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Dianna got better sometime last year as well, just in time to fly home to Hawaii for her father's funeral (yeah ...), but she got a lot worse again later. I really hope things will keep going well for Dianna now.

Props for her husband who's been incredible of taking care of her.

This is the nature of ME/CFS (caused by Covid or otherwise), it does vary somewhat over time although the course is not always to improvement or around the same level but sometimes to death. She received some form of experimental treatments in order to gain the prior recovery which was at least a stellate ganglion block, she has not mentioned what else she may have received.

Hopefully she maintains a higher baseline from here on out and the production of these videos doesn't produce further Post Exertional Mailise that could worsen her condition.

>"Otherwise"

Would could this possibly be referring to?

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), unknown genetic conditions or other unknown stressors.

Man... I came here hoping to read she was fine now. Had no idea things got worse again :( I hope things get better for her.

At the moment, she appears to be progressing up. The user you are replying to was talking about a past up-swing followed by a down-swing. Hopefully there isn't a down-swing to follow this current up-swing.

Aww, I was excited to see her name pop up again, thought maybe she had recovered.

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For a sense of how crazy 30 detections per day is: Super-K is a cylinder 41.4m tall and 39.3m in diameter [1] and neutrino flux on Earth is 65 billion per square centimeter per second [2]

The tank's cross sectional area relative to the sun depends on its relative orientation to the sun. We'll ballpark it at somewhere between its circular endcaps (Pi x ((39.3/2)^2) = 1213 square meters) and its curved cylindrical face (which, pointed right at the sun, has a rectangular cross section of 41.4 x 39.3 = 1627 square meters).

So, conservatively, the neutrino flux through Super-K's tank is 1400 m^2 x (100cm/m)^2 x 6.5e10 neutrino/second/(cm^2) x 86400 seconds/day = 7.86e22 neutrinos/day passing through the tank. Of which 30 are detected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino (end of intro section, just before History). Wikipedia says only that the "majority" of the 65 billion flux is from the sun, so we might be off by a factor of two-ish in the worst case.

Such amazing news. She’s been bedridden due to long Covid. Got better a few times but after a while attacks came back. Both she and her husband showed great strength. So happy to see a new milestone.

thanks so much for the context. I'm glad if she's reclaiming from her losses <3

i want to be more appreciative every day for my health post-covid... not everyone was so lucky, and I can only imagine the gut-punch it is to know everyone went through a thing, but you got singled out for some perpetual daily punishment :'(

Welcome back. One of my staple YouTube Subscriptions.

I’m today years old learning that the light that we actually see on earth today came out 100s of thousands of years ago.

It's not the same photon though. The fusion happens in the core, then takes millennia for the energy to escape. During that time photons are emitted and absorbed by the atoms, until the surface emits one that finally travels to the earth in 8 minutes. Anyway that's taking you from the ELI5 to the ELI9 version. I'm sure someone on here can correct it further.

Any interaction between light and matter can be modeled as absorption and re-emission (stimulated or spontaneous) of photons. In this picture, there is not much difference between a photon traveling through the sun or through a piece of glass, and the analog makes physical sense. Since photons are massless elementary particles, they are indistinguishable and their number is not conserved. The notion of "the same photon" is questionable in any case.

I agree that photons cannot be distinguished, but how do you reconcile the following:

- photons travel at the speed of light in a vacuum

- it takes 90k years (or whatever) for a photon to travel from the sun's core to your retina?

Ok, the core of the sun is not a vacuum, quite the opposite, but the path is fraught with being continuously absorbed and emitted. It's not one photon travelling at a few km/hr is it?

And I don't think photons are reflected in hydrogen, although I have no proof. I just thought reflection was done with things like flat surfaces or mirrors.

This is why I said "not the same photon", but I admit I have only YouTube-spectator level knowledge

Is it a "Ship of Theseus" photon? Hehe

I haven’t tried to look up the history of this claim, but here are some guesses:

1. There’s a sort of diffusion process going on. Photons from the core have some mean free path as a function of radial position (and, obnoxiously, of wavelength as well, so maybe we ignore that). You could calculate the mean time for a hypothetical object emitted from the core and traveling according to those mean free paths to escape.

