Energy/Math Discussion

[Blowmonkey]

David, it's valid REGARDLESS of what you think about it.

 

[David]

David, it's valid REGARDLESS of what you think about it.

Prove it.

 

[PGTips]

Prove it

I believe the maths phrase would be "Proof by obviousness"

that reduce your own thought to babbling inconstancies, and disregard for semantics.

I would say the vast majority of my posts are pretty easy to understand. I seem to be able to have many different conversations with people who understand what I am trying to convey and exchange ideas with me without once complaining I am making no sense due to incoherent construction of sentences.

Let's not forget the intellect of a rat.

I'm still pissing you off though aren't I

Remember David, never argue with an idiot, some people can't tell which the idiot is. %)

 

[Blowmonkey]

Prove it.

I don't have to. People can look at your posting history.

 

[David]

^^ Ok, and you really expect people to trust you, oh that's right they will because I make waves. 8)

Trust is not a function of understanding.
I would say the vast majority of my posts are pretty easy to understand. I seem to be able to have many different conversations with people who understand what I am trying to convey and exchange ideas with me without once complaining I am making no sense due to incoherent construction of sentences.

Lol. What are you trying to prove? I already acknowledged that trust is not a function of understanding. How does that make me a fool? I never asked for anyone to trust me. I also stated that in my journal. I've stated it many times, which I'm sure I could dig up in my discourses with SoHi. The only people I've never had understand me is those that are proclaiming they are knowledgable enough to know physical theories, and the such. No one else.

I'm still pissing you off though aren't I

No, discourse on the interent doesn't piss me off, as much as it bores the piss out of me. Maybe if you were actually intelligent enough to provide a good base of argument, then I would have fun. Which brings me to your next line in that post.

Remember David, never argue with an idiot, some people can't tell who is who. %)

Yeah, I made the mistake of acknowledging your intelligence, and arguing with it. I already knew that. I really didn't need you to point that out to me. Either way I'm off I have to deliver something.

 

[PGTips]

The only people I've never had understand me is those that are proclaiming they are knowledgable enough to know physical theories, and the such. No one else.

Because they are the people who are not fooled by "f(x) is chaos" and " lambda/4pi - ??? = ???, its about gravitation" which others might think is deep and impressive physics but to those who know, its clearly bull.

^^ Ok, and you really expect people to trust you, oh that's right they will because I make waves. 8)

Again with the "I'm bucking the trend, fighting the powers that be" view. Sometimes they aren't all against you, and you aren't a lone crusader fighting for truth and enlightenment.

Though in this case, we are all against you, but we're the one's fighting for enlightenment :D

No, discourse on the interent doesn't piss me off

Come on Your PM's seemed slightly riled :D Or you just just causually call people "you're a worm, a disease".

That cut me deep David, I almost stopped being amused by your posts.

 

[Blowmonkey]

Ok, and you really expect people to trust you, oh that's right they will because I make waves. 8)

What are you talking about? You make waves?

What?

Is this another thing "we don't understand", David..?

 

[nowonmai]

Much obliged for the entertainment guys

 

[Cex]

Originally posted by David
It's not defined if it's not a known exact value. It's an aproximation, which is what I have stated all along here, and in that other thread. Did I make a glaring typo that made it difficult for you to read it?

No, you didn't make a typo. Unless, of course what you meant to type was "An equation which has a unique solution defines the number that is that solution", and you erroneously typed "It's not defined if it's not a known exact value.".

I sincerely doubt that though - it seems increasingly more likely to me that you're a COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD who's lost all sense of proportionality. Maybe that's a topic for another thread, though. Let's confine this post to discussing the limits of your understanding, rather than specific facets of your personality, and see where that takes us, shall we?

I'm still waiting for someone to prove how information isn't energy.8)

I hold a glass of water over a flame. The water heats up - energy has been transferred to it. What information can we glean from this energy transfer? Absolutely fuck all. Quod erat demonstrandum thank you very fucking much.

