Danoff
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I'm saying that it's not subjective, and not open to interpretation.
Absolutely.
Space In General
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I'm saying that it's not subjective, and not open to interpretation.
Absolutely.
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Ah, I didn't mean "subjective", certainly not in that sense. I just meant that we don't have the full picture. We are limited by our collective human understanding, since we have to hypothesise about what's really going on, and then test it robustly - which can take a long time. Definitely a human element in there, too.
If we don't know everything, how do we know what we know is "correct", given what we previously knew to be correct has often been shown not to be strictly correct in all circumstances? I.e. it was incomplete.
I know that for all intents and purposes, what we know must be held as correct, since there has yet been no reason to doubt it; but it's still an interesting thought to bear in mind, I think.
Anyway, my original point is probably better said as: it's easy to see how one's perception of mathematics, logic, science etc. can extend beyond a simple "it is" to a "what else?", in a spiritual sense - or any other sense, for that matter.
Danoff
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I don't like that you used the worth "hypothesise". Mathematics and logic are not hypotheses.
We know it's correct because it accurately describes our reality. From any point of view, that has to be held as correct. Stephen Hawking likes to talk about a gold fish seeing the world from inside a goldfish bowl. The goldfish will see a skewed reality through the fish eye lens of the bowl. If the goldfish were to derive equations of motion for objects outside the bowl, he might come up some some very complex equations that would look overly complicated and unnecessary to us. Our response would simply be to say "you used the wrong reference frame - use this reference frame instead and the math works out easier". But what the goldfish came up with would not be considered incorrect. It's correct from a certain reference frame, and an accurate description of his reality - even if not the most straightforward.
Human beings may be in a similar circumstance as the goldfish. We may be seeing things through our own fish-eye lens. We once considered the Earth to be the center of the solar system and derived some very complex equations to show how the rest of the objects in the sky moved around us. Later it was shown that using the Sun as the center of the solar system allowed the math to work out easier - but that doesn't make a system of equations that accurately predicts the motion of the planets around the earth is wrong. In fact it was right! It accurately predicted the motion of the solar system. It just did so from an odd and inconvenient reference frame.
Someday an alien race might say "if you just did it this way, the math would work out easier", but we can't be considered wrong. At worst our knowledge of mathematics or logic is incomplete or simplistic, but not wrong.
I don't understand your point. You originally said "there's a reason that many accomplished and knowledgeable mathematicians and physicists are deeply spiritual people." I don't find them to be spiritual people. I find a strong correlation between a knowledge of mathematics and physics and a lack of spirituality.
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Oops, well I was talking more about science there, I apologise. I often don't think straight. But that brings up an interesting question, which I'll come to (I bet you can't wait!)
Very enlightening to read that, thank you. But this is what I mean, what does it make you think, or feel, to know that everything we're doing could (potentially, in theory) be simplified in some way?
However, and the big, if no doubt stupid, question: if mathematics is correct in this manner, why do scientists need to speculate, measure things, iterate it a billion times etc.?
Are we to decouple the hypotheses of science and the underlying maths of a particular theory? I like that, technically in this way, if science is wrong, mathematicians can just hold up their hands and say "not our fault"
Perhaps we have a different understanding of what it means to be spiritual, or to simply have spiritual thoughts. I wasn't being specific - I certainly didn't mean "religious", to be clear (I'd have said so, otherwise). Or perhaps these poor people have had their "souls" (whatever that means) beaten into submission from being overworked
Anyway, I know there have been famous examples of people who have found the seemingly unreasonable power of logic (etc.) to be inspiring in various ways. Granted, the vast majority of people probably won't blink an eye, which matches my experience with the scientists I've met, too. Perhaps "many" was my mistake, or maybe it was replying to someone who mentioned "God".
For more clarity, I'm far too young to have any kind of well-rounded spirituality of my own, so that's not what this discussion is about.
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1 atom of iron will do that!
