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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: How time proves quantom mechnics

« on: October 14, 2015, 03:01:05 PM »

Just a minor addition: assuming the CPT theorem holds true the weak interaction is an example of a physical process that is not symmetric in time

For all you flat earthers who think that quantum mechanics is a lie, here is proof that you are wrong.

You can all agree that time exists, correct?  I mean, not even flat earthers can deny the existence of time.  You can remember the past but you are clueless about the future, it's pretty basic.

All laws of physics do not depend on time going a certain direction.  Let's say you drop a glass of water and it breaks, and then you pause time.  If you were to reverse the velocities of all particles of glass, particles of water, and particles of air then when you resume time the glass will reassemble and fly back up into your hand.  The only law of physics that is irreversible is entropy, which states that everything always goes from order to disorder in a closed system.  In essence, disorder is information because it takes more information to specify the state of a messy room then it does for a clean room, and information can never be destroyed.

If entropy is increasing then where is all this information coming from?  The answer is quantum uncertainty and randomness.  It is why the future is uncertain.  If entropy AKA quantum uncertainty were to suddenly stop then the future would be just as evident as the past and time would cease to exist.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: atoms,neutrons,electrons,etc

« on: October 25, 2013, 02:47:16 PM »

Parsifal you shouldn't argue physics with me. Like iznih said, I am indeed right. The equation to calculate De Broglie's wavelength is simply wavelength=planks constant over momentum. This simple equation works well to find the wavelength of a baseball.

Once again, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

Waves carry energy, not mass. This works well when particles have a small mass, as they can easily carry the wave. As they get bigger, they gain more inertia, and so they absorb any wave energy instead of carrying it. This is basic physics.

Are you talking about classical waves like sound waves or waves on water surfaces?

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: atoms,neutrons,electrons,etc

« on: October 24, 2013, 02:57:27 PM »

In other news, electrons are not the only thing with a wave function. Obviously everything has a wave function. Like electron clouds, alpha particles show there wave function quite often.

Incorrect. Electrons are able to function as both waves and particles due to their small size and low mass; larger particles are unable to transform into waves because they are too big and heavy.

It was my understanding that the larger particles' wave functions were just very uninteresting.

to my knowledge every object has a wavefunction assigned to it. one has to be careful though. for elementary particles there's not much to discuss as we're talking about standard single particle wavefunctions (eg electrons). Composite particles require composite wavefunctions but it is still possible to observe quantum effects on these larger scales. Eg the double slit experiment has been demonstrated for molecules consisting of 60 carbon atoms. Another good example would be Bose-Einstein condensates that are macroscopic quantum objects with a well defined macroscopic wave function.
The main reason why we're not observing quantum effects in everyday life is called decoherence. Basically this means that you (your body) and any object are exchanging photons or any other kind of interaction. As a result you're getting quantum entangled with the object and to you it appears as if the object's wavefunction collapsed. It's sort of an continuous measurement process. In fact you and said object just form a bigger composite particle with a more complicated wavefunction.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: atoms,neutrons,electrons,etc

« on: October 23, 2013, 02:40:01 PM »

nope, because that would equal a simultaneous measurment of position and momentum which is not possible. what you would see (not in a literal sense) is the electron popping up at various locations given by its wavefunction

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Are you smart, dumb, or are you average?

« on: April 12, 2013, 04:34:06 PM »

What is the difference, to you, between discovery and creation? 

The English language, for example, is created. The mathematical equation existed before humanity and will exist after humanity, English will not. Thus math is discovered, English was created.

Mathematics describes abstract ideas, but mathematics itself is not those abstract ideas.  Its a language to both communicate these ideas and to study them.

Math is the idea. The human comprehension of a physical existence. The universe does not change, only our understanding of it. Thus math can not change and must be discovered, not created, little by little.

for the record: this question has been discussed at the beginning of the 20th century without a proper resolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics#Foundational_crisis). As there's little practical relevance to it to me it seems to be a matter of taste. also i guess it's not limited to just maths but something all formal languages have in common.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Dimensions

« on: March 30, 2012, 03:10:42 PM »

How does mass have a wavelength if a wavelength is pure energy that radiates at a frequency and matter isn't radiating itself.  It absorbs and radiates wavelengths of energy, but it isn't, in itself, a wavelength of energy.  To prove this, I will attempt to slide my hands through my keyboard....
....
...
Nope.  Didn't work.
Since all waves can pass through each other, and my hands can't pass through the keyboard, matter is not a wavelength.

