Physics for the longest time equaled mechanics. By the late 19th century this discipline was developed to perfection. I don't use this term lightly. In the Lagragian and Hamiltonian reformulation of classical mechanics everything can be derived from 3 simple and intuitively understood first principles: Nature follows the same laws ... ... now as in the past. ... here as at a different position and/or orientation in space. ... on the path of least resistance i.e. getting form one state to the next with the least amount of energy exhibited (D'Alembert's principle). This formulation of classical mechanics is so stunningly and intoxicatingly beautiful that a young Max Planck was asked by one of his teachers why he would ever contemplate going into the field of physics. After all physics was completed. He was told there was nothing left to be done (other than maybe some minor third degree issues on the fringes). Fortunately he did not believe this teacher. I think what motivated Einstein was to get back to a theory that recaptured this kind of beauty that was threatened by Maxwell's equations - an aether that doesn't adhere to the equivalence of frames of reference just wouldn't do. In this sense Einstein was a reconstructist who inadvertently triggered the greatest revolution in physics due to his uncompromising rigor and an otherworldly unconventionalism.
Physics for the longest time equaled mechanics. By the late 19th century this discipline was developed to perfection. I don't use this term lightly. In the Lagragian and Hamiltonian reformulation of classical mechanics everything can be derived from 3 simple and intuitively understood first principles:
Nature follows the same laws ...
This formulation of classical mechanics is so stunningly and intoxicatingly beautiful that a young Max Planck was asked by one of his teachers why he would ever contemplate going into the field of physics. After all physics was completed. He was told there was nothing left to be done (other than maybe some minor third degree issues on the fringes). Fortunately he did not believe this teacher.
I think what motivated Einstein was to get back to a theory that recaptured this kind of beauty that was threatened by Maxwell's equations - an aether that doesn't adhere to the equivalence of frames of reference just wouldn't do.
In this sense Einstein was a reconstructist who inadvertently triggered the greatest revolution in physics due to his uncompromising rigor and an otherworldly unconventionalism.
Migeru special! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
This will not be as good as the best popular science book ever written but hopefully it will illustrate why modern physics doesn't ever seem to give straight answers anymore to even the most simple questions.
Turn in next week when I reveal what happened to your grand1-grand2-grand3...-grandn-niece 10E5 removed and may or may not get around to actually answer brodix questions.
I didn't set out to question physics, but in trying to make sense of it, various questions keep coming up and the people I ask usually brush me off. If you don't mind, I'll pose a few, just to give you an idea; My first heresy occurred about twenty years ago, when I read that the total expansion of the universe is fairly evenly matched by the total gravitational attraction/collapse, resulting in an overall flat space. It occurred to me that if this were true, the Big Bang theory didn't make sense. If expansion is balanced by gravity, than there is no overall expansion. It makes more sense as a convective cycle of expanding energy(Excuse the term), radiation, if you prefer and collapsing mass. The mechanics of how this might be eluded me, so I assumed whatever is falling into galactic black holes is emerging as vacuum fluctuation and thus while the geometry of space falls into galactic wells, it is expanding in the space between. Sort of like ocean floor slides under tectonic plates and expanding by volcanic activity along ocean ridges. In the mid '90's, in conversations on the old NYTimes science forums, someone describing himself as a physicist out of Chicago said he had a similar idea(in far more complex language) in grad school, but that the transfer medium was light and other forms of radiation, including the jets of electrons out the poles, escaping from galaxies and radiating back out across space. Apparently an adviser recommended it wasn't a good career move to pursue, though. Now obviously it's caused me no end of trouble to even try discussing this, but I don't have a career to risk. My first question to you then, is; If the Big Bang Theory is right and all the space in the universe expanded from a singularity, why doesn't the speed of light increase proportionally? Since Inflation theory argues the universe isn't just expanding into a stable void of space, but that it is space itself that expands, wouldn't our most basic measure of this space, the speed at which light crosses it, have to increase as well! Think of it this way; If two objects are a billion light years apart and the universe doubles in size, wouldn't they be two billion light years apart? The problem is that if this is the case, than it is not expanding space, it's an increasing amount of stable space. That's how the Doppler effect works anyway. The train moving away from you isn't stretching