lemur

Sorry, I posted the wrong question. I meant to ask how adding energy to an atom causes it to gain an electron. But math doesn't do anything more than relate measurements according to predictive patterns/correlations. Theoretical models are needs that explain how the actual physical processes work that cause the math to work the way it does. Right, so you can generate models of physical processes that are too small to observe directly and then test the models against various evidence and logic, right?

I generally don't like this argument because it implies that the West modernized as a team with all players cooperating and contributing to development. Many, probably most, westerners benefited from modernization by proxy. All have inherited shoulders to stand on at birth. Some rise to the challenge of continuing the struggle for further development while some or most simply try to secure the most benefit they can and insulate themselves from detriment through commerce and other social-political means. I'm not saying this kind of profiting from a subsidiary relationship to development is good, but why is it seen as natural when the people doing it are identified as being part of the same society/culture as the innovators and developers? How can someone whose grandfather worked in a factory building Model T Fords claim that his ancestor contributed more to modernization than someone who could have done the same job if they would have been at the right place at the right time? They also need a model for economic culture they want to work toward that addresses sustainability concerns and doesn't simply aim to maximize revenue from trade with wealthy clients. Are you assuming that it is impossible to live in harmony with nature without enduring major health problems, short lifespan, high youth mortality, etc.? Couldn't access to medicine and other basic technologies improve living conditions greatly without culminating into a highly-polluting industrial economic/consumerist culture? Aboriginal people haven't always built houses of some kind? They haven't always fished and educated children how to live from the land? Because they think it will increase their profits (this is a bad reason btw). I don't think the goal should be to develop or prevent development. It should be to promote balances of power that generate more individual freedom for people to determine their own cultural development. I think there can and should be intervention to steer away from developments that can lead to unsustainable economic practices developing and people from exploiting each other to increasing degrees. Why shouldn't people in developing economies be doing the same thing for those in the developed ones? But isn't it sometimes better to buy something very useful on credit than to go without in order to stay out of debt? In general I agree, but I think it depends on the specifics of the situation. What do you do when some people get guns and start dominating others? Do you not try to come up with a way to balance power to prevent warlords from monopolizing and abusing power? Ideally this would be done by de-escalation of violence instead of escalation, but is that possible in all situations all the time? It sounds generally exploitative, but is it necessarily so in all cases? Is it not possible to offer someone a job so they can learn a skill while producing for someone else? Is "underpaying" people always a problem, e.g. when their cost of living is proportional to their wages? Wouldn't it do more to harm a poor economy to pay people relatively high wages, which would cause inflation and promote people around them to cater to them with services and luxuries instead of developing more important skills that contribute to a more robust local economy?

Then how does adding energy to an atom cause it to lose an electron? What do you mean by "contrary to empirical evidence" then? That sounds like it could have a lot of subjective bias. As far as being testable, do you mean something more than consistently agreeing with observations? Theories should be deducible to testable/falsifiable propositions but that doesn't mean they have to be directly observable, does it? E.g. Paleontology can theorize about dinosaur behavior based on fossil evidence without being able to test their theories on living dinosaurs. Still, they attempt to falsify their theories by interpreting existing evidence and seeking new information.

The OP asked, I believe, "are you the same person after a brain transplant?" What do you want to call the "person" separate from her/his body and/or brain except for a "soul?" If you ask whether the transplanted brain will still have the same thoughts and memories, then say that instead of "the same person." If you want to ask whether the functions of the brain are coterminous with personhood, say that. Personally, I think there is a material possibility that a brain can be transplanted to a new body without the person's consciousness being transplanted with it. I think it is possible that one's consciousness harnesses the brain and other nerves to gain access to sensory input, cognitive power, memories, and muscle control but it may be that a body with brain removed would persist in searching for these functions within the de-brained body instead of transplanting along with the brain itself. Is there any way to test either hypothesis (i.e. that the brain can or can't be transplanted without transplanting the person's consciousness)? Take a partial-transpant approach for comparison: If you could just transplant memories and nothing else, would the person with implanted memories be the same person/consciousness? What about if you could transplant cognitive-abilities (i.e. thought patterns) without altering memories or anything else? Would the altered person be the same person with the same memories but new thought-patterns, or would the thought-patterns constitute a new/transplanted person/consciousness who had to deal with memories and a body new to them? If Einstein's cognitive-programming could be scanned from his brain tissue and re-written onto someone living, with or without the life-memories, would this be the same thing as resurrecting a person from death or merely a revision of a living-person's subjectivity, where the consciousness remained otherwise unaltered?

