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Note from micronesia: please read the thread before making comments about how we have just turned physics on its head. |
On January 07 2013 07:16 Chargelot wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2013 06:12 Desertfaux wrote:
Where's my flying car, goddamnit, its 2013 already. It's called a plane. Show nested quote +On January 07 2013 06:08 remedium wrote:
It's only a matter of time before physicists pull a Mines of Moria and unleash a Balrog on us. Just sayin'. No. Just sayin'. Show nested quote +On January 07 2013 04:56 lumencryster wrote:
now i'm going to wait till we can get from point A to point B faster than the speed of light. i mean, people didn't think it was possible to fly, seems ridiculous enough since we don't have wings, right? You cannot move faster than the speed of light. You cannot move at the speed of light. Any passage that you take to arrive somewhere, light will travel through it faster. Light will always win.
While faster than maximum light speed is a science fiction right now, you can be faster than light through some passages.
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On January 07 2013 22:30 Spidinko wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2013 07:16 Chargelot wrote:On January 07 2013 06:12 Desertfaux wrote:
Where's my flying car, goddamnit, its 2013 already. It's called a plane. On January 07 2013 06:08 remedium wrote:
It's only a matter of time before physicists pull a Mines of Moria and unleash a Balrog on us. Just sayin'. No. Just sayin'. On January 07 2013 04:56 lumencryster wrote:
now i'm going to wait till we can get from point A to point B faster than the speed of light. i mean, people didn't think it was possible to fly, seems ridiculous enough since we don't have wings, right? You cannot move faster than the speed of light. You cannot move at the speed of light. Any passage that you take to arrive somewhere, light will travel through it faster. Light will always win. While faster than maximum light speed is a science fiction right now, you can be faster than light through some passages.
Such as?
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On January 07 2013 09:23 GGTeMpLaR wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2013 07:47 adwodon wrote:On January 07 2013 07:22 Microsloth wrote:On January 07 2013 07:16 Chargelot wrote:On January 07 2013 06:12 Desertfaux wrote:
Where's my flying car, goddamnit, its 2013 already. It's called a plane. On January 07 2013 06:08 remedium wrote:
It's only a matter of time before physicists pull a Mines of Moria and unleash a Balrog on us. Just sayin'. No. Just sayin'. On January 07 2013 04:56 lumencryster wrote:
now i'm going to wait till we can get from point A to point B faster than the speed of light. i mean, people didn't think it was possible to fly, seems ridiculous enough since we don't have wings, right? You cannot move faster than the speed of light. You cannot move at the speed of light. Any passage that you take to arrive somewhere, light will travel through it faster. Light will always win. Unless you're that particle that was accelerated beyond the speed of light. Words like cannot and always means you're predicting the future. To that I say: You'll never accurately predict the entire future. Ever. Suck it. You are correct when you say we can't predict the future, but what you're saying is akin to someone suggesting that one day everyone in America might wake up and start speaking Chinese out of the blue, you can't say it won't happen because the future hasn't happened yet, but it violates everything we know about language, learning, behavior etc so its a pretty solid bet (aka solid fact) that it definitely won't happen. I'd say your example is a lot less believable because it literally makes no sense that it could occur without a cause (which is what "out of the blue" implies). Having a higher velocity than the speed of light can at least make some sense if our current set of scientific paradigms is flawed, incomplete, or just wrong, which is definitely more possible than you're admitting.
That was essentially the point, by out of the blue, I just mean suddenly, ie some crazy new learning tool allowing you to learn a new language overnight wasn't invented or some other explanation that would make sense with what we know. It would occur with a cause, but any cause would violate everything we understand about language, for instance that it is learned etc etc as a sudden, otherwise unexplainable, mass language 'shift' would imply.
That's basically the same as discovering that we can move faster than the speed of light, and remember, this person wasn't talking about some kind of random new shiny particle with exotic properties, which I'll concede there may be a remote chance of discovering, they were arguing that you cannot say 'we' cannot ever travel faster than the speed of light because we can't predict the future.
Considering we understand this far better than we do language / the human mind I'd say it was a perfectly reasonable statement, in fact I would say it would be far more believable that everyone would wake up speaking fluent Chinese than discovering normal particles can push past that barrier.
