lemur

The question is what justifies any government evicting people, troops or otherwise? You are assuming that national territorialism is natural, and that it is naturally illegitimate for military activity to be conducted globally. You are free to have that perspective, by why would you insist that others share it and suggest that "foreign presence," military or otherwise is grounds for war or other political-economic retaliation? Doesn't that view seem somewhat belligerent to you, or do you see national territorializing as one of a select few legitimate reasons to bully, exclude, and discriminate against people?

I think of an electron as a negatively charged electrostatic field that somehow has mass. I see mass as a gravitational field that somehow has inertia. I assume that these fields are basically regions of varying force-potential that get activated by interacting with other 'particles.' The only reason it seems to have a, "point," imo, is because the field-force extends in all direction with an "interior" that converges at a point of strongest intesity (I assume). However, I don't have the idea that the 'point' itself is anything except the center of the force-fields. For it to be a thing with volume, it would have to be a tiny 3D object with surface area, inside/outside, etc. but I think that seems like a projection from a perspective that distinguishes matter from force at the level of observable objects.

Are you kidding? I haven't worked in the military personally but whenever I talk to people about what they did in the military, it involves things like constructing makeshift housing out shipping containers or anything they can get their hands on, living in harsh climate conditions with nothing but special clothing and simple equipment to mitigate discomfort and problems, etc. The military has to come up with the most efficient ways to do things because it needs to maximize the resources available for achieving mission objectives. You can't create an army of gourmet cooks devoting excessive resource to preparing the most delightful possible meals for each individual because those resources (including labor) could be used more effectively. Survivalism is probably the ultimate form of self-sufficiency. Think Rambo with a knife constructing makeshift bows and arrows to hunt wild game. This relative self-sufficiency is one of the reasons I think military spending is the most effective when the goal is to slow spending in an economy to cool inflationary pressures. A war effort causes people to save for the future when they are no longer deployed. So the more money you divert to military incomes of people deployed, the less money gets spent (assuming they're not sending it home to family members who are burning through it with every possible expenditure. As much as I dislike the fact that families get separated by deployment, I have to admit that it stimulates both the deployed person and the person/people staying at home to develop greater self-sufficiency in order to save resources for when the family is re-united.

I don't understand. If two electrons are approaching one another, they don't become increasingly repelled from each other the closer they get?

I should have posted a link to the spectrum comparison of hydrogen and calcium I googled when posting before (now I can't find it). Anyway, I mentioned different frequency blues because you mentioned blues. I don't remember what hydrogen does at ground state. I could fathom, however, that it could be possible that electron transitions in heavier atoms could produce lower frequencies if they take place farther from the nucleus; but I don't really know what I'm talking about empirically nor do I have any hypothesis about the relationship between the various shapes of orbitals and the amount of energy absorbed/emitted when they transition from one to another. What does seem logical to me is that the difference in spectrum lines could have to do with the fact that all substance behave according to ideal gas laws (I think) regardless of weight. The way I understand this is that an atom/molecule of calcium may weigh a lot more than one of hydrogen, but both will express the same amount of pressure at the same temperature as a gas. If I am understanding ideal gas behavior right, then, a heavier substance exerting the same amount of pressure as a lighter one requires more energy to do more work to keep the particles moving at the same average speed. If that is indeed the case (if I don't understand it wrong), then it seems like the amount of energy required to emit a certain frequency photon would occur at a lower temperature in a heavier substance because more energy is required to bring it to that temperature.

Ok, but both hydrogen and calcium emit at @480nm; but whereas calcium will also emit at 440-450, hydrogen won't emit until under 440. What causes the hydrogen to hold out for more energy (or am I understanding the spectra wrong?)?

Are you saying US tax payers are enslaved to the military? But isn't the military enslaved to protecting the interests of US tax payers? Maybe they are enslaved to each other. Maybe the political-economic goal should be to liberate them from each other by making each (more) self-sufficient. Hasn't that always been the goal of US independence movements though?

why did you write this poem? (just wondering - no implicit commentary or judgement meant)

I don't see the distinction from the way you explain it. An electron has a charge distribution just like a proton, right? As for the other two reason, why do they imply volume? In what sense are any of these particles 3D?

