exchemist

If there are no known examples, in what sense is strong emergence a real phenomenon?

Well in the examples that spring to my mind at least, emergent properties most certainly can be derived from the behaviour of the small scale entities responsible. That is what statistical thermodynamics is all about, surely? Macroscopic properties of bulk matter are derived, quantitatively, from the statistical behaviour of molecules.

I may be being thick but I don’t understand what is meant in this context by putting the genie back in the bottle. Surely an emergent property is just the consequence, at larger scales, of a sufficiently large aggregate of entities at a smaller scale? Things like the bulk properties of a liquid being due to the aggregate behaviour of large assemblies of constituent molecules. I suppose you can get rid of (“reverse”) the emergent phenomenon by disaggregating them, but that seems a bit obvious. Can you expand a bit?

It was not me that made unprovoked accusations of “slurs” and “dogwhistles”.

My own contribution was simply to observe that, as governments are limited in what they can ask citizens to contribute towards the needy, it is inevitable that there will be those at the tail of the wealth distribution who are not helped to move out of it. It is regrettable but it is a fact. There was no implied moral censure of such people. Nor was there in my reading of other contributions.

As far as I can see, nobody on this thread has suggested any such thing.

What slur?

There was a middle class in the Victorian era. But certainly, most working class people at that time could not be considered “bourgeois”. Whereas now, to a very large extent in western societies, they can, this being thanks to the mixed economy approach that governments found themselves following as the c.20th developed. The Marxist analysis does not hold and did not in the 1970s, when I used to come across such nonsense at university.🙄

The passage you quote seems to think it makes a valid point merely by labelling those it wishes to attack as "bourgeois". But it does not address the key point, which is that human beings will always have a tendency to look after themselves first, and this limits how much altruistic behaviour can be expected. That applies to any peasant or factory worker, just as much as to a "bourgeois" gentleman. (What is particularly poisonous in that passage is the insinuation that even the law is merely the will of the middle class. That is both preposterous and dangerous.)

Arf arf.😆

One of the enduring features of human nature is the struggle between altruism and self interest. Political systems that try to impose altruism (e.g. communism) always fail, because people always want to look after their own interests first. Religions and some political creeds exhort people to altruism but it is always an uphill struggle and only partially successful. Thoughtful politics tries to strike a balance between allowing people to keep the fruits of individual enterprise and taking care of the needy. This is the social bargain that people in western societies accept. That being so, there will always be a tail of the population distribution curve that suffers hardship.

We had the E V Rieu translation read to us when we were kids. But I'm intrigued by the T E Lawrence version. Maybe I should look for it. I did read the 7 Pillars of Wisdom while I was working in the Middle East - thought it would be a good idea to see how an Englishman adapted to the Arab world.

Hey, look over there! A dead cat! [And don’t look at our attempts to undermine the voting system in time for the mid-terms]

Yes, so that would suggest to me the EM interaction and the weak and strong interactions are qualitatively different from gravitation, in that only the last can be modelled as due to geometrical effects of spacetime (or spacetime + nnn).

OK yes I gathered it was classical. To rephrase my question, what interests me is whether the basic concept - of treating the EM interaction in terms of 5D geometry of what could I suppose be called space-charge-time can in principle be adapted to fit with QFT, or whether the two approaches are inherently mutually exclusive. Without knowing much about the subject, it seems to me the QFT idea of a field mediated by virtual particle exchange is utterly different.

That's interesting. So it's an analogous approach to GR, but for the EM interaction. I see it predates QFT. Is this concept compatible with QFT, i.e. the EM field and mediating virtual photons?

As a complete outsider to entropic gravity, I must say I am rather excited by all this. It always struck me as odd that gravitation, which per GR is not really a force but a manifestation of spacetime geometry, should be conventionally treated like the other 3 fundamental interactions which are real forces, mediated by force carriers per QFT. Also it would appear that it might resolve other issues, apart from obviating the so far fruitless search for the (possibly mythical) graviton, viz. dark matter. Now that you have explained a bit about, it I shall keep an eye on this topic!

Actually I’m not puzzled by that so much. I was just wondering whether emergent gravitation might do away with some of the intractable problems people seem to have had developing a quantum theory of gravity.

This is all well beyond my grasp of physics but if gravitation were an emergent phenomenon rather than a fundamental interaction, would that get rid of the intractable problems associated with the (so far hypothetical) graviton? I can imagine that in that case one might no longer need to try to treat gravitation in terms of QFT, with its own mediating particle and so forth.

Very likely. But what is the operating principle of the desert still?

Yes, I admit I don't quite follow how this works. It speaks of the adsorbed water being released from the structure by solar heating, but then being "condensed", implying what is released is water vapour. So to condense it requires latent heat to be removed. How is this achieved, given that solar heating will be available during the day, while the lower temperature needed for condensation only obtains at night? Addendum: I've found a paper on this (from 3 years ago): https://yaghi.berkeley.edu/pdfPublications/23MOFwaterdevice.pdf It seems there is an aluminium heat sink shielded from sunlight. The MOF material adsorbs water at night and then releases it as a vapour under solar heating during the day. The device relies on the heat sink still remaining cool enough to condense it (I suppose it all takes place in the early morning). The point, presumably is that the partial pressure of the water vapour released is far higher than in the ambient air from which it was adsorbed, and above the dew point at the temperature of the heat sink. By the way, I read in yesterday's FT that Omar Yaghi, the Nobel winning chemist who has worked on this, has now decamped from the USA to China, due to the hostile attitude of the Trump administration towards science research. Nice one Donald!

I note that UEFA has very publicly stated there will be no such breaks in their competitions.

I thought it was nice that the Belgian manager had a word with Balogun after the match to reassure him it wasn't his fault. That is the sort of kind and thoughtful human gesture in victory that would be inconceivable to a man like Trump. But Trump's Turdas Touch strikes again, this time tainting the World Cup and, unfairly for them, the US team. (But Infantino should be made to resign.)

Oh bugger I was trying to reply to @geordief .

Yes tit willow is Mikado. The policemen are in Pirates of Penzance, however.