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On January 08 2013 00:30 adwodon wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2013 09:23 GGTeMpLaR wrote:On January 07 2013 07:47 adwodon wrote:On January 07 2013 07:22 Microsloth wrote:On January 07 2013 07:16 Chargelot wrote:On January 07 2013 06:12 Desertfaux wrote:
Where's my flying car, goddamnit, its 2013 already. It's called a plane. On January 07 2013 06:08 remedium wrote:
It's only a matter of time before physicists pull a Mines of Moria and unleash a Balrog on us. Just sayin'. No. Just sayin'. On January 07 2013 04:56 lumencryster wrote:
now i'm going to wait till we can get from point A to point B faster than the speed of light. i mean, people didn't think it was possible to fly, seems ridiculous enough since we don't have wings, right? You cannot move faster than the speed of light. You cannot move at the speed of light. Any passage that you take to arrive somewhere, light will travel through it faster. Light will always win. Unless you're that particle that was accelerated beyond the speed of light. Words like cannot and always means you're predicting the future. To that I say: You'll never accurately predict the entire future. Ever. Suck it. You are correct when you say we can't predict the future, but what you're saying is akin to someone suggesting that one day everyone in America might wake up and start speaking Chinese out of the blue, you can't say it won't happen because the future hasn't happened yet, but it violates everything we know about language, learning, behavior etc so its a pretty solid bet (aka solid fact) that it definitely won't happen. I'd say your example is a lot less believable because it literally makes no sense that it could occur without a cause (which is what "out of the blue" implies). Having a higher velocity than the speed of light can at least make some sense if our current set of scientific paradigms is flawed, incomplete, or just wrong, which is definitely more possible than you're admitting. That was essentially the point, by out of the blue, I just mean suddenly, ie some crazy new learning tool allowing you to learn a new language overnight wasn't invented or some other explanation that would make sense with what we know. It would occur with a cause, but any cause would violate everything we understand about language, for instance that it is learned etc etc as a sudden, otherwise unexplainable, mass language 'shift' would imply. That's basically the same as discovering that we can move faster than the speed of light, and remember, this person wasn't talking about some kind of random new shiny particle with exotic properties, which I'll concede there may be a remote chance of discovering, they were arguing that you cannot say 'we' cannot ever travel faster than the speed of light because we can't predict the future. Considering we understand this far better than we do language / the human mind I'd say it was a perfectly reasonable statement, in fact I would say it would be far more believable that everyone would wake up speaking fluent Chinese than discovering normal particles can push past that barrier.
The difference is that we can't even theoretically really come up with a decent explanation that would work for how everyone would suddenly start speaking fluent chinese, but there are many theories in how we could move from point A to point B faster than light, such as wormholes and the alcubierre drive.
Sure, the odds that a particle we know of could physically be made to travel through normal space faster than light are so small that they can be ignored and are indeed comparable to everyone suddenly speaking fluent chinese, but I wouldn't say it's even close to as unrealistic to think that there could eventually be a way to travel faster than light.