the space in between, but simply adding to it. So it would seem that if space is actually stretching, then the two objects would always appear a billion light years apart, but then the expanding universe wouldn't be apparent and the whole theory falls apart. I think the redshift is an optical effect. Just as gravity bends the path of light, it doesn't move the source around, than radiation would stretch light without actually moving the source. What if light/radiation expands out from the source as a unitary field and it is only when it connects with some material object, such as the lens of a telescope, that it "grounds out" as a quantum of light. For one thing, it would explain why stars are so clear, even though the light travels so far. If they traveled as distinct photons, it would seem the opportunities for disruption would be far greater, especially traveling through gravity fields, etc. Also it would explain the pulsing we describe as waves. Think in terms of a dripping faucet. The drips remain the same size, due to surface tension and gravity, but as you tighten the handle, they form slower. Now a bright young star that is throwing out lots of energy is blue. That would be because the photons are forming faster and so the waves are shorter. Now an older red star is throwing out less light, so these drips of light, photons, form slower and the waves are longer. What happens when they are really far away, like in another galaxy? The light is that much weaker, so that even the blue stars are shifted to the red end of the spectrum. Remember Einstein predicted the cosmological constant to balance gravity and the anomaly currently ascribed to dark energy measures close to what a cosmological constant would be. If it is an optical effect and not the acceleration of the expansion of the entire universe, it would certainly reduce the need for a lot of undetected energy. Generally most physicists just tell me to go read a book and figure out what I'm talking about, but these books talk about things I find as nonsensical as you find Star Trek physics! There is no time travel if time isn't a malleable meta-dimension, nor are multi-worlds necessary if time is the multiplicity of the future collapsing into the order of the past, as opposed to traveling that meta-dimension from the past into the future. Not to mention Inflation theory proposing the entire universe expanded to many times its visible size in a microsecond. If space pre-exists, as a stable speed of light suggests, this would create quite a shock wave. I try being logical, but physicists tell me that the logic of physics isn't common sense. I point out that thinking of time as a dimension going from past to future is common sense, since that is the basis of history and human thought. What is truly logical is understanding the events of which we are part are being created and consumed, thus going future to past.
My first heresy occurred about twenty years ago, when I read that the total expansion of the universe is fairly evenly matched by the total gravitational attraction/collapse, resulting in an overall flat space. It occurred to me that if this were true, the Big Bang theory didn't make sense. If expansion is balanced by gravity, than there is no overall expansion. It makes more sense as a convective cycle of expanding energy(Excuse the term), radiation, if you prefer and collapsing mass. The mechanics of how this might be eluded me, so I assumed whatever is falling into galactic black holes is emerging as vacuum fluctuation and thus while the geometry of space falls into galactic wells, it is expanding in the space between. Sort of like ocean floor slides under tectonic plates and expanding by volcanic activity along ocean ridges. In the mid '90's, in conversations on the old NYTimes science forums, someone describing himself as a physicist out of Chicago said he had a similar idea(in far more complex language) in grad school, but that the transfer medium was light and other forms of radiation, including the jets of electrons out the poles, escaping from galaxies and radiating back out across space. Apparently an adviser recommended it wasn't a good career move to pursue, though. Now obviously it's caused me no end of trouble to even try discussing this, but I don't have a career to risk.
My first question to you then, is; If the Big Bang Theory is right and all the space in the universe expanded from a singularity, why doesn't the speed of light increase proportionally? Since Inflation theory argues the universe isn't just expanding into a stable void of space, but that it is space itself that expands, wouldn't our most basic measure of this space, the speed at which light crosses it, have to increase as well! Think of it this way; If two objects are a billion light years apart and the universe doubles in size, wouldn't they be two billion light years apart? The problem is that if this is the case, than it is not expanding space, it's an increasing amount of stable space. That's how the Doppler effect works anyway. The train moving away from you isn't stretching the space in between, but simply adding to it. So it would seem that if space is actually stretching, then the two objects would always appear a billion light years apart, but then the expanding universe wouldn't be apparent and the whole theory falls apart.
