Energy/Math Discussion

[ebola?]

>>how long are people going to keep arguing over these banal equivocations? for fucks sake, get off the pseudo-intellectual new-age bullshit and read a fucking physics book before you start butchering scientific concepts with your inappropriate analogies. leave the quantum physics to the quantum physicists, and the mathematical proofs to mathematicians. stop trying to apply your vague knowledge of complex concepts on dense subject-matters to every single argument you make in order to sound smart. this thread doesn't even have anything to do with 90% of the scientific/mathematical topics being raised. talking about special relativity, black holes, quantum physics, or any other esoteric scientific concept here just makes you look like an ass.>>

Okay...seriously. You could have levied this criticism without being a dick.
I see people trying to learn by asking questions (even if these questions are steeped in various preconceptions).

>>Would you like your very own thread for this argument of limited interest?
I'll even make it sticky.>>

Oh yeah. If no one figured it out, the new thread is "Perspectives on Math and Theoretical Physics". I didn't want to call it "Argue with David".

ebola

 

[sexyanon2]

Ah... now compact said:

but it's not really an intrinsic property in the sense that things like mass, charge, etc. are.

But zorn, you just said they're pretty much the same. A system doesn't lose or gain total energy, does it? Or if it does, does it lose/gain mass as well?

What's a basic/physical object? Just particles and fields? I can understand a particle like an electron (right?), but I don't understand what fields are exactly. David was trying to explain to me what fields were but I'll need another perspective/explanation to understand what it is exactly. My teacher today was explaining that the smallest particles were these point particles like an electron (I believe that's what he said).

Anyways, because this thread has turned into a physics orgy, I'll keep asking questions.

How can something being the building block of the universe? Something that isn't made of anything else but itself. That's contradictory. Like, if you were to "zoom in" endlessly, how could there be an end to what you zoom into? That connotates a "floor" of the universe, or reality for that matter.

So thursday - anything that's physical, like mass or a battery, isn't information? You can get info from them, but they're not info themselves? I don't see why you can't get info from energy but energy isn't info itself. Does tangeability have anything to do with this?

 

[sexyanon2]

I see people trying to learn by asking questions (even if these questions are steeped in various preconceptions).

I assume by people you're talking about me. And yougene sometimes. But I wouldn't be able to learn and change my preconceptions without steeping my questions, now could I?

Oh, and can someone explain the defraction experiment and quantum physics? My phys teacher busted my balls on this one.

Double slit experiment. If you just fire 1 electron per second at the slits, you'll get a double slit pattern. But if you measure which slit the electron goes out of, you get two single slit patterns (or at least a different pattern).

Double-u Tee Eff?

I understood the Schroedenger's Cat idea. But the double slit defraction experiment is different. You're creating something else. There should be no different.

 

[thursday]

Okay...seriously. You could have levied this criticism without being a dick.
I see people trying to learn by asking questions (even if these questions are steeped in various preconceptions).

how am i being a dick? i call 'em as i see 'em. seriously, there are so many retards who try to use their misguided interpretations of scientific theories to illustrate completely unrelated points. no matter what the discussion is, someone always tries to bring the heisenburg uncertainty principle into it, and 90% of the time they do it even though it's completely inappropriate to apply it to the discussion topic. and it's like a disease because then other idiots will jump on the asinine suggestion and start discussing it as if they knew what the fuck they're talking about. it's always the armchair physicists who never took anything past quantum physics 101 who do shit like this too.

 

[Euler]

no matter what the discussion is, someone always tries to bring the heisenburg uncertainty principle into it, and 90% of the time they do it even though it's completely inappropriate to apply it to the discussion topic. and it's like a disease because then other idiots will jump on the asinine suggestion and start discussing it as if they knew what the fuck they're talking about. it's always the armchair physicists who never took anything past quantum physics 101 who do shit like this too.

Have to agree with this. I think Cex highlighted the point here. This forum seems to be full of "internet experts". Those who throw in a few buzz words, in a hope of giving the impression they know what they're talking about.

 

[Cex]

Oh, and can someone explain the defraction experiment and quantum physics? My phys teacher busted my balls on this one.

Double slit experiment. If you just fire 1 electron per second at the slits, you'll get a double slit pattern. But if you measure which slit the electron goes out of, you get two single slit patterns (or at least a different pattern).

Double-u Tee Eff?

If you fire electrons singly at two sufficiently narrow slits, you get a diffraction pattern - a pattern of light and dark fringes on the wall behind it. This is what you'd expect to see if the electron was a wave, and was going through both slits at the same time (much as you could imagine a water wave going through both slits at the same time).

If you then install devices next to the slits to record the electron as it passes, the diffraction pattern disappears. You just get a spread of electron impacts on the far wall, in a boring, regular probability distribution. This is what you'd expect to see if the electron was a particle, and went through only one slit at a time.

