fredrik

Thanks for your insight. Am I right in my impression that some papers take over the copyright? So that once published you can't publish it elsewhere because you have "given away" the copyright? Is that never a problem? /Fredrik

I have not searched for other forums, I just came here myself not too long ago. I think if you want comments on an idea you have, the most important part to start with is to try (even though it's hard) to explain what your purpose is. Sometimes psychology is involved too. To get a comment you'd want to explain what you are doing. For example, do you propose reinterpretation of something? Do you propose that some current theory is wrong? To speak for myself, I was not entirely clear on what you where suggesting. "Tachyons have imaginary mass. Now is imaginary mass real? If so is it positive or negative." Is your hypothesis that tachyons have imaginary mass? In order to understand the question tachyons must be defined in a way that connects in to reality. And does imaginary mass make sense at all? It's hard to understand exactly what your idea is... until I understand that it's hard to comment properly. I can comment what I think, which I did. What is your starting point, for posing the question? Are you thinking in terms of experiments or are you thinking in terms of "toying" with formulas in special relativity. Try to define the terms more from your point of view. Ie. what is your idea of mass, and what is your idea of tachyons. What principles to you believe in? I feel some things is floating here. And the first step before making hypothesis is to apply some order of concepts. One obvious question is how to you consistently measure or relate to superluminal speed? I'm not saying there is no way to do it here, I'm just saying that since it's speculative in nature, there may be different views on it. And I think the chose view may matter to your question. /Fredrik

Who own's or administrates the big journals? If it's not straight "commercial companies", are they owned like by universities or research organisations? /Fredrik

Thanks, How about some free electronic archives? Say ArXiv? Does the presence of a papter their usually imply it is not in any other journal? Or can it be at both places? Do you usually send papers to all journals, or do you pick the "best" where you think you have a reasonable chance? And regardless of the prestige, is there no sort of archive or anything were people routinely send copies of papers regardless of wether they is published elsewhere or not? ArXiv is simple, easy and accesable, but I assume only a fraction of papers go there? Btw, I really enjoyed your cartoons! /Fredrik

I have a question for those on here have experience with dealing with publications. First there seems to be several uses for the various journals and archives. I assume the more important part is that anyone who is interested can find the papers. And in each papers sufficient information exists if the author needs to be contacted. The second is the research funding systems and so on. I have noticed that there is alot of journals and archives out there, some journals for some reason sell the articles. I don't know if the money is for paying the peer reviewers or if it is simply business? Anyway, there are both free and non-free journals. Reviewed and non-reviewed. I also notice that many journals want exclusive rights, and don't want to publish something that anothe journal does - why? Is there no kind of "master archive" or something, or link archive? What is the general reasoning when submitting papers for publishing? Try the most popular journals first (that funders look for) or the journals that has most viewers? I have no experience with this, so that is why I ask. I recall this same thing in other disiplines where papers are often treated as products they want to sell. What is the idea behind this? Can someone help me separate the practical sense here from the commercial and research political interests? I notive also that some journals are farily expensive to subscribe to? How should I interpret that? What journals are most commonly used and "serious" in the theoretical physics, quantum physics, relativity world and why? Suppose I want to scan the field... then there seems to be a mess of journals and stuff to go through. Is that the normal procedure, or is there a clever system? /Fredrik

I also think that we will should be able to create something like we can consider "real artificial intelligence". I think this, and other related issues of learning models will be a factor in the next revolution in science. And I think that will have a huge impact not only of "AI" as related to thew computer science field but maybe from my perspective, to a evolution of the scientific method. I have some interest in these things but not from the classical computer science perspective, rather from the philosophy of the scientific method perspective. They way I choose to see things, many of these fundamental things from different fields of science go hand in hand. I've always had the feeling that they they different applications of a more profound field. Here is where I await the revolution. I think many fields of science evolution can be reduced to a fundamental theory of learning, or systematic questioning, based on a few supposedly hard to resist starting points. This is in the "loose sense" (to avoid misunderstandings) one of my intuitive principles of guidance when I am trying to review the logic of physics. I am currently working on this, and I've found that there are a number of people in pysics that are also working on similar ideas. But so far, it seems the ideas are still young. I expect alot out of this eventually. /Fredrik

