Faster than light universe?
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It all shows that you need to plan and document, plan and document before you start thinking you can just slap together 26 dimensions and assume it'll all work. Imaginary mass for tachyon particles? Can you say "kludge"? :rolleyes:
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Actually from what I've read, they've found a solution to that problem. I can't remember the details, but I think it involved dual strings. Esentially they were using a bad perterbation. Some of the latest non-string theories can shoehorn all the particles into a 4 dimensional subspace of a 5 dimensional space with exponentially increasing gravity in the 5th dimension. It sounds completely artificial but it does produce a solution with the big gap between the weak and strong scales.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
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One of my favorite notions is that science is more philosophy than fact. I mean come on... do we really think that with our limited brain pans that we can accurately calculate the beginning of this space and time we find ourselves in? Fun excercise and may uncover quite a bit of relevant information and useful data, but really, again, we're guessing. I'm fascinated by it though. Taking a look at the assumed view of the grand universe, our own milky way is like a gnat in comparison. When you get to the level of clusters of clusters of galaxies... all of my problems seem pretty insignificant indeed. I think that as science evolves this data will keep changing. As our understanding and technique improves so will the data, but I wonder if we can come up with the correct numbers and if it even matters. But the old number was 14 billion years. Side note: There's a book I'm reading called Programming the Universe[^]. Some very provacative ideas here. Maybe when the quantum computer is optimized it will tell us that we can't know the age or size of the universe as that data itself changes along with our ability to digest the details.
This statement is false.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Side note: There's a book I'm reading called Programming the Universe[^].
I just finished it. It was pretty good, I was hoping for a little more meat to the book but it was interesting.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Maybe when the quantum computer is optimized it will tell us that we can't know the age or size of the universe as that data itself changes along with our ability to digest the details.
What I got from it was that the universe is a quantum computer and the only quantum computer that can actually predict it has to be the same size or bigger.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
One of my favorite notions is that science is more philosophy than fact.
I'm not sure I follow. Science is guided by philosopy. The scientific method is essentially based on philosopy. The only question about the facts discovered by science are the error bars. For some things we know them down to 9 or 10 digits others not even one, but generally we keep learning.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
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Shog9 wrote:
Cheese curds
<homer drool>ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh</homer drool> Can you get them where you are? I've only seen them in Cheeseland growing up they were one of my favorite childhood treats.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
Andy Brummer wrote:
Can you get them where you are?
Not proper ones. Colorado just isn't big on cheese the way Wisconsin is. Then again, it's also tough finding good beer and sausage here, even though there are lots of brewers and butchers. I suspect i don't quite "get" the local taste.
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Exactly :) Relativity says that information cannot travel than the speed of light, it says nothing about objects travelling faster than the speed of light (as far as I can remember from my college days). If there are any object that travel faster than the speed of light, we have no way of sensing that they are actually doing so. So it is perfectly plausible to think of a universe that is wider than ~31 light years. Nicola
That's not what Jörgen said at all. Space is expanding which is a completely different process then an object moving through space. What you are talking about are some types of (wave/particle) do have speeds greater then c, but the information/energy carried by the wave is carried by relationships between those waves. Those relationships are limited by c.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
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Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Side note: There's a book I'm reading called Programming the Universe[^].
I just finished it. It was pretty good, I was hoping for a little more meat to the book but it was interesting.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Maybe when the quantum computer is optimized it will tell us that we can't know the age or size of the universe as that data itself changes along with our ability to digest the details.
What I got from it was that the universe is a quantum computer and the only quantum computer that can actually predict it has to be the same size or bigger.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
One of my favorite notions is that science is more philosophy than fact.
I'm not sure I follow. Science is guided by philosopy. The scientific method is essentially based on philosopy. The only question about the facts discovered by science are the error bars. For some things we know them down to 9 or 10 digits others not even one, but generally we keep learning.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
Andy Brummer wrote:
I just finished it. It was pretty good, I was hoping for a little more meat to the book but it was interesting.
Yeah, I'm about halfway through. And I already think its too small.
