On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 8:41 AM, Russell Standish <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 01:20:35AM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote: > > Jason, > > > > That's a totally off the wall answer. When the two shake hands it's not > > just photons that are interacting, it's the electrons, protons and > neutrons > > of the matter of their hands which don't travel at the speed of light. > > > > Goodness gracious! > > > > Edgar > > > > Jason is correct - electron-electron and electron-proton interactions > are mediated by photons. Only nucleon-nucleon interactions are > mediated by different stuff (gluons in that case), but for all > practical purposes, the strong force is irrelevant to the phenomenon > of handshaking. > And if it were, say in some particle accelerator, the gluons also travel at the speed of light and their present is spread across all proper times. > > Which gets us to the more important point. You idealise a handshake as > instantaneous as a demonstration of your "present moment", but in fact > those interactions Jason was alluding to are smeared out over a > temporal duration of the order of a few picoseconds (a duration well > measurable by current day technology - my laptop's CPU clock cycles on > a sub-picosecond timescale, for example). > You must have a VERY fast laptop! :-) Jason > This doesn't matter much for human affairs, but becomes quite > significant when extrapolating over cosmological scales. > > Cheers > -- > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > Principal, High Performance Coders > Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] > University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
