Talk:2898: Orbital Argument

May not be (probably isn't!) the inspiration for this comic, but just yesterday there was news of the latest successes in cooling down Positronium (an 'atom' in which nothing is at the nucleus, the charges 'orbit each other' (or the quantum equivalent)). A co-inky-dink, surely, but just thought I'd mention it in passing... 141.101.98.78 03:13, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

In editing, I'm accutely aware that even the "relatively small" force by the Earth on the Sun is a bad way of putting it. Looked at properly, exactly the same force is exerted against the Sun by the Earth (heavy item drawn pulled down to light item) as is exerted against the Earth by the Sun (lighter item being pulled down by heavier item). ((Fairly easily proven, these days: e.g. If it were not so, something like a bowling-ball and ping-pong ball could be kept separate by a stick, but released in space where they'd then work as a 'gravity drive' that propelled them one way (or perhaps the other!) without any need for power/propellant.)) Of course, the force should be considered equal (bidirectionally singular) with the inertial framing being the factor that makes the freefalling apple the more obvious thing to fall than the Earth upon which any budding Newton is stood/sat in rapt observation. But the Earth's contribution to the (currently) indivisible joint attraction that drives both sides of any 2-body problem is far more than any given apple and far less than any given star. As and when we can perhaps split this (either directionally 'diode' the flow of gravitational effects, or even independently manipulate inertial and gravitational masses) then perhaps we will need to be more discriminating in calculating/describing about such things. Assuming we don't just go with "gravity is a lie, it's all just mass-curved spacetime", instead. ;) But just thought I'd expound a few different relevent worldviews, of greater or lesser usefulness... 141.101.99.33 04:35, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Atomic & subatomic "particles" as discrete units, are a test condition artifact. Everything is waves. ProphetZarquon (talk) 13:56, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Or (admitedly 'wavy') strings. Or resonant fields. Or some other esoterically theorised GUT-fodder... ;) 172.71.178.156 15:49, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Submolecular strings are just (helical) waves viewed through a threshold-conditional gate.

ProphetZarquon (talk) 21:34, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

I think comic 690: Semicontrolled Demolition is relevant to this one and should appear somewhere in the explanation of this one, as it touches on the same base idea. 15:45, 24 February 2024 (talk) 172.71.175.75 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Isn't there something about knowledge being true information arrived at by logically sound reasoning? This meets the first criteria but not the second. RegularSizedGuy (talk) 17:31, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I feel there is an additional explanation that White Hat did not intend. The Sun and Earth, the entire Solar system for that matter, orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Which may also orbit the center of the known Universe? I am not an astrophysicist or knowledgeable enough to attempt a proper explanation. Vampire (talk) 15:31, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

"The Earth-Moon barycenter is located approximately ¾ of the way from Earth's center of mass to its surface, towards the Moon's center of mass. Our tidal bulges (oceanic and otherwise) occur along that line. One bulge is towards the Moon because of the gravitational attraction, and the other is in the opposite direction, by centrifugal force from the Earth's rotation around the barycenter." This is wrong for a couple of reasons. First, both bulges are the result of the same effect, and they would be there even if the Moon and Earth weren't producing centrifugal force by rotating about each other. In the usual explanation of the opposite bulges, you look at the acceleration of a particle on the near side of the Earth towards the Moon by more, the acceleration of the center of the Earth by a medium amount, and the acceleration of a particle on the far side of the Earth by less. Then, to look at things in the frame of reference of the center of the Earth, you subtract the center's acceleration, and find that the near side accelerates toward the Moon by a little, and the far side accelerates away from the Moon by a little. But even that explanation is wrong, or at least, very incomplete - the main driver of the tides is due to the vastly larger volume of water *away* from the line through the Earth's and Moon's centers; when you do that same vector subtraction of the local acceleration from the Moon minus the acceleration of the center of the Earth, you find that you get a tangential component of acceleration, and since water can flow, it does, until it reaches a surface of constant potential (it's not a lot of distance, but it's a lot of volume moving, so the tidal bulge is a significant volume of water). See https://web.archive.org/web/20220115060446/https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/scenario/tides.htm 172.70.110.30 15:46, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Ok, so regarding this argument, the problem is removing the clarification that this is not subject to consensus 'averaging'. Two totally different opinions which cannot be averaged, merged, subsampled or intermingled. It is maybe useful to mention taking multiple weather predictions and generating the most supported trend, much as natural language processing algorithms, but here the two statements cannot be combined in simple numerical or tokenwise ways (that is the point). Yes, state that mid-point estimations are useful (I'm happy with such a statement, and preserved/enhanced it), but do not remove the salient issue that in this case it is not a useful process. It's beyond even 2893: Sphere Tastiness illogic. Which is the joke.... 172.71.242.55 18:51, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Re: expert averaging, it's non-intuitive to consider that different symbolic statements in text can be averaged, but with a neural predictive model (NN, human brain) this actually is possible. You *can* average the latent vector representations of two text inputs (x,x') in the (vectorized) latent space of a neural model (z + z'). Latent averaging is often used in ML as an empirical heuristic to improve performance (sentence embeddings, mixture-of-experts models), and can be hypothesized to operate via the mechanism of improving the efficiency of a learned Bayesian circuit that performs abductive reasoning. Averaging is more obviously seen in the output token space, for example, you might symbolically average temperatures from two weather models (formalized as ensemble models, consensus models, etc.). So although it sounds weird at first glance, averaging experts in either latent or manifest space is often a good heuristic for a guess, and is rewarded as a result. Arguably, White Hat is using this algo and actually making a good guess here, although if he can't explain his thought process symbolically (he's just doing it because it feels "nice"), his accuracy may come off as an "accident." Caveats: there are definitely conditions under which averaging experts can go awry in both latent and manifest spaces (false balance, non-expert data, partial observability, etc.), but this arguably isn't the case in either the orbital or wave-particle initial observations. 108.162.242.37 01:21, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