[a black hole is a] massive cluster of particle with an extreme gravitational pull, and emits radiation at a lower rate than it absorbs new materia.

You haven't said anything that's incorrect. However, you have left out a whole fucking lot. What's the effect on spacetime in the vicinity of a black hole? What effect would an observer falling into a black hole see, compared to the effect measured by a stationary observer outside it? What happens to the information (in the form of entropy) that enters a black hole? What would happen to an observer who collided with the singularity? The answers to some of these questions are well understood, and some are mysteries to us. Do you even know which is which? Oh no, that's right, black holes are completely understood, aren't they? In that case, would you care to elaborate on a few of the points I raised?

That would great, if I didn't still have the IRC logs, where the conversation took place.

Feel free to post them. Also, what was the name of this colleague of Stephen Hawking's that you were chatting to over IRC? I only ask because I work in the same faculty building that Hawking does, and I know or recognise a lot of people working in the theoretical physics buildings. There's even a chance that I might know this physicist that you're buddied up with! What a small world that would be, eh?

 

[PGTips]

You haven't said anything that's incorrect.

Actually he was incorrect in that some black holes (sufficently small mass ones) can emit energy faster than they absorb it, while he said they absorb it faster than they emit it.

I agree though, his "Its perfectly understood" explaination lacked any actual detail, as per my "I understand the Sun perfectly, because I know it to be bright" example

Much obliged for the entertainment guys

Glad others found it amusing too

 

[Cex]

Actually he was incorrect in that some black holes (sufficently small mass ones) can emit energy faster than they absorb it, while he said they absorb it faster than they emit it.

How true. In fact, a thought occurred to me when I was reading his post again. He describes black holes as a 'cluster' of particles. However, we often hear a black hole described as a 'singularity', which is emphatically pointlike and so couldn't be a cluster of anything. Which is it?

 

[zorn]

Is there any scientific reason why the flow/exchange of information can't be viewed in terms of energy.

Information and energy are two distinct things.

Energy is a property of physical systems. It has a standard, precise, quantifiable definition -- for example, the energy of a single photon of yellow light is 2 eV.

"Information" is a much trickier concept to deal with scientifically. There are in fact ways to rigorously define a measure of information (eg, Shannon information) but they apply to messages, not to arbitrary physical systems. Without knowing how a message is supposed to be encoded in a system, you can't say anything about the information present.

So if you give me some physical system -- say, a particular handful of photons travelling down a tube -- I can tell you exactly what the energy of the system is. But I can't even talk about the "information" of the system unless you tell me how messages are supposed to be encoded in it. The 'information' is not a property of just the physical system itself in the way energy is.

 

[zorn]

I never implied that information is energy. What I'm saying is that information is a property of energy. You could interpret information as RELATIVE differences in energy.

These two statements seem to be completely meaningless to me. What do you mean by "information is a property of energy"? Remember, energy isn't a "thing," it's a property of things, just like weight is a property of things.

What about DNA? Is there any reason why it is more of an energy system then it is an information system?

I don't know what "energy system" or "information system" mean. DNA is a type of a molecule. A particular strand of DNA will have some amount of energy, just like any other physical system. Practically speaking, DNA isn't well-suited to be an energy storage mechanism for your body, if that's what you mean by "energy system." A practical energy storage mechanism would be something that your body's enzymes could easily add or remove energy to in a controlled fashion with little loss -- such as glucose (sugar.)

DNA is well-suited, practically speaking, for storing information for your body. Your body stores the information coding for your genome in a DNA strand as an ordered sequence of the 4 possible base pairs (A, T, C, and G.) The structure of DNA is such that messages encoded this way can be stored reliably, and are very easy to duplicate & read out. Each base pair of DNA carries 2 bits of information, so eg a strand of DNA 12 bases long like ATAAGCTACAAG has 24 bits of information. The human genome is ~3 billion base pairs of DNA, corresponding to about 750 megabytes -- the same amount of information that can fit on a single CD.