QFT just stands for Quantum Field Theory, and is formalism for quantum mechanics on fields where usually the quanta of fields are interpreted as particles (field-quanta). This is unlike the schrödinger quantum (nonrelativistic) mechanics devised to be consistent with special relativity. For example the quanta of the electromagnetic field is the photon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/ /Fredrik

IMO, the preferred way to resolve this question should be to take several steps back and start question and rectify meaning of basic terms and define what the reference or starting point of the whole reasoning is and what we are getting at. Ideally the starting points should be at least in principle observable quantities, otherwise I don't know what we are talking about here? Usually mass is a parameter of a model or theory, which is defined by relations, often involving yet OTHER parameters of the same theory. This is why I think many concepts in physics only have a relational meaning and are entangled up. If one starts to twist the meaning of things out of context one need to decide how all the relations are supposed to behave during this twist so that the basic demands of consisteny of the theory remains. Clearly speed and change are entagled up with alot of things like causality and locality. Mass is usually entangled up with energy and momentum which is also just relationally defined and not very clear either, as time is usually involved there too. Also these "relations" depends on what theory you are working with. If you are trying to expand some existing theories, then the way of modification must be regulated. How does is consistency preserved during the adapation? /Fredrik

Yes it's not mysterious, I was mainly trying to be a little funny /Fredrik

I have no idea what advanced mean in your case but a easy and fun show off experiment is some variant of oscillating reactions, like the iodine clock reaction. The first thought that might occur in the audience heads is how the oscillations can be consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. Then one can follow up with a brief description of the kinetic equations and show how the entropy production is not violating the 2nd law in despite the oscillatory behaviour. /Fredrik

> Since when is smart defined as "able to divide by 1000" ? > > > lol I know it's right there. KILOgram. I think the smart part comes from > > relating this to relativity. Maybe the concept of "beeing smart" is relative. It seems no matter how much we learn, the number of unanswered questions seems constant. Why is that? /Fredrik

I've recently been dreaming about thing related to the dynamics of relative probabilities in relation to day time projects and I am searching for an emotional state, that is presents the solution. Then going from emotion to analytic description usually is not the main problem. It could probably be done in the awake state, but it's a bit like utilizing the downtime better and it's easier to focus when you are dreaming. In the awake state there is too much distracting information the blurs the search. /Fredrik

This is possibly very individual but I don't feel very analytic when I sleep, it feels more like an emotional search. But I have been amazed how reasonable some of these emotions turn out to be at times. Sometimes I get a feeling that pure analytic processing may be a bit narrow minded, and these emotional search inputs helps find the not so obvious paths. I used to feel a strong frustration over these emotional and uncontrollade fuzzy dreams. It's like you have no control over yourself and it's annoying. But then I learned to trust and enjoy these fuzzy states. It feels a bit dual to the analytic part. Another fun thing is that when I was a kid(10 maybe?), I used to have these silly nightmares about a monster coming to get me and when I woke up the next day I was amazed but how come I could not tell fact from fiction while I was dreaming... because it was soo easy and trivial when analyzed in the awake state... this was crystla clear, yet I was uncapable of handling it in the dream state, why? it's still "me"? I thought about this several times because it was a recurrent dream. Then finally I tried to implement a trigger in my mind so that I would cause myself to wake up as soon as I was dreaming that thing again, and eventually I succeded. I remember the exact feeling... I was asleep, dreaming about the monster coming, and while dreaming I new that the escape was to wake up, bcause then I would analyze the monster to pieces in a second. And I recall trying to control my arms to push myself upwards in beed physically to cause me to wake up. It was very difficult to in some weird way communicate between the dreaming state to send a controlled singal to the muscles in the arms... I usually I had to do a few attempts, and finally the control of my arms from withing the deam was sufficient to lift my own weight out of the bed, and I was awake... and I could beat the monster. After I learned how to escape from the monster, it didn't come back anymore /Fredrik

