Okay something that bothers me is the fact physics is seen as the more prestigious of the three main sciences, with biology at the bottom and chemistry in the middle. Like. I doubt most people could name a famous biologist, but they could name 5 famous physicists. Why are Albert Einstein and Stephen hawking household names but Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk aren't?

Not to dismiss the accomplishments of Einstein or Hawking, or their genius, but their actual tangible contributions to society have been miniscule compared to that of Borlaug or Salk who have each saved LITERALLY hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives each. Half the food on your plate was probably grown thanks to Borlaug and Salk is the reason half your siblings didn't die of polio as a kid.

Sure Einsteins theory of relatively is important for modern satellite communications but really though how can it compare?

This is coming from someone who studied physics. I love physics, and years ago when i was at uni I looked down at biology and so did everyone else studying physics. And I know others did too. Retroactively of course I know this was so very wrong.

If society as a whole started treating biology with more respect then maybe more students would go into that field. If we had rockstars of medicine and agricultural science that were household names rather than just physicists? think of how many more lives could be saved, how many more lives could be improved.

I'm not saying physics isn't important, and more scientists of any kind is always good, but proportionally I think societies priorities are a little skewd.

Relevant xkcd

Jonas Salk was a household name in his lifetime, and people do know the names Richard Dawkins and Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin. But biology has been demoted to a "soft science" in recent decades, a phenomenon I can explain with a single image:

My prediction is that you will see this happen with chemistry next.

its already happening with chemistry-adjacent studies!!! chemical engineering used to be seen as the hardest form of engineering, until it became extremely popolar with women students, to the point where it is now pejoratively called ‘femical engineering’, and lookie-look which is now considered the *easiest* type of engineering. wanna venture a guess?

Someone in the notes actually took the time to inform me that "correlation does not equal causation" but there is actual scientific evidence that we value women's work so low that when women enter a field, the prestige and pay in that field drops. We have seen this in numerous fields, even outside of the sciences and engineering fields. Biochemistry is being demoted to a soft science now too, but I think we will see, as the trends continue, that more women in chemistry will lead to devaluing of chemistry.

Some sources on this phenomenon.

The above two sources are discussed on the NYT article and show that, as women enter a field, the prestige and pay drops from that field. I found an interesting article on this below:

This third link is to an article that examines the long-term change in disparate prestige and pay experienced by women over time. In some respects, the gender pay gap is shrinking significantly and has been doing so since the 1980s. HOWEVER, when you control for other factors (more women are highly educated now, more jobs require higher education now than in 1980, more fields have earned a prestige and pay boost commensurate with these events) the negative effect of female percentage on overall pay an occupation receives has become stronger over time. In other words, the sex-based discrimination women experience has intensified as our net educational level and career choices have increased.

It's interesting because there's science behind this, there's science behind the pay gap, but MRAs value women's opinions so lowly that they can rebut it with "nu uh!" and people will go "well there's really no way to tell who is right here."

I had wanted to link them before, but I really didn't want to do so in the context of an online argument. Either you believe in sexism or you don't. If you don't, then I won't convince you it exists, and I don't want to spend my free time trying.

^ oof the tags

(Source)

Science Fighter – What if the great scientists had special moves...by Diego Sanches.

Charles Darwin – Evolution

Albert Einstein – E=mc2

Pythagoras – Tetractys

Marie Curie – Radium

Stephen Hawking – Wormhole

Pythagoras – Pythagorean Theorem

Isaac Newton – Opticks

Culture is so obsessed with the idea of lone geniuses that it doesn't really appreciate that most of the progress of science (and likely every other discipline) occurs collaboratively, in babysteps, and usually through a lot very tedious, utterly unsexy, work.

