joigus

Granite? Really? Would the granite parts be more eroded than the quartz veins? I've no idea really. I just want to learn more about rocks. And unfortunately I didn't have any geologist's kit with me.

OK, then. Let me ask you a very technical question: What's with 2 and 3?

The way I see it it was either Speculations or Nature.

I've attached them here. The first one with the quartz-like veins was collected hereabouts: https://www.google.com/maps/@36.9992728,-7.89032,15357m/data=!3m1!1e3 And the obsidian/basalt looking one, hereabouts: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9845133,-6.6169228,15156m/data=!3m1!1e3 I could be a little bit off in the second one. I do remember the terrain was ochre-red and the place was littered with many similar obsidian-looking rocks.

Very interesting topic. (+1,+1) Thank you. If you don't mind, I will post a couple more pictures of rocks I collected in Spain and Portugal and be posting them here ASAP. One of them is very similar. Looks like a sedimentary rock that's been infiltrated by quartz. It's visibly more eroded in the "sedimentary body" and the "quartz" veins have resisted erosion much better, so it has some kind of ridges all around. The other looks to me like obsidian and rougher basalt arranged in layers, but I could be wrong. Is that possible?

To my taste, those are very interesting philosophical-scientific questions I don't know the answer to. +1. I know it has been speculated that intelligence/conscience could be some kind of condition that's being seeded from a distant future or perhaps auxiliary dimensions. That we are simulations running on somebody else's computers. But, to me at least, that has the flavour of anthropocentrism again, of a Ptolemaic rather than Copernican perspective. I'm more of the opinion that conscience, whatever it is physically characterized by, is a condition that every once in a while in cosmic terms, appears in the universe. That we're not all that special even in respect to that. That there may even be other kinds of conscience than ours. So my line of thought is more along the lines of entanglement (correlated non-separability) and einselection (emergence of a special set of variables for that correlation) in quantum mechanics. For whatever reason, some physical systems become computers/register machines in relation to their environment. They "learn" to ignore the noise and develop handler variables for the environment as well as representation variables. Something like that. I hope it's clear and I hope it's not too out there. I think for something like conscience to evolve from a nebular chaos, it must have been universally inherent in all matter all along, and then something physical must be triggering it on over and over. And then I have suggested as a possibility that this 1+3 mapping of conscience may just be a characteristic of how conscience is formed rather that an inherent quality of the physical universe itself. But these are just speculations, admittedly. I don't know how we could do a gedanken experiment or more concrete hypothesis from that imprecise idea.

I fully agree as far as I understand. That's why I said: "Have to do with" was not meant to imply causation, nor with a one-to-one mapping from ideas to patterns of neurons firing. The 1 is far too special. It shouldn't be there. But it is. But I tend to think that the 1 is in the mind and only in the mind.

If you mean real gravitons, "free-flying gravitons" so to speak, that's out of the question. They should be what gravitational waves are made of, and GW are difficult enough to detect themselves. Let alone the quanta that (presumably) make them up. If you mean virtual gravitons, no virtual particle can be detected. They are un-physical or "off-shell" (they don't satisfy Einstein's mass-energy relation). For gravitons to be detected you would have to scatter them with massive particles* or other gravitons, and the cross section is so small, due to the smallness of the coupling at any reasonable energy that we wouldn't see anything. Besides, as Eise has pointed out, messenger particles, like photons, don't really have localization in the normal sense. This is a consequence of quantum field theory. In QFT, you cannot define a position operator. Because massive particles can move in a non-relativistic regime, you can approximately define position for them if they're in the non-relativistic regime. But photons and other gauge bosons cannot be considered as non-relativistic (except possibly the Z and W+, W- before they decay), so they cannot given position in any precise sense in QFT. *Actually, with anything that has energy.

Good one! +1. True of all politicians. Only difference is who is more likely to get screwed.

Most chemical reactions of interest take place at constant pressure. Irrespective of how general that assumption is, most chemistry books do consider P to be constant. If that's the case, even though partial pressures of the different components are changing: \[p_{i}=n_{i}\frac{RT}{V}\] because the moles are changing. And assuming the changes occur in quasi-static conditions, while every ni is changing, the total volume is not. Nor is the total pressure. So the total work is zero if the volume doesn't change. Maybe that has to do with what you mean by "the workflow that the gas performs to exist". Is that it? Are you picturing that the gas that's being formed does work in order to be formed? That's not the case if the volume is also constant. Mind you, there is no such a thing as "partial volumes". I hope that answers your question.

