Fred56

Does "equipartition law" have anything to do with a blackbody spectrum? viz: Which obviously all means that our THERMODYNAMIC view of heat isn't quite on target... P.S. This chart, which has at least 2 other links in this forum, might help anyone understand our "picture" of EMR and so on. It's got descriptions of all the kinds of radiation "excitation": (luminescence, flourescence, ...). Covers absorption, nice pretty pictures... take a look (go on). I wonder how many reading this realise that HEAT is the result of, and itself causes infrared EMR to be absorbed, or emitted....? http://www.lot-oriel.com/site/site_down/cc_light_deen01.pdf

There's a logical fallacy: if there are an infinite number of planets, by definition there are an infinite number of both occupied and unoccupied ones. Saying there are a finite number (of infinite planets of any kind) is incorrect.

My first nit is yourdad's problem with heat/entropy -anyone want to "sort out" his concept for him?

Ahem. This thread, "heated" though some may feel it may have become, has spawned at least one "child" thread process. In which there is much discussion of black holes and so on, how we can look at them and what information is available (from them to us). There also has developed in that thread, (it seems to me) a perception that its parent has "diverged" from mainstream Physics. I say this is not true at all, we are discussing the nature of not just reality, but the reality of information, and believe me, it is most definitely connected. You need to remove your thermodynamically-designed classical spectacles for a bit.

Comment: any and all discussion of "information", "quantum information", and "information energy" need more careful use. There is information in a single photon, which carries mass/energy, but there is also the "information" we have in our heads, which "doesn't"... Maybe we should call them quantormation and logiformation, or quantumation and logication, ...

Where does it get momentum from then?

Well, if you think about it, there's lots of life doing this very thing every moment of our (and every other animal bigger than the end of a pin's) existence. Don't they call it flora, or something?

This is about apostrophes (and how lots aren't properly used properly, or properly used correctly, or...). If there are perceptions that some sort of remedial programme is on offer, I dunno. But surely you can figure out when to use "their, there, or they're (they are)"??

In charta-murus mensis scribere: T.V. is usually my daily equivalent of a background “moving and speaking” wallpaper. I leave it turned on, even swiveling it round so I can “see” it if I'm sitting at my PC. Perhaps it is my muse of sorts. It forms a sort of background to my daily “conscious space”, and often my nightly “unconscious space” (I fall asleep with it left on). We have, down in “Godzone country”, as I'm sure many reading this also have in theirs, a “resurgent” Christian evangelism, wherein the lost and downtrodden, the misunderstood and the socially impaired, are “oferd a noo salivation”, often from a brand-new pulpit, wearing what looks like a brand-new sartorial “offering”, unto the altar of what seems to me, more an attempt at “coherence” around their own person(ality). A guy who uses phrases like “what ...is”, where the 'in-between' words are usually along the lines of “you need to know”, “you have to understand”, “s'important”, “its trying to tell you”, “this means”, etc. a lot, and who often quotes from “th'book”, liberally interspersing or interchanging their own words with those that can be so “quoted”. We have our own self-appointed “new” prophet(eer) of the human condition. He often “goes off” on long semi-polemical rants, but sometimes something comes out that actually sounds a bit “deep” or philosophical, even a “wise” remark. And sometimes something slips out, perhaps a Freudian kind, and he is “obliged” to continue ranting in the direction of “explanation”, of what he is “really” saying. But someone who uses words like “we” a lot, along with phrases like “will be appointed”, or “will rule”, or “will rise to the top”, and talks about how 'Jesus' was trying to set up “our rule” and a big church (with really big 'temples', or 'tabernacles'), and 'Pilate' who “slew him of the Jews”, neither of whom appear to have existed except in some tale (of a religious hero, whose mission was to “save” the whole world), and how “we” will be “in charge”, and goes on about how a 'king' is someone “more important even than a prime minister”, and last week the police carried out armed raids on some 'organisation' that apparently had caches of weapons and was planning some kind of insurrection, in an otherwise 'economically poor' area... Otherwise the T.V. doesn't bother me that much.

OK, so can that "mathematical reality" be woven somehow into it, or is there always some point where logic hits the wall, so to speak? The problem with the story is that he appears to be the only guest (except for the register). But since he forgets which room, does that deal with the conundrum? Could the clerk say something about extensions to the hotel being underway, so his room has to be changed? Why doesn't his room number (infinity plus one) deal with your objection? How can a hotel with an infinite number of rooms not have a "room infinity"? Perhaps there is no answer.. the idea doesn't "work": there are an infinite number of possible objections to such a proposition...

