joigus

No, it's not deterministic. Quantum mechanics is fundamentally non-deterministic, and sure enough Gell-Mann adheres to it. He does argue at the end though in terms of his favourite interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is that of decoherent histories. See how non-deterministic it is: Alice: "I'm gonna go there and measure the x-component of spin" Bob: "OK" Now each one goes far away from each other and they conduct the experiment. Alice measures the x-component of spin. Before she measures, she has no idea what it's gonna come out. See? Non-deterministic. It happens to come out as "up". OK. Now she knows. At the same time --in a reference system in which both are at rest-- Bob measures the x-component of spin. It sure turns out "down". Alice can tell him nothing, but now he can predict that Alice must have obtained "up" in her experiment, even though they're miles away from each other. He, of course, couldn't tell beforehand what he was gonna get. See? Non-deterministic on Bob's end too. Both results are totally random separately (in fact they have maximal dispersion). Yet the Sx1+Sx2 is always zero. They're perfectly anti-correlated. Each spin is random, but the sum is non-random (zero dispersion). See how it works? Did that help?

No, there is nothing superluminal going on between both parts of the bipartite state in Bell's theorem. All the correlations are initial. Quantum correlations were there when the state was prepared. They're there a Planck's time later. They're there a millisecond later. And they're there two hours later as long as you don't measure spin and let the state evolve coherently. The moment you measure a spin component of one of the particles, correlations appear that cannot be explained in terms of the logic of three independent propositions in classical logic. Physicist Alice measures something. If physicist Bob knows what she is going to do (assuming he trusts her), he can tell some things about the state he wouldn't be able to tell if Alice didn't measure. Nothing is superluminal. Everything happens in the very weird internal space of elementary particles that we like to call the Hilbert space. If you don't believe me, perhaps Murray Gell-Mann will convince you:

Yes, but countries are not machines. The key is countries are always running. That's where the analogy ends. It's the while it's running that I mentioned --and apparently someone didn't like-- that's key to what I meant. I didn't mean to defend monarchy. I oppose monarchy. I'd rather see it gone for good. The problem is sometimes I try to be so suave that I come across as thinking the opposite of what I really do. OTOH, I didn't interpret this thread as one about "pros and cons of monarchy", which it seems to have become. I tried to be respectful while at the same time do my best to help you understand why Europe works differently, which --very understandably-- puzzles Americans, and you were expressing yourself in those terms. Because I'm very familiar with the arguments, I tried to tell you why many people in Europe are wary of changing core pieces of the political system overnight. I know the argument because I've been told to ponder it while I was arguing against monarchy in the past. I understand the pickle Britain is in. In some respects it's similar to what happens in Spain. Suppose 200 Km from where you live there are people who have a different language, traditions, with deep historical wounds, misgivings, etc that go back many hundreds of years, if not thousand plus --or thousand upon thousands, in the case of Basques. History is not something you can reverse-engineer in a couple of months, sign an agreement, and live happily everafter. A formula that's stood the test of recent decades has been to gradually deactivate monarchies from their old absolutist role to the role they play today: The visible --and mostly symbolic-- head of diplomacy, the Army perhaps and, in the case of Britain, the Anglican Church. In a way, you Americans have been dealt the lucky hand of being able to more consistently engineer your political system from almost scratch at a time when this kind of debate was already possible --free thinkers were no longer persecuted. As an example of what to me is an almost reciprocal feeling, when I look at you guys, with your Mormons, and Amish, and all those religions that seem to mushroom out of every corner, I stand in disbelief. Yet, freedom of religion belief is one of your most important principles for reasons that are mostly historical. To summarise: I respect your freedom to roll your eyes at us, as long as your respect my freedom of rolling my eyes at you.

The rarer the air, the faster the speed you need to sustain the pressure difference between both sides of the wing. Crank up the speed, and you will crank up the pressure difference. But, as studiot said, it's not because the air is made of atoms, but because of energy conservation. Think of the pressure as some kind of internal potential energy. Fields (continuous media) also have this "internal tension." And they're not made of atoms; atoms are made of fields.

They say she passed peacefully. She must have thought the 20th Century was but a bad dream. Rest in peace. @zapatos, Suppose you're the owner of an old machine. It's been working for many centuries. It's old, but reliable. Would you re-design it while it's running?

"Ta da!" "Ta da what?" "Ta da!" "What?" "Ta da!" "Bye."

No. Space-time pulses have no charge. Gravitational waves are transverse, massive quantum fields are not. Gravitational waves have different number of components (tensor) than spinor and boson quantum fields. Gravitational waves do not have spin. I'm not sure that even makes sense. Space-time pulses (gravitational waves) do not scatter off matter. Rather, they are like blips of space-time stretching going through matter. Nothing moves faster than light. Expansion speed can exceed the speed of light because it's not the speed of anything moving from one place to another; it's rather the rate of space itself stretching. I don't know what you mean by "time going infinitely fast". I find it very difficult to understand what you mean, especially when you say it all in words. You can say sentences full of meaningful terms like, for example "time catches up with space" or "energy is cooling down" and yet, don't mean anything because all the terms are used improperly. That's what's happening here.

