lemur

What does math have to do with it? All math does is describe and calculate patterns of observations, no? Evidence is always consistent with existing theory, as far as I know. What about when evidence is explained by existing theories but they're not correct? Many past scientific concepts have turned out to be flawed though they explained existing observations fairly well. Are new models always the product of new or better observed data? When you call it a "foolish consistency" that all forces should have polarity because electrostatics does, or that the intersection of electrostatic and nuclear force in protons should have analogies in the intersections between other forces, I wonder if it's because you have proactively determined something foolish about it or if you're just reacting to the fact that you've never thought in that way before. I completely understand your point that just because one force acts a certain way doesn't mean that any other force should act the same way, but what is wrong with questioning if it is possible that the way these forces have been observed has biased us against being able to identify common traits among them? I am reminded of the thread on why herbivores are so muscular and a conversation I had with someone about the role of digestive-system bacteria in generating protein. I compared the protein-generating bacteria to animals that convert plant-matter into protein for carnivores. My conversation partner said I was creating a false analogy between animals and bacteria, but this was only because he didn't see the consistency between bacteria and complex animals as protein-factories for their consumers. Sometimes science can be done by studying the relationship between similar species of phenomena, no?

How does quantum theory explain electron trajectory between "sightings" then? My impression was that it could only predict its appearance in terms of probability but that no explanatory model was offered as to how it gets between observed positions.

In principle I agree. Intuitively, force is a static quasi-object to me. Force that is caused by energy-transfer, such as momentum, also seems necessarily distinct from the energy it transfers. Nevertheless, how else would you describe the cause of potential energy except as position within a force-field? And then, what else stores that (potential) energy except the field-force itself? An apple may have potential to fall out of a tree and strike the ground at a certain speed, etc., but the energy to accelerate the apple to t hat speed is not contained within the apple. If the apple was a rock hung from the same branch, it would have the same potential energy. So the energy is stored as position in the gravitational field, no? So what is the source of the energy except the force-field itself?

Ok, but why aren't there any proposed models for how the electron's trajectory is as it is?

The point of my post was that the common conceptual distinction might be misguided. Why is it logical to differentiate potential energy from field-force? When a force-field causes something to accelerate, how is that different from fueled-propulsion? If a battery is used to store energy, you call it energy, right? But isn't the battery just separating ions in a way that produces electrostatic force between the cells?

I have to start by once again saying that I think your summations of QM aspects are extremely clear and concise from the limited perspective I have from what I've read. I am post, however, to say that at least for me, the tension with QM and Newtonian mechanics is not whether electron clouds resemble satellite motion within a gravity field. The issue is that SOME logical patterns of motion should explain how the electron "teleports" and why. If it behaves as wave-energy instead of a moving point, that is comprehensible. But if people settle on a model of the wave's motion that teleportation/tunneling is a mode by which it transports itself, then there should be some mechanical model to explain how/why it would do this and what would explain why the probability of it popping-up within a certain area is more likely, imo.

If some species seemed to have common ancestors but other species didn't, would you consider that a scientific problem or would you say that those species that didn't simply don't and there's no reason to ask why? I agree with you that there's no inductive reason to assume that mass can be negative, but are you saying that there's no reason to think that different forces of nature would have common characteristics? If electrostatic force is dipolar, why wouldn't nuclear force and gravity?

Actually, maybe it is - based on the definition from Wikipedia: F=MA: Isn't acceleration a change in a physical system? F=MA: Isn't acceleration a form of (mass) transfer?

The problem I'm trying to solve is inconsistency among different kinds of force and a lack of inter-relation in some places despite such interrelation in others. For example, protons are both the positive poles of electrostatics and the point-particles of nuclear force. This links the two forces in a common anchor-point. Why shouldn't it be expected that other forces would be linked in similar ways? Also, it is inconsistent that electrostatic force exhibits (relies on) polarity while nuclear force and gravitation don't. It's like electrostatic force is a direct current and the other two are AC. On another level, I'm trying to address an empirical-observability problem of light being affected by gravity while also being the basis for visual observations of gravity-systems.