This is such a fascinating story because you don't seem like the type of person who wouldn't be able to explain away their own childhood perception in terms of psychological phenomena. Do you remember if there were some media sources that portrayed victorian-style houses with people dressed the way your 'ghosts' were? If so, that might explain your imagination choosing to associate the two images.

Democracy is all about civil interference, as was Star Trek. If people didn't interact with each other, they would have absolute autonomy and maintaining absolute autonomy requires absolute power. You can't dictate autonomy with authoritarian repression. Democracy resists authoritarian repression, so it checks/balances autonomy with critical dialogue.

I thought a perfect blackbody was a substance that absorbed and emitted all frequencies. I thought that EM emissions always were the result of an electron dropping from a higher level to a lower one; and that photon absorption always resulted in an electron increasing levels. To me it seems like substances behave like crystals with certain resonant frequencies at which they either vibrate or not, except whereas crystals are vibrating mechanically, the photon-emiting substances are vibrating electromagnetically. Is that a detrimental comparison?

I believe that scientists generally hope to make ground-breaking discoveries, but I think there is some validity in Kuhn's notion that there are certain paradigmatic foundations and that people invested in working within a certain paradigm don't feel as warm toward 'boat-rocking' work that could pose a potential threat to their favored paradigm(s) as they would to work that generates ground-breaking knowledge that doesn't seem to pose a threat. In other words, I think many scientists have the personal attitude of "live and let live" where paradigms/disciplines are concerned. If you start presenting research that has clear undermining potential to others' work, it will create controversy and some people will allow their personal interests to interfere with them constructively criticizing what you're doing to strengthen it. Also, I think there is jealousy in academic science where people think younger researchers should "pay their dues" by doing not-so-flashy research and leave the really ground-breaking projects to people who have earned the right to fame and fortune. They will say that the reason for this is that more experienced researchers are in a better position to do more radical work because they know their subjects more thoroughly and intimately, but why shouldn't less experienced researchers learn by charting radical trajectories and rigorously documenting what they learn from doing so? That might make them seem cavalier on a personal level, but isn't part of science supposed to be that you don't allow personal feelings and interests to bias your critical abilities?

Don't want to derail the thread, but could it help to answer this question by including the issue of what might cause the relationship between energy level change and the frequency of emission? E.g. if electrons are absorbing and re-emitting energy at a certain rate, and thus emitting radiation at a certain frequency, what is responsible for the given frequency and what allows it to occur only for certain frequencies in each element and not others?

I apologize if you felt unpleasant reading my post. I hope you realize, though, that one of the big obstacles to democracy at present is the fact that people stick their fingers in their ears every time someone takes a position that disagrees with theirs. I don't expect you or anyone else to listen to something I have to say when I was using speech as a weapon of symbolic violence, but that's not what I was doing by mentioning the socratic method. You mentioned socrates and I was pointing out that what you were doing was different than socratic method and that if you would use socratic method, it would be more democratic imo. No personal attack intended - just commenting on the character of your post.

The hard part of legitimating any statistical approach, for me, is that there is a degree of separation between the levels of empirical events and that of analysis. It would be like if there was a model for predicting the time it takes a race car to go around a certain track by taking the average duration of all possible paths around the track under all conditions. While the average would represent something pertinent, it would not be a direct representation of an actual empirical situation where a particular car went around a particular track under specific conditions, etc. So if I wanted to theorize what factors influence the car's time around the track, it would be impossible because my model would work purely at the level of arriving at a mean and working with that number in other ways. The question about the probability of Feynman being wrong was well-answered but it was also meant a little rhetorically as a play on the fact that Feynman said that uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of nature - so why shouldn't that apply to Feynman's claims about nature as well? If QP can say that Einstein was wrong about God not playing dice, then why can't anyone else say that using statistics to work probabilistically is like physicists playing dice with nature and just getting good enough with spreading their bets to always come out ahead without really caring how the game (might) work(s)?

