gib65

Sorry if I misconstrued Revenged sentiments to be directed at me. It was this quote which lead me to think so: I wouldn't argue with the answers that come my way after posting a question (otherwise, what would be the point of asking ), but when I get conflicting answers, naturally I'll follow it up with more questions that apparently frustrate some people. I don't mean to frustrate anybody. I just get more confused when I get conflicting answers. That being said, it's pretty clear to me now that opiates and anti-depressants don't overlap, so I'm through with my line of questioning there. Thanks for your answers.

Oh, I'm sorry, Revenged, from now on, I'll only listen to your posts and I'll completely ignore anything anybody else says, because, as you and I both know, you're where the buck stops. Does this even apply to questions? I mean, I can't read the all-knowing Revenged's mind unless I begin with a question like which clearly shows that I'm not so stupid to think heroin could be used as an anti-depressant. Obviously there are some opiates that, although way more mild than heroin, could still lead to addictive behavior (look at pain killers... and they're sold over the counter). Also, I really appreciate the , it's really constructive and it makes me want to ask more question here at SFN. If only everyone was as generous as you and handed out :doh:'s to every question posted on this forum. I think it would create a very amicable atmosphere, and would bring people back for more questions and discussion. In fact, you're so willing to help, you seem to go out of your way after having said that you're through with this thread and are too frustrated to deal with the course this discussion has taken, rather than leave it alone like anyone else would if they had nothing but nasty sentiments to express. What a guy!

Well, it makes sense to me. The whole reason I started this thread is because I just recently got myself some kratom leaves. Before it was made illegal in Thailand, the Thai used to chew on these in order to give them a mild pick-me-up and make physical labor go by a little more smoothly (kinda' like coffee for us). When I tried it, it sure put me in a good mood, and it got me thinking whether this could be used as an anti-depressant in a clinical setting. I don't know what doctors think of using opiates as anti-depressants though (wouldn't there be a risk of addiction?), but as geoguy said, there's methadone, so I guess it's already been done.

Ah, so some opiates can also be anti-depressants. So there's not really an essential difference.

Thanks for the link. So, then, would you say that anti-depressant just remove/regulate the sadness but won't necessarily make you happy (i.e. they make you "normal")? I've had experiences with opiates and they do brighten your day. Maybe the link you gave me will answer my question.

Besides be pain killing effects of opiates, what's the difference between the mood uplifting effects between each?

What's the difference?

Thanks, fredrik. I like the brevity of that paper . You know, this discussion (about the relation between math and the real world) has inspired me to start a new thread. I wrote a paper a looong time ago about this very issue in which I actually went through, step-by-step, the derivation of the formula for the standard deviation of the bell curve you often see in statistics and social sciences (or was it variance?). Starting with the elementary variables, I described what each step represented conceptually, going into great detail, until I got to the the overall formula (sometimes I wonder if I have way too much time on my hands ). If I find that paper, I'll probably start a new thread, not so much about the bell curve and what each step of the derivation represents, but about something I've always felt the discipline of mathematics needs: a branch that actually tries to tie each step in the derivation of the most common formuli in the sciences to easy-to-understand concepts. We already do this for the individual variables we start out with, and for what the formula calculates overall, but when you get half way through your caclulations, you're completely in math-land where all sight of the world of concepts is gone. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of standard lookup table or reference book that explained exactly where you were conceptually at every step along the way? Not only would this lay the groundwork for potential new discoveries IMO, but it would bring a whole chunk of the educated public into the inner circles of the mathematical and scientific community. A lot more people would be enabled to understand what's going on. Oh, and thanks for the kind words.

I would love to read your paper, ajb, and in fact I took a look at it. As I feared, however, its speaks at a level a little too indepth more me to understand (heavy math always screws me up). I really need to take a whole battery of math courses before I can understand this stuff. Until then, I'm stuck with conceptual models . m is mass, E is energy, right? What is q?

Really? So the proton is the heavier one, right? It accelerates more slowly than a positron in the same electric field?