Anything with momentum travels forever unimpeded by outside force. Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. I thought you meant that photons are "pure momentum" in the sense that they are just packets of pure energy that transport momentum from one particle to another. Maybe another way to put it would be that particles with mass seem to have internal-energy that takes the form of mass and somehow allows them to travel below C. EM radiation doesn't seem to have any such "internal-energy" and maybe this has something to do with why it can and does travel at C. Honestly, though, I don't even think that photons are comparable to other particles in that I don't think they "move through" spacetime as much as they are spacetime itself in motion. I think particles with mass might be constituted at their most radical level from spacetime-motion-energy but once bound as particles, I think they have to traverse through force-fields instead of using them as a medium. Sorry to throw in personal beliefs, but I find it frustrating that no model is ever given for how light travels without a medium and its other special characteristics as a particle/wave.

Right, but what does adding energy to the atom do that "ripens" it for additional electron-binding? Yes, I think of a rotating object but this seems slightly different to me than something in orbit, probably just a subjective bias but in my mechanical thinking a satellite in orbit is on a geodesic path and a thing rotating is not in linear motion. You can't really tell what anything is doing when it's not being observed (and I admire the empirical rigor of recognizing that something is ultimately unknowable when not directly observed); however, you can create models of what you think it may be doing based on knowledge derived from observations. It's like if you see a mole popping up in different places in your garden, you can theorize that their may be tunnels under the ground between the holes, even if you can't directly see the tunnels. You can even theorize about how the mole digs the tunnels, what it does with the dirt as it goes, etc. Did Einstein discover gravity's effect on light by watching stars or did he first theorize and thereafter test the implications of the theory? It seems like you eschew pro-active modeling and deductive testing/observation/reasoning for some reason and I'm not sure why you would unless you think science would just be better if it stuck with describing patterns of observations/measurements without ever trying to create explanatory models for how and why things behave as they do.

So you don't want to attempt to make a classical mechanical model? How else do you theorize what is actually going on that causes these numbers and observations to occur? I understand that shells can come close to fullness and thus be positively charged relative to the full shell. What I don't understand is how adding energy causes that; unless it somehow "knocks free" one or more of the electrons in a full shell. (but there's more pesky classical mechanical modeling for you - how else do you explain force interactions logically except with classical mechanics? Aren't they just arbitrary interactions otherwise? It would be like saying that person A pushed person B and person B fell but the two events had nothing to do with the pushing itself, i.e. pushing-action 1 resulted in falling-state 1 and then finding an equation to elegantly describe all possible ratios of pushing actions and falling-states. You would never truly understand how pushing causes falling. Again, don't you want to know HOW angular momentum causes the wave-function shape to change and why?

For me, I became an atheist when I started to have a strong enough feeling of understanding physics that I felt I could know with certainty that there was no material being external to myself, i.e. "out there." It wasn't until I learned to understand the difference between spirituality and materiality that I was able to entertain the idea that God does exist WITHIN people and that this is a form of existence that is sufficient to believe in "God's existence." Many people can't understand how I can call subjective existence a form of true existence, but I think if it is sufficient to convince people who truly believe in God's existence that God in fact does exist (even objectively/externally), then it has as strong an effect as if God DID in fact exist externally/objectively. So I still don't think that God exists materially in the same way as, say, a road but I think He/She/It does exist in people's subjectivity and in theological discourse, and that is sufficient to drive all religious practice of humanity as if God existed external to all that. edit: if you compare "God" as an idea with Jupiter as a planet, I think "God" the idea may have more power in human life than the planet Jupiter - although the idea of "Jupiter" may have more power in some astronomers' lives than that of "God." This is an example of how I measure subjective power. edit2: this thread needs to have a sequel entitled, "not throwing out the baby with the bathwater: why don't atheists typically reject secular values derived from religion?"

Have you stopped to consider that the reason it is hard to get a job with a fundamental science or liberal arts degree is that these studies are "liberal" in the sense that they are not directly driven by economic interests. Thus, for a scientist or literary scholar to be truly free, they have to be independent of economic control, which in turn requires that they achieve economic sustainment through some other profession or means? Anytime you pay someone to do science or write, they are in a position of being forced to modify their research or other perspective to conform to the interest of their funding-source. Tenure is really the only means to protect academic freedom but even then, you are dependent on the investments of the university or research institute that funds your salary. The people who are most academically free are those whose income is entirely independent of their research/writing. E.g. if you get paid to paint houses, no one cares whether you research and write about black holes, basket weaving, or banana republics. Of course there could be cases where people would choose not to hire someone to paint their house just because they disagreed with their politics, but theoretically your client shouldn't have any interest in whether you're a republican or a communist or both at the same time. Do you really want students who are induced to study your field? Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out what the purpose of your science is and then make a case for why your field shouldn't become a dead language? Actually, it might be more effective to do some research into what culture would be like if science faded and was eclipsed by other forms of culture. I.e. what would the world be like without science. I think it would be pretty bad, but I'm not exactly sure how since it is such a strong culture in "my world."

