A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I always liked the idea that the genie rules, when they're presented, are not laws/rules so much as hard physical limits. You can't wish for more wishes because the genie just doesn't have that much power. They're powerful, but they're not God with a capital G. The genie tries to add a electron to every atom in the universe. If fails and collapses with exhaustion before it's even finished adding one extra electron to every atom in your body.
"Wish granted. Electrons, being a human construct, have now always been defined slightly differently. Just as Franklin got the polarity wrong and you still use his labeling system, J.J. Thompson will now have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the electron, leading to a cascading assumption by later scientists that the number of electrons in a neutral atom is one greater than the number of protons. Even though this completely breaks the math of quantum mechanics, everyone is just used to subtracting one at this point. This is a minutely worse world, but as a bonus, every physicist who sees you will now be preternaturally certain that you are personally to blame. You're welcome."
It is way too common to confuse the abstractions we use to understand reality with reality itself. Like the scientists who work with this stuff are really consistent in keeping the two separated, but the moment a theory gets in the hands of a journalist or god forbid a politician, it starts wreaking havok
It is way too common to confuse the abstractions we use to understand reality with reality itself. Like the scientists who work with this stuff are really consistent in keeping the two separated
I wish this was true. I remember seeing a physicist talking about how the laws of physics are mathematical in nature and that the laws of physics needed to exist before the universe do the universe is made of math. I don't think the vast majority of physicists have a philosophical grounding for the types of ontological claims they make. Even less so since "shut up and calculate" became the professional axiom.
They're making the electrons gay!
Never met a gay electron. They're always so damn negative.
What if it’s one extra neutron? >.>
Can someone ELI5 what would happen?
You know how when you put magnet faces together with the same polarity, they push against each other. If you squeeze them together they will pop away. When an atom has an extra electron, it makes its charge more negative. If all of the atoms have extra electrons, all of their charges will be more negative. Now imagine every single atom in the universe was suddenly the same polarity and began pushing all other atoms away. I'll let your imagination take over from there.
For some reason you just explained the probability of the big bang. Some idiot made a wish, and poof, new universe.
Oh, I see. I read it wrong at first. I thought it was saying add one electron total, I didn't realize it meant one to each atom. It makes a lot more sense now.
Same. And it sounded so silly I could imagine the look of hatred. But this explanation makes more sense.
Yeah, my first thought was "does that just break supersymmetry or something? What happens then?"
You've clearly never met a 5-year-old
Extra electrons make atoms go 'splodey.
When I was younger, I would often splodey too when thinking about Carmen electron
It would probably go crunch not boom. https://whatif.xkcd.com/140
In the example in from that what if, they are putting a universe's worth of mass in the volume of the moon, so it would create a super massive singularity. That's not what is happening in here.
If every atom suddenly gained an electron, they would indeed increase in mass. But a hydrogen atoms would gain the most relative mass as it is the lightest atom, and that would only be an increase of 1/1837th of its total mass now, so... not that much. Masses of heavier atoms and the macro level matter made from them would increase in mass even more marginally. It would be a negligible difference, definitely not be enough for a singularity to form from this increase alone unless a star's core were already riding that edge.
So their original determination would still be correct, that molecules would fly apart (atomized) and explode outward into the vacuum of space. Now, maaaaybe if the explosive force were enough to cause atoms to collide in space and at relativistic speeds, tiny singularities might form. But their combined negative charge would be far more powerful than their gravitational pull, and they would decay almost immediately, so... no crunch.
In the example in from that what if, they are putting a universe's worth of mass in the volume of the moon, so it would create a super massive singularity. That's not what is happening in here.
Not quite, xkcd put a moons worth (by mass) of electrons together, so if we add an electron to each atom we go down four to five orders of magnitude.
The black hole came about, because the electric charge creates a electric field in which the electrons have a potential energy that by E=mc^2 is equal to the mass of the universe. If we apply our scaling factor we still end up with black holes everywhere.
Lets play with those numbers:
Scale factor between Sagittarius A* and the observable universe 10^37 / 10^53 = 10^-16
Mass of Moon 10^23
Mass of electron cloud equivalent to black hole 10^23 * 10^-16 = 10^13
mass of electron added object equivalent to black hole 10^13 * 10^5 = 10^18
That means adding an electron to each atom is enough to rival the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Even if I miscalculated by many orders of magnitude, at least each planet collapses into one.
I'm really not even a little bit following what you're trying to say. What units are you using? What does the Sagittarius A* have to do with anything? What scale factor are you talking about? Mass? Volume? "Mass of electron cloud equivalent to black hole" what electron cloud? Where are you pulling these numbers?
Mass isn't what determines if a singularity forms. Density is. Enough mass has to be formed in small enough volume to form a singularity. Mass more most matter would have to multiply by many many orders of magnitude for a planet to form one. Adding a single election to each atom doesn't do that.
Maybe charge can play a factor, but I don't really have any idea how exactly or how significant it is.
Much better!
Genie is being lazy and interprets that as: Add one electron to the universe, and attach it to any of the atoms available.
That's not Interpretation, that a whole different thing.
I disagree. They asked to add an additional election to all the atoms, not each atom, so the genie could interpret it as adding a single electron to the universe.
Add one extra electron to all the atoms in the universe -- adds one electron to all the atoms but not one each for each atom
Edit: typo,typo2
Gotcha.
PS: you still have a "melectron" in there :D
m'lectron, *tips fedora *
Damn seems like I can only find one typo at a time
Former situation: there is one electron
New situation: there are two electrons
This is getting out of hand, now there are two of them!
Barbaric.
Just make ionic bonds a little stickier for a minute.