Slashdot Mirror
More on the Fine Structure Constant
Bonker writes "Neat news from the Beeb. It turns out that data collected from observation of quasars indicates that the fine structure constant of the universe, aka 'Alpha', may have changed since the universe began. It may have been very slightly smaller than it is right now. The article hints that other constants we're familiar with, such as high, holy 'c', may also vary over time. Of course values can't have changed dramatically, because that would mean that low-weight atoms such as carbon would be unstable, and without carbon, there wouldn't be anyone around to measure the fine structure constant anyway." We ran a story about this last year. It looks like the team has continued to check their work for errors and hasn't found any yet.
No. c is the speed of light in a vacuum. The slowed light down by passing it through a certain material.
c is the speed of light in a vacuum . That's what's been assumed to be a constant.
The speed of light in other materials varies quite a bit. That's what causes refraction to occur. Things like diamonds have a low speed of light (high refraction).
It's that same group saying the same thing again. Although I haven't reviewed their latest paper, I remember that I wasn't impressed with the statistical analysis of their data, as of the previous paper.
Personally, I won't find the evidence convincing untill another group takes some their own data and gets similar results. Given that many astronomers have similar sentiments, it seems that giving VLT time to the same group seems not the best use of VLT time.
Of course, if no other astronomers find the likelyhood of the discovery worth the effort of making the observations, then it may be difficult to get independant confirmation. Given that it would be a really big deal if true, I think that says a lot about how seriously the astronomical community takes these claims.
The number of dates I've had in the past year. Of course this tends to cause some division by zero errors.
--It's Pimptastic!--
The article actually doesn't really hint that 'c' is changing, which is good, because it's not clear what would be meant by that. The article says that several physicists have previously wondered if it could change. It then goes on to quote a modern physicist as saying that they were wrong.
I think c is best thought of as a man made constant. Just as I might say that there are 2.54 centimetres per inch, I can say that there are ~3*10^8 metres per second. Neither of these really contains any information about the universe outside of our perception of it. It is simply a statement of how one one system of measurement compares to another. 2.54 centimetres per second evaluates to unity (the number 1, with no units) if you actually evaluate it. Likewise, physicists commonly use unity as the speed of light, because in a very meaningful way, it is.
If I suddenly magically increased c by 10%, that would be indisinguishable from stretching the universe by 10% in every spacial direction. Consider that the speed of light it essentially unity, and that expressing it otherwise is really more a statement of our systems of measurement that we use than of physical reality. This makes it seem silly to say that I have magically increased c by 10% and makes it seem more reasonable to say that I have stretched the universe by 10% in every direction.
Arrr, it be the infamous pirate, No Beard Pete!
If I were guessing in the absense of any data, then I would agree with you. However, there is data which appears to preclude such large rates of change. There is a narrow range of values for the rate of change which is consistant with this data. However, if you beleive theconstraints placed by the Oklo reactor, then the changes have to be oscillatory.
Whoa, time to change those #defines to doubles.
Quoth the article:
"If this is correct, it will radically change our view of the Universe. We have to be cautious but it could be revolutionary. We have seen something in our data - but is it what we think?"
I like it when scientists talk about their theories in this manner. On one hand you have a whole body of researchers, scientists, and journals who are so afraid to rock the status quo that they refuse to research (or publish) controversial information. On the other, you have scientists and/or crackpots who are so paranoid and skittish towards working within the peer reveiw system that we'll probably never gain access to their research, some of which may be quite important and revolutionary.
(I quit my physics major a year in and switched to CS. At what point do 'paranoia' and 'ego-building' become required courses?)
I think this is a nice middle ground. These guys have announced a neat finding, with the caveat that they are still in a thourough 'error-checking' mode and are looking for problems with their own research and are implicitly inviting others to do the same.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Okay - so here's the next question:
Suppose the speed of light through medium X is 38 MPH...
Speed of light through a vaccuum is 186K MPS...
Einstein says you can't go faster than the speed of light in a vaccuum.
Does that mean if you traveled trhough "medium X" that the new maximum speed limit is now 38MPH?
Is light ALWAYS the fastest thing in any given medium?
Seeing as how they slowed light by passing it through "medium X" could there be a way to make a medium that would speed up light - say the speed of light through "medium Y" is 500K MPS? If so, wouldn't that mean the amount of energy to go that fast would be reduced (if not, then the photon that started going faster would have acquired energy from somethin-or-other)? And if so, wouldn't that allow faster-than-light(-through-what-we-call-space) speeds?
