joigus

Wonderful source to study political fallacies is Yes, Minister. Priceless. It never gets old.

That would be a mighty interesting universe.

I passed your sentence through a syntax parser (.) No complete linkages found. ++++Time 0.00 seconds (354.34 total) Found 2 linkages (2 with no P.P. violations) at null count 8 Linkage 1, cost vector = (UNUSED=8 DIS=0 AND=0 LEN=12) +------------------------------------------Xp----------------------- +------------Wi-----------+ | +---E--+ | | | LEFT-WALL [gravity] always work.v [at] [specific] [degree] [angle] [at] -------------------+ | | | [instant] [moment] . Constituent tree: (S Gravity (S (VP (ADVP always) work)) at specific degree angle at instant moment .) As a test run, I tried: "It's raining heavily tonight." Here's the result: ++++Time 0.00 seconds (354.32 total) Found 4 linkages (2 with no P.P. violations) Linkage 1, cost vector = (UNUSED=0 DIS=2 AND=0 LEN=6) +------MVpn------+ +-Ss+--Pg--+---MVa--+ | | | | | | it 's.v raining.v heavily tonight Constituent tree: (S (NP It) (VP 's (VP raining (ADVP heavily) (NP tonight)))) I'm still not very familiar with it, but it may prove a valuable tool for the forum Speculations.

Very good advice IMO you're getting here. Just for completeness and to add to what @iNow is providing: https://philosophy.hku.hk/think/fallacy/list.php Very intelligent people have made very silly mistakes by not taking them into account. My favourite example is Enrico Fermi, who once said extraterrestrial life must not exist because, otherwise, we would have noticed already. I'm not saying extraterrestrial life must exist (which I think it does,) I'm just saying Fermi's argument is not valid. That's argument from silence (argumento ex silentio,) very well known to historians and archaeologists. Marco Polo didn't mention the Great Wall of China. Should we assume it doesn't exist?

I think the only one who enjoys free will here is @Eise. The rest of us are machines!!! Sorry, Eise, that was a cheap joke.

I think this is a very interesting question and, as far as I'm concerned, I understand your puzzlement. Planets are not closed systems. They're rather thermodynamically characterized by incoming and outgoing fluxes of energy, highly variable due to multiple factors, like the albedo effect, currents and winds, and so on. Organisms aren't closed systems either. The principle that all systems tend to a minimum energy is only valid for statistical systems that have completely thermalized. That means that disorder has reached a maximum. In those conditions, statistical mechanics does allow you to use the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, which implies that any parts of the system spend most time at their minimum energy. But that's not true in general. Living things store comparatively large amounts of energy in the form of free energy, or usable energy. In biology the most useful form is Gibbs' free energy. E.g., your body stores enormous amounts of mostly ATP, GTP and other tri-phosphate nucleotides ready to be used for anything needed. As soon as they're spent (the phosphates hydrolize,) they're regenerated again by complex chemical cycles. Open systems are more similar to complex self-organizing systems governed by fluxes than to "lazy" thermalized systems. I don't understand the quotation marks here. Also, it's estimated that life took somewhere in the range of 1 billion years to evolve. Very energetic action must have been needed at first. But after the first redox reactions to extract energy from the environment and store it in the form of usable energy (energy stored in chemical potentials) started going, it probably initiated a much more peaceful and quiet cycle of self-maintenance. For life to evolve, one of the most important things you need is reducing power (a donor of electrons) and oxidative power (an acceptor.) Plus a mechanism to cycle everything again. When complexity sets in, there appear other different molecules that play the role of modest oxidative agents, or carriers, that take the electron from one part to another and release it to the more powerful oxidant. Life is amazingly complicated.

Thank you. Yes, they're all missing the point of the ceteris paribus (all things being equal.) For two theories being equal as to explanatory/post-dictive power and predictive power, you pick the one that's more logically economic. The onus is on the proponent to show that their theory is equally powerful in proving the above.