2. You could imagine you have marked a photon and watched it travel. This is quite problematic. First, photons in thermal equilibrium obey Bose-Einstein statistics because they are indistinguishable bosons, and anything that could mark them would change the statistics to that of distinguishable particles. But whatever, the temperature is high and maybe this doesn’t matter. Also never mind that those core photons are mostly much shorter wavelength than the photons we see. But you can still imagine. (The answer is probably quite similar to #1 since this is sort of the same problem depending on how you think about the interactions with matter in the sun.)

3. You could calculate how long it would take to notice anything if the core suddenly stopped fusing.

I agree. I read the 5000 years time a few times and I don't like it.

When you have a transparent medium like water or glass, the photon that enters and the photon that exit share a lot of properties, in particular energy/color/frequency. Perhaps they have a shift in the phase or a different polarization (like in water with sugar or if you want to be fancy a quarter wave plate). You can still split a beam before in enter and make interference experiments after half of it passed though water or glass, and other weird experiments, so I think it's fair to call them "the same photon".

But in the Sun, the original photons in the center of the Sun have a few very specific values of energy/color/frequency, that are totally lost. (But the neutrinos have so few interactions that they don't lose this information, and it's possible to do neutrino spectroscopy!)

Also, the photons emitted by the "surface" of the Sun have a wide spectrum of energy/color/frequency that is very close to black body radiation at something like 5000K-6000K.

So in my opinion it's better to think that the original photon in the center is absorbed shortly after it's emitted, and transformed into heat. The heat takes 5000 years to get to the surface. And then the hot surface emits a few new photons unrelated to the original one.

I'm not sure what is the main transmission method inside the Sun: conduction, convection or radiation.

belated edit: My comment about “whatever, the temperature is high” is silly. The mean photon energy is about 2.7kT, which scales in direct proportion the interest bits of the Maxwell-Boltzmann and Bose-Einstein distributions (see [0] and [1]). At 2.7kT, the curves are pretty close, but you don’t have to go down that far to get a big difference. So tagging all the light would cause a substantial change in the sun’s color.

[0] https://scholarship.haverford.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... Eq. 16 [1] Handy plot at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quantum_and_classica...

The canonical Q/A pair "Why does the Sun shine?"/"Fusion in its core" perhaps contributes confusion here? Where the question is silently swapped out for "Why is the Sun still shining after 4+ Gyr?". You're primed for a close connection between core and surface photons. Asking "Why is there fog over the uncovered corner of the pool?", one seems unlikely to appreciate "the fog comes from a small aquarium heater somewhere on the bottom!" (IIRC the magnitudes). "The Sun is hot, and hot things glow" creates less of that association between core and light.

> You could calculate how long it would take to notice anything if the core suddenly stopped fusing.

FW(little)IW (very not my field, just AI, quick&sloppy), for a Sun magically switched to contraction-dominated heating, I'm sloping order 10^6-7 yr for a 1% increase in surface temp, with core contraction dynamics being just one uncertainty.

Photons are generated in the star’s core but the core is dense. The photons move around the core, bouncing off other particles, a random walk. It takes a vast amount of time for that photon to escape the sun and reach the Earth, as per monte-carlo simulations of this random walk.

However, as the photon collides with other particles during its random walk, some of its energy is transmitted to those other particles. Sometimes a collision transfers energy to it too.

In a simple model, the energy that originally belonged to the photon gets transmitted from particle to particle through convection, and can escape the star through radiation long before the original photon reaches the surface. I don’t think that model is supposed to be physically accurate, rather to be an illustration about the convention process inside a star.

Similar to how infrared radiation works in our atmosphere, minus the timescale?

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Oh, probably skipped physics too. I haven't seen the video (yet), but I would have bet that light on earth came out 8 minutes ago from the sun.

Light from the sun that is reaching us now escaped the surface of the sun 8 minutes ago, yes.

But photons are generated in the core through nuclear reactions, where they take their sweet amount of thousands of years bouncing around until they get out.

I think this is right in a certain sense, but not precisely. From what I understand no visible light photons are created in the core from nuclear fusion, it's mostly a bunch of gamma rays that get almost immediately absorbed. The energy, but not the photons from fusion, gets transfered up through the layers of the sun, through radiation and convection, eventually heating the photosphere. It is then the photosphere, white hot, which ultimately radiates the visible light we see as sunlight.

And thats a fact you don't need to learn in high school, at least you didn't in my time.

They probably meant, as explained in the video, "light from our sun"

...did you skip human socialization?

Long COVID is a nightmare. I'm glad she's able to fight it off enough to do the things she loves again.

