foodchain

First off use of the words "try to" implies will, it can be forgiven and omitted.

 

Life, infact, is constantly offsetting equilibrium through the imput of chemical energy, which ultimately comes from the sun, or in some cases (Chemotrophs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotroph) from other chemical sources.

 

Sorry if I took the words "in life" from your topic header out of context.

 

Edit: this being so, equilibrium is still in process, since energy used to offset equilibrium in cells is taken from another place. IE the sun gets colder, and life gets warmer.

 

 

 

All matter has thermal energy, except that at absolute zero temperature, this however will gain energy from other matter to obtain equilibrium. Except if that matter is also at absolute zero, this is possibly what could be call the ultimate equilibrium.

 

Edit: The question you're asking could also be phrased, "why does entropy continually increase?" And can only really be answered circularly, it just does, its an observation that holds true, so far.

Here is an interesting link on a concept that is still somewhat "new" if you will.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negentropy

In terms of life lots of potential energy is derived in the metabolism by bonds being broken/bonds being formed(Anabolism/Catabolism in a very general sense). As some chemical reactions give off energy while others require it, that's the exo-/endo- prefix to thermic which of course is short of thermodynamic stuff that also deals with concepts like enthalpy, activation energy, and catalysts, or enzymes, lots of stuff, etc...

Though a endothermic change of state/phase can be something other then a reaction and same for exothermic, think of water freezing to ice ->liquid to solid phase change with no chemical change to the substance.

-The anthropic principal has little more then rhetoric to back it up. In all reality you could say the anthropic principle is actually based on toilets, the universe plus us needed to exist in order for toilets to exist, any change to that like the anthropic principle itself is based on really the observers desires to mold a purely philosophical concept into hard scientific stuff.

-I am not against the concept, I am against the fact it really has no substance to it, its something you have to take truly on faith currently like intelligent design.

-This is one of the reasons I want sciences to be hybrid. If you study for instance the life sciences, in particular evolutionary theory you would be hard pressed to understand how this philosophical conjecture actually stands.

-Most the time I really think its just people wanting something, something sacred I guess to put them back into a comfort zone, which of course destroys any reason for doing science if all of it can be destroyed to serve such desires. If you read stuff by Hawking who sort of loved if not pioneered this concept you can find actually a great deal of ignorance on subjects that did not involve his direct field of inquiry, which I think helped support the anthropic principle. Plus in physics I think its easy to see you can have dynasties really, like string theory, and all the related stuff to that such as if the anthropic principal gains lots of steam you may have difficulty getting into grad school if you don't agree with it.

Just because an unknown variable exists does not mean you just assume what it is and take it as scientifically valid.

In terms of cosmology, "nothing" means no space, no time, no matter, no energy. IOW, the constituents of our universe.

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Consecutive posts merged

 

 

The NET energy of the universe = 0. That is, the positive energy of matter/energy = the "negative" energy of gravitation. At least, this was the case before the discovery of "dark energy" -- the accelerating expansion of the universe.

 

In quantum mechanics, energy can be "borrowed" from the vacuum and particles come into existence for a very short time. The energy is then "paid back" and the particles disappear. It has been thought for at least 17 years (I read it in Paul Davies' The Matter Myth published in 1992) that the entire universe could be a quantum fluctuation and that the 13.4 billion age was just a "very short time" in this particular quantum field.

 

The problem has always been that a vacuum is in an existing spacetime. We don't see "something from nothing" or have the mathematics to get "something from nothing" in the absence of a spacetime. So, how do you get a spacetime from nothing?

Right and such phenomena goes into quantum tunneling and pair production right, like Hawking radiation I think with black holes. Things I don't get though are issues like proton decay. I mean from a neutron you get a proton and electron, or you can at any rate, so why does that not count for "decay", unless decay is to be viewed as something else then something becoming something else. Yet that's a quantum event right, but pair production around a black hole is something that's supposed aid in detecting them, yet a BH involves both spacetime and quantum mechanics. Would gravity around a BH be considered a scalar or vector quantity, in that does increasing the strength of the field increase rates of pair production? Plus how do you have a quantized gravitational field if you cant yet produce the field quanta of it like gravitons.