Thank you.

Please don't do that. I started colouring my posts some days ago (on selected bits,) then I realized how silly I was being, and mended my ways. I recommend you use the standard diacritics. Plus the abuse of colour is against the rules, if I remember correctly. Best luck.

I suppose that would largely depend on where the meteorite landed, as well as its size (approach rapidities are round 10 km/s I think.) The granite continental crust is very hard, and floats on the basalt, acting like a cushion of sorts. If it landed on basaltic soil, it would probably be more likely to eject lavas to the atmosphere. Also, I think it would depend on the pressure tensions due to seismic activity building up around the landing area. Lines of seismic tension have a fractal dimension, but at a large scale they can be looked upon as..., well, just lines, thereby proportional to R (the Earth's radius.) While the total area that the Earth offers to collision-bound meteorites goes like R2. So I surmise it would be unlikely but possible. I'm not sure by any means of what I said above. There could be more factors involved. Edit: Almost xposted with @studiot. Yes, my answer goes in the direction of trying to guess the unknowns in what he's pointing out.

Ditto to @Strange and @MigL above. On a completely related note, how is this an example of Occam's razor?

In science, it doesn't (darkly, even) matter at all what anyone believes.

As Strange points out: His intuition that you can't represent the individual photon is totally right. You can't. It's not that the individual photon is well represented by an s-wave or spherical front wave of light. It's more that the probability amplitude has a spherical shape, so that what you say, Is a correct intuition too, AFAICT. Every time you send a photon outside, you get a photon back from an entirely random (equally likely) direction after 2 light seconds, in such a way that every direction for the photon getting back to you is equally likely. The first part of this problem (the photons going out but ending their trip being absorbed in a spherical photographic film) got Einstein seriously worried. It's one of the lesser-known arguments from A. Einstein, so I'm having some difficulty finding it on the web. Maybe it didn't involve photons, but electrons instead. I'll keep looking for it.

That was a great summary of how scientists and engineers arrived at entropy from the formalism of thermodynamics. +1 It was pretty clear to me. Perhaps the next step will be fixing of the zero of entropy against the zero of temperature...? But, please, carry on.

No. Here you got me wrong. I think the illusion of free will (please, be aware I have no problem saying "the illusion of temperature" or "the illusion of entropy") is an emergent property. I was more going along the lines of what I've heard some anti-reductionists say. Namely: electrons or protons are ideas or theories, not real things. So electrons and protons really are "born" in your mind. Therefore (they say) neither gives rise to the other. I've been called a naive realist. But the person who called me that got called "simplistic idealist" by me. Idealists and anti-reductionists are not the only ones who can claim the right to hang an adjective on those they disagree with. Neither am I naive nor are you shallow. You probably are. Aren't we all?

Aha, right. That totally adds up in my mind. So ignoring the QCD factor, which I wouldn't be able to calculate anyway, for an estimation of electrostatic attraction between proton and electron, we can use the inverse Bohr's radius, which proportional to the mass of the electron. That would give an estimation of chemical energy released in hydrogen reduction. For an estimation of electrostatic repulsion between proton pairs (which is the order of energy released when the nucleus undergoes fission,) you can assume the energy proportional to the mass of the proton. The reason being that the reduced mass of the p-p system is mp/2 while the reduced mass of the p-e system is me. I'm being very schematic here, because p-p is not an EM bound state. So the solutions will not be the same, but they will scale the same. That would give, \[\frac{E_{pp}}{E_{pe}}\sim\frac{r_{pe}}{r_{pp}}\sim\frac{m_{p}}{m_{e}}\sim2000\] A rough estimation does give you order of 1000 times more energy released. And then there would be corrections due to breaking QCD bonds that you're referring to. The rough way to picture it for me would be a rubber sheet that gets very loose when the protons get closer together, but pulls very hard when they pull apart. Until they break. But having to break the gluon bond would subtract from electrostatic energy stored. The higher order term would have no dependence on either alpha_EM or alpha_QCD coupling constants, but the other would carry a QCD-coupling dependence for sure. I think the mp/me does appear as the dominant factor, but the argument was missing. As you suggested, it's not a coincidence. I think it's a consequence of separating the leading term, which is electrostatic in nature. Thanks a lot, @swansont, and corrections most welcome. I agree, @MigL.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got me there. I was just thinking about re-editing that bit. Edit1. On the other hand, the average ratio in interactions is of the order 102, so it really is: \[\alpha_{\textrm{QCD}}/\alpha_{\textrm{EM}}\sim100\] Masses don't play a part, AFAI can see. Thank you. Edit2. On second thought. Energy released in fission what really is is stored electrostatic energy from proximity of the protons. So the estimation is different and is not governed by, \[\alpha_{\textrm{QCD}}/\alpha_{\textrm{EM}}\sim100\] 100 times stronger seems to me peculiarly small. What do you think, @swansont?

