lemur

I understand the instrumental value of concepts that facilitate calculation, but my main interest is what the fundamental constituents of physics are or could be. Maybe I am making too much out of the models, though, and concepts like "proton," "electron," and "photon," are just as arbitrary as "virtual photon." Still, the fact that a EM wave photon has internal cohesion makes it seem more like an actual packet of energy that travels from atom to atom. Is the point of describing magnetic fields in terms of "virtual photons" that a field of force behaves similarly to an array of photons being emitted from a source? Still, energy seems distinct from force, imo, because I can't see how force can be conserved the way energy is. Or is it all conserved in the form of mass, with matter losing (and gaining) mass as photons get emitted (and absorbed)? But how would this be similar in magnetic fields? It's not as if a piece of iron stuck to a magnet absorbs the magnetic force that is transferred to it, right? Its atoms' spins just get aligned temporarily and become random again after the permanent magnet is taken away. You wouldn't say that the iron atoms "absorbed" and "re-emitted" magnetic (virtual) photons, would you?

In the top right corner of the forum screen, there is a drop-down menu that tells the number of post that quoted you since your last visit. Once you click it, the number resets to zero. Why isn't it like an inbox where it only resets the number to reflect the number of unread posts on the list? Wouldn't that make it easier to reply to all your replies without necessarily doing it all at once?

Are virtual particles just a way of defining field force for calculation purposes or are they supposed to be true fundamental entities?

so the electrons don't just get displaced, they get transformed?

If something moves at c, does that always imply that it has momentum the way light does? Does a magnetic field have momentum? To me that would imply that it could be amplified and focused, like a laser does with light.

Right, but what I meant was that if the wobble of the axis changes by 1 degree in some direction, that change would have to be offset by an appropriate amount of offset in some other direction. I.e. the mean tilt of the axis can't change, only the amount and patterns of deviation from that mean. Would that be incorrect to assume?

I think cheap energy actually alienates people from their most inalienable source of energy, their own bodies. The Matrix movie made quite a shocking idea of using human body energy as an energy-source, but I think that in the very distant future, cultural-economic efficiency will have evolved to the point that humans can live with amazing levels of comfort using only their body energy. I think the 20th century was a set-back to efficiency evolution because of the focus on abundance of energy and industrial production generally. It was a necessary step to achieving the technological advances that have made miniaturization and other major advances in efficiency possible, but it will take a long time to get beyond the assumptions and dependencies that have been created.

So there's also a conservation of wobble-geometry then, I'm guess.

I can't believe I got bored enough to open this thread. I think it would make more sense to consider using fireflies for light. Who would want to depend on electric eels to keep their TV going? What would you do, throw some salt in the tank and provoke them whenever your picture started to fade?

But if they had a prime directive of ethical treatment of life, they would avoid using their "superior intellects" against humans or other living things, wouldn't they? Or are you thinking they would reason their way out of ethical directives like, "don't abuse living things?"

Odd, that's something I would take pause to observe. And I thought it was entertaining to watch them regurgitate and chew cud.

Maybe I'm just a devil's advocate by reflex, but it bugs me that I haven't heard one argument against Gaddafi besides the fact that he's unpopular. How am I supposed to know whether the rebels aren't simply wrong and his regime is simply right?

Why? Because the pole moved relative to the equator? How does a planet's tilt change without having something else to push against?

What's with the pessimism about AI? It is like the Terminator movies are getting elevated to sacred status. Is it because people think AI would eschew human interests over other forms of rationality? That is an old philosophical argument. Why can't AI simply be programmed with ethical interest constraints?

Analogies address different aspects of ideas than mathematical descriptions. When I read Max Planck say that electricity would be studied as a type of gas dynamics, that was a helpful analogy because I could suddenly imagine electrons in a conductor interacting the way particles in a gas do. Quantitatively, it gave me no basis for predicting any form of electrical behavior, but no equation could facilitate the same depth of qualitative understanding, I think.

People would see it as a tax and resist it. The only way to do what you're saying is to sue for damages directly. The other method would be to charge impact fees but this is more difficult since businesses seek out areas whose governments are favorable to their business practices, so you would have a hard time lobbying such governments to raise impact fees to those businesses. It would be more effective to replace those businesses' products with more eco-friendly ones and promote those with lucid informational campaigns that don't don't come across as manipulative advertising. I think you'd be surprised, though, that when you tell people that an alternative produce is eco-friendlier and they really get why/how and it's not too much more expensive, they choose it over the less eco-friendly alternative. I always buy cage-free eggs, for example, even though they cost more than caged abused-chicken eggs.

