I'm a plasma physicist, and personally I love weird results - new mysteries to solve! That said, there are a wide range of personality types out there. And I would also be extremely surprised if the correct solution to some particular weird result was, for instance, that the Maxwell equations are broken for that regime (other than expected quantum corrections, e.g. the Schwinger limit).
The M87 supermassive blackhole is thousands of times as massive as Sagittarius A*, but since Sagittarius A* is a lot closer their emission rings appear roughly the same size in the sky (42 μas vs 51 μas). Both have already been imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope
If you're worried about bad pixels or noise, it seems like there is an easy fix: point it in a direction specified by some angles theta & phi, wait long enough to accumulate light from distant faint objects (high redshift galaxies etc), then shift Webb's orientation by a small amount to theta+delta_1 & phi+delta_2, which will have a significant overlap with the original image, and after taking the 2nd image check to make sure that all the objects have shifted over together by the same amount...
> Outside of the very few computer scientists working on novel algorithms,
It's a quite a bit broader than that: for instance most of science and engineering is heavily supported by simulations (very useful when the system you're considering doesn't have perfect spherical or cylindrical symmetry), and there is still tons of algorithm development going on. The world is vast, and thus so is the domain of programming.
And halfway through 2026, AI has become a very interesting and helpful partner in algo research too. If it does continue to pull away and zip off to ASI land, hopefully we can leverage the resulting magical technology and catch back up with it...
> It's a quite a bit broader than that: for instance most of science and engineering is heavily supported by simulations (very useful when the system you're considering doesn't have perfect spherical or cylindrical symmetry),
That isn't the vast majority of traditional software engineering work, and arguably is better called applied physics or applied science. Super interesting though - and definitely uses programming as a core skill/tool - but it leans heavily into traditional engineering and science.
> That isn't the vast majority of traditional software engineering work, and arguably is better called applied physics or applied science.
Fair enough, and yeah definitions are always going to be somewhat fuzzy. Still it seems safe to assume there are also a lot of novel things going on in games, embedded, finance, AI itself of course... Generally I can't help but feel that we have only dipped our toes into the vast ocean of program space, and I'm curious what else is out there.
That's not the point being made: the article clearly states that those areas did not previously get hit by storms at this level. Climate change is making hurricanes stronger and wetter, so even though they've been a phenomenon for as long as humans have lived there that doesn't mean that the frequency of damaging storms over an area can't change in a way which makes it worse for agriculture. There's an inflation-adjusted list of weather events which caused the equivalent of a billion dollars or more in damages, and the upward trend is pretty clear — it's like dismissing the impact of the machine gun because people used to have long rifles.
You get a similar problem with saltwater intrusion where, yes, it's never not been a phenomenon but now it's affecting a lot more people than it used to:
> That's not the point being made: the article clearly states that those areas did not previously get hit by storms at this level.
This is the conventional wisdom, and it is completely falsified by the actual data that I linked to. I wrote a python script to go process and plot it, and there has been zero increase in Cat 1, 2, 3, or 4 storms hitting the US since 1851 (there are only 4 Cat 5s listed total).
This is obtuse. The assertion was a deviation in the areas of Florida experiencing hurricane penetration. This is a localized effect. You’re discussing the gross effects of an entire nation, in this comment, of an entire state in the prior. However no one is discussing Florida or the US. They’re discussing the orange growing regions of Florida, which is a region that has not historically had hurricanes, but has had them recently.
It’s like saying the UV radiation hitting the earth is the same as it was historically so therefore an ozone hole in Australia didn’t exist and cataracts can’t be higher there.
So what you are saying is that, yes there has not been an overall increase in hurricanes hitting the US over the last 175 years, but climate change has been specifically and precisely steering the hurricanes towards the orange growing regions of Florida in recent years, and is therefore to blame for the crop failures.
You have to diagnose a problem correctly in order to have a chance at solving it.
