webplodder

Yes you can, and maybe you can create mathematical models which are self-consistent but still, you have to test these at some point. The universe is not obliged to follow the way we imagine it is.

This thread is about whether something can come from nothing. The crucial question here is what you mean by nothing. If you mean something can come from nothing where you never re-examine what is meant by nothing then I do not think it is meaningful to assert it does because then you might as well forget about science and attribute things to some god or gods . Science functions by testing ideas and possibly falsifying them but never, never jumping to definite conclusions so that to conclude something can come from nothing would simply be taking an unproven position. What it should be is a starting position subject to modification based on future ideas and experiments. Interestingly, if it turned out something could come from nothing then it would totally undermine causality and make a mockery of science. It would mean our scientific models of reality only applied within certain limits and outside of these science could have no application. The concept of unicorns was simply used illustrate that despite something not actually having any objective reality, the idea does because an idea is a product of the brain and as the brain does objectively exist so does the idea. Ultimately, everything is just an idea, maths., art, love, ethics and so forth and the point is ideas can easily turn into more concrete entities as we have spectacularly seen over the last few centuries. This relates to the original topic of this thread by redefining what is meant by 'nothing' and puts it into a wider context.

You will have to expand on this a bit. But why exactly going faster than light upsets cause and effect? Nobody has spelt it out yet.

Now you've lost me a bit. Is a tachyon the same as a neutrino?

The catch here, I think, is as soon as you give something a name, even 'nothing', you have created an idea which, therefore, cannot literally mean nothing in the sense of not existing. Only stuff that has never been thought about literally cannot exist. Even a unicorn exists as a concept and as such can be seen in books and movies etc. even though not existing in the natural world. It might even come to exist one day as a genetically engineered species and this is only possible because it first existed an an idea. As soon as you say something came from nothing you have created a thought which itself is something, not nothing. Think of it as allocating the label 'nothing' as a placeholder for an idea which might well be modified in the future. One thing science teaches us it that things never stay the same; current ideas will eventually be replaced by newer ones so that the important element here is consciousness. The universe, in my view, is not so much 'there' as it is 'interpreted'. In mathematics 0 denotes nothing but it is still an important concept and an essential element in making maths logically consistent. If 0 literally did not exist it would have to be invented.

Well, if it is found that faster-than-light speed is possible then it could lend support to string theory which proposes that all known particles are simply objects called strings vibrating at different frequencies.

Could this problem arise because we do not have a single theory that accounts for both classical physics and QM?

Ok, so is it the case that the faster you go the more massive you become and, therefore, the slower you move? That at the speed of light you would become infinitely massive so that no movement or time would exist? If so, how could a particle like the neutrino, which I understand does possess a little mass, get past this barrier? Even a tiny amount of mass would become infinite at light speed, wouldn't it? The one about causality was the main one.

Please do. I did see that documentary but it seemed to leave unanswered questions.

If it is found that neutrinos do violate the faster-than-light barrier how would that destroy the notion of causality?

0 cannot interact with any form of number, therefore, is neutral. 0 is a necessary concept in order to make maths an entirely logical discipline.

Any maths is just a 'brain diagram' of events that occur in the real world and that we which to measure. Maths does not really exist outside of our brain.

Ok, I misunderstood you there. Yes, you are right, what we call 'consciousness' is just a very small part of what is going on. There's a huge amount of information stored way back in the unconsciousness that we are usually not directly aware of and at certain times comes into consciousness through some kind of stimulus. This could be an idea, memory, smell, sound, site, etc., etc. I like to compare the unconscious to a huge warehouse and the conscious mind to a kind of 'workshop' that utilises bits of information stored in the unconscious. Another good analogy I think is computers. The RAM of a PC, for example, can be compared to working consciousness and the hard disc, which stores most of the stuff, the unconscious. What do think about the controversial idea that we may be partial quantum computers where our brain has some ability to access parallel processing that takes place with superimposed quantum particles? Problem with this idea is that no feasible site within the brain has yet been identified.

Thanks for that swansont, but you've covered a lot of ground there. What do you mean by isotope?

The Halting Problem seems to be an example of not being able to predict the consequences of future actions. However you have to posses consciousness to realize this fact. Aren't consciousness and unconsciousness mutually exclusive?

No they don't. The hidden variables idea suggests that underlying the strange effects of quantum entanglement are a set of hidden variables which might 'explain' 'spooky action at a distance' and that essentially preserve the idea of locality. It's kind of like saying that both entangled particles have some kind of pre-programmed variables within them (local) and that it can be predicted in principle what is going to happen beforehand. But I noticed you said 'non-local hidden variables rather than local ones, so is this what you meant by that? The idea of hidden variables, whether local or non-local been tested many times and found to be false. The fact is, quantum mechanics is just strange and although people have tried to find rational mechanisms with which to explain it goes against all our intuitions. One can only assume there must be some deeper level of reality other than spacetime that operates as part of the overall fabric of the universe. Some people have suggested that because quantum objects have no definite properties until measured it is somehow consciousness than is involved in the 'concrete' universe by 'measuring' it. Not sure about that. In a way, we should not be too surprised about strange phenomena such as we have been discussing because it is probably the case that we only see our little bit of reality which might be but a small sub-set of a much larger one. The multiverse is today a legitimate idea among cosmologists, so here we are in our one universe of universes and think we know it all. We don't!

