I bet you didnt know that

Ipso · 05-12-2018 1:02am

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”

― Werner Heisenberg,

And lots of variations thereof.

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
― Bill Shakespeare

Throw physic to the dogs!
Bill Shakespeare

mzungu · 05-12-2018 1:46am

Air Marshal Sir David Grahame Donald became famous for his miraculous escape from death having fallen from his Sopwith Camel at 6,000 feet (1,800 m) in 1917. He was attempting a new manoeuvre in his Sopwith Camel and flew the machine up and over, and as he reached the top of his loop, hanging upside down, his safety belt snapped and he fell out. He was not wearing a parachute as a matter of policy. Incredibly, the Camel had continued its loop downwards, and Donald landed on its top wing. He grabbed it with both hands, hooked one foot into the cockpit and wrestled himself back in, struggled to take control, and executed "an unusually good landing". In an interview given 55 years later he explained, "The first 2,000 feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damnably 'firma'. As I fell I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby. Suddenly I fell back onto her.

topmanamillion · 05-12-2018 3:55am

Jameson, founded by a Scot, is a French owned Whiskey producer made in Ireland

Waterford Crystal is a Finnish owned manufacturer of Crystal made in India

Guinness is a British owned Beer producer made in Ireland

Cully and Sully is an American owned Soups and Hotpots company produced in the UK.

Lyon`s Tea and HB Ice Cream are owned by the same English/Dutch company and produced in the UK

Siúcra sugar is a German owned company produced in Germany and the UK

Donegal Catch is a British owned company which sells fish products from Scotland, Norway and Chile.

pleas advice · 05-12-2018 4:35am

mzungu wrote: »

Air Marshal Sir David Grahame Donald became famous for his miraculous escape from death having fallen from his Sopwith Camel at 6,000 feet (1,800 m) in 1917. He was attempting a new manoeuvre in his Sopwith Camel and flew the machine up and over, and as he reached the top of his loop, hanging upside down, his safety belt snapped and he fell out. He was not wearing a parachute as a matter of policy. Incredibly, the Camel had continued its loop downwards, and Donald landed on its top wing. He grabbed it with both hands, hooked one foot into the cockpit and wrestled himself back in, struggled to take control, and executed "an unusually good landing". In an interview given 55 years later he explained, "The first 2,000 feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damnably 'firma'. As I fell I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby. Suddenly I fell back onto her.

if you dug a hole straight through the earth and jumped in, it would take 42 minutes to fall through to the other side, this is exactly the same amount of time it would take someone orbiting the earth just above the surface to travel half way around the world (assuming a spherical earth of uniform density, and ignoring air resistance)

IvyTheTerrific · 05-12-2018 8:34am

Speaking of falls being survived, Betty Lou Oliver is the record holder for the longest survived elevator fall.
In July 1945, in heavy fog a B25 bomber crashed into the Empire State building between the 78th and 80th floors. Oliver was an elevator operator and was on the 75th floor at the time of the crash. The elevator cables were severed, sending the elevator on an uncontrolled descent. Luckily for Oliver, two factors helped her survive. As the elevator fell, air pressure built up beneath it, slowing it down slightly. Also, the severed elevator cables fell faster than the elevator, and coiled at the bottom of the shaft, making a sort of spring that cushioned the fall somewhat.
Oliver was severely injured but survived.

sbsquarepants · 05-12-2018 9:29am

Morbert wrote: »

But (as Fourier's references imply) this is increasingly becoming a minority view. Instead of describing reality in terms of a primitive existence, modern physicists often speak about reality in terms of the properties it exhibits to us.

Ok I can grasp that as a concept, but (surely

) even if we are only talking about the properties that reality exhibits to us, "something" must be there to be capable of exhibiting those properties.
The property may be no more than that, a property of a deeper more fundamental reality, and that may well be beyond our comprehension, but it must be made of "something".
For once one of Fouriers points made perfect sense to me - that is, and i'm paraphrasing here:D, particle detectors detect particles because what the hell else are they going to do! You can't blame your smoke detector at home for not detecting the burglar climbing in the window after all.
To my mind something just cannot be made of nothing??