Going back to the original post. If looked from the perspective that consciousness arises from the interaction of an organism and it's environment, it seems scientifically sound to say that "Vibes", "Auras", etc... could flow from human to human through various waves known in Physics(and possibly through some unknown to physics). These vibes are in the air, for lack of a better way of putting it.

Vibes do propagate through the air from human to human, communicating our attitudes, thoughts, & feelings, and affecting people they come into contact with, especially those who are attuned to us. That's more than just a possibility, it's a scientific fact! These "vibrations" in the air, or "sound waves" as we call them, most commonly take the form of human speech or music but can be other sounds as well.

As far as "auras" and "energy fields" and suchlike... such ideas have nothing to do with the actual scientific definition of energy. There's no known physical mechanism for such things, certainly not the ordinary EM field by which cellphones etc fucntion -- we understand it extremely well. Of course there's the possibility undiscovered physical mechanisms might account for these phenomena.... but pretty much any scientist will tell you it ain't so and these things are just complete bunk. There's more than enough communication between people through "ordinary" senses -- sight, touch, smell, hearing -- to account for all sorts of deep & emotional connections we feel IMO.

 

[zorn]

I don't answer your questions, because you've never answered the very first question I asked you. How is Pi accurate if it is not rational? You can't answer it, other than refering to other irrationals to explain it.

.... It's not defined if it's not a known exact value. It's an aproximation, which is what I have stated all along here, and in that other thread. Did I make a glaring typo that made it difficult for you to read it?

David, you honestly still don't understand this? Pi can be defined by any one of a zillion formulae: eg,

It's easy to show that this series is convergent and hence it uniquely defines Pi. Defined this way Pi is an exact value, not an approximation. Furthermore, the series gives us a direct method of constructing arbitrarily good decimal (or rational) approximations to Pi.

Again how do you measure the mass of an electron?

There are many ways to do it. One simple way: First, by passing an electron beam (accelerated using a known potential) through a known electric and/or magnetic field and observing the deflection or radius of curvature of the beam, you can calculate the charge charge-to-mass ratio of the electron. This is a common freshman physics labs. Then measure the electron charge, for example using an oil-drop experiment (an intro chemistry lab), and you're done.

 

[yougene]

"Information" is a much trickier concept to deal with scientifically. There are in fact ways to rigorously define a measure of information (eg, Shannon information) but they apply to messages, not to arbitrary physical systems. Without knowing how a message is supposed to be encoded in a system, you can't say anything about the information present.

But the information is present regardless...

So if you give me some physical system -- say, a particular handful of photons travelling down a tube -- I can tell you exactly what the energy of the system is. But I can't even talk about the "information" of the system unless you tell me how messages are supposed to be encoded in it. The 'information' is not a property of just the physical system itself in the way energy is.

Perhaps it's not a property in the same way, but it obviously is a property of the physical system since we are here thinking about it in terms of information.....

Yes they may not be the same thing, but they do share some properties, which to me implies that they are similar on a more fundamental level.

These two statements seem to be completely meaningless to me. What do you mean by "information is a property of energy"? Remember, energy isn't a "thing," it's a property of things, just like weight is a property of things.

Isn't that only one perspective though, why can't "things" be a property of energy as well?

I don't know what "energy system" or "information system" mean. DNA is a type of a molecule. A particular strand of DNA will have some amount of energy, just like any other physical system. Practically speaking, DNA isn't well-suited to be an energy storage mechanism for your body, if that's what you mean by "energy system." A practical energy storage mechanism would be something that your body's enzymes could easily add or remove energy to in a controlled fashion with little loss -- such as glucose (sugar.)

What I mean is you can look at DNA in terms of energetic interactions, or you can look at it as a system that stores and manipulates information.

Vibes do propagate through the air from human to human, communicating our attitudes, thoughts, & feelings, and affecting people they come into contact with, especially those who are attuned to us. That's more than just a possibility, it's a scientific fact! These "vibrations" in the air, or "sound waves" as we call them, most commonly take the form of human speech or music but can be other sounds as well.