This is what’s so faulty with our short sighted coverage of scientific discoveries. You hear politicians question why we spend money on science studying insect wings and then decades later that research gets used by NASA for the most efficient way to fold/unfold solar panels on spacecraft. All of science is connected and useful because it enhances our understanding of the universe

When lasers were discovered they were called “a solution without a problem”, noone had any idea what to use them for. Since then they’re revolutionised communications and SO many parts of technology. CDs, DVDs, printing, fast internet, laser etching for making computer chips, laser eye surgery, spectroscopy, LIDAR measurements of weather patterns, barcode scanners, cooling atomic clocks, nuclear fusion, microscopy, LED technology and materials research. I’m probably not even scratching the surface here. Fund theory and fundamental science research.

It's actually kind of heartening, lasers; because before they were invented, their only real antecedents in science fiction were things like rayguns and heatrays and what not. But it actually turns out that their usefulness as a weapon is extremely limited, whereas their usefulness for just about everything else is incredible. It's one of the occasions where we flipped the "Dual Use" coin and it landed very solidly on the good side.

everyone on replies is terrified of this fact but i just think it's so sweet and heartwarming. she's holding our hand and leading us somewhere secret and we're both giggling like kids. i love her

Technically towards the black hole in the middle of the milky way but the sun'll be dead by then and we gona have a solar system to get there

No???? We don't move towards the black hole, we are orbiting the center of the galaxy, and there is a black hole there. we are not fucking going towards the black hole. The black hole has NEGLIGIBLE effect on the solar system, it's only a mass of about 4 million solar masses, and it's smaller than the orbit of Mercury. The galaxy itself is 1.5 TRILLION solar masses. We are not going toward the black hole jfc

Yea that didnt sound as cool tho and i enjoy spreading disinformation

You know what, I can respect it

Amazing.

Still so salty the James Webb telescope got named after the homophobic inventor of CIA psyops (who wasn't even a scientist) when it could've been the Payne telescope (there were petitions.)

Hundreds of Science Fiction novels

Uncountable hours of hobbyist studies of Astrophysics

Documentaries. Classes.

This. Is what finally gets me to see how

Jupiter really is

It really is like 10% of the way to being a Star huh

It looks like there’s enough material for a whole additional planet after Mars, that’s just… being perpetually perturbed out of a proper accretion disk by Jupiter’s big fat fucking gravity well.

Huh.

So why are the red objects in a triangle? And how come the green clusters are at only two of the points?

Because of the interaction between Jupiter's gravity and the Sun's gravity, only certain orbits are stable. Specifically, orbital periods close to - but just a little longer or a little shorter than - Jupiter's are unstable. This actually holds true to some extent for all the IAU-recognized planets, though it's most obvious with Jupiter. The green clusters are known as the Trojans (called that because they were named after figures from the Trojan War - with two exceptions, those at the leading point are named after figures on the Greek side and those at the trailing point are named after figures on the Trojan side), which surround two of the five Lagrange Points, known as the L4 and L5 points, which are 60 degrees ahead and behind it. A diagram using the Earth-Moon system (not to scale):

The principle is the same for any system where the first object is much larger than the second object, with the same angular separations

Anything at one of those points will have a stable orbit equal in length to the Earth's orbit. However, only the L4 and L5 are stable in the long term. Objects that are close to the L4 and L5 point will, over the long run, kind of circle around them, with an orbit that varies over time, being sometimes slightly shorter than and sometimes slightly longer than the second object, but averaging over the long run exactly the same, causing their angular distance from Jupiter to fluctuate over time, but always around 60 degrees. Because of Jupiter's large mass, it has the most dramatic effect. A large number of asteroids have gotten caught in orbits around its L4 and L5 points. These are the ones that are marked in green on the above gif. Jupiter has over 10,000 total known asteroids between its L4 and L5 points, while most of the other planets have a few in theirs. Earth, for example, has two known asteroids in its L4 point, but none in its L5 point. Neptune has a total of 28 known asteroids between its L4 and L5 points. Mercury and Saturn are not known to have any. Theoretically, it might be possible in some other solar system for an actual planetary-mass object to be located in the L4 or L5 point of a larger Jovian, though no such system has been discovered to date