Morbert wrote: »

[edit] - This is a great bit of writing by Werner Heisenberg on the wrinkles QM has introduced to our intuitions about reality. Specifcially page 74 of 91 "Language and Reality in Modern Physics"

http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Heisenberg,Werner/Heisenberg,%20Werner%20-%20Physics%20and%20philosophy.pdf

I'll have a read a bit later - something tells me it's just not an 8am easy read:D

razorblunt · 05-12-2018 10:26am

topmanamillion wrote: »

Jameson, founded by a Scot, is a French owned Whiskey producer made in Ireland

Waterford Crystal is a Finnish owned manufacturer of Crystal made in India

Guinness is a British owned Beer producer made in Ireland

Cully and Sully is an American owned Soups and Hotpots company produced in the UK.

Lyon`s Tea and HB Ice Cream are owned by the same English/Dutch company and produced in the UK

Siúcra sugar is a German owned company produced in Germany and the UK

Donegal Catch is a British owned company which sells fish products from Scotland, Norway and Chile.

Reason #271 for Barry's being superior.

Cleopatra_ · 05-12-2018 11:16am

sbsquarepants wrote: »

Ok I can grasp that as a concept, but (surely) even if we are only talking about the properties that reality exhibits to us, "something" must be there to be capable of exhibiting those properties.
The property may be no more than that, a property of a deeper more fundamental reality, and that may well be beyond our comprehension, but it must be made of "something".
For once one of Fouriers points made perfect sense to me - that is, and i'm paraphrasing here:D, particle detectors detect particles because what the hell else are they going to do! You can't blame your smoke detector at home for not detecting the burglar climbing in the window after all.
To my mind something just cannot be made of nothing??

I'll have a read a bit later - something tells me it's just not an 8am easy read:D

Maybe it's made of something we can't understand or detect? I prefer that over being made of nothing because I can't wrap my head around that

Lady Haywire · 05-12-2018 11:28am

A lot of hamsters only blink one eye at a time.

sbsquarepants · 05-12-2018 11:30am

mzungu wrote: »

The Battle of Hastings did not take place in Hastings, it took place seven miles down the road in a town aptly called Battle.

Yea mzungu, but even in 1066 the battle of battle just sounds like a typo:D

You, soldier boy, what beith the name of yonder town?

Hastings, m'lord.

Hmm, verily it hath a pleasing ring to it, does't thou not thinketh?

Sure, fúck it m'lord, from hence forth, battle of hastings it is!

Fourier · 05-12-2018 11:38am

sbsquarepants wrote: »

Ok I can grasp that as a concept, but (surely) even if we are only talking about the properties that reality exhibits to us, "something" must be there to be capable of exhibiting those properties.
The property may be no more than that, a property of a deeper more fundamental reality, and that may well be beyond our comprehension, but it must be made of "something".

Cleopatra_ wrote: »

Maybe it's made of something we can't understand or detect? I prefer that over being made of nothing because I can't wrap my head around that

Cleopatra has the basic idea.

The idea would be that reality is made of something, but that:

It's not in "lego brick format". Think of the way it's normal presented, everything is just a combination of quarks, electrons, etc. They are the lego pieces and the rest of the world is built out of them. The view would be that this is false. Diamond and Charcoal aren't both made of carbon atoms, but rather they both exhibit a set of properties we call "carbon" when examined in a certain way. Just as a green jumper isn't made of green.
The world is somewhat contextual. For example a person scanning my body would say it was made of electrons, protons, pions, etc
A fast moving person (near light speed) would say it was made of a quark-gluon plasma. These are completely different, so what I'm made of depends on one's speed with respect to me and other factors. Again the view would be these are simply two different facets of the underlying stuff. The "stuff" can look like particles sometimes, look like fields other times, look like a plasma made of completely different particles another time, etc
There are plenty of theorems that strongly argue the fundamental stuff is literally incomprehensible to the human mind or at least not amenable to mathematics.
It's not definitive yet, but as the years have worn on it seems to be more and more the case as more and more of these theorems have been proved that eliminate possible future explanations. The majority view among those in Quantum Foundations would be the incomprehensibility as the quotes show.

valoren · 05-12-2018 1:33pm

pleas advice wrote: »

if you dug a hole straight through the earth and jumped in, it would take 42 minutes to fall through to the other side, this is exactly the same amount of time it would take someone orbiting the earth just above the surface to travel half way around the world (assuming a spherical earth of uniform density, and ignoring air resistance)

Imagine 4 jets at the equator of a sphere and instruct them to explicitly travel due north until they come back again to the equator on the other side of the sphere. For illustrative purposes we will assume the sphere is not rotating.

