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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Chances are, Hawkings, if given the chance, would likely try to meliorate, otherwise solve, humanity's current and future woes - esp those having to do with over-population, renewable resource depletion, scarcity and higher prices, socioeconomic depression if not collapse - operating off of an ecological basis.
But the Pope? Who really knows. But of course he'd SAY the best basis for any problem solving concerning the human condition would be a biblical basis.
Either way, in the end, ecological dynamics always have their way. -Whether they're understood, respected, responded to, by humans or not.
.....
Look at this election cycle. It's reported the number one concern of the voter: jobs, or loss of jobs. -Which is way more ecological (having to do with globalization, corporate action and decision making, global markets and exchange (free trade) across continents) than partisan (political) - but to hear the campaign ads you wouldn't know it. "Reid spearheads loss of jobs in Nevada." How sad.
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Crodog
Social climber
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Something from nothing is a quantum possibility.
Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle opened the doors to overturning the law of energy conservation.
Is it ever possible to get something for nothing? The global wave of financial scandals has been widely seen as confirmation that “only nothing can come from nothing”, as the Greek philosopher Parmenides argued around 2,500 years ago and finger-wagging moralists have been telling us ever since.
Slackers everywhere should therefore take heart from the mounting evidence that Parmenides and his ilk could not have been more wrong. It is now becoming clear that everything can – and probably did – come from nothing.
Whenever some common-sense view of the nature of reality is challenged like this, you can bet quantum theory will be involved. And so it proves in this case, with two recent advances in the understanding of the subatomic world adding to the weight of evidence.
Unlike financial scam artists, physicists have been amassing evidence for their unlikely claim for decades, beginning with the discovery by a young German theoretician of a loophole in a supposedly inviolable law of nature.
As countless generations of schoolchildren are taught to parrot in class, the law of conservation of energy states that it cannot be created or destroyed, but merely transformed from one form to another.
In 1927, Dr Werner Heisenberg showed that the truth is rather more interesting in a paper that addressed a philosophical question: how do we know what reality is like? The answer seems obvious: by making observations. But Dr Heisenberg pointed out that the newly emerging quantum theory implied that the very act of observation affects whatever is being observed. That, in turn, means it is impossible to know with total precision what reality is actually like.
Dr Heisenberg went on to show that his now-celebrated Uncertainty Principle implies there is always some uncertainty about properties of any region of space – specifically, how much energy it contains over a given period. The “law” of energy conservation is thus merely a conceit, and one whose violation leads to some astonishing consequences – including support for the something-for-nothing view of reality.
Heisenberg’s principle implies, for example, that the very space around us is seething with subatomic particles, popping in and out of empty space. During their fleeting existence, these “vacuum particles” interact with each other, and turn the supposedly dull vacuum of space into the quantum vacuum – which astronomers now know is anything but dull. Observations suggest the expansion of the entire cosmos is being propelled by quantum vacuum energy, in the form of enigmatic “dark energy”.
Something for nothing can also be seen working its magic down at the other scale of things. In the late 1940s, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir predicted that the quantum vacuum could generate a force-field between two flat plates of metal. This “Casimir Effect” again emerges literally out of nowhere, pushing the plates together.
The force is pretty feeble: between two book-sized plates separated by just a hair’s breadth, it is equivalent to barely the weight of the ink in this sentence’s full stop, and it was properly measured only in the mid-1990s. Even so, it’s enough to cause the components of delicate micro-mechanical devices to seize up.
Fortunately, back in the 1960s some Soviet theorists predicted that the quantum vacuum can be engineered so that the Casimir force becomes one of repulsion rather than attraction. And last week a team of scientists in the US reported in the journal Nature that they had confirmed the prediction in dramatic style, using the repulsive form of the force to levitate a gold-plated ball. OK, the ball was less than the size of a full stop, but that’s pretty impressive considering it was being held aloft by nothing but the energy of empty space.
Some theorists now think they can go even further, and use the physics of something for nothing to explain the origin of literally everything. They claim that the Big Bang from which the entire universe emerged was the result of convulsions in the quantum vacuum which took place around 14 billion years ago.
New theoretical work on the nature of matter suggests we may now have to regard even ourselves to be manifestations of the quantum vacuum.
