studiot

@Andrew William Henderson I am as confused as intoscience (+1) as to your thesis. I would therefore welcome your comment in this up to date research, excerpt from the book accompanying a BBC science series of the same name. Life in Colour : How animals see the world. Martin Stevens Witness Books 2021

There are now three concurrent threads that turn on the meaning of 'nothing'. This is after quite a few such debates here in the past. Not bad for a concept that "has no existence" I think we are generally agreed that and since we are having so much trouble with that definition I am offering an alternative approach as apposed to the getout of declaring it nonsense. @Conscious Energy has been trying to express nothing mathematically as 'zero' but does not seem to have the mathematical sophistication to do this. No offence meant CE. This approach, like most in mathematics, is best done in set theory and then we can employ the empty or null set. Beacuse mathematicians employ the null set to construct the numbers we get a hint of something we can do with nothing. This bring us to my spark plug and also my litre box, because we can quantify nothing mathematically. That is we can order different nothings as larger or smaller than each other. In some cases we can make actual measurements. In the case of the spark plug there could be simply air or there could be inert gas or there could be complete vacuum between the electrodes. The point is there is the 'spark plug gap' which is conceptually composed of nothing at all. And we can quantify this gap. Furthermore if they are actually touching there is nothing between them! Nothing is indeed a strange beast; as so often happens fact turns out stranger than our imagination (ie fiction), which is why we have (and probably always will have) so much yet to discover. 🙂

People often confuse randomness, causation, enablement, concidence and a few other things. However none of these have the strength of mathematical 'necessary and sufficient'.

You would first have to define the term event. When you do this please bear in mind that this is the (scientific aspects of) religion section. Yes. I thought so. Radioactivity is random, but occurs on account of a cause.

I have but I see no connection whatsoever. In particular the word uncause is not defined, nor even mentioned.

No. I think 'to uncause' does not refer to an absence, but to some undoing process as in undoing a shoelace. Ie it necessitates at least two processes, the original causative one and the uncausing one.

What the heck is an 'uncaused event' please ?

Well I understand 'nothing' perfectly well thank you. I agree that nothing is pretty insubstantial, but pray tell me, what is between the electrodes of a spark plug ?

I understand the moderators offered you the chance to clarify your thinking and expression when they started this thread on your behalf. As far as I can see, all that you have done is made it mode convoluted and confusing than before. 'Nothing' is very simple and can be quantified. No only can be but is every day by motor mechanics the world over.

Yes I think you put your case quite well +1 and welcome here. Sadly I think you took your analysis to extremes and even contradicted yourself with your additional post. Apart from the fact that space, empty or otherwise was not mentioned by Kitty, you have told us a couple of times that you can't link 'contains' to 'nothing' and then gone and done just that in the last line! Try this. I have just one apple in my bag. I eat the apple. Now my bag contains nothing.

For those who think getting a blood clot from the vaccine is bad, here is what you could get with blood clots from the real thing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57569540

Agreed.

A fine example of my point. "an experiment" is something other than space. A simpler example would be congruent triangles in euclidian geometry. Congruence is a symmetry that can be established by the conventional methods as taught in lower high school. But the whole of euclidian geometry can be recast in terms of transformations so that congruence becomes a translation (and perhaps a rotation) so that you can overlay one triangle on another. But you require something other than space alone, in this case two triangles, as I said.

But I didn't get an answer to the Physics content of my post. But I would go further than anyone else here and declare that a box which contains exactly nothing is impossible as a self contradiction. Let us say this 'box' has sides of 10 cm by10cm x 10cm that is it has a volume of exactly one litre. So it has the capacity to contain one litre of whisky. Now capacity is an abstract noun, to be sure and an old fashioned one to boot. But a noun it is and therefore a 'something' So by studiot's theorem "Every empty box contains something."

Again swansont has hit the nail exactly on the head here. A carbon dioxide puck would be continually subliming away like crazy. So its mass would be continually diminishing. From the text of your original submission I wonder if you realise that 'space' alone does not admit of translation. Something translates or is translated in or through space (or rotates in it). And it is the invariance of some property of that something that provides the symmetry, not the space itself. Did you get your reference to Noether from somewhere like this ?

