Sorry to all you Coulter groupies, but if Ann were a physicist, and I weren't a brunette man, I might post pictures of her too.
Posted on 05/25/2004 8:01:29 PM PDT by Ronzo
Edited on 06/07/2005 12:27:06 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Can you access the flash of emancipation you felt the first time you were able to stay up on a bike or propel yourself through the water? Can you remember the way your new knowledge enhanced your life? And can you recall the gratitude you felt toward those people who had the skill and the patience to pass that knowledge along to you?
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Many years ago, just for fun, I ran an experiment on my own laundry to see what happened to lost socks. I used a permenant ink marker to assign a number & letter to each pair of socks (they were mostly white tube socks) to see how many I would loose over time. (Yes, I was board...)
The experiment ended a miserable failure after three years: I never lost a single sock.
How did you realize they were parallel universes, and not OUR universe...
I agree fizziwig. Normally I don't post science articles because they are either too technical or too arrogant! But this guy seems like he actually has humility, and a gift for explaining things in everyday language....
Thanks for the quick book review Tex! I was thinking of getting a copy of this myself. I'm fascinated by physics, but am put-off by the math, which I don't really understand all that well, if at all!
Give me that extra time dimension then, Alamo-Girl! It seems clear to me that a more elaborated concept of time, “a much better theory” needs to be found in order to explain such things as duality, non-locality, and superposition, which have been observed under laboratory conditions. Even under laboratory conditions, these phenomena would seem to require superluminal velocities in order to occur. I gather the speed of light is posited as a universal constant/constraint in relativity theory, such that were two entangled particles from “opposite ends of the universe” to get together for a spontaneous “love fest,” and this happens instantly, spontaneously, we can’t explain under either Newtonian or Einsteinian theory how that could have happened.
In such scenario, travel time would be nil; time would seem to be a null factor with respect to such effects – if we understand time as measurable in terms of particular configurations of velocity and mass, moving from point A to point B through a topography featuring other “massive” (more or less) objects capable of “exerting gravity effects on passing bodies.” And thereby causing the space through which the primary “space-time body” is moving “to curve.” Which would seem to suggest that a more massive body can affect the mass and velocity of “passing” objects moving relative to it.
I’m with you, Alamo-Girl: Geometry is the very language we need to describe such relations. Geometry seems to propose most useful language for describing the features of the reality that man and nature seem to be commonly, collectively subject to.
I figure that the various geometries as originally conceived and described were personal visions – from Euclid and his ancestors in Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Plato, et al., to the present day. That is, a novel geometry elaborated represents the singular vision of the particular geometer who articulated it. And in an honest culture, such products of mind and spirit are not any kind of fly by night routine.
Just to give an example: Reimann conceived a particular geometry that flew in the face of Euclidean orthodoxy. Apparently, this was a gift received via imagination and experience. Yet far from being a merely “subjective belief,” it appears that Reimann’s geometry referred to real things far beyond Reimann’s “subjectivity.” For when Einstein needed a conceptual base for his speculations into relativity theory, he picked Reimann’s geometry “right off of the shelf”: For it furnished “the best description” of what Einstein in his deepest, most intense mediations and reflections “encountered” as “already out there” in reality. Thus I imagine the geometer as a type may be more artist than scientist. And so given their invaluable achievements, both Reimann and Einstein were great artists as well as great scientists/mathematicians.
Alamo-Girl, you and Thermopylae have broached a number of issues today that I want to think about some more before I reply. When I come back, maybe the problem would be: “What must have been loaded into the Singularity of pre-Space/Time-Zero, such that a living universe of the particular configuration we now observe (in all its harmonious branches) could possibly become the way that it is, and continue to maintain in that way?”
This to me is the single most fascinating question that can be asked.
The string theorists are trying to work this problem from the inside out. Do you suppose there is any way this same problem could be worked from the outside in?
That is from the Whole to the Part, instead of the other way around?
Just wondering, asking. But then I must be famous for my dumb questions by now. Oh, well…. Good night to dear A-G and T! God bless you and all of yours….
Unfortunately, that may not be possible. Computers are specifically built in order to *be* understandable by their owners. The universe's properties, on the other hand, don't seem to have been formulated with a consideration for what might seem "easily understandable" for us.
In fact, J.B.S. Haldane's famous line may well be very true: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we *can* imagine."
Or on a more flippant note, there's Mark Twain's, "Of course truth is stranger than fiction: Fiction, after all, has to make sense."
The point of course is that fiction is purposely constructed so as to make some sense to the reader -- but reality is under no such restriction whatsoever, and is often such that it makes little or no sense to human notions of how things "ought" to be or "ought" to behave.
The universe just is what it is, whether we can wrap our minds around it or not.
That's not what some of my customers tell me!
The rest of your post is well taken, it did not come into being to be comprehensible by me. I just wish someone could explain a few concepts with decent analogies, I do that for my customers with their computers.