All atoms are made up of electrons plus a far more massive central nucleus, made up of clusters of particles called quarks. It seems obvious that the mass of the nucleus must be the sum total of the masses of its quarks – but that reckons without the effect of the quantum vacuum. It turns out that the quarks account for only a tiny fraction of the total mass of a nucleus. By far the bulk comes from the subatomic “glue” that binds its quarks together. And this glue takes the form of vacuum particles flitting in and out of existence.
That at least is the theory. Confirming it requires some appallingly difficult calculations, involving all the different manifestations of quantum vacuum particles inside the nucleus – of which there are trillions. At the John von Neumann Institute for Computing in Jülich, Germany, Dr Stephan Dürr and colleagues have had a shot at doing this titanic calculation, using a computer capable of performing over 100 million million calculations a second.
After several months of number-crunching, the machine has now spat out its estimate for the mass of a hydrogen nucleus, and it is within 2 per cent of the value measured in the lab. In other words, virtually all the mass contained in atoms – and indeed us – appears to be nothing more than the evanescent energy of empty space.
It thus seems that much as we may like to distance ourselves from financial scam artists and get-rich-quick schemes, we are all living proof that it’s possible to get something for nothing.
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WBraun
climber
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"It is now becoming clear that everything can – and probably did – come from nothing."
Sure .....
If you don't know, you can always just ....
GUESS
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Dr Heisenberg went on to show that his now-celebrated Uncertainty Principle implies there is always some uncertainty about properties of any region of space – specifically, how much energy it contains over a given period. The “law” of energy conservation is thus merely a conceit, and one whose violation leads to some astonishing consequences – including support for the something-for-nothing view of reality. When we talk of quantum foam and of virtual particles coming into and out of existance, we are approching the Plank scales... As per Heisenberg's Principle, the smaller the space, the larger the energy of these [virtual] particles, thus no violation of energy conservation laws.
Some theorists now think they can go even further, and use the physics of something for nothing to explain the origin of literally everything. They claim that the Big Bang from which the entire universe emerged was the result of convulsions in the quantum vacuum which took place around 14 billion years ago. Current consenceous regarding the Big Bang is that IT gave rise to all of space and time, that it didn;t bang "into" a previously existing space... Thus, there was no 'quentum vacuum' for this to take place "in"... IT gave rise to the quantum vacuum, space and time.
That said... "What" banged WAS most likely a quantum object. Trying to understand this without a quantum theory of gravity [if there is one to be had] is, IMHO, folly.
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MH2
climber
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from Ed:
"That is, the algebraic relationship of the transformation of states which create the universe, define it, actually generate mathematics too.
And the consequences of these ideas, which Wheeler referred to as "pre-geometry" are certainly testable empirically. So certainly I can be shown to be wrong... "
I think that's crazy, and wild and a great idea!
Thanks for elaborating, Ed.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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What you're describing is science education in physics.
.....
Careful though. Science education plus a commitment to actually live up to it can be compelling - compelling enough even, maybe, to COMPEL you to take a stance or two against tradition - a practice of questionable productivity not recommended for the faint-of-heart. ;)
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Possible caption?
"Demons be gone! Rise up and walk! The power of Christ compels you!"
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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still putting time in on the lorentz grid work- interesting to me that to actually understand eintein it is best to just study the folks who preceded einstien and gave einstien his thoughts to work with in the first place. Yes... Maxwell, Lorentz, and Minkowski.
]i still can't quite make it click how time slows down as you travel faster? It's a cheesy video, but it explains it well as far as velocity (Special Relativity) goes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySP5RuuLPrA
This is a pretty good wiki entry, BTW:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
It also lists a few well known confirmations of this, namely the GPS satellites, and you can look deeper from there.
From there:
Gamma, on the left, is the relative difference in time, depending on speed, on the bottom, shown as percentages of c... Note that it is not linear, AND that you can never get to the speed of light... Close, but not quite there... As if you did, time would STOP, relative to an observer. Thus, relative to a photon, there is no time.
Gamma, the delta between the two frames of reference is one thing that the Lorentz equations calculate.
The "how", is a bit harder to wrap your head around...
(Note - More speculation from me than asserting as correct, as I'm not a big 'relativity' guy.)
One item to consider is that the Lorentz equations also solve for length (distance) contraction/dilation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction
AND, that an object at velocity has more energy [kinetic], than an object at rest (this is why they say "rest mass"), thus it's mass (remember, it equals energy) increases, so it WILL curve spacetime more so than an object not at velocity.... But this is more GR than SR.
