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=> GENERAL DISCUSSION => Topic started by: Ikarus on March 18, 2005, 03:59:00 am
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13 things that do not make sense (http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600)
personally, i think these things are interesting in a lovecraftian sense, in that the human potential for comprehension is finite. at the same time, please note that the theory of evolution is not on the list. sorry, homeskoolers.
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I wish I could fully comprehend all these issues, but from my amature brain, devoid of any physics classes in HS or college, I can still say that there are many things we don't know about the universe, and putting down people who are doing their damnest to figure it out is asinine (sp?)...
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mental complexities such as these are the true reasons for living within the created time of space, and not whether service charges are fair or not, or if pre-sale ticket chances are the way to go or not, or if morrisey and chris issak were separated at birth or not. what a gem this thing called reality is, and what other forms of it could exist out beyond out bounds is so candy coated excitement. everything stated in that article and all thinking on this planet has a one sided opinion, though, being that it does comes from the minds of us humans. we are all we know, and what is that to show? i love that part about the other planet they've discovered, beyond pluto: "planet x". fascinating. i can't wait until that probe reaches the point of veiwing it. the year we make contact.
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Originally posted by walkonby:
mental complexities such as these are the true reasons for living within the created time of space, and not whether service charges are fair or not, or if pre-sale ticket chances are the way to go or not, or if morrisey and chris issak were separated at birth or not.
Surely you have no choice about when you live? I suppose you must also conform to the laws of physics, so space and time cannot be altered by you. The only laws you seem to bend regularly are those of comprehension, grammar and logic.
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I thought that placebo effect had been discredited? I heard that the original study was shown to be flawed.
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I thought it was discredited with the last album:
<img src="http://www.avopolis.gr/articles/placebo.jpg" alt=" - " />
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Originally posted by Miss MaRpIe:
Surely you have no choice about when you live? I suppose you must also conform to the laws of physics, so space and time cannot be altered by you. The only laws you seem to bend regularly are those of comprehension, grammar and logic.
I am hardly a quantum physicist, but don't they believe that you are in every time and space, and your current view of time and space is just what you perceive, your current location is just one possibility out of unlimited possibilities
I find quantum physics fascinating, but it makes my brain ouchy
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Originally posted by ratioci nation:
Originally posted by Miss MaRpIe:
Surely you have no choice about when you live? I suppose you must also conform to the laws of physics, so space and time cannot be altered by you. The only laws you seem to bend regularly are those of comprehension, grammar and logic.
I am hardly a quantum physicist, but don't they believe that you are in every time and space, and your current view of time and space is just what you perceive, your current location is just one possibility out of unlimited possibilities
I find quantum physics fascinating, but it makes my brain ouchy [/b]
Quantum physics deals with sub-atomic particles. What you are talking about is true on that scale, but not true on the larger scale. It is clear for instance that I am sitting at my computer waiting to go home at 2.41 on a Friday afternoon in College Park.
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Originally posted by Miss MaRpIe:
Quantum physics deals with sub-atomic particles. What you are talking about is true on that scale, but not true on the larger scale. It is clear for instance that I am sitting at my computer waiting to go home at 2.41 on a Friday afternoon in College Park.
I know it deals with sub-atomic particles, but some scientists have theorized on whether or not it can be applied elsewhere.
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No matter where you go...there you are.
<img src="http://www.starland.com/bb/images/pcz01.jpg" alt=" - " />
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Originally posted by ratioci nation:
I know it deals with sub-atomic particles, but some scientists have theorized on whether or not it can be applied elsewhere. [/b][/QUOTE]
Where? The standard laws of physics, Einstein and Newton work mostly OK for atoms and larger.
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Originally posted by Y. P. Blood:
No matter where you go...there you are, watching another B-movie with a bizarre synopsis: Adventurer/surgeon/rock musician Buckaroo Banzai and his band of men, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, take on evil alien invaders from the 8th dimension.
YOu are oDD
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Originally posted by Miss MaRpIe:
YOu are oDD
See this rock? It's solid matter, right? But in point of fact, the solid parts of this rock, the neutrons, quarks, protons, and electrons comprise only about one quadrillionth of its total volume.
