• bitteroldcoot@piefed.social
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    2 小时前

    Worked as a physicist for 30 years, nobody talks like that. Everyone else in the room is to smart, and will slap you down for using absolutes.

    • 🍉 DrRedOctopus 🐙🍉@lemmy.world
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      4 小时前

      no science teacher would ever say that.

      Light travels in a straight line, plenty of crystals, linear erosion, many trees evolved to be as straight as possible…

      and to be esoteric, every object path, even when gravity affects them (they travel in a perfectly straight line, but it is spacetime that is curved).

      • mrsemi@lemmy.world
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        3 小时前

        no science teacher would ever say that.

        Careful with those absolute statements there buddy. I was told the same by a teacher, who challenged the class to come up with natural examples of either straight lines or perfect circles. He talked about how such things cannot exist because at high enough resolution/magnification there will always be interruptions.

        Your own example of light traveling in straight lines doesn’t account for the fact that photons are waves and absolutely do not travel in straight lines.

            • Maldreamer@lemmy.world
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              54 分钟前

              But isn’t the gravity bending the space, so the light itself is travelling straight but seems curved to the observer?

              • SystemDisc@feddit.org
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                51 分钟前

                Hmm, I’m not actually sure. Are we also ignoring refraction and reflection because the path is straight between those? If we’re talking discrete photons, you may be correct about each segment in its path being perfectly straight, but I’m not a theoretical physicist.

            • 🍉 DrRedOctopus 🐙🍉@lemmy.world
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              36 分钟前

              gravity isn’t a force, it’s the curvature of space-time itself.

              light follows a perfectly straight line through vacuum. the space itself isn’t straight.

              like drawing a straight line on a flat paper, if you roll the paper, that line is still straight within it’s medium.

              Newtonian gravity has been replaced by General relativity, and has been proven to be the correct model (at least more correct than Newtonian gravity).

      • Krudler@lemmy.world
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        3 小时前

        We can say that spatially, the summation of the photons movement is linear, but everything in the universe is waves and curves and we all know that to be true

        • 🍉 DrRedOctopus 🐙🍉@lemmy.world
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          3 小时前

          if by straight you mean a perfect eucledian line, then there’s no such thing as a perfect line in nature or reality.

          as that might violate the Eisenberg Uncertainty principle. because if I know two points position or or if I know the direction and one point I’ll know the position and direction of every point.

          but then that’s too esoteric.

    • JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca
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      2 小时前

      It’s useful as a navigational aid, if you’re lost in the woods keeping an eye open for straight lines, especially horizontal, is a good way of finding man made structures and potentially a way out. Beyond that, on a micro scale nature loves perfect geometry.

  • nehal3m@lemmy.zip
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    3 小时前

    I must confess, this sparked a laugh

    This pointiness, it’s nature’s gaff

    Give me a siiiiign

    Fool me baby one more time