I think the redshift is an optical effect. Just as gravity bends the path of light, it doesn't move the source around, than radiation would stretch light without actually moving the source. What if light/radiation expands out from the source as a unitary field and it is only when it connects with some material object, such as the lens of a telescope, that it "grounds out" as a quantum of light. For one thing, it would explain why stars are so clear, even though the light travels so far. If they traveled as distinct photons, it would seem the opportunities for disruption would be far greater, especially traveling through gravity fields, etc. Also it would explain the pulsing we describe as waves. Think in terms of a dripping faucet. The drips remain the same size, due to surface tension and gravity, but as you tighten the handle, they form slower. Now a bright young star that is throwing out lots of energy is blue. That would be because the photons are forming faster and so the waves are shorter. Now an older red star is throwing out less light, so these drips of light, photons, form slower and the waves are longer. What happens when they are really far away, like in another galaxy? The light is that much weaker, so that even the blue stars are shifted to the red end of the spectrum. Remember Einstein predicted the cosmological constant to balance gravity and the anomaly currently ascribed to dark energy measures close to what a cosmological constant would be. If it is an optical effect and not the acceleration of the expansion of the entire universe, it would certainly reduce the need for a lot of undetected energy. Generally most physicists just tell me to go read a book and figure out what I'm talking about, but these books talk about things I find as nonsensical as you find Star Trek physics! There is no time travel if time isn't a malleable meta-dimension, nor are multi-worlds necessary if time is the multiplicity of the future collapsing into the order of the past, as opposed to traveling that meta-dimension from the past into the future.
Not to mention Inflation theory proposing the entire universe expanded to many times its visible size in a microsecond. If space pre-exists, as a stable speed of light suggests, this would create quite a shock wave.
I try being logical, but physicists tell me that the logic of physics isn't common sense. I point out that thinking of time as a dimension going from past to future is common sense, since that is the basis of history and human thought. What is truly logical is understanding the events of which we are part are being created and consumed, thus going future to past.
The problem with physics is that the metaphors used in popular science are a poor substitute for the mathematics and this person is very confused because his understanding of the metaphors leads them to inferences which are just wrong.
The problem is one of cognitive linguistics, not of physics. How Lakoffian of me.
There is also the perceived arrogance of physicists who just tell them to go read some book or other and brush them off. The problem is that what is needed is to pick apart this person's mental models, take them down and rebuild new ones so that he stops complaining about "common sense"; that this is exceedingly difficult to do without the mathematics; and that, if you're going to use mathematics, there are books out there that do a better job of marrying mathematics and intuition than your average physicist can do in an off-the-cuff conversation.
I hope that makes sense. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
I know that light is both a wave and a particle. I can do the numbers on that stuff. I've done the experiment when you shoot laser light at a wall and get a fuzzy red point on the wall, and then put a grating in front of it and instead get a number of separare sharp points spread all over the bloody wall. Even if I understand the process, it still doesn't make any kind of sense to me.
Even things we usually think makes sense, like gravity, is often more that we've gotten used to the senselessness rather than actually understanding it. It took years and years for me to understand gravity even from a Newtonian point of view. I had my apple moment when lying on my back on a counter with my head down the drain, observing the water running "upwards". I was actually not trying to get a deeper understanding of the universe, I was just thirsty and drunk. But there you go. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
bridging these disciplines is very important for the future of science and enthusiasm to learn it, i think. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
The problem is one of cognitive linguistics, not of physics
there are two right there, if i'm not mistaken.
then there was your comment about ontology and QT, two more...
or aren't they disciplines?
you could have just said: 'it'll never happen, unless you do the math homework first', but you tried to help brodix understand why his questions were mis-premised, and in doing so, helped me inch forward.
sometimes even realising how ignorant one is, is a kind of knowledge, (how valuable i guess depends...)
;) ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
but i went to the agonist to groove on possible further discussion of your mega comment, and it's not there.
