TheVat

I will leave this summary of Smolin's hypothesis, just to show an alternative view where there are changeable constants. (he sees parameters as driven by the ability to produce black holes): Black holes have a role in natural selection. In fecund theory a collapsing[clarification needed] black hole causes the emergence of a new universe on the "other side", whose fundamental constant parameters (masses of elementary particles, Planck constant, elementary charge, and so forth) may differ slightly from those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe thus gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes. The theory contains the evolutionary ideas of "reproduction" and "mutation" of universes, and so is formally analogous to models of population biology. Alternatively, black holes play a role in cosmological natural selection by reshuffling only some matter affecting the distribution of elementary quark universes. The resulting population of universes can be represented as a distribution of a landscape of parameters where the height of the landscape is proportional to the numbers of black holes that a universe with those parameters will have. Applying reasoning borrowed from the study of fitness landscapes in population biology, one can conclude that the population is dominated by universes whose parameters drive the production of black holes to a local peak in the landscape. This was the first use of the notion of a landscape of parameters in physics.

Ok. Then you are saying there are equally logical bases that could potentially be uncovered for alpha, e.g. Or elementary charge.

What causes there to be three extended spatial dimensions?

It's unclear to me how one could ever obtain definitive first principles for constants (like below) without access to other universes. The unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium-133 atom ΔνCs is 9 192 631 770 hertz. The speed of light in vacuum c is 299 792 458 meters per second. The Planck constant h is 6.626 070 15 × 10−34 joule second. The elementary charge e is 1.602 176 634 × 10−19 coulomb. The Boltzmann constant k is 1.380 649 × 10−23 joule per kelvin. The Avogadro constant NA is 6.022 140 76 × 1023 reciprocal mole. The luminous efficacy of monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 × 1012 Hz, Kcd, is 683 lumens per watt. And of course the FSC, which has to stay around a certain range to have stable matter and hence observing creatures like ourselves. Value of 1/ α  137.035999084(21) Perhaps we could develop better ways to model toy universes (or make them, haha) in order to get at such principles?

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in--an interesting hole I find myself in--fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' - Doug Adams I know his quote has been posted here a hundred times but it bears repeating. No cleverer statement of the observation selection effect will be found. I like Smolins fecund universes theory, which @joigus mentioned, which assumes universes have "offspring" through the creation of black holes whose offspring universes have values of physical constants that depend on those of the mother universe but can differ slightly. He's made a couple of predictions from that theory which have held up.

Propulsion systems using reaction mass seem just wrong to me, for reasons touched on already. And exterior acceleration (laser sail, say) confines exploration of Proxima to a very fast fly-by, given we can't zip on ahead and set up a deceleration laser there. Alcubierre metric drive looks good albeit maybe impossible.

What happens when the ditorus is stimulated?

Great song! An earworm for me in the early eighties. Good blend of social comment, funk, reggae. Don't know if I recall this rightly, but wasn't there some street in Brixton that was the first to have electric lights, hence it was named that.

Phlegm theories Article in the Atlantic a few years back on the explanatory holes in many theories of consciousness. Popped back on my radar...an excerpt: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/phlegm-theories-of-consciousness/472812/ If you want to read it and you get paywall blocked, LMK and I'll put up a screenshot link.

That is fascinating and astonishing. What I mean is that I have heard that Kelvin quote over and over almost my entire adult life, from teachers and scientists I respected, from science writers of sterling reputation, and no one ever contested its accuracy! I would say that this demonstrates the pernicious way many repetitions can make a wholly fictitious statement or attribution develop the ring of truth. Really, I am quite happy to learn that Kelvin was in fact responsive to the results of the MM experiments and not so dogmatic. And also startled that Michelson would say something like that. I would assume he backed away pretty quickly from that a few years later. Good job on debunking the quote, Genady.

Reminds me of William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, who said in the 1890s that "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." It sounds foolish now, but you have to recall that Kelvin had lived through a staggering wave of advances in the field that included Maxwell unifying electricity and magnetism and deriving the speed of light, then Hertz's experimental verifications, so there were many in science who were thinking that took care of all the forces. And the luminiferous aether hadn't been tossed aside yet. Kind of funny that Michelson and Morley had done their first aether experiment in 1887. But Kelvin et al didn't pay much attention.

