What's the Big Deal About that New Physics Discovery I Keep Hearing About?

[Greg Langelius *]

Why don't you take a look online at the work required to become an astrophysicist. Make a list of all the courses, first undergrad then graduate school. Then add in a bunch of years of research and consider that at that point in your career what you know about the facts of the big bang is just about dick.

MTT, actually that's good advice, and I hope I can maintain a decent commitment to following through.

Considering that my formal education has never exceeded 12th grade, and that much of the bookwork came out of books copyrighted in the 1940's and 1950's, just about everything I have formally learned on the subjects of astronomy and physics have been 'disproved', this does not leave me with much faith in formal learning. That does not mean the sum of my learning is obsolete, it just means that I've been limited to reading and watching the products of popular science providers. Honestly, this leaves far more new questions than it ever answers.

My reasons for not completing my formal education stem from being drafted to fight a war, and what followed being the tariffs associate with young parenthood, and attempting to support a family in a technical field with the status of a HS grad. For all of that, I did not do badly at all.

I never really understood why retired folks took college courses, but I think I'm beginning to get it. Being 68, and really not being 'into' the classroom mindset these days, I'll be seeking my knowledge from popular, free sources. The odds really don't favor my ever being able to complete this project, but that's not a real point; improving the mind has always been an open ended path. Putting up with negativity is nothing new, either.

I agree, 500, my panties did get in a wad; but in your case, the only thing I need apologize about is my language, and that apology goes to the forum. Besides, how would one go about apologizing to a pseudonym?

Greg

 

[MarkCO]

Greg, a student is always learning, whether in the classroom, life, hard knocks wherever. I had a Prof in Grad school that, at 86, took the summer to go to UofAz to learn Pro-Engineer and then the next semester, taught a 5000 level course on it. That same prof told me, when I go into a factory, or onto a job site, look for the grissled old guy with calloused hands and a red rag in his pocket...make him your friend and he will guide you. There is book learnin', application of book learnin', common sense, mechanical aptitude, pereception, etc that goes into the portfolio of an "educated person." With a PhD father who worked on Apollo 13, SkyLab, the MX missile, and at facilities including Los Alamos, White Sands, SERI and JPL, I can tell you that a PhD does not make anyone "educated" just learned. To be frank, the loss of the true educated person is one of the sad downfalls of America. The VAST majority of engineers I interact with that are under 35 can build and program the computer, but they have never built an engine, a house, changed a faucet, etc. These are the guys designing bridges and power systems and rocket motors now! Part of the problem is the lack of parents teaching kids, part is the computerization of society, but most is at the feet of the secondary education system that has been largely led by those with only the book learnin' and no understanding of the application of those principles in real life.

All that said, you could probably teach people a lot more about life and living than any PhD in Physics or Cosmology. Cheers!

 

[Dogtown]

For the record, my formal education ended at grade 12 too - I joined the Army as soon as I turned 17. And a very important lesson I learned was that you don't need formal education to be educated, so to speak. Sure, it helps, but it's not 100% necessary. With proper motivation, knowing where to look for answers and lots of effort, you can educate yourself. That's exactly how I educated myself with computer graphics the first time I ETSd in the 90s. I worked really fucking hard at it and it was difficult to learn the required math and later on physics when I only had a formal education up to high school algebra. But I did it anyway and over time learned not just enough to get by but enough to know where to find answers to the never ending work-related questions that would come up and more importantly the confidence to know that I could do it. The only downside was that I didn't get a proper foundational education, which painfully reveals itself sometimes when I'm trying to figure out an advection problem with fluid dynamics and the guy with the master's degree says, "oh dude, you forgot to multiply by delta time" (x += u(x+u(x)*0.5*dt)*dt; ) I'd facepalm, but can I really blame myself?

