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Everything posted by joigus
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What do you regard as the most basic operations in Mathematics ?
joigus replied to studiot's topic in Mathematics
Perhaps the most primitive mathematical "operator" is that of a relation?: Any well-defined connection between two elements of a set. aRb = a is related to b by means of relation R within a set A and a relation within a set is any binary pairing, that is, any subset R of AxA So a is related to b by relation R if (a,b) is in R (we write \( aRb \) ) and a is no related to b by R if (a,b) is not in R (we write \( a{\not}R b \) For that you kind of must have set theory first, so... Perhaps "belongs", as an external operation (between elements and sets). If you think about it, equivalence relations are just a particular example of relations in general. If aRb, then bRa If aRb and bRc, then aRc and aRa always And equivalence relations are at the basis of our categorical thinking. But this is so abstract that my head hurts. So I guess what I'm saying is the Cartesian product. -
Yes, it has all the hallmarks of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I wonder whether there could be a survival component to this cognitive bias, as the effect is so common. After all, a modern scientist can afford months of agonizing about whether they got it right. Under more stringent survival conditions, being self-assertive no matter what may have played a role in decision-taking.
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Please, do tell us. I gave you an early alert that you need to up your game. This is a good chance for you to start making some sense. Getting on the nerves of people is certainly no way to push your arguments forward. I find your first statement surprisingly bold. QM and GR have proven to be extremely difficult to reconcile so far, if not impossible. The only ways I've heard of to make sense of quantum corrections to all levels and include gravity are superstrings, LQG, and MHV amplitudes. MHV makes next-to-impossible calculations actually doable. The problem is you lose track of explicit Lorentz invariance and locality. And, of course, you need to devise experimental techniques to ramp up the energies of the experiments to Planck scale. Please, tell us also about that one necessary characteristic for a sensible theory of quantum gravity. For dramatic effect, you can use the spoiler function, like this, Q: What is the one characteristic that a quantum theory needs? A: I'm looking forward to your illuminating answers.
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Why in an irreversible expasion, the pressure is constant
joigus replied to Scienc's topic in Classical Physics
Good point. I forgot to mention this, which is essential, I think, to understanding why in irreversible processes it doesn't work that way. -
Why can't the philosophy of science be: Do what the aliens do.
joigus replied to Glancer's topic in General Philosophy
Human interest: The human potential to imagine, to invent, fill in the missing details, and propagate false belief plays out in many different ways. But generally there is a big human motivation behind all these stories. I've seen this craze go on and off for many years now. I'm a child of the sixties. The amount of books, films, magazines etc sold is a factor that shouldn't be taken lightly. How the brain works: There are rigorous scientific studies that go to prove that our memory does not work at all like a video camera, which is what our intuition tells us. Our memory edits these impressions in the hippocampus and makes up a story according to different "interests" that may be convenient to different purposes or internal needs. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140204185651.htm#:~:text="Your memory reframes and edits,editor and special effects team. People even talk to each other and "reconfigure" their impressions, correcting them with "data" from other witnesses into a narrative that they feel must have been "what really happened." See next point. Collective memory: Think about this: Many people in the past believed in centaurs, fairies, angels, leprechauns, giants, dragons etc. And now consider this example (with a possible explanation): Accounts of centaurs, IMO, probably had their origin several thousand years BCE from real facts, when the first peoples to domesticate horses swept across the Eurasian steppe in East-West direction. The first agriculturalists who saw this must have been terrified by these warriors (the Yamnaya), and haunted by visions of horses whose business end was a human torso with an axe in one hand. They had no previous experience of anything like that. The first accounts probably included some phrasing like "half horse, half human." By the time all peoples of Europe are used to the sight of warriors riding horses, they understand what they see now, but the initial story of these hybrid creatures already has a life of its own. You can now re-edit the story --socially-- and make these centaurs benefactors of the human kind, spreading good will; or you can turn them into demons, or whatever the wishful thinking of the times takes them to be. Reason and evidence are paramount. You cannot build objective knowledge only from witness accounts. -
Why in an irreversible expasion, the pressure is constant
joigus replied to Scienc's topic in Classical Physics
Pressure is not constant in an irreversible expansion. The pressure that you've got there is not a state variable of the system that's expanding; it's the external pressure of the environment, which is constant. Thereby the subindex "ex" in the formula for work. In fact, during an irreversible expansion, the pressure of the system is not even well defined. It's only the external pressure what's well-defined as a thermodynamical variable. -
Why can't the philosophy of science be: Do what the aliens do.
joigus replied to Glancer's topic in General Philosophy
Oh. Is that for my benefit? Thank you. The straw man argument is even discussed in the guidelines of these forums. You may want to have a look at those. Thanks for the news update. Do they punch people in the face too? Maybe kangaroos are behind it. Here's another idiom that you may be interested in: jumping to conclusions. Other names for the fallacy that's operating behind it are "just so" stories, ad hoc arguments or associative logic. From Google: Carl Sagan has a beatiful example in his book (and TV series) Cosmos of how even scientists in a not to remote past used similar arguments to surmise that Venus must be populated by dinosaurs. The logical fallacies are plain to see for anybody who's familiar with logical fallacies. Humans have been inventing outlandish explanations for unexplained phenomena for at least 11'000 years. It's all a recurring theme: Beings from another level of existence visit us and affect our lives. I'm not saying that there aren't phenomena that cannot be explained by current science. There are. I'm not even gonna touch your argument about parallel universes. Back to you. -
Why can't the philosophy of science be: Do what the aliens do.
joigus replied to Glancer's topic in General Philosophy
You really need to up your game. There is definite proof that kangaroos exist. There is not even a clue that intelligent civilisations from another planet are visiting us. Are you familiar with the concept of a straw-man argument? -
Why can't the philosophy of science be: Do what the aliens do.
joigus replied to Glancer's topic in General Philosophy
Playing straw man, are we? You really have to up your game here. -
I don't understand. Can you rephrase, please? Double-stranded DNA is joined by hydrogen bonds, so it can be zipped / unzipped quite easily in aqueous media. That's why cells have devised mechanisms to hide some segments with bunches of protein when the gene had better not be expressed. I don't know if that's what's causing you trouble.
