md65536

t

 

 

o

So close!

I appologize this was two different post for your last two answers. You are a letter in the puzzle.

I'm not t, I'm not o

md65536 is not michel123456 (except a little at first, and a little at the end)

It must be true that you are you,

And t is t and o is o

But what am I?

I'm not suggesting time flows through us. Proper time marches on irrespective of observers. We do not get to choose the speed and direction of our motion through time as we do with tthe three spatial dimensions, rather we get dragged along with the flow of time,[...]

Yes, but what are you referring to when you say "we"?

A subatomic particle can behave as if it's moving backward or forward through time (if citation needed I'll try to find where Feynman explains this in his New Zealand lecture series... I can't remember exactly how he put it).

We as humans can't do this, but then again the particles that make us up can't move arbitrarily through spatial dimensions either. They get dragged along with the rest of our bodies.

So I'd say we move and perceive movement through both space and time not arbitrarily but as a coherent blob that places a lot of restrictions on us. These restrictions aren't necessarily fundamental aspects of space and time.

This doesn't say much about the nature of time. It's just an idea that we shouldn't make assumptions about how time and space work based on how we humanly perceive them to work.

You are nothing. If nothing were something, which would be a different teaser alltogether. Only nothing, used as a noun, can be and cannot be at the same time. One could ask "what is in the box?", you could say "nothing.". Or one could ask "what is in the box?", one could say "you" if what you are is "nothing".

I don't think that's acceptable.

If nothing's in a box in a house, how can it be true that "nothing is not in a box"?

I'm not nothing!

But I'm found in nothing.

I'm in the absence of everything.

I'm in a bottle of gin,

But not a glass of water,

Hmm. That surprises me, given the widespread support for presentism. I would have thought it was consistent with the data.

I don't see how it is not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(philosophy_of_time)

A word of caution: No one's right all the time and worse, certain members like to use their own definitions of whatever words and concepts they choose, without bothering to tell anyone that they're using their personal definitions. I don't think the accepted use of presentism includes that "the present is universal and identical for all observers".

As far as I know, presentism is not inherently incompatible with relativity.

However, I believe that an instantaneous universal "now" is incompatible with relativity.

Relativity of simultaneity implies that what is simultaneous for one won't be simultaneous for all.

Thus, anything simultaneous with a hypothetical "universal now" according to one observer will not be simultaneous for all observers.

If "now" includes events that aren't simultaneous, then it contradicts the "time is not extended" meaning of presentism.

You are the swish of a silk sari on a summer night, and other things described here:

Not what I had in mind.

I'm not in a box,

and I'm not in a house,

but I'm in the two combined.

I'm in either,

I'm in neither,

I'm in both at once you'll find.

So it's the holes in the box that make it a box? Or are the sides more important? I could see that, since you couldn't even have a top without at least two of the sides.

I don't know. I'm a little slow when it comes to the peculiarities of riddle logic. I was referring to the original, unchanged definitions of "box" or "house" that get changed if you open them, as in:

And again, technically, if the box is open, you've just changed the definition of "box" to include "open box".

What if we had a wall to wall piece of cardboard that covered every inch of the floor in a house, and also ran six inches up each wall? Then you could have your definition of a box, and it would fit my definition of being able to interact with the house while in a box.

If the goal of a riddle is to find the most convoluted way to answer the question (which could be acceptable, since the riddle didn't specify what "you" are (human? refrigerator?)), this would be a good way of arriving at the same appallingly simple answer of "yes".

This one is phrased differently for a different answer.

I am in a box in a house.

But I'm not in a box, nor a house.

What am I?

If you keep adding atypical things to the scenario, like restraints on a chair, and refrigerators on toilets, you're distorting what I've said in order to justify your argument. Moving the goalposts like that seems weak. Is that a straw man tied to the chair?

I'm trying to generalize the argument for why you're "not in the house".

Yes, it changes the question being asked, but you've handled the different cases that I've presented, and I won't try to claim that the answers to the different cases apply to the main question.

Is this our final answer (for the million)?

Sure! The answer of "Yes, both," is just too simple, straightforward, and obvious to possibly be true.

But you still won a house. Yay!

Not if the door's open I didn't.