I get funny feelings when a physicist makes statements like this, something along the lines of time travel is or is not possible. I want more tangible proof that exists outside of a document. Not to say the guy is right or wrong or some shade of gray on the issue, just that such a statement is really rather profound I would imagine.

What would our view of the universe be if we had people viewing the universe from all over the place, as far away from earth as you can get, would something that simple change our current views. How do we empirically know?

Another thing is energy levels. Now I know in particle accelerators more juice is supposed to produce different interactions or even new physics. How can anyone really estimate what the universe would look like if it the size of a pea? Would that be something beyond a black hole, as a BH does not seem to occur from every star going nova, and mass I think relates to energy right. So would it be a somewhat safe speculation that maybe some other form of matter could occur if we are dealing with so much mass, like the universe in total, would that be just a black hole, and why would it just be a BH and not something else, is that an effect of spacetime, or QM, or etc?

I just don't see this as an end all by any means. I also do not think we can currently state how much and of what makes up the current universe in order to perform such a calculation. Last time I checked dark stuff was still a mystery meat, unless I missed something and we know exactly to to a good enough extent of how much dark mystery stuff exists.

I think it all depends on how you look at it. In one way you could say all the sciences and engineering fields are really just applied physics, and that each field is different simply because each is such a huge body of knowledge. Yet you also have scientific paradigms which are typically native to say a particular field. I mean civil engineers probably do not concern themselves that often with say quantum mechanics, or for that matter protein protein interactions in some cell. Yet concepts you find in any of the natural sciences or engineering disciplines can be related to each other, such as concepts like energy, or mechanical energy, force, momentum, or why elements bond.

For instance another way to look at it is you can get a phd in just organic chemistry, or many other disciplines within chemistry. In that there is so much to know just to certain aspects within a field you can spend ten years at college on the subject. Also you have genetics, why don't we just call that chemistry? I think its because you again begin to deal with so much a person can learn and work with, as with genes you have all of the chemistry behind it, such as all of the biochemical processes alone that go along with chromosomes, but you also have how the genes themselves operate in terms of phenotypes and above. Yet in both you will be working with spectroscopy, which I think was derived by physics right, so really these fields are more then just applied mathematics for a reason, and that reason is to me simply because you really can learn so much about a particular subject that it deserves its own field.

Well in all reality how would you gauge the intelligence, just by a human standard, such as could they make a tool or what not? I mean some tigers in the wild kill humans as prey, they actually can go into the water and sneak up and snatch people off of boats. Lions have been found to cause panic and then ambush in the confusion killing people. So basically what is the gauge of intelligence here. I mean maybe they had some kind of world view similar to the sci-fi creatures like Predator or something.

Humans evolved in a social context or selection/mutation may produce an "alien" intelligence, maybe these creatures did not do that, nor had faculties for it like language, just a thought.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catabolism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krebs_cycle

I don't know enough about paleontology to refute it, but it seems like a species as ubiquitous and environment-changing enough to cause a mass extinction would leave lots of traces behind. Are there fossils that suddenly show up in large numbers all over the world at the time of the mass extinction?

 

Also, if that is the cause, then the dominant theories have to be wrong, and that has to be demonstrated too. Is all the evidence for a major impact event flawed? Or was there a massive impact, but it just happened coincidentally?

Also one might expect lots of fossils indicative of some kind of food stock.

off hand does that have anything to do with a disassociation constant?

Corrupted is a great band. First of all they hail from Japan but they sing in Spanish, that by itself is way cool. Second the music is very heavy, something around electric wizard but heavier, which suits the music as its droner metal overall as far as classifications could be made I think. The music itself has a lot of lucid type psychological aspects to it along with philosophy that I am sure would not suit a great deal of people, but to me its simply awesome. In one song in towards the beginning you could almost make it out in English like he said "they honor DNA and call it their god". This goes along with lots of other interesting aspects that make the band to say the least unique.

If you happen to either be bored or into heavy metal and its types, I would strongly suggest checking this band out.

Okay, I am getting stuck in a paradigm I think is self designed in total and I am not all to comfortable with it.

Basically in this view I hold that matter=reality, and the only fundamental property of matter is that it transforms. This transformation process at any giving time is basically the geometry, forces, etc, that make up the visible universe. Now I know this sounds like a play on classical definition of chemistry, but in all reality I am just looking for something that counters the view in total.