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On January 08 2013 01:07 Tobberoth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2013 00:30 adwodon wrote:On January 07 2013 09:23 GGTeMpLaR wrote:On January 07 2013 07:47 adwodon wrote:On January 07 2013 07:22 Microsloth wrote:On January 07 2013 07:16 Chargelot wrote:On January 07 2013 06:12 Desertfaux wrote:
Where's my flying car, goddamnit, its 2013 already. It's called a plane. On January 07 2013 06:08 remedium wrote:
It's only a matter of time before physicists pull a Mines of Moria and unleash a Balrog on us. Just sayin'. No. Just sayin'. On January 07 2013 04:56 lumencryster wrote:
now i'm going to wait till we can get from point A to point B faster than the speed of light. i mean, people didn't think it was possible to fly, seems ridiculous enough since we don't have wings, right? You cannot move faster than the speed of light. You cannot move at the speed of light. Any passage that you take to arrive somewhere, light will travel through it faster. Light will always win. Unless you're that particle that was accelerated beyond the speed of light. Words like cannot and always means you're predicting the future. To that I say: You'll never accurately predict the entire future. Ever. Suck it. You are correct when you say we can't predict the future, but what you're saying is akin to someone suggesting that one day everyone in America might wake up and start speaking Chinese out of the blue, you can't say it won't happen because the future hasn't happened yet, but it violates everything we know about language, learning, behavior etc so its a pretty solid bet (aka solid fact) that it definitely won't happen. I'd say your example is a lot less believable because it literally makes no sense that it could occur without a cause (which is what "out of the blue" implies). Having a higher velocity than the speed of light can at least make some sense if our current set of scientific paradigms is flawed, incomplete, or just wrong, which is definitely more possible than you're admitting. That was essentially the point, by out of the blue, I just mean suddenly, ie some crazy new learning tool allowing you to learn a new language overnight wasn't invented or some other explanation that would make sense with what we know. It would occur with a cause, but any cause would violate everything we understand about language, for instance that it is learned etc etc as a sudden, otherwise unexplainable, mass language 'shift' would imply. That's basically the same as discovering that we can move faster than the speed of light, and remember, this person wasn't talking about some kind of random new shiny particle with exotic properties, which I'll concede there may be a remote chance of discovering, they were arguing that you cannot say 'we' cannot ever travel faster than the speed of light because we can't predict the future. Considering we understand this far better than we do language / the human mind I'd say it was a perfectly reasonable statement, in fact I would say it would be far more believable that everyone would wake up speaking fluent Chinese than discovering normal particles can push past that barrier. The difference is that we can't even theoretically really come up with a decent explanation that would work for how everyone would suddenly start speaking fluent chinese, but there are many theories in how we could move from point A to point B faster than light, such as wormholes and the alcubierre drive.
Both the Alcubierre drive and traversable wormholes would require matter with either negative energy density or negative mass, which, in my opinion, is even more implausible than everyone somehow learning Chinese for no apparent reason, but I guess that's somewhat subjective.
edit: unless relativity is fundamentally "wrong" in the same way Newtonian physics was, I guess, but that seems unlikely.
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Newtonian physics wasn´t fundamentally wrong, just only applicable within a certain set of boundaries.
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On January 08 2013 06:06 Mikau wrote:
Newtonian physics wasn´t fundamentally wrong, just only applicable within a certain set of boundaries.
That's why I put "wrong" in quotations. It is technically wrong in the sense that it ignored relativity, but we can still use it very effectively.
To elaborate: you could argue that at the time Einstein came up with relativity, you would have called speeds where relativity matters "exotic," i.e. things that can't be described by or outright violate Newtonian physics. It's possible that there are other "exotic" things in physics that violate relativity, and we still don't have a true complete picture. I just really doubt it.
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Newtonian physics has been falsified. Saying "it is only applicable within a certain set of boundaries" is exactly why it is fundamentally wrong (assuming you think that it is actually possible there is a right theory capable of holistically explaining the nature of reality).
A wrong theory can still yield correct predictions under some circumstances, but that doesn't make it any less wrong when it fails to accurately describe the nature of reality. Anyone can make an ad-hoc description of past events and claim they've discovered a theory that causally explains the nature of reality within certain boundaries (for example, Astrology is great at this).
Let's say ice cream sales increase and shortly following this trend, the rate of drowning increases. One might conclude that increased ice creams sales causes more people to drown. If you only look at a certain set of boundaries for the results yielded, this theory wouldn't be fundamentally wrong either. However, we all know that increases in ice cream sales doesn't actually cause more people to drown. Just because Newtonian physics is capable of yielding extremely accurate results in most every-day situations doesn't make it right. It is useful and pragmatic, but still fundamentally wrong (unless you're a hardcore pragmatist).
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On January 08 2013 07:59 GGTeMpLaR wrote:
Newtonian physics has been falsified. Saying "it is only applicable within a certain set of boundaries" is exactly why it is fundamentally wrong (assuming you think that it is actually possible there is a right theory capable of holistically explaining the nature of reality).
A wrong theory can still yield correct predictions under some circumstances, but that doesn't make it any less wrong when it fails to accurately describe the nature of reality. Anyone can make an ad-hoc description of past events and claim they've discovered a theory that causally explains the nature of reality within certain boundaries (for example, Astrology is great at this).
