Ronald Hyde

This is very important to me. I've long ago rejected the 'motion of the Earth's core' hypothesis as it is completely ad hoc and without any kind of observational support. I know how dynamos work, and they need to be carefully designed to work at all. I've looked at the 'other way' of making magnetic fields, spontaneous symmetry breaking, aka ferromagnetism but haven't come up with anything. More stuff to include in your theorizing. It's long known that the Sun has a quadrupole field, it's part of the Solar Cycle, now it's being found out that the Earth has one too. Do all large rotating bodies? Another big question. How do the magnetic fields associated with the Van Allen belts arise? The belts are practically defined by these fields, if the fields disappeared so would the belts. And of course other planets have these toroidal 'belts'. My intuition say that you might be on to something. I'm wondering how those equations were arrived that, very much so.

The phrase 'if it exists' is important here. And this is part of a model Feynman was working on. Maybe I should have said 'there is not a generally accepted theory that connects Gravity with the rest of Physics', because this spin-2 gravity is not yet generally accepted. But then I'm fiddling around with something that involves quadrupoles and that involves spin-2 and I may flip completely around on this issue. So I'll just say that you may be entirely right, but we still need to put it in a competent theory. Has that confused matters enough.

There is no competent theory that links Quantum Mechanics or the rest of Physics with Gravity. No one knows what a Graviton 'looks like' in a theory. Even greats like Richard Feynman, who tried to link them, have not found an answer. So be suspicious of any glib answers.

Nature seems to able to do that, but we don't know how she does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BL_Lac_object

Multiple alarms go off on this one. Too slickly presented, the machine if too highly polished, just for starters. I used to work at a place that attracted many inventors. They would often tell me vague details of their latest invention. I would guess how it worked, I wasn't supposed to do that, please don't tell anyone, the patent is pending. Never told. I cannot figure this one out. Does the Casimir Effect ring a bell? No, because you can't get any energy out. Vacuum energy is not. I could explain in more detail, I did on another forum when the notion was popular, but I won't if not asked. I would not put any money in this one. What will you get if you put Rin-tin-tin and Lassie and this together? Two money makers and a dog.

Evolution is a process, plain and simple. It may be governed by laws, I can't think of any that might apply specifically and only to it.

Just the title of this topic sets off little alarms, and when I open I find they are valid. Even Darwin knew that Evolution was 'not Darwinian'. He just observed that biology only made sense if this process, which is exactly what Evolution is, occurred in Nature. He knew of no mechanism, nor postulated any, that would come much later. We are still only learning of what mechanisms occur. Nature is very 'inventive'.

It may indeed know why it's doing what it does, but it completely fails to tell us, yet lets us write a mathematical function that gives us the odds.

The Sun has several layers. Scientists have even developed a kind of 'solar seismology' purely by observation, and know something about the layers. The Wikipedia article on the Sun gives a very good description of this, it starts with the core and ends with the corona. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun You can find several articles on the Wiki about the Sun.

No, I don't, they are not using a 'real person' name, they're not trying to fool me. Zero points for that deduction. The rest I will simply ignore.

These are very good points. I'll just say to the first one that space-time does appear to be globally flat, by what I find in the literature. I actually do have a replacement in mind, it involves the substitution of a potential of a simple and familiar form, you can pull predictions out of right away and when you look in astronomy catalogs there they are. It involves no singularities that I know of. You can start to understand things like Eta Carinae and the dumbbell shaped nebulae that are associated with some stars. But I just wanted to see what people thought about the idea that we should give up on GR. Basically you come away with the notion that Gravity has a lot 'more parts' than the one we are familiar with and plays an important roll regarding structures on the large scale. I also wanted to know if something had reached the same conclusion as I had and what reasons they might have.

Ok, so make a poll, and yes I know that Nature doesn't read my posts. Dis could be fun!