I'm sorry, were those last two sentences supposed to make ME sound silly?

No, I'm just being silly now for fun.

But let's recap!!!

When using "in" as a preposition to describe the noun in the locative case, [only] the most immediate location is implied (so you can be in a box, but not in the house that the box is in),

unless the functional sense of being in something is not disrupted (so you can be in both clothing, and in the house that the clothing is in, because you can still use the bathroom),

where the functional sense of something is defined by allowing at least one interaction with it, but only "normal interactions" (so you can be in bed and be in the house, even though you can't interact with the bathroom).

For example, we might witness the following scene:

A mother yells at her kids: "Are you playing in that box in the living room again?! Get back in the house! It's not normal for kids to play in a box!"

The father replies: "It's alright honey, it's not a box. They're leaving it open."

None of those examples precludes you from interaction with the house the way being in a box would. Being in bed is at least one normal interaction with the house.

 

If you're in the box, you can't interact normally with the house until you get out of the box.

Excellent. A process of refinement!

If you are in a chair in the house you are in the house.

If you are tied to the chair, hands and legs bound tightly, and let's say gagged and blindfolded for good measure, then you are not in the house.

Perhaps that's the answer. You're in a coffin in a mausoleum, which looks like a house:

Question: If you're in a box in a house are you in a house or a box??

Answer: You're in a coffin in a mausoleum, which looks like a house.

I like it. It's just the sort of enigmatic answer that these riddles are looking for.

I also think "You're a refrigerator, and you're on the toilet," is an acceptable if unconventional answer.

And your earlier example removed the top of the box. Is a house still a house if it has no roof? If you won a contest that had strict rules that said the grand prize is a house, and they tried to give you one without a roof, wouldn't you argue that a house needs a roof or it's not technically a house?

 

Good point. And if I won a house and they left the door open, that would be no good either. People could just walk in and out willy-nilly!

If I won a contest where the prize was a box, but it was open, I'd demand that they close it to restore it to its full 6-sided box definition.

Well, since you're still stuck in the box, and you actually wish to interact with the house rather than just defiling the floor of whatever room you're in, you'd have to assume someone moved you into the house's bathroom, close enough to the toilet for this to be effective. Or perhaps right on top of the toilet, depending on where you're cutting the hole, what gender you are and how thorough a job of bathroom-going you plan on accomplishing. And even if we assume you're just a guy cutting a hole big enough to pee through, we further have to assume you have the... reach to be able to make this practical.

 

That's really too many assumptions for a riddle, don't you think? I mean, I'd be a bit angry if the answer was that convoluted.

I have a feeling that it's not. That must be the trick to this puzzle! I even suspect that it has nothing to do with refrigerators or bathrooms at all, let alone the precision with which they are used.

Technically, you wouldn't just be "in" a box, you'd be more like "standing in" a box. And again, technically, if the box is open, you've just changed the definition of "box" to include "open box". Is it just the vertical sides that define a box? How many more iterations will it take before you have me standing on a flat piece of cardboard that you're still calling a box?

Well, we'll leave the boxes closed then, so there's no confusion about whether it's still a box.

I'd consider it a spectacular waste of time if the answer was the simple one, that you are in both a house and a box.

 

Yes, I think the phrase "spectacular waste of time" is accurate. However, I don't think that a simple puzzle with a potentially simple answer is "not great" just because there is the possibility of getting lost in a convoluted discussion about it. I would say "The puzzle is fine; not all answers are great."

I love that joke, though I'm not at all surprised you never understood it before now.

You'd be surprised by the number of things I simply cannot understand.

So which of my statements regarding the original puzzle are incorrect?

Not being able to interact with the refrigerator or the toilet implies one is not in the house.

Therefore while you are in bed, you are not in the house.

Further, if you are sleeping anywhere within the house, you are not in the house, unless you are sleepwalking. Or perhaps if you fell asleep on the toilet, with a cold snack in your hand.

A dead person cannot be in a house.

Calling an open box a box changes the definition of box.

A house with windows would also change the definition of house.

Am I on the right track? I have a feeling we'll have this simple puzzle cracked in no time, with a little team effort!

