KipIngram

I'm not expert in this area, but I have been trying to read up on quantum field theory, and I think your misstep is in regarding matter as ultimately something solid to start with. All of those particles that make up the atoms aren't really little balls - they're excitations of various fields, so the whole idea of trying to describe the space they "fill" in an intuition-based way just doesn't work, I think.

Yeah, good point on a lot of that. The bartender was actually a character, and I quite enjoyed him by the way. But I agree with you, and on the reason also - I think it was to inject "light comedy."

Cheers from another 54 year-old middle-aged man. One of my gear-grinders is people that "set themselves above" others, even in small ways (maybe especially in small ways). A daycare I used to take my kids to provided care for infants and older children. They requested that parents dropping off multiple children drop off their older child first in the appropriate room and then their infant, to minimize the chances of having sleeping infants woken up by noisy older kids. Made perfect sense to me, and at any rate it was their place. The father of one of my daughter's friends pointedly snubbed this rule, and I always found myself wondering what it was that made him feel like it wasn't necessary for him to show respect for the management's desires. So, a small thing, but at the time it did grind my gears. I am no fan of overly authoritarian rules per se, but on the other hand there are a lot of people on this ball and without some rules we'll fall into chaos.

Ah; I wasn't aware that there had been another of the name. I was referring to the recent one with Matt Damon.

Yes. And, for that matter, who is anyone to tell others what they need?

Yes, I'm sad I didn't think of that one. The Martian was superb in that way.

You'd have to think it would be theoretically possible on a per-species basis. Some species might just not be within "genetic engineering distance" of such an improvement, whereas others might. It's sure a lot easier to buy for chimps and dolphin than it is for sharks, but exactly where the limits lay might surprise us.

I thought 2010: The Year We Make Contact was good. One problem here is that I know some areas of science better than others. The Andromeda Strain seemed good to me, but it could have holes in it miles wide on the medical / biological front and I wouldn't have necessarily caught them. I watched Passengers last night, and it was largely good on that front. I thought they made a couple of mistakes re: gravity and the ships spin, but nothing that just really fouled up my disbelief. That said, I don't think I scrutinize for that as much as some people - I just enjoy the movies. I enjoyed the Jack Reacher novel series by Lee Child, but an acquaintance of mine who knows guns just couldn't even read them because of what he thought of as gross inaccuracies in firearms realism in the books. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Inaccuracy of that sort bothers me much worse when it has to do with computer technology. Black Hat nearly made me gag.

Seconded - she really looked fantastic. Saw the movie last night. PS: To give equal time, my wife thought Chris Pratt looked just fine as well.

I try to respect people's privacy, people's property, and people's right to live their lives as they choose. I try not to judge, and in cases where I'm unable to avoid "registering" judgment (sometimes we're unavoidably affected by our upbringing) I try not to act on that judgment if it's inappropriate to do so. And I expect that same treatment from others.

Right. We'd just have to hope that Congress wouldn't back him up on anything too extreme.

He stated that pretty strongly, I believe, by invoking the idea that if it took any time at all then there would be some time during when you had fractional quanta.

Great. Then we'll have Pence, who seems to be very strongly driven by his religion, and more than ok with imposing those values on everyone else. Can't say I'm a huge fan of that either. Hopefully there are adequate checks and balances to keep that from being too severe.

Hopefully sooner enough to change the *choices*. Both of them. Seriously - seek out that Jonathan Pie video and give it a listen. It his response to his studio cameraman (well, his fictional character's studio cameraman - "Jonathan Pie" is just an invented character) the day after the election, as to whether he's surprised at the outcome or not.

Oh, maybe #1 should be "identify all the possible changes to that state that can occur by moving any integral number of action quanta (including zero)"? I assume "no change" would have some probability as well, and so should be included? How does time enter into that? When the quanta move, they move instantaneously according to Hobson. I could see a logical path if I evaluated the probabilities every Planck time or something like that, but it's hard for me to see what to do with instantaneous changes in the context of a continuous time variable.

No, I really don't think anyone gets to be as rich as Trump is while being a person of impeccable integrity. That said, I was not familiar with Trump's history; it was just a feeling I had. I don't know how to explain the difference in my perceptions of them - it's just that at that particular time I was more bothered by things I'd heard about Hillary than things I'd heard about Trump. Plus I got this feeling from Hillary that she felt like she "deserved" to win somehow, and sense of entitlement almost always puts me off. So the decision really had a strong emotional component. Trump said a couple of things during the campaign that did appeal to me - foremost among them being the notion of using a stiff tax to penalize businesses that outsource jobs from America overseas. But of course that didn't get followed through on, so it was just another politician telling another lie during the campaign. I had some hopes he'd come in and do some right things, but he's disappointing on every front. So I really don't want to get into a details debate over how I made my voting decision. It was an emotion-based decision; let's just leave it at that. And I am thoroughly disgusted with how Trump's handling things, so I'm definitely not in the Trump supporter column. It's been a long, long time since we had a President that I really felt great about.