How does this fit into Astronomy and Cosmology? Well, I have an interest in both, but no formal education in either, yet the math and physics I learned in an unrelated field has made understanding them so much easier. And I'm motivated to understand them, so I stay on top of both fields regularly. Some people stay on top of the machining world or farming - I do the same with the Universe. Of course it means there are obviously huge limits to what I know about both, and I realize that, but at least I have enough of an understanding that it's not gibberish to me and I know where to look for the answers (ie research papers). And you'd be surprised how forthcoming research folks can be about their work. On more than one occasion I've emailed the author(s) of a paper to ask them about a specific area that was well over my head and they went out of their way to explain and educate me in the process.

So bottom line, you're never too old to learn and there's nothing that says you have to get a formal education in a field you want to understand. That said, I'm hoping to use my GI Bill to go to a gunsmithing school as I have zero intention of trying to build precision rifles the same way I learned computer graphics.

 

[TNT]

For anyone interested, I started re-learning with the MIT open course curriculum. It's actually kind of aggravating after looking at what is offered to know that nowadays, you are just paying $50-100K for a piece of paper and nothing else. Take a look, lot of great stuff on here:
MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials

 

[shankster..]

 

[Sako man]

For anyone interested, I started re-learning with the MIT open course curriculum. It's actually kind of aggravating after looking at what is offered to know that nowadays, you are just paying $50-100K for a piece of paper and nothing else. Take a look, lot of great stuff on here:
MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials

There is a grand fallacy surrounding higher education. I worked as an Assistant Professor for six years and had worked with many PHD's in that time, few of whom could wipe their own asses. A piece of paper or years in academia is little indicator of aptitude, intelligence, or ability to problem solve.

Addendum: I have to add that as a degree can be an indicator it's by no means an absolute. I received the vast majority of my training and knowledge after school. And frankly I felt bad for the students at my work who would go into debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars with little prospects of a job after graduating.

And TNT thanks for the material, I will be sure to peruse over it when I have another life's time.

 

[Greg Langelius *]

For anyone interested, I started re-learning with the MIT open course curriculum. It's actually kind of aggravating after looking at what is offered to know that nowadays, you are just paying $50-100K for a piece of paper and nothing else. Take a look, lot of great stuff on here:
MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials

Thank you immensely for this link; I have bookmarked it and placed it on my favorites bar. I expect to put it to good use.

Greg

 

[pinsandpitons]

... the more far fetched and persuasive the proponent, the larger the bandwagon they tend to lead. Especially when the greatest proportion of substantiation comes from pure speculation.

For example, consider the entire dispute over whether or not information becomes unavailable to the visible Universe once it enters a Black Hole. On one side is a physicist who started life a plumber asking us to think in terms of propellers, taking exception to the work of Steven Hawking, whose only audible vocabulary seems to consist of various versions of 'Nananananana'. First of all, I understand that Prof Hawking is quite fluent with written communications, and that his counterpart has all the required background to speak with authority, but even so, it would seem that when that when Morgan Freeman attempts to elucidate the context for the dispute, I seriously think he has trouble keeping a straight face. I know I do, but this is the sort of blue-sky wisdom we are being asked to accept at face value.
Greg

Wait, what? I've been following the innuendo and gentle mud slinging here and I, for one, heard you the first time Greg about the "scientific establishment" ginning up conclusions. I don't buy it, but I understood your argument. Then there's the above... most likely I'm unaware of the dispute between a plumber turned physicist, Dr. Hawking and Morgan Freeman, so it would might help to point me in a direction that I could learn about what you referenced. Are you accusing Dr. hawking of a one sylable vocabulary or the plumber turned physicist?

And to address the blue sky wisdom, face value comment that is near the core of your complaint (as I understand it), no one is asking you to take things on faith, ie "just trust me", but unless one is willing to do the hard labor of reconfirming for themselves all the hard science starting at mechanical advantage (levers) all the way through to results from a home-built large hadron collider, you're going to have to take at least some of it for face value. I'm an EMT and reasonably well educated with a BS degree, but I take at face value the recommendations given to me by my medical director regarding pharmacology. Is this appreciably different from a particle physicist telling me there exists something called a neutron? To my eyes, picking apart matter into quarks and leptons is as faith based (for me personally) as looking back in time 14.38 billion years to a thing cosmologists are calling 'the big bang'. But I'm willing to give the folks who collectively came up with these ideas the benefit of the doubt. I'll follow them closely and try to stay current as you said.

