No it’s not!
Yes, it’s called a poppy seed.
XKCD adjacent – latest What If video:
Brian
Someone will have to explain the crossword one to me.
Crosswords love to use short words that have lots of vowels, like oleo and epee as well as using “e” things like a shopping website site is for “etail”, and modern people going on “edates”.
I don’t believe those specific artists have any particular crossword connection.
Certainly cruciverbalists have gotten a lot of mileage out of Swift’s ERAS tour, but that was already a valid word, and Swift just made it a bit easier to clue.
I think that it’s just that they’re all popular enough artists that their album names would be well-known.
light is some in-between thing that’s both wave and particle
More correctly, light is neither wave nor particle, because it fails to meet the definitions of either.
It’d be fine if it were “Some people say that light is a wave, because it behaves like a wave under certain experimental conditions, but other people say that light is a particle, because it behaves like a particle under certain experimental conditions”.
Depends on what definitions you’re using for both.
Light behaves like particles when it’s emitted or absorbed, and like waves in-between. Which led to my question in another thread over whether photons “exist” while in transit. Do photons exist? - #17 by Lumpy
We don’t bother with that for anything else, though. Do we say that water waves aren’t really waves, just that they behave like waves under certain experimental conditions (like length scales)?
IMO, the answer is that photons are both waves and particles, and that we used to think those were mutually exclusive states but now we realize they aren’t.
It’s easy enough for me to conceptualize photons as particles whose wavelike nature is due to uncertainty about their location, which follows a wavelike distribution. But how does one do the reverse: regard light as waves that for some reason occasionally act quantized?
If anything, I’d be inclined to call the wavelike nature more fundamental, with the particles an emergent property from that. But you really, really need to start with precise definitions of all of the terms to make the question even sensible.
I think this metric / target duality fits in very nicely with our recent aside into wave / particle duality.
Of course our aside was prompted by Randall’s pop-up in his last comic. Makes me wonder if he set them up that way on purpose, or stumbled into it?
Why The Foundation had to be kept a secret.