I loved this example from: If you don't mind, I would like to add it to my toolkit as a wonderful illustration of emergence. The problem for me is that I tend to see in emergence a fundamental asymmetry between the explanatory elements and the explained ones. That cannot be reversed: You cannot use pressure or temperature to derive positions and momenta of the particles. You cannot use your A to B wave to explain the behaviour of cars going B to A; but you can use cars to explain the emergence of an apparent car going in reverse direction. And the word "apparent" here is very relevant, in my opinion. Similarly, it's atoms that explain the behaviour of people, or will, presumably, some day. But people do not explain the behaviour of atoms... Unless... Wait a minute. Is that what you mean? Theories are emergent in people's minds? So people, by forming concepts in their minds, are trapped kind of in a circle. Is it the atoms that explain your mind, or is it your mind that explains the atoms because they are actually a concept in your mind? Is that what you mean? I'm not saying I agree. I would have to think about it, but, is that what you mean? Or does it go somewhere in the direction that you mean? Especially from your last arguments with MigL, I think something like that is related with our lack of agreement here. The reason for our discrepancies, I think, is that while you do not accept reductionism, I think @MigL, @iNow, (I'm not so sure about @Ghideon, @Prometheus and @vexspits,...) and I are reductionists.

Yeah, I was thinking for a while about writing the solution with all the information you didn't write and I didn't know about. But then I thought: "probably Hodja is working on this already from some sector of the noosphere, and will guess the missing parameters." It seems I was right. Hats off to Hodja!!!

I agree with StringJunky. I will just try to add other aspects after him. You've done nothing to deserve people being hard on you, as far as I can see. The particles are not destroyed after your body burns; they just change chemical state. Your iron will still be iron; your sulfur, sulfur; your magnesium, magnesium. They'll change the oxidation state and keep going. They're going to feed somebody else, that's all. Maybe a plant. Speculating about the afterlife may be perfectly valid, but it's not a subject of science. "Theory" is also one of the most widely misunderstood terms in science. One last thing. I think this question belongs in philosophy. As the afterlife is not a topic of biology. Be optimistic, @Sorrow. Nature takes care of everything, even if our tiny, fatty, bloody, watery brain can't understand it.

I don't understand it either. Seems like you want to compare the reducing power of hydrogen versus energy released by 235U in fission... [?] I agree with Strange in everything I can think of +1. Another way is seeing it is by scaling/dimensional arguments. Nuclear rearrangements typically are 103 = 1000 times more energetic than electron rearrangements. That's about the ratio mp/me, which is the order of 2000.

Yo need another parameter besides C.

Is this homework?

Sorry. I thought it was about how to introduce the concept of entropy. My mistake.

You can also introduce entropy axiomatically from statistical mechanics. From that approach temperature is more of a derived concept and entropy has a very intuitive meaning. I always hated the Carnot approach, @studiot. I'm very interested in the method that you suggest.