Let's say ice cream sales increase and shortly following this trend, the rate of drowning increases. One might conclude that increased ice creams sales causes more people to drown. If you only look at a certain set of boundaries for the results yielded, this theory wouldn't be fundamentally wrong either. However, we all know that increases in ice cream sales doesn't actually cause more people to drown. Just because Newtonian physics is capable of yielding extremely accurate results in most every-day situations doesn't make it right. It is useful and pragmatic, but still fundamentally wrong (unless you're a hardcore pragmatist).
I think you completely miss the point of physics and science in general making comments like that.
No physicist will ever claim to know what truly happens in nature, this isn't something we aim for because its impossible, we can't know what happens. Instead we simply try to describe what we see, the general tool used for this is mathematics as it has been shown over centuries to be an amazing tool for describing the world around us.
This is basically physics, describing the behaviour and interactions of particles / objects through maths.
This is where classical mechanics has been phenomenally successful as it is still provides us with accurate descriptions of the classical world. What you are confusing things with is that we eventually we discovered there is more to the world than what we can immediately see, these generally concern extremes, like the extremely fast relativistic mechanics or the incredibly small quantum mechanics. Classical mechanics falls apart at this point and these other forms of mechanics step in, however you would never use quantum mechanics on macroscopic objects etc
This does not mean classical mechanics is wrong, it is simply a collection of mathematical rules to describe the motions of macroscopic objects at non-relativistic speeds, this never changed and it still works to make accurate predictions through simple models, the rules still apply, it is still correct. In fact it still does this better than anything else we have, but as mentioned above, it works within certain constraints / under certain assumptions, wander out of these and it will fall apart.
Just think about it for a second, if you want a truly accurate description of even something simple, say a ball falling, you'd need to model ever single particle, how it moves, interacts with the ball and all the total outcomes, that's the only 'correct' model, at least according to how we understand the world now, which also makes assumptions and so is probably not entirely accurate.
The whole thing is a massive waste of time which is why physics is not about 100% guarantee'd true totally accurate models of exactly what happens, rather making assumptions and applying constraints to make an extremely complex problem manageable ( the ball falls with acceleration ~9.81m/s^2 ), its simply about modelling the world in ways we can understand, some people might like to chase some kind of crazy equation that does it all but most of us just simply want good equations to describe the parts we work on, and generally that's what we get.
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Newtonian mechanics are wrong. They are a generalisation which assumes a continuous energy distribution and a linear increase of energy with velocity which is of course wrong where v -> c as well as E -> 0 and m -> 0.
In fact they are so wrong that if we were to use Newtonian mechanics as they were originally intended we would not have the ability to treat cancer, amongst other things. Newtonian mechanics are a subset of relativistic mechanics where none of the above conditions apply. It's a simple exercise to derive the Newtonian force and energy equations from their relativistic expressions. It is not really the quantum regime where this applies - we use a different subset of mechanics for that based upon the quantization of properties of given particles where property distribution is no longer continuous.
It doesn't matter that they are useful. They are still wrong and in a lot of cases by several orders of magnitude or more. Relativistic equations will ultimately provide the more accurate answer even in traditionally Newtonian cases. However, there is little need for that kind of accuracy when dealing with macroscopic bodies as ultimately every model we use is a simplification of some sort.
What you are confusing the situation with is the problem of n-body simulation - something we don't deal with by simplifying equations in physics but by statistical averages and assumptions of stability.