Well, nice try, Lucky, but you're still functioning as a human while you're in your skin or your clothes (although you really can't be "out" of your skin, that's a bad analogy). If you're in a box in a house, you're in a box. You can't do anything you normally do in a house. You can't use the bathroom, go to the fridge, you can't even do the most basic thing to change being "in" a house: you can't go "out".

 

Why? Because you're in a box.

 

The box is in a house.

 

 

 

The puzzle requires a human in the box, not a laptop, so let's toss out that bizarre example.

 

And a human only partially in a bag, not fully enclosed? Ridiculous.

Ah! I see. The definition of being in a box is a strictly functional one.

If you cut a hole through which to go to the bathroom, are you still in the box?

If you open the top of the box and poke at things outside the box with a stick, are you still in the box?

Okay, no laptop examples then. Only humans and refrigerators.

Here's a puzzle for you:

Suppose you have a large box with ample room in it, and you place in this box one human and one cloth bag large enough for the human to get inside and draw closed.

Now you close and seal the box.

Are you able to tell if the human is still in the box?

A true mindbender! Hardly ridiculous!

A physicist, a biologist and a mathematician are sitting in a street café watching people entering and leaving the house on the other side of the street. First they see two people entering the house. Time passes. After a while they notice three people leaving the house. The physicist says, "The measurement wasn't accurate." The biologist says, "They must have reproduced." The mathematician says, "If one more person enters the house then it will be empty."

Finally the joke makes sense to me! There must have been a refrigerator box in the house that the mathematician knows about!

What say you to this?

Still incorrect. But try repeating it verbatim again and see if that changes anything.

Technically, I still don't think so. Grammatically, no.

 

Look at it this way: if you're a refrigerator, and you're in a box in a house, are you "in" the house or are you still in the box?

 

Similarly, if you're a human, you're not "in" the house in a functional sense if you're in a box. You can't do anything you would normally do "in" a house, you can't even access the house itself if you're still "in" a box.

[...]

You could dream?! We barely slept, naked outdoors....

You must spend a lot of time naked outdoors, because as long as you're in your own skin you couldn't be in clothes or in a building.

Luckily most of us don't live by such bizarre rules.

Customer: I purchased a laptop here, but when I opened it up there was no laptop in the box.

Service desk: Okay let's see here. <Opens the box, removes a plastic bag from around the laptop...>

Customer: Oh! Well, now there's a laptop in the box! It wasn't in the box when I purchased it.

Ridiculous.

A magician seals an assistant in a black box. The assistant puts a paper bag over her head.

The audience, unable to tell if the assistant is still in the box or not, applauds.

After all your venomous personal attacks, I am way beyond caring whether you take me seriously. You didn't even get the very clear sense in which I just agreed that "clocks in orbit will slow down relative to earthbound clocks."

 

Yes, but it's the specifics that matter.

If your theory also predicts that clocks will slow down, then it predicts some phenomenon that SR also predicts.

If it predicts it accurately enough, then you don't need SR to explanation the phenomenon.

Repeat for everything SR successfully predicts, and if you still have a consistent theory that is different from SR, you might have a chance of overthrowing relativity.

You seem to have a serious need to make me wrong, even where I agree with relativity (if not the language of "time dilation" reifying time.)

My goal is more along the lines of stopping you from being wrong. To be fair, you're free to believe what you want and to never expand beyond that and to judge what is right or wrong; you don't have to care about what I say. Regardless of whether you care, what I'm saying is that I'd prefer it if you stopped repeating your beliefs as if they are facts -- you are misinforming people -- especially when it's been explained time and again that your beliefs are not consistent with reality given the axioms that you've agreed to.

 

I have often disagreed with mainstream science, particularly about how it uses the concepts of time and space with only disdain for the ontology of what they are in the "real world", off the graph or conceptual coordinate system, so to speak. So If you claim that I am in error, explain how so. Repeating as if it is a given that 'time dilates' does not make me wrong. Neither does repeating that no one knows the real, true shape of Earth, because relativity dictates that there are no preferred frames of reference, and it might look like an extremely oblate spheroid from an extreme FOR. We all beat that one to death, but the above argument didn't make me wrong or the Earth just as likely very flattened as nearly spherical.

So if you really need to make me wrong, be specific.

