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Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by ISL on Friday May 25, 2018 @02:08PM (#17156384)
Most of us natively write anti-clickbait titles.

Though it is rarely cited, my favorite paper that I've co-authored is:

Indirect Evidence for Lévy Walks in Squeeze Film Damping: https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4926

It could have alternatively been titled: "Holy crap! Did you know that high-vacuum gas particles trapped between two walls follow fractal paths?!"

Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by ChuckMcM on Friday May 25, 2018 @02:28PM (#17156568)
"You won't believe where these high vacuum particles go when they move, or how they get there!"
Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by mromanuk on Friday May 25, 2018 @03:04PM (#17156897)
“The walls hate these particles, they can move in fractal ways, you can learn the secret, too”
Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by jonbarker on Friday May 25, 2018 @04:41PM (#17157759)
A light wave got sucked into a black hole, you won't believe what happened next! I predict a new meme theme of taboola/outbrain style headlines that are actually semi-accurate sciencey clickbait titles. Genius!
Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by kevin_thibedeau on Friday May 25, 2018 @03:18PM (#17156991)
Bait me with how this affects my car insurance and you've got a click.
Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by jonbarker on Friday May 25, 2018 @04:42PM (#17157770)
These four tech giants are upending this centuries old industry... with quantum entanglement.
Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by shoo on Friday May 25, 2018 @06:11PM (#17158445)
Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by DrScump on Saturday May 26, 2018 @04:07AM (#17160800)
"Indirect Evidence for Lévy Walks in Squeeze Film Damping" is one of the most revered Vogon poems[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon#Poetry

Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by phaedrus on Friday May 25, 2018 @02:31PM (#17156603)
I wonder if this in any way related to (causes, or shares a cause with) Mandelbrot's discovery that electrical noise on a signal line follows a Cantor set pattern? Or perhaps the motion of the particle is due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? (If the exact position and velocity of a particle is not knowable in detail, then its path would have to have a fractal dimension overall.)
Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by ISL on Friday May 25, 2018 @07:37PM (#17159074)
There's unlikely to be any direct link. The Levy-walk behavior is a simple consequence of geometry interacting with the distribution of particle directions that a particle might select each time it comes off the wall.

The result turns out to be scale-invariant, and was a surprise for us, as we had expected a nice integer power-law in the scaling of the gas dynamics, and it turned out to be fractional. The upshot is that when computing gas damping in high-precision force/displacement sensors, one must resort to numerical simulation.

One consequence of this work, in concert with the groups at Trento and MIT is that the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors opened up their gaps between the detector masses and nearby "reaction masses". The easy gaps to open happened before Advanced LIGO turned on, and I believe that the more difficult/expensive gaps to open are being upgraded roughly now.

It's fun how little table-top measurements on the minutiae of force-sensing can have impacts on whether or not we observe cataclysms billions of light-years away....

Re:Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs by DrScump on Saturday May 26, 2018 @04:05AM (#17160790)
REVEALED: How a high-vacuum gas particle learned to follow fractal paths using this one weird trick!