SaganWannaBeWannaBe

What would happen if Jupiter's orbit started to decay? Would there be a point before which we'd feel no effect on Earth or would we experience something relatively soon (regardless of the relative positions of Earth and Jupiter in their orbits.)

Excellent points. And doh! to me for not thinking about the scenarios you outlined. Can you say "Contact" or "Stargate" anyone And that's really a good way to think about things too...in stages.

Great thread, nice discussion. But this topic strikes me as one where a little different perspective might be in order. Most of the proposed solutions I've read here are variations on "how to make a faster horse". (Maybe the ones involving wormholes aren't.) Is it possible to speculate about means other than a faster horse? A nice analogy is solving the problem of getting a message from one town to another. That's where the faster horse example comes in. Way back (say 500 years), all the thinkers could do was think in terms they were already used to like horses, maybe better horse feed, etc. No one would ever, COULD ever, think about email for example, or just the telegraph. Are we doing the same thing here when we talk about propulsion sources, fuel, even "speeds" and generation ships? Is it possible to speculate on some wholly different means to travel between stars? Sometimes I think it's useless. Then again, we'd never get anywhere if there weren't those thinking totally out of the box. Thoughts? Speculations?

This all sounds very interesting. But what are the physical implications? I know I'm just a layman but I can't help wondering if the mathematicians are making what's called a category mistake. That's when you attribute properties to something that cannot have those properties. An example would be to say the various coordinate systems one can use to navigate the globe actually and really exist and can be pointed at. Or more simply, that matrix of numbers has a mass of 234. (Number matrices aren't things that have mass, even though the sentence seems to make sense.)

Do you actually enjoy programming though? Start with that. Sounds like all you want is money money money..."gimme it all, I want it now!!" But seriously find something you like to do first then pursue that. Get an entry level position in anything related, and once you're in go nuts doing a good job.

I'm surprised you're having trouble. Perhaps it's your location? Have you checked out dice.com? C++ is pretty heavy duty programming so your choices might be somewhat limited. Obviously the big moneymaker nowadays is anything related to the web. HTML, JavaScript is real big, Ruby, etc. The nice thing is, if you don't know these, it's not too bad to pick them up. You can set up everything you need for free...a web server, an app environment, etc. Think apache, php, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, MySQL for database programming. With a standard laptop you can get at Best Buy for under 500 you can have enough power to run all of these.

Kind of reminds me of the Big Bang Theory scene: Sheldon: I recently had a dream that I was giant, but everything around me was to scale, so it all looked normal. Leonard: How did you know you were a giant if everything was to scale? Sheldon: I was wearing size "a million" pants. I guess in your thought experiment you need to find the "size tag" that let's us know the expansion is actually a result of a changing scale versus actual expansion. On another note though, I believe the notion of expansion is different from what we usually think. It's not "here's a big room, and there's a balloon (the universe) in it that's getting bigger". It's that the room itself is in some sense expanding, but not within another bigger room.

Ok, I see what you mean by correlated properties. So I believe entanglement would refer to, to use your analogy, two spatially separated coins such that as soon as you determine that coin 1 is heads, we instantly know the remote coin is tails. Is that right? The important thing being that there are multiple coins that are "entangled" not multiple properties of a single coin that are entangled.

OP? And when you say useful to describe conserved quantities...do you mean like physicists might use the HJ in accounting for data gathered from a collider, for example?

All great points. I think my thing was, way back I had the notion that math was similar to Plato's forms. Forms are the true and actually existing things "out there" from which all that we see in our little cave of reality is derived. In that sense, a tensor (in my mind) was an actual thing that could only be used to describe spacetime, or whatever. It definitely was NOT something to be used to describe an economy or something so man-made. It doesn't help that the names of things in math are so "physically oriented". Tensor, Spinor, Gauge, Manifold. These sound like in some sense real things (tension like a spring, spin like a spinning top, measuring tool , surface) versus mere analogies or conventions.

Hi guys, layman here. Can you give an example (in laymen's terms) of how you'd actually apply or use the math above in a real world situation?

I have a feeling the same can be said about things like "spin", "strings", etc. right?

I didn't see an actual Philosophy of Science forum so I'm posting this here in hopes of getting some responses from more "hardcore" science folks. Back in my physics days in college I read all sorts of complex math with terms like Riemann manifolds, gauge invariance, tensors, etc. I was never anywhere near smart enough to understand these. Regardless, I had this notion that if only I *was* smart enough, I'd be able to talk the language of the universe. Most of my hero's are scientists, and I've always revered them partially because they did speak this wonderful language. Then years later, well after leaving college and going on to other things, I was reading about economics. The math was again way over my head BUT it was using the same or similar mathematical things, like tensors, matrixes, etc. I remember it being quite an emotional shock. How could it be that the "creator's language" (and I use that word figuratively) can also be used for such mundane and pedestrian things as cash flow, net cash value, GDP etc. Put another way, I used to think the math of physics corresponded in all actuality to the physical aspects of the world. But now it seems like it doesn't, and is only a highly thought out, but ultimately arbitrary (however useful) human-made framework.

I remember reading that Richard Feynman long ago suggested the reason all electrons appeared exactly the same is because there is only one electron that exists. And this single electron just enters and exits our space, I think he said traveling through time somehow, an infinite number of times and different locations. The effect would be what we observe, identical apparently "different" electrons, at different locations. Could a similar idea apply to quantum entanglement? It appears to us, in our 3d space, that two particles seem to have identical and linked properties even though they are spatially separated. But this is just apparent, because there's really only a single particle slipping in and out.

Hi all, this looks like a great forum where semi-informed folks like myself can ask questions and not be ignored because we're not actually physicists. So, it seems like everything boils down to particles. I watched a show today about the Higgs-Boson for example, and they explained that the LHC had enough energy to actually produce the HB. This makes it seem like there are these ultra tiny, fairly weird, but nevertheless locatable "things" that if we only had "god's eyes" so to speak we could physically see spinning, glowing, whatever. Is this true? Or is the word "particle" just a handy term used to talk about a phenomena that really doesn't accord with our common notion of a particle. And if that's the case, what's really meant by saying the particle is observed in a collider? Thanks!