Productivity is defined differently by different "disciplines". Sounds like you need to look at "social" productivity, or the idea of a "synergistic" process, that produces (some outcome)...

Aha, we have exposed an empiricist! What have you to say, you analog being you... In the quantum world information gets "lost" apparently... That doesn't happen to you guys though, does it? maybe you should stay in the deterministic universe (where it's safer)... I see. What about entropy and expansion?

I know about bound systems, are you talking about electrons...? Does a "free" electron emit a continuum of EMR? I know about Bremsstralung (really fast electrons). (Perhaps, for the eluctation of some, one would expand somewhat...?)

You mean there are real time particles of some kind, that time is a fundamental property like mass or entropy?

'sigh'

P.S. I vote this goes into the relativity thread.

gib65: You might be having a problem with the way you're looking at frequency (of light). This is usually represented by a Greek v (nu), and is a quantised, not analogue or continuously variable, quantity. Any shift in frequency (into the red "end" of the spectrum) is due to the source receding, and blue shift is due to the opposite effect. Any photon otherwise stays the same frequency (energy), amplitude is meaningless to a photon's "wave".

Indeed, this appears to be a somewhat inexplicable phenomenon. I found a paper that looks at the "dark matter" angle -that entanglement is due to a loss of information to a "dark horizon" -something like that. Here's a snippet: "Our key idea is this. The larger the cosmic horizon expands, the [more] information about vacuum disappears behind the horizon, because an observer out of the horizon sees an expanding spherical horizon eating up more and more space as it expands. This information loss (in the form of increase of dark entropy) at the horizon requires energy consumption according to ...Landauer’s principle. If this energy increases as the universe expands, it can play [the] role of dark energy. This is in concordance with the famous slogan in quantum information science '“information is physical!”'." -Jae-Weon Lee, Jungjai Lee, Hyeong-Chan Kim 1 Sep 2007

Ok , sorry I haven't posted for a bit, I've been looking at a fair bit of stuff -everything from dark matter to condensed matter and a lot in between as well. I haven't actually come across that much about double-slit experiments, but I know (obviously) about the "problem" -I've done the experiment. There are certainly some weird and wonderful ideas "out there", sometimes I come across something that appears to be based on fundamental, or fractal, time and distance -I am skeptical but obviously there is absolutely no problem with building a "time/distance" model of some kind, as long as you remember that time is a virtual quantity, I guess.

It's not meant to be a potted history, just how I think we developed the ideas, how abstraction of information became language and symbols. Along with the ideas of change (increase/decrease), we would have had concepts like "with", "without" (inclusion/exclusion), and other basic ideas of measure (grouping/portioning) that project straight to numbers. There would have been a socio-structural pressure to develop symbolic forms of measure, and external, and oral, record-keeping came from this. Once larger collections of people and larger organisation developed, along with the onset of things like agriculture and construction, our need to put numbers and their measuring to better use would have created greater pressures, for such things as the representation of distance, and volume, rather than just counting and recording quantities. A need for geometry would have arisen to better understand how to structure and calculate distance and area, to manage resources more effectively. Our understanding of the power numbers could give us to map, to abstract the world, would also have grown. Along with the concept of function within measure (itself some function), this led to more levels of abstraction. The thing about this connection that math has back to "basic" ideas of measure or change, -difference; this projection, is that it goes all the way. All the way up the chain, past arithmetic, algebra, geometry (where you notice the chain starts to divide, to branch), on past a certain imaginary link which seems to connect to the chain in a lot of other places, but in a way that can't be seen directly. It's a link of pure logic, a product of our reason; you can see how much it supports the chain, holds it together, how many other real and imaginary reflections (of real links) to higher mathematical concepts there are, beyond the three dimensions, into a realm that exists because of our ideas of change, increase and decrease, and our logical minds. With numbers (imaginary and real), tagging along like trustworthy hounds. ...sorry about this to anyone with a non-artistic "clinical mathematical" pair of glasses on: I was thinking about numbers and how sometimes they "fly around" in your head, and this popped out (don't ask me)... Twilight of our Reason Soft light, green in the gathering of trees, a distant blue-emerald behind the grey clouds of evening. The softening sussurus of bird wings, as they swift unnumbered through dying light to a shadowed shore.

Can you expand on the nonsense I'm (according to you) making? It makes sense to me... Are you saying that the concept of a number larger (outside) an infinite set is logically consistent? If so, could you please show me where I've made a mistake with the assumption (that it isn't). And how many members of the set of "infinite" cardinals can you write down and tell me are infinite? Please support your contention that I am not making sense...!?!??

