Ahh, it's no big deal. I know it sounds magical, but there's probably some humdrum explanation...you're probably just popping in and out of different universe in the multiverse whenever you observe a particle, or something mundane like that.

Solely based on knowledge, yes. In practice most of us wouldn't be able to create a half working lamp from raw materials.

Middle bottom is the demon core, an extremely radioactive orb:

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

And anyway, there's a new physics demon now:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2386751-demon-particle-found-in-superconductor-could-explain-how-they-work/

The middle bottom is the demon core, and I guess the bottom right is a reactor of some kind

The bottom right one looks like a mercury arc valve: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-arc_valve It reminded me of an old Photonicinduction video https://youtu.be/QY6V2syGnZA

I have a habit of calling things 'technological magic' because that's what it is in my mind. The fact that the universal laws and logic exist in such a way to allow things like computers or the huge complexity of living things and AI matrixies is nothing short of miraculous when you think about it.

https://youtu.be/aFlromB6SnU

In terms of the bottom middle: that's the demon core. Science Thor (a.k.a. Kyle Hill) does awesome videos on nuclear and radioactive stuffs which can explain it better than I could.

I only know this because of ElectroBoom

Imaginary numbers are merely a poorly named mathematical construct used to reconcile the empirically observable phenomena of nature (e.g., summations of waves). They’re the means by which we achieve mathematical closure under exponentiation. You could call them whatever the F you want, so long as they could be used to represent vectors in the complex plane.

What reason do you have to believe in anything outside of material nature?

There's a really good science fiction novel by Robert Sheckley called Immortality, Inc. where scientists in the future have discovered that there is an afterlife, but the only way to ensure you get there is a medical procedure and you can only do that if you can afford it. That's just the beginning, there's a huge amount of worldbuilding, but that's the main theme of the book.

actual theoretical physicist here: "imaginary numbers" are just poorly named, there's nothing imaginary about them. You might as well use 2D geometric algebra to do the exact same job (treating real numbers as scalars and imaginary numbers as pseudoscalars)

Math is a tool of the mind to describe our world, imaginary numbers is only a extension of that tool to allow us to go beyond what mathematical logic prevents us to do, while still getting in the end a real number. Math, despite being powerful, is a flawed tool, so getting around its flaws by creating things like imaginary numbers isn't absurd and doesn't make the result any less real at the end.

On the other hand, I don't think calling everything we don't understand "magic" or the new trending words "supernatural" and "a miracle" and give god or anything else (like karma) credit for it would be more clever. Back then, we didn't understood the concept of thunder and interpreted it as god's wrath. Now, we understand it's a transmission of electricity from the negatively charged clouds to the neutral ground through ionized particles in the air. I don't think that scientists now, despite referring to the same phenomena, are talking about the same thing as we did a long time ago.

So no, no scientist will discover the afterlife "but we'll just call them "Post-Human Conciousness Wells" or something, and insist it totally isn't the same thing as that ancient superstition." as it won't be.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Arthur C. Clarke

Yeah people used to think this way. But the Halting Problem proved that not everything in mathematics is solvable. If we can't solve every mathematical problem, there's gonna be things in science that aren't solvable either.

Sorry for upsetting your belief system, but it's simply not possible for us to know everything. Just one of those quirks of life, it's been mathematically proven that not everything can be proven.

A mercury arc rectifier. The mercury vapor is ionized, and used for increasing the current carrying capacity of the component – compared to how much a traditional valve design with complete vacuum would work.

In short, it makes DC out of AC.

Courtesy of google lens

https://www.postalmuseum.org/blog/powering-mail-rail/

In short a rectifier for post office railway?!

Edit: contents and Spelling

But, but, the Euler-Lagrange equation is really cool!

Did you check the frictionless vacuum?