----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan M" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion'" <brin-l@mccmedia.com> Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 9:06 PM Subject: RE: It's confirmed: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations
> > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On >> Behalf Of xponentrob >> Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 11:06 PM >> To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion >> Subject: Re: It's confirmed: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations >> > >> >>Ummmmm....yeah. Though I have to admit I'm left wondering if you are >>talking about questions in the "soft" sciences (which can seem a bit >>arbitrary to my mind and subject to change for a variety of reasons), or >>if you are referring to "ultimate" questions that lay people tend to >>think physics aims for. (Just for clarity, I think we both agree when it >>comes to the subject of "Truth") > > I was thinking more of the latter, but the former also helps bring the > problem into perspective. Take psychology. We don't really know what > people are thinking. Experts in the field of psychology have been fooled > by > people who outgamed them. Still, empirical observations are made, and > models of those observations (say fivethirtyeight's vote prediction) can > prove quite accurate. > >> >> OK thanks! >> I'm not sure I understand your statement in that case. Fleishman and Pons >> observations were certainly called into question, as were their >> methodologies.Same with, say, creationists. So offhand I would expect >> that >> the reliability of observations is important, but recognise that you >> could >> be defining "observation" in a way I am not. > > I think I am defining "reliable" differently, partially because I'm rather > familiar with the debates of the time when physics emerged. Pons and > Fleishman made unrepeatable observations. Creationists use bad technique > in > evaluating phenomenon. But, Pons and Fleishman's problems were not the > uncertainty of the empirical and only a small subset of creationists use > idealism to question observations (as Berkley (sp) did). > > We can make detailed models of the empirical and have rigorous standards > for > good, repeatable experiments. But, we don't worry about what is really > there, we "shut up and calculate". In a real sense, this Feynman > statement > is a culmination of what makes physics what it is. > > > > >> >> I recall that years ago there was a very lengthy thread here that dealt >> with metaphysical questions of the ultimate reality and why such >> philosophical discussion is pretty much meaningless. > > Actually, I'd argue that meaning is one of those metaphysical questions > that > cannot be determined empirically. I love the statement in the first > preface > to the Critique of Pure Reason on this. > > "HUMAN reason has this peculiar fate that in one species > of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed > by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to > ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also > not able to answer." > > > > > > >> > >> > Thus, I take exception with a science magazine which states that the >> > authors >> > pet interpretation has been proven by a new discovery, when it hasn't. >> >> Something has been demonstrated. I agree it is open to interpretation. I >> can think of other explainations that might satisfy the observations, >>leakage from tiny higher dimensions frex. > > None of that is needed. Just standard E=m works (I'm using good physicist > units here where c=1. :-) ) That's what's frustrating for me; the New > Scientist makes standard QM theory out to be a startling new discovery. > The > theory dates back to at least the early 30s. Nothing has been > demonstrated > except that QCD works numerically. If they failed with computers 100x as > powerful, and everyone did, then that would be something new, because QCD > would have been falsified. >> >> >> > >> > One real problem, from my perspective, is that the average layman is >> > trying >> > to fit modern physics back into a classical box. To paraphrase one >> > prominent physicist from the 20s when asked to comment on the >> correctness >> > of >> > someone's hypothesison a theory he thought was horrid, "Right? Right, >> > he >> > isn't even Wrong." This is what the first two paragraphs of the New >> > Scientist article remind me of. >> > >> Last year everything was all about strings (again), but the article seems >> to ignore all that and doesn't reference. > > That's at a layer below what was covered in the article...where theorists > try to reconcile GR with QCD and the Electroweak...there strings (and now > fuzzy space if 2 year old last reading of John Baez's online "This Week In > Mathematical Physics" is current enough). > Of Interest: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html Once again, the comments *on* the article are more interesting than the article itself. This gem from Vendicar Decarian for instance: "What is and isn't matter is all relative to the observer. What is real particle and what is a virtual particle is also relative to the observer. For example: Theoretically - and indicated but not positively proven through experiment - acceleration causes some portion of the vacuum energy to be observed as real thermal radiation. This radiation was first postulated by a physicist named uhnru I believe, and became the basis for the theorized Hawking radiaiton that is emitted by the vacuum around black holes. The thinking goes that if acceleration produces a realization of thermal radiation then the acceleration experienced by the vacuum near a black hole should do the same thing under the principle of equivalence. It's not really productive to worry too much about what is real and what is virtual, since there is no firm basis for the categorization. Particles are a quantized bias in the field fluctuations that compose reality, and as such they are transient. In their position but well defined in terms of their detection. When an atom emits an electon for example, it loses a quantized amount of energy, spin, momentum, charge, etc. But that "stuff" just falls into the vacuum. Eventually some of these lost properties will pop up somewhere else, perhaps with some additional properties, and they will interact with a "real" particle that we will observe and think, because of the observation that we have observed the movement of this electron to another place, when in fact the electron never existed in the first place. It was a name given to the quatized bundle of properties that were combined with the field fluctuations that make up the churning properties of the vacuum." Amazing stuff in comment sections. xponent Primary Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