°çéé&&%$! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
just kidding...
good stuff. gracias. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
It is very interesting that you can open your comment withMath is another language and while it's wise to be fluent in it before conversing with those who are, it, like all languages, is a modeling of reality, not the irreducible basis for it, as some mathologists would have you believe.and end with I try being logical, but physicists tell me that the logic of physics isn't common sense. I point out that thinking of time as a dimension going from past to future is common sense, since that is the basis of history and human thought. What is truly logical is understanding the events of which we are part are being created and consumed, thus going future to past.Physical intuition, like common sense, is a "logic" which is based on a certain "experience". 20th century physics has gone well beyond the realm of ordinary human experience (in terms of the energies, speeds, sizes, time scales... involved) and so it is not surprising that "the logic of physics" is not "the logic common sense". You could say "the logic of common sense" is "the logic of Aristotelian physics". Then there's mathematics as language. You could use mathematics to express "the logic of common sense" quantitatively and you're have a mathematical physics quite distinct from "classical physics" (Newtonian, up to the late 19th century) and definitely different from the mathematical physics of the 20th century. The logic of both Aristotelian and Newtonian physics includes a single universal "time" to which al clocks tick. Under Einsteinian physics (special relativity: no gravity involved) there is no universal time - each observer, each physical system, carries its own clock, and they don't necessarily agree after taking different paths through spacetime. However, in Einsteinian physics there is a sense of "causality", or "past" and "future", which is unambigous, independent of the observer and which agrees with the "common sense" idea of time flowing forward. Now, it appears to me that you have a problem with the "popular science" metaphors used to communicate intuition about modern physics to a lay audience. The metaphors are a poor substitute for the mathematics and it is not guaranteed that you can reason "logically" in terms of the metaphors and reach the correct conclusions, especially if you cannot refer back to the mathematics to check your conclusion. And here we go back to the point about mathematics being a language. Mathematical physics is a way to express with precision a certain model of the physical world. Sometimes it is attempted to express the model of the physical world in "plain English". Epic misunderstandings ensue, because physics is done in mathematical language not out of perversity but out of necessity - plain English just doesn't cut it. For instance:I read that the total expansion of the universe is fairly evenly matched by the total gravitational attraction/collapse, resulting in an overall flat spaceI am familiar with the Friedman-Robertson-Walker cosmological model and I don't think this is a particularly fortunate way to summarise them in plain English. You then sayIt occurred to me that if this were true, the Big Bang theory didn't make sense. If expansion is balanced by gravity, than there is no overall expansion.Here we're confusing two meanings of the word "to balance". Or maybe the original explanation was an unfortunate rendering of the FRW cosmology into "plain english".It makes more sense as a convective cycle of expanding energy(Excuse the term), radiation, if you prefer and collapsing mass.I don't know what you mean by your model of the convective cycle. Is this a new theory or just a way of explaining Friedman-Robertson-Walker? I can't tell. It makes little sense to me. And, what's worse, now we've discussing in terms of whether the cosmological model is "more like convection" or "more like a stretching sheet of rubber" or whatever. The FRW model is what it is, and if you query it properly out pop precise answers to empirically testable questions. We cannot do this with mental pictures of convection or rubber sheets.Sort of like ocean floor slides under tectonic plates and expanding by volcanic activity along ocean ridges.The problem with this picture is, apart from the fact that it has no obvious connection with Einstein'e equations, that convection happens in fluids that are conserved, whereas spacetime (or space) is neither a fluid or any other kind of material nor is it conserved. Under the FRW model, the volume of space is not conserved except under very finely tuned choices of parameters. But that's okay since space is not a "thing" and doesn't need to be conserved.If the Big Bang Theory is right and all the space in the universe expanded from a singularity, why doesn't the speed of light increase proportionally?The speed of light is a constant of the theory. What happens when the universe expands is that the wavelength of matter fields (and, in General Relativity, "light" is a form of "matter field") is stretched out. So, if the light we observe now was emitted at a time when the universe was half the size, then the wavelength of the light we observe is half of what it was when it was emitted. This is the cosmological redshift first observed by Hubble.Since Inflation theory argues the universe isn't just expanding into a stable void of space, but that it is space itself that expands, wouldn't our most basic measure of this space, the speed at which light crosses it, have to increase as well!No, it wouldn't. The speed of light is a constant. Space is not measured by the speed of light, if you want it's measured by the round-trip travel time of light. Think of it this way; If two objects are a billion light years apart and the universe doubles in size, wouldn't they be two billion light years apart?YesThe