It could be U shaped and not just a flat panel. Also, I assume the ceramic tiles have a very low coefficient of friction, so if it was stuck at any kind of small angle, the sediment might easily get carried off.
I got to hold a sample of one of the white tiles a long time ago. I don't know if it was identical to the flown versions, but it was anything but smooth.
I remember being able to feel and see individual silica fibers. It was very much a 3d surface.
I believe they are rather similar to the fire tiles you can get to line the inside of a blacksmith's furnace. They are quite light, but also very fragile.
I wonder if it could have gone through cycles of buried/uncovered? I don't know anything about the waters off Florida other than they experience periodic hurricane events.
Very likely. I am in the west coast of Florida, and storms can really shift things around quite a bit. Passages between some of the small islands can open or close after a decent storm. Sandbars come and go, etc.
The waters tend to be a little deeper on the east coast, which would tend to lessen the effects of large shifts, but over a timespan of nearly 40 years it is very likely the piece had been covered over at some point.
Counterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this happen very often. The odds of a specific event like this are astronomically small, but there is an even more astronomically large number of different possible unlikely events. The sheer number of possible events is orders of magnitude greater than the odds of individual unlikely events, causing them to occur regularly.
The universe is a really weird place, where really weird stuff happens constantly.
I just thought, he made fun of the stereotypical heros taking their one in a million chance and allways succeeding, meaning it is a physical or dramatic law that one in a million chances are 100% guaranteed.
(mainly refering to "Guards! Guards!", where they intentionally make one guards bow shot harder, to make his shot (at a dragon) a million to one chance, so it becomes a 100% shot, nice absurd logic and of course it does not work, but the chance for them surviving the stunt was one in a million..)
Sometimes, I drop something by accident, and the object falls in a strange way. I think "I could never in a million years duplicate the path that took."
"I could never in a million years duplicate the path that took."
I still remember, from at least twenty years ago, an anti-duplication technology based on this idea. IIRC it involved embedding glitter in clear plastic and then measuring the reflections at different angles. Devilishly hard to duplicate, especially since one wouldn't know which angles would be used in a reading so the placement would have to be nearly perfect in every dimension. Unfortunately so would the alignment in a reader, which I think is what sank the idea. Still, the idea of physically embodying something so similar to a mathematical proof of work seems valid and quite appealing. "I could never in a million years make the glitter fall that way again."
P.S. Here's a modern application of a similar technique to detect tampering with a laptop. https://archive.ph/g1kDW
If it is true, doesn’t it follow that there are (very rare) universes where unlikely events happen so often that anyone in such a universe would effectively observe a different probability distribution of events?
The thing is, if the theory is true, how do we know we are not in such a universe? We can say it is extremely unlikely because they are very rare - but we say it is “unlikely” and “rare” because we assume the global (multiverse-wide) probability distribution is similar to the local (this universe) one - but isn’t that assumption effectively equivalent to the assumption that we are not in such a universe? An argument which begins by assuming its conclusion is not much of an argument.
However, if we can’t rely on that assumption, it seems in principle impossible for us to know what the global probability distribution is - how is that not a lethal blow to the entire theory?
If you insist on using old fashioned logic to reason when in a probabilistic universe where that kind of reasoning is only an approximation, you can say that the universes you are talking about don't exist. They are such a small fraction of possible universes, that you can safely 'know' you aren't in any of them without checking.
This comment misses the point and just plays with the meaning of “know”. Not that epistemology isn’t interesting, but parent was referring to absolute certainty (contingent on your senses being accurate, of course).
Not sure which parent you mean, but if you mean my comment, I wasn't talking about absolute certainty at all. Rather, I was attempting a reductio ad absurdum against theories which talk about the probability of different universes within a multiverse. Nothing I said is an argument against probabilistic reasoning/knowledge limited to the confines of this universe only.
I don't understand your criticism, and I think you might have been mis-understanding my intent. The Everettian (Many Worlds) interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is itself at odds with the concept of absolute certainty. I am thinking about this in terms of E. T. Jaynes perspective that probability theory is an extension of traditional logic, and is required for reasoning about the MWI.