This is a perfect representation of the central idea behind quantum mechanics - that 'particles' don't exist in the normal sense of the word, most of the time. The exist, roughly speaking, as a wavefunction - a probability distribution over the whole of space. It's pretty likely (as in billions to one on) that they'll be found where you expect them to, but there's the chance that they could be somewhere else entirely. And the point is that there's no way to find out until we measure them.

I'm going to say all that again in a different way, because it's important to grasp. It's not that the electron is somewhere, and we don't know where until we measure it. It's everywhere with some probability distribution, and measuring it 'collapses' the wavefunction so that it's at point X with probability 1, and everywhere else with probability 0.

It's a complete bitch of an idea, and still today no one really understands it, but it's a step towards understanding.

I understood the Schroedenger's Cat idea. But the double slit defraction experiment is different. You're creating something else. There should be no different.

When you say that you understood the Schrodinger's Cat idea, you do realise that it was conceived to show how ridiculous the notion of quantum mechanics is? There's not actually anything to be 'grasped' when thinking about it, because it's supposed to sound completely illogical. How can a cat be both alive and dead at the same time, and how does us looking at it make any difference whatsoever?

In my opinion, Schrodinger's Cat is an awful way to teach quantum mechanics to students, and especially to high school students who can't really be expected to pick up any of the fundamental ideas behind it. A scientific metaphor is supposed to illuminate the subject by comparing it to something you have more experience of - Schrodinger's Cat completely fails to do this. Sorry, rant over.

 

[PGTips]

How can something being the building block of the universe? Something that isn't made of anything else but itself. That's contradictory. Like, if you were to "zoom in" endlessly, how could there be an end to what you zoom into? That connotates a "floor" of the universe, or reality for that matter.

Why exactly would it be contradictory?

Alternatively there is something within things like electrons or quarks, but the energies which bind them together are so amazingly huge that nothing either observed in a lab or out in the universe has been even close to being able to break them apart. We believed atoms where indivisible till we understood basic electromagnetism, quarks were then needed to explain radioactivity. All the while information and phenomena were infront of us to say "Hey, something deeper is going on here" but our understanding had not advanced enough to realise that. Now its a huge area of research to probe the inner workings of particles, and nothing has hinted anything about the electron being a composite particle, and its something some people have looked for for a long time.

The energies required to probe the atom can be acheived by a TV electromagnet. To probe the nucleus you need a particle accelerator. If a quark is made of smaller things, we probably cannot create a powerful enough accelerator to see.

but I don't understand what fields are exactly.

One way of thinking about them would be a sea of "virtual particles", which the source particle produces. I don't know the specific ins and outs of it, its a product Quantum Field Theory which isn't lectures to undergrads here Zorn or Compact might be able to ellaborate properly.

I don't see why you can't get info from energy but energy isn't info itself.

Warming a container of water with a flame gives it random heat energy, no information is transferred. If energy was information, then information should have been transferred too.

 

[yougene]

how am i being a dick?

Well, the way your posts are worded, all they tend to do is provoke is negativity. Which is showing obvious disrespect since the purpose of this forum is CONSTRUCTIVE DISCUSSION, and not inciting digressive behavior.

I agree and relate with most of what you say, but your approach just turns me off to anything you have to say.

 

[Cex]

He has a very valid point though.

I'm always willing to teach and educate up to my ability. If someone admits to having little knowledge of a subject which I am versed in, I have no problems helping them along and trying to increase their understanding.

However, when someone who obviously has no knowledge of a subject comes along and says that everything I know is wrong, or even worse, bullshits unnecessarily about things which they're entirely clueless on, it's a bit annoying. In fact, it's downright insulting.

Discussion is fine as long as, when you're in the position of lesser knowledge, you approach that discussion with the aim of expanding your understanding. If you approach it with the aim of trying to prove everyone else wrong, trouble will kick off. That's what I see happening all the time here.

 

[yougene]

Discussion is fine as long as, when you're in the position of lesser knowledge, you approach that discussion with the aim of expanding your understanding. If you approach it with the aim of trying to prove everyone else wrong, trouble will kick off. That's what I see happening all the time here.

Problem is everyone can approach with the belief that they have more knowledge than everyone else. For a truly productive discussion everyone should take the same approach.

 

[Cex]

It's generally pretty obvious, after a few posts worth of discussion, which participants in the debate are confident in dealing with the subject matter and which ones are trying to bullshit their way around the fact that they don't know anything.

 

[yougene]

It's generally likely, however; all it takes is a carefully chosen set of words for something to seem possible as you have pointed out in your "Soul energy-chakra and quantum harmonies". It should also be taken into consideration that everyone is at different levels of being able to express themselves and communicate, but that does not mean that they are any more or less capable of modeling existance in a truthful way.