the wave particle duality holds true for "classical" particles with mass (eg electrons) as well. have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_wave

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Physics Inconsistency

« on: September 16, 2011, 02:46:49 PM »

please take the following with a grain of salt as i'm not 100% sure.

as far as i know two antiparallel beams of light do indeed interact gravitationally. parallel beams do not interact. this can be described by GR and to my knowledge it has been verified experimentally.
to make predictions for single photons we would need a combination of GR and quantum physics.

i think this illustrates the quantum physics/GR issue quite well. GR works well for "macroscopic" systems (obviously even for light) but if we're entering the quantum level all we can do is making educated guesses.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Why Relativity is False

« on: August 23, 2011, 10:57:14 AM »

According to this, and the constancy of lightspeed various equations for spacetime transformations are developed. According to these a man running (at something like 99.999% the speed of light) while carrying a 20 meter bar may run though a 10 meter barn, have both doors shut then opened quickly (according to the barn doors reference frame) then run outside. This paradox is resolved by realizing that simultaneity is relative, according to the runner the doors were shut at different times. There is no contradiction in this, as unintuitive as it may be.

this is correct for the moving FOR. in the stationary FOR the paradox is resolved by the length contraction of the bar. in the stationary FOR the bar is shorter than the barn, else this won't work. the doors are only kept shut for the time the bar is completely inside the barn.

But I ask you to consider a heated bar, glowing white hot as he begins to run: What color will it be as he enters the barn? According to the running it may be yellow hot as he enters and red hot as he leaves. From the reference frame of the barn door, the bar will be red hot at one end and yellow at the other. This violates the consequence of the heat equation earlier mentioned, a physical law. Thus The Principle of Relativity is contradicted. By this Gedankenexperiment we conclude that relativity is false.

both ends of the short bar (lenght contraction!) are yellow when the bar enters the barn. when the whole bar is inside the barn the doors are shut for a short time. during that time the bar cools down and both ends are red when the doors are opened again so that the bar can leave the barn. there will be no contradiction to the heat equation.

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The Lounge / Re: Is the sky really blue?

« on: June 05, 2011, 04:30:41 PM »

The sky isn't blue, it's just the result of refraction of sunlight through the atmosphere.

it's scattering, not refraction (refraction plays a role, though). sorry to be nit picking

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Firefox 4

« on: March 30, 2011, 03:42:52 PM »

i'm using the windows 64-bit nightly build and i'm quite happy with it. speed is ok and it looks cleaner than the previous versions

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Can we describe thought by purely using terms of science?

« on: February 10, 2011, 02:28:59 PM »

But as for the idea that thought is the electrons moving through neurons and the like...what does that mean?! You can say that, but it means virtually nothing. Does that adequately describe the texture of anyones thoughts, dreams, feelings, etc?

i think the point is, that if a thought is just a physical process like some electrons moving from A to B then we are at least theoretically able to understand all basic principles that govern our thoughts. simulating a complete brain is then just a matter of computing power and getting along with the huge complexity of a brain. if a thought is more than just electron movement - from a scientific point of view - we will never be able to completely understand what is going on. 

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Solar Roads - Solution or expensive waste of time?

« on: January 20, 2011, 02:07:49 PM »

for the record: glass does not dissolve in oil. in fact water is much more dangerous as it can lead to glass corrosion ("washing out" of certain constituents of glass depending on the ph of the water)

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Can this be right?

« on: October 10, 2010, 05:05:42 PM »

yup, still around

constant of proportionality just describes the mathematical functioning of a constant. two pysical quantities a & b are proportional if there's a "constant of proportionality" x so that: a=x*b. whether there is a physical relation is another story.
tbh you should not bother about the stuff he wrote about the schwarzschild radius. i didn't look into it, but you won't need it to understand what he is doing in general.

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The Lounge / Re: Sarah Silverman is short and sweet on topic of Americans and homosexuality.

« on: October 07, 2010, 04:18:05 PM »

our foreign minister (germany) is homosexual and married his life partner a few weeks ago. there are always some bad jokes around but the majority of people doesn't care about his sexual orientation. i guess we're quite liberal when it comes to homosexuality

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Can this be right?