GR explains gravity by the warping of spacetime near massive objects. I've always wondered if there was a way of explaining other forces in this way. For example, could the electromagnetic force be explained by spacetime distortions at the level of particles? Every thought experiment I've tried out doesn't seem to hold promise of this. For example, we could explain why a proton is attracted to an electron by assuming that time and space curve towards each of these particles, and the result would be much like an object falling towards a planet. But then all particles should be attracted to each other. Why would putting two electrons together result in their mutually repelling each other? Does spacetime curvature figure at all into any forces other than gravity?

It's your call. If you think people will like it, go ahead.

Are there any more audio/video recording for download? That one by Richard Dawkins has been on the home page for quite some time now. It was very cool. Just wondering if there's others yet to come.

Yes, I agree with this. SR does follow from the premise of inertial frames alone since the absolute speed of light is a law of nature - you just have to know this.

What exactly does it mean?

In all the full treatments, I'm sure. To name one person, there's Richard Wolfson of Middlebury College who, in an introductory lecture on Relativity, says that all the bizaar and non-intuitive phenomena that SR predicts follows just from the fact that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames. He mentions nothing of the constant speed of light.

Thank you. That's very kind. So what can we say then? That quantum physics is the study of the smallest "quantum" of matter/energy? Does that link it all together?

This is the key point I was wondering about. They always start out with the premise that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames, but they only get to the particular, and somewhat esoteric, law of light later on. In other words, they try to wow you with the obvious stuff, but leave out one important detail that novices rarely know. Nothing of relativity follows without this crucial detail.

I have a feeling most people who deny GW are afraid of being blamed. That always seems to be the tone of their angst.

Whenever Einstein's theory of relativity is explained, it always starts out with the premise that the laws of physics are the same no matter what frame of reference you observe them in. How does this idea lead to the dilation of time?

I tried not to make the title of this thread too long so it might not be clear what I'm asking. Let me elaborate. I've always wondered how the pivotal idea that started the field of quantum physics lead to all the strange discoveries that showed up as the field matured (like superposition, random collapsing, quantum entanglement, etc.). The pivotal idea I'm talking about is the idea that energy can be quantized into indivisable units akin to material particles (like the photon is to the electron). That makes sense out of the "quantum" part of quantum physics, but I don't see anything "quantum" about the odd anomolies that were discovered later (like superposition, random collapsing, quantum entanglement, etc.). How does the quantizing of energy lead to this? Does it follow logically somehow (i.e. a priori) or did they just so happen to be the discoveries made by the scientists who so happen to be persuing studies in quantum theory (that is, the pivotal idea starting quantum theory)?

Is quantum tunnelling the phenomenon I've heard of that requires particles to "borrow" energy from the universe? I mean, if a particle is to penetrate a barrier, one would think it needs a large amount of energy to do so. So is this where the concept of "borrowing" energy comes from?

Anybody have any thoughts on this quote: What would be the conditions defining "isolation" and "interaction"? I started another thread here that makes clear that "decoherence" never really means collapsing the wavefunction to a perfectly "classical" state (i.e. Newtonian/Maxwellian state). Decoherence always results in an approximation to a classical state - it's a matter of how fine tuned your measurements are (think HUP). If this is the case then maybe a quantum system is always decohering to a smaller or greater degree with its environment, and the degree of uncertainty involved is a function of the idiosynchratic constraints the environment puts on it. Under some conditions, a particles position will be rather localized (such as when an electron is in a low-level orbital around a nucleus), whereas in other conditions, it may be much more spread out (such as when an electron is free roaming in a vastly empty space). Does this make sense? Is this consistent with current mainstream theory?

That is exactly what I meant.

The standard theory of wavefunction collapse describes particles existing in states of superposition, and then when they are measured they collapse into a classical state. But I think this is a little misleading. I could be wrong, so I pose this as a question. Isn't measurement never perfectly precise? Which means that whatever you're measuring (position, momentum, energy, time, etc.) is going to have some margin of error. The uncertainty principle tells us that this is not a shortcoming of our measuring instruments but with the nature of the superpositions states themselves. So if you want to measure position, you're necessarily going to have to accept the uncertainty in momentum. But when do we ever measure position precisely such that momentum is going to be infinitely uncertain? This leads me to wonder if whatever it is we're measuring is always going to have some degree of uncertainty to it (and this uncertainty is inherent in the thing we're measuring), and so if measurement collapses the wavefunction, the collapse is never going to achieve classical states - it will only approximate them. Is this sound reasoning?