It really is too early to tell with any confidence the mode of collapse. My impression of the structure was that it was in three parts. laid out like a letter H for stability. Often buildings of this type Either the wings are more strongly founded and constructed and the central joining leg spans between them. or The central joining leg is the most massive and strongest, and the wings less so. The point is from this sequence https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57609620 The failure appears to have been a breaking of the connection to one side support starting the collapse of the central section, which then pulled the other side over with it. The upper levels of the centre appear to have broken and fallen at one side, onto lower levels which then collapsed in on themselves in the middle under the extra weight. There is a report that 15 years after the building was constructed (about 1995) it started settling or subsiding and has been doing so ever since. There is another report suggesting inadequate drainage leading either washout or excess (clled active) soil pressure on the basements. Either way if excessive differential settlement occurred and the centre lost sufficient of its support from one or both sides, collapse would occur rather as in the video. But proper investigation will reveal much more, I don't doubt.

So tell us what expression of the theorem you have as it is difficult to offer generalisations if the question is too broad. Swansont has offered a good summary in his second post +1

What I don't understand is what this Physics question is doing in the General Philosophy question. A couple of hundred or a couple of thousand years ago GP might have been the correct place but today we have Quantum Mechanics, Feynman diagrams and virtual particles, so the answer must be Perhaps. Your 'impentrable walls' deserve further consideration as well. If you heat them with a blowtorch, will they not radiate into the box although no particles pass through?

Indeed. Perhaps you mean symmetries, relate to conservation laws. In your particular case are you referring to this ? But your question may have nothing to do with the symmetries (and invariances) of this particular transformation. So please provide the context in which you have asked this question.

Well you don't need a fancy laboratory or to spend lots of money. Although you haven't given us much to go on, I hope you already have lots of enthusiasm and an enquiring mind. Chemistry is fun and is about stuff and how it interacts with other stuff. And there is lots of stuff all around you to play experiment with. Starch, paper, soil, oil, water, iodine, air, calor gas, leaves................................... You can start to look at why some are solid, some are liquid, some are gas and some are something in between (eg waxes). What happens when you mix things; sometimes there are changes sometimes not. And some changes are big and/or fast (combustion) some are small and/or slow (staining, corrosion, rusting) I said paper because 'chromatography' - look it up and find out what it means - is a very important technique (Covid lateral flow test) is a very important chemical technique that allow you to do some chemical analysis. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chromatography-be-a-color-detective/ Electrochemistry is another area for experimenting and finding out, as exchemist has already mentioned. Also growing crystals can be great fun and many suitable chemicals can be obtained from a chemist and kept in clean household jamjars. Some simple (and cheap) instruments might be a pH (acidity) meter (from a fish tank supplier) a Thermometer, a multimeter and a simple U- tube pressure gauge (manometer). Judging from the time of your posting you could be in the bush or outback or other remote place. Also not sure what skills your dad has to help.

Followers of long covid might find thisc ase interesting. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-57586965

I think you are kicking a dead donkey. Though you are working very hard, The OP hasn't been back since the day he joined and posted.

Which, to quote swansont's comment, is irrelevant. This is about the density of many electrons in materials (look it says so) It for for consideration of metals, semiconductors etc. We are discussing one electron within a single atom. I do accept that there are many similar sounding terms so we should all be careful not to mix them up. It is very easy to fall into this trap.

Nor is this a graph of probability density. And it says basically the same as your Khan graph. Both are the result of several pages of working in Maths and Physics. What is the density distribution of the electron ? I have already warned against confusing Probability with Probability Density, they are not the same. Look at the post I just made in Arnav's thread before you answer.

The c curve in your posted diagram is nothing more than simple geometry. (Mathematics) The b curve is nothing more than saying that the wave function or its square are proportional to the (electrostatic) potential energy of a charged particle in the field of the nucleus. This is equated to or calculated by the work to remove the particle to infinity from any given point. Obviously the further from the nucleus, the weaker the field and the less the work that has to be done. This is why the graph tails off to the right. As the particle moves closer to the nucleus and the potential increases because the work to move it out to infinity increases. That is why there is an inverse relationship between potential energy and distance from the nucleus. But the nucleus has a finite (non zero) size and when the particle curve reaches the surface of the nucleus things change so the potential energy does not go off to infinity as a simple reciprocal or inverse relationship would do. However the radius of the nucleus is very small, too small to show on your graph b, Does this also help ?