The kicker, though, is that each observer will see the OTHER'S clock as going slower than theirs. Meaning, even the one at velocity will view the one who isn't, as experiencing time more slowly, since who's to say, "you're moving and I'm not?"
I hope that didn't confuse you more.
Also, you HAVE to stop thinking that space and time are seperate, but are instead one manifold, with time as another dimension... Not (x,y,z) and (t), but instead, (x,y,z,-t).
Once you do this, you can think of it in 2 dimension this way...
Use the gragh above, but put North going up on the left in place of Gamma, and East going right on the bottom in place of speed (through space). If you travel only East, you will make no progress North. But, if you start to vere North, you will progress North, but at the expense of some of your Eastwardly progress. Now, if you travel only North, you won't make any progress East.
Now let's change what the gragh represents, let's put space (x,y,z) on the bottom, and time on the left. You can still think of it as just 2 dimensions, as when you move through space, you do it in only one direction, making a line... You will still have left/right, and up/down (y,z) relative to your direction on motion (x)... So, it's rally just x on the bottom and t on the left. Now, if you are standing still (I.e., not moving through space), you will only progress through time... Ticking the seconds away. But, as you start to move through space, it's at the expense of making progress through time just like North v East in the paragraph above, although not linear). In fact, if you were to move through space at c, you would stop moving through time.
Enjoy your journey, my friend.
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Not sure when you read my previous reply, but I rarely get it right the first time, and edit some bad spelling out and clarify better. You may wish to reread.
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StahlBro
Trad climber
San Diego, CA
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I read Hawking's "A brief history of time" and was doing pretty well (after reading some pages many times). I got event horizons and their cones etc, but when I got to space as an infinite curve, my conceptualization broke down. I know I am missing something........what the heck is an infinte curve?
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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I read Hawking's "A brief history of time" and was doing pretty well (after reading some pages many times). I got event horizons and their cones etc, but when I got to space as an infinite curve, my conceptualization broke down. I know I am missing something........what the heck is an infinte curve? Welcome to the club... It's next to impossible to envision soem of this stuff in multiple dimensions, which is why people use models.
The most common model is that of the surface of a baloon (2 dimensions) to represent the expanding universe (3D, well, really 4: x,y,z,-t) in the shape of a sphere. Remember, in this model, there is only x and y (area) on the surface of the baloon, there is no z dimension... No up or down.
Imagine the surface of a balloon, but only the surface, remember, not the inside of the sphere, or the "space" above it. THAT is a 2D surface, just like the surface of the Earth.
On the surface of this ballon, there is no starting point or edge... If you go in one direction long enough, you will come back to where you started.
Now, on this balloon, randomly draw a whole bunch of dots with a black marker, and randomely put one red dot and one blue dot on it.
Now if we inflate the balloon, from the perspective of the red dot, we will notice that ALL of the dots move away from the red one, AND the further out we go away from the red dot, the faster the dots are moving away... This is EXACTLY* what we see when we look into space, as galaxies further away from us are moving away faster from us than ones that are closer. THAT is Hubble's Law.
Now, one might be tempted to think that we are at the center of the universe since all objects are moving away from us, but this is where the blue dot on the ballon comes in... From the blue dot, all other dots will be moving away from it EXACTLY like they are moving away from the red dot. No matter where we put the red or blue dots, it will always be the same. This is because it is the surface of the balloon that is expanding, and the dots are just being carried with it.
What we see in the universe is because it is actually space itself that is expanding, and, like the dots on the balloon, the galaxies are being carried with it. And, just like the balloon get's larger in surface area as it inflates, the universe grows larger in size as it inflates.
But remember, in this model, we are confined to the surface of the balloon ONLY... Same thing goes with the universe, as all of space IS the universe, so while it expands, it doesn't expand "into" anything.
Now, one might also be temped to think that the galaxies may be flying away "through" space, as if from an explosion, as they do call it the Big Bang, but that's not what the term really means**. If it were galaxies flying through space as the result of an explosion, all objects would be moving at the same rate, or even slowing down the further out we go due to gravity, AND if we were in the center, yet were to go to another dot/galaxy, we would see our neighbors (dots/galaxies) roughly moving in the same direction as us, away from one point. This isn't what we'd see.