« on: October 06, 2010, 03:14:58 PM »

Yeah, I guess I sort of get that..but, basically when you say "[insert fitting units]" - can you help me understand how Newton didn't just "insert fitting units" to the constant of G when he came up with his original equation? What I did last night was look at Wikipedia for some clarification and it just got me more confused. Because it says that "The dimensions assigned to the gravitational constant in the equation above — length cubed, divided by mass and by time squared (in SI units, metres cubed per kilogram per second squared) — are those needed to balance the units of measurements in gravitational equations."

the purpose of constants is pretty much balancing equations. c is not that different, if you measure frequency and wavelenght of a lightwave you'll see that you need c with it's well known value to get it working. the only difference is that at some point in history we dedided to make c an exact value and derive e.g. the metre from it.

I really sound like a pain in the butt, I know.

No worries 

I wanted to ask when you said "fiddle around with mass, volume and density" - wouldn't just fiddling around with one of those affect the other ones? Just because they are all "dependant" on the other ones? Does tha make any sense?

i'll show you what i meant by fiddle around: take for example the classical expression for the gravitational accelaration g:
g=Gm/r^2
from c = 1.005568553[insert fitting units] * 1/(16 * pi * G) we get G=1.005568553 *1/(16 * pi * c)
=> g=1.005568553 *1/(16 * pi * c)*m/r^2
with m=d*V (d=density, V=volume) and V=4/3*pi*r^3 we get
g=1.005568553 *1/(12*c)*r*d
now we define 1.005568553 *1/12*d as a corrected density D and we arrive at the formula given in the blog:
g=D*r/c
please note: that's pure mathematics. the formula suggests a physical relation between gravity and c that does not necessarily exist. it might be there but to my knowledge we don't know (i'd love to see the derivation of his formulas).
btw: i saw that he completely omitted the 1.005568553 in his equations, i guess that why he arrived at slightly different values in his examples.

If we can do it retroactivly, than why don't we? Like that blog says we can, we should get rid of G, right?

what would be the benefit of getting rid of G? imo that blogger dislikes the fact that we don't know the exact value of G as it is just measured. he replaces G by c as it has a well defined value. instead of doing this he could also propose to give G an exact value. just cut off the last 2 or 3 digits and derive all other things (e.g. the density). no difference at all...
so why is this a bad idea? i guess there would be inconsistencies, e.g. two different approaches to calculate g could yield different results despite both equations being correct per definition.
 

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Can this be right?

« on: October 05, 2010, 03:22:18 PM »

Hi

basically that guy found out that c = 1.005568553[insert fitting units] * 1/(16 * pi * G). so it's just constant = 2nd constant * 3rd constant (you could do the same with any other pair of physical contants). just take the classical formulas, put in the relation between c and G and fiddle around with mass, volume and density. all numbers that are left after that go into the "corrected" density and you'll arrive at the formulas he gave. they are not wrong but contain no revolutionary physics and won't help you in any way.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: A QUESTION TO ROUND EARTH BELIEVERS

« on: September 21, 2010, 04:32:33 PM »

Have you personally performed or seen performed the The Cavendish Experiment?

yup

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Olbers' paradox

« on: August 18, 2010, 05:32:35 PM »

Universal expansion, although not faster than the speed of light, might be a good hint.

maybe most of the light is redshifted (to the infrared part of the spectrum or even further) so we can't see it

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: BARF - Compress any file to zero bytes

« on: July 26, 2010, 09:42:12 AM »

reminds me of the "write only memory": http://www.national.com/rap/files/datasheet.pdf

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Redshift

« on: July 15, 2010, 02:59:58 PM »

if I throw a pebble in a body of water the wavelength become longer and the frequency stays the same the further it moves away from the source, right?So wont it be true that the light from a distant star will move into the red spectrum the further the star is away from the observer without the star having to move anywhere?Or am i just stupid?

this is not related to redshift. when throwing an stone into water you're not creating just one wave with a given wavelength and velocity but quite a few different waves. the velocity and damping of these waves depends on the depth of the water and the wavelength. e.g. a wave with short wavelength could be prominent for short distances to the center but if it experiences strong damping only waves with long wavelengths will be visible at huge distances to the center. this creates the impression that the wavelength changes when moving away from the center.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Alternative explanations for "Gravity"

« on: June 26, 2010, 05:44:48 PM »

I take a piece of string and run it all the way around the equator of the Earth (assuming its a sphere of the size almost everyone thinls it it). The I add 1 cm to the length of that string, how far above the ground is it assuming that its equally above the surface at all points?

about 1,6 mm, exactly the radius of a circle with the circumference 1 cm

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The Lounge / Re: Post your lurk ratio

« on: May 31, 2010, 12:51:58 AM »

38 minutes and 41 seconds

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Flat Earth Debate / Re: REFUTATE THIS

« on: March 17, 2010, 10:00:02 AM »

But because it is light and waeakly interacting you get effects that classical physics won't predict, they only come out ot of wave mecahnics.

