Whole Track Question.

[Infinite]

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Just a reminder . . .

[Gadfly]

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Just a reminder . . .

EXCELLENT!!!!!!! The right side, "faith", sums up so well what I often try to describe about "believers".

I have downloaded the diagram, and am going to go to the website to see if I can get a larger version.

Dang, the site doesn't go anywhere useful. Do you have a link for that chart - a bigger version maybe?

Nevermind, I am a Google-monster, and I found it within 30 seconds. It can be found here:

Science versus Faith Flow Chart

And for a veritable panoply of all sorts of science versus faith flow charts, see HERE.

[lwhytock]

Can anyone answer for me wy in Gods green earth would a flag rep when asking me what name I came up with last life, the reply was very quickly...there was a fire. huh?

I don't know. Yet I wonder.

(And no, I don't endorse Freezone, Indies or OSA.)

Just thinking out-loud.

[Student of Trinity]

I agree with your statement regarding lines of force. But regarding magnetic "reconnection" I would submit this is a major misinterpretation of observation. ...

Astrophysicists do know Maxwell's equations. It's just that what mostly interests them is the electrodynamics of convecting plasma, since this is what stars are made of. The plasma is charged, so there's all kinds of current, so the magnetic fields are very strong. So the charged particles tend to move in tight spirals around the local magnetic field direction, and so to a very good approximation, the current follows the magnetic field lines. So you can accurately approximate the full problem with a simplified model that only even mentions the magnetic field lines.

Reconnection doesn't actually break any field lines. What happens is that two separate closed loops touch and merge into one. Or the reverse: one loop splits into two. You could do this yourself if you just moved two current-carrying wires close to each other. When the wires are far apart, the field lines are mostly separate circles around each one. Once the wires are on top of each other, obviously the field lines are all circles enclosing them both. To get from one situation to the other, field lines have to merge. Pull your two wires apart again, and you make a lot of field line loops split. Both processes are perfectly continuous. It's just that at the precise point of splitting or merging, the magnetic field is exactly zero, and so its direction is not defined. At such a point, two field lines are allowed to cross.

[Dulloldfart]

Student of Trinity, what do you think of the Electric Universe ideas as laid out (extensively!) at www.thunderbolts.info?

I don't recall any comments from you on this specifically.

Paul

[NonScio]

The point is not that Heisenberg's concept is a 'self-evident idea', the point is that it reflects a physical principle. There is nothing 'self-evident' about the fact that the physical universe functions on a fundamental level in this fashion. However plausible a concept, as a concept it need not represent physical fact. That it does is what makes it notable.


Mark A. Baker

Well, self evident or not, it would seem to be self contradictary to say a body is both
in motion and standing still at the same time. No? Actually, the most elegant
explanations of the truth of how the universe works are basically so simple
that when outlined most would say "that is so self evdent, why did'nt we
see that before?"

[Student of Trinity]

From a quick look, it looks fine — as far as it goes for now. The guy seems to know his electrodynamics and plasma physics, though I haven't looked at this in detail. Stellar astrophysics is not my field; I took a course in it once, but that's all. So I can say he's not an obvious idiot, but he might still be full of crap. If I did take more time to read his stuff I might become skeptical, but perhaps wrongly so. I'd estimate that he's competent enough that it would take a better expert than me for a reliable judgement.

For the future, though, my outlook is less rosy. It looks as though this guy has hopes, though so far no claims, to make some radical revisions to cosmology by means of electrodynamics. Here I'd be a lot more suspicious, because he hasn't yet said anything that shows he understands general relativity. For example, his comment that dark energy is absurd because empty space can't possibly do anything is simply ignorant. Dark matter and dark energy are purely theoretical, but they're really the very opposite of epicyclic fudges. They should be there by default, and it would require more explanation if they didn't exist.

I didn't notice anything to indicate that the guy is really well informed about cosmological observations, either. So once he gets on to propounding his own radical new theories, and not just expounding standard plasma theory, my suspicion level would rise dramatically. Conceivably he'll turn up something new. More likely, he'll turn out to be smart and serious enough to realize that his ideas don't work. Most likely is still that he'll turn out to be just another crackpot, either too vain or too stupid to recognize his mistakes. The competent Newtonian engineer who doesn't get Einstein is unfortunately a common crackpot species, all the sadder for being capable of understanding if they weren't too vain to really try. But maybe he's a different species after all. Time will tell.