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On January 08 2013 00:30 adwodon wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2013 09:23 GGTeMpLaR wrote:On January 07 2013 07:47 adwodon wrote:On January 07 2013 07:22 Microsloth wrote:On January 07 2013 07:16 Chargelot wrote:On January 07 2013 06:12 Desertfaux wrote:
Where's my flying car, goddamnit, its 2013 already. It's called a plane. On January 07 2013 06:08 remedium wrote:
It's only a matter of time before physicists pull a Mines of Moria and unleash a Balrog on us. Just sayin'. No. Just sayin'. On January 07 2013 04:56 lumencryster wrote:
now i'm going to wait till we can get from point A to point B faster than the speed of light. i mean, people didn't think it was possible to fly, seems ridiculous enough since we don't have wings, right? You cannot move faster than the speed of light. You cannot move at the speed of light. Any passage that you take to arrive somewhere, light will travel through it faster. Light will always win. Unless you're that particle that was accelerated beyond the speed of light. Words like cannot and always means you're predicting the future. To that I say: You'll never accurately predict the entire future. Ever. Suck it. You are correct when you say we can't predict the future, but what you're saying is akin to someone suggesting that one day everyone in America might wake up and start speaking Chinese out of the blue, you can't say it won't happen because the future hasn't happened yet, but it violates everything we know about language, learning, behavior etc so its a pretty solid bet (aka solid fact) that it definitely won't happen. I'd say your example is a lot less believable because it literally makes no sense that it could occur without a cause (which is what "out of the blue" implies). Having a higher velocity than the speed of light can at least make some sense if our current set of scientific paradigms is flawed, incomplete, or just wrong, which is definitely more possible than you're admitting. That was essentially the point, by out of the blue, I just mean suddenly, ie some crazy new learning tool allowing you to learn a new language overnight wasn't invented or some other explanation that would make sense with what we know. It would occur with a cause, but any cause would violate everything we understand about language, for instance that it is learned etc etc as a sudden, otherwise unexplainable, mass language 'shift' would imply. That's basically the same as discovering that we can move faster than the speed of light, and remember, this person wasn't talking about some kind of random new shiny particle with exotic properties, which I'll concede there may be a remote chance of discovering, they were arguing that you cannot say 'we' cannot ever travel faster than the speed of light because we can't predict the future. Considering we understand this far better than we do language / the human mind I'd say it was a perfectly reasonable statement, in fact I would say it would be far more believable that everyone would wake up speaking fluent Chinese than discovering normal particles can push past that barrier.
Really? One of these problems is the spontaneous transmission of vast quantities of information to every single human being on the planet without an obvious vector capable of effecting such a change. The other is the violation of world lines. It is theoretically possible for faster than light particles but not this side of the relativistic barrier. We also have absolutely no idea how we might discover these particles.
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On January 06 2013 00:43 micronesia wrote:
I think you are misunderstanding what this means. It's not that we broke physics, but so minorly that it can be written off... it's that the conventional understanding of temperature is incorrect. I realized this when I studied thermal physics, well before this article. I don't think you're choosing your words well. When you say "the conventional understanding of temperature is incorrect", you mean that it's not the one used by physicists. It's still perfectly adequate to describe hot and cold as most people experience it, and since that's the experience that the word "temperature" was created to describe, I don't see how any adequate description of it can be called objectively "incorrect".
On January 06 2013 00:54 Evangelist wrote:
Okay. I'll do a quick TLDR for the people who aren't in this field.
Absolute zero is a misnomer as far as physicists are concerned. We only really consider temperature as a thermodynamic process where we can define temperature as a relation between entropy and energy where entropy is the disorder within a system (where disorder is defined by physicists as the degree to which a system is seperated from a perfectly spread, entirely equal medium). The ultimate entropic system is one where all energy is spread through an entire body of the system in perfectly equal amounts and any distribution demonstrated on this system is FLAT.
What this means in laymans terms is if you imagine that the universe is full of strings of lumpy custard, a perfectly entropic universe is not only perfectly smooth but has absolutely no heat flow at all.
When considering entropy, when you increase the temperature of an atom, the electrons preferentially distribute themselves up through increasing energy levels and entropy thus increases with temperature. In the case of negative temperature, as I understand it, a decreasing negative temperature preferentially fills the HIGHER energy shells and not the lower energy shells. This implies a bound higher energy state which if considered in the perspective of a system which is collapsing, will administer a repulsive anti-collapsing potential.
Essentially, the way to think of it is that normally when you increase the temperature of a system, you fill a glass from the bottom up. With negative temperature, it is the equivalent of taking that same glass and filling it and finding it actually fills from the top down.
Very interesting stuff. The paper is fascinating too. Something at negative temperature is going to be fighting local attempts to be at a positive temperature and thus reach a steady state. Thanks for the post; very helpful.