I see. So it's a chemical reaction. Sorry. I should have read more carefully. I really don't understand this part of one of your sentences. I don't have a concept of "workflow that a gas performs to exist."

I think you're confusing change in volume with change in amount of matter present in your system. Moles are a measure of the number of atomic participants in your system. Volume is very different. Please review your statement so that a proper answer can be given to what's troubling you. The system, such as you've defined it, is an open system (open to exchanges of both energy and matter).

I'm not sure plain mass is that much useful to measure ideas. Energy would define a more appropriate scale, as well as measuring procedure. Ideas should be possible in principle to be traced back to the activity of neurons, and that's how neuroscientists treat them AFAICT. What we call ideas would have to do with certain time-correlated and/or location-correlated patterns of neurons firing. Saying that ideas are but physical processes may be going too far (although, what else could they be?), as "what we see" could be a projection from a perhaps richer level of physicality. So they would be some kind of projections on sets of internal, intra-quantum (or whatever we may want to call them) variables. This irredeemable puzzlement of "this moment is the only thing there is" feeling that conscience gives us is what tilts me in the direction of what Markus suggests (or at least that's how I interpret him) that consciousness and its formidable paradoxical nature cannot be tackled until we deal with the problem: What is so special about 1+3 dimensions? Another way of putting it could be: What general mathematical (geometrical, topological...) context would make 1+3 projections of it special in a representational sense? As I've quasi-quoted @Markus Hanke, I want to clarify. I don't necessarily think he and I agree on this, but what he said feels to me strongly overlapping with my mental picture or intuition of what must be going on. And what I've just said is my way of delivering it. He may well not agree. Sorry, I've spent a long time editing this entry, so it may be outdated by something already said. Also, I may not have been very clear about what I mean, but it's because the intrinsic difficulty of the subject.

I'm not sure if you're interested in this, and also it's not exactly about eidetic memory. But talking about extraordinary human minds and memory, I found this very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDbFSiMg_nQ I hope you enjoy it and/or leads you to further information about memory. For some people, excessive memory can be a problem. How do you like that.

If I understand you correctly, what you're getting at is conscience being a physical condition embedded in a more counter-intuitive context, a context that conscience itself is deprived of, that requires as a mapping constriction to be projected through a 1+3 dimensional spreadsheet, so to speak, in order to run properly. So space time would be a constriction for this conscious mapping to be functional, rather than an innate characteristic of the physical universe. This is a very interesting idea (+1), and I'm rephrasing just to guarantee that I understand you correctly. I'm not so sure about this. How does one get to know an idea has no mass? If it made operational sense, I would assume an idea has energy associated to it, however loosely. When you think a lot, your brain certainly consumes more glucose. Ideas are physical processes.

Another way of saying it: Enthalpy is a function of state that allows you to express heat balances. Heat is not a function of state, but you can relate it to a function of state. Some kind of "heat potential". Isn't that nice? You must keep pressure constant if you want it to do its job as "heat potential". Does that help?

Thank you for your comments. +1. It sounds funny that a small contamination of heavy elements would lead to completely different "phases" for stars that scatter all over the place in the diagram. But I can't see any other major reason why the diagram would look so "multi-phase" so to speak. Sure, but I agree. My intuition is precisely that because these second or third-generation stars are composed of matter that has collapsed, blown up, and re-collapsed again, that could be a good "in principle" reason why they get out of the main sequence. Suppose that at first, they are mostly protons fusing in the nucleus, giving off their protons and helium-nuclei exhaust. Then the fact that they get depleted of hydrogen would be the reason why this small contamination of heavy elements would start showing up as more significant in relation to the remaining hydrogen than for a star in its first generation. Whether this is covered by standard astrophysics, I don't know, to tell you the truth.