Thus, the 2D model of our 3D universe works well to convey what is actually happening, and an easier way to envision the expanding closed space.
Now, imagine an ant walking on this expanding balloon... He has one speed, and never moves faster or slower. He may be able to get to other dots close by, but if the balloon is large enough, and/or expanding fast enough, he will never reach the dots beyond a certain point, as they will be moving away from him faster than he can move, and remember, he only has one speed.
Same goes for light (the ant) and galaxies (the dots)... In the expanding universe, there is a point where light will never reach it, or it's light reach us... This is the "observable" universe... It's not an edge, just the point where the galaxies are moving faster, relative to us, than light.
NOW... Don't think that the galaxies are moving "through" space at a velocity greater than c... They are not. It is space that is expanding, carrying the galaxies with it... Like the dots on the balloon. The galxies do move through space, but not anywhere near the velocity of c.
Make sense?
*The rate at which all galaxies move away from us isn't perfectly linear, as, for example, there are some groups of galaxies that excert a gravitational influence on their neighbors, and slightly alter their movement, but it is very small. In fact, some are moving towards us, like our closest neighbor, Andromeda.
** The term Big Bang came from Fred Hoyle as a term of derison, as he believed in an infinate steady state universe, that wasn't expanding.
For a flat space, think of the game PacMan as a 2D model, as you can go out one side and instantly come in from the other, thus, closed, yet infinate.
Sorry... I can't do a hyperbolic cure... You're on you're own there, but since I believe Omega to be >1, and that space has positive curvature, that means it's in the shape of a sphere... Albeit a VERY large sphere... So large as to appear flat (Omega=1) with all the tests we have been able to perform thus far.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Is this why other climbers always appear to be climbing slower?
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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If interested, in any of this, here is some some interesting stuff:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/timeline.html
(madbolter1... You will NOT like this stuff.)
John Baez, cousing to Joan Baez, is arguable the worlds leading mathematical physicist, and he has some really good stuff written for all levels...
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/
In fact, he even says better what I tried to say above:
What causes Gravity?
One of Einstein's old tutors, a man by the name of Minkowski showed that the special theory of relativity could be expressed in an interesting way.
The world we live in consists of four dimensions, the three space dimensions and one that is not exactly time but is related to time (it is in fact time multiplied by the square root of -1). This is not at all easy to understand but it means that space-time as we call it has some rather weird properties. In particular, when you move through one of the space dimensions you also travel, unwittingly, through time. You do not notice this, indeed as far as you are concerned nothing happens to you at all, but someone observing you would say that you have travelled through time. Of course, we are always travelling through time, but when you travel through space you travel through time by less that you expect. The most famous example of this effect is the "Twins Paradox".
All the effects of special relativity, such as the slowing down of clocks and the shrinking of rods follow from the above. In fact, it is often better to think of some things, such as electromagnetic fields as being four-dimensional objects. However, the important thing to remember for the moment, is: when you move through space you are compelled to move through time but, when you move through time (which of course you are always doing) you do not have to move through space.
So, what does this have to do with gravity? It is quite simple! When a mass is present in the above space-time it distorts it so that whilst it remains true that travelling through space causes you to travel through time, travelling through time now causes you to move (accelerate) through space. In other words just by existing, you are compelled to move through space - this is gravity.
The particular advantage of this theory of gravity (General Relativity) is that it explains, at a stroke, all the observed properties of gravity. For example the fact that it acts equally on all objects and substances becomes obvious when you thing of gravity as a distortion of space-time rather than a force.
Imagine that you are in free space, away from any planets or stars, when suddenly a planet is created quite close to you. You would not be aware that anything is happening to you, you would feel no force, but you would find that you started to accelerate towards the planet. This is just like the case where you travel through space, you are not aware that you have also travelled through time but people observing you are. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/gravity.html
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Ricky D
Trad climber
Sierra Westside
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Science is hard and people are easily distracted.
Religion can be learned by songs and comics.
Explains things I think.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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re: 1 Pope vs Hawking 2 Change 3 Paradigm Shifts
Enough Einstein, how about Planck. Change often occurs the way Max Planck described it:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Applies to belief systems and their narratives, too, I think.
.....
By the way, I'd rather live under the Abrahamic narrative than the Mayan narrative. At least that's how I felt all day today after watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2006) yesterday. Wow. Highly recommended. Guraranteed to take you back and to fire the imagination!
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