As for the rubber sheet theory, the orbit of Pluto does not compute with the sheet, therefore it must be wrong.
Something else: A black hole, what is it made of?
I think it's made, just like a neutron star, but even more squeezed together, quarks and all the others compacted to blackness.
It's hard typing on a phone.
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The problem is that a rubber sheet is two-dimensional and space-time is four-dimensional. It's just an analogy - the reality is more like being inside a jelly (US: jello).
Pretty much.
Neutron stars are made of, shockingly, neutrons. The idea is that they were pretty hefty buggers originally and, as they began to collapse under their own weight (stars are a balance between gravity forcing them inwards and nuclear fusion [heat and energy] forcing them outwards - remove some mass and fusion wins, they explode; remove some energy and gravity wins, they compress) they become denser and denser, squishing the atoms together and squishing them into neutrons (proton + electron = neutron [or rather a neutron decays into a proton and an electron]).
Eventually the star reaches a point where not even gravity can squish it any smaller - the balance shifts to gravity forcing them inwards and the Pauli Exclusion Principle (which states that no two fermions [neutrons are composite fermions] may occupy the same quantum state - in this instance their position in space-time) - manifesting as degeneracy pressure - stopping it from happening. The result is a body made of degenerate neutron matter at densities higher than that of atomic nuclei...
You can think of neutron stars as Black Holes Lite. They're massively dense - typically up to twice the mass of the Sun, but only a few miles across - and affect the travel of light so much that if you look directly at a neutron star you can see more than half of its surface due to gravitational lensing... If you were able to stand on a neutron star and drop a coin from shoulder height, it would hit the ground a microsecond later and at thousands of kilometeres per second (thanks, Coxy
)... Gravity at Earth's surface is about 9.81N/kg (or m/s/s), compared to 2,000,000,000,000N/kg (or m/s/s) at a neutron star's surface...If the original star was heavy enough then the energy caused by gravitational potential will overcome degeneracy pressure, by promoting neutrons into higher quantum states according to the Pauli Exclusion Principle. The star can collapsed further and further. Once it exceeds densities required for neutron degeneracy, the matter becomes quark matter - the same stuff as before, only made of quarks (the components of neutrons - two down quarks and an up quark) and requiring even higher densities to compress further - quark matter is postulated to exist at the centre of neutron stars, where the densities are five orders of magnitude higher and in as-yet undetected objects called Quark Stars. If the original star was heavier still (above the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit), it can push quarks into alternate quantum states according to Pauli and compress further*, becoming what's effectively an infinitely dense point in space - or Black Hole.
What's a black hole made of? Mostly bugger all - the "hole" itself is a spherical region (if the object at the centre doesn't rotate - the more it spins, the less spherical it is) around the singularity at the centre which we all know and love as "the event horizon". This occurs at a distance called the "Schwarzschild radius" and depends on the mass inside it - any amount of mass compressed to within its Schwarzschild radius would become a black hole (the Schwarzschild radius of Earth is 9mm) but compressing masses lower than the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit is impossible due to the discussed-earlier degeneracy pressure and the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
At the centre of the black hole is the singularity, which is an infinitely compressed region containing all the mass of the original star (plus whatever it's eaten) in zero volume. What's that made of? 🤬 knows, but it's an unhelpful question since even the smallest known things that make other things have a volume and so can't be present - you may as well ask what blue smells of. About the only thing I can think of that is matter and has no volume is energy and I might be wrong on that front...
No. It's worth noting that several physicists have pointed out that if you think you understand this stuff, you don't know enough about it yet. I know I don't know enough about it - I don't even understand the notation on most of the equations they use...
*Some have postulated that there's even smaller components of quarks called preons. Not heard much about preons recently - but if they exist, that'd be another step and you'd have preon stars.