problem is that if this is the case, than it is not expanding space, it's an increasing amount of stable space.Um, it is expanding space, that's what the cosmological model is telling you.That's how the Doppler effect works anyway. The train moving away from you isn't stretching the space in between, but simply adding to it.That's how the "velocity redshift" works. It's not how the "cosmological redshift" works. Galaxies are not moving trains - they are like dots on an inflating balloon. And the observed redshift comes from the expansion of space, not from velocity.I think the redshift is an optical effect.Actually, it's more than that, because it changes the energy carried by light - it's not just a geometrical effect like the bending of light rays.Just as gravity bends the path of light, it doesn't move the source around, than radiation would stretch light without actually moving the source.Sorry, but I can't make sense of "radiation would stretch light". What if light/radiation expands out from the source as a unitary field and it is only when it connects with some material object, such as the lens of a telescope, that it "grounds out" as a quantum of light.You could describe the quantum theory of interaction of light with matter in this way. This is not a new theory. If it helps you to think of the theory in this way, fine, but this doesn't change the theory.For one thing, it would explain why stars are so clear, even though the light travels so far.I didn't think that was a fact that required explanation. Also, since I am also not sure how your description of light propagation and interaction is different from the standard theory, I am not sure how you're supposed to be solving a problem that couldn't be solved before.That would be because the photons are forming faster and so the waves are shorter.No, there is no relationship between the rate of emission of photons and the wavelength. Wavelength is related to the energy of each individual photon, not to their rate of emission. A bright young star is hotter than an old red star, therefore it is emitting more energetic (bluer) photons.Generally most physicists just tell me to go read a book and figure out what I'm talking about, but these books talk about things I find as nonsensical as you find Star Trek physics!Well, sorry to hear that. Because the fact is that the physics that is described in those books actually describes experimental facts pretty well. Just like Euclid told a king "there is no Royal road to geometry", there is no road to talking about modern physics that avoids learning its mathematical language. Anyway, I could do worse than to refer you to this article: the meaning of Einstein's equations. It attempts to be as simple as possible This is a brief introduction to general relativity, designed for both students and teachers of the subject. While there are many excellent expositions of general relativity, few adequately explain the geometrical meaning of the basic equation of the theory: Einstein's equation. Here we give a simple formulation of this equation in terms of the motion of freely falling test particles. We also sketch some of the consequences of this formulation and explain how it is equivalent to the usual one in terms of tensors. Finally, we include an annotated bibliography of books, articles and websites suitable for the student of relativity.Good luck.
Math is another language and while it's wise to be fluent in it before conversing with those who are, it, like all languages, is a modeling of reality, not the irreducible basis for it, as some mathologists would have you believe.
The logic of both Aristotelian and Newtonian physics includes a single universal "time" to which al clocks tick. Under Einsteinian physics (special relativity: no gravity involved) there is no universal time - each observer, each physical system, carries its own clock, and they don't necessarily agree after taking different paths through spacetime.
However, in Einsteinian physics there is a sense of "causality", or "past" and "future", which is unambigous, independent of the observer and which agrees with the "common sense" idea of time flowing forward.
Now, it appears to me that you have a problem with the "popular science" metaphors used to communicate intuition about modern physics to a lay audience. The metaphors are a poor substitute for the mathematics and it is not guaranteed that you can reason "logically" in terms of the metaphors and reach the correct conclusions, especially if you cannot refer back to the mathematics to check your conclusion. And here we go back to the point about mathematics being a language. Mathematical physics is a way to express with precision a certain model of the physical world. Sometimes it is attempted to express the model of the physical world in "plain English". Epic misunderstandings ensue, because physics is done in mathematical language not out of perversity but out of necessity - plain English just doesn't cut it. For instance:
I read that the total expansion of the universe is fairly evenly matched by the total gravitational attraction/collapse, resulting in an overall flat space
It occurred to me that if this were true, the Big Bang theory didn't make sense. If expansion is balanced by gravity, than there is no overall expansion.
It makes more sense as a convective cycle of expanding energy(Excuse the term), radiation, if you prefer and collapsing mass.
Sort of like ocean floor slides under tectonic plates and expanding by volcanic activity along ocean ridges.
If the Big Bang Theory is right and all the space in the universe expanded from a singularity, why doesn't the speed of light increase proportionally?
Since Inflation theory argues the universe isn't just expanding into a stable void of space, but that it is space itself that expands, wouldn't our most basic measure of this space, the speed at which light crosses it, have to increase as well!
