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A Trillion Times Larger - by 0xsmac - Semi-Lucid Thoughts

0xsmac.substack.com · 4,618 words · saved by 2 readers

Separating the implicit variables within a multiple and why capital struggles to disentangle them

I promise this introduction won’t be as long as the last one about weather. But please indulge me for 90 seconds. So, a little more than 100 years ago, this woman Henrietta Leavitt was doing the tedious work of measuring how bright thousands of stars were on photographic plates (these were the predecessor to film as a way to capture images). She noticed a behavior in a particular class of pulsing stars that effectively said, the slower these stars pulsed, the brighter they were intrinsically.1 This probably seems marginally interesting today, like ok cool I guess. But at the time…

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