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Ha, presumably the inverse isn't true, otherwise I'm in the wrong job
Fascinating stuff, as usual. Forgive me if I'm wrong here, but I thought I read somewhere that Famine is / was involved with education. If the fact that I now find myself interested to learn more, as well as being aware of the general "structure" of the physics just outlined in the post above (which will help me know where to start looking) isn't the mark of a good teacher, then I don't know what is. 👍
Danoff
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Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I'm sure that one day we'll understand the universe much better than we do now, and our equations and simplifications will look silly. "They could have invented faster-than-light travel so much faster if only they understood...."
But we do the best with what we know now, and I think we're doing pretty well.
However, and the big, if no doubt stupid, question: if mathematics is correct in this manner, why do scientists need to speculate, measure things, iterate it a billion times etc.?
Are we to decouple the hypotheses of science and the underlying maths of a particular theory? I like that, technically in this way, if science is wrong, mathematicians can just hold up their hands and say "not our fault"
Math and science are definitely independent areas of study. They rely on different forms of reasoning (induction vs deduction), and the result is that mathematics and logic are on significantly stronger ground than science - not that science is on shaky ground.
Scientists concern themselves with an understanding of the universe that mathematicians and logicians never concern themselves with. Scientists attempt to understand the nature of everything. Mathematicians limit themselves to the understanding of mathematics itself. That's why scientists are constantly hypothesizing, testing, measuring, coming up new hypotheses, and eventually adopting theories. Mathematicians simply derive.
So, indeed, science can be entirely wrong while the underlying mathematics remains correct. A scientist could hypothesize that flies spring forth naturally and spontaneously from unattended meat. He could derive equations that model the rapidly expanding fly population from an unattended meat. He could even show that when meat is left unattended, these equations accurately predict the fly population to within fantastic accuracy. He can still be wrong about the nature of the observation though, flies do not spring forth spontaneously - no matter how correct the mathematics were that modeled their population.
I'm going to invoke Hawking again. Yes, there have been physicists that have found themselves in awe of how well suited our universe is for comprehensible laws of physics and stability. They observe that constants of the universe could be off by only a tiny fraction, and suddenly the universe collapses on itself and explodes within the first moments of its existence. How then did we happen upon the exact set of correct values of these seemingly arbitrary constants of reality. It seems awfully carefully laid out. Many physicists in the past have found this eerie and unsettling. Some of them have found it to be proof of god.
Most of the people I was talking about are not this type of scientist. I was speaking of the engineers and scientists that I work closely with, who concern themselves more with the thermal properties of a solar array, or a voltage spike, or the gravitational field of a lumpy body... and whether this gravitational field indicates the presence of a solid core within the body etc. etc. Only cosmologists struggle with questions like, what would happen to our solar system if we changed the gravitational constant of... gravity by a fraction. I don't work with cosmologists, so I don't work with people who gaze deeply enough into the underpinnings of reality to find precariousness and precision in its structure. The engineers, physicists, and scientists that I work with tend not to be spiritual about reality.
So I should get to Hawking. Hawking's most recent book attempts to lay out a framework for how our universe might have gotten so perfectly balanced. He hypothesizes that when our universe initially formed, other universes also formed... a nearly infinite number of them. Most of the universes that formed had unstable laws of physics or physical constants. These universes collapsed almost immediately. Only those universes whose laws of physics were suitable for stability continued to exist, and only the universes who's physical laws were conducive to life would eventually form life. And so our existence is a product of an enormous sample size. We formed in the universe that is conducive to our existence because that's the only place where we could form. I find this to be much more believable than any sort of mysticism. Cosmologists have needed to postulate that alternative universes must exist with alternative laws of physics. This is a natural and straightforward result of that.
Dotini
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This is a good explanation of the "multiverse" hypothesis. It's one way (of several) to avoid the "anthropic principle". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Respectfully submitted,
Steve
There is optimism now that evidence of extra dimensions can be observed by scientists.