This has all been explained, specifically, before. Please reread your previous posts regarding these topics and then read the many replies that various people have given.

It's fine to disagree with mainstream science. It's fine to state your disagreement (perhaps not repeatedly in science forums). It's not fine, in my opinion, to treat your disagreements as fact and then try to shove it down as many throats as you can.

Would you happen to have a link to a study that was performed on this at different intervals and their outcomes?

I don't know of any study that specifically tested the consistency of reality. All observations and experiments have agreed on reality.

If I understand what you're saying correctly,(not sure), is that time and space have to be proportionate. And the speed limit of information is the speed of light, as far as we know so far. If this is true wouldn't information traveling slower than c ,the limit, proportionately slow down in time. And theoretically anything traveling faster than c, speed up in time. If so anything in between would speed up or slow down in time depending on the speed at which the information was traveling.

I don't know how to describe this correctly. To maintain invariance of c with relative motion, it's not simple proportionality, but instead is described by the Lorentz transformation.

I don't think the invariance must apply to everything. But if you say that all information or energy or even fundamental particles travels at c, then nothing can be slow or at rest, but this is okay because the energy can oscillate at a speed of c. A rock at rest is still made up of particles that are constantly moving.

Good questions. It reminds me of how little I truly understand. Others could give you better answers.

Edit: Come to think of it, a better way of describing this than the way I think about it, is that everything is moving at a speed of c through 4 dimensions. If it is relatively at rest in the spatial dimensions, it must be moving through time at a rate of c. The faster it moves through spatial dimensions, the slower it moves through time, so that the length of the 4-vector velocity is always c.

I am suggesting that since higher speed clocks in orbit slow down in rate of "ticking" (internal dynamic of their physical process) compared to surface clocks, the internal physical dynamic of human aging also probably slows down, so they would "age' more slowly than the rest of us on Earth.

If you can show that your theory predicts that clocks in orbit will slow down relative to earthbound clocks even close to how precisely and accurately special relativity predicts it, I will try to take your theory seriously.

Please be specific about how I have made errors. For instance, calling "strawman" does not defeat an argument. The debate would require an explanation as to how the argument is specious, i.e., how exactly it is a fallacious, 'strawman' argument.

(Perhaps a new thread on "Owl's Errors" as a new topic.)

Please reread the many replies to your many repeated erroneous posts. The specifics about how you have made errors are all there.

I don't think a new thread is needed. There are already several threads repeating the same things.

I think so. Time is the concept that motion (everything moves) 'takes time', not that it creates something called time or, as above "detects" time.

Nor does a ruler create distance. Nor does a ruler "detect" distance. It still measures distance and can define a distance. A clock measures time and can define it.

 

except that there is no standard time speed

The invariance of c can define a standard, and ensures that different observers don't see random or arbitrarily different rates of time passing on different clocks. This standard ensures that various different observations made from different points in spacetime are all consistent with each other.

Please review all your previous posts in various threads and note the various errors you've made that have been pointed out many times already.

Hi.

How can the exterior (as in a yard) ambient light just after sunset be focused/directed to a photosensor in order to delay its action that turns on some lights at night ?

The sensing device is not adjustable for threshold of operation.

 

I have several plano-convex and bi-convex lenses; from 1" to 6" diameter. With a defined light source as the sun disc, focusing it to the photosensor is no problem -when coaxial- but with diffuse light it is another story.

 

Suggestions, please ?

I wanted to do the same thing and I solved the problem electronically.

The photosensor is probably a photoresistor. The more light that shines on it, the lower the resistance. All you have to do is lower the resistance, and that should have the same effect as shining more light on it.

The way I did this was to add another photoresistor in parallel. It's very quick and dirty but it worked adequately for me. I happened to have a few lying around. If you don't, you might try using a normal resistor, but I'm not sure how effective it would be. Or a variable resistor, or even a combination of several of these. Another photoresistor should be better because it behaves like the one that's already there (I suppose it's like doubling the surface area of the original photoresistor).

I also had the additional photoresistor outside of the main box so it could be tweaked by orienting it differently.

But the black line has a very peculiar property:

since no interaction can happen in zero time, no interaction can happen between the elements of the black line. The black line is a "dead body", meaning that there can be no direct bindings beween its elements.

