Fred56

Guys here's an interesting article about what I'm sifting for. You know, phase transitions and state spaces, topology, etc http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/qubit_c06/fradkin/pdf/Fradkin1_KITP.pdf I found a good page about curl and divergence too: http://www.math.gatech.edu/~carlen/2507/notes/vectorCalc/fcdensities.html

Several different teams of researchers have since discovered no such thing, however. You can keep reading old news items and looking wherever else for whatever you think they might have missed, but I'm happy to leave it up to them myself.

Here's what a certain wheelchair-bound mathematician has to say: “Despite ... difficulties with the idea of a static and unchanging universe, no-one in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, or early twentieth century suggested that the universe might be evolving with time. Newton and Einstein both missed the chance of predicting that the universe should be either contracting or expanding. One cannot really hold it against Newton, ...but Einstein should have known better. The theory... that he formulated... predicted that the universe was expanding.” Stephen Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes You have to step beyond Newton's ideas to accept the expansion. Anyone who has difficulty with this concept isn't alone, Einstein couldn't accept it either.

Um, what's up?

Aha, you seem to be talking about emergence.

There certainly is a certain elegance to that. Kinematics is "energy in motion". I just though of a way to illustrate another idea about kinematics. If a wheel or a ring rolls down an inclined surface, any point of contact is like a time derivative of the body's motion. If you set up an experiment with an inclined surface that made a regular sequence of marks on the moving diameter you could show this to anyone. Neat or what? Ahem. -except they would need to be regular intervals of time. After thinking on this, I have decided that this would present some difficulty. The aim is to produce a series of marks on the outer edge of a rolling body, and to do this in a timed way...hmmm

Anything: a jar with some mouldy stuff in it, a pond, the area of damp earth under a rock, is one of the very things you seek.

Docere est sapere

“Though they about his cerebrum gyrate, no logical device is the effect.”

There is no 3-dimensional edge to spacetime. There is an "edge" to its expansion, which is the "arrow" of entropy.

It's a bit like one of those blind guys who feels an elephant's leg and announces that an elephant is “just like a tree”. Don't you think?

I read something recently about a youngish, up-and-coming novelist whose agent asked him to look at a screenplay and consider turning it into a novel. The screenplay had been written by a wannabe politico who at the time (1996) was a high-ranking public health official. Anyway, the story itself was pretty ordinary, about an outbreak in the US which becomes an epidemic, and the hero detective whose dogged determination pays off and he not only helps to "save the country" but uncovers the truth about the epidemic: it was smallpox unleashed by Saddam Hussein in a plot to destabilise the US of A. OMG... So, as the hero is being congratulated by the Commander in Chief, he tells the President that Baghdad must be bombed. The President says "OK" and the US nukes a city full of millions of people. What a great imagination this guy has. What a great story huh? Needless to say the novelist declined the offer. But the screenplay's author is now a biosecurity expert working for the DOH, or DHSS, or whatever it's called now. He was also an ardent supporter of the Iraq war, and a staunch believer in the existence of Saddam's stockpile of WMD.

I like Latin. Latin is a cool language. English, with its revved-up syntax, stripped and fully rebuilt verbs, overblown vocabulary, and extra luggage space, is certainly an impressive language. It can travel many roads to the same meaning or intent, whereas Latin, more the stately carriage, a marque among languages, whilst unable to follow, will get there with words that have a longer range, that give more linguistic mileage. Latin can be “pithy”, that way. English is overloaded with meaning and therefore has more “nuance-range” (there are more ways to say something). Latin can get to the point with a lot less effort.

Is this thread going to cover any new stuff (preons,helons)?

Just a sort of OT query: Does anyone know about what influence Rachmaninoff had on Eric Carmen's music? I'm trying to find the piece he used in "All by Myself". Anyone?

No there isn't. Check out the other thread on sunspots, mate. There is absolutely nothing, zip, nada, zilch, to the idea that the sun is to blame. There's a cycle is all. Someone apparently (why it took so long I have no idea) found out that there is a bigger forcing from the cycle, but there's no underlying trend in the data.

p17. New Scientist 29 Sep. 2007: "Quantum bodies go here or there, but not in between ...waves of atoms can move between three boxes separated by impenetrable barriers. Ordinarily a quantum particle starting at one end will tunnel through the first barrier, move into the middle box, and spend some time there before tunnelling through the second barrier to reach the third box. ...particles can skip the middle box. The team built a computer model of the movement through a Bose-Einstein condensate,...they could make the waves in the middle box cancel each other ...only a few atoms ever occupied the middle box....may be useful for controlling matter waves..."

Has anyone mentioned Blish? James Blish wrote some good earlier stuff (60s-70s)

Planck's constant is an interesting thing to look at when you measure the deBroglie wavelength of "the" electron. He was the first (I think) to propose E=hv?

Are you trying to say you want to know if there's any models out there? You might have to define it a bit more succinctly.

elas, have you looked at any helon models?

Does anyone know about that 3-box experiment? Where they got some particles to arrive in the end box, without going through the middle one?

When you say "sci-fi" are you restricting it to Star Wars, or what? There are several different kinds, or genres, you know. You do know that, right?

No kidding. It certainly seems a fertile area 4 sure. Maybe since it might answer how relativity and QM are connected. I still remember when I got Laplace transforms. We had been studying the complex plane and the behaviours of reactive networks and how such can be reduced to an algebraic. Then the bulb came on, and I realised how the transform functions, in a complex plane are like a sort of magic view, where you get a much simpler picture which is then easier to “manipulate”. Then the transform inverts the view again and you've got your answer in the “real” world. Amazing.

Ok, why are there only three "forms" it takes (solid-liquid-gas), ignoring BECs, supersolids and liquids, and plasmas for the time being?