I'll also note that I did miss the point of the OPs comment, but I think not in the way you suggested.
skissane, after re-reading your comment, I realize I did mis-understand your point, but in a different way than the other commenter suggested.
I don't think MWI is assuming the global (multiverse-wide) probability distribution is similar to the local (this universe) one, but rather than local probabilities directly arise from the global probability distribution, they are the same. If you do an experiment (e.g. wavefunction collapse) the outcomes we observe in a given experiment are each a single sample from the global distribution. Some outcomes can be highly unlikely and give a skewed view of the global distribution, but a larger number of experiments will always converge to the global distribution.
> but a larger number of experiments will always converge to the global distribution
But don't there exist universes in which that fails to happen? Consider a binary quantum experiment for which the global distribution is 0.5 (we might call it a "quantum coin flip"). If I repeat the experiment often enough, will it always converge to the global distribution? Well, suppose I have an ordinary (non-quantum) fair coin, and flip it one million times – what is the odds of it coming up heads every time? If I've got my maths right, 2^(-10^6) – so beyond astronomically unlikely, its probability is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from zero.
And yet, if MWI is right, then if I flip a "fair quantum coin" one million times, there are universes (just as "real" as ours) in which it comes up heads every single time. 2^(-10^6) is unbelievably small, but it isn't zero. Indeed, no matter how many observations occur, the probability of getting them all wrong just by chance remains non-zero – and, according to the MWI, everything with a non-zero probability in the global distribution actually exists. If MWI is true, there is no limit to how misled some actually existent observers will be.
Hence, by MWI, there are universes, just as real as ours, containing observers who (purely by chance) are consistently misled by their experiments, and therefore conclude that the global distribution is very different from what it actually is. But, if such observers exist, how do we know we are not them? We can say that, by the global distribution, they must be exceedingly rare, so it is exceedingly unlikely we are among them – but that argument relies on the assumption that our locally observed distribution is a reliable guide to the global distribution, which is the very thing it is setting out to prove – and hence must fail as a circular argument. With that argument dismissed, we are left with this conclusion: if MWI is true, we cannot know what the global distribution actually is. That contradicts one of the foundational claims of MWI; therefore, reductio ad absurdum, MWI is false.
This is different from classical sceptical arguments "what if our senses mislead us?", because it argues (if MWI is true) that such misled observers will exist, and the only question is how do we know we are not among them. Classical sceptical arguments are a lot weaker because they are not arguing from the (assumed) actual existence of such deceived observers, only from the (even remote) abstract possibility of their existence. But, if MWI gives sceptical arguments a huge boost - isn't that in itself a good argument against MWI? It renders MWI a self-undermining theory, and theories which undermine themselves ultimately refute themselves.
One might save MWI from this argument by assuming there is some "minimum probability", such that only universes whose probability rises to that minimum actually exist – if all the "misleading" universes are beneath that probability cutoff, no misleading universes exist, so we who exist could not possibly belong to any of them. However, this solution seems rather reminiscent of Ptolemy's epicycles.
The person you are replying to isn't saying anything about the probability of individual events. They are talking about the probability of at least one of many events occurring, which does change with the number of events being considered
Indeed, but I think you might be misunderstanding what I said. Think of the universe as a nearly infinite number of dice rolls all independent and in parallel. Any possible rare combination of dice rolls will actually be happening constantly.
Right, but while it may only be a 1/6 chance that a single die roll will give you a six, rolling more and more dice eventually makes it a near-certainty that at least one will give you a six.
The odds of this group of people, on this day, finding this piece of the shuttle, are of course astronomically small.
The odds of some group out of millions of people, on some day out of ten thousand since the incident, finding some piece of debris out of thousands, are considerably higher.
This is the multiple-endpoints fallacy. You only notice the events that happened after the fact, you never notice everything that doesn't happen.
This is why it is dumb when people say "The odds against life arising at random is astronomical."