The idea is to look for Pulsars (neutron stars) near to black holes. Black holes are said to be linked to the other dimensions, with matter slowly leaking via Hawkings radiation out of the black holes taking quite a long time, if matter were to leak into extra dimensions the rate of release would increase and would show itself in the changes of the pulsar light-house beams which are observable. As the neutron star gets a wider orbit from the black hole due to it's diminishing gravitational power.
This change is a prediction for black holes linked to extra dimensions.
The idea is to look for Pulsars (neutron stars) near to black holes. Black holes are said to be linked to the other dimensions, with matter slowly leaking via Hawkings radiation out of the black holes taking quite a long time, if matter were to leak into extra dimensions the rate of release would increase and would show itself in the changes of the pulsar light-house beams which are observable. As the neutron star gets a wider orbit from the black hole due to it's diminishing gravitational power.
This change is a prediction for black holes linked to extra dimensions.
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Came across this before.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/25/us-planet-diamond-idUSTRE77O69A20110825
A planet possibly composed of diamond.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/25/us-planet-diamond-idUSTRE77O69A20110825
A planet possibly composed of diamond.
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To come back on mathematics as spiritual thing.
When some new singularity is discovered in a new set of equations, it generally gets a pro camp and an anti camp.
Pro believing this is the next new break through and giving it a name.
Anti just describing it as the wrong conclusion of the ... equations.
It is logic in the way you describe it as a singularity in a certain of equations.
The whole quest of proving that it really physically exists, etc... is spiritual.
Once proven (lets say by 3 independent research labs) it becomes common knowledge and loses its spiritual side.
Oil seems more useful at this moment to us.
When some new singularity is discovered in a new set of equations, it generally gets a pro camp and an anti camp.
Pro believing this is the next new break through and giving it a name.
Anti just describing it as the wrong conclusion of the ... equations.
It is logic in the way you describe it as a singularity in a certain of equations.
The whole quest of proving that it really physically exists, etc... is spiritual.
Once proven (lets say by 3 independent research labs) it becomes common knowledge and loses its spiritual side.
Oil seems more useful at this moment to us.
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Funnily enough diamonds would be virtually worthless to us, or at least, mining them any further would be worthless. If all the diamonds already kept in reserves by companies such as de Beers were put on the market, they'd be worth no more than glass replicas, and probably even less than artificial diamonds sold by companies like Swarovski. The market prices of things like diamonds, gold, silver, platinum etc are always kept artificially high by only releasing small quantities of them onto the market.
Vince_Fiero is pretty close to the mark - oil would be more useful. Even more useful would be an easily harvestable source of something like hydrogen, or lithium, nickel... things that could reduce our dependence on oil as a fuel so more of it can be used for medicine, plastics and lubricants.
It's an energy balance thing though. Our technology would have to significantly develop to make mining on another world worth the money it would cost to set up such a project.
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Water-based lube is widely available these days.
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That pretty much depends on the characteristics of the mining site though, if there are virtually much less gravity than in the earth and permissive atmospheric characteristics, a lot less fuel would be used to achieve escape velocity and therefore, reduce spacecraft launching costs although having a outpost set-up far away will have imense maintenance fees.
Other than extraction of really rare elements, I don't see why to explore space for mining. Not even oil is worth that much, since nuclear fusion is only five or six decades away(it will drastically reduce our oil consumption) and we still will have plenty of oil reserves at that moment.
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I wasn't so much thinking that, as getting a bunch of stuff onto another planetary body in either our solar system or further afield in the first place. Given that even Mars is currently a herculean task, mining for minerals on Io or another Jovian moon for example really would require some massive benefit in order to make a journey there for materials worthwhile.
Dotini
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14948730
"Dark Matter" is now officially on the chopping block. Experiment and observation continually fail to find or confirm it. When the final results of the LHC experiment come in with more negative results, it may be time to admit that the old paradigm has died and it's overdue to find a new one again.