It may help to read the thread. Things moved on from the OP. And if energy is dirt cheap and carbon neutral then the need for your suggested air extraction would seem less pressing. As a practical matter, the air extraction systems I've seen all seem to be Drop in the Bucket solutions. It's a general term for removing atmospheric co2 and keeping it in some relatively stable form, out of the airshed.

I got the hint. Yes, barycenter (looking at a single orbit) means one of the foci of an elliptical orbit. And the sun also orbits that barycenter, very tightly, so it is not right at the focus, either. The cumulative effect of all the 8.5 planets also shifts the barycenter so that it would be pretty unlikely to find the sun at a focus of one single orbit.

Well, the sun is not actually at the barycenter. And Newton understood the barycenter lay outside the sun's sphere.

I was wondering about the orbits, but I wasn't expecting a banknote to attempt accurate renditions of orbital eccentricity. If it's about orbital mechanics, Kepler should be sitting beside Newton. The geometry drawing seems to be treating an ellipse like a circle?

The wildly askew orbits drawn around it, right? I wonder if the horse's ass dimension was for separate motor segments. I also wondered why diameter would be specifically limited to the rail gauge - some cargo is noticeably wider than the rails on many train shipments.

That photo does seem pretty improbable. Meep meep.

I think the story is that he was in weakened health, and the fowl experiment meant spending some time out in harsh cold, a condition often associated with snow, which caused further weakening and immune failure leading to pneumonia. A thumbnail version of the story doesn't fill in those blanks.

Indeed. And of those how many does your brain register as of the slightest importance? My answer, on any given day: 0. The primary function of the mind is pruning out irrelevant stimuli. Most of us engage with ads online anout as much as we engage with street noise filtering into our houses. A dog started barking down the road, a toddler cried at the daycare across the street, a heavy trailer rattled over the bump at the intersection....my day and outlook is not transformed. It's just another day with normal ambient noises. @Trurl, would it be possible to post in the default font of this forum? Yours seems microscopic on this tablet.

One of my favorite anecdotes is that Bacon died as a result of practicing his empiricism, conducting a scientific experiment. He went out to stuff a fowl with snow in an experiment on meat preservation, contracted pneumonia and died. I have wondered if that story is apocryphal but it's still a good story. It is, however, true that his mother was Lady Anne Cook, so when she married Nicholas Bacon, she became known as....

I like that phi is the limit of ratios of successive Fibonacci numbers. What's cool is that the series will converge on phi with any starting value.

Because such a revenge debases our humanity. Imagining such cruelties with glee puts you in his sick world.

I wish we had read authors like Dostoyevsky in school, but maybe we were too young. Most of my reading during K-12 was outside of the school curriculum. But school did expose me to writers like Orwell, Twain, Hawthorne, and Steinbeck, along with some Shakespeare. And like every high school student in the US, I read Catcher in the Rye. Outside the schoolhouse, I ranged widely through sci-fi, adventure, anthropology and many science books. Later, in my twenties, classics - Dostoyevsky, Camus, Nabokov, Kant, Poe, HG Wells, et al. I remember @Moontanman mentioned book, When Worlds Collide, partly because Hutchinson, Kansas becomes the US capital city after a catastrophe and we lived near there. Hutchinson as the capital of anything is a hilarious concept.

It may help to know this thread spun off from one about efficient cooling in a hot climate, spec. SoCal. So the chat was sort of focused on the hot places that are now heading towards uninhabitable for humans. The thread is just developing ideas, and that's one of them. I would imagine each idea which used a subterranean or rock-embedded approach would have to find ways to bring in natural light. Light tubes would be one, park areas carved into surface alcoves another. There are many ways to skin a cat.* * a figure of speech our cats find disgusting That was interesting. And a reminder that thick temperature moderating walls can be built with low tech and local earthen materials. I'd love to see a return to some form of this in areas of the US Southwest.