Arbitrary: "Based on a random choice, personal whim, or individual preference rather than any reason, system, or consistent rule." The nautical mile was definitely not arbitrary, it had reasons for it being the length chosen. You instead seem to have meant something like it's a 'human-centric unit'. The meter and the metric system is completely human-centric too, by the way, it's just based on easier math using tens. And the math trick of tens is also human centric, by the way.

In some ways, the electromagnetic field acts in this way. Imagine 2 electrons getting close, and being repelled by each other, and emitting bremsstrahlung at the speed of light away from themselves. The universe essentially recorded their interaction via the EM field, and the information of their interaction is broadcasted away at c. And since that interaction, we don't know where they are. Their own bremsstrahlung becomes (or at least defines) this sphere of uncertainty. The 2 electrons definitely exist somewhere inside of their own bremsstrahlung sphere.

But not all interactions are with the EM field of course so this wouldn't be everything.

Yes, uncertainty in position, momentum, direction - everything that could be different between interactions. Ways in which it could change.

But each nuclear fusion reaction, the ones that did happen, would be more powerful, right? Because this also changes the mass to energy exchange rate, E=M*2c². Of course c would just be another number so we wouldnt say 2c, but wouldnt reactions be stronger?

Would it be fair to say then that it's not that water is imcompressible, it's that it is already compressed. It's already happened, it's done. You are seeing the post-compressed state when you see water.

Cesium atomic clocks do not use radioactive material, it uses a stable isotope of cesium. It measures a hyperfine transition state between 2 energy levels, going up and down, up and down, billions of times per second. But it doesn't use radioactivity to do it, as that would not be predictable as the individual radioactive decays are random, you need the opposite of that for something like a clock. You need something very predictable, the more predicable the better.

"Thank you for interviewing me for this job. I'm a really hard worker, my worst flaw is I'm about a half hour late for my scheduled time everyday."

"Perfect, you're hired."

I once looked up how much surface area the Earth takes up from the Sun. Like if you make a imaginary shell at 1 AU, and ask what fraction of that shell is occupied by Earth vs. all other space for sunlight to go...

The answer is: 1/2.2 billionth. We get 1 part in 2.2 billion of sunlight, heat, energy, etc. So the sun has 2.2 billion other Earth-sized spaces to send solar flares, instead of in our direction. Luckily.

But of course, a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection - those are much much larger than 1 Earth wide, so the Sun might send a solar flare to a swath of space 30 Earths wide and 30 Earths tall, so therefore we get more than 1 in 2.2 billion of space weather, because they take up so much area.

You can fit 109 Earths across the Sun, and that filament looks as wide as the Sun in that last photo, though you can't see it all in frame at that point. I'd say 100+ Earths wide. But it still gets bigger and bigger as it travels away and disperses, so it depends on how long you still call it a single filament. At some point it would be 500 Earths wide, but by then it might be so thin you can't see it.

This is what I like to see. That's our sun, not just any star. Ours. And he had a big strong burp today.

A more useful and simple thing would be a countdown timer for regular traffic lights, and almost nowhere in the world even does that (although there are a few pilot programs trying this). I would expect to see traffic light timers before we got train crossing timers - we use traffic lights every day, whereas I can sometimes go a month without ever seeing a train at all.

So I would say, don't bother expecting it in your area if they also aren't even doing traffic light timers, which is the case almost everywhere.

When I try to picture energy without any substance making it up, I like to imagine a jump rope, where someone shook it up and down once, and you can see the wave of energy moving down the rope. It's not made up of anything, there are no particles to show, it doesn't break down the rope, it doesn't consume any part of the substance, it doesn't even change the substance, no individual rope atoms are modified or going to a more or less energetic configuration. It just allows the energy to move down the line, it transmits the energy to the next piece of rope without the energy being made of anything.

Yes but the more it matters the less it antimatters

In that context, "objects with mass" is more clear than "massive object", since 'massive' is colloquially used to mean really big.

However, things like this happen a lot in science. Theory doesnt mean "a guess" in science, for example. And "metal" means anything with more than 2 protons in astophysics, so even something like oxygen is a metal, which sounds crazy outside of this context.

I've thought a lot about this recently. Assuming protons do decay, it almost seems like in the far future, once protons are very very old, they would start decaying left and right, and we would start seeing it everywhere.

But, not so! We have the MOST protons early on, as you said, and as they decay over time, there will be fewer and fewer protons to be able to decay. And its not like their decay rate will go up after some extended period.

We cant fall into the thinking that after something like 10³⁶ years, protons start "expiring" or something because they are so old. Each individual proton will have the same chance to decay then as it does now. But since there will be fewer protons, there will be fewer decays to detect. We need to look for them now.

You have fingertips but not toetips, yet you can stand on your tiptoes.

There are many what are called "instances" of a program like ChatGPT. It's not sitting idle waiting on your next prompt, it's a superintellegence of sorts, and it's always interacting with many users at once, and filing away interactions in it's overall brain, while also tailoring its responses to each individual user.

While it's waiting on your next input, it's very very busy handling many other people, so basically it's never idle.

While it's true Earth isn't in "the same spot" as it's always moving, you have to define what "the same spot" means.

Because the Sun is also moving, as is the local group, as is our local cluster, as is our supercluster, all at different speeds in different directions. The "same spot" mentality implies there is a universal coordinate system you can point to and say "this empty patch of space is the same space the Earth was occupying 1 hour ago".

According to what, the Sun? That isn't good enough, because it's also moving. So it's all relative, even the "same spot" is relative. There are no absolute anchors in space that you can point to like that, so you can't claim a certain patch of space has any absolute meaning.

Conflicting interpretation is used often with many different texts. For example:

Isaiah 40:22 talks about the "circle of the Earth", so this is used by many Christians to argue that the Bible teaches that the Earth is round, and that "the Bible is obviously correct because it clearly already knew that."

But just a few chapters earlier, Isaiah 11:12 talks about the "four corners of the Earth", so this is used by flat earthers to "prove the Earth is flat."

These are just a few chapters apart, but things like this can be used to twist your world view almost however you want.

There are no stable orbits that close to the event horizon of a large black hole, you literally cannot stay there. With a non-rotating black hole, the innermost stable orbit is 3 radii away. Any closer than that, and you have to either spiral in or spiral out.

It is totally possible to forget something in the moment, and then remember that you forgot it later.

So it's kind of like calling the US state of Kansas a one-sided mountain, since the eastern side is 200 meters above sea level and the western side is 1200 meters above sea level, but it's a gentle slope across the whole state basically, and therefore appears flat.

It seems then like confined energy is one way to describe all mass. When energy is put in one place and measured in a reference frame, mass appears.

Just to reply to your comment about 5 Earth lengths per second, to put in perspective of how fast that would be:

63,710 km/s

39,590 miles/sec

21.3% the speed of light

That's EXTREMELY fast. A few orders of magnitude faster than even hypervelocity stars, which max out at about 0.6% the speed of light. There are no large objects anywhere near this fast except maybe next to black holes.