I value your wisdom and contributions to this site, so please don't count me as someone implying ignorance and such, but I have a different take on all this, and only wanted to respond to the comments you have made. Bottom line, I have faith in the peer review proccess. Yes it's competitive, that's one reason it's powerful. DIS-proving some theory is as press garnering as jumping on the bandwagon with the newest.

 

[500grains]

I agree, 500, my panties did get in a wad; but in your case, the only thing I need apologize about is my language, and that apology goes to the forum. Besides, how would one go about apologizing to a pseudonym?

Greg Looseanus,

Your insistence on incivility would be perplexing if I did not attribute it to the same lack of emotional control which led to your original outburst. If you insist on incivility, it will be returned in kind.

 

[MosesTheTank]

The plumber turned physicist is Leonard Susskind. He actually gives Hawking a lot of credit in his lectures.

If we're going to be defined by how we earned money when we were 16 then I'm a coonass fish monger who scraped the bottom of Bayou Loutre to pay for gas, beer, and shotgun shells.

 

[Greg Langelius *]

Time to stop feeding trolls. Have it all your way, folks.

Greg

 

[Dogtown]

The plumber turned physicist is Leonard Susskind. He actually gives Hawking a lot of credit in his lectures

And he was a plumber when he was young who went to school and became a physicist and decades later argued against Hawking's position on information conservation. It's not like Hawking was such an idiot that a plumber outsmarted him.

 

[Sako man]

Along the same lines, this is really neat.

6-billion-year-old quasar spinning nearly as fast as physically possible | Ars Technica

 

[TNT]

I like reading up on all the theories we are now generating, but it's so hard to keep up with them all. I think I still never really made it through a basic understanding of what string theory is even saying. I will contend that I think in the future, we will have a great realization. Either most of the stuff we have been working on, we will be able to confirm, or we will realize that we have followed one or two narrow paths so far down the rabbit hole and they ended up as dead ends. Because we have advanced so far in our deduced knowledge, basic assumptions that these theories depend on are taken as gospel because they are taught in secondary schools without even a hint of explanation. "It's just the way things are." Well, if one of these basic principles turns out to be an incomplete understanding, we will have deduced many incomplete or incorrect things.

I have some thoughts on how the universe works, and they may very well be wrong, but I can at least agree that the current models we use are good enough. Take for instance randomness. I really don't think there is such thing as randomness except as introduced by a living entity's choice. That possibility in choice is what propogates that which we call randomness. If I manufacture a billion widgets with a machine that isn't broken, the widgets will fall into a random distribution of sizes; however, I contend that if we could know perfectly the state of all the matter and the interactions, we could know exactly what size the next widget that comes out of the die would be. It is possible to know, except with the tools we have today. Randomness as we use it in things like nuclear reactions is an illusion, but because of the numbers of things we are working with, the random model is much much easier to calculate and is plenty accurate. Then we get to plank length and the discrete universe. I don't buy that either. There is no infimum of length or time. I think it just can't be seen or measured. I understand that this ends up coming from (among other things) assumptions about quantized energy states. Well, those may be an incomplete understanding as well. After all, a lot of the basics were assumed, and then "verified" experimentally, with instruments that may or may not be able to discern beyond the levels of accuracy that the current theory predicts. I still think of the universe as a continuous space (or set), with discrete elements.

Lastly, for a real mind-warp moment, check out Godel's incompleteness theorems. Start making you wonder if any of it is unquestionably true or not. All this being said, I still think there is a well defined universe independent from opinion. There is some way that it works, some absolute truth that we continue to try and discover. And, it sure is an interesting one.