What Heisenberg said, and others that followed him have added to, goes far beyond the simplified description of the 'uncertainty principle', into the heart of our understanding of Nature and the measurement process. I haven't read Karl Popper's book on the measurement process, my bad, I understand it's highly rated by physicists, you might want to check it out. What I'm going to say next is very harsh, maybe it violates some kind of rule, but I feel obliged to say it, you leave me no choice. You're lied to us twice, first by posting those images which did not fit the described conditions of the puzzle, then by admitting that you used a false name. However you interpret it the second is something of a lie. So why should I believe that your observations were made under the specified condition?

I'll draw you a nice analogy type picture. Most compression algorithms .rar, .zip, etc. have a self-extracting format available for use. You don't have to use it, but you may. This is more or less what you're describing, but you want to have options to it. Unlike the usual images formats these are executables, binaries, they yield a file, or a folder full of files. On the other hand, an image format is 'read' by another application and composed into a bitmap which is incorporated into the screen bitmap. So now you see exactly what is involved here and what options might be available to you.

This is a bit more complicated than providing a link or embedding a file. Just search for 'plugins' and you will find useful links. Don't forget that you have different browsers and operating systems, so you may need detection of those. I don't know if you're using a server side language, you would want to do detection as early in the process as possible to avoid having to reload the page.

It wouldn't bother me at all. The results might be interesting. Add one if you wish. On the other hand ( there is usually one ) I don't think that Nature pays any attention to poll results, she just does whatever she wants to and leaves us to figure it out. "Nature isn't like Lucy, she doesn't have any 'splainin' to do."

Again you've given a excellent reply, and I will reply to these parts. Yes, I'm applying Quantum Mechanics here, all the photons the camera, eye, spectrograph or whatever receives are quanta. Yes, it's really just a restatement that we are bound by the laws of Nature, but you would be amazed, maybe not, at how many people do not understand this and apply it. So I just stated it in the clearest most concise way I could. When I worked with several 'wordy' organizations, I was the guy they relied on to phrase things in the clearest way. Yes, I know about the different color spaces and their representations. And I'll say one more thing, not addressed specifically to you, but to anyone reading. Once upon a time there was this cocky German fellow, and he taught us all an important lesson, but some do not seems to understand or appreciate it. That due to the irreducible nature of the quantum, there is no such thing as 'objective' reality, any measurements of the real world involve choices about what we are measuring and how, and what kind of results will be obtained. It's been eighty years since Werner Heisenberg taught us this so it's time we all understand it.

I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your reply, and the manner in which you replied. To say that you are a gentleman and a scholar is no exaggeration. The colors are not truly distinct bands. I've only seen the pictures of prisms working, my bad, must get an actual prism and see exactly how it works. Yes cameras are clever, I've taken thousands of photos. I know that they work much like the human eye. But they still obey the laws of Nature, they can be used as instruments, they just are a different instrument, so you have to include that in your description of an experiment. I'm going to say again that the notion that there is such a thing as an 'objective' measuring instrument is a fallacy, a common fallacy, but still one. By the rules of QM an experiment must be completely described from start to finish, including any measuring instrument chosen, and different instruments will give different results. On the notion that color is solely an invention of the human mind. I used to believe that myself, for a very long time, but no more. I was trying to understand how life first appeared, and began to evolve, and in the process I elicited this, I call it the 'Doctrine of Inherent Capability'. "You cannot invent, discover or otherwise use an effect which is not inherent in Nature". I was very pleased when after Chas. Townes and Co. invented the Maser, masers were found in the molecular clouds of the galaxy. A little Kipling: For this is the Law of the Jungle, as old and as true as the sky, and the Wolf who keeps it may prosper, but the Wolf who breaks it must die. I later worked at a place that attracted many inventors, and I noticed that is was the law of the jungle for inventors. The successful ones obeyed it, they didn't try to exploit effects which didn't exist in Nature, the failed ones didn't, They would ask me to help them 'get a working model going', I would avoid them. I know that the human brain has a lot to do with how we interpret color, and of course every kind of 'data' we process. That's pretty much a given. I have this computer, you know that I do, but I'm not grandma that just checks her email, I can do all kinds of stuff, make web pages in many colors, make graphics, write programs that actually run, etc.. So I learn about 'color spaces' and how colors can be represented, and I can see that color has an 'algebra' let's just call it Color Algebra, and that it is similar to the algebra of Quantum Mechanics. But I have other reasons for thinking that ths Color Algebra is part of the scheme of things, which I haven't begun to explain, I'm sure that if I did I would attract attention from people who know the answers already and not about to learn anything new. So I find that the World is deeper and more subtle than I had imagined. I didn't even see you answer, so now I make a reply. When I was into photography I would explain to people how the eye adjusted for things, and told them that the camera was 'stupid', that they had to make all those adjustment themselves before taking a picture. Of course cameras are much 'smarter' now, so I agree with what you say. I haven't tried taking any pictures of this, but I have a camera and will do so. In fact I have a dumb camera and a smart one, so I can try that too.

