Everything posted by joigus
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Is it permissible to use infinity, which is not defined in physics, to assume the impossibility of traveling at the speed of light?
That's not what regularisation/renormalisation is about. And there is zero in physics, as they've repeatedly told you. The charge of the neutron is zero, for example. It's not a tiny little non-zero smidgen of a thing. It's zero.
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limited
You will have to be more specific.
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Everything is one whole
Are you trying to frame me? On a side note: I was just trying to be poetic in the face of frustration.
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Everything is one whole
I think you make some good points. Mathematicians have developed tools like fuzzy logic and the like that maybe could some day applied to the natural sciences successfully --meaning usefully. The thing about "seeing the wood from the trees" is that I don't know how you do that when what we're talking about is the whole physical universe. I'm not sure that there's a valid outlook that allows you to say, "oh, I see, it's just a wood!" I love that sentence by Carl Sagan --above any other quote by him--, which says, which is the very beginning of his series Cosmos.
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Everything is one whole
I'm having problems with "contiguous with all of itself". Do you mean something like all the information about the universe stored in the last least bit of it? There is a proposed principle that's called the holographic principle, that all the information about a region of the universe is stored in the surface. Reminds me a bit of what you're saying, but I'm not sure.
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Everything is one whole
This 'when the ties are broken' that you're articulating here is very much like what I was trying to suggest when I talked about the denial of the unseparable whole being so useful. Some situations, like entanglement, or Fermi gases/Bose condensates etc (QM) remind us of how this separability falls apart quite naturally in certain contexts. In a context like here and now --the Earth 2.7 billion years after its formation--, we tend to see the world as interacting parts. When the universe was but a fraction of a second old and in a state of plasma, it's very difficult to conceive of an entity being able to distinguish anything like parts interacting. Analysis is best defined as studying something in terms of its constituent parts. The Greek lysis root gives it away. Lysis = breaking up. A big part of the method of science is analysis. I don't know how else to do science. Trying to describe the whole --whatever that means-- by means of analysis would --so it seems-- necessarily defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?
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Everything is one whole
Of course everything is one whole. The problem is what to do with that. And what's more, why is the denial of this monumental truism so useful?
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A small lake near Milton, Ontario marks the official start of the Anthropocene Epoch
It's always going to be ambiguous. You need sedimentary deposits in order to have a clear-cut boundary that tells you when things really started to really go this or that way on a global level. You have to give geology some time.
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Why is there no Omega-minus with spin 1/2?
Yeah I knew Ne'eman was related to the higher echelons of Israeli politics, or the military. I do remember an interview with Gell-Mann in which he mentioned Y. Ne'eman's interests really lay in general relativity, but he was somehow forced into particle physics. I do consider this era of physics kind of a heroic one. It's not for everybody to find your bearings in this terrain of approximate symmetries and mass formulas, empirically guessed relations and the like. Great respect on my part.
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Why is there no Omega-minus with spin 1/2?
You have to distinguish total spin J=3/2 from spin projection. A particle of total spin J has 2J+1 possible spin projections. Eg, a particle of spin 1/2 has 2*(1/2)+1=2 spin projections, which are -1/2, +1/2. In the case of omegas, we have 2*3/2+1=4 possible spin projections, which are -3/2, -1/2, +1/2, and +3/2. If omegas lasted long enough, we would be able to perfom a Stern-Gerlach experiment and separate them into 4 distinct beams, I'm sure. Omega- has spin 3/2 for the reason that these are isospin multiplets, so all the particles in the n-plet have the same spin. The ultimate reason for that is the concept of approximate symmetry iso-spin='same spin'. IOW, baryons with the same spin have approximately the same mass. Exactly. I wouldn't call it S, as that's reserved for strangeness. I particle physics it's traditionally called J.
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algebra
Elementary algebra, as others said or implied, is using the properties of numbers that are known to be satisfied for every number in order to, eg, solve equations among other things. The word comes from an old Arabic term, al jabr, which means something like 'the restoration'. There is a so-called abstract algebra, in which you generalise the idea to less familiar, but quite consistent, quantities and operations: rings, groups, and so on. I hope that helps / complements what other have --correctly-- said.
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English?
Yes, I forgot that. I've mentioned it elsewhere in these forums though I think, or I should have, when talking about language. Brain studies indicate that the areas of the brain that usually code for sounds are used to code for images --sequences of images[?]-- in the case of people with this particular disability. I'm sorry I don't have the biblio with me. It's covered in Stanford lectures on human behaviour by Sapolsky. Makes you think whether the most primitive languages really were a mixture of mime and sounds.
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English?