Wonderful to hear. Her long Covid was heartbreaking (saw the videos). I hope she gets stronger and stronger! Welcome back!

Some of my favorite YouTubers have done guest spots on her channel, which made me love them a little bit more.

Her back catalog is good and you still get paid for people watching your old videos.

The Neutrino collector bit was interesting, but the best part of this video is seeing the joy in her eyes educating the rest of us about science again.

Is this long Covid or depression or Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)? Because in her earlier videos she talks about becoming bed-bound again due to her emotional state after finding news her friend who had a similar condition died.

As someone who suffers from a complex autoimmune disorder which has caused dysautonomia and suspected mitochondrial dysfunction, stress flares and exacerbates symptoms. This has a physiological basis in the complex way the HPA axis/cortisol affects us at the cellular level. My primary diagnosis is sarcoidosis with small fiber neuropathy, but they don’t fully understand all the mechanisms of auto-immune fatigue and dysregulation.

Sorry to hear. Thanks for explaining.

Long Covid and ME/CFS can make you fragile. At least it has for me. I never used to get emotionally overwhelmed, now I do. I don't have it as bad as she does, but I've been bedbound because of this. And being sick for months to years, already leaves you feeling on the brink of depression.

It was essentially long covid. me/cfs or chronic fatigue syndrome induced by covid infection

Wow, did not know that. Thanks

Dunno, personally I don't think its that much of my business. Sure I'm curious, but that doesn't mean I have a right, or that its a nice thing™ to publicly speculate

She’s been pretty open about it. She even touched on it at the end of this video.

She has, and I commend her choice. but that doesn't mean its good form to further speculate.

I'm quite sure being that terribly sick could cause depression yeah, but that's not the reason

So happy to see her back! It was a grueling journey and we were all crossing our thumbs, waiting and hoping…

It's really cool to see her back and making videos again.

After seeing her status updates 2 years ago I was honestly really concerned she would be gone for good. It sounds like she had a serious case of myalgic encephalomyelitis brought on by Covid.

Part of why we know so little about these types of conditions is they are incredibly unfair. Women are 4x as likely to have some sort of constant fatigue disorder as men, and you see this reflected in literature going back centuries when describing women who just flat out disappear from public life.

One of the things about being bedridden for a long period of time is that there is a high risk of becoming more or less permanently bedridden. Especially if you have a chronic fatigue syndrome, you become weaker and any activity can retrigger fatigue. So her pushing herself to make new content sustainably is important very encouraging.

What an amazing storyteller. I will watch many more of her videos. I hope she will make many more videos ♥

It's a giant long term project with a fascinating history and engineering. One notable event which is interesting from engineering perspective was a catastrophic failure of roughly half tubes in 2001. It took them five years to fully restore 6K tubes.

The video mentions that this image was taken during the night time. If the neutrinos do not interact with the entire Earth on their way through, then how do they interact with the sensor?

Watch the video

Thanks. I watched half the video, but couldn't finish it. Now that I've finished it I see that the neutrinos interact with water in the tank.

Thirty interactions on average per day, that's crazy - earlier in the video the host mentions that the cross section of a thumbnail has a billion neutrinos flowing through every second!

Great news! I am super happy for her of course but I think it should always be remembered that her husband has been a super hero going through all of this.

One of my favorite bits of astrophysics trivia is that the neutrino detection experiments serve as an early-warning system for supernovae, to allow astronomers to prioritize telescope time and swing the scopes around to see the first visible-light and radio signals of the event.

This is because the electromagnetic energy of the supernova can take hours to force its way through all the star's mass to the surface when the core dies, but the gravitational crush turning protons and electrons into neutrons releases a massive burst of neutrinos in every direction. And the neutrinos are so weakly-interacting with the matter in the star that they get out first. Then, a million years later, arrive in our solar system at such a high fraction of lightspeed that they presage the coming electromagnetic shock-front because the constant difference in escape time between neturinos, which are particles of matter, getting out of the star without interacting with anything and the electromagnetic waves moving through the star's matter at a fraction of lightspeed created a gap that the light never caught up to.

The universe is a profoundly wild place.

Can confirm - worked on Super-K as a grad student and a regular part of shift work was to go through simulated supernova alert testing. Was always kind of fun, in the lotto ticket sense (alarm goes off, review to see, ah yes, simulated test, back to shift monitoring).

How much of the mass of the universe is neutrinos?

Nobody knows for sure.