But its elements are simply events. The "no direct binding" simply means there's no (instantaneous) information transfer between events at different places on the black line, which means there can be no causal relations between such events. The "direct binding" is essentially a causal connection. Having a mutual "direct binding" between two events would mean that it's possible to have each event cause the other event, which of course is paradoxical.

It's already been established that the light cone (blue lines) represents the immediately perceived "now", which is also the immediate causative now (providing your "direct binding" between an observer and a distant object).

In SR I think the interpretation would be:

- Nothing can interact instantly (including the 'now' instant) over non-zero distance.

- Any influence an object has on an observer (a "binding"?) involves information from a past state of the object.

In your interpretation it might be:

- There is no immediate causal connection between distant objects. Objects are interactively connected only through past events.

"Binding" is a misleading word because you're really only speaking of information transfer and interaction. Two particles can be connected in other ways, such as through quantum entanglement, and be "bound" in that way to each other at 2 different points on your black line. But there is no possible way to transfer information between the particles at those points. They are connected, but not in the essential way that we're talking about here; they're not causally connected.

There is no more fundamental definition or deeper understanding. If you find one, publish it immediately.

That's what the thread is trying to figure out.

It's certainly helpful to realize that it's not a solved problem. We could even ask "Is there even a possible unknown greater meaning to time still to discover?"

If there's a "simple, deeper meaning" it's not going to be found simply in any likely way. But it's still worth contemplating.

I agree "Time is what clocks measure". It's simple, precise, and accurate.

In the unlikely event that the result of the experiment is validated and a neutrino has actually exceeded c, then relativity does get tossed out.

I agree that this is unlikely -- exceedingly unlikely -- because the result of the experiment is a discrepancy in the distribution of measurements from what was expected, which is what the OPERA team reported. The result of the experiment isn't that a neutrino exceeded c (though that is one of the simplest interpretations of the result). This means there's a possibility that the results can be validated and no neutrinos exceeded c.

It will have to reduce to the same formulas that exist in relativity.

Any new observations that disagree with relativity will probably only do so due to some peculiar aspect that doesn't apply to existing observations (and so doesn't invalidate them), such as m^2 < 0 as you suggested.

If relativity doesn't work, a new theory would be needed.

Relativity would still be an accurate model, it just wouldn't have a "range of validity" that applies to the new observations.

So it could be that in the future, relativity is "thrown out" the same way that Newtonian gravity was. That is: Not at all. It's just that its range of validity doesn't apply to everything.

That said, if relativity implies that something is impossible but it turns out that it is possible, then there are more problems with the theory than just limited range of validity. I agree with DrRocket that relativity would have to be thrown out (or completely overhauled).

However I don't think anyone has anything to worry about here. Wondering about this now is like asking "What would it mean if this strange thing I just saw was actually something impossible?"

What if it's found that one of the neutrino flavors has m^2 < 0? I don't see how that tosses relativity.

Would this allow v > c? Could it allow a violation of causality, without actually breaking relativity?

I think the perihelion precession was first noticed in the mid 1800s. The light-bending observation happened in the other order... i think.

Oh that's right, I must have been thinking of the observations of deflected starlight during an eclipse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Deflection_of_light_by_the_Sun

So yes, I think that if the OPERA observations are correct and a "paradigm shifting" theory explains it, this could be part of something like a "perihelion of mercury" moment. But do we consider that "moment" to be when the observations are made, or when there is a theory that predicts it?

The experiment would be done very accurately, but the measured time range is too short.

How accurately can we measure the starting time? Are there any time lag to detection from the neutrino starting point to the time recorder?

Unless the scientists have missed something or made an error, the measurements are precise to within 10 ns. A list of the various uncertainties is shown here: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/are_we_fooling_ourselves_with.php

If and when the result is confirmed - when other experimenters have replicated the results; will this not be seen as a "perihelion of mercury" sort of moment?

I don't think so, because the "perihelion" observations confirmed the predictions of an existing theory, whereas in this case there is no contending theory (to my limited knowledge) that predicted the OPERA results. The OPERA observation is not confirming any expected previously made prediction.