I get this idea from physics up to the big bang, as currently held physical models fall apart at that point, which to me means the visible universe was something different at least. I get this idea from chemical and biological evolution, I get it from culture, from geology, in that basically reality exists, but it always changes, and that change really is the fundamental aspect of reality.

I know this just sounds like a philosophical question, but could you not say its true statistically? I mean maybe up to some 100% marker, this is what I am looking to defeat.

Minus morbidity such issues like this is why I think global warming actually could be a "blessing" in many ways. I mean the ignorance of that issue alone on the right should have been enough to pretty much discredit them from interacting with anything important but you do have your believers and that whole mechanism whatever it is.

Bottom line is again this simply just shows important foundational aspects of a particular groups ideology. I mean you go to that site and all you find is stuff about hating on evolution, atheists, and all kinds of other social issues and none of it leads to any aspect of thinking about freedom or liberty or for that matter the pursuit of intelligence...

Overall I really think it just does not matter that much anymore. What the heck should a particular translation of the bible have to do with anything, I mean is our political system some form of the tower of London, are we to be perpetually ruled by various wealthy and powerful religious families plus their associates?

Way back I looked at natural selection and thought hey, all you have to do is make sure you stay in line with that and life will persist. I think its fine that it will be ignored, and eventually we will have giant Malthusian corrections or an environment that will be selecting against. No translation will save you:-p

When a program or a piece of software goes to perform some action, it has to take a few steps right, that eventually interfaces with the operating system and the hardware correct? Well, should there be a regular pattern to this behavior? I was wondering if you could make a program that would statistically map all of these actions so that abnormal program or pc behavior could be mapped to whatever piece of code for instance that was causing it to occur. I think one of the ways that such stuff could be traced is not only via the path any of the actions took, but how long also.

Is such technology in use today, or is it simply of no point to even think about.

I use to want to model a language using matrix algebra a long time ago. I think it would be cool if every action a computer took would produce a like equation in such terms that basically gave a map of various actions, with what caused or did the action and how long it took. Then such equations could be statistically rendered.

I think the best you could do would be to make a mass extinction event and see if mutation along with radiation could increase the divergence of species. Mutation is really a biological constant, it gets acted upon by selection in the form of biotic and abiotic variables, such as resources or sexual selection. Mutations that are beneficial tend to persist while others that are not don't. I don't think there is any actual speed or velocity to this process overall, or more or less that its temporal. I mean what purely aquatic species would be supported in a terrestrial environment, or would the immune system look the way it does if viruses or bacteria did not exist, or if those were not harmful to some extent. What if the earths gravity were stronger or weaker, why do some organisms see ultraviolet light and others don't.

The only real lasting order to evolution and how it plays out is what traits happen to become "fixed" vs. those that don't. So going back to my earlier example if you happened to free up a bunch of niche via extinction, mutation in extant species might have a chance to thrive in those.

Using bacteria people tested selection over and over. In every case the mutations that came about did not come about in any predictable manner, and in some cases the populations simply did not survive.

You have to take into account that certain things people can do can always be looked upon with disgust by some other group. For instance in some cultures cows are looked upon as divine and in other social groups horses could be viewed as a regular food item as in America a cow can be viewed. So when you bring up incestuous relationships, you will always have some certain amount of people in the real world as of now that will view it automatically as "taboo" or simply disgusting.

I think the real issue here is how do you empirically state some behavior a person or persons can commit to is bad or wrong? What standard is there ultimately, it cant be that no one is harmed, or everything we do today should be outlawed really including money. I think you tend to deal with that perpetual subjective standard of might makes right to some extent.

As with same sex marriage I support it for a couple reasons. One is that why not? I personally do not care to engage or really witness such behavior, but that aside should my bias in that regard be enough to deny people from engaging in some form of social ritual or custom? With incestuous marriage though you really can't link the two just as easy, I mean in a secular format its sort of like having apples and oranges and saying they are both bananas. They are different things, and just because your not opposed to one because it creates social conflict or is abnormal to some observer does not mean you have to automatically accept or reject the next conflict for the previous one, I am sure that is some sort of fallacy.