I dunno - I watched a Star Trek marathon today. I've absorbed too much fantasy physics to think...
Yep. It confused the hell out of me yesterday. Taco and crew need to go back to web design school (or is that, *go* to web design school?)
You can't change the speed of light (in vacuum).
Such a change would be undetectable. All you can do is distinguish the cases of c being 0, finite>0, or infinite. Real natural constants have to be dimensionless, so a change can not be compensated by rescaling measuring rods and clocks. The fine structure constant, of course, is dimensionless.
Relativity arose largely due to the mystery of the (short-term) constancy of c. It is this constancy that implies contraction at high velocities, dilation etc.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Seastead this.
It's not possible to go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. However, it is possible to go faster than light in some medium.
This actually happens fairly often in nuclear physics. Radiation given off by, say, radioactive waste in a nuclear power plant's storage pool can go faster than the speed of light in water. When it does this, you get the eerie blue glow everyone imagines with radioactivity (which usually isn't really there).
This effect is called Cherenkov radiation, unless I've forgotten how to spell.
It is not possible for any medium to speed up light, so far as in known.
The simplest way to understand why light slows down in a medium is to think of it this way:
Light is zooming along at its full vacuum speed, right? But, there are all these atoms there! Zillions of them! So, light runs into an atom. Luckily for light, the way this works is that it temporarily "charges" the atom, which then almost immediately (but not quite) "discharges" a photon going in pretty much the same direction with the same frequency. Depending on how many atoms there are, and how the atoms behave, this can have varying effects on the light.
This isn't really particularly accurate, but it's easy to understand and more or less vaguely similar to how it works.
Of course, IANAP.
No. c is the speed of light in a vacuum. The slowed light down by passing it through a certain material.
Actually, this is also, technically, incorrect. The speed of light is a constant. Always. Light always moves at light speed. Now, the time it takes for light to pass through various mediums is different, but this is not because the light is being slowed down. It's because the light is hitting the atoms in the medium and is kicking the electrons in the atom to a higher energy state. When the electron falls down from its higher energy state, it in turn release a particle of light. You could go so far as to say that it's the same particle of light. With denser mediums, light takes longer to get through. In the sun, for example, the plasma surrounding the fusion core is so dense, the light from that fusion takes many millions of years to reach the surface. During those millions of years, the light is always moving at light speed. It just keeps running into stuff.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Well C just "happens" to be speed of light in a vacumm but it doesn't bind to light really. 'C' really is just the maximum possible speed period. This can only be acheived in a vacumm with light but there is no such thing as true vacumm. In fact light goes about 75% of C in regular water. So indeed you can go fater than light but not 'C'. So realyl 'light' should not be associated with 'C' for any other reason that it "theoretically" could go the maxim speed. So really "theoretically" many things could go 'C' but many of ours law quickly break down should we break 'C' such as but not limited to entropy (im sorry but oyu cant get more than 100% return of energy). So this is why 'C' is not 'L' for light or something.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Why do they bother? If there really is an invisible man who runs the universe, any attempt at scientific reasoning or analysis is futile.
This guy could change all of the physical rules, alter all physical evidence, and even fsck with your mind at will. In fact, under this scenario, the evidence that has been left for us (strange bones carefully arranged into historical families, radioisotopes, lightwaves streaming in from the sky, etc.) is clearly meant to deliberately mislead us.
If you really buy into this outlook on life, you'd be better off just ignoring the physical world and focus on trying to interpret the meanings of the mystical texts that are supposed to hold more credibility than physical evidence.
Alternately, if we're shrinking on a hyperbolic space (ie staying the same size on an ever growing space), then pi should be getting smaller.
Actually, unlike 0, 1, and e, pi is not "a fundemental constant", but a convenient artefact that allows circles and spheres to be expressed. For example, one can use any number "k", and express pi in terms of "k". The definition of k would be different, but that's ok.
For example, if k were pi/4, we would say that the circumference of the circle is 8kr, and its area 4kr^2. For diameters, circ = 4kd, and area = kd^2. This make the circumference and area k times that of the circumscribing square.
Also, I have played with a set of mathematics, that makes the surface of the sphere 8 pi r^2, with pi=3.14159265359 &c. This has an effect on the "rationalisation" in physics, where 4pi gets replaced by 8pi.