Say for example we had a viable theory that unified quantum mechanics and relativity, and that that theory could predict the OPERA results. Then it could be a similar kind of moment. Purely speculatively, that could still happen. If the OPERA results are not due to error, there should be some theory that will explain the results, and that theory might be revolutionary the way that relativity was. Even then there's still the difference in the order that the theory and the confirming observations happened in, compared with the "perihelion moment".

MD - I like Ethan's blog and his explanations of his four scenarios are easy to grasp; but the received neutrinos do 'look' to the naked eye to be fitting to a pulse shape (this could be a bit of academic paper legerdemain but I really hope not).

 

I think a (hidden to experimenter) selection of particles from the front section of a bell shaped distribution could also have a bell-shaped distribution - it's a curve that appears in nature all the time; but the pulse shape in CERN is irregular and jaggedy - and the built up set of readings at OPERA seems to match that irregular jaggedy shape. I cannot see how (without the pulse shape being a simple shape that occurs naturally) the neutrinos in the first section of the pulse are accurately mimicking the shape of the whole pulse. And both pulses seem to match the build up neutrino readings - so a lucky coincidence is less likely

 

Secondly I believe the length of the pulse generated at CERN was accurately repeated at OPERA - if the speed up is caused by a only a leading edge being detected then the pulse length should be shortened (changed) and I don't think it was.

 

my money is still on a systematic error in the details of the experiment - there is a miscalculation or delay on when they believe the neutrinos start their trip ie they start 60ns before expected (or finish it later). But the guysngals at OPERA know the set up better than anyone and they havent been able to spot it - and I doubt anyone else will be able to.

Disclaimer: This discussion is over my head.

Is it possible that the irregular shape can be described with (essentially constructive) interference of several simpler (bell-shaped) curves, each showing the same apparent temporal offset?

To violate causality, it would have to be possible to determine the shape of a pulse of incoming neutrinos before the neutrinos defining the shape of the pulse arrived. I think that if an irregularly shaped pulse (consisting of many regular "sub-pulses") arrived, where each of the sub-pulses was detected near the leading edge of the sub-pulse, but still completely within the larger (taller, but not wider) source sub-pulse, then it might be impossible to detect the shape of the irregular pulse (ie. to detect the length and intensity of any sub-pulse section of the whole pulse). I suppose the question is, if you made the source pulse more distinct, say a square wave with short durations, what would the detected pulse look like? I suspect that it would look smoothed for some reason, still like bell-curves. But I also suspect that somehow those curves would still fit within the curve of the source pulse, at least to the degree that any information could be extracted before the actual information-carrying neutrinos arrived.

Anyway, the blog post mentions that OPERA is planning an experiment (with results "in the next few weeks") that could rule out this and another explanation. That's #3 and #2 respectively, of this list:

1. There was a systematic error in their measurements, and their measurements are simply systematically off by 60 nanoseconds (or thereabouts).
2. The errors are much larger than they claim, and they're not actually measuring the arrival time of these neutrinos to their claimed accuracy.
3. There's a bias in the detection of their neutrinos, and the pulse shape of the arriving neutrinos doesn't match the pulse shape of the things that created them. Or...
4. They really did break the speed of light, and the laws of physics don't work the way we think they do, and in your face, Einstein!

The list seems ordered by likelyhood, and it would be rational of me to also suspect #1 or #2 over #3, but I guess I just want it to be #3.

Doesn't the OPERA result (if verified) only show that the "group velocity" of the neutrino density exceeds the speed of light?

The oft-quoted-by-me Starts With A Bang blog has a write-up explaining the possibility of something similar to what I was describing, but with a lot simpler circumstances:

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/10/a_test_for_neutrinos_put_up_or.php

Of the 4 possibilities (listed in the link) of explaining the results, the one I was describing is this:

3. There's a bias in the detection of their neutrinos, and the pulse shape of the arriving neutrinos doesn't match the pulse shape of the things that created them.

I imagined the reason for this happening must be something weird like quantum entanglement, but Ethan explains how this can happen simply by having the pulse shape of the neutrino source a lot bigger than the pulse shape of the receiver (which it is because most neutrinos are not detected). In this case, the smaller detected pulse shape can be offset in time (either toward the past or future), yet it may still fit completely within the larger transmitted pulse shape. (Or something... I didn't actually read it yet! )