But what basis would you even have then to ask if the soul would get transplanted with the brain in a brain transplant? Obviously there is some possibility that it is possible to donate one's brain to another person or there would be no point to discussing the issue in the first place, would there? I'm not trying to escape corporeal logic. What I'm saying is that the brain may simply be a processing organ that the soul uses to think and store memories. The soul might also have feeling-organs separate from the brain. E.g. people feel things in their abdomen's, hearts, stomachs, etc. Maybe those parts of their consciousness are not just perceived by their brain - maybe those parts are actually feeling themselves as well as the brain. Yes it is logical that if one part is severed from another, they lose access to each other. Severing the optic nerves would result in blindness, for example, but maybe the eyes can still see though the signal is no longer reaching the brain. Sight might be a bad example since that requires interaction with conscious perception to focus, control light intake be regulating pupil-size, etc. But maybe a person who is paralyzed from the neck down still has feelings below their head, only they are no longer conscious of it because the signal-connection is broken. Thus, the soul could be constituted from all the tissues and nerves, not just the brain. Does that clarify? What was the movie with Harrison Ford where the guy loses his personality, memories, etc. but he still lives and functions? Anyway, the point is that a person can lose personality and memories, etc. and still have a "soul," no? You wouldn't say that a person who lost most brain function but maintained some had lost their soul (completely), would you?

I think I know what he means because I have a similar impression; i.e. the electron has momentum and suddenly this momentum drops as it goes down a level and the energy is "teleported" at C to whatever particle it reaches next. I know that photons have their own momentum, hence lasers, but they also seem to just transport momentum between sending and receiving particles at a fixed speed without accelerating, decelerating, or being subject to any friction in between. It's almost as if one atom/electron is able to suddenly convey its energy across a distance (at C), as if it was teleported to the receiving particle and then quickly teleported back to its original position. Although maybe what he means by "pure momentum" is just that energy is completely transferred unlike a particle colliding with another particle where partial momentum may be transferred. Or maybe he's implying that momentum should be treated as a ratio between motion and mass/inertia and therefore that photons would have the ultimate ratio of motion to mass/intertia. I guess there are more ways to interpret "pure momentum" than I at first thought. Are any of these close to what you mean, Steevey?

Meaning the photon energy knocks one or more electrons off the atom? How do atoms get negatively ionized, actually, since that requires them gaining electrons, right? How does energy cause a particle to attract extra electrons? Yes, s/p/etc. orbitals. I vaguely remember the letters after reading a book recently but I do recall that the number of electrons per orbit is 2p^2 (2,8,18,32). Do I get extra credit for that? I didn't know that "angular momentum" of electrons referred to their "going around the nucleus." I didn't get that but I thought it meant something else. But if it's not a "standing wave," meaning it doesn't stand still AND it's not going around (i.e. orbiting), what is it doing exactly?

I think God would notice the number approaching zero and then consider allowing the infinite approach to converge with the endpoint. Maybe God would elevate the discrepancy between the eternally nearing point and the eternally unreachable endpoint to infinity despite infinite nearness. I think God could multiply this question in ways that we haven't even thought of, yet, just because God is the superset with all possible human interpretations as a subset. God could probably continue coming up with multiple interpretations that make it half way to totally solving the paradox without every reaching a true explanation, just for the sake of generating an infinitude of explanations AND THEN transcend the problem by coming up with a single simple reductive solution that defies the paradox. God is the subjective idea of limitless power so however far you can subjectively imagine power to deal with this paradox, your subjective concept of God transcends that - if only by virtue of the fact that God is an idea that any and all limits can be transcended.

