Ronald Hyde

Every concept used in Physics has to be in some sense 'invented' by the Human mind. And then used to describe some aspect or aspects of Nature. Some of these inventions turn out to be wrong, dead wrong. Phlogiston for example. Some turn out to be superfluous, Ether for example. Why was Ether invented, to allow the new Electromagnetic waves a medium in which to propagate? If you actually read Maxwell's Treatise, I owned a copy as a teenager, the Dover version, and it had models of how they might propagate, he even had pictures of wheel and gear arrangements as models. As time passed he and others dropped all these kinds of models and were just left with the Ether model. But after M & M that model was dropped too as it simply made wrong predictions and no one felt it was needed. Only the equations themselves had any real meaning. And that's why people often call Physics 'mathematical physics', because we can only describe what happens in mathematical terms, to give an accurate picture. I remember very clearly when I was fifteen, reading a book about how electrons behaved in a cathode ray tube, that the electrons didn't have any properties outside of a particular physical context, no 'intrinsic' properties, we couldn't take them outside the World and examine them. And that every thing we said about them had to be expressed mathematically. So I don't feel any need for Ether, or even for Nature to have an underlying 'physical' context to be understood, just math with the correct text. So I reject the notion that there is an Ether.

This is so not the way to understand the problems of measurement. To understand a problem in measurement you must at least imagine an experiment that makes that particular measurement. You may follow that experiment by another that makes another measurement. Using wave/particle duality and other broad brush principals will not lead to a clear understanding.

What is needed is a very clear statement of the working principles of QM, so that no one who ever uses them might misunderstand them. I find lots of 'problems' around that just completely disappear when the described 'experiment' is formulated correctly. One such is the dispersion of the wavepacket for a localized particle. When you formulate the experiment from beginning to end, the wavepacket sort of disappears into the larger problem. It's been eighty years since Dirac stated them and some updating, at least of the language, might be in order. Might be a good project for some people here.

OK, so we define Darwinism as the belief that Evolution is an ongoing process that occurs in the natural world. And add that we only need to understand the mechanisms which underlie it, not impose any philosophical 'paradigms' upon it. I can totally live with that as an answer to the original posters question or post. Anyone else agree?

A major factor here ( someone may have already explained this, I haven't read the whole post ) is that sound in solids is carried in two ways P-waves, pressure or compression, and S-waves, shear or transverse. The P-waves travel faster, if the waves 'go around a corner' or encounter an obstacle they can be converted from one form to the other. I live in earthquake country, you can actually get a pretty good idea of how far away a quake was by the difference in arrival time of the two waves.

An old fashioned cast iron cooking pot or lead melting pot should work. Size may not be what you want. A torch might work but you might want to make a furnace of some sort with a small steel drum and charcoal. Beware of CO poisoning. NaNO3 will melt more easily that KNO3, it contains some moisture, very hygroscopic.

Seriously, all that you need to understand about evolution is that it is a process, and to understand its mechanisms. Period, end of story. Failed philosophical notions are a paradigm a dozen.

It's nice to know that at least someone clearly understands what I'm saying. A while back people used to say that 90% of the genome was junk'. But now they're getting smarter, they recognize that these were successful adaptations the organism used in the past and they can be 'revived' so to speak, if the organisms survival requires it, by what mechanisms I do not know. To my knowledge Darwin, that gentle and caring man, had no philosophy regarding evolution, he simply observed it to occur in Nature. So the notion of a Neo-Darwin philosophy is to me completely silly. I think we should disregard any philosophical guidance, no matter who offers it, and just try to understand what mechanisms it works by.

Don't tell me 'what I'm trying to say', I've expressed exactly what I was trying to say. I could use more words and say more things but I'm not trying to write a book here. The other people who have replied to this thread knew exactly what I meant when I said that evolution was a process, and by the time I had returned to this thread they had explained it to the OP, and they already indicate an awareness of what I said in my last post, so who is missing what here?

A friend of mine worked at a hotel, some German guests were staying. There was a little earthquake, they ran down to front desk and said 'Was that an earthquake? We didn't get any warning.' No response was needed, it's more like a heads-up for anyone doing this.

Very dangerous. Even just in ordinary handling. The least bit of contamination can set of fires and explosions.