Andy Brummer wrote:
What I got from it was that the universe is a quantum computer and the only quantum computer that can actually predict it has to be the same size or bigger.
I guess what I'm interested in is the notion that we can affect our reality and contribute to the calculations. But this seems to be a function of Quantum Mechanics in general, if the universe is what's being observed, then the observation would affect it, but to what degree? There's competing expectations that suggest some interesting potential results.
Andy Brummer wrote:
I'm not sure I follow.
Just a notion. Any facts can disappear as the method gets more accurate. What is truth one day is a lie on another. Or rather, truth changes with time and space. Its a moving target. Along the lines of "You can't examine life by killing it."
This statement is false.
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Andy Brummer wrote:
I just finished it. It was pretty good, I was hoping for a little more meat to the book but it was interesting.
Yeah, I'm about halfway through. And I already think its too small.
Andy Brummer wrote:
What I got from it was that the universe is a quantum computer and the only quantum computer that can actually predict it has to be the same size or bigger.
I guess what I'm interested in is the notion that we can affect our reality and contribute to the calculations. But this seems to be a function of Quantum Mechanics in general, if the universe is what's being observed, then the observation would affect it, but to what degree? There's competing expectations that suggest some interesting potential results.
Andy Brummer wrote:
I'm not sure I follow.
Just a notion. Any facts can disappear as the method gets more accurate. What is truth one day is a lie on another. Or rather, truth changes with time and space. Its a moving target. Along the lines of "You can't examine life by killing it."
This statement is false.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
But this seems to be a function of Quantum Mechanics in general, if the universe is what's being observed, then the observation would affect it, but to what degree?
If you took 1000 philosophers and gave then 1000 years they wouldn't come up with anything as strange as quantum mechanics. Essentially there are 2 sets of equations governing time evolution in quantum mechanics. Unobserved mode and observed mode. The problem is that in traditional quantum mechanics the observed mode is a hack that physicists added just to make sense of the way things work. It is where the multiple worlds and all the metaphysical crap comes from. Without the observed mode quantum mechanics is a wave theory just like electromagnetism. Nobody is exactly sure what causes a transition between the 2 modes but if you put enough stuff vibrating randomly together it behaves in observed mode. One active research area is to find the biggest system that we can make behave quantum mechanically. I think the record is a C60 molecule. I believe the author mentions plans to try and send bacteria through a double slit and get them to interfere.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Just a notion. Any facts can disappear as the method gets more accurate. What is truth one day is a lie on another. Or rather, truth changes with time and space.
The observed world never really changes. All that changes is the mathematical model that we use to approximate it. A lot of problem arise from people getting that model confused with something called the truth.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
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Doesn't the fact that you have a girlfriend pretty much disqualify you from being a physicist in the first place? :-D
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
I thought that was a programmer. Eh, I'm screwed (or not screwed depending on your perspective) either way.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
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Doesn't the fact that you have a girlfriend pretty much disqualify you from being a physicist in the first place? :-D
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Doesn't the fact that you have a girlfriend pretty much disqualify you from being a physicist in the first place?
Well, Einstein had several mistresses, so as I see it I have some catching up to do. :-D
Jeremy Falcon
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You have to stop thinking that the universe is like a big room that, somehow, is inside something else. It's not. It *is* the "something else". You can give youself a very bad headache thinking about this.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
You have to stop thinking that the universe is like a big room that, somehow, is inside something else. It's not. It *is* the "something else".
True, but it could be both and we don't know it. Olbers's paradox[^] was one of those that people believed to be true, until it was resolved. Although I prefer the alternate theory.
Chris Maunder wrote:
You can give youself a very bad headache thinking about this.
Indeed. That's where faith comes in. Personally, I have the faith, but don't mind the headache.
"People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them." - Anonymous Web - Blog - RSS - Math - LinkedIn
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And many a mathematician has contemplating infinities and infinity of infinities and the sets of infinities.. My infinity is bigger than your infinity.
This statement is false.
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Chris Maunder wrote:
You have to stop thinking that the universe is like a big room that, somehow, is inside something else. It's not. It *is* the "something else".