Yes, it was trolling a bit, and I'm not sure I see why it has to be asked - my point was just that we did not have a good choice to make that day. But - it's all good; my skin isn't paper thin. The comedian Jonathan Pie did a great bit right after the election that captures my take on things very nicely. I'll dig up the link if someone asks. And he is a liberal person, so it's not some conservative hate tirade. But I think he hit the nail precisely on the head.

No, I most definitely am not saying that. That's why I added that note at the end, specifically so people wouldn't take my post as defending Trump.

Yes, what Strange said. That is exactly the point of the Hobson paper - that the quanta are in fact absolutely not localized. Any attempt to regard them as localized comes into conflict with relativity - he has a section on that.

By election day there were really no good choices left. But that just shifts the focus to the primaries, so it doesn't really address your point. And I would not impugn Hillary's competence - I see her as an extremely skilled politician. I just question her integrity. Note - I'm not saying that Trump has integrity.

I recently perused this (fairly thoroughly in the earlier chapters): https://cquest-studygroup.wikispaces.com/file/view/A+First+Course+in+String+Theory.pdf I thought it did a good job of "motivating" the whole business. Explained how things we're familiar with in 3D/4D translate to higher dimension, said some fairly understandable things about the "rolled up" dimensions, and so on. Won't make you an expert (at least it didn't make me one), but I thought it was "well pitched" for my particular starting point.

Sure thing. Digital logic is my "expertise by education," so your problem was nagging me quite a bit, especially after I did the Karnaugh map and saw that it would simplify.

This paper says that quanta are spatially distributed in the sense that they are associated with the excitation of a single mode of the field that spans all of space. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.4616.pdf It's explicitly stated that they have no position. I had the impression from the presentation that you had to consider multiple quanta in different modes to start to get a "shape," just like you have to add up numerous frequency components of a Fourier transform to get anything other than a uniform sinusoidal shape. I'm putting that out there with a very large grain of salt - I'm just barely beginning to get my head around this stuff.

So is this generally on the right track? I'm trying to apply Feynman's path integral approach in the context of what we're talking about. We have the universe in some assumed initial state. So we 1) identify all the possible changes to that state that can occur by moving one quantum of action. Then 2) the probability of each of those outcomes is found by summing over all of the possible ways that change can occur. So now we have a set of possible next states and the probability of each, and that's all we can say, right? In step 2 we have to consider the cases where sub-quantum virtual fluctuations occur as well?

Good example, but I don't think every expression of the initial form will necessarily go to the form you got in the example. In the example you have a part that's of the form a.b + /a.b, which will always go down to b. I didn't see that happening in the first of your two initial problems, which is the only one I've played with much. Are these problems presented in a context that promises they're reducible? I did a Karnaugh map and got this for the first one, (x+y)(/x+z)(y+z) yz x=0 x=1 00 0 0 01 0 1 11 1 1 10 1 0 xz + /xy So why are we having such trouble getting that algebraically? (x+y)(/x+z)(y+z) (x./x + x.z + y./x + y.z) (y+z) (x.z + y./x + y.z) (y+z) x.z.y + y./x.y + y.z.y + x.z.z + y./x.z + y.z.z x.y.z + /x.y + y.z + x.z + /x.y.z + y.z (x.y.z + /x.y.z) + (y.z + y.z) + /x.y + x.z y.z + /x.y + x.z I checked that and it gives the same Karnaugh map. So there's some rule that can be applied here. Here's what we need to do formally: The first term contributes only if y and z are both true. In that case one or the other of the other two terms will be true. So we can see that it simplifies. We just need the formal rule. The rule more or less has to say exactly that reduction: ab + /ca + cb = /ca + cb By the way, your second problem is directly in this form, so when we find this rule we can immediately apply it to get xy + /xz + yz = xy + /xz I'm assuming this isn't a rule you've been given, but it's a good one. And given that I didn't immediately recognize it upon looking at your second problem I imagine it wasn't given to me as a "rule" either. Ok, here you go. y.z + /x.y + x.z Multiply through by "true," defined as xz + /x + /z: (y.z + /x.y + x.z) (x.z + /x + /z) y.z.x.z + /x.y.x.z + x.z.x.z + y.z./x + /x.y./x + /x.x.z + /z.y.z + /z./x.y + /z.x.z Obvious simplifications: x.y.z + x.z + /x.y.z + /x.y + /x.y./z Note that x.y.z + x.z = x.z: x.z + /x.y + /x.y.z + /x.y./z Now note that /x.y.z + /x.y./z = /x.y x.z + /x.y + /x.y And finally /x.y + /x.y = /x.y: x.z + /x.y Done.