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Originally posted by Y. P. Blood:
Originally posted by Miss MaRpIe:
YOu are oDD
See this rock? It's solid matter, right? But in point of fact, the solid parts of this rock, the neutrons, quarks, protons, and electrons comprise only about one quadrillionth of its total volume. [/b]
well they would do, if you could define their position or space in time
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Originally posted by Miss MaRpIe:
well they would do, if you could define their position or space in time
Ehhh... may I pass along my congratulations for your great-a-interdimensional breakthrough. I'm sure, in the MISERABLE ANNALS OF THE EARTH, you will be DULY ENSHRINED!
<img src="http://www.rageboy.com/lizardo.jpg" alt=" - " />
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here is a lot of reading about it, I am not saying it is right, I just find the ideas fascinating -
http://personal.tcu.edu/~dingram/edu/pine3.html (http://personal.tcu.edu/~dingram/edu/pine3.html)
Ironically, the main resistance to the Copenhagen Interpretation came from Albert Einstein and a few of his followers. Einstein objected very much to the idea that we had stumbled upon a barrier to knowing what is real. Philosophically, Einstein was a realist who believed that the goal of science was to conjecture boldly about the nature of reality from the details of our observations. He acknolwedged that as we continue to probe nature for her secrets, we would encounter more and more exotic features, most of which we could never directly observe because of the nature of our observational limitations. He believed, however, that the human mind could always fathom at least the most likely hypothesis about the nature of the reality causing the events we do observe. Thus, although Einstein introduced a revolutionary view of space and time, one that destroyed the classical or Newtonian conceptions of absolute space and time, he nevertheless remained a classical physicist faithful to the concept of reality. Descartes stated centuries earlier: "There is nothing so far removed from us to be beyond our reach or so hidden that we cannot discover it."
For Einstein, nature was like a mysterious clock. We are limited to observing only the exterior features of this clock. We may never be able to see directly inside and know for ceratin how the clock works, but by observing and thinking about the movement of the hands long enough, the human mind will provide a likely answer to how the clock works. For Einstein, a clockwork for the universe exists and can be known. For Bohr, to assume that a clockwork exists independent of our observations is only another human philsophical bias, another example in a long line of assumptions that experience validates at a certain level, but that experience at another level now demonstrates cannot be considered "the way things are".
If an electron is not a thing until it is observed by some instrument, does this not imply that reality depends on our observations and hence, ultimately, the thoughts we use to frame the world? Does this not imply that reality is created by human thoughts? Metaphysical idealism is an old and widespread belief stating that the physical world as we experience it is basically an illusion; the perception of a world of material things separated in space is said to be only an appearance. Individual things exist only insofar as we have an idea of them. If there were no human observer or recording instrument of any kind in a forest, then a falling tree would make no sound. In fact, there would be no tree to fall and no forest. When I walk out of a room, I assume that the physical room and all its contents are still there. But according to the idealist, the room ceases to exist if no one is there to have a thought of the room.
Most scientists have always viewed this metaphysics with disdain, as more of a symptom of despair of the sometimes harsh realities of the physical world, as primarily a religious view associated with those who find the physical universe threatening and who desire a more perfect but duller world. Does quantum physics validate the philosophy of idealism? How embarrassing for Western science if it does. Imagine that after thousands of years of struggling to know the details of the atom, Western science shipwrecks into a religious philosophy it thought it had left behind at a more primitive time!
Thus, Einstein viewed quantum physics as an incomplete theory: We simply do not know enough yet. Because we cannot produce a consistent picture of subatomic phenomena, we obviously do not know exactly what these things are yet or enough about the mysterious forces governing their motions and manifestations. "God does not play dice with the universe", according to Einstein. He has created one universe and does not choose to have it manifest itself as waves one moment and as particles at another for no reason.
