joigus

OK. I'm a bit hazy on this right now. But I think the key words you're looking for are Henderson-Hasselbach. Try to work it out, and if I'm not helping, maybe someone can provide better help. You must picture the tritation curve in your mind. It's what biologists call a sigmoid curve.

Yes, that's right. Time reversal in the equations of motion for a falling object just make it look like an escaping object by reversing the initial conditions for velocity. While the force term remains the same. Everything? I also think an invitation proffered to Leonard Susskind to the forum to give him a chance to actually say what he would actually say is in order.

What's the pka of propionic acid? You must know how weak it is, right?

Well, white is a charge. It's what in QCD plays the role of zero charge in electrodynamics. The complication with QCD, if you wish, is that there are more ways to obtain zero charge: red-antired, green-antigreen, blue-antiblue, red-green-blue, antired-antigreen-antiblue, and more complicated but higher order combinations. As Swansont said, color-anticolor are mesons (lighter particles that decay very quickly,) and RGB things are baryons (heavier particles like proton and neutron, some stable, some ephemeral.) OK. Let's call anti-something by crossing them out. Like G would be anti-green. You could hit a nucleus with something hard, like an energetic proton, or a meson, and kick off some GBR piece from it. But it wouldn't last long in that colored state. What remains in the nucleus (because the nucleus is white) would be anti-GBR = RR. They would start pulling from each other like crazy, so you would generate a lot of energy in gluon lines going from one to the other trying to "equilibrate the color imbalance" let's say (I'm not being very precise,) up to the point that antiparticle pairs would appear "closing the lines," and turning the colored particles that escape into white particles again. I can't find a useful diagram for you to picture it. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe someone can provide it. The whole thing is even more complicated, because these colors are quantum numbers, so they're not even determined. They're constantly rotating in a space with three references R, G, B, but never quite being pure R, G or B. It's sort of like a dynamical rotation in the color space. Again, very imprecise, but I'm trying to explain as best I can. Swansont is totally right. A single quark would have to choose one color. But then again there are no "single quarks." Quarks in nucleons (protons and neutrons) are constantly rotating their colors by exchanging gluons, which are exchanging their colors among them!!! QCD is totally crazily complicated. Highly non-linear, which means even the interaction particles interact with each other. How do they do it? with other gluons that also interact with each other... Only quarks I can think of that were flying about with single colors must have been those that were doing so when the universe had a temperature TQCD (a very very high temperature.) It's crazily, crazily complicated. I hope it's clear that QCD colors are nothing like the ordinary concept of color!!!

AAMOF, you're totally right. I was imprecise to the point of being incorrect with "mix." It was a really bad word choice. You can mix them, yes. Gravity cannot escape the quantum nature, of course. I should have said gravity cannot be formulated as a quantum theory. A 3-body problem in which one of them is a photon is very simple. Even though with high speeds you must be careful, the photon wouldn't be very difficult to deal with. It's a 2-body Newtonian problem (which has an exact solution) plus a photon moving about. You can totally ignore the effect of the photon on the planets (I suppose you're assuming astronomical objects) and you could get fine details about the effects of the planets on the photon, which would be very small anyway.

Don't be sorry. It's OK. Confined particles are always white, yes. Well, quarks are perpetually changing color, with their gluons. It's not that confined particles are always white, it's more that aggregates of colored particles are always combine to white, and if you want to kick off a colored particle, it splits into white combinations again by creating particle-antiparticle pairs. It's the charges that balance out (or cancel out,) not the energies. Energies of quarks and gluons add up to the mass of the proton, neutron, etc. Exactly. If a particle is at x, there's no reason for it not to be somewhere else some time later. Charge is different. If a particle is white, it keeps being white or decays into red-antired, e.g. But then the products of decay immediately turn white again (because of confinement.) But you cannot have a particle with 1 unit of red charge turn into 2 red charge one second later. There are more differences. So that's why I told you not to take the analogy too seriously. In fact, there's no analogy at all. "Color" is just a name for a type of charge. You're very welcome. There's no reason why you can't get a reasonable understanding of QCD by reading popular science books or even some excellent books with some mathematics.

