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Originally Posted by redbreegull
no, sadly it is because although I love science, I can usually only understand it in broad conceptual terms. I don't know exactly what all the shit flying at our solar system from deep space is. I know some of it is energy from other stars, like cosmic beams of energy, but I believe there is also matter in the intergalactic medium?
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I think they tend to use "cosmic rays" to refer to radiation that isn't electromagnetic radiation, like flying proton or neutrinos or alpha particles or something. Usually things radiated from atoms.
As to where they come from, I dunno. I guess things like stars and quasars? I dunno, I feel like the intergalactic medium wouldn't have enough energy to sort of shoot matter at us, because I kind of imagine it as really sparse clouds of gas just kinda floating there. I have no idea, though.
Yeah, I'm like you, in that I like science, but don't have a technical understanding of it, so I have to settle for conceptual metaphors, which can be so abstracted that they don't capture what's really going on. Makes me wish I gave a fuck in high school so that I'd had taken physics and done well at math, so that I could maybe pursue a minor in astrophysics or something. As it stands now, I would have to go back and learn all that shit before taking introductory physics courses, and I'm already almost done my degree anyway so I probably wouldn't have time, unless I wanted to take an extra year or two.
Watching this video makes me find of sad that I will never truly understand things like quantum mechanics because I don't know the formalism. I only have, like VSauce videos and shit.