The uncertainties about the masses of the various kinds of neutrinos are very high.

Also their abundance in the Universe is much less accurately known than for electrons and nucleons, because many processes generate neutrinos or antineutrinos and only few of those are absorbed in later collisions, so the total amount of neutrinos and antineutrinos is increasing continuously, even if the difference between the number of neutrinos and antineutrinos varies only little.

For the mass of nucleons and electrons one can make reasonable estimates, even if the uncertainties about the densities of interstellar and intergalactic matter are also very high. On the other hand, for the mass of neutrinos + antineutrinos the uncertainties encompass many orders of magnitude.

The detectors of neutrinos can detect only high-energy neutrinos. There may be much more undetectable low-energy neutrinos.

When I tried to look myself it was about this waffly but I’d also note that they were all talking about neutrinos at rest. But they’re wizzing around at relativistic speeds which makes them all many times heavier doesn’t it?

Between things like black holes and neutrinos I wonder how much Dark Matter will end up being dark matter. And I think the cosmological crisis indicates we are measuring space curvature wrong somehow.

Like neutrinos interact with gravity, which means they can be lensed, and ejected from pulsar and black hole jets. And particles moving faster than visible matter would pass that matter and accelerate it, increasing blue shift and decreasing red shift the farther you are from the source.

I think Super-K is the place with water so pure that it will leach pretty much anything which was discovered when one of the tech's hair got wet while leaning over the water. The hair looked bleached after it went into the water. My googlfu is not finding anything to confirm though

Ha, I had never heard of this effect despite having studied Kamiokande (well neutrinos, at least) as part of a mini-dissertation for my B.Sc.

However, looking for sources relating to leaching by ultra pure water (UPW) not much turned up.

I did however find on Google Scholar a paper "Ultrapure Water: friend or foe?"... which lead me to https://www.balazs.com/sites/balazs/files/2023-03/pub0039-up... . Reading between the lines, Marjorie Balazs appears to have made a career out of UPW; she says in that paper:

"The ability for UPW to absorb and dissolve or react with all kinds of materials complicates other aspects concerning its use in the processing of wafers."

Seems like UPW dissolves anything, so lends credence to the anecdote.

Interesting topic, hadn't thought about UPW for wafer fabrication before.

I found the article I was trying to remember:

https://www.businessinsider.com/super-kamiokande-neutrino-de...

> when travelling through water, neutrinos are faster than light

Interesting, how could this be possible?

I didn't read the article, but it's likely they are faster than light is when traveling through that water. light can have different speeds through different media.

for charged particles (so not for neutrinos) this leads the Cherenkov radiation, often observed in the cores of nuclear reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

as to why in this case: it can be somewhat intuitive to think that photons would be forced to take a somewhat longer path when traveling through a medium they interact with a lot (water, anything with a charge) then something which is almost going at the speed of light and famously doesn't interact with almost anything!

This is the way: faster than the local speed of light in water.

[I was going to write an explanation, but these sentences of Wikipedia article ar better.] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande

> A neutrino interaction with the electrons or nuclei of water can produce a charged particle that moves faster than the speed of light in water, which is slower than the speed of light in vacuum. This creates a cone of light known as Cherenkov radiation, which is the optical equivalent to a sonic boom. The Cherenkov light is projected as a ring on the wall of the detector and recorded by the PMTs.

Reminds me of the scene in Kung Panda 1 where one feather of the goose, Peng, falls into the tunnel which Tai Lung uses to unlock his cage and escape.

Isn’t that also the one where a sensor imploded and caused a chain reaction that destroyed like a third of the other sensors?

Yes, except about half. This[1] article goes into how and why, without the fluff.

The chain reaction escalated uncontrollably, and within ten seconds, approximately 6,800 of the 11,129 PMTs were destroyed.

[1]: https://physicscommunication.ie/neutrino-detector-in-peril-t...

Cavitation is a bastard.

I wonder if the successor has any pressure buffering built into the design to absorb pressure waves or if they're just gonna make them 1) stronger or 2) fail more gracefully (it's okay if a sensor crumples as long as it doesn't implode)

You aren't finding anything because it is not true. Ultra pure water does not become some kind of solvent.

It's the reverse problem: because the water is so pure it easily gets contaminated by minor things. So all the equipment has to be carefully cleaned.

Water is a solvent. Not sure where you get that it's not.