"half its circumference in the interior" means your alpha-helix is halfway "inside" the protein (I guess you've already worked out that bit). "Draw a projection" means "on paper", presumably. The rest is about how to label it. Are you unsure what a helical wheel projection is?

Sure, its probably hilarious, in fact. But without separation, there would be no space and no universe. Time is "imagined", and two "differently timed" events can occur in the "same" place, of course. At least this is what you, me and most other people believe. What's your take on superposition and its apparent immunity to distance? Or are you still rolling around on the floor...? ...to continue (/me exhales slowly, draws on pipe...): Time is an apparent property of (classical) entropy/distance. It's appearance (to us), is an artefact of our own brains, and the way they are built. The brain “uses” change to “see” change in the external world. It's all relative. There is no time (we "imagine" it), there is diffusion (separation) of mass due to entropy. The mass/energy equivalence of information exists in the quantised world of very small distances, except for a mysterious property of mass/energy: superposition ("entanglement" of quantum states). Which appears to us to be able to ignore distance, as if space did not exist.... ... .. . oh, right, there's another one: a massless (very small size) particle that travels really fast, that photon thingy. The photon is the "message" we get from the quantum world, which we "convert" into "information" in our brains... There is also a conceptual (philosophical/scientific) problem with our quantum view: ...hang on, let's think about this, though... Is entanglement (quantum "information") possibly the (I know this sounds strange) "quantum" way of "dealing" with entropy? We have two different versions of what information is: The "no-cost" thermodynamic view and the quantum view, which has "cost". We can't apply the classical thermodynamic view to quantum "information" (superposition). We know that mass/energy is conserved (throughout the universe, presumably). We know that it "emits" photons, little packets of energy that "convey" information into our biochemical, thermodynamic brains. We know there is another conserved and quantised property that mass "has": superposition, and that this, unlike the photon (a "real" particle), is perturbed easily (by the thermodynamic/quantum world). Edit: The preceding, some of you may have noticed (or not), is using "information" in a classical (no-cost, no-mass) way. When looking for articles about superposition (entanglement) and what sort of information it is, there are a lot about how such can be put to use processing "information", as a sort of "multi-superpositioned" machine that works out, or "knows" every possible state, or outcome, simultaneously. What sort of mass/energy does this information (that is labeled "quantum") have? It isn't due to photons being emitted from a "classical collection" of iron atoms (like a red-hot stove) or an "excited" gas. We might need to start distinguishing between when we mean: "costless" and: "having mass/energy". Photon "information" (the mass/energy of photons impinging on electrons, say in someone's eye) is different from their entangled "state information". At least I think it is, how about you? ...more to come Edit: should have posted this in "a mass of information", seems more relevant here though... but there's a definite, um, connection... ..'chortle. guffaw, har har!' Edit: can some moderator bung this back in Adv Phys where it belongs?

Yes, perhaps something that life does is contemplate its own existence. I wonder what the "map of self" of some C. elegans looks like? Ok, time for a summary so far: Life is a "structure" an organisation of certain elements (mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) and it is able to extract energy from its environment. In a bootstrap process, life uses energy from the environment and some of the energy it has stored to store more energy. It does not have to be able to move around, necessarily, to do this (if the environment contains sufficient levels of "food" already). Probably the earliest forms of life on the planet were non-motile. The development of the ability to move around, the first propulsion systems (cilia, flagella, pseudopods -these use stored energy), would have allowed early life to exploit larger areas, or to move somewhere if the conditions changed. A way to sense the environment is an obvious, probably a necessary, feature that mobile life-forms (still) have. This allows them to react to it, and these first chemical signalling systems were perhaps the beginnings of specialisation, which led eventually to more complex, multicellular life forms, and eventually the arrival of marine and land plants, animals (which have highly differentiated cells), and the mammalian brain. Edit: unless someone can illustrate why this is pseudoscience, can it please be moved to a Bio thread? I know I started it here but surely... should I petition a moderator directly, is that the rule, or whatever?

Comment: I have posted something relevant to this discussion in pseudoscience:"it's all connected" q.v. I think part of the difficulty is I need to look through the same goggles yourdad is wearing. I've used a thermometer, I know temperature is "out there"...!? I don't think that's what I did at all... I certainly hope it isn't... Well, I know that a molecule can vibrate hard enough to cause one of its electrons to emit a photon of infrared; electrons can absorb a photon and the molecule will vibrate more...but which one is the quantum chicken? Which the egg? Is the egg across the road and the chicken has to get to it? Stay tuned folks...