ORLY? Like what? Do you observe neutrino interference in your detectors?

what about neutrino oscillations?

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: 0^0=1

« on: March 09, 2010, 07:49:30 AM »

according to Bronstein's "Handbook of Mathematics" 0^0 is not defined. there is no reason given though. additionally 0^0=exp(0*ln(0))=exp(-0*infinity) seems a bit odd, too.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: black body

« on: March 09, 2010, 07:36:07 AM »

Also, thanks iznih. This thread actually got me curious as well, and your explanation makes a lot of sense.

it raised my interest, too. a simple question but if you have a close look at it, it gets quite complicated. 

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: black body

« on: March 08, 2010, 06:28:55 PM »

@ eireengineer: it would be wrong to say that there's no difference in "height" either. the change in energy is linked to a shift of the peak value in the radial part of the wavefunction. the angular part has no big impact on the energy. its change just compensates the angular momentum of the photon.

i'll have a try at explaining the initial question:
in a gas we can neglect any intermolecular (or interatomic for noble gases) interaction. this leaves us with the sharp spectral lines that result from discrete energy states of the electrons.
these lines can get wider if the gas is very hot and/or under huge pressure because of doppler shifts. additionally scattering between molecules can cause a lower mean lifetime of the excited states which also results in widened spectral lines. (result of the uncertainty principle)

solid objects: now we can't treat the atoms independantly as they are bound to each other. the electrons feel a periodic potential caused by the nuclei of the atoms. solving the schoedinger equation for this system yields a electronic band structure. depending on the material we get forbidden states that can't be occupied by electrons and continuous distributions of allowed states. the electrons are no longer bound to the "classical" orbitals. this results in a more or less continuous black body spectrum. if you want to learn more about that you should grab a introductory book on solid state physics.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Bonus points for physics test

« on: February 23, 2010, 10:47:25 AM »

I appreciate that. I simply showing how incompatible it is with physics as we understand it now. You can't 'flip' the time arrow and expect to get the same stuff happening in reverse.

I have yet to come across a single equation or law in physics which requires time to move in a particular direction.

i'm not 100% sure, but i think the CP violation of kaons could be such a case.   

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Bonus points for physics test

« on: February 20, 2010, 05:26:07 PM »

just look up second law of thermodynamics on the very small scale as I said before. you just need to show that something can become more ordered without causing disorder somewhere else right? you can find many source with that.

please be careful, generally entropy is not order or disorder in a literal sense (symmetry) .imo that's only partially true for crystals. a better explanation is (please correct me if that's wrong), that the entropy of a system depends on the amount of possible microscopic states for given macroscopic boundary conditions. so it can be seen as a measurement for the information that is missing to fully decribe the system when you only know the boundary conditions.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: Gravitation, Relativity and Other Bad Ideas

« on: December 26, 2009, 03:08:54 PM »

...,Einstein doesn't reconcile quantum physics,...

just throwing in, special relativity and qm work together quite well. only general relativity and qm cause trouble

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / Re: The Third Dimension - Real or imaginary?

« on: December 01, 2009, 03:44:26 PM »

Assuming science can be trusted even somewhat (since you use it as evidence in your own OP), Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation should have been found to be false immediately, for the relation would be F = GMm/r, rather than F = GMm/r^2.  In a two-dimensional world, the density of field lines would drop proportionally to the distance.  They drop by the square of the distance in three-dimensions because the field lines take on a spherical shape, and the surface area of a sphere is proportional to the square of its radius.

However, if you simply want to make all of our perception potentially invalid, then it is basically a brain in a vat model - interesting to think about, but that's all it can be used for.

i wonder why noone adressed this post, imo it's quite a good point. you could argue in a similar way for every other field.
a few other thoughts that came to my mind:
- is two dimensional life possible? is it possible to construct a working organism without any overlapping structures?
- what do 2D objects consist of and would they have any mass?