autisticbisexualsokka:rykemasters:autie-commie:autisticnarset:maxiesatanofficial:I can’t believe bre
autisticbisexualsokka:rykemasters:autie-commie:autisticnarset:maxiesatanofficial:I can’t believe bread’s a social constructdamn sjws and their oxygenthis…is literally true. oxygen while having an essential component (two atoms bonded together each with eight protons, usually eight neutrons, and eight electrons) has been thought of differently even just 60 years ago and different people understand it differently than modern science does anyway like chemistry and quantum physics are just frameworks/tools to understand complex things so literally socially constructed… to be clear, this is our best guess given the evidence and i’m not about to claim psuedoscienctific b.s. is “equally valid” or w/e the question of when oxygen was “discovered” is actually used as an example by Thomas Kuhn to show that what constitutes a scientific discovery is largely socially constructed, because the various steps from “isolating oxygen but calling it by some other name and having completely wrong ideas about it” to “isolating oxygen, calling it by that name and being slightly less wrong about it but still having a conception of it that doesn’t have much to do with our modern conception of oxygen” until eventually getting to our modern understanding of what oxygen actually is, is a process that took literal centuries and can’t easily be pinpointed to a single person or time, and it raises the question of what we mean when we say that someone “discovered oxygen”.actual physical molecules of oxygen are obv not social constructs, but we have no way to perceive or talk about them that isn’t in some way socially constructed.Um. I’m sorry, but …“actual physical molecules of oxygen” is a social construct. Molecular (and atomic) theory is useful. It works. But we have no certainty that it’s actually true. We use it because using it gives us right answers, which is independent of the question of whether it correctly describes reality.The further you go into chemistry, the more everything turns out to be an equation rather than a physical thing. Like, “Where is this particle?”“Here’s a three-dimensional curve in subatomic space.”“But where on that curve is it at any given time? What path does it travel on that curve?”“No, you don’t understand. The curve is the particle.”I’m serious, I studied this stuff, I was good at understanding this stuff, and there are parts of it where the ability to conceptualize it just breaks down. There’s a good reason why it’s a handful of eccentric geniuses in each generation that can legitimately keep up with the most modern concepts (spoiler: I am not one of them, although I suspect I could have been if my circumstances had been auspicious enough).To fully illustrate how incomprehensible things can get, here are two of the most counterintuitive bits of atomic theory I’ve ever encountered.Protons (and neutrons and electrons) are interchangeable. Every proton is identical to every other proton, and likewise with neutrons and electrons. But the protons and neutrons that make up the nuclei of different kinds of atoms have different masses. Or, that’s maybe not actually true, but for that to not be true, the mass of the nucleus of an atom has to not be equal to the sum of the masses of all the protons and neutrons comprising the nucleus. Both premises are equally ridiculous, but one of them must be true to describe observed reality. (We generally go with the latter. The difference is called binding energy if you’re curious about this, but be warned, if you go looking this up, you’ll be straying into the neighborhood where General Relativity lives.)In quark theory, part of quantum mechanics, you imagine a particle as a string, and the quarks that make it up as the ends of the string, which is how you get to the understanding that you can’t isolate an individual quark by cracking a particle in half, because that would be like imagining a string with only one end. Texts will tell you this, and then with a perfectly straight typeface, go on to mention that some particles are made up of three quarks, compelling you to imagine a two-dimensional string with three ends. This is, terrifyingly, the best and most easily understood analogy for quarks.Bonus factoid: quantum mechanics is named for the fact that subatomic particles don’t quite make mathematical sense. Like, an electron can have a certain amount of energy x, or a certain other amount of energy y, and it can go from x to y, but it can never exist with any amount of energy between x and y. Since an electron’s distance from the nucleus of its atom is directly proportional to its energy level, this means that it must be able to move from distance x to distance y without ever occupying the intervening space. Yes, electrons teleport.So, in conclusion, if you think a molecule as we understand it is anything other than a social construct, I’m not sure what to tell you, because none of the working theory makes any sense if you assume it describes a physical reality. -- source link
#man