swansont

Do you have some examples of these efforts?

Perhaps it's more that entropy defies an easy distillation into a sound bite. To say that scientists don't understand it is true in the same sense that we still have more to discover, as with all science, but not so much in the sense that we have no understanding of it. Feynman had a good quote about this difficulty, when someone asked about magnets in an interview I really can’t do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you’re more familiar with, because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else you’re more familiar with. IOW, there are some situations in physics where you need to learn some physics in order to develop an understanding of a concept.

! Moderator Note Because it's cheating, and also advertising is against our rules. But mainly because it's cheating. And so you get banned, because you do the bidding of cheaters.

It split when we started testing ideas and making more detailed predictions. You can test the notion that heavier things fall faster than lighter ones, but nobody bothered to see if Aristotle's philosophical idea held up for almost 2000 years until Galileo did it. Ditto for crystal spheres and orbits. We finally discarded that notion because elliptical orbits worked better (simpler model) and made more sense

iNow's quote and my reply were about science, not perception. And, as I said, there *is* more but it's mostly the details of how you go about building and testing your models.

But those are primarily details of how you go about building and testing your models.

How do you stack something that requires lenses to concentrate the light?

In the document I linked to they discuss this, on p 210. They use multiple methods, depending on which experiment you're looking at "These experiments have used four different techniques (target materials) and therefore have different energy thresholds—233 keV for the Gallium experiments (SAGE and GALLEX), 814 keV for the Chlorine experiment (Homestake) and a few MeV for the water Cherenkov experiments (Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande; 5.5 MeV for the latest analy-sis threshold of Super-Kamiokande),and,we expect,5MeV for the heavy water Cherenkov experiment (SNO). It is an advantage that these experiments have dif-ferent energy thresholds and therefore have sensitivity to different regions of the solar neutrino spectrum." The chlorine and gallium experiments are the beta-decay technique I don't know enough about the Cherenkov experiments, but this Wikipedia page has some info. "the neutrino enters and then leaves the detector after having transferred some of its energy and momentum to a target particle. If the target particle is charged and sufficiently lightweight (e.g. an electron), it may be accelerated to a relativistic speed and consequently emit Cherenkov radiation" I don't know if a muon or tau neutrino would undergo this interaction with an electron. The entry suggest that they can, but you can't tell what kind of neutrino was involved. (this is beyond my schooling) The other interaction says "a high-energy neutrino transforms into its partner lepton (electron, muon, or tau).[7] However, if the neutrino does not have sufficient energy to create its heavier partner's mass, the charged current interaction is unavailable to it." So here we know there is not enough energy to do this, since the requirement is bigger than 100 MeV

But this is an example where clear rules are in place, and it's a problem. These are not transgender women, nor is there any suggestion that they have cheated. This is like setting a height limit in basketball. Or, as the article notes, like banning someone for having abnormally large hands in basketball, or better than 20/20 vision in baseball.

Or if it already has a defense against phased plasma attacks.

A phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range will do a nice job of making toast. Set it to 3, wide aperture, one-second burst on each side, from about 12 meters (to let the beam expand sufficiently). If you're a good shot.

The line that set this off is "This types of comments just indicate ignorance." and in the context of the exchange, the topic was already known, so it was not (or should not have been) ambiguous to those in the conversation. What was being discussed was based in science, so it's much less of an opinion and much more about what you can support. ———— But Phi is absolutely correct: being called ignorant is not a personal attack in the context of our rules if it refers to some issue being discussed. Disagreement is not, either. If you assert an opinion as if it were a fact (especially an uninformed opinion), or something contrary to facts, then one should expect pushback. "You cannot dictate to others" would be an example of pushback. It's not like only one person is not allowed to dictate to others. OTOH, "you lack integrity, honesty, decency and are too cowardly to enforce a rather simple rule. Now go f**k yourself" is a string of personal attacks. As I've written before, "This is a place to discuss science, not a self-esteem support group. Civility is required, but this does not extend to walking on eggshells to accommodate fragile egos."

Remember that the terminator did not kill that particular Sarah Connors.

To me, the fact that "smart" algorithms try and interest me in things I just bought is a pretty strong indication that the internet is not close to being self-aware. [Me] <buys toaster> [internet] Hey, I see you like toasters. Can I interest you in any of these twelve toasters? <sends terminator to me to try and sell me more toasters>

Yes, if one is going to say that science is trying to establish what reality is, you'd best define the term. I'm not, so that's best left to others.

It's interesting (to some, anyway) and yes, it might open the door to new physics. Likely at scales we can't yet probe, or are at the edge of probong, because otherwise we would probably have noticed something by now.

I would replace "reality" with "behavior" We can see how something behaves, but how do we test to see if that is reality? First step, as always, is defining what we mean. Is it reality vs illusion? Or reality as in "objectively exists"? We know that certain components of the models we build in physics do not objectively exist, because we made them up as a convenience. We know right then and there that physics is not a search for reality. As a test of something objectively existing, I ask this: is a hole real? Or is it a convenience? (edit: and does this matter? If we're searching for reality we have to know. If we aren't this doesn't matter so much)

“beta decay reactions” are ones that swap a proton and neutron. In a decay, both the particle and its associated neutrino (one of them is an antiparticle) is released. In the detection reaction, the particle is absorbed and the neutrino emitted see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Particles/neutrino2.html If a reaction needs e.g. 10 MeV to occur and your source is giving you 5 MeV particles, you won’t cause the reaction. One would need to check the specifics of the solar neutrino spectrum and the specific reaction to see how much of an issue this is. The muon mass is > 100 MeV and tau mass is ~1776 MeV, so they definitely require added energy. A bare neutron is only a few MeV more massive than a proton, and the energy difference in a nuclear shell is of similar magnitude. edit: from this document from SLAC it looks like the solar neutrinos are all under 20 MeV (p.208, graph on 209) So if they changed to muon neutrinos along the way, they don't have enough energy to create muons in a n—>p reaction

No, they are not.

So they are, in fact, detectable. The ones we use, because of the neutrinos we detect. Muon and tau neutrinos do similar reactions. The detection of the muon neutrino got the Nobel prize in 1988 (edit: it's trivially true that they don't participate in a reaction where an electron is emitted, because that violates lepton number conservation)

I'm not sure who "we" is referring to, because I am arguing that we strive to do just that. We don't rely on someone to tell us the color of the light, because we can't trust their perception. We using e.g. a diffraction grating, to improve precision and remove personal bias. To quote Obi-Wan: Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them. Yes, we can do that, too. If someone is e.g. dreaming or hallucinating, I can claim that their experiences are not real. I agree, science can't reveal reality to us. I don't think anyone was arguing in favor of that proposition.

Perceive undersells the situation for relativity. The time is actually different, regardless of perception. To use "perceive" suggests there is a true value underlying this for someone with perfect clarity to discern. The time difference is real. It's not an illusion.

Sure you can. If the stopwatch we are using says the duration of something is 3.00 seconds, there is no disagreement that the stopwatch says 3.00 seconds. We don't ask people how long they think the duration was. We remove perception from the problem.

And he did the same thing with distance. It's not perception. The actual amount of time passing is different for observers in different frames.

No, it's formulated as a physics question, and asks about measuring time, which means we are excluding perception.