If you do see yourself as someone that is to be percieved as the more knowledgeable of the group wouldn't it make sense to make an example of yourself by at least APPEARING to be more open-minded? It is common knowledge that humans model themselves off one another. If someone is in an open state of mind they are more ready to take in new information. If the information you present as truth is indeed truth and is modeled correctly in the recipients mind then they are likely to see it as truth as well. Alot of people on here seem to understand this. Alot of other people seem to see this board as a source of egotistical gratification and is often reflected in their posts.

 

[Cex]

Some might think that if you're the sort of person who can't tell genuine science from complete bullcrap, you shouldn't be posting in that sort of discussion anyway.

And a nice counterpoint to your argument - It should be stressed that different people have wildly differing abilities to model, or explain, reality in a useful or objective manner. This does not, unfortunately, mean that they are any less able to express themselves to others.

I try to be open minded - however, there's a difference between being receptive to a new idea which is being put forward by its proponent in a sensible, clear manner with powerful arguments to back it up, and an idea which is obviously so out of whack with observed behaviour that there's no way it could be right, but which is being proposed nonetheless by someone who claims that there's a massive conspiracy out to get him and that everything you currently know is wrong.

Note that this applies to any field, not just mathematics or quantum physics.

 

[ebola?]

>>I'm always willing to teach and educate up to my ability. If someone admits to having little knowledge of a subject which I am versed in, I have no problems helping them along and trying to increase their understanding.>>

That's the thing though. I don't see the non-physicists of this thread as purporting to have a great deal of knowledge. They, like anyone else, are just trying to learn by doing, manipulating new concepts, learning more, and correcting their understanding accordingly.

ebola

 

[Cex]

I must have missed the part where "I am going to overthrow modern physics in less than a year, so listen to me" meant the same thing as "I don't know too much about physics, but...".

 

[ebola?]

For the purposes of my statement, I was classifying David as a theoretical physicist (bracketing aside if he's a good one or not). I didn't note that explicitly because I didn't want to draw attention to that line of debate.

ebola

 

[compact]

I don't see the non-physicists of this thread

Not to pick nits, but there's really only one person on this board who can make a legitamite claim to being a physicist (namely zorn).

Cex pointed out the problem of "internet experts", but to be honest there's only one person here who really fits the bill, and it seems silly to take it out on the whole message board just because of one conspicuous personality. A cynic might also note that undergraduates and other educated non-professionals trying to pass themselves off as experts pose just the same sort of problem. %)

This thread should be closed imho, there's no coherent discussion throughout the nine pages and most of it is bickering. I think it would be better to let math/physics issues percolate out in other threads as needed and let the social dynamics evolve as necessary.

 

[yougene]

Some might think that if you're the sort of person who can't tell genuine science from complete bullcrap, you shouldn't be posting in that sort of discussion anyway.

Even scientific journals have trouble telling them apart from time to time.

And a nice counterpoint to your argument - It should be stressed that different people have wildly differing abilities to model, or explain, reality in a useful or objective manner. This does not, unfortunately, mean that they are any less able to express themselves to others.

That is a nice counterpoint.

I try to be open minded - however, there's a difference between being receptive to a new idea which is being put forward by its proponent in a sensible, clear manner with powerful arguments to back it up, and an idea which is obviously so out of whack with observed behaviour that there's no way it could be right, but which is being proposed nonetheless by someone who claims that there's a massive conspiracy out to get him and that everything you currently know is wrong.

Well from my perspective the only reason people keep posting stuff like that, is because other people are so willing to respond to it. All I'm seeing is the same points be presented over and over, which gets really old really fast. At this point people feeding the behavior are just as much of the problem as the people exhibiting the behavior.

 

[Cex]

^ All very true.

Especially the point about the scientific journals - there was an interesting case a while ago where two brothers (I forget their names) presented an essentially empty paper for their PhD thesis, which, even to a fully qualified theoretical physicist, looked fairly genuine. They were accepted for their PhDs initially, but they were later revoked when people looked at the paper in depth!

Edit: Also, I agree that this thread probably deserves to be closed as it's going nowhere.

 

[yougene]

^ All very true.

Especially the point about the scientific journals - there was an interesting case a while ago where two brothers (I forget their names) presented an essentially empty paper for their PhD thesis, which, even to a fully qualified theoretical physicist, looked fairly genuine. They were accepted for their PhDs initially, but they were later revoked when people looked at the paper in depth!

It does seem to be a big problem these days as I have heard of more then one such case in the past year. It really makes you wonder how much of this stuff is completely fabricated.

Edit: Also, I agree that this thread probably deserves to be closed as it's going nowhere.

Speak for yourselves, I found this thread very informative.

Just because most people feel compelled to respond to bullshit, while ignoring the more constructive posts, doesn't mean the thread should be closed in my opinion.