You've given me a nice opportunity to expand on the notion of evolution as a process, but first I have to reply to some of the things you have said. A wave function is not a physical system per se so the notion of it's evolution doesn't really apply here. Evolution is essentially completely random. This is simply not so, evolution is a process, and processes can be 'guided', I can't think of a better word right now. If you've ever tried to define 'completely random' you will know that it is 'like nailing jelly to tree', it's simply impossible to give an unambiguous definition. Mutations may be random but there are ways to remove 'faulty' ones from the process. That we know. I'm going to take the definition of 'process' as the one that is used in computer programming, as it can be placed into one to one correspondence with the one of evolution, and how processes in general work in Nature. In a computer, a process is simply a running program. Most computers are 'single threaded' so that only one process can run at a time, even though it may seem to you that many processes are running at the same time on the machine you are reading this with. An enormous amount of effort has gone into making single threaded machines behave like multi-threaded machines, truly enormous. In the computer you can have processes that run inside other processes, for instance in Windows you have Service-Host processes, several run on the machine and each one 'hosts' several processes that run inside or under them. Their purpose is to 'supervise' the processes that run inside them to make them share the machines limited resources, don't overwrite each others memory space, etc. Nature doesn't have this single thread problem, so she runs as many threads as she likes. But her processes run inside other processes. Your mind runs inside your brain, your brain inside your body, etc.. The fertilized egg changes into a viable organism, much like the execution of a computer program. In the computer, processes have 'methods', specific ways that tasks are performed, likewise Evolution has 'methods', i.e. mechanisms, and it's very well known that some of these mechanisms can favor very rapid change when change is required for survival of the genetic line. So evolution does indeed evolve itself, and can guide itself from within as it were.

I can hardly believe what a good topic this has turned into. Even people who aren't interested in Biology may learn from the clear reasoning it shows about how we view scientific thinking. Nawt tu wurry. The repliers have helped to form it into clear concepts. The dumbest questions are the ones never asked, because no one know how to answer them. Look into 'self organizing systems'. I put up a topic in classical physics, "why do spiral galaxies so resemble hurricanes', because it related to some things I amworking on, and it pointed in that direction. Something I was working on and it already has a name. Really nice to know. And remember, all sciences are branches of Physics. This is a very large area that needs to be clarified. It won't be done in a post or two. As mentioned, Mathematics is much better at how they classify concepts, especially new ones. Physics has a harder job and is way behind. More power to whoever does this.

Well, they could both employ a 'third party' to perform the measurement, an instrument. When the instrument makes the measurement an entropy change in the instrument will occur and can be observed by both of our 'observers', but that is not the same as your original question.

Nice workup.

If you're intuition is that something isn't right here, I would say that you're intuition is entirely correct. The mere fact that someone might apply 'classical common sense' to questions involving QM and modern Physics is dangerous. Water doesn't run uphill, but liquid Hellium-3 can. Einstein 'quit' QM because he thought it conflicted with his idea that 'God doesn't play dice', that the inner workings of the World were deterministic. I can find no reason to believe that QM conflicts with the notion that the world might be deterministic, none. And I've gone over this with a fine toothed comb. So my take on all these questions may be very different from the usual views, some might say highly speculative, but to me they are just thoroughly thought out. However, that doesn't answer your question, it only shows that I think it's more involved than Mr. Cox or maybe you think. Suppose that you're sitting in front of a little black box with a knob on it, the knob has three positions, the center on is 'do nothing' the others are 'change something over here' and 'change something over there'. The changes all involve putting energy and a change of entropy into a system. The two 'change' positions may start long casual chains that make many changes in the world. You can see that the ordinary notion of causality involves entropy and energy, trying to use the notion of causality where those are not involved can be very tricky indeed. It really goes back to my earlier statement that these questions need a thorough workup.

They're not allowed to both measure the state. Whichever one manages to measure it first destroys the information for the other.

It's interesting and novel but it fails to meet the definition of a 'clock', which is a device that indicates the time. Every clock I know of involves the coupling of a 'periodic mechanism', to an 'indicating mechanism', and such coupling, to my knowledge, always involves a change of entropy.