It's not about feeling good, as I made clear in the following lines you didn't quote. I explained why I have reasons for optimism. I don't wish this debate to be eternal though... You strike me as overly pessimistic. Enjoy the songs of birds while we share the planet with them. Not even cocroaches will last forever.

The scattering properties of gravitational waves are completely different to those of every other quantum field --they actually don't scatter, but go through like the distorsion of space-time they are. How do you "code" the properties of massive fields into a gravitational wave? Nothing you say makes sense in the context of known physics. You haven't even mentioned temperature, and simple considerations of how temperature affects the average value of speed of elementary particles simply rule out almost everything you're saying. And so on, and so on. As @Ghideon has said, it doesn't take much to know for sure that you can't be right. In fact, you're so badly wrong, it's actually a daunting task to list all the mistakes. Why don't you ask some questions instead?

An electron moving around the nucleus cannot exceed the speed of light. It can get close to the speed of light though. In fact, if you assume just that, you can get a limit on Z (the atomic number) for a hydrogen-like atom which happens to be of the right size (somewhere over 100). This matches the experiments. OTOH, fast-moving objects have a much slower coordinate time (measured from the inertial system from which their speed is perceived as "fast") than their proper time (measured from a reference system that moves with them). That's why high-energy muons from cosmic rays have much longer decay times as perceived from us.

So the meek shall inherit the Earth? Where have I read that before? I see lots of forks on the road where we could lose our wits, but I prefer to be optimistic. Common sense can be whipped into, hammered into people's minds. Or perhaps you can kill them softly with your song. Human intelligence gives you at least a capacity to change behaviour or attitude based on intelligence and --let's not forget-- human emotion and empathy. Maybe it's the whistle-blowers that need to change their discourse so that the message is finally brought home. I'm not suggesting they (we) should; I'm just saying it's a possibility that non-intelligence doesn't afford you. Somehow, I don't see that coming from the ants. Very interesting. The only argument I'm missing here is the possibility of a spandrel: An evolutionary change that could apparently (or actually) be pointless, because it's just accidental, or perhaps associated with a re-location of traits in which it's just making room for another (crucial) trait.

Yes, now that we've been properly teased, lay it on us.

I'm constitutionally incapable of praying. But if I were to bet on what stands a better chance of successfully tackling the effects of rapid changes in the environment, intelligence or..., say, something like a thicker skin, more efficient thermoregulation etc, my money is on intelligence. Collaborative human intelligence to be more precise. Honestly, it feels like I'm stating the obvious here.

Yes. But speed, power, stamina, and other adaptations more "mechanical" require optimization of the organism with respect to environmental conditions in a more simplistic way than intelligence. Thus, they need environmental conditions to be varying relatively slowly as compared to speeds of molecular evolution (mutations.) The evolutionary bonus about intelligence is that it gives you a fighting chance to win the game even when environmental conditions are changing very rapidly. You can avoid your disadvantage if you are able to predict it somehow. That's where big extinctions would raise intelligence above any other adaptive advantage. It is in that sense that I say that maybe increase in intelligence has been favoured along different lines of evolution (more an homology inter-species than a wonderful supercalifragilisticexpialidocious property of humans.) If that were true, dolphins and sharks, humans and gorillas, koalas and mice of today, all of them, would be in some sense more intelligent on average than the species that occupied the corresponding environments in, say, the Jurassic.

(My emphasis.) Not a sine qua non, but certainly gives you an advantage. If I chase after an animal repeatedly, there comes a time when it gets exhausted and I can chase it more easily. I don't need to be that fast. It's the seeds that give rise to a plant. If I carry them with me, I can make them grow somewhere else. If the animal thinks I'm a plant, it won't notice me (theory of mind) When the stars come back to this position again, I should expect rain... Etc. Ideas of cause and effect, mind, etc. seem to me to have been quite useful when it comes to improving reproductive chances. Survival is in the equation only because it increases those chances. The engine of evolution is advantage. You only need to be more efficient at producing offspring that's more efficient at producing offspring than the next fellow. Evolution is not really so much about survival. Sometimes, it can be very helpful to the species to consider own sacrifice.

I wonder if we've been looking at intelligence the wrong way (one species vs others), and it's really a (homological?) feature that will be favoured once a certain threshold (of basic "lower-level" (immune system, and similar more "mechanical" aspects) has been conquered from an evolutionary point of view. Does that make sense?

