Johnny5

Your backpack is permanently connected to your suit, and it happens to contain a solenoid, which is permanently connected to it. You have a space-tool which is a ring in shape, which just happens to fit around the solenoid, and some space-tape, so you can tape the ring to the solenoid if you wish. You have a switch which can turn the battery to the solenoid on or off, attached to a guage. So the only thing you can throw, is the ring. The mass of the ring is such that if you throw it with your maximum force, you will reach the ship in 11 minutes, so that's out. What do you do? PS: The tape is effectively massless.

Yes I seem to be getting this answer a lot.

Excellent statistical analysis. So you perform the experiment. 99 swans were white. There is now only one swan left in the bag. My question: Would you be surprised if it was black? Your answer: Yes and no.

There are problems in electrodynamics, in which Newton's third law is violated... is one of them? <------ THAT'S THE WHOLE QUESTION. I was hoping to get more responses, but no one here wants to take this on. That's a shame. You are in space. Your spaceship is twenty feet away from you to your left, and at rest relative to you. You have in your posession a cylinder, copper wire, a battery, and an iron ring, they are parts of your jetpack which broke. You have 10 minutes left of oxygen, and there's no one on the ship to help you. What do you do?

Ok excellent. I'm gonna go through it carefully, I could use the review, I'm sure I'll have a question or two. I looked it over yesterday, yep it's very clear. Give me a day or two.

I don't understand it' date=' can you explain it to me? I read your post there, and didn't follow.

I like the term coupling, if in fact, there is some kind of coupling going on. I have no problem referring to hbar c, as the electromagnetic coupling constant, but what is being coupled to what, is my question.

Let me just think about this ok? [math] \hbar c = 3.16 \times 10^{-26} Nm^2[/math] My first thought would be' date=' what in the world is a Newton meter squared. Pressure is force per unit area, not force times unit area, it's not a pressure. Lets take those two pingpong balls with one electron on them into the vacuum. In principle, they push apart, so if your hands were keeping them at a constant distance away from each other, you would feel a slight push on each hand, and the magnitude would be given from the formula we found. It has been said to me many times (in fact swansont said it a few posts ago), that photons mediate the electromagnetic interaction. So using a model in which photons mediate the electric force, even though the pingpong balls are static relative to each other, there is some kind of exchange of photons going on inbetween them. This pingpong ball model is highly oversimplified I know, but still... What is a Newton meter squared? Changing to energy per unit length is only gonna substitute one problem for another. I say break things down so you can see the inertia... [math'] \hbar c = 3.16 \times 10^{-26} KG \frac{m}{s^2} m^2 [/math] [math] \hbar c = 3.16 \times 10^{-26} KG \frac{m^3}{s^2} [/math] Now, suppose we knew how many state changes the universe undergoes per second. As a guess, use the Planck time. We could then remove all reference to time, from this number as follows: I have an idea, I am going to go think about it, and put it here tomorrow. The seconds will be removed from the constant, and there will be a true temporal constant of nature, which will be exemplified from the fact that there are no units of seconds involved. Then I am going to take the inverse of inertia, you will see. Then who knows. You will have a quantity that is inertial mass times volume. I'm sure you can see it. Have to go. You are helping me figure out something, it could work. Something... Right now I just want to understand this constant, which you feel is so important. If you already know the answer, that is fine, just lead me to it also. Kind regards

Well here is what I was wondering. What possible other interpretations are there for the experimental results, besides time dilation. Also, how do you know that you are detecting muons, and not some other particle. The way the experiment worked, is that some large detector was built in the physics lab, inside of the building. So those muons apparently traveled through several feet of concrete, into the lab detector. Then, mass computations were made, which corresponded to muons... I believe. As I said, I didn't do this experiment, I chose to do another, but I did discuss the results with the guys who did the muon experiment, after theyd finished it. One of the questions I've always had about the muon experiment, is even if the particles being detected really are muons, what if there are so many muons created in the upper atmosphere, that statistically some are long lived enough to reach the ground (independent of relativity theory). After all, we are talking about the mean lifetime of a muon, which is statistical.

Well that's a shame, since I've been wondering about the secret of 137 for a long time. What I do already know, is that in the simple Bohr model, the speed of an electron is 137th the speed of light in the CM frame. NIST value for the fine structure constant: [math] \alpha = 7.297352568 \times 10^{-3} [/math] [math] \frac{1}{\alpha} = 137.0359991 [/math] You keep saying electromagnetism coupling.

[math] |\vec F| R^2 = (8.9876 \times 10^9) (1.60217653 \times 10^{-19})^2 = 2.3071 \times 10^{-28} [/math] There you go. The force of repulsion times the square of the separation distance between two electrons is: 2.3071 X 10-28 Newton meter2

No, you are helping.

You say it depends upon the system, I'm not sure what you mean. As far as what are called "confidence levels" go, in the computation of a confidence level, you choose alpha, and beta, before you use the charts, so you can fudge. I know you can fudge, I've taken statistics, I know how to do it (fudge). So statistical analysis doesn't provide genuine certainty. But I realize that's not what you are saying, you are asserting that you can break uncertainty into levels, and statistics proves it. And I repeat, "No, the issue is binary. You can't be .7 of certain." Using statistics, you can conclude that smoking causes cancer. You could also use it to determine that drinking water causes cancer too. But the issue raised, is about genuine certainty of an individual. I think its also a very understandable, and personal issue. Can the certainty level of an individual be gauged using numbers or not? What I will say, is that the rules of uncertainty/certainty apply to all individuals, equally. So that my position is clear, I am emphatically saying no, you cannot measure uncertainty (in any non-trival sense), because at any moment in time, on any specific issue, either an individual is certain of something or not. If not, then the individual is uncertain. To say that person X is half as uncertain as person Y, on whether or not statement S is true, is bad epistemology. This doesn't mean that statistical analysis isn't useful, it's just that you cannot apply it to human certainty, and I think that is what we are talking about here. The certainty/uncertainty of a human reasoning agent. You have to interpret statistics another way, you cannot use it to break human certainty into degrees. I think I've made my point clear.

Interesting. Yes of course that would work. Here is Euclid's proposition on how to bisect a given finite straight line. Euclid Book I Proposition 10 But issues about how you would have randomly picked two diametrically opposed points arise. If you really did choose at random, you could never find the diametrically opposed point by luck (the probability you randomly chose the diametrically opposed point would by 1/infinity = 0), SO you would need to know where the center is and then draw the diameter, which pre-supposes that you already knew where the center was. So I suppose I objected unfairly, but of course now we are analyzing Euclidean geometry with a tinge of probability theory, and I don't think Euclid knew about probability theory at all. Call it a hunch. I see your point.

Yes. Euclid's proof is rather interesting too. Euclid Book III Proposition 1 Incidentally' date=' his proposition on how to bisect a given angle was already covered in book one, so Euclid could have used your proof in book III, or his own. Euclid Book I Proposition 9