I have to admit I'm cheered, since I've always been uncomfortable with the dark matter/dark energy theories. For me, it's too much like magic or religion to hold a socially required belief that the visible universe is only 4% of what's really there, and the invisible remainder is forever undetectably hidden from us.
Respectfully submitted,
Steve
"Dark Matter" is now officially on the chopping block. Experiment and observation continually fail to find or confirm it. When the final results of the LHC experiment come in with more negative results, it may be time to admit that the old paradigm has died and it's overdue to find a new one again.
I have to admit I'm cheered, since I've always been uncomfortable with the dark matter/dark energy theories. For me, it's too much like magic or religion to hold a socially required belief that the visible universe is only 4% of what's really there, and the invisible remainder is forever undetectably hidden from us.
Respectfully submitted,
Steve
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That seems to be slow moving Dark Matter, not fast moving?
Anyway it also shows that looking for proof of the theories people now are investing during long periods and if it turns out to be wrong, the investment cycle starts again to send more specific equipment to test other theories.
Seems to me a less important find then the fact that the earth is not flat.
Dotini
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Yes, I too used to think that whatever goes on out in the distant reaches of space and time were unimportant compared to our quotidian problems here on Earth.
However, I recently read a book by Svensmark and Calder, "The Chilling Stars", and learned:
- Our solar system orbits the Milky Way once every 240 million years.
- Our system passes through each of the four major arms of our galaxy, as well as bobbing up and down through the galaxy's plane.
- As we follow our orbit, we encounter regions of stellar births and deaths (explosions, or supernovae).
- These encounters are correlated to flux in cosmic rays, which in turn are more closely correlated to climate change on Earth than any other single factor.
- Our principle means of protection from cosmic rays is the magnetic field strength of our sun, and to a much lesser extent, Earth itself.
It occurs to me that humanity, if it is to ever live up to its potential and take some responsibility for understanding and adapting to our environment, must invest in the science and technology that gets to the root causes of what we call weather and climate.
Respectfully,
Steve
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Correct Steve,
I believe this topic is important and we should avoid to be like ants that are surprised when they get squashed by a finger. Knowledge on space might change the priorities of humanity.
The point in the article on the "Dark Matter" is that it seems to be different then what was expected, experiments indicate this, experiments that seemed to be indirect (simulation of creation of mini systems) . However there might be issues in the simulation or in the theory of formation of systems that are more important then the issues in the Dark Matter theory. However interesting find it does not seem to lead to a major shift in paradigm about space yet, but it surely raises questions if other paths of matter in space should not be researched more deeply.
I believe this topic is important and we should avoid to be like ants that are surprised when they get squashed by a finger. Knowledge on space might change the priorities of humanity.
The point in the article on the "Dark Matter" is that it seems to be different then what was expected, experiments indicate this, experiments that seemed to be indirect (simulation of creation of mini systems) . However there might be issues in the simulation or in the theory of formation of systems that are more important then the issues in the Dark Matter theory. However interesting find it does not seem to lead to a major shift in paradigm about space yet, but it surely raises questions if other paths of matter in space should not be researched more deeply.
Dotini
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Svensmark and Calder, "The Chilling Stars". Cheap at only $9 on amazon!
Henrik Svensmark is the physicist who initiated the multi-year, hugely funded 50+ scientist CERN CLOUD experiment. Initial cloud chamber tests carried out a few years ago by Svensmark have been confirmed by the big accelerator at Switzerland. More cosmic rays = more clouds = global cooling.
I'll add links to papers and articles a little later, particularly if you are really interested. 👍 Personally, I think it's a huge deal.
Respectfully submitted,
Steve
Edit with links:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.org/10/1635/2010/acp-10-1635-2010.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cloud-formation-may-be-linked-to-cosmic-rays
There is a lot more on the brink of publication in the science literature on this subject, and many stories already out on the web. This is a continuously breaking story, and very bad news for AGW enthusiasts, research funding priorities, etc, so CERN must cast their news releases with appropriate circumspection.
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