 

[EventHorizon]

For the record, my formal education ended at grade 12 too - I joined the Army as soon as I turned 17. And a very important lesson I learned was that you don't need formal education to be educated, so to speak. Sure, it helps, but it's not 100% necessary. With proper motivation, knowing where to look for answers and lots of effort, you can educate yourself. That's exactly how I educated myself with computer graphics the first time I ETSd in the 90s. I worked really fucking hard at it and it was difficult to learn the required math and later on physics when I only had a formal education up to high school algebra. But I did it anyway and over time learned not just enough to get by but enough to know where to find answers to the never ending work-related questions that would come up and more importantly the confidence to know that I could do it. The only downside was that I didn't get a proper foundational education, which painfully reveals itself sometimes when I'm trying to figure out an advection problem with fluid dynamics and the guy with the master's degree says, "oh dude, you forgot to multiply by delta time" (x += u(x+u(x)*0.5*dt)*dt; ) I'd facepalm, but can I really blame myself?

How does this fit into Astronomy and Cosmology? Well, I have an interest in both, but no formal education in either, yet the math and physics I learned in an unrelated field has made understanding them so much easier. And I'm motivated to understand them, so I stay on top of both fields regularly. Some people stay on top of the machining world or farming - I do the same with the Universe. Of course it means there are obviously huge limits to what I know about both, and I realize that, but at least I have enough of an understanding that it's not gibberish to me and I know where to look for the answers (ie research papers). And you'd be surprised how forthcoming research folks can be about their work. On more than one occasion I've emailed the author(s) of a paper to ask them about a specific area that was well over my head and they went out of their way to explain and educate me in the process.

So bottom line, you're never too old to learn and there's nothing that says you have to get a formal education in a field you want to understand. That said, I'm hoping to use my GI Bill to go to a gunsmithing school as I have zero intention of trying to build precision rifles the same way I learned computer graphics.

The American Dream.

 

[EventHorizon]

I'm sure I'll earn a 'lighten up Francis' somewhere but this is just bullshit. There's a difference between making fun of people and a culture that is ridiculous (the G crap and so on) and applying that stereotype to someone who is clearly light years (pardon the pun) away from it.

 

[Dogtown]

TNT, I think most physicists take the idea of randomness quite seriously because everything we know about the quantum level of matter tells us that we live in a probabilistic Universe and not a deterministic one. The further you break things down to fundamental levels, the more we see randomness - it just seems to be a feature of the Universe. At larger scales, things even out and we generally see things appearing to be more deterministic, but occasionally that randomness can have large-scale implications.

 

[TNT]

TNT, I think most physicists take the idea of randomness quite seriously because everything we know about the quantum level of matter tells us that we live in a probabilistic Universe and not a deterministic one. The further you break things down to fundamental levels, the more we see randomness - it just seems to be a feature of the Universe. At larger scales, things even out and we generally see things appearing to be more deterministic, but occasionally that randomness can have large-scale implications.

I have this discussion with people at work all the time, and I'm generally on the losing side. I just don't follow that at the base level, things are based on probabilities or randomness. I cannot prove, and I cannot even give good reason for believing the following: Given the same initial conditions, two particles will interact the same way every single time. We see differences in interactions despite supposed identical starting conditions because the starting conditions are never really identical. Even on the macro level, there is variation in everything that can be modeled with randomness, but that's because there are so many interactions going on with so many different conditions that we couldn't possibly evaluate them to the level of accuracy necessary to know completely what is going on. For these "repeatable" experiments that prove randomness is inherent in physical interactions, how do we really know that this time, when we activated the laser, there wasn't a tiny unseeable dust mote angstroms in size that impacted the beam intensity that delayed the threshhold amount of light to the sensor by trillionths of a second that ....

I think the major problem is that I can't get my head around micro and macro objects behaving fundamentally differently. Heck, if I ever start thinking too much about the strong nuclear force, I will more than likely start going crazy. Really, what is going on there??? It just seems counter-intuitive that the rules seem to change - if they do, what is the threshhold, or what are the different sets to which different rules apply? I'm with Einstein and Schrodinger on this one:

"You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gunpowder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation."

