very, very long time ago and thus is made of different proportions of elements and may even have new compounds in it that react slightly differently to light and heat. In some other, better timeline, we would have probes stationed around the solar system to intercept and study interstellar objects and maybe we would make new discoveries.
For now, all we get are youtubers and sensationalist book authors flailing their arms in the air about aliens, because that's what sells headlines.
Thats not whats happening at all. I have read Loebs posts and seen his videos about this comet. He says we should be open to the possibility of it being something else than a comet. He doesnt say "omg aliens" at all. Have you read his medium posts?
As for Youtubers, sure, tons of Ai generated shitty videos to make money, yeah.
I haven't read any of Loeb's recent anything because, and I cannot stress this enough, he is a crackpot trying to sell books and get media attention. I used to follow him because I liked the idea of being open to studying more areas of astronomy with an open mind to figuring out if there are unknowns we've been missing like Von Neuman probes in the asteroid belts and so on.
But since those earlier days of speculation, he has gotten more and more radical and "grifty" and disrespecting his own peers like the head of SETI and declaring anything that moves to be possible signs of aliens, to say nothing of his doubling down on recovering industrial waste from an expensive mission to retrieve ocean gunk on some longshot, hyperbolic narrative that he knew where an alien ship crashed. He does nothing but media and podcast tours and doesn't take criticism. Not a scientist.
We can do better.
Yeah ive noticed this about the reactions to the comet. There are two camps, one who thinks Loeb is all the negative things you said, and another who thinks he makes a lot of sense.
Either way, I think the comet is very interesting and look forward to following it the coming weeks. :)
to be fair, all that only applies for the extremes.
I can make turbulence with my bare hands.
Or some same topic. Read Griffith to feel like you understand electrodynamics, then Jackson to realize you don't.
"It only applies for how the Universe works at its most fundamental level"
yes, but the bits where its a problem like the meme implies only apply at the extremes.
view more: next ›