I’m asserting nothing other than the article asserted the pattern of hurricanes changed to target the orange growing region more often and that you’re using gross geographic data to discuss an orthogonal point. However you make it seem like the assertion is nature intentionally targeting orange groves rather than shifts in patterns implies patterns shifted from where they were to where they were not hitting - this is definitional in the concept of a pattern shift. Your evidence for your assertions are unrelated to that topic of pattern shift, indicating you’ve misunderstood the problem to diagnose.
It’s great you’re bringing data to the table but you’re overstating its validity to the assertion dramatically.
Finally I’d note you’re asserting an analysis you’ve done without providing the data, method, or any reproducibility. So while you might personally feel you’ve done an accurate job, your assertions are citing exclusively yourself, against hidden methods, making it of no more quality than a puff piece article citing research without citation that you’re arguing against.
The analysis is easy: copy and paste the data from that link into a new text file, then write a python script that goes through it and counts the number of Cat 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 hurricanes that make landfall per year (the "Highest Saffir-Simpson U.S. Category" column), and then make the plots: I used gnuplot. You can then do fits to the data if you'd like, but the flat trend lines over the last 175 years are obvious.
I encourage you to not trust me and to do it yourself, but I'm also happy to share my script, let me know.
As far as the hurricane trajectory trend lines go, they are clearly highly stochastic: check out e.g. both the spaghetti plot predictions for various storms from previous years, and ask google for a map of where they grow (grew...) oranges in Florida.
By the way, I know I saw someone point out the same data at least 5 years ago - probably more like 10.
At some point the discourse changed from “just because it’s a cold winter doesn’t mean that global warming isn’t happening” to “every hurricane/wildfire is due to climate change” and it’s ridiculous.
I honestly think a lot of young people don’t realize that while climate change is probably real our weather and variability hasn’t changed that much - yet, at least.
> I honestly think a lot of young people don’t realize that while climate change is probably real our weather and variability hasn’t changed that much - yet, at least.
"Much" is one of those vague words, where it's true and false depending on your meaning.
If you live on any of the transition zones between climates, as I did growing up, it is directly visible: My experience of snow in the south coast of the UK was almost entirely in the early years of my childhood, and family photos of my older siblings show that they had even more than me. My parents had experiences of even deeper and longer cold, with ponds freezing completely solid, not just a layer of ice on the top.
I can easily imagine someone who lives in the parts of the US where all the winter urban snow photos come from, may not notice the loss of a 1-2 centimetres out of 100cm of snowfall, but when it's your last centimetre, it's much easier to spot.
> Do actual climate scientists claim we're getting more, and stronger, hurricanes now than we did before?
The general line is that climate change has probably increased the amount of rainfall associated with hurricanes, possibly the severity of hurricanes (due to sea level rise and warmer water) but there isn't good evidence that it has increased the frequency of hurricanes.
I've heard climate scientists that describe climate change as a "more energy in the system" phenomenon. The overall system for now is mostly the same, but every event inside of it has "more energy" than it had before.
For hurricanes this seems especially problematic because the historical categorization system is based on radar-observed width of the storm. "More energy" means that the categories stay the same over time, but every category is getting worse (more rainfall, heavier/faster winds, further travel, higher damage).
As with so many statistical phenomenon, it's also a reminder to be careful what metrics you are trying to compare. Comparing just the hurricane categories to historic values may just be the exact sort of wrong metric, for these "more energy" concerns.
Ah, sorry. I suppose it is only fair to mention using the wrong metrics and getting the exact metric wrong myself. Today it is radar-observed wind speed and historically there were other less efficient means to test or at least estimate wind speed.
The original point still stands that Hurricanes are defined by only the one metric and other metrics have room to grow bigger as the category stays the same:
> The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale is a 1 to 5 rating based only on a hurricane's maximum sustained wind speed. This scale does not take into account other potentially deadly hazards such as storm surge, rainfall flooding, and tornadoes.
Yeah, exploring data is always interesting, sometimes super interesting, and it's also healthy to approach things with a mixture of open-mindedness and skepticism - a sort of zen habit you can get better at with practice. Ideas serve me, not the other way around.
Hurricanes do more dollars in damage because we're richer and there's more capital near the coast.