I don't, but I don't think there is more that conjecture in favor of the assumption that the soul is contained within the brain. There are religious philosophies that treat the mind as separate from the soul and I think that shouldn't be dismissed, since it is possible that the mind is more akin to software whereas the soul could be more like the processor that runs the software; or maybe the energy that runs the processor. Anyway, the point is that until you can specify what "the soul" is, how could you specify what part of the body it would/could persist to live within? I could, but I wouldn't do that in a materialist discussion like this one. It could, however, be that the brain only acts as an apparatus for processing signals and stories thoughts, memories, and habits of activity. The soul could operate through the hardware and software of the brain to create a sense of self, memories, etc. without these being permanently attached to the actual experiential being utilizing them. Maybe you could even do some kind of partial brain transplant where memories and thoughts from the original brain were kept in addition to the implanted brain. That way you could remember the way you used to be - or your new soul could have access to how the old soul used to live in the body. Either way, how would you know which soul you were if you couldn't assume correspondence between mind/memories and soul?

So electrons don't really exist for gamma rays? And all other photon frequencies interact with the electrons, which in turn interact with the nucleus? What would the filtering-factor be that allows some photons through and others to get absorbed by the electrons? Swanson, "orbits" may "conjure up" the planetary model but what better word is there to describe a wave going around a nucleus?

Good post. Important to insist that peace doesn't translate into false agreement. People need to assert their beliefs and it actually helps to put them in terms of the people you're trying to convert (or just make understand your point of view). I would not try to explain God in spiritual terms to a materialist because they would just question spirituality in terms of materiality. Likewise, I would try to insist on evolution to creationists by insisting that the creation story is proven wrong by fossil records. I would instead try to explain the findings of evolution in terms that acknowledge the breadth of the creation and then try to interpret evolution in terms of divine will. God bless science and how about some critical rigor for theological ideas, just to develop them further?

I am independent, but I was adamantly liberal for a long time and I see now how the left tends to strawman republicans as just being about keeping tax money for themselves so they can spend more money. This strawman works well for promoting the tax-spend-stimulus agenda because it appeals to people who basically want to get and spend more money to think that rich people are spending it and not conserving it so they should get to too. It would not be in the interest of fiscal liberalism if rich republicans were living frugally and saving the money they saved in taxes. This is because it is hard to justify taxing someone else when you spend more money than they do. So I think that if people are "gradually realizing that the media-driven "war" between liberals and conservatives is really relatively minor disputes over current problems," that this is just more media spin to convince people that everyone is a spend-happy consumerist and it's just a question of how to drum up the economy to make more spending and consumption possible. Beyond spending, there are also a lot of different attitudes and views toward different issues that should actually not get boiled down to the one most likely to garner a majority. All views should be expressed and discussed critically in public discourse. It should not be about finding strategies of how to "win." That's great, but it's very likely that this dissatisfaction will be capitalized on by pundits like Jon Stewart and Glen Beck (whom I know very little about). The major means of achieving dominance in being a pundit is to claim a neutral or objective stance that puts "realism" over partisanship. This has been going on since at least national socialism in the 1930s. That's republicanism. Deconstructing people's faith in the benevolence and other goodness of authoritarian leadership/control. True, but many don't adopt total rejection of authoritarianism as a result - they just seek a better dictator, one who genuinely loves them and will take care of them. For US voters, it was Obama. For most people in the world, it is some form of ethno-national authoritarian regime or cultural ideology. They all tell people that they are going to "stand up for the (insert ethno-national idenitity here) people." Yes, I want people to question the validity and ethics of expecting a central government or other individual(s) generally to take responsibility for their lives and power. I want people to ask how they can achieve what for themselves and only secondly begin to look to others for help with the means to achieve it. I'm tired of people saying, "the economy needs fixing," when all they mean is that they want more money. I want people to say, "there needs to be more clothes," or "we need more bike lanes because gas is too expensive." Not complain about what they don't have but think about what they want to have and what it would take to get it AND THEN maybe looking to others, including to but not limited to government, to help achieve it. So, yes, I think it's good when people come to question their faith in top-down governance when they've become so uncritically assumptive of it.

That's what I meant; i.e. whether photons are capable of passing through the electrons and directly reaching the nucleus or whether all photons have to first be absorbed by the electrons before that energy can get translated into motion/vibration of the nucleus, presumably by means of the electrostatic tethering of the electrons to the nucleus. Thanks for your other post, btw. So, by "a wave," you meant that the electrons are not static but orbit, though they do so as waves that are never out of phase (hence the discreteness of levels, correct?). I've read this before but I sometimes get confused which theory claims what and why. When people start saying the QM basically disproves everything without stating the alternative model it proposes, I start glazing over with the claims of pure-math modeling that, to me, are not sufficient to describe what (could) be actually going on to cause the numbers. It's also my impression that QM restricts itself to talking in terms of probabilities of location of "electron sightings" to avoid even getting into the question of how electrons might get from one sighting to the next. The problem is that I don't see how anything can get from one point to another without some kind of line between the two points. If teleporting is real, it would be nice to have some kind of explanation of how the electrons do it, perhaps by being something akin to shimmering reflections on the surface of a wave?

