Schneibster

You're a genius if it only takes 2 or 3!!! And I haven't gone shopping for linear algebra books. Which is my next step up in the implicate order.

Actually I hope you're getting a list of books you should read. And if you think it's too many I will pare it down to the bare essentials for you. I think these bare essentials are what everyone should know before they discuss 21st century cosmology. And I am open to correction and eagerly anticipate updates which will result in the purchase of more books. Ask my opinion and I will freely give it; but most of what I say is simply fact and I strive to delineate opinions with statements that they are opinions. How can I help you understand? I hate to say it but I fail to see why you should consider the size of someone else's library excessive when you presumably have access to a scientific university library which is no doubt more extensive than mine. Not to mention I was requested to make this list. Perhaps you should criticize the person who asked. I'm not minded to; I think it was a legitimate question and will help people understand where I'm coming from, to know what I've read. I'd say that pretending it's "bragging" is evidence of a prejudice. BTW I have these books in two stacks next to my couch seat. I'm going to keep them there for a week or so, but after that sorry they need to be put back away in the shelves so I can vacuum. So can we finish this up soon please? Seriously you guys better get over this before I trip over this stuff. It's like really two stacks a foot tall in the way of me getting food. Rhhhhggggahhhh>crunch<!!!

Reality be's, IO. Remember: Camus: To be is to do. Freud: To do is to be. Ol' Blue Eyes: Do-be do-be do. And more seriously: pay serious attention to my post directing you toward the postulates of the FT. The Wikipedia article is particularly rich in this area.

This strikes me as very ideological and approximately equivalent to banning girls from the treehouse. And BTW Gravitation is not "out-moded." How about Thomas-Finney? Do you even know what that is? OK, let's start with Thomas-Finney: ISBN 0-201-53174-7 Calculus Ninth Edition Addison-Wesley 1996 I'm sure that's totally obsolete by now, right? Dude, do you own a copy or have you ever see a copy of Gravitation? Misner/Thorne/Wheeler 1970 ISBN 0-7167-0334-3 Gravitation Twenty-fourth Printing W. H. Freeman and Co. 2005 It's like a telephone book, like the Principia only bigger. Really. I own a recent translation of the Principia and can attest Gravitation is bigger. Newton, (transl. by) Cohen/Whitman 1999 ISBN 978-0-520-08817-7 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, University of California Press I cannot imagine the arrogance necessary to call it "outmoded." It's like calling relativity "obsolete." Morrison 1990. ISBN 0-13-747908-5 Understanding Quantum Physics Prentice-Hall. Itzykson/Zuber 1980 ISBN 0-486-44568-2 Quantum Field Theory Dover Press. Icke 1995 ISBN 0-521-40495-9 The Force of Symmetry Cambridge University Press. Meijer/Bauer 1964, with a 2005 preface, ISBN 0-486-43798-1 Group Theory Dover Press. Harrison 1980 ISBN 0-486-66021-4 Electronic Structure and the Properties of Solids Dover Press. Hughes 1989 ISBN 0-674-84392-4 The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Harvard University Press Moore 1962 ISBN Not Applicable "Physical Chemistry" Prentice-Hall Third edition So far. I'll keep looking. That's in addition to every other book I've mentioned. Kaku 1993 ISBN 0-19-507652-4 Quantum Field Theory: a Modern Introduction Oxford University Press Feynman/Leighton/Sands 1963 ISBN 0-201- 02116-1 The Feynman Lectures on Physics Addison-Wesley Sixth Printing 1977 Kaku 1988 ISBN 0-387-98589-1 Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory Springer-Verlag, New York, 2nd edition, 1999 When we're done with the textbooks I'll talk about some of the popular science books. They're actually fairly accurate; mostly they're just incomplete and imprecise. OTOH their audience is just trying to understand, not invent new physics (except the nutjobs). So I would rate the accuracy as more important than either the completeness or the precision. OTO, OH, I also wouldn't criticize a good try at pedagogy. Or, heh, even pedantry. It's always amusing watching "physics is super difficult" cranks try to deal with Feynman explaining QED. But that's for later. Let's start with the textbooks first. I'm almost out of physics books. It's about time for the electronics textbooks. Then we can discuss the software textbooks. And the networking textbooks. That list will be about two hundred volumes. That is, after all, what I do for a living: systems engineering for large Internet sites. Physics is only my hobby; I only have a few books on it. Oh and there are the astronomy books; and the astrophotography and wildlife photography books. And the books about filters, and films, and CCDs, and computer image processing, and digital processing, and so forth. That's another twenty volumes. I'll wait until tomorrow.

Sure, but remember that the universe is in a curious and mysterious accord with math. Well, that is not the relativistic view. Relativity proves time is hyperbolic. Spacetime's basic group is the Poincare group. Time is not right circular.

