joigus

You don't want to be bitten by a gorilla: The thing that intrigues me the most about the human body is our loss of hair* in comparison to most other mammals. I have a vested interest on advances in this particular field of research, but still... *Mighty selective --and peculiarly so-- as to certain body areas, especially for aging human males, I must say.

I have to say, I like this method way better...

I don't like it either. Prohibition tends to make room for more criminal activity. If anything, youngsters are more attracted to what's forbidden to them than discouraged by the prohibition. But what do I know... I'm looking forward to your head-butting. Interesting points always surface.

We tend to get exceedingly dramatic over these topics, and start thinking of the Middle Ages and the like. I'm not totally enamoured of the way a society like Japan handles similar issues, but it's a good example of how you can tackle them with a more creative approach --or perhaps based on a different tradition and cultural background. They tend to use what I would call inner-circle shame instead of physical punishment. Shoplifters, eg, if I got my information right, are treated to a public display of shame in their usual circles: Their boss, coworkers and family are duly informed about their lapse. Being showcased as a litterer might be deterrant enough. That could be another way to put those drones to good use. Just a thought. But Studiot may be right that you need more than just "leave nothing but your footsteps" witty information panel.

History of the Earth: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_aOteuWIY8ITg7DQQspG1g History of the universe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtRFmSyL4fSLQkn-wMqlmdA Excellent channels as far as I can tell, and I've been watching them for quite a while. High quality by my standards. Excellent narrative and prose in English, beautiful and precise imagery with text info that you can look up and doesn't disappear in half a second. Loads of information that you can follow up. On top of it all, excellent choices of accompanying music, so you can use then to sit in front of a screen, unwind your troubled self, and let your imagination go back to the first eons of our world, our solar system, our universe, and the origins of life. I highly recommend them.

Very much in the vein of thoughts expressed. How could it not? It is essential to explain magnets, for example. Ferromagnetism is a quantum phenomenon. So you either QM your physics, or you get it wrong.

No.

Hey, I've got one: There once was a man with a doubt All the mistakes pointed out He asked left and right He wasn't too tight But his questions were nothing about I hope it helps.

Found this definition by one such Jason Preston at Quora that I like, and think is relevant to this discussion: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-sophistry

Yes, it is. A neutral chlorine atom has zero charge. So does a neutral sodium atom. But they stick together because sodium "donates" its extra electron (the 3s1 electron), which is very loose, for quantum-mechanical reasons, while the incomplete 3p5 level of sodium is much more stable with an extra electron. Ionic bonds are electrostatic in nature, but not because the original atoms are charged. It's a matter of quantum stability vs electrostatic attration, so to speak. The chemical bond does not happen because of electrostatic unbalance, but because atoms create these stable "rooms" for the electrons to be in. Atoms with similar electronegativity create a common orbital, in which to share electrons. That's the essence of the covalent bond. While transition metals create gigantic orbitals to cut loose their extra electrons. Those are the conduction bands. A salt crystal is neutral overall though, same as metals, and covalent substances. Electric unbalance for macroscopic samples of matter is a tiny, tiny percent. Electron and proton are not kept apart because of the exclusion principle. The exclusion principle is valid for identical particles. Electron and proton are very far from identical. They're kept apart because of the HUP. One thing is attraction proton-electron in the hydrogen atom (electrostatic), and another thing is atom-atom attraction. I was addressing @JustJoe's request, (My emphasis.) Those are different phenomena.

You definitely need quantum mechanics to understand how atoms stick together. They are not electrostatic forces, as a chlorine atom attracts a sodium atom for reasons other than electrostatic force. They stick together because of a quantum equilibrium. With old ideas about force you can cover only so much ground. I'm sorry.

Anyway, charge can be grounded. Gravity can't. You would have to make all mass go to infinity to "ground" mass. I find it impossible to think of an analogue for a conductor in the case of gravity.

As @Lorentz Jr told you, the CoM of e- and proton coincide. If e- is in an s-wave, the charge distribution has no polarity. Is that "nullified" enough for you? If the electron is excited to a state with angular momentum, a slight polarity appears. So at very short distances you would see the electron "sticking out." You see, there are details --many of them-- that you're missing. So your picture is probably very imprecise on many accounts... EDIT: No polarity, sorry. A displacement of charge density, but no polarity. I find it very difficult to understand what you mean, honestly.

Equalised? I don't know what you mean. Electron attracts proton, proton attracts electron. They get as close as they can without contradicting Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. What is equalised there? I don't understand. Physics has a language that refers to a mathematical formulation. What is equal to what? The concept of force is less useful in quantum mechanics because we have stationary states, which can't be understood in terms of force. Many other quantum phenomena can't be understood in terms of force, like degeneracy pressure, or tunneling, or pair production... There are many things that cannot be understood in terms of force. Is that better?

The force is "nullified" --that's not the proper terminology though-- because of quantum mechanics. The electron keeps at a distance because it cannot get closer due to quantum constrictions. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

What you've probably read is that excess electrons go upwards, so lightning goes from the surface of the Earth to the atmosphere, rather than the other way around. It's electrons that move, not protons. I don't understand the question. Coulombs don't measure force; they measure electric charge. Science ignores force???

