Brian VK

I program for astrophysics, play music, and shit like that. Some people call me Juice.

[Brian VK @__1]

@MichaelLocklear @KSL5TV https://t.co/fXyRq969H1

[Brian VK @__1]

@CookingIssues Evaporation from the outside in. Try making a line pancake instead of a circle to observe pattern, maybe on a griddle on one of those long fifth burners on stoves.

[Brian VK @__1]

@prplmtns It’s my birthday but I’m in Chile, donde puedo comprar mi regalo para mi, online? @dragcityrecords

[Brian VK @__1]

@Cloudflare Seriously - my internet has been broken for a week now. Ticket 1715879. I can't get anyone at your company to acknowledge this.

[Brian VK @__1]

@Cloudflare Multiple Cloudflare-backed sites aren't working for me - 4 days now. Particularly https://t.co/SFmo0cMIA7 - this includes https://t.co/QZ85G5jjCr. I emailed support@cloudflare, - they say I should create an account, except I can't reach dash. No recourse for users?

[Brian VK @__1]

@Cloudflare Multiple Cloudflare-backed sites aren't working for me - 4 days now. Particularly https://t.co/SFmo0cMIA7 - this includes https://t.co/QZ85G5jjCr. I emailed support@cloudflare, - they say I should create an account, except I can't reach dash. No recourse for users?

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave It’s one of those things that makes a bit more sense if you see the math (not easy, but not that bad) but it’s hard to put into words too. Dark Energy is the interesting part- knowing a bit more about it tells us if the universe will die or reverse back the way it came/is cyclic

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave No problem. There’s really a lot of things involved in it all, so there’s not really one “thing” that makes sense by itself, but all the pieces together sort of make sense. I’m curious, does your intuition think the universe is older or younger?

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave Note that we also think the universe is young (e.g. not 50 billion years old) because of Olber’s paradox. Also, we look at the remnants of cosmic inflation by tryin to look at the ripples in the cosmic microwave background (Planck, BICEP3 projects)

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave Also, we know this doesn’t violate relativity because we know things are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be https://t.co/sJtUuWoqyP

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave Also remember that relativity doesn’t affect energy/light, and the rapid expansion is not things moving away from each other from the big bang but space itself expanding rapidly, which also isn’t subject to relativity

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave by the end of inflation matter (really, energy!) had spread out so much and had been so dispersed that the relativistic thing doesn’t come into play.

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave Well then earliest part of the universe was rapid, rapid inflation. We don’t know a lot about it because it was too hot, opaque. We might be able to “see” into this earliest time with gravitational waves because they don’t interact via EM, but photons get lost in the mix.

[Brian VK @__1]

Dark Energy, aka Cosmological Constant, is why things accelerate. We don’t know why. We want to measure that constant (I am part of a Dark Energy collaboration). We know things accelerate thanks to Type IA supernovas, aka Standard Candles https://t.co/qDmBT6eLCP

[Brian VK @__1]

We don’t know what DM is yet but we know it must exist. It’s completely vital for explaining structure formation because it doesn’t interact electromagnetically- “visible” matter clumped into structures early in the universe thanks to DM. The “WIMP miracle” is why we look for it https://t.co/qDmBT6eLCP

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave ...So relativity isn't a huge concern. It helps to make things more accurate

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave Anyway, basically you look at things now and extrapolate back. You understand how physics works at different points (thanks to things like LHC) over time and you do things in reverse, and you get a number. Most of the time extraction can be performed with newtonian physics

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@chisholmdave https://t.co/U8LM7PLw7p

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave As the universe expanded, the energy of photons running around decreases very fast, and you have freeze-out, and eventually hydrogen is hanging around, then helium, then nucleosynthesis starts happening. Dark matter and other stuff are around too. They start making things clump

[Brian VK @__1]

@chisholmdave Generally: Hubble's law: https://t.co/F9mblru0mg More specifically, thermodynamics, energy, nuclear physics, and other things. We know the earliest stars were hydrogen and helium because before that there was too much energy floating around and we had a quark soup

[Brian VK @__1]

@CookingIssues What's the link? I still need to do some christmas shopping