Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2021 January 5

= January 5 =

The loopholes that form the galaxy part 3
Entropy reduction can only be used on the earth, biological, because biological genes control entropy reduction. Even if the entropy of the universe can decrease, its probability is relatively low. According to the law of entropy increase, the longer the time, the more serious (degeneration) from order to disorder, that is, stars with energy emit energy outward. This shows that the universe cannot evolve, there is only one creator. Before the evolution of the solar system, the distribution of energy and matter was even, just like a cup of hot coffee, and then evolved into the current solar system with regular energy and matter distribution. This process violates experimental phenomena. After the Big Bang, energy and matter spread outward. Where did the matter and energy form galaxies? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fluenceerr11001 (talk • contribs) 11:49, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * So, you started your question with a number of demonstrably false statements, so I'm not sure what to do with all of that. You don't seem to be here so much to ask a question as to put your misunderstandings on display, and then to draw false conclusions from your misunderstandings in some misguided attempt to prove how much smarter you are than everyone else who understands these things better than you do.  If there is a genuine question in your rant, it is: "Where did the matter and energy form galaxies?"   That can be answered in a strict sense of "everywhere", since galaxies are the fundamental building block of the Universe, and we see galaxies in all directions in the observable universe.  In terms of other aspects of galaxy formation, such as how and when they formed, that question can be answered by starting in the Wikipedia article Galaxy formation and evolution.  -- Jayron 32 13:36, 5 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The flaw of that article is this. In order to form gravity so that galaxies can form, entropy must be reduced. The synthesis process violates the law of entropy increase. Scientists say that entropy is minimal after the Big Bang. According to the law of entropy, the smallest is the most regular.Everything is arranged. Scientists just continue to hide flaws in the theory of the universe. 5 January 2021 (UTC)Fluenceerr11001


 * Scientists don't hide flaws in the theories. What is happening is you have taken an incomplete understanding of the theories, and drawn bad conclusions based on those theories, and then used those bad conclusions to claim that the people who actually study this stuff are wrong.  This is a form of the Dunning-Kruger effect and I highly suggest that you take a step back from your own assertiveness over your own righteousness on the issue, and trust that the people who work in this area aren't just making this stuff up to mess with you.  They really do know what they are talking about.  In the case of entropy, it's not an easy concept, and your facile explanations of it here are simply wrong.  I don't know what to do except tell you that.  Entropy is difficult to pin down with simple explanations, and the conclusions you've drawn about it simply do not follow from either the theory or observations.  It's just simply a mess.  I'd suggest you start with Introduction to entropy and understand that even the word entropy itself is used in different parts of physics (statistical thermodynamics, information theory, classical thermodynamics, cosmology, etc.) to mean slightly different and not always interchangeable ideas.  Just know that if your conclusion is "this one law here means all of science is wrong" than you're doing it wrong.  What it means is that your understanding of that law, and of the theories in question, are incorrect.  It is not the rest of humanity that gets this incorrect.  Just you.  Look to educate yourself on this, not foist your own bad ideas on others. -- Jayron 32 14:40, 5 January 2021 (UTC)


 * There are too many words in that article, and I see dizziness, then you can help me solve this problem? Scientists say that at the beginning of the universe, entropy was the smallest and most irregular. So why does the law of entropy say that entropy is the smallest and most regular? 8 January 2021 (UTC)Fluenceerr11001


 * There are a raft of very interesting open questions related to the beginning of the universe, and entropy does play a role in them. Something had to get the universe to expand from a very dense and homogeneous state to what we see today. You might find arrow of time to be interesting. Once inflation kicked in, things are pretty well-understood. The quantum randomness present at that instant (baryon acoustic oscillations) got blown up to enormous size along with the universe, "seeding" the resultant non-uniform distribution of matter. Everything since then has just been the result of the fundamental forces playing out, as denser parts of the universe gravitationally attract other matter to them. --47.152.93.24 (talk) 20:46, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The common phenomenon is that ice turns into water, and there is also a random propelling water back into ice. However, this probability is small and can be ignored, so it like the universe. right? 8 January 2021 (UTC)Fluenceerr11001