The red asteroids are known as the Hilda asteroids (named after their largest member, the asteroid 153 Hilda). Unlike the Trojans, their orbits are not in a 1:1 ratio, but rather, in a 3:2 ratio, that is, they orbit three times for every two of Jupiter's orbits (on average). Their aphelion (furthest point from the Sun) approaches Jupiter's orbit, but their orbits are such that those aphelions are reached when Jupiter is either 60 degrees ahead, 180 degrees, or 60 degrees behind - as their orbital period is 2/3 of Jupiter's orbit, each time it reaches the aphelion, the angular separation between it and Jupiter is 120 degrees less - i.e., if the first time it is on the opposite side of the Sun from Jupiter, the second time it will be 60 degrees ahead, the third time it will be 60 degrees behind, and then repeating the fourth time. Hence, when you map out all of them, those at their furthest approach from the Sun - coming approximately to Jupiter's orbit - are either 60 degrees behind Jupiter, 60 degrees ahead, or 180 away, and those that are at their closet point are between the Sun and Jupiter, 120 degrees ahead, or 120 degrees behind, with those at intermediate distances being at intermediate angles. So, each individual asteroid follows an elliptical orbit, but the sum total of all their positions creates a rough triangle which appears to orbit with Jupiter

Other orbits that are close to Jupiter's, but not in those 1:1 or 2:3 ratios, don't last long. They'll either end up getting caught up in the 1:1 or 2:3 ratio, or end up getting flung out of those orbits ending up in significantly smaller or significantly larger orbits. Jupiter's orbit also causes certain gaps in the asteroid belt around orbital periods that would be unstable with Jupiter's influence

#was anyone going to tell me#the asteroid belt is more of a triangle#or was i supposed to see a tumblr post about it by myself?

@injuries-in-dust That's not actually the asteroid belt! The main asteroid belt is in a circular shape. A more complete, but non-animated, image:

The big white band is the main asteroid belt. The animated image above only shows the Jupiter Trojans and the Hildas, two specific groups of asteroids which are outside the asteroid belt itself

*Carefully places wikipedia rabbit hole where people can easily stumble into it and keep me company*

To be fair, a lot of goofy-sounding rocketry/aerospace terminology has a legitimate nomenclatural role beyond just being silly euphemisms.

"Unplanned rapid disassembly", for example, exists as the necessary counterpart to planned rapid disassembly: sometimes a rocket is legitimately supposed to fall apart or blow up, so you need a specific term to emphasise that it wasn't supposed to do that.

Similarly, "lithobraking" was coined by analogy with aerobraking (shedding velocity via atmospheric friction) and hydrobraking (shedding velocity by landing in water), and it does have some intentional applications; the Mars Pathfinder probe, for example, was deliberately crashed into the Martian surface while surrounded by giant airbags, and reportedly bounced at least 15 times before coming to rest.

(That said, aerospace engineers absolutely do use these terms humorously as well, because engineers are just Like That.)

this gifset was made for @washerdryer to support a palestinian family. commission me for a gifset to support mohammed by checking out this post!

The first simulated image of a black hole was calculated with an IBM 7040 computer using 1960 punch cards and hand-plotted by French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet in 1978.

the romance of hand-plotting. this guy looked at the numbers and drew each of those dots manually, and the image emerged. we can only imagine how he felt

Hilariously funny that they let the guy known for wandering off without warning to look at birds was allowed to do this

#famously few birds in space#probably the safest place to take him

i miss science class bro. we dont put things under microscopes as much as we should

I got a pocket microscope online for like twelve dollarinos and started just looking at random household items with it

I can only get 60x with it but it's still neato. Been looking at getting a much more intense microscope with filters & shit

sorry i just realized i missed this! thank u for showing me :D i need to get one of these lol

The life cycle of the Sun from cloud of gas to black dwarf cinder, illustrated by Davis Meltzer for the National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe, 1980.