The idea that climate change caused hurricanes which spread insects is not impossible but seems unlikely. I don't think the statistical methods exist to prove it.
The meta reason is a missunderstanding of nature. Even the industry basically considers it a tamed beast of burden, while environmentalist usually consider it as a sort of gaia godess raped by industrial mankind. Nature is war and fast adaption of wha works. The trees war the grass for shade. And every mono culture, be they cloned crab or planted orchard, is a giant dice inviting disaster with every yearly throw. And on that scale adaption and transportation yields rewards for those animals and plants transporting anti-man properties fast. We are running a adveserial breeding program for anti-human critters. And when they exist, as they do and did in all places with longstanding human populations and agriculture- they take the invite on speed dial. We simply are dragged back into the eternal conflict. We always where a part of nature and this is how it feels like to be a part of that. Counter measures? Lets ask the statisticians.. anything that eats dice throws of the advesaries.
How does that contradict the article? It seems like it supports it if those were the events which helped harm the previously-strong citrus industry - those storms are part of what hit at the peak, starting the decline.
Did you not see the article claim that the grove areas hadn't been hit by storms before/as big as some listed in the last decade?
Just not true with their phrasing.
edit:
for clarity, the author referenced 2017+ vintage hurricanes as if nothing of their intensity had hit before: Irma (2017), Ian (2022), Idalia (2023), Helene (2024), and Milton (2024). None of these got beyond cat 4. Meanwhile there were certainly other hurricanes that were cat4 that hit the groves in 2004-05.
Plasma physicist here, I haven't tried 5.4 yet, but in general I am very impressed with the recent upgrades that started arriving in the fall of 2025: for tasks like manipulating analytic systems of equations, quickly developing new features for simulation codes, and interpreting and designing experiments (with pictures) they have become much stronger. I've been asking questions and probing them for several years now out of curiosity, and they suddenly have developed deep understanding (Gemini 2.5 <<< Gemini 3.1) and become very useful. I totally get the current SV vibes, and am becoming a lot more ambitious in my future plans.
If we don't need plasma physicists anymore then we probably have fusion reactors or something, which seems like a fine trade. (In reality we're going to want humans in the loop for for the forseeable future)
In a hypothetical pure GR universe what you're saying is correct, but our universe also includes QM and that makes BH physics much more subtle, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(physics) and we can't state things with such certainty...
In pure GR an infalling observer will sail past the EH and not notice anything unusual since spacetime is locally Minkowski (ignoring tidal forces, which is valid e.g. for humans falling into supermassive BHs). If the (GR+QM) firewall hypothesis is correct (a big if), an infalling observer will instead be promptly incinerated within a Planck's length of the EH. The intuition one builds from a pure GR understanding of BHs may be dramatically wrong, not just at the singularity, but all the way out at the EH.
> If the (GR+QM) firewall hypothesis is correct (a big if)
A big if indeed, but if that hypothesis is correct, then the GR solution that applies is no longer the standard black hole solution. The "firewall" is not vacuum--more precisely, it does not have a vanishing stress-energy tensor. Which means "the intuition one builds from a pure GR understanding" for the "firewall" case will need to be a pure GR understanding of a different solution from the standard BH, and of course such an understanding can be perfectly correct.
In other words, if you're going to talk about a "firewall" solution, then saying "well, GR doesn't model that correctly because it's not a standard GR black hole" is simply wrong. GR can model lots of other things besides standard (vacuum solution) black holes. You just have to use the correct GR model for the actual stress-energy tensor that is present. Of course statements about a standard vacuum black hole will not be correct for a different non-vacuum solution; but that is not contradicting anything I said, because the post I was responding to was assuming a standard vacuum black hole, and my statement was correct for that case.
The real question is whether such a "firewall" model, with a nonzero stress-energy tensor, would even have an event horizon. As far as I know nobody has actually answered that question; the treatments I have seen have simply assumed that there is one without taking into account the fact that the "firewall" stress-energy tensor is non-vanishing. If there is an event horizon in such a model, then my statement would still be correct for that model, since my statement was based on general properties of event horizons.