In three dimensions their paths will looks something like this with their paths converging at the North pole.

In two dimensions, it looks like similar to this.

If you dropped a bowling ball through the 7,900 mile tube/hole through the Earth then it takes 42 minutes to drop to the other side and another 42 minutes back to where it started from as you pointed out.

Yet the cool thing about gravity is that no matter where in the tube you dropped the ball from it would still takes circa 84 minutes to complete the round trip from it's original dropping point, through the core and back to the start e.g. if you dropped it from say half way between the surface and the centre of the earth it would fall through the centre, come to a momentary stop at the corresponding point on the other side and fall back again from where it was dropped..

Assuming the free fall is with no air resistance and ignoring the earths rotation the 84 minutes it takes is fixed no matter where it is dropped from.

Let's show for example 5 such bowling balls and drop them.

The balls are dropping in space but also in time. Notice how the ball dropped near the centre hardly moves at all. So let's plot a spacetime diagram for each individual ball over the 42 minutes it takes for each ball to fall from one side of the centre to the other.

We can see that the trajectories for time of each ball are converging and this is the hallmark of a positive curvature and this looks the same as the due north Jets.

https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/general_relativity/index.html

[Deleted User] · 05-12-2018 2:19pm

Here's something everyone probably knows but I didn't until last night.

The expression 'The hair of the dog' dates back to the dark ages. If a person was bitten by a stray dog then if possible the dog was killed and it's hair used to cover the wound of the bite, as the hair of the dog was considered a cure for rabies - quite common at the time.

It was done whether or not the animal exhibited signs of rabies.

quickbeam · 05-12-2018 7:58pm

mzungu wrote: »

The Battle of Hastings did not take place in Hastings, it took place seven miles down the road in a town aptly called Battle.

That makes it sound like the town came first and the battle just happened to be held there. The town, was, of course named after the battle.

Similarly, Woodstock Music Festival didn't take place in Woodstock at all but 50 odd miles away in White Lake.

New Home · 05-12-2018 8:00pm

Wasn't Woodstock supposed to take place in Woodstock but the powers that be withdrew their consent almost at the last minute, so the festival moved on elsewhere, or am I remembering it wrong?

Franz Von Peppercorn · 05-12-2018 8:03pm

Fourier wrote: »

Just as a green jumper isn't made of green.

? Of course a jumper is not made of green. It’s dyed green. Could be made of wool or some other material though.

*** shakes head sadly *** scientists, eh?

Ipso · 05-12-2018 8:09pm

quickbeam wrote: »

That makes it sound like the town came first and the battle just happened to be held there. The town, was, of course named after the battle.

Similarly, Woodstock Music Festival didn't take place in Woodstock at all but 50 odd miles away in White Lake.

Was the town not Bethel?

quickbeam · 05-12-2018 8:11pm

New Home wrote: »

Wasn't Woodstock supposed to take place in Woodstock but the powers that be withdrew their consent almost at the last minute, so the festival moved on elsewhere, or am I remembering it wrong?

Yeah, something like that. But it kept its original name.

quickbeam · 05-12-2018 8:12pm

Ipso wrote: »

Was the town not Bethel?

Yes:

White Lake is a hamlet in the town of Bethel, Sullivan County, New York...

gozunda · 05-12-2018 9:19pm

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

? Of course a jumper is not made of green. It’s dyed green. Could be made of wool or some other material though.

*** shakes head sadly *** scientists, eh?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkZFuKHXa7w

:pac:

Morbert · 05-12-2018 11:46pm

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

? Of course a jumper is not made of green. It’s dyed green. Could be made of wool or some other material though.

