Wow.
As the great philosopher Alvarado shouted at Principal Poop in High School Madness, "What is reality?"
There is a non-zero probability that all the air molecules in this room will rush in the same direction to the opposite wall, suffocating me instantly. Using basic statistical mechanics, we can calculate that probability, and see that it would take more than 20 orders of magnitude more time than the estimated lifetime of the Universe. How worried should I be that this is going to ha
As the great philosopher Alvarado shouted at Principal Poop in High School Madness, "What is reality?"
There is a non-zero probability that all the air molecules in this room will rush in the same direction to the opposite wall, suffocating me instantly. Using basic statistical mechanics, we can calculate that probability, and see that it would take more than 20 orders of magnitude more time than the estimated lifetime of the Universe. How worried should I be that this is going to ha
Difference between theorem and "law"
I just wanted to interject here the difference between a theorem and a law. A theorem can be proven. A law cannot. What happens when empirical evidence is found that violates the "law"? Simple. The law is changed to fit the empirical evidence. An example of a set of laws is Maxwell's Equations. Strange that we should base so much technology on a set of equations that can't be proven, isn't it? As an example of changing "laws" to fit empirical evidence, let's look at one of what are now called Maxwell's equations. It used to be:
curl(H) = J
Which was "Ampere's law". But evidence was found that contradicts this. It was changed to:
curl(H) = J + partial of D with respect to t
The second term on the right of the second equation, the so-called "displacement current" had to be added to make the equations accurately predict measured phenomena. See http://maxwell.byu.edu/~spencerr/websumm122/node72.html for more info on this.
One could argue that science itself is a kind of religion (or at least dogma). But given the built-in facility for changing the "laws" to meet existing evidence (provided the change is based on fact and demonstrated rigorously), one ends up attacking a moving target. So one could argue that because of this built-in facility, that science is really a kind of "anti-dogma". I'm not so much interested in such discussions - for me, the practical consideration of "it works" is overriding.
I just wanted to interject here the difference between a theorem and a law. A theorem can be proven. A law cannot. What happens when empirical evidence is found that violates the "law"? Simple. The law is changed to fit the empirical evidence. An example of a set of laws is Maxwell's Equations. Strange that we should base so much technology on a set of equations that can't be proven, isn't it? As an example of changing "laws" to fit empirical evidence, let's look at one of what are now called Maxwell's equations. It used to be:
curl(H) = J
Which was "Ampere's law". But evidence was found that contradicts this. It was changed to:
curl(H) = J + partial of D with respect to t
The second term on the right of the second equation, the so-called "displacement current" had to be added to make the equations accurately predict measured phenomena. See http://maxwell.byu.edu/~spencerr/websumm122/node72.html for more info on this.
One could argue that science itself is a kind of religion (or at least dogma). But given the built-in facility for changing the "laws" to meet existing evidence (provided the change is based on fact and demonstrated rigorously), one ends up attacking a moving target. So one could argue that because of this built-in facility, that science is really a kind of "anti-dogma". I'm not so much interested in such discussions - for me, the practical consideration of "it works" is overriding.
Konnichiwa,
As RAW wrote "Reality is what you can get away with"!
DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND
IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING
Hmmm. Now just because something is UNLIKELY to happen, it does not mean it will not happen. More interestingly, you seem to assume the probability wave in the universe and local to you to be a constant. How ostrichy is that?
Of course if you where found suffocated thusly (not sure it would actually be suffocation) you would not feature in any big bscientific report as the man killed by an unlikely even but probably only in old, still open file down at the cop-house....
Sayonara
SY said:
As RAW wrote "Reality is what you can get away with"!
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND
IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING
SY said:
Hmmm. Now just because something is UNLIKELY to happen, it does not mean it will not happen. More interestingly, you seem to assume the probability wave in the universe and local to you to be a constant. How ostrichy is that?
Of course if you where found suffocated thusly (not sure it would actually be suffocation) you would not feature in any big bscientific report as the man killed by an unlikely even but probably only in old, still open file down at the cop-house....
Sayonara
Konnichiwa,
The hermetic principle - as above so below....
Subatomic particles exist in effect as "probability waveform". By definition and as a result anything that uses them as "building blocks" exist on such a "probability wave" (did Hawkings coin that term?).
And if we are talking about changes on a molecular level we do not need many of these building blocks. Such events might include SY's "wall of air" and Moses's "walls of water" in the red sea. It would not really take THAT MUCH change of the local probability wave to achieve the required effects.
One more of the fundamentals failures of socalled science is the treatment of variables as constants, simply because we have not (yet) observed them to vary.
Sayonara
pinkmouse said:
The hermetic principle - as above so below....
Subatomic particles exist in effect as "probability waveform". By definition and as a result anything that uses them as "building blocks" exist on such a "probability wave" (did Hawkings coin that term?).
And if we are talking about changes on a molecular level we do not need many of these building blocks. Such events might include SY's "wall of air" and Moses's "walls of water" in the red sea. It would not really take THAT MUCH change of the local probability wave to achieve the required effects.
One more of the fundamentals failures of socalled science is the treatment of variables as constants, simply because we have not (yet) observed them to vary.
Sayonara
As above might not be as below. Photons constitute the basis of seeing, at least for humans, so the notion of seeing is not meaningful at the level of the photon. I think what SY was referring to involved transferring a notion of above-world causation to the realm of below-world particles, where anything evidently can occur (if one believes Feynman) expressed as some or another probability. But what we observe as "probability" in the atomic world might be to "causation" on our macro plane what photons are to sight. That is, the so-called probability nature of the atomic world might be the basis for causation in the macro world, meaning the two concepts are at once inseparable but wholly separate. I've grappled with certain of Feynman's understandings, and this is one place I think he erred.
"Above-world causation"? "Below-world particles"? Yikes, did I miss that episode of TNG?
The kinetics of molecules in gases at normal temperatures, pressures, and densities is really, really, really well understood. It doesn't need to involve quantum mechanics, just some plain old statistics. The less-profound-than-Alvorado philosopher Daniel Dennett observed that writing out and trying to solve complete quantum mechanical equations for the electronic circuits that make up a pocket calculator will not give you much insight into how it shows that 2 + 2 = 4.
Kuei Yang Wang said:
Hey Thorsten,
You'r moving fast, but that doesn't help. How many of those local molecules you think have to move to one side of the probability curve to, say, stand up a wall of water? A million million? A billion billion?
It's VERY many, and the probability is VERY low. What did SY say, 20 orders of magnitude more time than the estimated lifetime of the Universe?
Jan Didden
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