There are quite a few polyglots among birds. I'd put cuckoos, corvids and parrots among the most intelligent[?] We should never forget they're the clever dinosaurs who didn't get extinct. I wonder if every time there's a big extinction on Earth, that creates a sieve for intelligence/resourcefulness more than anything other adaptive feature. Last autumn I was with a friend on a biking outing. During a stop, he produced a bird-sing app and played the Eurasian-wren territorial signal. Sure enough, a male Eurasian wren came out of the bush and he looked quite disgruntled. It was wren territory, sure, but there was none in sight before. I've watched videos of naturalists playing the alarm signal of some species. In a matter of seconds you see the bird unmistakably displaying sentry behaviour.

I don't know. I'm better at asking questions than answering them. But I don't think Dawkins is very much to blame for being delusional. I'm sure he's thought about God far deeper and far more seriously than many a religious type. Plus he's shown he's ready to accept he's wrong from time to time.

I agree. I'm not implying that horizons are not real. I'm implying that choosing a coordinate chart in which the horizon is manifest will not necessarily tell you anything useful about the global aspects of ST, or some other aspects. Eg, coordinates that are locally Minkowkian along the trajectory of a falling observer, tell you nothing about the horizon. For all he knows, his signals are reaching the totality of space behind him. A falling observer through the horizon of a BH that's big enough that tidal forces are small, will notice nothing peculiar; will see no horizon. This question of local charts is deeper than it looks. It's even possible that the question is more general than it looks...

Make it more a nuance in egg vs other egg. Eg.*, I doubt cuckoos would make any corvid their target. Crows would see right through it. * No pun intended.

Indeed. But not everybody aspires to be a scientist. I'm talking more about the regular fellows. If you asked me, I'd recommend everybody to make room for a little scientist and a philosopher of sorts in their daily rut-driven minds. Questioning things is a healthy habit, I think.

No doubt. But I think some birds would be more likely to have something similar to a debate than others. More aspects, more nuances, more "cerebral room" for if-then clauses.

I'm sure there's a gradation here too. It stands to reason that the signals of corvids be more sophisticated and nuanced than those of wrens or tits.

I think philosophy has no point, perhaps because its focus is most everything. Some of the overriding interests (historically) have been: What is real? (ontology) What is knowledge? (epistemology) What is "I"? (the problem of the self, a continuation of ontology) What is change? (cause and effect: teleology and its alternatives perhaps?) What should we do? (ethics) Everybody feels a call at some point, but nobody's forced to follow that call. And it's a tiresome exercise. Science tends to clarify in some measure those question, and supersede them with (perhaps) less ambitious questions. Thus, What is real? --> What is objective? What is knowledge? --> What is information? What is change? --> What are the physical laws? What should we do? --> What should we do? I think.

OK. Let me tell you you've been raising some interesting points here, and you're considerably better informed than the average occasional "speculative people" that come and go around here. I'm sorry that I was a bit grumpy some posts above. GR is not at all about "mass." It's not even about "energy" really. If you stick to your guns in this way, you're going to get very confused. IMO --and I make room for other member's disagreement here--, it's about curvature, perhaps torsion, and the weirdest elements of all: Diffeomorphism invariance (smooth distorsions of the coordinates that preserve the essential information coded in the metric.) It's also about singularities and horizons. Horizons are a peculiarity of geometries with non-definite metric. Trivial observation, but important to keep in mind. Horizons appear whenever there is a singularity in your theory. They always hide a singularity behind. Horizons always have an entropy associated with them. Horizons always appear when we try global coordinates that are assymptotically or locally flat. I'm a firm believer in Dirac's motto: The equation knows best. What did Dirac mean? I think he meant something like this: Once you have the right equation, it's never gonna lie to you. If it gives you a headache, don't despair, because it's a symptom and a clue that your initial intentions were corrupted in some way. So it's a priceless instrument in pointing to the limitations of your initial assumptions. Mass arises in GR because we insist in obtaining a set of coordinates that is closest to solving ST globally, is locally or assymptotically flat, and on top of that, is a solution to Einstein's vacuum field equations. Now, isn't that perhaps asking too much? Not totally happy with that, we even demand that the solution be spherically symmetric. So the equations behave as best they can. They reach a compromise. They give you back this parameter, M, which is totally meaningless in any real situation, but encapsulate all these properties in one parameter. When you stick to the overly-demanding program that I've just described, you end up with more than you initially bargained for, because the theory gives you things that are completely extraneous to your initial dream (describing everything in terms of pure geometry.) You're stuck with this "mass," horizons, and entropy. What does entropy tell you (always, always,...) in physics?: That you're missing something; that there are some variables that, quite simply, are not in your description. That you want to describe your phenomenology in terms of, say, (A,B,C,...), but there are other things, say, (p,q,r,...) that are not in your equations, but some fundamental principle operates in such a way as to impose constrictions on them. I've left out vacuum energy, not because I think it's unimportant, but because it requires another discussion of itself. Agreed. Apparently it was Heisenberg who said this. Opps. James Gleick, Genius; the Life and Science of Richard Feynman.