"I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong."

-Eliezer Yudowsky, Einstein's Arrogance, Less Wrong

VeryPeeved (talk) 15:00, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

I don't think that it's really a case of a gettier problem because whilst white hat's belief is true it isn't justified so its just a case of epistemic luck (a lucky true belief) which isn't particulalry problematic for defining knowledge as a justified true belief which is what gettier was arguing against. Bubli (talk) 12:44, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Is the relative masses of Jupiter and the Sun really closer than the moon and earth? 5.151.198.173 (talk) 10:53, 17 March 2026 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

No. The Sun is slightly under 1500 Jupiters, the Earth 'only' 81+ Moons. So the Moon is 13ish times more a similar mass to the Earth than Jupiter is to the Sun. IYSWIM.

But I think you misunderstood the Barycentre thing (that the Sun-Jupiter point is outside the Sun, while the Earth-Moon one is still within the Earth). This isn't a direct ratio to the masses (it's effectively "<the 'far' mass> divided by <the sum of both masses>") and, as a factor of the intervening distance, is independant both of how far apart they are and how large (by radius) either or both masses are... Well, so long as they're not touching, or even poking over the Roche Limit/etc, which changes the whole scenario in other ways.

The proportion of the Sun-Jupiter distance (centre to centre) that gets you to the Sun-Barycentre point is... hang on, let me just calculate that... 0.00095(ish). Earth-Moon is 0.012ish. (Nearly 13 times further away, proportionately, but a slightly different nearly-13!)

But Jupiter is far, far further from the Sun than the Moon is from the Earth. Both in absolute terms and by any other useful measure, which makes that smaller offset (from the less similar mass ratios) go further. More importantly in Sun and (respectively) Earth radiuses, there's lot more Sun-radiuses to get to Jupiter than Earth ones to reach the Moon. By a factor a lot more than 13, so the 'mid' point is >1 radiuses, despite being proportionately closer than the case where it's <1 radius.

Think of it this way. Two identical masses have an exact mid-way barycentre. Always above the radius of either of them, unless they're somehow touching (then its on the surface, of both at once) or overlapping (in which case, it's 'subsurface'... for both!). If they're a whole universe separated, the point is 'half a universe' above both surfaces. You didn't change their masses, but you changed the position.

Now choose any dissimilar masses (but same radius, say, or even the same density so that the larger mass is the larger in size, too). If touching (or 'merged'), the barycentre is clearly within the more massive body, whatever the exact details. At some point between there and sending them to opposite sides of the universe, it's a similar fraction of universe above the more massive mass's surface. (Unless you're significantly reducing the density to absolutely expand the volume, therefore radius, naturally. Which is a good trick if you can do it. :p )

We might also guess that the Sun has a relatively smaller radius as well, due to having a greater density... Actually, that's wrong (the Earth is ~4x more dense, what with all that rock (and iron/etc) rather than small-atom gas/plasma (hydrogen, then helium, overwhelmingly). But it's still not enough 'solar expansion' to eat up the orbit-proportioned extra distance up to the barycentre, everything else taken into account.

You can play around with all the numbers, of course, but that's the principle. 82.132.236.236 16:51, 17 March 2026 (UTC)