To: MacDorcha
hypothetically speaking, we cant achieve Absolute 0 either, yet we're getting so close, it's frightening. (somewhere in the 1/12% range if i recall correctly) just because we haven't reached it doesnt mean it does not/cannot exist. Your word of the week is "asymptotic". Very important when dealing with discrete systems.
The theoretical reasons some things are impossible are much deeper than the level you are looking at them. Things like thermodynamics are said to be what they are not because it is a strong scientific hypothesis (e.g. the Big Bang), but as a necessary mathematical consequence of fundamental properties. You are allowed to get "close" to absolute zero as you want to, so getting "close" is not a sign that the laws of thermodynamics are about to be broken. Saying so is similar to saying that we are getting close to breaking the speed of light, and we just need to build faster rockets to do it.
We have a concept of the abstract, yet we have nothing around us that we would have learned "abstract" from. where, precisely, did our understanding of "non-existance" come from? how do we dissociate this from "un-existance"?
This isn't intended as a flame or anything like that, but you aren't really ready to go there. We're still working on the fundamentals here.
826 posted on
07/08/2004 2:10:38 PM PDT by
tortoise
(All these moments lost in time, like tears in the rain.)
To: tortoise
i wont take it as an insult, so long as you assume that you are capable of enlightening me. i have several mentors far more qualified than yourself in my life, but by all means, if you can explain how life can exist without the Divine Spark, by all means, i beseech you.
also, Saying so is similar to saying that we are getting close to breaking the speed of light, and we just need to build faster rockets to do it.
i recall a gas of sorts being used in recent years. they shot a light beam through the gas, and it reached the wall BEFORE it hit the gas itself. the gas was behaving on a quantum level, and bypassed some laws of matter that we find in natural science. if we can make LIGHT go faster than LIGHT, wouldn't it stand to reason that we could make US (maybe travel isn't the right word, but....) get from point A to point B FASTER than light?
absolute zero, keep in mind, is not a "temperature" technically, so much as a speed of molecules. we achieved the speed not by super cooling a system, but by firing photons into the molecules at an opposing vector, thus attempting to stop movement much the same way can stop a car with a brick wall. (or an intruder with a tumbling bullet from a Colt .45) the trick is honing the power to be precise and to hold the movement long enough to note and study any changes in behaviour in the molecules. both of these "impossibilities" are becomng more and more plausable.
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