My big beef with all of it stems not from a secular format per say, but a libertarian front. In America for instance the constitution is to grant people certain rights, that are not supposed to be infringed on. I ask from a constitutional standpoint is it ok to simply grant some behavior ok, and others not, from some view that a certain amount of people simply take offense. I am not a huge fan of the bible, if I got together say 60% of the American people on my side, do you think it would be ok for me to just say, ban religion?

Incestuous marriage is its own topic, or you could simply say is it ok for heterosexual couples to marry, I mean marriage is a human made institution after all, but it would be easy to say that its not the same as B, or C, its A.

Does sound in general give support to quantum decoherence? I know the human ear is probably not registering sound on a quantum level, but could sound support quantum decoherence?

I mean the measurement problem is not a solved deal, but with decoherence I think it makes a bit of sense. If no physical body could interact you could have no observation, or measurement, or anything. In such activity energy is typically involved, and energy comes in quanta right? So for instance giving the uncertainty principal, should phonons or sound in general always be random to some extent, or for example why is there any regularity to sound production giving any physical objects capable of producing a noise? Such as dropping a penny on a metallic surface from three feet does not make a sound like stepping on a rubber ducky ever, why not? Does quantum physics or the uncertainty principal not apply or am I looking at this all wrong?

If the premise behind that "machine" were close to true none of the past or current problems with cloning animals should exist I would think. To do a copy and paste of a human being or slug with such data compression technologies would be tragic to say the least on the other side.

Maybe you can see if the force applied produces vibrations?

But why does it do that? Why does time dilate?

It might be of benefit to offer up what you think time is, then it can be contrasted to what time is in terms of general relativity. Time and space in terms of general relativity become I think somewhat intertwined, like spacetime.

It sort of goes back to that example of people on a train, vs people not on the train all viewing a lighting strike and how and when each observer sees it, which then ties into the concept of frames and the speed of light with distance and so on, not sure though.

Have done a web search and cannot find a site where Schrodinger equations are used to explain the internal structure of atoms; would greatly appreciate a reference to one that does.

S,P,D,F shells are all generated via QM I think. They fill in a specific order also, which is applicable to all the elements, and it follows in a trendy fashion along with the periodic table. This trendy behavior is what gives rise to the octet rule per say, and why bonding behavior(all?) tends to yield something with more stable configurations like those bastard noble gases. This for the most part hinges on having a full outer shell I think, though such gets more messy when you deal with transition elements.

For instance with carbon, periodic table carbon, common carbon, etc...

Carbons electronic configuration is 1s2, 2s22p2. This means for it to have a full octet, or satisfied outer shell, it needs four more electrons, it also can bond with the four electrons in its outer shell. Doing the bonding with hydrogen to gain a molecular compound for example could fill in those last spots in the P shell, or carbons most outer shell, which is not the 1s, which is hydrogen's, but hydrogen bonding with carbon would give each hydrogen a full shell via two electrons, or 1s2 from bonding, as hydrogen having one electron can only make a single bond, yielding two electrons for each element shared in the bond. You also have max values for how many electrons can be in any giving shell, which can vary, such as with carbon or period two I think the max is eight or the second subshell in general can hold a max of eight electrons, this relates to the filling order in which you start to deal with things if memory serves like the Pauli exclusion principal as electrons are not photons.

Here is a couple links I think might help fill in the holes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electron_Config_Table.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_electron_configuration_table

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electron_orbitals.svg

Please note the group along with the elements, and their shells, and why the transition metals are somewhat different.

Approximately how long will it take until we have aneutronic fusion to generate electricity? 50 years?

They can do fusion, it just simply cant be sustained, and you have to think that 1 gram of material releases just a giant amount of energy basically in a pop I think which is highly destructive or cannot be controlled yet is the real technical problem, no ability to harness that nuclear "explosion" really. I know that a few projects are up and running, but in many cases again all you have is a pop with no way to funnel anything out or harness the energy released. I know it does not have many of the same problems with older technology such as waste, and if mastered we can just live pollution free off of the oceans, but it also might just be a pipe dream. The idea has been around for a long time, its nothing new as its discovery to my understanding goes back to the hydrogen bomb.

My points are simply what would that look like if it became a main fuel source for humanity?

I think the problem with any energy production really is consumption. If you have an ever increasing base of consumption that will always require more energy production or what not to keep up any desired standard of living for the mass.