Did I miss how to turn it on?

Solid matter physics. Maybe as a subforum of the "Modern Physics" forum unless it gets big enough on its own.

We can see echoes in the CMBR of the inflations of other universes "near" ours at its inception. This is years old, maybe even a decade. Do you need an article on it? It's not very hard to find. But I'll go find one if you can't.

Of course not; string theory doesn't single it out. Cosmology does. This knowledge that it must be the Standard Model gauge group, U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3), is empirical. Other universes may have only two, or five or six or more, "large" dimensions, and might have more than one hyperbolic "time" dimension. Unfortunately we don't know enough about M-theory to generate our particular universe from that data. But there is not much doubt on the part of most theorists that there will, eventually, be a particular string theory that correctly describes our physics. It's not singled out; the multiverse/metaverse explores all options. We are here because this is an option we can develop and survive in.

Well, certainly we have to allow for our biases and our sensory equipment's sensitivity and range. Instrumentation is intended to "make something happen" where we can see it when our experiment pops.

Actually Guth invented Eternal Inflation but Linde certainly did a great deal of work on it. As far as consequences, they appear to be in the CMBR written across the sky for those with radiotelescopes to see. Carry on.

Actually it's a physiological point, bound up with how humans perceive time. Which is due both to that, and to the fact that time is hyperbolic, whereas space is right circular. ETA: Well, flat space is anyway.

2LOT no longer strictly applies below size xyz, mass m, and timespan t1 - t0. Two important facts: 1. The FT is not a physics theory. It is a mathematics theorem. It has an absolute mathematical proof. You should have a look at its postulates. 2. QM does not deal with Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics; MB statistics do not have spin. QM uses Fermi-Dirac statistics for fermions, that is, half-spin particles, that is, matter, and Bose-Einstein statistics for bosons, that is, unit-spin particles, that is, force/energy. There are no "maxwellions" or "boltzmannions." The closest is Cooper pairs, which are bosons. You should be able to find out what you need to know about the FT from the Wikipedia article. It's pretty good. I've been there a lot and compared it with quite a few different articles elsewhere (like hyperphysics) and it looks like it's one of the good ones.

Well, Lizzie, I wondered if that was you. Perhaps here we can talk about science instead of board politics. You are of course correct. OK, well if you want to have a urinating match regarding pedagogic techniques with Leonard Susskind please include me out. I was OK with his pedagogic technique. It was obvious to me that he was speaking metaphorically. Electrons flying along the beam inside a TV tube don't randomly emit photons as his description would require if taken literally. So, you're a PI? May I ask if you're running any experiments right now? Do you have any teaching duties? So would you call Gravitation pop-sci? How about Quantum Field Theory, A Modern Introduction? How about The Feynman Lectures in Physics? I think scientists who are contemptuous of popular science forgot where their money comes from, quite frankly.

How "privileged?" You'll see the same thing from everywhere; just not the same location for the horizon. Actually you are hurtling into the future at the speed of light. Yes: time is passing. But inside a muon? No. Muons have no internal structure. They are Generation II fundamental leptons. They have no more internal structure than quarks. No. Time is as real as space; in fact, the Lorentz transform lets us convert one into the other. If you go fast enough you see time as space; of course it just looks like space to you, but everyone else can see you think space is time.

Yes. It defines the line between "classical" and "quantum." It's the new version of the 2LOT; it defines the size, mass, and time above which things are classical and below which they are quantum. I never said anything about unification. QM degenerates to CM in the size limit. Always has. The FT defines the size limit.

I have amassed my cosmology from many sources. I will give you the library as I have time. My major sources have been Heinz Pagels (whose premature death I bitterly regret), Brian Greene, Kip Thorne, Stephen Hawking, and Leonard Susskind, with major assists from Isaac Asimov's non-fiction History of Physics and Feynman's Lectures in Physics, commonly called "The Red Books." Some of the physics I learned in the EE curriculum served me well and most of the math certainly did. It's a bit late this evening. Perhaps a partial one tomorrow, and a complete one the next day. If I'm motivated.

Totally cool, ajb, I am going to really enjoy running stuff past you. I am already starting to read the books that have this stuff in them, so as I recall these ideas there will be more to say! And I know a lot of cosmology, including Eternal Inflation and the echoes in the CMBR, as well as the large scale structure. So we're going to bounce a bunch of good stuff back and forth. My next project is to figure out how to have multiple quotes. It's probably obvious but it's late to me, and I'm going to bed. Tomorrow.

You bet. Anytime. My pleasure.

I am totally OK with that, ajb. You're completely correct, and in fact this is an analogy that, quite frankly after having had my behind thrashed I will deploy with a great deal more caution in the future. I'm hoping to get stuff that is what they're teaching the undergraduates today and try to make it comprehensible to my old tired engineering cadre. So bear with me.