I thought you asked the question could you do both, and I answered YES! The math is very simple, you're interested in the velocity squared over 2, which is conserved except when you fire the rocket engine, or it is changed by gravity.

The simple answer, YES!

To akh and Ophiolite, I very much like the thinking that you have expressed in the last two posts on this topic. To me you both express very deep insight into what might be called a 'law' in Physics, and how to organize the concepts used in physics. Mathematics has a very good way of organizing the involved concepts but Physics has to deal with physical reality and not just abstract ideas, so it has more on its plate, so to speak. Reality can be a harsh mistress. More power to you, and thank you for expressing these thoughts so clearly.

I don't know about your particular problem, but near the Earths surface, in the air, there is a constant potential gradient of about 300V/Meter and a constant current associated with it. If you integrate this current over the Earths surface it neatly cancels out the currents associated with Lightning. I'm going to start adding stuff. This may be somewhat rambling but it's all connected together, I can't explain everything all at once in this post and don't intend to try. Some of it connects directly with Weddekind's posts, some is a bit aside from it. This concerns Self Organizing Systems, the Universe as a self organizing system, organizing principles, but that's a much larger topic and I'm not going into detail on that. If you look up 'self organizing systems' in Wikipedia you will find that it is a large well developed field. To Weddekind I'm going to say that the processes you describe may be what I call 'entropically driven' processes, the total energy remains the same but the entropy is continually pushed in the negative direction, so that the process is maintained. This violates one or more of the 'laws of thermodynamics' but it only works on the larger scale so you won't be able to get work out of it. The layers, Earth layers. Names like Troposphere, Ionosphere, etc., some of these are layers, others like the Ozone Layer, are thin boundaries between layers. The Sun has its own layers and boundaries and they are well observed. I'm only going to describe things close to the Earth's surface, as they are easy to observe and related to Weddekind's posts. I've spent more than a few lazy afternoons watching thunderstorms develop. Where I live now they rarely happen and mostly at night, so I can't do that anymore. What I saw was first a few white puffy clouds forming at a specific height above Earth. Soon one cloud would begin growing in width and later in height. It would no longer be pure white, would take on darker hues, get that 'silver lining'. I now know that the cloud is sitting on top of a boundary, and as it grows upward it reaches another boundary, and starts spreading out at the top. It forms the characteristic 'anvil shape' of thunderstorms. Here is where the fun begins. The topmost boundary and the Earth's surface form a giant electrical capacitor, with an enormous charge and a huge potential drop between them, I've read something like a hundred million volts. The thundercloud partly short-circuits the capacitor, so the air near the bottom of the cloud starts to break down, and sends a 'step leader' toward ground. The step leader is tree like with many branches, which ever branch touches a good conductor from ground starts a return stroke, which is the lightning that we see. I used to believe that the lightning was caused by a Van de Graff generator effect in the cloud, I'm beginning to think that more is involved. The charge at the topmost boundary may be related to the charge in Weddekind's post. Where Q is the charge difference between two concentric conducting spheres: Total energy: [latex] Q^2 2 \pi / r_1 + r_2 [/latex] Potential is that divided by Q/2 where the two r's are the radii. Enough for now.

I'm way out of my league on this one but consider that holes as well as electrons may be involved. We know that metals get a lot of their strength and toughness from being squeezed by the 'electron gas' which has a kind of surface tension, i.e. surface potential. So holes being present may change things.

I'm definitely in favor of the 'fixed background' picture. Remember how when they put the masses of the Weak bosons in 'by hand', their equations blew up. I see exactly the same problem with GR, it puts too many degrees of freedom into the picture and it 'blows up'. The potential I sort of described ( a smart person could figure out what it is from my little hints ) fits right into the FB picture. Good point though and well worth replying to.

I see that you have more, and are doing very well with connecting with observables. I have more too, but it connects with things that happen above the Earths surface and are more observable. What I am dealing with tells me that around every large body there are layers and boundaries between them. At first I called these abstract layers, but then it began to dawn that these were real physical layers, and for the Earth and the Sun they had already been given names. So I could understand why and how things were happening, lightning and such, and even write a few equations myself. But it's getting very hot where I am, I will come back when things are cooler and write much more. Isn't it nice to know that someone understands what you are saying when you talk about something new? Another 'out of the box' thinker.