And beer. The dominating malt buffers are various phosphates, which then interact with water carbonates and organic acids produced during fermentation. Therefore most beers have a fairly similar pH. Wine is more acidic partly because the buffering power in wine must is lower and second due to more organic acids in the first place. /Fredrik

Interesting questions. I have learned that during the years I've learnt to make more use of my dreams. I regularly use sleep in solving problems and while it is not possible to accurately and exactly control your dreams, trying to solve a problem while falling asleep this causes me to continue to solve the problem in my sleep, at least more often than could be explained by conincidence. When I was a kid, I rarely understood howto interpret or "use" my dreams, but these days my dreaming seems to do fuzzy processing... in an emotional way. And often I wake up feeling more elightened, where my suggestions by conscious intuition was supported by the nights contemplation. I have tried this on several kinds of problems, from biochemistry to physics and I have found that fuzzy creative problems does benefit from sleep reasoning. Occasionally I wake up feeling consfused and annoyed, and it's often when I feel that my sleep reasoning for some reasons has been disturbed (for example by an alarm clock). I hate waking up to the buzz. So I often wake one or two minutes before the clock. Amazing how the brain can keep the time pace at sleep. /Fredrik

The general idea that the carbon source is ideally combused into carbon dioxide and water is right, however in general, real life combustion reactions are rarely have that simple and controlled stochiometry. You'll get mixed end products depending on how the combustion is carried out and relations of reactants. Various carbonbased residues, nitrogen, potassiumcarbonate, and possibly some mixed nitrious oxides too but probably not that much KNO2. For black powder(Carbon,sulphur and KNO3) there are several suggested approximating balancing formulas but real life combustions give a range of end products, also depending on conditions. It can't be determined in a general setting. See for example http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/phys/bang.htm#Blac for comments. But reality isn't that simple. Combustions aren't very controlled. /Fredrik

A natural use for KNO3 is in preparing salted ham as it preserves an attractive colour of the ham. Here at least, you can buy it in supermarkets along with food additives and baking stuff. It's often called salpeter. It's a oxidation agent needed for the sugar or carbon to burn. Not to discourage your interest in chemistry, "smoke and fire" is always fun but be careful when playing with those things. People do get hurt all the time, in particular when then don't know what they are doing. Even if you know what you are doing things can go wrong, a mistake, or microsparks can come from all over the place and to work with explosive and flammable stuff without know what you are doing is something you may regret. So think twice, and never do anything blindly. Your question indicate that you don't know exactly what you are about to do, and this is reason to raise a warning for your own health. /Fredrik

They all started like you! asking good questions. Then they take small steps, and trying to make sure the steps taken take them in the right direction. So "figuring out" is an process, that btw is still ongoing. Answers leads to new questions, nonone asked before. And our knowledge grows. Curiosity is the mother of knowledge. So why are we curious? The questions never stop coming do they? Not a "proof" in the sense that you probably mean as in is it right or wrong. But there are various consistency requirements that are seen to encourage the initated journey. If conditions suggested otherwise, we would just change into the suggested direction. I wouldn't ask "are we there yet", instead ask "are we going in the right direction"? You are not the only one that has had headache of these things You have to start somewhere, pick position that you can rewise in a consistent manner and progress will come. /Fredrik

This is and old thread (before my time here) but I happened to see it now. Like has been said already the constancy of the speed of light is a postulate of SR. Formally there are just a few postulates in SR that formally can be treated as axioms, and SR can be derived from it. The nature of the postualte of the "constancy of the speed of light" in deriving SR logically has (logically) nothing to do with electromagnetism or specific units. It might as well be written as There exists a signal, whos speed of propagation is the same relative to any intertial observers. This is enough. You do now have to worry about the physical nature of this signal or what units to use. It has to do with information signalling between observers. One may still ask an interesting question as a teaser: Is it possible to give another answer to why is there a signal whos speed of propagation is constant to all, than that it better be accepted since it has proven consistent so far? I personally hint ther there may be an alternative, abstracted way of arguing that there exists such a signal, but it remains speculative. It would have to do with the perceptoion of spacetime. And I have a feeling that it eventually boils down to information encoding and it can be argued from principles of information encoding, and the relation may be beacuse both room and time are related from first principles. The units however is just some arbitrary standard and is not magical. /Fredrik