Think of it this way; If two objects are a billion light years apart and the universe doubles in size, wouldn't they be two billion light years apart?
The problem is that if this is the case, than it is not expanding space, it's an increasing amount of stable space.
That's how the Doppler effect works anyway. The train moving away from you isn't stretching the space in between, but simply adding to it.
I think the redshift is an optical effect.
Just as gravity bends the path of light, it doesn't move the source around, than radiation would stretch light without actually moving the source.
What if light/radiation expands out from the source as a unitary field and it is only when it connects with some material object, such as the lens of a telescope, that it "grounds out" as a quantum of light.
For one thing, it would explain why stars are so clear, even though the light travels so far.
That would be because the photons are forming faster and so the waves are shorter.
Generally most physicists just tell me to go read a book and figure out what I'm talking about, but these books talk about things I find as nonsensical as you find Star Trek physics!
Anyway, I could do worse than to refer you to this article: the meaning of Einstein's equations. It attempts to be as simple as possible
This is a brief introduction to general relativity, designed for both students and teachers of the subject. While there are many excellent expositions of general relativity, few adequately explain the geometrical meaning of the basic equation of the theory: Einstein's equation. Here we give a simple formulation of this equation in terms of the motion of freely falling test particles. We also sketch some of the consequences of this formulation and explain how it is equivalent to the usual one in terms of tensors. Finally, we include an annotated bibliography of books, articles and websites suitable for the student of relativity.
is this what prompts the 'ugh'? the fact that he's trying to jump the initiation process, trying to shortcut something that doesn't admit this kind of reduction?
or don't you like the website for some reason?
you've been threatening/promising to write that diary for yonks, these questions, long on hope and intellectual aspiration, but missing an essential key as you say, have elicited some very interesting elucidations from you.
i can see that from where you stand, this might seem as futile as throwing a one metre rope across a mile-wide canyon, but that's relativity for ya!
/snark
i admire brodix for trying to get there from here, and i think you did a great job of helping him, without bastardising your knowledge, or sneering at his 'just enough knowledge to think you can shortcut' misapprehensions.
it must be frustrating, i would feel the same way if someone wanted to learn guitar without putting in the hours, just through asking some semi-perceptive questions doesn't advance him a jot.
some initiations are not bypassable, with all the good will in the world, yet it's human nature to try and find loopholes, or should i say 'wormholes'?
:)
i hope you have better luck registering at the agonist than i did, the software just doesn't want to play nice.
i wish i understood a fraction of all this, yet something 'moves' inside my brain as i try to entertain the vastness and minusculeness of the universe, and the realisations f great minds who saw deeply into the reality that i swim in, unaware of the forces that surround me, other than through vague intuition.
i know here at ET there are some heavy hitting mathematicians, statisticians, economists and energy specialists, and yet physics is not discussed here very often, why should it be?
over at sean-paul's there was this coonversation, see, and i wondered if such could ever appear on ET, and how well it might draw you out into trying to help us curious uninitiated make a few tiny steps towards understanding.
thanks very much for trying to do what apparently may be impossible, i hope it didn't cause you any untoward stress! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
More likely the visceral dislike of seeing a description of some advanced physics that is Not Even Wrong. It evokes the same kind of aesthetic displeasure as seeing a big, ugly Land Rover driving around in the historical centre of a pretty city.
It's just... ugly. And it's frustrating, because the guy in the Land Rover most likely can't understand why people think it's ugly.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
We don't discuss a whole lot of hard science of any kind on ET - not much biology or geology or astronomy: facts get reported but not much is gained from discussion. What we will discuss is the acquisition and interpretation of the data (as, for instance, in the field of Climate Science). We discuss engineering and public policy and social science. That's partly because, despite appearances, ET is not a place for idle speculative discussion. It may be more debat- than action-oriented but the debate is eminently practical in intent. We discuss ideas, some quite fanciful, for how to organize power plants or transportation networks, but we don't discuss proposals for the next space-based telescope. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
Twice, not half. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I didn't add the point about Newton's idea of time because it could be argued it comes from Hebrew ideas of time (whereas cyclical time is associated, for instance, with Hinduism) and it would become too long a point to just insert in the comment as an edit. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
I argued that time is created by motion
I'd just ask him (but won't bother to register): What is "motion"? You just replace one axiom with another. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I realize my command of modern physics isn't sufficient to allow me to raise questions as to its veracity
As for my point about light speed, if that expanding balloon has units marked off on it, called light years, such that two galaxies are a billion light-years apart and we blow that balloon up further, the number of light-years doesn't increase.