True, but it could be both and we don't know it. Olbers's paradox[^] was one of those that people believed to be true, until it was resolved. Although I prefer the alternate theory.
Chris Maunder wrote:
You can give youself a very bad headache thinking about this.
Indeed. That's where faith comes in. Personally, I have the faith, but don't mind the headache.
"People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them." - Anonymous Web - Blog - RSS - Math - LinkedIn
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
Although I prefer the alternate theory.
Is that the fractal one?
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
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Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
Although I prefer the alternate theory.
Is that the fractal one?
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
Yeah. God and the universe are mysterious things. Anything is possible. Hell (figuratively speaking of course), if you try to think what the smallest molecular object is, your brain will explode.
There are II kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who understand Roman numerals. Web - Blog - RSS - Math
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Nope, but good try :) The speed of light isn't based on a revolution of a small planet orbiting a small non-descript star in the unfashionable western reaches of the Galaxy. Measurements of time and distance all follow the same rules when measuring anything from the size of the universe to the size of a molecule. Get down below that and you have to talk to Uncle Quantum Mechanics, who's surly, disagreeable and slipperier than a greased weasel.
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
It's also worth pointing out, not many people know too much about the outer extrimities of the Universe (if any) yet. We are trying to apply modern physics to it, but haven't completely succeeded. So, there still exists the chance we could be wrong about it.
Absolutely - and this is the beauty of Science. Trying to find how big the universe is is like being put in a pitch black room and being asked what colour the walls are. It's one deductive step after another and each step we take may be right or wrong, but with each success or failure we get another clue and get closer to the answer.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
Trying to find how big the universe is
Why can't we all just agree that it's BLOODY HUGE and leave it at that.
"Nothing ever changes by staying the same." - David Brent (BBC's The Office)
~ ScrollingGrid: A cross-browser freeze-header control for the ASP.NET DataGrid
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Yeah. God and the universe are mysterious things. Anything is possible. Hell (figuratively speaking of course), if you try to think what the smallest molecular object is, your brain will explode.
There are II kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who understand Roman numerals. Web - Blog - RSS - Math
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
Anything is possible.
For very small values of possible.;) Have you actually seen the probablility of something simple like a million monkeys typing 100 characters from any one of Shakespeare's plays.
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
if you try to think what the smallest molecular object is, your brain will explode.
It hasn't yet. :~
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
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Chris S Kaiser wrote:
But this seems to be a function of Quantum Mechanics in general, if the universe is what's being observed, then the observation would affect it, but to what degree?
If you took 1000 philosophers and gave then 1000 years they wouldn't come up with anything as strange as quantum mechanics. Essentially there are 2 sets of equations governing time evolution in quantum mechanics. Unobserved mode and observed mode. The problem is that in traditional quantum mechanics the observed mode is a hack that physicists added just to make sense of the way things work. It is where the multiple worlds and all the metaphysical crap comes from. Without the observed mode quantum mechanics is a wave theory just like electromagnetism. Nobody is exactly sure what causes a transition between the 2 modes but if you put enough stuff vibrating randomly together it behaves in observed mode. One active research area is to find the biggest system that we can make behave quantum mechanically. I think the record is a C60 molecule. I believe the author mentions plans to try and send bacteria through a double slit and get them to interfere.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Just a notion. Any facts can disappear as the method gets more accurate. What is truth one day is a lie on another. Or rather, truth changes with time and space.
The observed world never really changes. All that changes is the mathematical model that we use to approximate it. A lot of problem arise from people getting that model confused with something called the truth.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
Sure they would, and they have. We have it now as a result of philosophy. Quantum Mechanics and String Theory are just that. Philosophy. Well, we can't observe the unobserved mode so we need an observed mode to correlate, but that's its own catch22. Just like the study of what causes life. Life can only be studied while living, but we usually kill something first and then try to figure out what made it live. Similar case, you can't determine a fixed point for a particle, as its in motion. And I don't understand the hang up regarding particle vs wave. Water does this. Its base form is particle but appears to act as a wave when grouped and in motion.