The resultant gravity field is the sum of the fields in Newtonian gravity, both for force fields or for potentials (superposition principle for Newtonian gravity.) It's a good approximation if the fields are not very strong. "Very strong" means that the Newtonian potential divided by c2 is << 1. In GR it's much more complicated (strong fields.) But even in the Newtonian case the resultant gravity field doesn't really solve the problem of motion if the three masses are comparable, as you are in the 3-body problem, which can only be approached numerically or perturbatively (by calculating incremental approximations from a simple particular solutions.) The reason is that any of the three bodies interact with the other two, and the equations cannot be separated. I'm not sure I'm answering your question, I'm trying incremental approximations to your question. I hope it adds something significant. I forgot: Mixing quantum mechanics and gravity is not possible as of today. Some people (Beckenstein, Hawking) have successfully combined both to do calculations, but it doesn't generalize very easily at all. Plus gravity generally is negligible in the very small world.

There are three colors in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Colors don't cancel each other out. They cancel RGB = colorless. Or RG = anti-B, GB = anti-R, BR = anti-G. All observed QCD particles are colorless. Don't take the analogy too seriously. Frequencies of light are a continuum, while QCD "colors" are discrete observables. To make it even more puzzling, you can't actually observe them directly, due to confinement. Plus there is no simple "anti-red" fotons, while there are anti-red gluons in some sense x, y, z are very different from color charge. Charges are internal (non-space time) and conserved. x, y, z are not conserved. You can't word physics and make sense of it with poetic phrases. Especially quantum physics. You need higher mathematics. And very sophisticated experiments on the other side. There's no way around it. E.g., energy is not "a point," it's an abstract quantity that we define when systems don't single out any particular time (are time-symmetric.) Experiments take care of checking that our definitions, deductions, and inductions are correct. I applaud your enthusiasm to try to understand it all, but it's more complicated, and subtle, but equally mysterious and wonderful, or even more, than you try to suggest. I hope I don't bother you or diminish your enthusiasm about physics. Physics is really wonderful and helps you understand a lot about the world around you. But it takes time, dedication... Imagination in straight jacket, as Feynman said. I didn't say anything about spin, because Strange covered that pretty well. I just added some more info about QCD.

@Eise Now I really understand what you meant when you said, Let me ask you something. You don't think the Libet experiment settles the question, which I quite agree with. So here's my question: Is there any way you can conceive of that could settle it? Experimentally, I mean. Because otherwise, my next question will be: How is all this we've been discussing here in any way different from a battle of words?

I will just ignore all your contents, provided you eventually manage to find any. It's more... economic. I have no time for deliberate, self-indulging, obscenely pointless, and painstakingly --if ridiculously unskillfully-- worded idiocy. There's plenty of room for narcissistic lunacy on the internet. What brings you to this place of discussion and honest communication of evidence, make no mistake, is no mystery to most people here. Most, from what I'm starting to learn, are quite used to reasoning things out, self-informing/correcting and respectfully informing/correcting each other. You're pretty obvious to everybody. It's like entering a room where you're the only one naked. Put your clothes on!

Yes, that's true. It's a theorem. You can't argue with a theorem.

Are you an insectist-sexist? A very good point. I forgot interrelations.

I disagree. If only for the reason that genomic libraries as so immensely valuable. They may have toolkits that we lack. The challenge is to keep them under control. I know it's a tall order, but it's a must. Knowledge is too precious.

Ok. Just one question, though. Can't that be obtained also from the fact that the Newtonian approximation always ties you to some g00 that to first order must have a Newtonian interpretation and thus the maximum aging (or maximum proper time) principle is already implied by it? IOW, isn't it a matter of what axiomatic approach you take? As not all fields are amenable to weak field approx., what you say does seem more general and preferable from an axiomatic POV... On the other hand, you can always do a Taylor series expansion and the first order is one plus the Newton potential, according to the historical approach.

