Posted on 08/09/2009 12:08:19 PM PDT by LibWhacker
If you had, I would have said the answer was:
Two - one to climb the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.
You were caught in a Schrodinger’s Cats 22 situation.
parsy, whose wave function has collapsed
I’d been swimming in a luxurious, long, deep pool in the San Fernando Valley at. 83 degrees by a thermometer in the water while 100+ in the air.
Sitting in the Sun, feet dangling in the water, I could see the light’s refracted patterns (Snell’s law) from it’s surface along the bottom of the pool.
I’d seen video documentary mock-ups to show how existence “looks” at or near the Planck Scale. Yet here and now was an example even clearer.
Envisioning part of the pool bottom as a slice of “quantum space”, filaments fleeted into - and out of - existence, each having been created by that gone before. And out of them bits of brightness (again, reflections of the Sun along the surface, cast on the pool bottom and sides) would move along the length of each segment. Intersecting with their ends such “strings”- quickly dissipating here, and reappearing there - danced on with each such interaction.
Moreover, there would enter waves of interference - by admittedly moving my legs, in fact simulating energy from outside the system - that would yield to the “strings” an even greater sense of overall excitation.
In a stretch, this might serve as a representation of the “Uncertainty Principle” where at the quantum level, “virtual” entities come into and go out of existence, yet presumably sum to an “actualization” of reality, which however even billions of years hence, may as likely decay and zap back into the void from whence they came.
And I’d bet too that this could all be worked out mathematically.But, as I said, it’s merely a representation of such conditions...which is all that can ever be achieved at the Planck Scale anyway.
So, as this lazy day’s imaginings gave rise to other waxings, back into the water I went, even in that second of submergence, back to childhood again.
But these guys interest me. They are all about thinking outside the box, and the academic box is as stubbornly orthodox and self-protective as the Communist Party USA.
Great site, too. Great thought experiments, based on better data, like a four minute separation in the arrival of cosmic rays of different energies from a galactic flare at extra-galactic scale distance.
I wonder if it's occurred to anyone that gravity, unlike electro-magnetism, propagates instantly; that it is an echo of super-position left over from the earliest states of energy. That would rock the conference, wouldn't it?
And would this be the means by which physically separated entangled particles are able to "communicate" instantaneously?
You found it. Check with the Nobel people. If they can give Al Gore a prize I’m sure they’d consider that. :)
The earth is about 45 minutes away from Jupiter. Wouldn't we be being tugged by Jupiter from where Jupiter was 45 minutes ago, rather than where Jupiter is now?
Is this effect so small that it is still unmeasureable or has someone already looked into it?
Just wondering.
To observe things in our solar system we use light waves. Any observation of gravity would travel to us at the same rate. By the time we see it, it’s happened essentially. Indirect stellar measurements with much larger masses make it easier. If you want to test say, the concept of a battery for instance. It’s much easier to confirm a car battery’s got juice as opposed to a watch battery. It’s a matter of scale. Binary stars decaying in orbit with respect to each other are much easier to measure as the forces are larger and the decay rate itself is dependent on gravity.
Just thought I should add. The models used to calculate the speed of gravity through gravitational dampening with respect to binary pulsars, I don’t agree with personally. It’s the best we’ve got at this point. Like you implied earlier. Theorists need more people who think outside the box. The boxes we’re in are leading to dead ends at this point.
So long as its not that dang box with the cat and flask of poison in it, I guess we're OK.
>>Camelia’s doubly special relativity posits that
>>there is also a minimum length—the Planck
>>length—below which space cannot contract.
But if spatial density is variant, then so too are units of distance - including the Planck Length.
I’m sticking with Occam’s Razor and assuming the gravitational lensing observed and associated with hypothetical dark matter is due, not to “dark matter”, but to variation in spatial density.
If space is to energy as energy is to space, then it is reasonable to assume there are areas of space where the energy density is not sufficient to manifest the strong forces required for the formation of matter - but still strong enough to manifest the weak force of gravity, observable as gravitational lensing.
>>But when he got to the other side Bohr was there also.
Probably.
You were in the pool? Okay, a little jealous...
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