From the closing of the first graph in the Wiki for water: Due to its presence in all organisms, its chemical stability, its worldwide abundance, and its strong polarity relative to its small molecular size, water is often referred to as the "universal solvent"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water

Edit: after enough searching I was finally able to find this article [0] that I was originally trying to find. The leaching part was right, but the bleaching part looks to have been as misremembered

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/super-kamiokande-neutrino-de...

You misread what I wrote. Water is the same solvent as both regular water and ultrapure, I was replying to the ultrapure part.

Also: I appreciate you found a source, unfortunately it's not true what they said. It's not possible to "leech nutrients through the hair to the scalp", the wrench story is not true either - there is zero chance a lab with the standards they have would just leave a wrench at the bottom of the pool - it would contaminate the water. Not to mention the bottom is filled with more of those light tubes, so there is no place for a wrench to sit. (And if someone dropped one it would break a tube.)

I don't know why someone would tell businessinsider such stories, but they are not true.

And see: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/7467/is-pure-w...

It's hard when a supposedly reliable news place writes things that are not true, but that's the world we live in. I guess technically they are just quoting stories they were told.

(My personal pet peeve is a news source that made everyone think you can't leave eggs outside the fridge if they were washed, (as they are in the US). This is not true, but "there's a news source".)

I think people might be confusing ultra-pure water with "DI water" (deionized water).

DI water is AN AMAZING SOLVENT. Waaay more powerful at dissolving low-solubility solids than tap water, or even distilled water. It's stunning IRL to see how much better it cleans optical surfaces, where single-molecule layers can visibly change the appearance.

But if left open to the atmosphere, as in these pools, it would soon be just plain old (pure) water. Ultra-clean, but not an ultra-solvent.

"Super-Kamiokande" remains the best name for anything ever

Happy to see her back to science!

According to science video thumbnails on YT, nothing should be possible

And even if it was, you wouldn't believe it anyway

I can't remember where I heard of it, but decades ago there was another neutrino detection center, also in Japan I think, that had those vacuum tube detectors, but care wasn't taken in systems design. One of them broke and the implosion caused the neighbors to break. Leading to a catastrophic of almost all the sensors! I feel bad for them, I'm sure someone here knows the exact name and date. But man, what a tough lesson to learn.

Edit: on another note, way to go on your recovery Diana. We've been rooting for you.

That was Super-K, the same detector she's talking about in the video. The incident occurred in 2001 and set back the start of the data taking for them quite a bit, they were able to begin data taking by re-distributing the unaffected photo-detectors to cover the gap where the imploded detectors were. Eventually (2005/2006) they replaced all the destroyed photo-detectors and took data from then on out with a full-suite of sensors. Following this incident all Japanese experiments with these types of photo-detectors take the risk of implosion seriously and have mitigation built in to the design. Super-K has been running continously since then with some interruptions for upgrades & maintenance, and is still taking data today (as far as I'm aware).

Construction is underway on the next version of the experiment "Hyper-Kamiokdande" which is similar in design but significantly bigger. If I recall correctly Hyper-K will be two 200 kilo-tonne detectors, compared to Super-K which is a measly 50 kilo-tonne detector.

It was the same detector that imploded. Mark 2 was then reinforced so it didn’t happen again.

Having absolutely zero prior context, I thought the title was an old obscure Nintendo game.

BOOM! Let's go

This is fantastic news! Long COVID is awful, so I'm glad to see that she's recovering, if only incrementally.

Cool for looking at the Sun, although I think SK was changed to be more specialized towards hunting supernovae. There's also sky surveys like IceCube does. [0]

And for terrestrial sources (geoneutrinos) from natural and artificial sources, there are/were efforts that could detect terrestrial reactors in operation like AGM2015. [1] Irrespective of the current geopolitical instability, I'm surprised that the IAEA doesn't have its own network of geoneutrino detectors to proactively look for proliferation concerns.

0. https://neutrino-map.science/ (ICNO)

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep13945 (KamLAND and frmr Borexino)

Good to see her back!!

video about her long-covid battle and recovery here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqeIeIcDHD0

(caution for those currently sick as it's a rough watch at first)

I know someone whose CFS is about 10% of hers and it was still a rough watch. She got hit really fucking hard.

> "How is it possible that this photo was taken at night?!"

Seems like someone's having difficulty with object permanence. The Sun doesn't actually disappear at night.

(Typo in the title.)

TIL nobody can spell phyzix

Fixed

(should be Psychic Girl)

As in, knows the future?

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