I guess that's a more substantial answer than, "I don't know," would be.

We're talking about two completely different issues. I think your "slow food" sounds great. My point was that prices in the developed world reflect an economic ecology that supports the most eco-unfriendly lifestyles of the globe. So when you're buying cheap food grown by peasants who lack cars and other means to consume eco-unfriendly products, you are supporting more eco-friendly labor than when you pay local farmers for "slow food" who are going to buy a house from developers who are very eco-unfriendly in the way they spend the money they get. Basically what I'm trying to suggest is that maybe the best way to support eco-friendliness is to pay as little as possible for any commodity because doing so reduces the revenue and income levels of the people who have the most eco-unfriendly lifestyles. Then, as these people adjust to lower budgets, they will live more like the rural peasants that do the farm labor to produce low-priced "slow food." That's interesting about the cat tails, but I wouldn't be so concerned with creating bio-fuel as I would be with creating producer-consumer networks that can function in the absence of ANY fuel, since ANY fuel that is developed will be scarcer than fossil-oil and thus will continue to grow more expensive and thus get consumed by the super-rich. Keeping the masses fed is going to require numerous sustainable communities that are capable of sustaining their own agricultural feedback loops without fueled transport. An example might be like people I talked with who live in Ghana who walk each morning to their farm-plot to weed and tend it before going on to the rest of their daily activities.

I tried reading an organic chemistry textbook recently and the complexity of it overwhelmed me. Now I'm wondering if it wouldn't make sense to learn chemistry like a language, where the elements are like phonemes or word-fragments that form "words" (i.e. complexes of atoms that build up to more complex configurations to form large molecules)? I can imagine that super-molecules would work this way, building up from multiple layers of sub-molecular structuring processes, but I don't know enough about chemistry to know if I'm right. Could chemistry be learned in this way, e.g. learning basic vocabulary and grammar of simple super-atomic complexes and gradually learning to see how these complexes are pieced together into ever larger ones?

So why use the word, "tragedy" in the thread title then? For the alliteration?

Maybe similar to the "sea legs" effect of being on a boat for a long time. I think that has to do with inner-ear balance adjusting to the motion of the boat and then having to readjust to stable ground. Maybe you got "train legs." What's tragic about it?

"Path of least resistance" is a good basis for physics-reasoning, imo. It goes along with conservation of energy. So would you consider the governance of "particle-popping" due to the force-fields that they "pop in and out" around? Or do you think these fields of force are themselves emergent from the "popping?" If so, it would be handy to have some causal hypothesis in order to reason about how such causation would be related to pre-expansion force-energy relations within a singularity.

I find your method of thinking interesting. I'm still working on figuring out how you can make connections between quantum-level events and the observable-level patterns that seem to emerge from them. How, for example, would "fractle pattern/s and mathamaticle statisticle probability [be] born out of chaos?" What would cause such a "birth?"

But what do you do about the fact that paying local people to work in local agriculture requires pricing that supports a high level of eco-unfriendliness in the broader economy? It might be more ecofriendly to ship cheap produce from somewhere that people don't drive, consume a lot, or buy property at prices that support people who do. This leads to the more general question of whether recession in wealthy economies is itself eco-friendly because it constrains the culture of resource-waste by inducing budgeting. I've been thinking about this issue lately, and specifically how to recycle human waste into fertilizer that can be used on food. This should probably have its own thread, actually. What I came up with is perhaps you could use human waste to fertilize some intermediate crop that's not directly ingested, like flowers, and then compost the flowers into fertilizer.

Does gravity as strong as that of the sun or other star cause sub-atomic particles to separate and stratify the way solid, liquid, and gas do on Earth? Does gravity reach such a level of strength that it overcomes the force of electrostatic attraction, essentially ionizing all the atoms? If so, it would seem like the sun and other stars would have an atmosphere of negative charge as their outermost layer. Yet, I've never heard of the sun being surrounded by an "atmosphere" of static electricity. Why?