There is light as well

As far as "auras" and "energy fields" and suchlike... such ideas have nothing to do with the actual scientific definition of energy. There's no known physical mechanism for such things, certainly not the ordinary EM field by which cellphones etc fucntion -- we understand it extremely well.

In my view "auras" do propogate through EM energy.

Of course there's the possibility undiscovered physical mechanisms might account for these phenomena.... but pretty much any scientist will tell you it ain't so and these things are just complete bunk.

ofcourse, what scientist would want to ruin their reputation, even if they do believe in it.

There's more than enough communication between people through "ordinary" senses -- sight, touch, smell, hearing -- to account for all sorts of deep & emotional connections we feel IMO.

Right, but you still need a medium through which to communicate. EM energy is a major one, since alot of the information we pick up is through light.

 

[PGTips]

ofcourse, what scientist would want to ruin their reputation, even if they do believe in it.

I would say any scientist who did prove the existance of modes of perception outside our 5 senses would probably win a Nobel Prize and a shedload of fame. Imagine being known as "The person who discovered telepathy"!!

However, wether someone believe in it or not, experimental evidence would be required, and at the moment the evidence is overwhelmingly against telepathy or something similar.

Many scientists believe in a God, and say so openly, despite there being no conclusive evidence for him. Some might believe in telepathy, but if you ask them if there is evidence, they will have to conceed that there isn't. Until there is, the offical line will always be "Extra modes of perception do not exist", or to use Zorns phrase "Its all bunk".

 

[yougene]

Is there conclusive evidence that shows that it's bunk?

There seems to be this double standard in the fact that something is assumed fake until proven otherwise. I understand it's somewhat part of the scientific process but I don't neccasarily agree it's the best approach.

In other words I'm skeptical about skepticism.

 

[yougene]

In order to communicate even with the five senses you need to relate with others. This may be done by projecting your self onto the world. Obviously a sense of self is needed for this.

 

[PGTips]

While "absense of evidence is not evidence of absense" if nothing hints at somethings existance, why should it be included in a model or view?

Its a slightly extreme example, but there is no evidence the Easter Bunny doesn't exist, but then there's a complete lack of evidence he does. Should the theory of evolution be altered to allow the evolution of a 6ft tall rabbit which has the strange compulsion to give away chocolate? I'm hoping not.

There is at least cursory evidence that telepathy does not exist. Many people have over the less few hundred, even thousand, years done tests on "What number am I thinking of?" "I'm thinking of a colour" and things to that effect with no decent evidence that any kind of extra-sensory communication exists. That would be a strong leaning that there isn't anything "extra" to our senses, but you generally cannot prove a negative (except in maths ) so it could forever been an open question.

 

[gloggawogga]

Energy can be random or non-random. Heat energy at thermal equilibrium is an example of random energy, i.e. just random molecular kinitec energy. Mechanical and electical energy OTOH can be non random, such as charged capacitor or the work done by a motor. Non-random energy is often referred to as 'useable energy', since non-random energy can be directed towards some useful purpose. Another thing we know about randomness and non-randomness of energy is the second law of thermodynamics, which says that in a closed system, the total randomness of the system can only increase. In other words, the dissipation of usable energy is an irreversable process.

Now 'information' is a little bit more slipery and subective. But still, there is an interesting property about information. Lets say I have some information that is "classified information", or a secret of some sort. What happens when the information leaks out. Can I take it back? Can you untell a secret once you have told someone and that someone blabbed it to everyone else? No, you can't. So in other words, disseminition of information seems an irreversable process. Once you tell a secret, you can't take it back.

So we have two irreversable processes at play here, dissipation of usable energy, and disemination of information. My question is, are they connected? I've attempted to get my head around this hypothesis (that they are connected) but to be honest there is very little we understand about 'information' and its subjective nature. We need to remember that science itself a process by which we acquire and filter 'information'. Thus any science about information is itself 'meta information', and its self subject to any properities of 'information' that might exist.