Yes, but it's easy to perceive a wave as a packet of energy in that it bends the shape of its medium giving the appearance of a discrete entity. Since photons supposedly lack any medium, this would seem not to apply - but if they are waves of field-force variability, I think that would explain how they could transport energy without their medium having mass. Mass seems to require closed-field particles and the fact that the EM fields of photons propagate seems to indicate that they are not closed-fields. I hope that is reasonably non-speculative enough to add to the discussion.

How does that explain how the electron tunnels between sightings within the wave function? Isn't the wave function just a probability-area for sightings of the electron as a point-particle, or have I understood it wrong? So if it's not a point-particle or a standing wave, what does QM say it is? Or does QM only deal with concepts at an instrumental level and refused to model electrons in a qualitative way whatsoever? If so, is there some other approach that can move forward with qualitative modeling in some way (please)? I thought the pertinent question was about what the relationship of the electrons are to the nucleus in absorbing energy as heat (vibration). It seems logical that energy would have to affect the electrons and the electrons would transfer the energy to the nucleus, but maybe energy can penetrate the electrons and directly animate the nucleus. Are photons an exclusive mechanism for energy transfer among atoms or can they still collide with each other despite theoretical advances?

There is a radical cognitive difference between conceptualizing space(time) as a container of all forces that transcends (i.e. is separate and distinct from) those forces and conceptualizing space(time) as an internal product of force-interactions. Since this language may sound convoluted, take the following examples: 1) space(time) is viewed as a container housing matter and energy phenomena but it is assumed that the forces are not themselves the ultimate container 2) gravity and/or other forces are viewed as directly interactive and what is observed/perceived as space(time) is purely an effect of interactions between forces. If spacetime is indeed a trancendent container of forces as a fact of nature, there is really no need for discussion here (unless there is some empirical or other non-axiomatic basis for demonstrating that such is the case). However, if spacetime is in fact nothing more than force-interactions, the question is whether there is something about human cognition that causes us to interpolate empirical observations as occurring within a transcendent container? Are we for some reason prone to thinking of things as being circumscribed and defined, and thus always thinking about anything as having something outside/beyond its presumed boundaries? Probably someone will mention Kant now, but I don't really think it would be interesting to have a discussion about such cognition as being an absolute imperative. I would rather consider what possibility there is to conceive of empirically observable forces and objects/particles/energy as co-constituents of a universe without a container-concept. If you would like to explore why/how cognition may be biased in favor of circumscription/container-thinking that is fine; just please no Kantian insistence on absolute/imperative concepts (only because it stifles discussion of the alternative, imo).

Why? Because of calculation-utility? Because it's more intuitively comforting? Because there's something about that model that has more veracity? Some other reason(s)? Why does that matter? The issue was whether force-fields themselves constitute a form of potential energy. Why or why not? It doesn't seem like it should be a chicken/egg problem of modeling. It seems like there should be something about the relationship between mass and gravity that restricts the acceleration of particles with mass within a gravitational field. Then there should be something else about gravity and/or electromagnetism that causes photons to always travel at C. If all matter is constituted from energy in some way, then gravity would ultimately be a byproduct of energy. In that case, the relationship between EM waves and gravity would be something akin to the relationship between evaporation and precipitation (i.e. co-influential aspects of a single process). Ok, that analogy is maybe far-sought, but what I mean is that the reason gravity limits the motion of EM waves in a consistent way probably has to do with the gravity playing a role in the photons' transport. I.e. gravity and electromagnetism don't seem to be unrelated forces.

Why wouldn't you just say that gravity stores energy in a potential form according to an object's position relative to other objects in the field? Ultimately, isn't matter only convertible to energy because the configuration of the sub-atomic particles changes relative to each other? Isn't such a configuration-change just a change between the two particles' relation to each other's field-force? I.e. the position of each in relation to the other's field force constitutes a certain amount of potential energy that can be converted into some other (kinetic) form, no?

If space consisted of many point-like point-sources, what would constitute the space between the points? If the points generated co-terminous fields, what would determine the motion of the points relative to each other and why wouldn't the gradation between the points and their exteriors be observable?

Ok, so should I decode this as you suggesting that gravity does not actually exist and that something else does that explains its effects but in some other way? Why wouldn't you just post your idea explicitly instead of using implicit suggestion in this way? Btw, imperative commands don't end with question marks.