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Why can't the philosophy of science be: Do what the aliens do.
joigus replied to Glancer's topic in General Philosophy
Here's a rough estimation of the odds that an observer from outer space, looking at Earth through a random time window, would find anything like high-technology, biosphere-managing, space-exploring civilisation: Age of the Earth: about 4.5 billion years Archaean/bacterial life: 3.7 billion years --> Probability: 82 % Multicellular life: 500-700 million years --> Probability: 10 % Intelligent life (evolution of frontal cortex): 20 million years --> Probability: 0.4 % Hominin intelligence: 2 million years --> Probability: 0.04 % Modern humans: 200'000 years --> Probability: 0.004 % Agriculture (complex societies): 10'000 years --> Probability: 0.0002 % Understanding of physical laws: 500 years --> Probability: 0.000001 % Space exploration: 50 years --> Probability: 0.0000001 % All of this is conditional probability: Assuming an Earth-like planet does exist, and it's close enough that the distance is not a factor. So I'm not doing Drake estimation's here, but only working with observation time as a variable. And I'm not considering parallel universes either. My intuition is that the sample space would get so unfathomably big that your hopes would grow even slimmer. Fat chance. -
And what is the ratio of down quarks to other quarks in the case of photons, which are certainly coupled to gravity? 0/0?
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The Universe in Pictures as you've never seen it Before
joigus replied to Kartazion's topic in Speculations
Are you implying that charge is not conserved? -
We live in a De Sitter universe. That means that the universe looks very much the same for every typical observer (galaxy): same horizon distance, same distribution of receding speeds for the galaxies, etc. However you define the energy (sources, geometric terms, vacuum energy) it will be the same for every observer. It's worth noting though that in general relativity all discussions concerning energy are much more subtle than in classical mechanics.
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To add to other members' objections to your theory --with which I very much agree: Photons, gluons, electrons and neutrinos gravitate, yet they have no quark content. Gravity is universal: all particles are coupled to it. All energy, AAMOF. Also, down quarks play very much the same role in the standard model (SM) of elementary particles as the other quarks do. According to the SM, the different quarks are only different to each other because they are relatively low-energy states within the framework of an exact symmetry that's broken at low energies. At unification energies (very high temperatures) we probably wouldn't be able to tell them apart. I'm assuming you're implying that down quarks are the source of the gravitational field. Maybe I didn't understand your assumption. I hope that helps.
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I totally agree with you that in general we should give people the benefit of the doubt and try to concentrate on scientific arguments. I for one am sorry that I haven't contributed much in the way of scientific arguments here. But answers have been provided --the one by Janus particularly thorough, including reflections on plausibility of the whole thing-- that should be enough to entice a scientific discussion on the part of the OP if they are interested in anything other than pushing forward this running nonsense no matter how much common sense and facts you throw at them. That hasn't happened. Besides. It's not only that, eg, the flag argument, whoever formulated it originally, can only come from a complete ignorance of classical physics of motion in the vacuum. It's the fact that it's not original, it's been repeated to death. And it's been answered many times in many places. I've never had any particular interest in this particular conspiracy theory, and even I am familiar with the argument. But I do believe the OP should be given a fair shot at trying to regroup and start answering the scientific questions.
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Perfect example of a botched debunking that results in rebuking for ignoring well-known rebuttals to well-known pre-existing debunkings. Really? All your speech is still here for everybody to read.
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Very interesting topic with very interesting contributions. You can always make a bundle of variables with space, time, and momentum, or energy or anything you wish. The relevant question is, as Swansont and Exchemist and others pointed out/implied, whether there is any geometrically meaningful information to attach to it (orthogonality, distance, parallelism, scale independence, etc.) Mathematically, the key point is invariance group of your physical laws. Groups of transformations are other words for class of transformations that relate valid observers or coordinatisations that make your physical laws invariant. But first, you cannot forget relativity. So if you wish to attach any geometric meaning to energy, you must not forget it goes along with momentum, (E,p) so as to make a 4-vector in Minkowski space. Bundling together space-time variables with energy-momentum variables is trickier, but you can do it. If you re-write mechanics in the light of Lagrange and Hamilton's formalism, you can see there are valid groups of transformations relating, eg, x (position) and p (momentum). These are called canonical transformations, but their intuitive/operational meaning is far less clear. This (x,p) geometry is very far from intuitive and is called symplectic. Primitive concepts aren't particularly useful until you formulate far-reaching general relations between them.
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It seems we have a winner. I'm looking from independent confirmation.
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What do you mean versors? And what properties of those entities describe interference, polarization, helicity, tunneling, spin-statistics connection, or ground-state energy? All of them known and measured properties of quantum objects. If you actually described any one of those properties from number theory, I'd take your ideas very seriously.