What aerosol can will give the best chance of killing a big spider that's close to escape?
Inspired by a dream where I sprayed a ~3/5ths inch body length one with Barbasol to try to slow it enough to smack it before it escaped. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:10, 5 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I was going to say "insecticide spray", but I realized that I don't actually know if insecticide kills spiders. --Iloveparrots (talk) 14:13, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Why kill them? They are harmless and can be scooped up with a dustpan and brush then gently put outdoors. Dream on.... and insecticides aren't licensed for use on spiders (except things called spider mites). Mike Turnbull (talk) 14:18, 5 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I rarely kill them. That's one of the reasons I don't know whether insecticide kills spiders. --Iloveparrots (talk) 14:23, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Barbosol might work on a tarantula, if you're planning to give it a shave. There are pesticides made specifically for spiders, either because their breathing mechanism is different from insects, or maybe because they can sell more products that way. I used to hear that hairspray makes a pretty good insecticide because it renders them incapable of movement as it dries. In America, the only dangerous spiders we hear about are the black widow and the brown recluse. Obviously, there are dangerous spiders elsewhere in the world, such as the banana spider which is also quite large. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:03, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * And in America there's a lot more than 2 species that make annoying webs and shit. A small one bit my finger once in the woods and I barely felt something after a gap of nothing. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:18, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * 1) Yes, spiders use a very different mechanism for breathing than do insects. 2) Even the widow and recluse aren't as dangerous as people make out. Not to mention that "brown recluse bites" are often reported in areas where no viable populations of such are found. Here in NC, I once had a student whose child was diagnosed as having been bitten by a recluse. After finding out that the spider is NOT found here, she went to another doctor. The child had a staph infection. ---Khajidha (talk) 12:13, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed. There haven't ever been any cases of actual brown recluse bites outside of the central Great Plains, and even then the bites are rare (brown recluses only bite a person very rarely, they're not aggressive and even harder to get to bite even when provoked), envenomation rarer still, and negative reactions to the venom even rarer.  There are a lot of (incompetent) doctors who diagnose any idiopathic skin lesions as "brown recluse bites", even in geographies where the brown recluse has never been found.  Even the black widow, which while it does produce a rather mild neurotoxin and can be rarely deadly, most people experience a full recovery from such bites with no long-term effects.  Black widows are also fairly reclusive spiders, but they build their webs in predictable locations, and if you know what you are looking for and exercise a modicum of care, like not sticking your hand in places without checking first, they can often be avoided and removed before they can bite. Other spiders do bite, but their bites are not terribly problematic.  -- Jayron 32 15:14, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Here are some ideas of products to kill spiders. I will, however, echo what the above people all note: other than being a minor annoyance for making webs that make our houses look messy, spiders themselves are with very very few exceptions harmless to humans, and often beneficial to have around, because they often eat the things which are harmful to humans.  -- Jayron 32 14:43, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

All attempts to rid the Natural History Museum of Helsinki of the most dangerous of the venomous recluse spiders have failed, and it's also rather futile to try to get rid of a single ordinary spider, because the global spider density is 131 spiders per square meter. Count Iblis (talk) 14:35, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

Why CV Raman awarded Nobel prize for scattering effect?
Peter Higgs predicted bosons then ATLAS experiment detected in 2012, then Nobel prize awarded to him.

But in case of Scattering effect was predicted before by Adolf Smekal. But still CV Raman awarded with Nobel prize for discovery of scattering effect Rizosome (talk) 18:05, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Just to note that the ATLAS experiment and CMS experiment at the LHC detected the Higgs boson. LIGO detected gravitational waves. Dja1979 (talk) 18:52, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