The cat in the box translates the micro behavior into a macro system, and would therefore force the macro to behave like the micro. Doesn't make sense unless the micro is the true behavior, and the macro is the illusion - we simplify it because of the scale, things tend to smooth/average out and the deterministic solution is a good enough approximation. I have a hard time believing that, but maybe that's the reality of it. Still, again with Einstein - I don't think the universe is a big game of dice. And for that matter, we could probably know the exact outcome of a roll of a die if we knew all the variables involved with enough precision, but for our purposes, the random model works well enough.

 

[Dogtown]

You should probably talk to someone involved in Quantum Mechanics, as I only have a cursory understanding and such small scale physics isn't part of my work domain (which since we fake everything in movies, Newtonian Physics is often good enough). But that is the area where the probabilistic property of the Universe reveals itself. Take for example the electron and the old model of how it orbits the nucleus but today we know that it's actually a probabilistic cloud of orbits. And the Uncertainty Principle really does appear to be a property of the Universe that allows for the smallest scales to become highly probabilistic clouds of matter that is difficult to pin down to precision. Personally, I suspect this has more to do with the nature of Quantum Field Theory and how particles are really just excitations of fields, but I fully realize that there are huge problems with that - it's just the educated guess I like the most. And it should be a clue to realize it was Heisenberg's math that revealed the Uncertainty Principle, not initially observational data.



And yes, the Strong nuclear force is bizarre, but the Universe isn't required to make sense to us nor does it owe us any comfort in the process.

Okay, it's Friday late afternoon here in NZ and my brain is fried....have fun....

 

[Clark]

In 1985 and engineer VP, Bruce Dippie, said to me there was an Heisenberg uncertainty principal for management, anything monitored improved.
My wife has been monitoring me for a long time with little improvement, but I am a heavy particle.

 

[Sako man]

I like reading up on all the theories we are now generating, but it's so hard to keep up with them all. I think I still never really made it through a basic understanding of what string theory is even saying. I will contend that I think in the future, we will have a great realization. Either most of the stuff we have been working on, we will be able to confirm, or we will realize that we have followed one or two narrow paths so far down the rabbit hole and they ended up as dead ends. Because we have advanced so far in our deduced knowledge, basic assumptions that these theories depend on are taken as gospel because they are taught in secondary schools without even a hint of explanation. "It's just the way things are." Well, if one of these basic principles turns out to be an incomplete understanding, we will have deduced many incomplete or incorrect things.

I have some thoughts on how the universe works, and they may very well be wrong, but I can at least agree that the current models we use are good enough. Take for instance randomness. I really don't think there is such thing as randomness except as introduced by a living entity's choice. That possibility in choice is what propogates that which we call randomness. If I manufacture a billion widgets with a machine that isn't broken, the widgets will fall into a random distribution of sizes; however, I contend that if we could know perfectly the state of all the matter and the interactions, we could know exactly what size the next widget that comes out of the die would be. It is possible to know, except with the tools we have today. Randomness as we use it in things like nuclear reactions is an illusion, but because of the numbers of things we are working with, the random model is much much easier to calculate and is plenty accurate. Then we get to plank length and the discrete universe. I don't buy that either. There is no infimum of length or time. I think it just can't be seen or measured. I understand that this ends up coming from (among other things) assumptions about quantized energy states. Well, those may be an incomplete understanding as well. After all, a lot of the basics were assumed, and then "verified" experimentally, with instruments that may or may not be able to discern beyond the levels of accuracy that the current theory predicts. I still think of the universe as a continuous space (or set), with discrete elements.

Lastly, for a real mind-warp moment, check out Godel's incompleteness theorems. Start making you wonder if any of it is unquestionably true or not. All this being said, I still think there is a well defined universe independent from opinion. There is some way that it works, some absolute truth that we continue to try and discover. And, it sure is an interesting one.

TNT, great post.

As I have stated. If your ever lucky enough to speak to a theoretical physicist most of the really brilliant ones will admit that they know very little in certainty as much is still in theory state. Though many things are quantifiable we are not sure about how energy and matter work. We still don't know what the weak force of gravity is. As well, our family friend said light could be a particle on tuesdays and a wave on wednesdays. Thus hilighting evan a theoretical and optical physicist can't tell you what light really is.