Ok, so why don't you use the socratic method then? War is no fun, but imo fear, apprehension, and avoidance of war has fostered the greatest anti-democratic (authoritarian) culture presently dominant in global culture. The deterrence and containment strategizing that took place following WWII with the cold war amounted to a relativist imperativism to place conflict-avoidance interests over consumation of political differences, because the nuclear threat made consummation unthinkable. Democracy is war by other means, so how can you have democracy when underlying conflicts and dissent are suppressed under a reign of fear for what conflict could potentially lead to if the stakes got high enough?

What's the probability that Feynman was wrong and what's the confidence level of certainty for the answer?

Even in the more cognitively intensive concentrations of nerve cells (frontal lobe?). Sorry if this is covered by your link. I'll check it out later but I don't have time at this moment.

You're right that different meanings and emphasis of the idea get emphasized by different interests. That is caused by having a democratic discourse about what democracy is and should mean. You note the etymology of demos and cracy, but "the people" doesn't directly translate to mean "the majority of the people." That is actually a significant jump because it suddenly implies that certain people have more of a claim to define the will of "the people" than others. Another way to approach "the people" would be to assume consensus, but then you end up with consensus-seeking situations where people are manipulated and bought off to support the the will of a minority or non-total majority. Either way, I think both approaches are flawed because they assume that the people, the demos, has to behave as a unified entity in order to rule itself. There is no reason to assume this. It is just as logical that the demos can be fragmented and that the point of representative government generally, whether majoritarian or minoritarian would be to facilitate discussion and negotiation of conflicting views and interests. This could be done just as well by having a minoritarian government and a majoritarian opposition, but since representation and authority tends to evoke critique, it makes more sense to have majoritarians in the hot seat until their supporters have shifted to new (oppositional) ideologies, and then organize those into a majoritarian party to be represented and criticized in government. That way, every prerogative for leadership gets tried and tested in practice, and its flaws noted and reformed to either retain support or form new ideological platforms. In the case of Gadaffi, I think the rebels can either form coherent oppositional ideologies and pursue these in terms of some kind of constitutional foundations OR they could form a majoritarian government as long as they allow minority opposition, including Gadaffi's regime supporters, to fairly voice criticisms. My only issue, if I was Gadaffi, would be that I owned a great deal of wealth personally and the new government could abuse its governmental power to take my wealth away. So, when you are dealing with people who are claiming to be for democracy but their main interest is taking wealth from those who have it, do you regard that as legitimate politics or piracy disguised in institutional formalism?

This is a response to an emerging discussion in another thread about the common claim that most of an atom consists of empty space. My question is whether it makes sense to attribute any volume at all to the constituent point-particles or if that's like claiming that 0-dimensional points make up a small amount of volume in a 3D object. Can electrons, protons, and neutrons be described as having volume and "empty space" or do they generate volume/space with their energetic interactions: from previous thread: Ok, but nuclei are configurations of particles, not particles themselves, right? I'm just wondering if there's any basis to that assumption that the particles themselves constitute some amount of the atom's volume that isn't "empty space?" It seems like the fact that the particles move around with energy is what creates volume, which I supposed is why they are regarded as waves (i.e. patterns of motion among otherwise volumeless particles). Doesn't that make sense?

edit: I'm moving this post to start a new thread on volume and empty space in an atom.

Could the two be potentially related? I heard that as nerves develop, the shielding between them grows so that they are less likely to make connections, whereas the transmission ability of the mature, well-shielded nerves becomes better (more practiced/honed?) in its functioning.

Saying that atoms are mostly space implies that point-particles have some definable volume. I don't think that's the case. So why do people say that atoms are "mostly empty space" instead of saying that they're completely empty space whose operative volume is a result of their forces and energies? Do point-particles have volume independently of the configurations they form? Is it possible to predict a minimum volume for any type of particle, such as a collection of electrons, protons, or neutrons?

I've never heard of the atomic nucleus described as having containment walls. That makes it sound as if the nucleons are repelling each other intensely and would fragment into hydrogen immediately if no longer contained. Is that how you meant it or was the metaphor not intended that deeply? btw, this is not intended to sidetrack the thread discussion. I am just trying to figure out how central this idea of "walls" is to the point of the OP.