This cute little cartoon so clearly refutes all my reasonings about Unitarity and such that I cannot find a reply. So I'm just going to leave it to people who read my original post to decide between it and the cartoon.

If you use a prism to split a beam of light and project the results on a surface you get a band with 3 or 7 distinct colors, not a continuous graduation of color. If you use an instrument to measure the frequency of the light along the band, say a little probe that you slide along the band, you will get a continuous distribution. Does the prism suffer from 'optical illusions'? I think not. Does the prism work by something other than the laws of Nature? I think not. You offered false information to refute my original question by posting a bunch of images which did not fit the conditions, oh just a mistake you may say, but your mistake. But your biggest mistake here is thinking that color is just an invention of the human mind and that it plays no role in the natural scheme of things. I repeat, the World is far more subtle than you have or perhaps can imagine, and you do not begin to see the truth of that.

I like that one. You gave me a real belly laugh. I needed that today.

The human eye doesn't 'get things wrong', it's simply another choice of instrument. Different instruments will produce different measurements. The notion that there is some unbiased instrument that always 'gets things right' is pure nonsense. QM says that the measurement depends on the instrument chosen. Tell a good professional interior decorator that her eye 'gets thing wrong' and you may get a well deserved earful. I know that QM 'doesn't do color', I've already commented on that in another topic but you thought that it wasn't physics. So what exactly in your self esteemed opinion does 'do color'? Color certainly occurs in Nature, just look around you. Look at pictures of nebulae, or stars, or Galaxies. I was remembering an electrical storm I saw and there was colored lightning. You think that is fiction, Google it. There's a lot more going on here than you will ever be able to understand. The World is far more subtle than you can begin to imagine.

This is interesting to know. Of course the instrument here is always the human eye, since it's what we use ourselves. What instruments are considered to give reliable readings of colour, as you Brits say? One of the rules of Quantum Mechanics, which people seem to often forget, is that the experiment has to be formulated from start to finish, including any instruments used to take the readings. And different instruments give different readings. This question was and still is to my mind just a simple puzzle that I would like to see answered, nothing more. "In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

It was perfectly harmless where it was. I hope it wasn't moved on account of Mr. Cuthber's obvious antipathy towards everything I say. I stand by everything I said in it, trying to put QM and GR together represents eighty years of completely failed effort, and if people continue it will be eighty more. It was placed where it was solely to elicit some intelligent comments about it, not to violate any rules. End of story.

First I ask you exactly which ones of those pictures were taken in the daytime and under the specified condition? You're beginning to teach me a lot. I'm beginning to understand why some people think mathematicians are smarter than physicists and in exactly what ways. You've taught me why, at Princeton, the other physics students were amazed that Feynman could sit with the mathematicians and solve problems with them, like the Hexaflexagons. In the book about him, 'Genius', his wife describes why he quit the APS and wouldn't even accept an honorary membership. I had people like you in it. Oh, I know you're British, I tried finding some of your seminal papers on the Web ( what a wonderful thing it is ) but I only found links to this forum and something about telephone poles and a radio antenna. Lest anyone be offended by my remark, it really applies only to people like Mr. Cuthber. However I will come back in due course and explain it exactly.