Hi greysphere, you are definitely correct that one primary thing preventing velocity of the electron from exceeding than the speed of light is the presence of gamma in the relativistic force law, aka \partial_t (m_e \gamma v ) = q_e(E + v \times B), although the LHS doesn't quite equal \gamma m_e a, since \gamma also depends on v...
In general I think it's fine to use Coulomb's law as an approximation in this case because the proton is much heavier than the electron and so we can just stay in the proton's reference frame and let the electron fall in from infinity (and we're ignoring QM and just doing relativistic EM here). We could also switch to a tritium nucleus and make it a bit better of an approximation, or indeed add a whole bunch more neutrons and get lucky that they don't beta decay to make it an arbitrarily good one. It is true that if the proton starts moving that you will no longer have a pure Coulomb field with respect to the original reference frame, as after a Lorentz boost the E field gets squished into the transverse direction somewhat, and you'll gain a B field swirling around the proton...
Staying with the frozen proton approx, if we plug numbers in we get quite a bit of energy: set the proton radius r_p to 1E-15, and we get U = q_e^2 / ( 4 \pi \eps_0 r_p ) ~ 1.4 MeV, or a gamma of about 4, so yeah, it would be moving faster than c if we stayed with Newtonian mechanics. But there's another wrinkle: the 1.4 MeV of liberated potential energy won't all go into the electron's relativistic kinetic energy, because it is accelerating like crazy, especially in the final femtometers, and that acceleration (essentially Bremsstrahlung, although its not braking here) will generate an intense pulse of EM radiation as well - a decent fraction of the 1.4 MeV will go into that instead. You could perhaps estimate how much using the Larmor formula (in general calculating this radiation reaction force precisely becomes very complex, because the excitation of the EM wave modifies the acceleration, which modifies the excitation of the EM wave etc... And, now looking on Wikipedia, I'm not surprised to see that the first QM version of the calculation was done by Sommerfeld).
So yeah, the electron will zip through the proton, with much of the potential energy converted to an EM pulse that zips off to infinity, and so the electron is now bound to the proton, and will continue to zig zag back and forth, emitting more radiation until it comes to a rest inside the proton. So yeah, we do need QM after all.
Thanks for the explanation of some of the interactions I was missing! It's amazing the complexity of what's basically the simplest setup one could think of.
This is extremely unlikely unless the relative motion is very slow, or, to put it another way, the total center of mass energy is very close to the rest energy of electron + proton, so there is a significant probability amplitude for capture into a bound hydrogen atom.
The post I originally responded to was obviously not considering such a case since it claimed the electron could exceed the speed of light.
If the electron starts with zero energy at infinity (e.g. a parabolic orbit, a natural default assumption), and some of the potential energy is converted into free EM radiation due to acceleration of the electron as it is falling down the potential well, then it will become bound to the proton. My reading of phkahler's original statement is that the electron will wind up going faster than the speed of light (which is incorrect, due to gamma) due to falling down the potential well, and not due to having non-zero kinetic energy at infinity...
> If the electron starts with zero energy at infinity...it will become bound to the proton
Even if that's true (I'm not sure it always is--see below), that case is extremely rare. A much more common case is Bremsstrahlung, which you mentioned upthread--and as the Wikipedia article you referenced notes, the electron in this process starts out free and remains free after the radiation is emitted; it does not become bound to the proton.
> My reading of phkahler's original statement is that the electron will wind up going faster than the speed of light (which is incorrect, due to gamma) due to falling down the potential well, and not due to having non-zero kinetic energy at infinity...
That may have been the original intent, yes (and, as you note, it's wrong because it neglects the gamma factor). However, even in that case, what matters is not the electron's energy at infinity in the proton's rest frame, but its energy in the center of mass frame. If the electron is really falling in from far enough away that the relativistic gamma factor is relevant, which is what was implied by pkahler's original statement, then its energy in the center of mass frame (or more precisely the center of momentum frame, since in relativity you have to take momentum and energy into account) will be relativistic, i.e., large enough that it's by no means guaranteed that it will emit enough energy in radiation to become bound to the proton.
