this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
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xkcd #3141: Mantle Model

Title text:

Mantle plumes explain Hawaii, Yellowstone, Iceland, the East African Rift, the Adirondack uplift, the Permian extinction, the decline of Rome, the DB Cooper hijacking, and the balrog in Moria. Those little hills of sand in your yard are caused by antle plumes.

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Source: https://xkcd.com/3141/

explainxkcd for #3141

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[–] lemonskate@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You're right that light is not "a wave and a particle depending on whether you observe it". Instead, light is a quantized field. It is a field because it exists at every point and allows for wave-like behavior such as superposition and interference (both things seen in all fields, like waves in water or radio, etc.). But it is quantized because when the field interacts it does so via photons which can only exist in integer quantities. This quantization of interaction of the underlying continuous field gives us all the "weirdness" we see. Okay, not quite all of it, there are still even weirder parts of quantum mechanics, but it does explain the double slit experiment.

[–] dragonfucker@lemmy.nz -2 points 3 days ago

Still doesn't explain how superpositions can collapse from interaction. Drag doesn't believe it, drag thinks they stay in superposition and whatever interacted with them is also in superposition now.