It did happen, therefore, the convoluted path to life wasn't what the skeptic speaker thinks it was.
Multiple-endpoints fallacy and overly anthropomorphizing reality also makes a fool out of the Drake Equation, and the idea of "The Great Filter" is dumb too.
Going on the evidence we have, it's certainly not impossible that our own planet (one out of something like 10^25 likely planets in the universe) happens to be the only one that life has arisen on, which I'd say qualifies as astronomical odds against for any random planet at least.
Right. The odds against intelligent, industrial life arising at this star in this galaxy were astronomical. The odds against it arising somewhere among trillions of stars and galaxies are much less so.
But I'm not so sure about that last. The Drake equation and Great Filter do handle the multiple-endpoints question correctly. They ask, with so many possible occurrences in the scale of the universe, why don't we see any of them?
No kidding. Actually, considering how mindblowingly huge but untouched the volume and area of our seas and seafloors are, "oceanically unlikely" is also a superlative I can get behind!
1.3 billion cubic km of water, the tallest mountain ranges and deepest canyons. Aside from occasional glimpses of the surface, it's forever out of sight and out of mind for nearly every person on the planet.
The Challenger flight path was approximately vertical and so the debris field was relatively close to shore and in shallow waters of the continental shelf.
Given what the documentary crew was up to, it seems probable the debris showed up on sonar and the dive team went down to check it out.
So it is not exactly a chance discovery in the deep Atlantic by tourists on holiday. It is well funded professionals discovering something that looks a lot like what they were looking for.
How far did the Challenger blow up off the coast? Maybe not that far. I bet the trajectory also could possibly bias towards the sea in case of an emergency for a less dramatic landing. Wouldn't want a shuttle landing on a building either obviously.
There's a lot found that very likely belongs to the airplane. It's just not a particularly sexy story. Most likely it's pilot murder-suicide, they did find a highly suspicious looking path in the pilot/copilot's flight sim. Iirc, during the handover from Malaysia to Vietnam ATCs, the pilot depressurizes the cabin, turns off transponders, turns around to avoid civilian radar, and once out of radar reach heads south across the ocean until the fuel runs out. Perhaps to have time to himself or maybe deliberately to not be found, out of shame.
It explains why the two main mysteries – why the initial search was a failure, and the lack of radio and transponder data.
It's also easy to see why authorities and airline operators want to silence it, especially if they have plausible deniability to do so. There is simply less prestige lost in a failed international search-and-rescue than a national airline pilot killing innocent people for god knows what reason.
I don't think airplane hulls are designed for more than 1 Atm of pressure differential between cabin and the outside; according to the wikipedia article [0] on cabin pressurization normal values are between 540 and 690 hPa pressure differential are normal.
If the cabin has an overpressure event, the hull might pop like a balloon, leading to a decompression event.
These seem to talk mostly about diving, where you breathe from a regulated air supply. I assume that air supply is not at 30-100x atmospheric pressure?
If the air supply wouldn't be at a slightly higher pressure than that, the air would get sucked out of your lungs as far as I understand.
This is why dive tanks run out way way faster the deeper you go (around 1 hour at 18 meters deep and around 10 minutes at 30+ meters out the top of my head).
Wow, thanks for that, that is a fantastic write-up, and a pretty compelling argument (at least to me) that the mystery of MH370 has been mostly "solved" (spoiler alert: all evidence points to a murder-suicide by pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah).
News showed that footage so many thousands of times over so many weeks, months, that I still hear the phrase in my head sometimes and I am really, really uncomfortable watching rocket launches even decades later.
It's just my assumption would be to not to get near it unless I knew for sure. The spacecraft would obviously be bombarded with huge amounts of radiation in space. Astronauts inside these vessels experience rather high doses of radiation. The question revolves around the materials used and whether they become irradiated or not and stay as such or not. I would assume that they would select materials that do not continuing radiating once back on Earth at a concerning level, but I don't know enough about materials to know that and this appears to be an external piece.