Thanks for your opinion. Your criticism is, well, uncritical. You fail to consider that legitimate science has the power to stimulate the fictional imagination in other ways than writing stories about interstellar space voyages. I found it reasonable to post this in speculations. I would find your critique more reasonable if I had posted it in Physics. edit: ok, I read the speculations rules and it seems I should have deduced some testable experiment or observation. How's this: 1) if protons/neutrons were related to some kind of polarity for gravity (the way electrons are to ferromagnetic fields), there should be some variability to gravitation that depends on something other than mass OR there should be some aspect of mass that doesn't depend directly on proton/neutron numbers. Both of these would appear to be unsubstantiated by current observations, though one could wonder if there's something we're not seeing. 2) If the gravity-wells we observe are the (visible) positive poles of a dipolar system, each gravity-well would have a concentration of spacetime curvature in the direction of the invisible negative pole. This would necessarily have some gravitational-lensing effect whose shape would possibly resemble that of a magnetic field in some way. I'm not sure how a magnetic field could be modeled in a way that light would trace curvature away from the negative pole toward the positive. If it was possible to model such a thing, the results could be compared with actual observations of stars, etc. Still, even if the results did not visually differ from observation, how would this support the validity of the idea that gravity-wells in fact have invisible repellant negative poles?

I posted this thread in "speculations" because I wanted to have the freedom to discuss something radically ungrounded except in the aspects of the building-block concepts that I used. Specifically, I wanted to think about the polarity of electrostatics in the (possible) context of gravitation, and as somewhat of a tangent to my own thread, the possibility that protons/neutrons are to gravity what electrons are to a ferromagnetic field. These are pure speculations that are barely derived from the logic of some known particles and forces. I don't have any math to go with them, but if someone else would/could create such math/equations, I would be curious how. You don't have to call these ideas physics, but then please give me a more accurate descriptor than "garbage," "nonsense," or "conjecture." Maybe it should be called theoretical-fiction and you can leave out your judgment of the quality from the actual descriptor. You can say "it's fictional theory and I think it's garbage," but don't call it "fictional theoretical garbage" please, because someone else might find it thought-provoking in some way. I think you're attacking it as if it was a paper submitted for publication to a peer-reviewed journal when it's just a speculative conceptual musing posted for amusement and commentary and perhaps legitimate physics insights as they related to it. Speaking of that, thanks to ajb and michel for using scientific terminology that is beyond me for the potential that it will contribute to some future understanding of Riemannian metrics, whatever those are. Michel's point about anti-spacetime being the future and the spatial metaphor described are creative and interesting though I think unrelated to my concept. Before I post this, though, I would like to say that the analogy of multiple magnets traversed by an electron seems particularly interesting to me in that if gravity-wells existed as the positive poles of gravitational "magnets" whose positive polls were invisible due to light being repelled by them along with matter, that sounds like something similar to the current ideas about "dark matter" and "dark energy" that are floating around. Do you think thoughts posted in the speculations section should still be limited according to some criteria?

Why does it require having a pre-existing model for a physical phenomena to behave according to its inherent mechanics? A tree falls down even when no one is watching because of the mechanics of gravity and not because there's a rule/law that trees always fall down instead of up, right? My point here is that the rules/laws described in physics are extrapolations about the physicalities they describe. They are a tool for scientists and engineers and NOT rules or laws that govern the behavior of objects. Objects don't care about physics, science generally, or any other human knowledge. They just behave according to their own mechanics. I'm not sure what your point was, though, and whether you were talking about the same issue as I was/am. So what "compels" electrons to pop-up in random spots at intermittent moments? Is that an artifact of the means of observing them or do they really exist like that? I don't see where people get the idea that electrons, etc. can be a collection of random, discrete events. If that was the case, why/how would con-sequentiality emerge from them at a more macro level? Imo, everything physical must interact with something else to exchange energy with it and there must be continuous movement between things that come in contact with each other at any level in some form or other.

Cleverly noted, but there's a difference between nature "following rules" or "obeying laws" and "behaving according to mechanical logic." When water molecules vibrate with increasing energy in a liquid, there is a logic to why/how they begin to overcome their surface-tension or whatever force it is that causes them to remain volumetrically compact. So the mechanical logic of the molecules directly result in the behavior they exhibit when heated. They are not following a rule that says when they reach a certain temperature, they have to start transitioning into gas. An apple isn't obeying a law when it falls off the tree; falling is its behavior and centripetal acceleration is the mechanical logic of gravitational force. I know it's a pretty subtle semantic distinction but I have read so many forum posts where people talk about physical behavior as if it were the product of obedient people choosing to respect arbitrary rules. This is very similar, imo, to (anti)religious people who view commandments and sins as arbitrary rules created to punish people for things that have no negative consequences of their own, like a game of cooties. There are mechanical logics to things, if you pay attention to how they work.