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On January 08 2013 22:51 Evangelist wrote:
Newtonian mechanics are wrong.
They aren't wrong, they just apply at a different scale. Comparing Quantum and Newtonian mecanics is just plain stupid to start with.
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United States24664 Posts
On January 08 2013 23:20 qrs wrote:Show nested quote +On January 06 2013 00:43 micronesia wrote:
I think you are misunderstanding what this means. It's not that we broke physics, but so minorly that it can be written off... it's that the conventional understanding of temperature is incorrect. I realized this when I studied thermal physics, well before this article. I don't think you're choosing your words well. When you say "the conventional understanding of temperature is incorrect", you mean that it's not the one used by physicists. It's still perfectly adequate to describe hot and cold as most people experience it, and since that's the experience that the word "temperature" was created to describe, I don't see how any adequate description of it can be called objectively "incorrect". Show nested quote +On January 06 2013 00:54 Evangelist wrote:
Okay. I'll do a quick TLDR for the people who aren't in this field.
Absolute zero is a misnomer as far as physicists are concerned. We only really consider temperature as a thermodynamic process where we can define temperature as a relation between entropy and energy where entropy is the disorder within a system (where disorder is defined by physicists as the degree to which a system is seperated from a perfectly spread, entirely equal medium). The ultimate entropic system is one where all energy is spread through an entire body of the system in perfectly equal amounts and any distribution demonstrated on this system is FLAT.
What this means in laymans terms is if you imagine that the universe is full of strings of lumpy custard, a perfectly entropic universe is not only perfectly smooth but has absolutely no heat flow at all.
When considering entropy, when you increase the temperature of an atom, the electrons preferentially distribute themselves up through increasing energy levels and entropy thus increases with temperature. In the case of negative temperature, as I understand it, a decreasing negative temperature preferentially fills the HIGHER energy shells and not the lower energy shells. This implies a bound higher energy state which if considered in the perspective of a system which is collapsing, will administer a repulsive anti-collapsing potential.
Essentially, the way to think of it is that normally when you increase the temperature of a system, you fill a glass from the bottom up. With negative temperature, it is the equivalent of taking that same glass and filling it and finding it actually fills from the top down.
Very interesting stuff. The paper is fascinating too. Something at negative temperature is going to be fighting local attempts to be at a positive temperature and thus reach a steady state. Thanks for the post; very helpful.
I think I should say definition rather than just an understanding.
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That's not really better. A definition is just giving a name to something. A set of definitions can be inconsistent, but calling a definition wrong is weird.
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United States24664 Posts
On January 08 2013 23:50 et wrote:
That's not really better. A definition is just giving a name to something. A set of definitions can be inconsistent, but calling a definition wrong is weird.
I disagree, since we are in the realm of science rather than language
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No, that's not the case. There's nothing in nature sticking the label 'Temperature' to the partial derivative of entropy wrt. energy. You could call that something else, and define temperature as something else, and physics would still work. Definitions are really just names.
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On January 08 2013 23:26 Douillos wrote:They aren't wrong, they just apply at a different scale. Comparing Quantum and Newtonian mecanics is just plain stupid to start with.
I think the whole point is that Newtonian mechanics actually doesn't apply at *any* scale unless you want approximations of an answer. If you want an exact answer then you can't use Newtonian mechanics, because...why else? Its wrong.
Einstein's theory of general relativity is something that does apply at a different scale, as it gives extremely precise answers on the macroscopic scale. It just doesn't work on the "quantum scale" obviously.
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On January 08 2013 23:52 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2013 23:50 et wrote:
That's not really better. A definition is just giving a name to something. A set of definitions can be inconsistent, but calling a definition wrong is weird. I disagree, since we are in the realm of science rather than language
You are always within language.
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So what the article says about dark energy, is that a big deal, or are all the physicists in the thread not touching on that? It seems rather awesome, like a significant step forward in figuring out what exactly dark energy is and how it works.
I'm assuming this isn't as awesome as finding the Higgs-Boson, but still pretty awesome. Is that a fairly accurate assessment?
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EPT