*** shakes head sadly *** scientists, eh?

The thing is, the particle numbers and arrangements which constitute the "wool" in your jumper are modeled as properties, just as "green" is modeled as a property.

This sounds contrived, but it has a precise meaning in modern physics. A property of a physical system is a feature that can in principle be recorded by some measurement apparatus. Properties are represented by a mathematical object called a "projection operator" (the details of which probably aren't important here).

The green-ness of your jumper is a property, as we could build a measurement device that records this green-ness. We would model this with a "green" projection operator, and use it to predict the likelihood that your jumper is green. Nothing too odd about that.

But similarly, we could build a device that records the "wool" property of your jumper, and write down a "wool" projection operator.

The weird thing about QM is these properties, these "features which can correlate with measuring devices" are more fundamental in the formalism than any notion of a "substance" that reality is "made of".

Raheem Euro · 05-12-2018 11:52pm

Morbert wrote: »

The thing is, the particle numbers and arrangements which constitute the "wool" in your jumper are modeled as properties, just as "green" is modeled as a property.

This sounds contrived, but it has a precise meaning in modern physics. A property of a physical system is a feature that can in principle be recorded by some measurement apparatus. Properties are represented by a mathematical object called a "projection operator" (the details of which probably aren't important here).

The green-ness of your jumper is a property, as we could build a measurement device that records this green-ness. We would model this with a "green" projection operator, and use it to predict the likelihood that your jumper is green. Nothing too odd about that.

But similarly, we could build a device that records the "wool" property of your jumper, and write down a "wool" projection operator.

The weird thing about QM is these properties, these "features which can correlate with measuring devices" are more fundamental in the formalism than any notion of a "substance" that reality is "made of".

Do you think that if something has not been measured at all that in a sense it doesn't exist?

New Home · 06-12-2018 12:17am

Raheem Euro wrote: »

Do you think that if something has not been measured at all that in a sense it doesn't exist?

Don't tell me that the tree that falls in a forest doen't exist because there's nobody there to hear its fall? What next? That Schroedinger's cat doesn't exist (let alone it being both alive and dead) until it's observed?!? :eek:

gozunda · 06-12-2018 12:20am

New Home wrote: »

Don't tell me that the tree that falls in a forest doen't exist because there's nobody there to hear its fall? What next? That Schroedinger's cat doesn't exist (let alone it being both alive and dead) until it's observed?!? :eek:

1. Depends if the forest exists or not
2. Everyone knows that where there's a box - there will also be cat ....

Morbert · 06-12-2018 12:41am

Raheem Euro wrote: »

Do you think that if something has not been measured at all that in a sense it doesn't exist?

I don't, but I would have to draw from sources external to the formalism of QM to argue about what exists. QM itself doesn't seem to entail ontological commitments one way or the other. It seems to only be concerned with what we can expect our instruments to register when we probe reality.

Franz Von Peppercorn · 06-12-2018 12:52am

New Home wrote: »

Don't tell me that the tree that falls in a forest doen't exist because there's nobody there to hear its fall? What next? That Schroedinger's cat doesn't exist (let alone it being both alive and dead) until it's observed?!? :eek:

Not exist - makes a sound.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound”

The answer is yes, since the falling tree displaces air and creates a sound wave. ( The only way this isn’t a sound is it a priori assumed that the purposes of this particular thought experiment a sound is a sound wave heard by a consciousness being.)

However the thought experiment sounds more mysterious than it is: is the sound happening at all if unobserved?

Some of physics, or more kindly some interpretations of it, seems to be heading down this kind of intellectual cul de sac. In the We can’t measure it does it really exist?

Raheem Euro · 06-12-2018 1:37am

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

Not exist - makes a sound.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound”

The answer is yes, since the falling tree displaces air and creates a sound wave. ( The only way this isn’t a sound is it a priori assumed that the purposes of this particular thought experiment a sound is a sound wave heard by a consciousness being.)

However the thought experiment sounds more mysterious than it is: is the sound happening at all if unobserved?