I č ne cnēƿ sē According to my dictionary at hand, I've answered you in English, only Old English. If English was evolving in the seventh century, I see no reason to assume it's not doing so right now. What's probably true is that the path and the patterns, and the speed of change, are different, as communities today interact in very different ways than they used to do back then. Of course languages evolve. Centuries upon centuries of 'contamination' are perceived as 'evolution' when a sufficient number of people perceived as educated adopt those ways of expression, and refine them to remove ambiguity and add nuances. Language is very plastic. There is no such thing as the right way to say things. I'm no expert, so don't take anything I say on authority, of course. But I've interacted with experts enough to know that something like this is what's known to be the ongoing process of language evolution. Agreed. Language is a two-pronged process, I would say. Writing is, after all, a sophistication, and an priceless tool, but it's derived from speaking. Language stems from a phonetic code. Speaking is no doubt much older than writing. Grammar is an afterthought. In our heart of hearts we know there is an implicit order and hierarchy, and we try to clarify it by spelling out some rules. But the process itself is much more spontaneous.
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I see. All of my posts go into 'trash can'. That, itself, is interesting to me
Are you familiar with the concept of subpar? --American English.
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Reintroduction of Quantum Field Theory into modern science
So you claim to understand what isolation in time and interacting time mean? Care to explain it to everybody else?
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I would like to have a debate with someone that claims math is 'real'
Another postmodernist outcry.
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problem with cantor diagonal argument
This is the simplest and thereby most beautiful way to explain the argument, IMO. It's the version I was exposed to. After reading most of the material here I'm convinced it's not the way in which Cantor formulated it historically. Probably. I don't know the history of it. I don't read German either, but I doubt any ambiguities might be lurking behind a more or less obscure German word. I agree that modern formulations tend to streamline the proofs in a very interesting way. I like your phrasing: Any list of numbers that purports to be listing a connected piece of the continuum of real numbers must necessarily be missing a string. The diagonal operation of somebody's version of Cantor's theorem goes on to prove in a glaringly obvious way, that we can always construct a number not in the declared list. The truth of such declaration is thus impossible. I'm at a loss as to what else is there to be unravelled in such a simple argument.
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Examples of Awesome, Unexpected Beauty in Nature
Is that spontaneous symmetry breaking?
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Reintroduction of Quantum Field Theory into modern science
Some questions: How can a single proton or neutron have a meaningful entropy? What kind of entropy is that? What do the terms "time interacts" or "isolated in time" mean? BTW, photons have no mass.
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James Webb Model at my Company
It's not Van Gogh's Starry Night, but it's certainly a thing of beauty, it's motivational, and also a reminder that the stars are always making us what we are.
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Wave-Particle Duality
As said by others, the probabilistic assumption is quite independent from the De Broglie assumption (relation between wavelength and momentum), and is called Born's postulate (from Max Born, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.) As Swansont said, De Broglie waves are components of the quantum state, rather than the quantum state itself. Every one of these DB waves would be totally de-localised, and is not physical. So a more realistic quantum state has infinitely many DB waves in it, each with a different momentum. So the logical build-up is: Einstein relation: energy = h * (frequency) De Broglie relation: momentum = h / (wavelength) Infinitely many Einstein-De Broglie waves (principle of superposition) --> probabilistic interpretation (Max Born) Something like that.
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Why can`t one sense god?
This question about how many senses, to an extent, depends on how we conceptually compartimentalise it, I think. One way would be to count as many senses as types of receptor cells that can be distinguished as per development. Another would take into account cells responding to different stimuli even if they belong in the same developmental lineage... I'm not sure what the standard definition in modern biology is, but I seem to remember balance --mentioned by @dimreepr and also suggested by @Genady concerning acceleration-- as an independent sense. In any case, a definition is in order. I don't think, eg, sense of humour merits it, no matter how important it is in life.
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Boltzmann brain (split from 137 the magic of the fine structure constant)
Why? The point has been settled. You don't get it, that's all. I can see that.
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Boltzmann brain (split from 137 the magic of the fine structure constant)
I hope my brain lasts for something more than a few seconds yet. It remains to be seen if my brain's attention to your arguments will last that long --last time we discussed something I didn't find it very promising. Again (because you missed it the first time): A world made up of false, fluctuation-generated, memories would not display correlations like those manifest when I watch my family album, legal documents, history books, etc, and compare them to my sensorial memories. Have you actually listened to Susskind's explanation? His point about Boltzmann's wife? You could have 1st-order coincidences, so to speak. Much more unlikely would be to have 2nd-order. Let alone 3rd, 4th, and apparently unlimited in the order or depth --if you will--. This is not a world of Boltzmann brains, only too obviously. This is a world in which what I see has been seen by many other 'processes' out there. You cannot simulate that with a thermal fluctuation.
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Boltzmann brain (split from 137 the magic of the fine structure constant)
If by "not very convincing" you mean "not convincing you", I would agree instantly. You have proven to be... How should I put it... very resilient to solidly understanding many ideas involving infinity, or perhaps very stubborn in your own views about them. Here's a piece of conversation between a student and Susskind about Boltzmann brains, elaborating on what they would be and why they wouldn't explain the world as wee see it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hh0lJZbUfo&t=1680s Upon the student stubbornly insisting on them and their properties, he ends at about t=1800s, "Don't worry about it: This is not the right theory of Nature." The reason is a world of Boltzmann brains spontaneously popping out of a thermally-dead universe would not bring about the correlations we see in the real world. Comments concerning George Washington and the cherry tree.