If I had thought that this idea was resonant with established theory/science, I wouldn't have posted it in speculations. However, to answer your question in terms of my speculative logic, I would say that there is no such thing as positive electrons, but their electrostatic counterparts are protons, which also happen to anchor the nuclear force. This is why I said maybe nuclear force is interwoven with electrostatic force in a way that is similar in the relationship between gravity and nuclear force. I.e. maybe the nuclear force is the negative pole of gravitation. I know these are bizarre-sounding thoughts, but think about the way a magnet's field extends outward from the negative pole and re-connects through the positive pole. This is all the result of some atomic-level shift in the electrostatic relations between the electrons and the protons, presumably. In the same sense, the external gravitational attraction between atoms/molecules could be due to some kind of polarization of the nuclear force. Magnetism may be strong because electrons are light and fast, whereas gravity may be weaker because protons and neutrons are heavier and less mobile. Obviously this is totally speculative, but I find it interesting to explore radically different thoughts sometimes. To me, spacetime is just another name for gravitational field-force. So anti-spacetime would refer to the "negatively charged" part of a gravity field, if gravity were dipolar. It wouldn't be like another dimension of spacetime that could somehow be explored like an alternate universe or something. It would just be like having a magnet where you're an electron and you can only perceive space(time) as the part of the magnetic field between the positive pole and a certain level of repulsion/curvature you would encounter when attempting to approach the negative pole. So translating this idea to gravity, outer space would not be like a large integrated container, as people often seem to think of it, but more like a collection of gravity wells whose exteriors repel objects back in the direction of the same gravity well or another one. Just think about an electron that could fly around freely among a collection of magnets. It would experience spacetime as being always curved in the direction of the positive poles and if light followed the same curvature, it would not even be able to see the negative poles because they would just as easily repel light as electrons.

Nothing unconscious "follows rules." That is a personification of behavior that is so predictable that it appears as if there were rules or laws governing its behavior. Saying that matter/energy "follows rules" or "obeys laws" implies that it has the freedom to choose what to do in the first place. Things that lack volition do not take the path of least resistance because they were instructed to. They do it because they can't do anything else. It is not a false premise to expect matter/energy to behave according to the logic of its own mechanics. The trick is to ascertain what those mechanics and their logic is. You could collect data about precipitation, temperature, barometric pressure, etc. over a period of time for many different locations and generate statistical correlations that might help predict weather. This could be done without understanding the causal mechanics of why water vaporizes, rises, and moves toward areas of lower pressure; and why it cools down, condenses, and falls to the ground. There is logic in weather patterns beyond simple statistical correlations among data and I don't see why you would assume that any aspect of nature is fundamentally illogical in an intuitive mechanical sense. This implies that the human mind is inherently incapable of generating logical theories for certain natural occurrences but why would it then be able to explain so many others? What would the difference between inexplicable and explicable nature be ultimately based on?

I love the quote from CS Lewis. I've never heard it, but it agrees with my view. Still, I think you're too quick to assume the ego/identity/self and mind are the same thing as the soul. If the soul was separate from these things, a transplanted brain could bring with it a new ego/identity/self, mind, and memories and the soul would have no means of self-reference except what was available to it through its new brain. It's not a question of whether a person is a soul with body or a body with a soul; it's whether the soul would transplant with the brain or flee to some other part of the body and wait for a new brain to manifest its will-to-cognition.

That is potential energy. Why wouldn't it be? Because it's in motion? If it collides with something, it transfers momentum to that thing and its orbit shifts accordingly. I think you could even say that an orbital position is the same thing as a stabile ground-position at a given altitude, except the orbital position has to maintain a certain speed to retain its altitude. In a vacuum, however, that doesn't cost any propulsion.

Most processes I know of seem to have some logic, which is satisfying to me. Electron intermittence is something that seems to have no inherent logic. Electrons apparently just vanish and pop-up randomly, except they have a high probability of "popping-up" within defined areas. It bothers me that there is no mechanical logic proposed to explain how the electrons get from one point to the next. Generally, when people claim that some process is beyond logic, I assume that the logic of the process just hasn't been understood yet.

My impression is that force-fields are stores of potential energy. I.e. they are themselves potential energy waiting to be released as kinetic energy. In a gravity-well, this fact seems somewhat obvious. Where I get stuck is how to convert the PE of, say, a magnetic field into KE. Theoretically, it seems like a magnet is a highly organized system with the potential to decay into a more disorganized system and thereby release energy, but how?