This whole "curved time thing" is too difficult, I just see time as being simply linear. I guess my computer grasps it that way, too!
LOL! I'm so glad you decided to join Free Republic Thermopylae! Your humor is well appreciated.
One of the best ever authors for making science understandable was the late Isaac Asimov. He wrote hundreds of essays (many collected in several dozen books) which addressed one aspect of science or another (e.g. the Periodic Table, gravity, etc.) and covered it with striking clarity for the general public.
And more than just covering a topic, he often made a point of taking the reader on a tour of *how* that topic was first discovered, *what* had first gotten scientists on its trail, *which* false starts they had explored, and *why* the current theory was arrived at and seems to be the inevitable explanation for the phenomenon being considered.
All too often science is presented as a dry, "here are some facts and equations, memorize them". Asimov was one of the few authors who took the time to show a nonscientific audience just how science actually works to root out truth and discard error and nonsense, and why it has been so successful in uncovering so many of the secrets of the universe.
In short, he answered not just "what" science knows, but how we know it, and why it's probably correct -- or at least pretty close to it. In fact, one of his essays, "The Relativity of Wrong", did a great job of showing how even "wrong" theories are often "right" to some degree, like how Newtonian or "classical" physics wasn't entirely "right" (it didn't include the effects of quantum physics or Relativity), but it wasn't even close to being all "wrong" -- even today most physics calculations can be done with great accuracy using only classical physics. Science is about "narrowing in" on answers, about getting closer and closer to the whole answer over time.
Many articles by various authors cover *what* science has discovered -- Asimov was a master at showing *how* and *why* those discoveries occurred, how the scientific method is successful, and all the fun drama of the "detective story" that lies behind most scientific discoveries or theories.
Asimov also frequently walked the reader through scientific or mathematical analysis of various problems or topics, in order to show how logical conclusions were arrived at, instead of just presenting a declaration with a "take my word for it".
I learned more real science from Asimov's fun little essays than I did in many of my school science courses.
There's been no one to fill his shoes in that way.
For some odd reason, I do not share his confidence in this matter, though it would be interesting to see what they would come up with.
Actually Thermopylae, I think you are on to something there....
Have you read much C.S. Lewis or Tolkien??? Both men have the universe being created by "song." I can't remember how Tolkien described it (I believe the description is in "The Silmarillion"), but C.S. Lewis, in one of his Narnia tales, has Anslan the Lion "singing" everything into being.
It's amazing how science is never able to contradict anything in the Bible, but often confirms some of those things taken as being the most unbelievable.
If the time is curved, then it might be non-linear, though I dont know if that would require multiple time dimensions or not.
For me, it is nigh impossible to conceive of a curve without using at least two dimensions. If time is curved, it seems that there is a strong hint of multi-demensionality.
I agree that in our view it would probably be multidimensional, though there could always be the possibility that every other dimension is curved around it.
I love the description of the geometers as artists. They strike me as "visionaries" who have a spooky ability to answer questions not yet asked.
But I digress (again)...
On the non-locality space/time issue, I thought y'all might like to read an excerpt on two common explanations (the first is a description of non-locality for Lurkers):
Splitting a single photon of well-defined energy into a pair of photons with initially undefined energies, and sending each photon through a fiber-optic network to detectors 10 km apart, researchers in Switzerland ... showed that determining the energy for one photon by measuring it had instantaneously determined the energy of its neighbor 10 km away
Physics: David Bohm. Understanding David Bohm's Holographic Universe
David Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. Bohm postulates that the ultimate nature of physical reality is not a collection of separate objects (as it appears to us), but rather it is an undivided whole that is in perpetual dynamic flux. For Bohm, the insights of quantum mechanics and relativity theory point to a universe that is undivided and in which all parts merge and unite in one totality. This undivided whole is not static but rather in a constant state of flow and change, a kind of invisible ether from which all things arise and into which all things eventually dissolve. Indeed, even mind and matter are united. Bohm refers to his theory as the holomovement. The terms holo and movement refer to two fundamental features of reality. The movement portion refers to the fact that reality is in a constant state of change and flux as mentioned above. The holo portion signifies that reality is structured in a manner that is very similar to holography. Bohm says that the universe is like a hologram.
Path integral formulation (Feynman)
In one philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics, the "sum over histories" interpretation, the path integral is taken to be fundamental and reality is viewed as a single indistinguishable "class" of paths which all share the same events. For this interpretation, it is crucial to understand what exactly an event is. Despite its general unpopularity, the sum over histories method gives identical results to canonical quantum mechanics and also explains the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox without resorting to nonlocality. This makes it the only form of the theory which can explain this paradox without breaking locality.
BTW, I strongly believe that God limited our vision and minds to 4 dimensions to accomplish His will concerning us. After all, faith is the evidence of things not seen. Praise God!!!
Sorry to all you Coulter groupies, but if Ann were a physicist, and I weren't a brunette man, I might post pictures of her too.
I'll bump to that! Are you looking forward to the new "I Robot" film?
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