Beyond that I know that nuclear energy would be great if it were people safe, but you have to think of everything that can go wrong along with waste products and so on, it just takes one bad accident to affect the entire globe.

I do think nuclear will eventually be part of the solution, I just don't see how its really safe to do that currently.

A better fix would be population not constantly increasing really, amongst and ocean of other concerns.

In general relativity space and time get "mixed up" and as such the notion of energy and its conservation become much more complicated.

 

If I recall correctly, locally one has energy conservation but globally it is much more complicated. A generic space-time may have no killing-vectors at all thus the notion of symmetries becomes obscure.

 

There is several definitions of a energy pseudo-tensor. As a pseudo-tensor it is not a tensor and as such it is coordinate dependent. This should set alarm bells ringing as we have to be very careful in case we have phenomena due to the coordinates and not physics. Basically, it is a frame dependent notion.

 

I would have to do some more reading in order to be more specific. I think energy can be conserved in general relativity, but that will depend somewhat on what you mean by energy and conservation.

 

You are far better off thinking bout energy-momentum conservation. This is conserved in general relativity.

I just wonder if at the big bang or big bounce or whatever it was any physical laws existed, such as if the forces/particles described by the standard model existed, or if via symmetry breaking such things came to be. With that I wonder if gravity might be more fundamental then other forces, and how all of it ties into conservation laws.

Without gravity I would think spacetime or the universe to look much different, would you have any regular form to planetary bodies, or blackholes, or any normal astrological phenomena. I know such a question sort of seriously goes outside of physics, but with that I also wonder if gravity itself could simply be viewed in such a context. If conservation of energy is to always hold true, could that in reality be the force of gravity?

I mean physics has to develop a theory of quantum gravity, such is string theory or loop quantum gravity. If you did not have conservation of energy I do not think any sort of "form" could come to exist. I should be able to throw a ball and have it do any number of things with no way to predict any sort of outcome, or really everything should be purely quantum in sense, as I would think I could just constantly tunnel. I wonder if the constraint on such chaos really is just conservation of energy, and how that translates in the physical world is via forces/particles, like gravity.

I mean if such a conjecture could be remotely true could atomic reality or particulate reality simply be what spacetime looked like at some point in the universes history? Even on a quantum scale with the uncertainty principal I noticed with sound or phonons that you can have something regular, to an extent, as in beating on a drum does not randomly produce some sound like a cat meowing. I mean can simple conservation laws be applied to the universe as a whole to maybe understand what gravity is?

In my opinion, our gene pool is being degraded. Many unwholesome genes are entering the gene pool and getting passed on. Your understanding of the fundementals of natural selection are correct in my opinion. No amount of rationalization is going to change that. Natural selection simply does not care about any of us people or any other organism. One of those facts of life in this indifferent Universe. That does not mean that I don`t care or am indfferent to the suffering of others. I do care and help others when I feel like it. ...Dr.Syntax

Have you ever questioned if our social nature from an evolutionary standpoint has developed possibly that desire to be nice or help people? I am not sure but I think being a murderer today reduces fitness to some extent:confused: Natural selection can account for a lot of things, I mean is drunk driving and accidents related to it natural selection? What about language, is that something that came about via selection, or anything that humans do or are capable of? What will our "specie" happen to look like in eons? If we make a lawful society that only cares for nice people, wont be be indifferently selecting against the rest? What is fair really?

Going past all of the above philosophy you can use along with biological stuff, I just overall think its mildly error prone to attribute anything to natural selection except for the scientific(biological) reality it produce.

OK - no bites huh? I asked two questions but they merged into incomprehensibility or inconsequentiality.

Let me try again:

 

1. Co-evolution must involve different selection pressures - any ideas on which pressures?

2. Evolution has worked at multi speeds in the past. Is it possible that evolution of 'master switches' of genes allows Nature to put the foot on the evolution accelerator pedal?

If the moth was pollinating the plant then that would produce a niche that mutations could come to be fit in, basically that is, I don't of course know the details. Pollination of plants by insects is not something rare, so with that I would make the assumption that such behavior basically allowed for some mutations to be beneficial in a temporary sense that are not without the moth or something in its place, which then makes them disadvantageous to the organism again without such. My best guess to research this question would to be looking at mutually beneficial relationships between other organisms, like with people and microorganisms.