This statement is false.
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Sure they would, and they have. We have it now as a result of philosophy. Quantum Mechanics and String Theory are just that. Philosophy. Well, we can't observe the unobserved mode so we need an observed mode to correlate, but that's its own catch22. Just like the study of what causes life. Life can only be studied while living, but we usually kill something first and then try to figure out what made it live. Similar case, you can't determine a fixed point for a particle, as its in motion. And I don't understand the hang up regarding particle vs wave. Water does this. Its base form is particle but appears to act as a wave when grouped and in motion.
This statement is false.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Quantum Mechanics and String Theory are just that. Philosophy.
Quantum mechanics is a theory which goes against every previous concept of phyisics. It it something completely foriegn to the human mind. Experimental results of a precision which greater then every other science is why we are forced to deal with quantum mechanics. It is quite simply the best tested and verified scientific theory the human race has developed. For example the entire field of solid state physics which covers the doped silicon that every modern computer is built on is part of quantum mechanics. Optics and electromagnitism are quantum mechanics too. The only thing that isn't based on quatnum mechanics is general relativity, which is a well tested theory on the scale of the solar system, plus various astronomical observations we can manage.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
And I don't understand the hang up regarding particle vs wave. Water does this. Its base form is particle but appears to act as a wave when grouped and in motion.
Imagine dropping several rocks into water. Only rocks of a specific size create waves on the water, and when the rock creates the water wave it disappears. Eventually the wave disappears and a rock shoots out of the pond somewhere else. That is one analogy. Another one is that if you watch the rock drop on the pond no wave is created, but if you look away when you drop the rock when you look back it shoots out of the pond as soon as you look, but it shoots out where the waves were the highest when you looked back, but you never get to see the wave. You have to drop many many rocks and plot the locations of the rocks when you look back to build up the wave pattern. It gets stranger when there is a pole in the middle of the lake. If you look when the wave is passing by the pole then the rock will show up either on one side or the other, but if you wait until the wave passes the pole you will observe dead spots where the rock will never show up caused by interference of the wave with itself. So essentially the rock went both ways around the pole occupying two places at once. This means that the system under observation behaves completely differently if it is observed then if it isn't.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Just like the study of what causes life. Life can only be studied while living, but we usually kill something first an
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Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
Anything is possible.
For very small values of possible.;) Have you actually seen the probablility of something simple like a million monkeys typing 100 characters from any one of Shakespeare's plays.
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
if you try to think what the smallest molecular object is, your brain will explode.
It hasn't yet. :~
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
Andy Brummer wrote:
a million monkeys
But make that infinite and the probability goes to one.
Andy Brummer wrote:
It hasn't yet.
Amateur. Mine has exploded, imploded and reformed so many times already. :)
"I know which side I want to win regardless of how many wrongs they have to commit to achieve it." - Stan Shannon
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Andy Brummer wrote:
a million monkeys
But make that infinite and the probability goes to one.
Andy Brummer wrote:
It hasn't yet.
Amateur. Mine has exploded, imploded and reformed so many times already. :)
"I know which side I want to win regardless of how many wrongs they have to commit to achieve it." - Stan Shannon
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
But make that infinite and the probability goes to one.
The difference between math and physics.
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
Amateur. Mine has exploded, imploded and reformed so many times already.
Well, quantum mechanically, by not exploding my head has done all those virutally.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote:
11 and 26 dimension versions are really unstable and back backwards compatibility problems, though.
which is why superstring theory has moved onto compactification of dimensions to 10. Bosonic hyperspace of 26 dimensions suffers the problems of tachyon particles with imaginary mass. More current discussions involve supersymetry, dimensional compactification, and M-theory variants. :cool:
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
You people need to stop now. You're going to hurt yourselves.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
You people need to stop now. You're going to hurt yourselves.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
You people need to stop now. You're going to hurt yourselves.
Isn't this the X-Games, Cosmology division? danger is part of the excitement! It gives you that adrenalin rush...
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)