Yes we will continue to learn and explore, curiosity is in our DNA, this is another thing no one has a good answer for, why are we so curious. My father once told me that most practical physicists are agnostic where there are many theoretical physicists whom have some sort of faith. Now I'm not saying there is any case for humans riding dinosaurs but the people who know, realize they don't know. There are few absolutes and sometimes skepticism is warranted.

If anyone is interested in an excellent primer on physics you have to check out the Feynman lecture series. They are fantastic reads and geared not just for mathematics and physics majors but layman such as myself.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics Website

Lastly, if you want mind bending look up spooky theory, yes quantum entanglement.

 

[GAP308]

Hell man, this post could make a guy want to sit back some some marijuana and ponder the universe. I am very surprised at the number of uber-nerds here on this forum.

I did smoke and stumbled on to this thread. I think because I can pronounce the words that I know what is being said. It's funny to me how I can be so fascinated when I know so little. Same thing happened in college. I was in a bookstore (Less than 10 times in 8 years) and picked up a quantum physics book. Knew nothing about it but 45 minutes later I was still reading and fascinated.

Are you really surprised a bunch of individuals who get excited about load development are uber-nerds?

 

[Dogtown]

As I have stated. If your ever lucky enough to speak to a theoretical physicist most of the really brilliant ones will admit that they know very little in certainty as much is still in theory state. Though many things are quantifiable we are not sure about how energy and matter work. We still don't know what the weak force of gravity is. As well, our family friend said light could be a particle on tuesdays and a wave on wednesdays. Thus hilighting evan a theoretical and optical physicist can't tell you what light really is.

I think you're really oversimplifying here, unfortunately. There is no certainty in science, only levels of validity and there are plenty of theories that have stood the test of time and will always remain theories because they are predictive models and not dogma. Some are just so well tested and confirmed that their level of validity is taken for granted yet they can always be tested. Scientific Laws are different in that they are observations that are always repeatable like the First Law of Thermodynamics or the Conservation of Energy, yet they do not describe a mechanism or define a framework that explains behavior and allows for testable predictions to be made. That's what scientific theories are for and because they will constantly be refined by further exploration and testing, they never remain static and proven 100%.

Yes, we don't know exactly what gravity is for the simple reason that we don't yet have a quantum description of it to fit into the highly successful Standard Model of Particle Physics (theory). But General Relativity has very successfully explained (and predicted) the behavior of gravity; so it's not a complete mystery that we'll somehow never solve, leaving scientists to just come up with wild guesses. If we didn't understand it, we couldn't send probes to other planets. The issue know is about finding the force carrier particle for gravity and seeing how it would fit into a quantum model; and there are a few different flavors of quantum gravity being developed and tested (Loop Quantum Gravity shows the most promise, in my opinion). To bring this thread full circle, I stated in the OP that one of the consequences of the potential discovery of primordial gravitational waves due to Inflation means that there would have to be a quantum component to gravity - that's huge!

And we know that light is electromagnetic radiation that manifests itself as both a wave and a particle. That's covered very well by the Standard Model and confirmed all the time by observation and data. The fact that as a theory the Standard Model works so successfully at such high precision means we understand quite well how matter and energy work. Do we know everything? Of course not, but having gaps in our knowledge doesn't suddenly throw into question everything we know.

 

[Greg Langelius *]

Well, nobody likes being wrong; but with so many folks insisting I am, I need to take them seriously. Dogtown, I defer to your wisdom.

While I can accept being wrong, it is less acceptable being on the receiving end of gratuitous antagonism and insult. There is something to be learned from that as well, and it is that when you get too close to shit, some of it is likely to stick.

While I do believe I could learn more from this topic, it is not in my nature to read in silence, and I seriously doubt that anything I may say beyond this point would be taken at face value.

If this house needs cleaning, it is clearly not my house to clean, and I can already see how seriously a clean house is desired here.

I can have no more to add on this subject.