I edited please answer my question. Rizosome (talk) 19:32, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Did the Nobel committee give an explanation at the time? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:51, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * No one had nominated the poor man, and I could find no evidence suggesting that Raman or the Nobel committee were even aware of Smekal's work. --Lambiam 20:21, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Our article Raman scattering suggests there is some dispute between Russian scientists and Raman. It mentions Smekal but doesn't mention any concerns of his contributions being unrecognised. Nil Einne (talk) 11:04, 6 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Look, we don't have to mince words here - the Nobel Prize is awarded by the Nobel Prize committee, who make no secret that they exercise editorial control over their choice to award their own prize. In the case of the Nobel Committee for Physics, a team of experts evaluate a lot of sources to determine merit, at their own discretion, and answerable to no one else: they are careful in the way they word their prize awards, essentially stating that in their opinion a particular individual or group of people have made important contributions in physics.
 * If other people misinterpret the accolade, that's unfortunate. The award of a Nobel prize is not an indelible or uncontroversial attestation about precedence (e.g. "who discovered it first"); nor about sole attribution ("to whom does all the credit belong"); nor uniqueness ("who is the only person who discovered it"); nor about novelty (e.g. "work that entirely took place between January and December 1929" has no special eligibility for the 1930 prize); nor about correctness (the Nobel committee cares about impact, which relates to scientific correctness, but is not identical); nor about longevity, nor profitability, nor utility, nor any other thing that popular consciousness may wish to attach to the coattails of the prestigious prize.  The prize is simply a statement that some specific individual made an important contribution, and insofar as we trust the subjective judgement Nobel committee, this individual ranks highly as among the most important contributions.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1930 was awarded to Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him."
 * It's really that simple. There exists an audience of people - even here on Wikipedia - an audience comprising people who are physicists, and they see these same words, and they think ... "hm ... how fascinating that he wrote a simple scattering relation that is novel - unlike all the other scattering equations I ever done seen!"  (After all, we're scientists, not grammarians). And these physicists chuckle smugly to themselves, knowing that Sir Raman made their life a little better because he impactfully used math to explain a tiny detail in the world in a way that is categorically different from all the other explanations they've ever seen (which is a lot, because this is, after all a community who spends a disproportionate amount of time studying scattering equations, instead of playing games with grammar or footballs).  The audience of people who understand exactly what that sentence means is a lot tinier than the broader audience, comprised of non-physicists who haven't written enough scattering equations to care about any of their variants... let alone to evaluate whose variant was the most impactful - and a sizable fraction are, well, simple folk who just think, "woah, that scientist done invented Raman scattering and I bet he got rich and famous from that extremely huge amount of Nobel prize money."  In the inner monologue of most physicists, the vox populi is pronounced in a hillbilly accent, which is in no way an indictment of the general public's education-level, because even a scattering equation sounds more interesting when it is enunciated in a slow Georgia drawl.
 * So it really does not matter whether Sir Raman was the first person who wrote out an equation. After all, the physics was happening long before any human was writing out explanatory equations for it.  The only relevant matter here is that Sir Raman's work was more impactful to the community of people who collectively inform the opinions of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
 * Nimur (talk) 14:28, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Minor side quibble: one can say/write "Sir Chandrasekhara (Venkata) Raman", or "Sir Chandrasekhara", but never "Sir Raman". See Knight Bachelor. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.1905} 2.122.56.237 (talk) 14:55, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Quibble about your quibble: one obviously can say/write "Sir Raman" (see, I just did it myself), it is simply not consistent with the rules set by those who created the honor. --Khajidha (talk) 16:30, 6 January 2021 (UTC)"
 * For "can" please read "may" :-). {the poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.56.237 (talk) 19:16, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Given that "may" has the meaning of "possibly" as well as that of "allowed", that doesn't really help.--Khajidha (talk) 19:52, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Waveform analysts have long been enemies of the aristocracy. Nimur (talk) 17:38, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I really love this explanation, Nimur. As someone who actually works in the field of Raman spectroscopy, obviously I find CV Raman's work quite important, but I rarely use his mathematical formalism. I much more often use the work of, say, Albrecht, which is probably more influential in the field today than Raman directly. If CV Raman hadn't gotten the Nobel Prize, I could see it easily going to Albrecht, and then someone would come along and ask why Albrecht deserved it when Raman had setup the groundwork. --OuroborosCobra (talk) 16:01, 6 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The short-short answer if Nimur's answer is TLDR for you is that the Nobel Prize Committee decided that Raman should get the award that year for the reason they explained in their prize award announcement. There is no other criteria for the award other than "The Committee decided he deserved it".  There is no functional way to explain it further than that, and there is no way to claim that someone more deserving was snubbed; that's a subjective personal opinion unique to every person, and has no bearing on changing already past events.  If you think someone else deserved it more, that is your right to believe that, but that belief does not change the fact that Raman won the award, and the committee justified the award with a clear and unambiguous rationale at the time it was given.  -- Jayron 32 14:59, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed, the only real set criteria is that the awardee has to be alive. As someone working in Raman spectroscopy, I'd really hoped that van Duyne was going to get a Nobel Prize for his work discovering and pioneering surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, but that sadly did not happen before his death in 2019. I've met his colleague, George Schatz, and I'm sorry that I never had the change to meet van Duyne himself. --OuroborosCobra (talk) 16:01, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I interpret the original question not so much as asking why Raman got the Nobel Prize, but why Smekal did not at least share in the glory. If the Committee was unaware of Smekal's work, there is no need to invoke the discretion of the Committee as a (non-)explanation. --Lambiam 17:21, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Regardless, there are no rules requiring them to give the award to any person for any reason. There are thousands and thousands of people who are doing active research in Physics at any one time; the Nobel committee is under no obligation to justify not giving the Nobel prize to each of them individually.  Indeed, I can't think of a single time when they ever published a rationale explaining not awarding the prize to anyone, for any reason.  The information you seek does not seem to exist.  -- Jayron 32 17:34, 6 January 2021 (UTC)