Some of physics, or more kindly some interpretations of it, seems to be heading down this kind of intellectual cul de sac. In the We can’t measure it does it really exist?

'Forests' and 'trees' those words and the 'ideas ' of those things represent properties or collections of properties as observed/ measured in the mind of a human. There is no human present.

What is really here in the absence of a human in the absence of those properties and ideas? Lots of Fields excited/unexcited state?

Franz Von Peppercorn · 06-12-2018 2:24am

Raheem Euro wrote: »

'Forests' and 'trees' those words and the 'ideas ' of those things represent properties or collections of properties as observed/ measured in the mind of a human. There is no human present.

What is really here in the absence of a human in the absence of those properties and ideas? Lots of Fields excited/unexcited state?

In my view what happens in the absence of humans when a tree falls in the forest is what happens when there are humans. Sound doesn’t depend on hearing. Anyway I don’t suppose this is a thread for bickering.

Fourier · 06-12-2018 1:02pm

I'll genuinely stop on this topic now for a few months, if people want to discuss I'd be happy to on the physics forum. I just don't want to leave the wrong impression.

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

Some of physics, or more kindly some interpretations of it, seems to be heading down this kind of intellectual cul de sac. In the We can’t measure it does it really exist?

Just to be clear that's not what the issue with QM is about. Neither the theory nor ideas related to it say things don't exist when they're not being observed. In my career I have encountered nobody who thinks stuff doesn't exist if we can't measure it, even in the most extreme views on QM. I don't think this is even a minority opinion in either physics or its interpretations.

Rather we know for example that objects aren't really made of particles or fields. Particles and fields are just useful ways of describing certain experimental results. This isn't abstract philosophising as Quantum Mechanics as a scientific theory directly says this. It literally flags/warns you about situations where thinking things are made of particles will lead you to incorrect conclusions.

For example the radiation that comes off certain nuclear reactions, if you attempt to think of that radiation as being made of particles and proceed on that basis you'll make wrong conclusions about how the reaction will proceed. Similarly certain processes in the cores of stars and certain effects in metals can't be explained in particle terms and QM will warn you not to use particle concepts there. Even in cases where you can use the idea of particles, you mightn't be able to use all of it. So for example shining light off a caffeine molecule, QM says that the caffeine can be thought of as a particle and the light can be thought of as particles (photons). However even in that case QM will warn you that you can't use everything we normally associate with a particle. We naturally think of particles as having a size, a mass, some energy, a location and a speed. In the caffeine example QM will tell you that the size and location concepts should just be ignored/aren't applicable. In other cases it might be the mass concept you should forget about.

Even worse sometimes a concept can apply but give varying answers. For example in a beam of light the "Number of Photons" concept does apply, but sometimes when you measure it you find 45 photons, the next second 72 photons and this is the same unchanged beam of light. So the concept is fine to use, but clearly the light isn't actually made of a specific number of photons.

These are scientific predictions and QM is providing an experimentally testable guide to when certain concepts (particles, fields, energy, momentum, etc) are valid and okay to use and when they are not. It's not an intellectual cul de sac, it's something you have to directly acknowledge as being shown from experiments.

Obviously then the underlying stuff doesn't care about our concepts ultimately, since any of them could fail to apply in different situations. Unfortunately we just don't know what are the sensible concepts/descriptions for the fundamental stuff and there are strong reasons (in the form of mathematical theorems) to think we basically can't understand them.

Not being able to grasp something is completely separate from thinking it doesn't exist.

TomSweeney · 06-12-2018 6:50pm

osarusan wrote: »

In Rainman there is a scene in which Dustin Hoffman's character refuses to fly because of his fear of plane crashes, listing off a catalogue of accidents. It's the scene which explains why they have to make the roadtrip which makes up so much of the film, but because of the content, it was cut from the in-flight version of the film by many airlines.

Can anybody guess one airline which left the scene in their in-flight version?

I remember watching Rain Man in the United States on a regular terrestrial TV station in the summer of 2002 or 2003 and they had cut that scene - I guess 9/11 was still a litte raw.

I bet you didnt know that

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