[Student of Trinity]

Well, self evident or not, it would seem to be self contradictary to say a body is both in motion and standing still at the same time. No?

Nobody said anything about a moving body standing still. The issue is about exactly where it is at some given instant, as it moves. These are subtle questions, but I'm afraid they're over 2000 years old, and they were resolved over three hundred years ago. Quantum mechanics comes several chapters later.

[Dulloldfart]

From a quick look, it looks fine — as far as it goes for now. <snip>

Thanks very much for taking a look and your comments.

Paul

[Student of Trinity]

Where out of all infinite possible conditions or states, when something is observed in a carefully conducted experiemnt, in a certain way, the act of observing seems to "cause" a specific exact detailed event to "collapse" the "probability field". But, the parameters and details of the experiment itself nearly "define" WHAT will be observed. If one changes minor aspects of the experiment, then something else is

The experimental setup determines what question you're asking. At least, it does if it's a good experiment. With a bad experiment, you might not really know just what property of the atom (or whatever it is) was being represented on your meter. But there's not really anything mystical or mysterious about this business of the experiment determining the question. If you put something on a scale, so that its weight deflects a needle, then you'll be measuring its weight, and not its electric charge. A measurement is, after all, just a particular kind of physical process. It has to happen by some sort of physical cause and effect.

The mysterious part is the Schrödinger's Cat thing. A quantum object might not have single definite values for all its properties, but if you measure those properties, you will force it to pick one answer randomly, and then stick with it. That may sound kind of fudgy and dodgy, but the equations of quantum mechanics predict the probability distributions with insane accuracy. They can predict some pretty complex and surprising patterns of randomness, and then you can go into the lab and see them happen just like that. So somehow it works.

I think in all larger contexts, or macro-scenarios, the measuring device itself influences and changes the energy of whatever small particle or photon is being detected or measured. On the tinier scale of sub-atomic particles, the act of observing does seem to interact and affect what is being observed. That idea gets "loosely" extrapolated into other, much different, contexts, where it might not really apply. In the same way, quantum effects are irrelevant at this level of resolution (zoomed-out).

It is like the effects of Relativity when approaching the speed of light - mass increases greatly, and time dilates (for the fast moving object). Except that here on Earth, for us, in our context, that factor is so minor to be inconsequential and not even considered as having an influence.

If I understand what you're getting at, then yes. Weird quantum effects are dramatic in some contexts, such as atomic-size systems, but negligible in others, such as daily life. There's even a sort of figure-of-merit you can compute, to indicate how important quantum effects will be. Comparable to the Reynolds number for turbulence in hydrodynamics, or the ratio of velocity to the speed of light for relativity. For QM it's the typical energy scale of your problem, times its typical time scale, divided by Planck's constant (about 10^(-35) Joule-seconds). So if you put in the numbers for an electron orbiting a proton in a hydrogen atom, you get about 1 (QM is very important). If you put in the numbers for the earth going around the sun, it's something like 10^(+72) or so (big number means QM is really unimportant).

Are there any studies that discuss the "speed" at which "electrons" travel? It always seemed to me that the reason that there is so much energy locked up in atomic particles is because they are vibrating at frequencies comparable to "close to the speed of light". I mean, anything can cycle, move up and down quickly. What if this "vibrating quickly" were actually close to or at the speed of light? Or, is THAT what is involved with ? Or did Einstien simply come up with equation, never expaining how or why? I am rusty on my physics.

Sure, we talk about electron motion all the time. Electrons can travel at a speed arbitrarily close to the speed of light, but in the atoms of most rather light elements, they never do. The innermost electrons in some very heavy elements do get to within a few percent of the speed of light, though, if I remember rightly.

But that doesn't really have much to do with E=mc^2. Even a particle just sitting motionless does have a rest energy. Did Einstein explain this or did he just postulate it? Well, sort of both. He introduced a deeper level of theory in which mass and energy have a definite and elegant relationship, and he gave a lot of good reasons why we should believe in this deeper theory, rather than in the older Newtonian idea of kinetic energy. He did not explain his new theory in terms of the older one, but rather argued that we should abandon the old in favor of the new.

As a matter of grim fact I have to teach about exactly this, tomorrow morning at 8:15. So this little discussion may have helped me focus my thoughts, but it's not actually getting my lecture notes written. I better get to work.