> isnt this more of a philisophical question than a scientific one? Yes. In any case I think it's a bit subjective or ambigous. However in general, I think it is sometimes a mistake to think that "philosophical questions" is completely and irreversibly irrelevant to science. Traditionally it has been used to reject fuzzy problems by saying it's philosophical and metaphysical nonsense. I think often because the physicists has been unable to grasp the what these questions mean, and the possible value in elaborating them. This seems to rely on some beleiefe that science is somehow a perfected machinery to delivere forever lasting truths. This is I think an idealized and unrealistic view. What is spacetime? has sometimes been claimed to be a philosophical question... which it is, however it is also relevant to science, or maybe more properly to the "development of science", which is a dynamic and highly real process, not static. I am personally more interested in the scientific process, than the result. And in that sense philosophical questions overlap to a high degree. Wether we like it or not, even science does have an underlying philosophy. /Fredrik

The question can possibly be given several interpretations but in a loose general sense I'd like to say that "nature" and the "laws of nature" are relational concepts and thus *evolved together*. I can't see how one without the other makes much sense because they depend on each other from a logical point of view. To apply the theories of todays "current awareness" in the human intelligence to the imagined big bang is not that obviously sensible IMO. Back in the big bang there was hardly much intelligent questions asked and hardly many "theories" or "laws" preceived, so describing that in the light of today seems like a non-real construct. The way we picture the past today, is not comparable to the way the past was pictured in the proper context (the "past now"). /Fredrik

I did a quick overview and from the papers I can find from him he is in a very early stage of elaborating the ideas, and it's fairly basic(early in the process), though still important. But he is definitely asking questions right in my taste. I definitely acknowledge some of his posed questions. I hope he keeps the focus up. The last paper I found from him on his are dated 2003, and it was on relative entropy and inductive inference. If anyone knows of any other people that work along these lines, I'm interested to hear about it. Many questions are still missing but since it seems that not that many people are working along these lines (??) as compared to other ideas it may not be that surprising? I have not yet had time to read the papers in detail, but it seems he does consider the consistency of the wavefunction(probability amplitue) formalism, however I am not sure he ever considered it's completeness. And if not, exactly what options are excluded in the formalism. This is important, but maybe I just missed it. I was working on verifying this myself but then perhaps he already did it. Other than that I'm not sure he has yet fully considered dynamical sample spaces and dimensionality, but OTOH that might be the next extension, in a yet young approach. I'll take my time to read his papers more properly and see. /Fredrik

The idea (which I beleive in), would be that this is the line of reasoning that will systematically lead us to a first proper step towards a consistent, and even highly plausible, philsophically appealling and logically consistent framework for quantum gravity that from first principles easily integrates with the quantum philosophy. Moreoever the model would also simultanesouly present a easily extendable framework for artificial intelligence. I think there are still a few missing steps here, but I think this is the least implausible method we have at hand. /Fredrik

I found by searching that there is a US professor at the University of Albany - Ariel Caticha that has written a number of at first glance very relevant papers to what seems to focus on the right direction of investigation. I'm happy to see that he seems to have an unusually appropriate focus IMO. I'm going to print and get an overview of some of his work and see how far he takes it. They seem well worth their time reading in more detail. /Fredrik

A note: I managed to find some related stuff under the label "information geometry" which seems to be the common name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_geometry ( The plausible part is that one can choose to define a metric such that the distance between two points represents the difference in information. And in the general case the geometry is dynamical and it can be "trained". ) So now I found some partly related papers to this wich I'll scan to see what has been done. Still if anyone has some suggestions for particulary brilliant papers to read I'm interested. /Fredrik