Eh, is this some kind of trick question? Or a trick question on yourself? Don’t mean to be dismissive though also don’t really care if I am, but one of the basic tenets of computer science and the deeper math “below” that is that all non-trivial outputs of programs are not determinable without running the program in question. That’s Rice’s Theorem and it’s a generalization of the halting problem first formalized by Alan Turing.

There is not single word for it, I guess. “Undecidability,” perhaps. But Rice’s Theorem and its various proofs are what’s being sought here. There is no possibility of omniscience for us in this realm. You might write the sim, but you still don’t know what it’ll do without setting it in motion and taking a peek. That’s all that is possible (even in principle).

If aliens and humans exist right at this moment but are 500 million light years apart do they exist at the same time?

There is no privileged or even quantifiable position of simultaneity of non-shared light cones. “At the same time” is meaningless over such distances.

All of those answers are so bad and wrong. Dang.

Objective space and time does not exist. This question is like asking, “What color would a ball be if it were some color that doesn’t exist and cannot exist?” It’s just, fundamentally, a bad question. Intuition does not work here. It’s so easy to be wrong because most people rely on the intuitive answer, which is in fact not even close to accurate.

The top-voted answer is wildly incorrect and so is every other answer there. Asking about simultaneity in this case is asking a meaningless question with no answer at all.

True. I read more medical papers than nearly all doctors and it’s not even close. Of course, it’s possible to go really wrong here if you are not rigorous. But that’s also true of credentialed scientists. However, it’s not all that hard to know a whole lot more than an “expert” if you study that topic intensively — because they will not have done that.

Many scientists and doctors want to be worshipped rather than to find the truth. And that is a real problem.

Motherfucker, you are smoking crack:

That’s the James Webb Space Telescope, for those not in the know. Much more wondrous than any cathedral IMO.

Žižek: Quantum physics shows reality is incomplete.

I would not say “incomplete.” I’d just call our reality “granular” as well as “non-local.” That makes it feel incomplete, but the proof of the completeness of reality is that there is the ability to perceive it — or anything.

I mostly agree with Žižek, though, especially his disdain for superdeterminism. It’s too much to go into here, but a lot of physicists absolutely despise that we do not — as far as we can tell — live in a deterministic universe. Superdeterminism is a way to sneak determinism in again, with no evidence at all. It’s bunk and fraudulent. Sabine Hossenfelder is a major voice attempting to grift that hokum theory back into physics, but don’t believe it — the evidential basis for it is “I wish this were true, so it must be.”

Also, Rovelli (which Žižek mentions) is a terrible hack. He does not understand how entanglement works at all. He’s atrocious and his books are chock full of factually-incorrect nonsense (please don’t read them).

To a photon, the universe is the same size it was when it first began.

And that explains a lot about a lot of other things.

Here is Matt Strassler’s far more technical explanation of how the Higgs Field imparts mass.

There is math, but it’s not that hard to understand the gist of it. It is 100% technically accurate. But it is by no means easy overall.

Unlike some theories or areas of inquiry, you can’t really understand any of the Standard Model or quantum theory unless you understand all of it. That makes it a very tough nut to crack.

It took me a decade of studying all of it nearly every day to get to where I could make sense of it in some cohesive way.

How the Higgs Field (Actually) Gives Mass to Elementary Particles.

This is just too simplified to be worth anything. It doesn’t work like that. These metaphors are frickin’ useless. They make you dumber than you were before.

I know Strassler is a physicist so he definitely understands how the Higgs Field and how the Higgs Mechanism works (I’ve read other things of his more complex than this), so it’s not lack of knowledge. In trying to make what’s happening intelligible to the non-trained, though, he just makes it too basic to be worth anything.

To offer a better explanation, the Higgs Field is the only field that has a non-zero equilibrium constant value, or to put it another way it has a non-zero vacuum expectation value — unlike all other known fields. This means that in (notionally) empty space, it can still “operate” on other types of particles (field excitations) in that space. Thus, having a non-zero vacuum expectation value means the Higgs interacts with other fields and gives previously-massless particle mass by two different methods (not important to know about here). So why doesn’t the photon gain mass by interacting with the Higgs field? Heh, well, it’s because the model would be inaccurate, basically. Also,the Higgs field has no color charge (related to the strong force) and is not electrically charged, so photons can’t “see” it. Thus, they remain massless¹

There is a much deeper, but much, much better explanation that involves symmetry breaking and the linear combinations of the four SM gauge fields, but you must have a lot of grounding in a lot of different areas and a very big brain to understand that. But that’s just to give you breadcrumbs to follow, if you are of a mind to do so.

Back to the topic at hand, though. The very short explanation of why the Higgs field gives mass to most elementary particles (the gauge bosons, quarks and leptons) is because its vacuum — or resting — state is one of excitation. Again, quite the opposite of other fields where their resting state is zero energy. For our purposes here, I’m going to be a a bit circularly-referential as the real deeper explanation is just too much for almost anyone reading this, but the Higgs field gives mass to excitations (particles) of those fields that can “see” it. It does this by donating a little energy to them, and in this universe energy equals mass². And it’s as simple as that.

That said, most mass in the universe does not come from the Higgs field/mechanism. The Higgs just explains why particles that should be massless in the Standard Model have intrinsic mass. Most mass in the universe arises from the strong interaction in the nucleus, which is not related to Higgs directly.

Isn’t that fun?

1. More technically, only particles with matching left and right hand terms in their quantum formulae have intrinsic mass. The photon exhibits chirality and is a one-handed particle, so to speak, so has no mass.
2. For particles possessing rest frames. Photons and gluons do not.