Thanks, Sensei. Very interesting comments. +1. Yes, debris from supernova explosions that get ejected out of SN attraction "sphere". That makes a lot of sense. So do you suggest tracking BH as candidates for previously existing SN that gave rise to our solar system is (or could be) accomplished by some kind of signature method? If that's not what you're suggesting, can you think of ways that it could be done or is being done? Give you an example: Accretion disks of BH's having same isotopic signature than ours, therefore likely that we emerged from that particular BH? Also kinematics of "us" with respect with particular BH signaling more likely that we running away from them. Although if we came out with just escape velocity we would be considerably slowed down by now, so difficult to detect. Now that you mention Betelgeuse. I remember some 6 years ago going out late in the night to watch Orion in the small village where is was living. In the Summer in Spain it only comes out really very late (about 5AM). Once the police (the rural police is the "Guardia Civil") stopped me and asked me for ID. They asked what I was doing. I told them the truth: I was looking at the stars. But I didn't tell them that I was waiting for a supernova to go off, which is what I secretly was hoping for. They looked at me funny. But there were no more questions. 😌 PD: I have to read your wiki entry yet.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-rna-reversing-mutations-underlying-neurological.html?fbclid=IwAR38JE4SGPC-ODBqRzTmdpenmcsLHHiSbfUa63rZhH42UFk0Lfxg-qPd5vI This sounds to me like a piece of very interesting news. Possibilities of editing RNA is a topic that fascinates me, although I still have to learn a lot about it.

I wasn't aware of this branch of maths. Thanks a lot, Studiot. +1 I've found this other one: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-constructive/ Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy has helped me a lot in the past (to understand the Kochen-Specker argument in QM, for example).

Hi again. I hope everybody is well. Without further ado, is there any appreciable difference between matter that has gravitationally collapsed from a primeval cluster made up of mostly hydrogen and matter that has collapsed several times within a certain galactic region? I suppose matter that collapses again and again in regions where many supernova explosions have taken place before would be richer in heavy elements. Could the wild variation in the types of stars as reflected in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram reflect this variation in the "degree of collapse" that there is in the universe? My intuition tells me that, if all stars had started up from a universal prototype cloud of mostly pure hydrogen (only varying in clustering size) the kinds of stars that would give us would nicely group into a 1-parameter curve in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. I have no mathematical proof for that, but it seems right (angular momentum, temperature, etc. are there too, so I'm aware that it may be an oversimplification). The fact that they don't, strongly suggests that matter in different parts of the universe collapses from very different samples of stellar debris. Some of them loaded with heavy elements, which would reflect in a very different nature of star formation. Does that make sense? Is there any hint of an answer that you know of or can point to? Thank you very much. Edit: By "collapsing" I don't mean black holes, I mean stellar formation. Sorry for possible confusion.

Now it seems to give a "bad gateway" error. It worked the other day. Thank you. +1

+1. This is a very interesting re-focusing of the question. Maybe the OP is interested in it? I don't think it can be done with our solar system because AFAIK remains of supernova explosions are seen as halos of dust (e.g., Crab Nebula). I surmise that our Solar System is much older than the Crab Nebula...

I had a teacher of classical field theory many years ago who, answering to a student who complained for his constant use of tensor analysis, replied: "If you want to understand Chinese poetry, it's a good idea to learn some Chinese." I'm sorry for the use of overly technical gobbledygook as AxB = C. You want to understand cosmology, the nature of time and what not, that's fair enough. Why don't you meet me halfway (or a tenth of the way), and remind yourself of what multiplication and division of simple numbers is? You do need some mathematics if you want to understand anything at all about time and the big bang. You can't just declare simple maths as off-limits. Ordinary guy is OK with me. An "ordinary conversation about the origin of time" is a different matter. There is no such a thing. Let me give you an example: Would you ask an economist to explain to you about the economy, without using concepts as interest rate, inflation, GDP or the like?

I think it's surface chemistry we're talking about here, rather than wax changing phase. Otherwise it would be incompatible with the principles of thermodynamics, I think. Waxes and rubbers have some surprising properties. Rubbers, e.g., cool down when stretched. When long molecules cool down under situations that would normally induce a temperature increase, that's because the very long molecules get more ordered when stretched, instead of disordered. Not same case as OP but, as I said, "surprising" properties. I share the puzzlement. +1 It can't be just the temperature that does it. It must be a combination of temperature, moisture, and most importantly, polar bonding with molecules in the skin cells. Otherwise, I'm clueless about what goes on here. +1. I agree. Again, it must be polar bondings and their effect, having to do with introducing molecular ordering in the very long wax chains.