this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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[–] latenightnoir@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

For me, it's the sheer scale of celestial bodies.

Our Sun is humongous. UY Scuti's radius is 1700 times larger - 185300 times larger than the Earth's. And then there's TON 618, which has a mass 66 billion times larger than our Sun's.

And even those are barely grains of sand when compared to solar and galactic structures... It is humbling, to say the least.

Edit 2: I deleted the previous edit, because my first observation is correct (scale is maintained when going from comparing radii to comparing diameters...), which is why I have an Arts degree.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If math is actually uncovering fundamental laws of the universe, rather than just describing it at various scales, then there's a chance we can rewrite reality with our own set of rules that would render the current ones incompatible (by GΓΆdel's-IT).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis

[–] badcommandorfilename@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tegmark's MUH is the hypothesis that our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.[3] That is, the physical universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is mathematics β€” specifically, a mathematical structure.

Look, I only heard about this concept, so maybe there's more to it, but branches of mathematics are just a set of rules that we create.

Sometimes these rules can be applied to real systems, in our reality, and that helps to describe and understand the universe.

But it's totally possible to come up with infinite nonsensical, useless mathematical systems that have nothing to do with the universe. The existence of these doesn't mean that we have or could rewrite reality.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml -1 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

If our universe is bound by the laws of mathematics (big IF), then any theorem discovered within it has to be consistent or incomplete w.r.t it.
If a theorem is discovered that upends math as we know it, then the repercussions could be cosmic.

Again, big if about the universe being bound by the laws of maths

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[–] Generica@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

There are more stars in the visible universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.

[–] TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works 0 points 22 hours ago (8 children)

In chemistry I was taught one carbon atom can exist in at least 12 separate living bodies before it's no longer stable.

[–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

that doesn't make any sense. Carbon doesn't get less stable by being used in bodies.

Carbon 14 exists, but that decays regardless if it's in a body or not. At has quite a long half life

[–] TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works 1 points 15 hours ago

Yea, I misremembered it. It was in my book from a while back. Here we go:

[–] droplet6585@lemmy.ml 2 points 21 hours ago

At least is a heavy lifting qualifier in this case.

[–] criitz@reddthat.com 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)
[–] TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works -1 points 21 hours ago

After you die, the carbon atoms that made you might go on to make another living thing.

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