I use the term "energy" in the Newtonian sense; That which cannot be created or destroyed and for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If I'm defining it in terms of a unit, that makes it both energy and information. A joule of energy can be expended and while the particular unit no longer exists, the energy has continued on into other forms. As I said, energy goes past to future. Information goes future to past.
generalist, metaphor-ridden, system overviewing, political-philosophical polymath leaps into unknown without benefit of insurance or sound map, to be nudged -not judged- back onto the straight and narrow by specialist, informed, data-driven, wonky-but-articulate spokesman (somewhat unwillingly, lol!).
there's a great tv show in there.
i don't 'understand' Bach the first times listening, but the poetry in the lines is immediately felt.
similarly, reading the discussion on that thread was a bit like eavesdropping on aliens from sirius discussing interstellar overdrive, but there's such majesty and loft in just allowing the words to resonate, the synaptic activity is palpable, even if the normal outcomes of linear enquiry and understanding are as far away as alpha centauri.
i appreciated jake's analogy about the SUV, and your reply about the ugliness of even trying to explain, that was illuminating, both in terms of the sheer ridiculousness of the proposition (to convince the driver of his unaesthetic choice), and in the hint of the verticality of this knowledge, the lonely-at-the top vibe, of having been initiated and seeing the ideas oversimplified for us dummies down on the plain, how pure it is up there, and how tiresome it is to see those presumptuous idiots trying to will themselves up, when anyone who has been there knows that unless you take the correct way up, you will always be muddled, and never be able to go back and check the results mathematically, therefore irrelevant, even annoying.
i also appreciated your feelings that ET is nor a place to speculate about science. i see that you feel this blog might be denigrated by serious people if posters use it too much as a playground for abstractions. apologies if i have misunderstood.
it seems that there is a huge appetite to try and grok this stuff, and yet the gap between those in the know, and yer average joe seems nigh-unbridgeable, more's the pity.
it would appear that the difficulty in mastering the levels of mathematics necessary for initiation precludes the masses being able to share in the wonder, at least until mathematics is taught in such a way that even the most innumerate can be gently handheld through addition and subtraction all the way to the intellectual himalayas of abstract mathematics.
not an easy job, pedagogically, or we'd have maths whizzes popping up like mushrooms everywhere.
i can imagine how strange it might be to write a diary from scratch about something so difficult to language in letters and words, when you know most people do not even have the abc's yet.
like writing a symphony for the deaf, or painting a masterpiece for the blind.
perhaps it's because i'm so clueless, but if i were a physics professor, and i had a student like brodix, i'd feel fortunate the guy was so into digging into his reality and trying to find points of reference others could share, letting his questions teach by 'not-even-wrongness', as representative of a layman's questions, wrongheaded perhaps, but in good faith.
but the that presupposes that people with your level of knowledge and understanding actually enjoy trying to share it, which was clearly not the case, unless 'ugh' is a sound of pleasure!
anyroads, you may never write that diary for us, and if you did, you may only have 3 or 4 comments on it because the rest didn't want to make fools of ourselves. so maybe it's not worth the candle...
meanwhile, i got what i wanted, (evil cackle...)
it took me quite a while to distinguish between a 6th chord and 6/9th, i don't imagine understanding einstein will come at any more accelerated a velocity.
brazilian bossa chords, so deliciously inside, so teasingly tangled, so sexily inverted, so languorously exciting, mmm. and that's before getting into the pantherlike surreptitiousness of the syncopation. or was it after?
maybe music and math will rejoin as one, one infinite starry night full of mystic melodies and dancing equations...
reading discussions about your field is as mysteriously moving as listening to great music.
fsm knows why! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I'm glad you're finding this entertaining. I'm not. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
Crackpot index
10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it. (10 more for emphasizing that you worked on your own.)