In the English edition that's the whole First Chapter. The subsection is titled "The Fine Structure Constant" and is after subsection "Antimatter" and before subsection "Quantum Chromodynamics," with another couple subsections afterward; all of these are inside Chapter 1, "The World According to Feynman." I will be interested to know about the translation, actually. Can you find the parts I am referring to? How can I help you?

Actually I think I started objecting when folks denounced what Susskind, who is currently a teacher in physics at Stanford, said in his book, after I quoted it as an example to show that I wasn't the only one who thought it was a good metaphor. I think that was bad judgment. I think you should admit it and move on. Unless you're a teacher at Stanford. I think you should be very careful about denouncing false authorities lest you denounce a real authority and get pwnt. I wouldn't personally announce I thought a teacher at Stanford's teaching technique was bad. I might say it didn't work for me. You guys are pretty arrogant. I just, you know, wouldn't call someone who probably has time on the main beam line at SLAC, you know, "not an authority." You know? I mean, do any of you guys know anybody who has time on the main beam line at a major accelerator center? If you do, I gotta ask you, how come you're involving me in this? Please write Susskind and tell us what he says. OK? And if he's not gonna answer, how come I gotta? Geez. Also, I'll tell you this: I'm too proud to use Susskind's example to "prove" how TV works. We both know it doesn't work like that; he's just trying to give folks who don't have all the math a gut-level "feel" for it. I never tried and resent the accusation. If you want to discuss how a TV works we can do that and it's a lot more complicated than Susskind's example; and that doesn't affect the effectiveness of it, nevertheless. I mean we can reduce everything to quark and lepton interactions, but if we do it's going to take a super-duper long time to explain it all.

I was told his book was not acceptable as evidence. Surely we're not arguing about that...? I was arguing in favor of a particular pedantic technique. Susskind's pedantic technique, in fact. It worked for me. >shrug<

I wouldn't want anyone to confuse me with a real scientist. I'm an engineer with a wild hair, I like to explain physics so everyone can get it. I'm not here to tell everyone the latest discovery, I'm here to make the latest-but-one-discovery make sense to people like me. While I don't like the "it's in there" response either, I think a full paragraph and page number is pretty much a valid pointer. Perhaps folks shouldn't streak to prove everyone's a crank. I can hear someone's argument against it without hearing a famous, award-winning author who is presently a teacher at Stanford called a crank. That is irritating. It's aggressive, like saying, "Einstein was a crank." I think it's a provocative stunt. Leonard Susskind is not a physics crank. He's teaching physics right now today at one of the most famous centers of physics research in the world. Calling him a crank or unreliable borders on defamation.

No, I won't tell you that's unreasonable; and in fact it's no more than a bad metaphor. I won't fight. As long as you admit, it's a metaphor, and that's all he meant, and I did no more than twist it, and never claimed (and in fact denied) it was correct or exact or accurate or precise. Either his or mine. That's all good by me. I never claimed it was the real exact truth. I said, someone who doesn't wanna learn all the math can think about it this way and be close enough to right to kindasorta understand it at gut level. And, it's not precise so don't push the analogy too far. Didn't I? I think I did and if I didn't it's because I put it in another thread and forgot this one. And that's all I ever intended. I know there are people here who know how to run the exact numbers and if something incredible and cool happens I'll hang on your every word just like everyone else. But I think I can explain it to some folks who, frankly, asked, if not entirely politely but quite clearly, for explanations for other than the elite. I aim to satisfy that audience; that person is, in fact, exactly who I would like to inform. Nothing more. And if someone says, well, that's inexact, and it's more exact if you do it like this, you can expect (if it's not someone's pet crank physics or whatnot) that I'll go, yeah, that's right, but you can incorporate it like this which is what I said. But what I said can only be calculated from your stuff, yeah, that's right. Or whatnot shmoozerama. Because it should, after all, be right for everyone, stupids, smarts, and geniuses. And everybody should get a vote based on understanding the consequences one way and the other. And sorry but I have to come back around and ask, what books that I have can I not mention as "authorities?" I need you to understand that I have nearly a hundred that I might mention; that's only non-fiction of course. About twenty physics textbooks and thirty popular physics books by various luminaries like Gell-Mann and Feynman and Kaku and so forth. I'm really pretty unhappy that this supposedly fair physics forum seems to disagree with about half of them. I'd like to know why you think that's justified. Actually, no. My point was only, here is where I got my example. I never claimed it was mathematically correct in detail and in fact denied it was from the beginning as you can verify from my posts. And quite frankly I think it was always a good example. Be aware that I have a recent translation of the Principia. ISBN 978-0-520-08817-7 Cohen/Whitman 1999. Do you intend to ban references to this book as well?