If gravity had positive and negative poles, like magnetism, could the opposite pole be hidden because it existed in anti-spacetime? Matter tends to organize into apparently spherical bodies, but what if the center of these bodies was just a transition point between the positive and negative poles of gravitational force, where only the positive spacetime-generating side is observable? So whereas we generally think of gravity-wells bottoming-out at their centers, could the curvature of spacetime actually be continuing through some kind of virtual/shadow anti-spacetime that feeds force back into the gravity field as we know it? Think about it like being an electron living on the positive pole of a magnet and observing electrostatic force as attractive and having no capacity to recognize the negative pole because the electron is consistently repelled away from that direction to the point of all direction curving back toward the positive pole of the magnet. Spacetime could work the same way, with spacetime expansion outward from any gravitational-center as a polar opposite of the center itself. Since light itself would be deflected toward the "positive" gravitational pole, the apparent expansiveness of spacetime would be the result of repellant force from the negative pole. Like an electron heading through a magnetic field, all directions toward the negative pole would only curve back around to the positive pole, making spacetime appear as an endless realm of positive magnetic poles with no negative poles. This is a bizarre idea, I know, hence it being posted in speculations. Mainly, I just think it's interesting to speculate about the possibility that gravity could be dipolar without our being able to observe both poles. A related speculation might involve connecting the electrostatic polarity between electrons and protons to the nuclear forces as seemingly attractive without having dipolarity. E.g. maybe gravity could be the anti-pole of nuclear force, since it attracts atoms from the outside of the electrons while the nuclear force attracts particles inside them. Anyway, very confusing thinking I know and what point could thinking this way possibly have? . . . but I still find it interesting and wonder what others might have to say.

The problem comes when you compare this with the alternative, which would be difficult to distinguish for everyone involved, including the transplant patient. Think about it: if somehow consciousness was not transplanted together with the brain, what would it be like for a de-brained consciousness to acquire a new brain? The consciousness would wake up with the mind and memories of the new brain, so what basis would it have for knowing that it used to have different memories and thoughts? It would remember itself by accessing the memories of the new brain and think it had been transplanted from another body, even if it hadn't. This is one of the most fascinating issues in consciousness-transfer theorizing (to me or my transplanted brain . . . or maybe both of us:).

Imo, egoism is excessive already due to meritocratic assumptions about social-economics, etc. Ego and other reasons for displaying and interacting on the basis of personal information are not universally bad. It's just that too many people have bought into and assert the view that personality is and should be the basis for all of life. They think that life is a system of rewards and punishments based on social validation. The worse part of it is that the economy has evolved to the point where they are right for the most part. So it is a vicious cycle and Facebook is both indicative and contributing to the problem, imo. Tell me, how many facebook users have the mentality that if there was a total economic crash where 50% or more of people lost their livelihoods, house, etc. that they would "make the cut" because of things like likability and social popularity? It is disturbing when people can justify their economic privilege over others purely on the basis of their social likability. edit: btw, I think biographies, (public) diaries, and many historical works do have an egoizing effect on many people who read them. People read about a famous person whom they idolize and consciously or subconsciously try to model aspects of their idol's personality/behavior and fantasize about gaining fame, historical significance, and having other people avidly reading their biography. I don't think this is cause for shame, as it is often taken to be, but it does detract people from making goals of achievement their focus instead of focussing on the personality traits of successful people.

I like this quote: "The Star Wars-esque scenario could happen by 2012, Carter says... or it could take longer." This probably means it could happen at any moment in the next 10,000 years. I'm on the edge of my seat.

Nice post. This sums up most clearly and summarily the mosaic of empirical observations and predictive theorizing I've read about electron behavior. It's like watching an acrobat performing under a strobe light, imo. Very confusing but impressive that people have described the possible empirical observations so precisely.

I wonder if the susceptibility of lung tissue to all sorts of carcinogens could have been spuriously attributed to cigarette smoking. Certainly, smoking can be correlated with job-related exposure to carcinogens like asbestos and fiberglass, just because people who work with these kinds of materials tend to smoke more (I think - I could be wrong). Anyway, there are numerous other possibilities for lung-susceptibility. Now since I said this, I want my cut of the wrongful-conviction lawsuits of the tobacco companies and the large settlements they will be demanding back from the government(s).