HomogeneityI have been following this discussion for over thirty years and there very much was an issue of how to explain why we appear at the center, due to the fact that everything, non-local, is redshifted directly away from us. The standard cosmological model is an exploration of the consequences of assuming the universe is on average homogeneous and isotropic - that is, that it looks exactly the same from every point and in every direction. This is an ansatz (simplifying assumption) of the theory, but it implies that "we appear at the center" because every point appears exactly the same, and every direction appears exactly the same, so all apparent motion appears to be radially away (or towards) the observer, any observer. By construction. That after 30 years of "following" "this discussion" you still haven't understood this basic point makes me wonder what you've actually been discussing, because the standard cosmological models can't be it. Migeru July 13, 2009 - 5:33am
I have been following this discussion for over thirty years and there very much was an issue of how to explain why we appear at the center, due to the fact that everything, non-local, is redshifted directly away from us.
This is an ansatz (simplifying assumption) of the theory, but it implies that "we appear at the center" because every point appears exactly the same, and every direction appears exactly the same, so all apparent motion appears to be radially away (or towards) the observer, any observer. By construction.
That after 30 years of "following" "this discussion" you still haven't understood this basic point makes me wonder what you've actually been discussing, because the standard cosmological models can't be it. Migeru July 13, 2009 - 5:33am
the lonely-at-the top vibe, of having been initiated and seeing the ideas oversimplified for us dummies down on the plain, how pure it is up there, and how tiresome it is to see those presumptuous idiots trying to will themselves up ... i see that you feel this blog might be denigrated by serious people if posters use it too much as a playground for abstractions ... people with your level of knowledge and understanding actually enjoy trying to share it, which was clearly not the case
...
i see that you feel this blog might be denigrated by serious people if posters use it too much as a playground for abstractions
people with your level of knowledge and understanding actually enjoy trying to share it, which was clearly not the case
Shadows in the cave, truly.
he's too attached to his "common sense".
A theoretic subatomic or galaxywide "creature" would probably have a quite differing view on "common sense" than we have... Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
When spotting apparent contradictions and oxymorons in modern science
He attacks the straw men erected for him by poor popularizers of science. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
The Agonist: Between Culture and Nature on Planet Earth
The reason Epi-cycles lasted for 1500 years was because it was far easier to add a patch whenever an anomaly came up, than to go back and rethink the entire theory. Now we have dark matter and energy. Math has to deal with the very fact that its precision can also be a weakness, if factors are overlooked. Just look at the physics PhD's who went to Wall St. and created enormous securities bubbles because they didn't consider the pedestrian element of declining house prices.
The trouble happens when you take the models and ignore the limitations because you damn well want to.
The problem with that approach are twofold:
First, the quintessential problem with a statement that is "not even wrong" is that it cannot be used to educate anybody about physics. If it could, it would simply be wrong. A "not even wrong" statement needs to be deconstructed at the level of epistemology. Which gets tiresome. And usually generates more heat than light.
Second, brodix, from what I've read of him, is not trying to dig into reality - he seems to be into constructing a mental framework that permits him to fix reality around an ide fixé. That is not terribly helpful when you are attempting to communicate.
It is one thing to say "I don't understand how [pop-science explanation] works." This is stating that the populariser has failed (whether because he is a poor populariser or because the subject is inherently difficult). It is quite another to say "I think this theory is wrong, because [pop-science explanation] doesn't work, for these reasons." That is quarrelling with the theory itself, which is not for the faint of heart.
This difference is not a minor semantic quibble or a matter of taste: The former statement admits to the knowledge that what you have read is not the actual theory. The latter does not. It means that the former case permits the misconceptions to be cleared up simply by the device of explaining the theory better, while in the latter case you have to deconstruct his wrong conception of what the theory says before you can even begin to explain the real theory.
It is, to take a more familiar case, the difference between explaining how the economy works to an interested layman and explaining how the economy works to an established neoclassical economist.
Now obviously it's caused me no end of trouble to even try discussing this, but I don't have a career to risk. ... Generally most physicists just tell me to go read a book and figure out what I'm talking about ...
Generally most physicists just tell me to go read a book and figure out what I'm talking about ...
..., but these books talk about things I find as nonsensical as you find Star Trek physics!