I don't understand. I quoted directly from your post before your last one. Yes, sorry. "That" is this: I never said that the whole point of thermodynamics is to model what a box of gas is going to do. That's what I thought you were pointing at. But thermodynamics is certainly powerful and sometimes you can predict behaviours in processes, define and measure coefficients, etc. Nevertheless, sometimes when I start reading through the forum I'm a bit tired and there's a danger for me to misinterpret. And I don't see criticism --of ideas-- as a bad thing. And as to the 'salt and pepper' I'm afraid I did it again. Now I understand what you meant, and that would be a good analogy for the runes IMO. You --unwillingly, of course-- had me looking for 'salt-and-pepper' idiom definitions at some point. LOL Here. That's what I said. Any comments, further qualifications or criticism welcome.

I've been thinking for like half a minute whether there could be any other reason than the Newtonian limit, but I can't find any other one.

What colour are Rube pills? How many do you take a day to feel this "good"?

The r12 convention tends to confuse me. I'd go with applying twice the right-hand rule. One for field/source and a second one for Lorentz force law: \[\boldsymbol{B}_{1}\sim\boldsymbol{\nabla}\times\boldsymbol{j}_{2}\] \[\boldsymbol{F}_{1}\sim\boldsymbol{j}_{1}\times\boldsymbol{B}_{1}\] The force on j1 is towards j2. Resp. for 2 <-> 1 I assume with Ghideon that there aren't, e.g. power sources that invert the current along AC or CG along either wire. Neither do I see how this is a speculation.

I never said that. Thermodynamics is about much more than that, of course. There are reversible processes, irreversible ones, and different interesting coefficients we've talked about before. But a gas is a good example to start talking about to illustrate its power and generality. I must confess, @studiot, that I wasn't following your arguments in this particular post as closely as I follow them in other posts, as I was following the OP's. And that's because the OP was rather lengthy already. I haven't been even able to follow all the details about the runes and the states based on them either --maybe lack of time and tiredness among other things. I thought I understood more or less what the OP was trying to do and tried to warn them as to what I called the "subtle misconceptions" in their approach. I thought it was an honest attempt at understanding the subtle concepts underlying the formalism. Any of your 'salt and pepper' explanations are welcome on my part. And even the ginger and lemon tea ones.

Nothing is pre-nothing here. It's gone full circle a few times already. But please keep going. I'm planning on getting myself a really good GR monograph by copying and pasting Markus' detailed explanations.

Exactly! Have you heard of Boltzmann brains? Well, I haven't shown you that your idea is wrong. I haven't shown you much, AAMOF. I've argued to you, I think, it's not plausible if you take it seriously to make a model of what a gas in a box is going to actually do. I've argued from general concepts derived from what I know. But there are qualifications to be made in cosmology. I would have to think about them deep and hard, or maybe have some expert in cosmology tell us what they think. The universe is not a boring place most of the time we are given to watch it because, in the case of the Earth, it's governed by fluxes of energy, coming in, and going out. Open systems like those are not Poincaré recurrences. They are the kind of systems that can hold something like life. There are very interesting models of systems which undergo self-organization under those conditions. But the universe is not like a closed box which thermalizes after some time. And I don't think the universe as a whole satisfies Poincaré recurrences. That's what I meant when I said, So if you don't like a universe that will thermally die, who knows, maybe that's not gonna happen and you (or some version of you in some far far away future or in some far far away cluster of the multiverse, is having that expectation fulfilled. Does that help? Maybe the universe repeats itself geometrically, by some periodicity condition. There may be many possibilities. They're going on. For example, some of the molecules I'm breathing now will be gasped by the last breathing creature that will live on Earth, and others were inhaled by the 1st breathing creature that lived on Earth. But I'm none the wiser. Yet, if the temperature goes up one degree, I will notice. Nice conversation.