Well, it has not been conclusively shown that consciousness is an emergent property of brain function, although many people believe this to be the case. The brain cannot simply be a computer because many of the ideas that have been generated by the brain cannot be found in any pre-existing algorithm contained in the neural networks. Just look at mathematics. If you start with a few mathematical rules you take to be universal truths you soon run into trouble because there will be cases where, although such rules 'work' in practice, can never 'proved' mathematically based on their own axioms; they are self-referential and require consciousness to step outside of them to see their limitations. Take the statement: 'I am a liar.' Now, if this is true it is false because I can't be lying, but if it is true then is also false because I'm claiming to be a liar, yet not lying. This is an example of a self-referential statement. It can only refer to itself and clearly gets nowhere because it cannot prove one thing or another. It takes someone to 'look outside' of such self-referential statements and see the greater picture and it is consciousness that accomplishes this. So what is consciousness?

Bell's Theorem shows that entangled particles (i.e. particles that have come originally from just one particle and still in some mysterious way represent one system) are in 'touch' with one another, no matter how far apart, even on opposite sides of the universe. So that if a measurement is made on one 'twin' the other twin is instantaneously aware of the measurement made on the other and, depending on what exactly is measured on the first twin, 'becomes' measured itself but in a complimentary way. What do I mean by that? Well in basic terms if you, say, measure a property of one of a pair of entangled particles, for instance, its 'spin', then whatever direction that spin is measured to be in, you know without having to look that its 'twin', millions or even billions of miles away, will automatically be measured at the same instance but its spin will be in the opposite direction. This is because the two particles are still acting as one system and, therefore, the two spins have to cancel one another out to maintain a balance or symmetry. Bell's Theorem proved that, mathematically, the statistical probabilities of local variables behaving in the same way as entangled particles spatially separated by large distances was violated in the sense that if you measure a local variable and another local variable they did not conform to the same statistical pattern of entangled particles, thus something else is going on at a distance and discounts local reality. Of course, you have to remember that until an actual measurement is made on one of the entangled particles they are both in a superposition of states, in other words, they both are in all possible spin states at the same time until one is measured, thereupon only one state become 'real.' This is not the transfer of information in the normal sense because you can never predict exactly what you are going to find before measurement as it's all down to probabilities, not certainties, so you could not send Morse code using quantum entanglement, for example.

What is the difference between atomic number and atomic mass?

Norman, In 1935 Einstein and two other physicists in the United States, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, analyzed a thought experiment to measure the position and momentum in a pair of interacting systems or 'entangled' particles, if you like. These entangled particles can be sent off in opposite directions to anywhere in the universe. The proton, like the electron, has 1/2 a 'spin' and no matter what direction is chosen for measuring the spin, or angular momentum, the values are always + in one direction and - in the opposite direction. This means, therefore, the overall aggegate spin is 0 (+ x -x = 0) right? It turns out that when you measure the spin of, say, of a photon in one direction it's entangled 'twin', which in theory could be seperated at any distance anywhere in the universe, 'knows' it's first twin has been measured in a particular direction and automatically 'becomes' measured in the opposite direction instantaneously without worrying about the speed of light. Einstein and his two collaborators thought that this conclusion was so obviously false that the quantum mechanical theory on which it was based must be incomplete. They concluded that the correct theory would contain some hidden variable feature that would restore the determinism of classical physics. However, in 1964, John Bell showed, by using a statistical argumant, that no hidden variables could possibly be involved and that non-local effects as described above were in fact part of reality despite appearing to violate the normal laws of nature. So far, there are no satisfactory answers to these questions, although there are several schools of thought from the role of the observer to the collapse of a wave function, to the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics.

I know a little about logarithms, for example, I know that in the case of 2^3 = 8, 3 is the logarithm of 8 to base 2, or 3 = log2, but how to fractional logs work, for example, 10^1.5? I'm not mathematically literate so a simple explanation would be nice. Thanks.

String theory attempts to merge quantum mechanics with general relativity and the name string theory comes from the modeling of subatomic particles as tiny one-dimensional “stringlike” entities. The concept of a string vibrating is supposed to represent a particle with a certain mass and charge. We're told that string theory has the potential to incorporate all four of nature's forces, i.e. gravity, electromagnetism, strong force, and weak force and all types of matter in a single quantum mechanical framework, suggesting that it might be the long-sought unified field theory. Although, to the best of my knowledge, string theory is still being persued it remains a purely mathematical construct because it has yet to be experimentally verified. So I guess the short answer to your question is that strings are, at least at the moment, purely conceptual ideas and can't really be visualized and may even be dropped in favour of some other model in the future, who knows? You'd need to have a knowledge of very advanced mathematics to follow the reasoning behind them!

Perhaps future incumbents of the White House might learn from the mistakes of George Bush and adopt the credo: 'evolution, not revolution'!

However, an electron hasn't the ability to form concepts such as 'hitting' and 'energy-level', therefore, our ideas about quantum level phenomena can only exist as a function of human consciousness. The implication of this approach is that the Universe as a whole is a concept-driven one that effectively dissolves in the absence of sentient beings. Put simply, the known Universe has no meaning without observers.

But, without some kind of conscious agency how can an 'interaction' have any meaningful status? What is present to define an interaction?