Greg

 

[TNT]

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP) is quite interesting, and it really messes with my head when I see how it's not an experimentally derived idea - it does come from the math. BUT, that math is dependent on a few key assumptions, in particular, the quantization of energy states, which I have to say is not entirely believable to me. Of course, my idea is actually less believable if we are considering what we have observed in the universe, but the problem with deductive logic is that if you make a misstep anywhere along the way, everything that follows is in jeopardy. Because we cannot guarantee we haven't misstepped, then there is still the question on all that follows, and so the reason for the term "theory" instead of "fact." So, it could turn out one day, we get to the end of this path we have taken in quantum mechanics and realize that we were close, but we're missing something, and only by going in a totally different direction would we get to the truth (or closer to it).

What if energy states are not quantized, and rather than being limited to discrete values, they can take any value in a range, but we can only observe certain values in that range? What if it's a heavily skewed distribution of energy states such that our measurement accuracy can only resolve certain values, but there is some small fraction of a percentage of values that actually fall between those distinct energy states? I think that an electron is observed to behave in accordance with the HUP because we don't have the tools to resolve any better result. I think that at a given moment in time, an electron has a definite momentum and position, but that we can't know it simply because we have no way of detecting those properties without affecting the system (and this is where I do think there may be some impact of the observer effect to give us results that support the HUP). Think for a bit about standing by a mirror, facing away from it. Is the image in the mirror that of your backside? Sure it is, but there's no way for you to verify that if all you have is that one mirror and yourself. If you turn around to check, the image changes. It's a fairly weak analogy, and I admit that most of this discussion and my opinion is born of my own ignorance on the topics. To consider the plausibility of my scenario, it is highly unlikely that you would have observer effects that just so happen to result in the exact behavior predicted by the HUP, unless there was some direct dependency between the two that we have not figured out.

I really commend all the people working on these questions of reality, developing a further understanding of the world around us. In the end, I think we have gotten to a point where what we have is more than good enough for modeling our world, but I'm happy that we're never satisfied with "good enough." Sure, we can use these tools we have developed to predict observable behavior, but I want an understanding that is perfect, just because. Keep on learning, keep on trading ideas, keep on working out that brain muscle. It's a truly wondrous gift to have a brain that can think the way we do.

 

[shankster..]

I'm sure I'll earn a 'lighten up Francis' somewhere but this is just bullshit. There's a difference between making fun of people and a culture that is ridiculous (the G crap and so on) and applying that stereotype to someone who is clearly light years (pardon the pun) away from it.

I understand EH. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of my idols and I watch all of him I can get. I just thought it was a funny and ironic picture quote.

 

[EventHorizon]

I got it. Thanks.

Now, if the picture was of the jester with the clocks from Public Enemy...

Cheers

 

[Sako man]

I think you're really oversimplifying here, unfortunately.

Dog. Perhaps you meant to say fortunately, as in for the sake of brevity and the sanity of the threads readership, yes I have simplified.

Ok, I would relent that Newtonian and general relativity observations of natural forces are quantifiable. Thus in agreement with you. But as an example of what I was referring too, we do not know even if there is a carrier quanta for gravity or other forces. If you're a Feynman fan then yes it's a particle of sorts "gravitons." But this is not even completely adherent to the standard model, and which existence has yet to be proven. Yes it works in formula but once again is this resolute or still in the realm of postulate? This is why these things are referred too as models, because the behavior is as such it fits into this dynamic. Now, enter quantum mechanics and QED, behold realms where theory is king. Ah oversimplification…. for sure...totally. But this is a zone where there are particles and interactions that have yet to be identified even though we can see them in hypotheses and action. Phew, possibly the most massive understatement I have made.

You might get a kick out of this. Below, one of my fathers inventions. One was donated to UAT and is buried over two miles deep in Antarctica, it is being used to help locate and prove the existence of neutrinos. Needless to say he's a super smart guy and I don't pretend to be anywhere near his level of intelligence or understanding. Most would agree with my statement.

Products « Radiation Power Systems, Inc.

cool thread.

 

[500grains]

Along the same lines, this is really neat.

6-billion-year-old quasar spinning nearly as fast as physically possible | Ars Technica

Interesting stuff - thanks for the link.