Read it and liked it very much and +1-ed you accordingly. It's a very good illustration that concepts based on emergent quantities appear to point at agents that do not really exist. Got you! Causal relationships don't have to be between two different events. When emergence is involved, they typically are be between 1024 (micro)events and one event. Really? Why? Irrespective of your answer, that I'm pretty sure is going to be very interesting, you cannot ignore the social factor. Namely: that the way in which most people use the concept of free will is to justify other secondary concepts like "guilt," "punishment," and the like. Some among this hosts of derived concepts, like "responsibility," may be useful and constructive, but many are definitely not. As I said, I couldn't agree more on this. And the last point was brilliant. +1

A big part of the problem may be rooted in muffled racist attitudes in sectors of society, economic inequality factors, political unwillingness to face certain facts, political convenience and who knows what else political or socioeconomic. Most everyone of you know much more than I do about this problem, and I'm more than willing to take a sit and learn. But, from my humble experience in the inner cities and the like, I can tell there is a regular profile of teenagers who want to make it into the police force in cities where the living is not easy. Quite a considerable number of the boys I've met who just wanted to become a policeman whatever the cost fell into the category of frustrated, misfits, racist, etc. types who would do anything for some adrenaline rush, doesn't matter whether it's one side or the other of law enforcing. I'm not saying that's the driving factor, but I think it's definitely a factor to be considered. As long as these people are not carefully monitored, we will have a problem no matter what side of the world we are. Maybe the US has a bigger problem because of the Second Amendment. But there are factors other than political, that's all I'm saying.

OK. Maybe so, but I see at least three problems with your strategy. 1st) It's not about how I define macrostates based on arbitrary assumptions such that the number of macrostates always overwhelms the number of microstates. Microstates for any reasonable definition of them are vastly more than macrostates. That kind of reasoning in science is called ad hoc, and I'm sure you know why it's not a useful avenue. Besides, what do these macrostates mean? How do they play in the general structure of known physics? 2nd) Macroscopic distinctions in physics always have to be measured. In the case of pressure, temperature or volume, it's through pressure gauges, thermometers and length scales marked up in the container. How do you measure your runes? 3rd) I've been talking about macroscopic distinctions with no further qualifications, but the truth is physics only permits you to apply the laws of statistical mechanics in a reasonable way that allows you to subdivide the system in a so-called canonical/macrocanonical ensemble, and get to something like the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, when you consider quantities whose balances between the cells of the canonical system can be reasoned about in terms of local exchange. IOW: quantities that satisfy local conservation laws. That narrows down the list essentially to energy, number of entities (mass, moles, molecules,) angular momentum, linear momentum, or things directly related with energy, charge conservation and rotation, like magnetic moments, etc. I'm sorry but, no matter how interesting runes are in your theoretical mind, and they may be from a POV of pure intelectual exercise, nature doesn't care about them. Runes, and other fantastically complicated to define --and fantastically irrelevant-- quantities are probably created and destroyed every nanosecond without being transferred anywhere near where they are formed. There's no exchange of runes. There's no local conservation of runes. There's no equipartition for runes. There's no near T=0 freezing of the rune DOF. And I even see more severe problems with QM, in which most observables you can write down are really incompatible. That's probably why runes don't appear in the laws of statistical mechanics. As to time-stopping, it was only meant as an intuitive phrasing. From the macroscopic POV, times does disappear from the problem once equilibrium is reached. Period. If you're not convinced, try to sit down in front of a gas at room temperature and see how much you have to wait for a rune to appear, or AAMOF for anything noticeable to happen, and how long it takes for it to disappear after you've waited several Earth life's worth of time for it to appear. That's a simple enough experiment to conduct. And there are some more things, but in due time.

Things to say, but very little time now. My entropy must be acting up. A whole new ballgame, both with the two molecules and with the universe. For completely different reasons. One is very small N (number of DOF,) and the other the possibility of frustrated thermalization due to cosmological parameters. Maybe we should get @Mordred interested in the discussion. Very interesting case for quantum systems near T=0, probably done to death by the experts but interesting to discuss nonetheless, and see if we learn something from discussion. Talk to you later. Very stimulating conversation.