studiot

This reference was much more interesting. Yet it still suffers from that all too human desire to classify and pigeonhole all things. As such it misses out on the fact that fiction can affect the real world about us. (My usual example of this is Harry Potter, though there are examples aplenty available.) This is partly why I commented that this thread is not about 'Real'. Another pair of words to be wary of in this context is material v immaterial.

Am I glad that I wasted no time reading any of the claptrap referred to in your reference or studying any of the terminology involved.

That would be me. If you are saying there are many beefs around the planning process I would agree wholeheartedly. The planning process in the UK is a joke, which is sad considering the importance of the subject. The comments by others about ulterior motives and/or disregards should be noted. No one however, seems to want to question the need for all these data centres. I see the situation as organisations wanting to secure their long term business prospects rather than satisfying a societal need. Once they have persuaded unwary lay users that they (the users) don't need to store their data locally they have a free ticket to long term business. Yet we are suffering more and more hacks, outages, and other nonsense due to outsourcing data storage and flinging it halfway round the globe and back, just to buy a cup of coffee. The latest insanity in the UK is that we are having digital telephones forced on us, using the already redundant 'information superhighway' (Fibre). With this invocation, writ large, After conversion you should (must ?) keep a fully charged mobile phone in case you need to make an emergency call in case of outages of the internet. I am seriously old fashioned in that I expect 'progress' to mean the user enjoys facilities she didn't have before, rather than looses them whilst paying higher prices to increase the profits of already over rich companies.

So far as I know, there are no quantities in Physics that can be expressed as a single number full stop. The nearest I can get would be 'count' , of which gamma may be considered an example. But of course 'count' by itself is only meaningful in Mathematics; in Physics it has to be a count of something. But everything is related to something else, even gamma is a 'count' of the ratio between two quantities of the same kind (velocities, which in turn are related to other quantities) Please speak for yourself and stop preaching. Scienceforums is not the place for that. If you wish to discuss Science please also stop replacing perfectly good definitions that everybody uses and understands with other words or phrases that confuse any issues you wish to discuss. You should also have realised from your previous posts here that members respond well to requests for clarification of terms which, after all, they are the experts in.

Nah yuh can clearly seethe coins in the cap. ( I took this picture on a street in Amsterdam a few years ago.)

Did someone mention busking and begging ?

The proposal for large monetary deposits is interesting. BBC NewsData centres could pay hundreds of millions in deposits f...The regulator said a fee of between £237,500 to £712,500 per megawatt should be charged for upcoming projects. This thread is to give an airing to the increasing tension between data centres and the wider public, society and infrastructure.

Sometimes absolute accuracy is possible. How many eggs are there in a half dozen box ?

Traditional Proverb

This thread is not about reality. Reality must include all manner of things which are neither facts, nor truths, such as ignorances, mistakes, lies, deceptions, disguises, plays and many more. Facts can indeed change. Data books such as Kay and Laby, Lange, CRC handbook, Merck, International Critical Tables etc are vast collections of interconnected facts. Occasionally small changes are made to one of these facts and the effect ripples through the whole data set.

What about facts we know to exist, but don't know what they are ? What is the date of the death of Charles Brewster Ross? It must be a fact but no one has any means to determine what that date is.

Marx had a point, some workers lived in appalling conditions in Britain. But that does not invalidate my point which was not to tar everyone with the same brush. I doubt for instance, that all the slaves in America lived in greater luxury than the best conditions in Britain. We are not all murderers, just because there are some murderers amongst us. It is of interest that the British were not only the inventors of capitalism but the most ruthless proponents of it But on the other hand they were also the leaders and example setters in abolishing slavery and giving workers better conditions.

My example of the arch bridge would be an example of static emergence. A possible example of dynamic emergence might be the maths schoolmaster's favourite surprise. "The contact point with the ground in a rolling wheel is not moving since it has a forward velocity as part of the system exactly equal and opposite to its backward velocity by virtue of its rotation." My trying to be too brief again. I meant that I was applying tried and tested classifications static and dynamic to emergence, not that such application is well trodden. Complex systems, such as those of exchemist, would be of the dynamic type. In a way the emergent property is a result of dynamic equilibrium of constant change.