The actual reason why electricity cannot be "grounded" --or, if you will, there is no similar principle for gravity, as there is for electricity, as "grounding of a distribution of charges and currents"-- is that electricity is polar, while gravity is not. Charges can be positive or negative, while mass is always positive and the interaction is always attractive. Positive distributions of charge have a natural place to set the zero for the potential: Spatial infinity. Negative distributions of charge have a natural place to set the zero for the potential: Spatial infinity. Distributions of mass have a natural place to set the zero for the potential: Spatial infinity. This is because, far enough away from the distribution of either charge or mass, the field always "looks" monopolar- except for radiation. You can see this from a totally general multipolar expansion of the electrostatic field. Gravity, as we know, is described by GR, but the pre-relativistic approach is enough for the purposes of this discussion. If anything, consideration of GR would make the analogy even more implausible. For electric charge, actually, there are deep principles of physics that tell us that far enough away from the distribution of charge, the monopolar term must go to zero. This is not exactly equivalent to what a recent poster said that "total charge must be zero," or something to that effect. It just means that, at large enough distances, charges will screen each other so as to make the electrostatic field go down at large enough distances. IOW: You just cannot take excess positives to one region and excess negatives to another at arbitrarily large distances. The Earth is a relatively good conductor and can take as many excess electrons as regular physical processes near its surface can produce without substantially changing its global electric charge --which is zero. So you can set its electrostatic potential to V=0, while keeping consistent with V=0 at spatial infinity You cannot do that with gravity... The upshot --if nothing else was understandable-- is: Gravity cannot be cancelled.

Thanks, Eise. I feel young again. You guys took me back to the times when I used these cute little ultra-light tools, and uploaded files with FTP. Those were the days...

This begs the question that, 1) This meta-observer must exist 2) Its observations satisfy a Boolean algebra Why should we believe that? Quantum mechanics is not Boolean. Why should "God" see the world in a Boolean way?

Yeah, there must be some "family connection" between both, as last night when I googled for it trying to remember the name, a lot of ELIZA results popped up.

Obviously chatGPt hasn't had to face real referees. Understatement is a stylistic must. This has reminded me of Kant Generator: I remember this old software from the '90s. It was fun, but you could tell very easily it was nonsense. I also played with "doctor" --which was invoked with an emac command. It talked to you and was supposed to work like a therapist, and give you advice. But it was so lame compared to chatGPT. It had a tendency to get start looping at some point. Emac was a very sophisticated text editor for Open Source platforms.

On the other hand, bots would never use such convoluted verbiage as "in the face of extremely challenging epistemological hardships." LOL It's important to have a long heartfelt laugh at yourself from time to time. I wonder if bots will ever be able to do that.

Humans can change their minds while in the process of analysing their own learning from data. I'm waiting for the bot that can change its mind based on some thinking process, and explain why. This "explaining why you changed your mind" is, I think, very unmistakably human. Also, humans seem to be capable of saying they don't understand something, and explaining why they don't. Many years ago, when I got frustrated because I didn't understand some complicated argument on the blackboard, I told myself: "Not understanding is not that bad. You should at least be able to explain to yourself what the critical points are that bring confusion to your mind." (Something like that, not in words, but in sequences of internal impressions.) Looking at the blackboard in puzzlement with a blank mind is not the same as looking at it in puzzlement with a critical mind. I think this is a very important difference between bots and human minds. Humans can make better, they can make do with, they can improve their understanding in the face of really challenging epistemological hardships. I'm skeptical --so far-- that circuitry can do what cell-based adaptive systems can. Moist brains still have the edge, IMO. Not that this is valid for all humans I know, but it certainly is for some of the humans I admire most.

No. The term singlet comes from group theory. A singlet under SO(3) --rotations-- is essentially unique --mod projective representations--, and it is, \[ \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\left(\left|\uparrow\downarrow\right\rangle -\left|\downarrow\uparrow\right\rangle \right) \] The triplet representation is 3-dimensional, \[ \left|\uparrow\uparrow\right\rangle \] \[ \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\left(\left|\uparrow\downarrow\right\rangle +\left|\downarrow\uparrow\right\rangle \right) \] \[ \left|\downarrow\downarrow\right\rangle \] It's made up of 2 non-entangled states and one entangled state. But the middle one --even though it's entangled-- is not nearly as "badly" entangled as the singlet one. The singlet state is an entangled state, but not all entangled states --in spin-- are singlets. The singlet state is peculiar for special reasons. One of them is that it's a scalar under unitary representations of the rotation group, which physically means it looks as having 0 spin angular momentum in every direction you look. The other reason is that it has maximal Von Neumann entropy. So it's maximally undetermined, so to speak. Both reasons are intimately related, but are not equivalent. Keeping maximal entanglement entropy and maximal indetermination for bipartite states is a considerable technological feat. It's the opposite of what you said. Far-apart systems are tipically non-entangled. Entanglement generally comes from particles interacting close to each other. It's hard to find a phrase in what you say that's not badly wrong in one sense or another. Stop saying things you know next-to-nothing about. It's bad for you, and it's bad for the discussion. As I said, one silly --or incorrect-- statement at a time...

It's quite humbling, isn't it?