Bohr and Einstein had several public debates over what was the proper interpretation of quantum physics. These were fascinating discussions between two intellectual giants, but little was resolved at the time. The vast majority of physicists heeded Bohr's advice that there was a pragmatic limitation inherent in our measuring devices. Physicists should be interested primarily in being able to predict experimental results and not in the question of what is real. They were persuaded that the question of what is real is primarily an unanswerable philosophical question. Physics must concern itself primarily with complex experimental arrangements and the derivation of the complex mathematical formuale needed to predict events. On the other hand, motivated by the goal of finding a hidden reality, physicists have also pursued Einstein's dream of a unified picture of reality, of seeking a theory that enables us to understand at a fundamental level the mysterious forces of nature.
Physics is still proceeding in two, perhaps complementary, perhaps schizophrenic, directions--one following Einstein's dream and the other developing a series of experiments to confirm Bohr's theory of complementarity. Using a particle approach and a model of subatomic objects consisting of different types of quarks, many physicists have become confident that they are approaching an understanding of the basic clockwork of the universe. These physicists believe that what appear at a certain level to be different forces in nature are actually different manifestations of a superforce, a force that existed for only a brief moment under the superhot, superenergetic conditions of the first microseconds of the universe.
In the quantum realm we cannot pin down a consistent reality, and nature teaches us in the process not to take our thoughts about reality too seriously, on the one hand, and to take them very seriously, on the other hand. We should not think of our human concepts of "particle" and "wave" as reflecting an independent reality, but we have been forced to recognize the creative power of human concepts. The mathematics of quantum theory pictures not a precise clock with definite parts but a strange indefinite cosmic substance capable of manifesting an infinite number of fleeting faces. Quantum theory pictures the particles that make up everything that we touch and feel not as little, hard, definite, independent things, but as a tangle of possibilities entangled with every other tangle of possibilities throughout the universe. As with the particles in the Aspect experiment, the particles in my body may be connected in some way with the particles of your body, and these in turn with particles in a distant sun, in a distant galaxy, billions of light-years away.
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I have a sudden urge to take a bunch of massive bong hits.
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Originally posted by Miss MaRpIe:
Originally posted by walkonby:
mental complexities such as these are the true reasons for living within the created time of space, and not whether service charges are fair or not, or if pre-sale ticket chances are the way to go or not, or if morrisey and chris issak were separated at birth or not.
Surely you have no choice about when you live? I suppose you must also conform to the laws of physics, so space and time cannot be altered by you. The only laws you seem to bend regularly are those of comprehension, grammar and logic. [/b]
i don't think you like me . . . but that's ok . . . i like you, a lot. and your name; it's gentle and soft sided sweet. i'm sorry my skills of outlandish comprehension outweigh your needs to accept, and that this blasted forum doesn't have spell and grammar check. and all i said was that it was a nice change of topic to discuss, and not all that altering physics and time, that you were going on about. ;)
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Originally posted by walkonby:
i don't think you like me . . . but that's ok . . . i like you, a lot. and your name; it's gentle and soft sided sweet. i'm sorry my skills of outlandish comprehension outweigh your needs to accept, and that this blasted forum doesn't have spell and grammar check. and all i said was that it was a nice change of topic to discuss, and not all that altering physics and time, that you were going on about.
How do you pronounce your name? Is it Walk-On-By? I tend to pronounce it similar to "Allenby", or "Enderby" .
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Originally posted by Y. P. Blood:
Originally posted by walkonby:
i don't think you like me . . . but that's ok . . . i like you, a lot. and your name; it's gentle and soft sided sweet. i'm sorry my skills of outlandish comprehension outweigh your needs to accept, and that this blasted forum doesn't have spell and grammar check. and all i said was that it was a nice change of topic to discuss, and not all that altering physics and time, that you were going on about.
How do you pronounce your name? Is it Walk-On-By? I tend to pronounce it similar to "Allenby", or "Enderby" . [/b]
say it however. it is walk on by, as in walkonby where i am at and say "how is it going?", or walkonby, as in "just keep on going and don't say a word to me." either way, i'm happy as a clam in boiling lobster sauce from Filomena in Georgetown.