I don’t agree with this. For example, one wouldn’t expect to see emergence in a simple harmonic oscillator; but if you had eg a very large ensemble of double pendulums all somehow influencing one another, it might be a different story. I think the complexity of the systems plays a role, and perhaps also the types of dynamics within it (linear? Non-linear? Chaotic?). Of course these terms need to be made precise. My apologies, I didn't make it properly clear, that this was a quote from a brand new book "Physics Fixes Everything" I do not support this view, but I thought it should be included as the trend seemed to be moving this way. In fact classifying notions into weak and strong versions also seems to be gaining popularity, another trend I do not support. If I were to classify emergence I would tend towards static emergence v dynamic emergence, a well trodden classification. To my mind emergence is something that occurs reliably and repeatedly in a system only in certain specialised circumstances as opposed to the many other circumstances that can and do pertain for that system.

Well I can't agree with that trite statement about winners and loosers. Whilst exploitation can be the case, for example the British East India Company, from Robert Owen to the great Quaker foundations (Cadburys, Clarks, etc) capitalism worked very well for all.

Well, three different posts with three different views of 'emergent'. Exactly as @MigL predicts. I think the reversibility issue is a very big deal indeed, since if the paper Markus referred to is correct that gravity is emergent, and if you can reverse the its emergence you could reverse or negate gravity. I note no one has addressed the proposals put forward in the passage I quoted. My understanding of emergence is somewhere between exchemist's aggregate description and that of StringJunky. I agree the emergent phenomenon is sometimes surprising but I don't agree that it is never calculable or predictable. I have to confess my answer to the question, at least at the moment is sometimes reversible. Perhaps some examples (all welcome here) might help clarify matters. 1) If a bake a sponge cake is the result of the baking unpredictable ? It is irreversible. Is is emergent ? 2) If I take a pile of bricks or blocks and arrange them in a certain way a structure emerges which has the additional property of spanning gaps and supporting loads moving across that gap. That is how arch bridges are built. This property only becomes extant when the last block is placed. If I place the blocks in any other configuration the property does not emerge. However it is reversible. I could dismantle the arrangement and even re erect it somewhere else, as many times as I wish. And so long as I kept to the correct configuration the spanning and load bearing property would reemerge each time. So is emergence a one time, one shot phenomenon ? Or must it repeat every time the correct configuration occurs ? Many thanks for the thoughts and replies so far.

Emergence is a popular hot topic word these days, and has been offered by @Markus Hanke in another thread in relation to gravity. So the question arises "Can the Genie be put back in the bottle ?" Or is emergence reversible or irreversible or even irrelevant as one Physicist has written a book he believes to show ? Note this choice is non binary and cannot be addressed by classical logic alone. My list of choices is always irreversible / sometimes irreversible / never irreversible but I will add irrelevant out of deference. Obviously your answer has implications for gravity and many other phenomena.

. It's so much more interesting to trade experiences than insults. Thank you. +1

But not all of them refuse. A couple of years ago we were asked where there was a good place to set up camp by a lone elderly guy on a bicycle. In the end we gave him a bed for the night and it turned out that he was excellent company during the evening. Over dinner, he turned out to be a professor of geology at the University of Otago who was doing the grand tour. One night in the West Country and then on to the East coast where he was heading for Norway in a couple of days.

I have absolutely no idea what you mean by this. The same words as what ? Really ? Didn't you also say ? You are the one who has misread posts by others (who I note have all taken you to task) . You completely misread my post, which was an answer to a specific and very sensitive post from Markus Hanke. It had nothing to do with dogs or whistling and provided no cause to demand 'reference' in such a peremptory manner. Yes I am aware of some rough sleepers who refuse conventional accommodation (We support a local charity called Open Door which provides this). Please note the emboldened word 'some'. In my original post I used italics, apparently that was not good enough. The actual comment was supplementary to that of Markus, who did not mention the few who refuse, as is the right in English Law.

Thank you for expressing my doubts so clearly +1

The you clearly did not read what I said correctly.

BBC NewsSecrets of birdsongs' 'spectacular diversity' revealedA scientific study has revealed the acoustic secret that connects all birdsong - and it is surprisingly simple

Agreed. And yours is a good answer +1. I would just like to add that some rough sleepers in the UK choose to avoid accommodation available to them.

Indeed yes, and these should be fully explored. But we are not there yet.