Mathematics has a lot of preconcieved notions in it.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Not so dumb a question, and not even as half-assed as what you generally see on Star Trek. However, you wouldn't find that such a material would have very many practical applications. Certainly interstellar travel wouldn't benefit. Mostly just datacom over fiber optic type media.
Now, on to the specifics. This medium would be what falls loosely under the category "exotic matter". Creating such material poses serious problems itself. Also, most of the things that physicists lump into that category would be dangerous and/or short lived. You'd probably never be able to manufacture macroscopic quantities of the substance, and you'd only ever see it on the readouts of million dollar sensors because it would evaporate almost instantly.
Which brings us to the real question, if they do manage to produce tripole magnets in the new big accelerator, will the new polarization be "East" or "West"? *grin* Gotcha.
Wasn't it a Greg Bear novel, where they had a sensor that checked for variations in the mathematical constants? Something about an artificial superstring, where as the heroine walked closer to it, the value of Pi dropped as low as 2.8. Dammit, can't think of the title, but the superstring was called the "Way".
Indeed, it was Eon, by Greg Bear.
I can't believe I followed that link. In any event, are all creation scientists this hopelessly clueless?
I'm no bible scholar, but I seem to remember that the earliest parts of genesis don't say when the universe was created, only that it was. Perhaps the universe can be 14 billion yrs old, without screwing up their retarded little mythology? Oh wait, that's right, astrophysics also dates the earth as being 4 billion years old. Maybe they oughtta work on that problem first, before taking on the universe?
Evolution is a process. It did, and does happen. If God walks up to me, someday, just for the irony factor or something, it will not, in any way, disprove evolution. Duh. This is why religion is without doubt, full of retards. Do you argue about whether Detroit engineers created the new SUV, or whether it evolved from the pickup and station wagons of the 50's? No, because both are true.
Science isn't out to disprove God, it just wants to know how things work. As such, it can only ever disprove or confirm the process, not some supernatural intent.
alpha is the coupling constant for the electromagnetic force.
In other words, it determines the "strengh" of the electromagnetic force. It is important because
a) it has no units (it's just a number, approximately 1/137)
b) it is easy to measure to a great degree of accuracy
c) it can be measured using a variety of different experiments
d) many fundamental phyiscal constants (such as c - the speed of light in a vacuum, e - the charge of an electron, and h - the Planck constant.
So a change in alpha would mean a change in one of the fundamental constants of physics.
For more information, you can read NIST's wonderful description.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
I used my Q powers about 100 billion years ago to alter this constant to impress a lady Q -- forgot to change it back -- I will get right on it.
"You dont ask how some things are done, you simply do them." - Q
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
It is a science; evolution and development of new or changed life forms has been demonstrated many times. For example, bacteria evolved to fight penicillin; new strains of cold virus appear every year; AIDS was unheard of until recently, etc. etc.
"Of course values can't have changed dramatically, because that would mean that low-weight atoms such as carbon would be unstable, and without carbon, there wouldn't be anyone around to measure the fine structure constant anyway."
Who is to say that carbon has always been stable... maybe one of the more unstable elements today was the stable element at the time and has become unstable as a result of the change in the constant value.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Over the past two years, I've developed a decent "haha, only serious" model of the universe. It works sort of like this:
About two years ago, Slashdot ran a story talking about the theoretical upper limit of computer speed (sorry, couldn't find a link). Basically, the idea was to convert the mass of your computer to energy to allow ALL of it to work for you. This energy, in the form of light, will create intereference patterns - just like you did with the two slits in 5th grade science - and that's how the computer (which now resembles a small star) does it's computing kinda thing (gross oversimplification of what the article said, but that's the gist). Now if you compress enough energy into a singularity, you have pretty much (and the "pretty much" is important) infinite computing power (due to time dialation and so on).
Well, it just so happens that God has one of these things on his desk. Our universe is a program running inside this uber-computer that resembles a black hole.
Earlier I said the processing power of this computer would be "pretty much" infinite. Well - it isn't big enough to handle every particle in the universe simultaneously. Some of the universe is "swapped out". Ever sit down at the computer to read slashdot, and whammo, four hours have gone by? Wonder what happened to the time? You were swapped out, that's what.
There also appears to be problems with the branch prediction unit of this computer. Deja vu? branch prediction made an error, and the queue had to be recalculated. Ever reached in your pocket and pulled out a $5 bill you didn't know you had? bad branch prediction.
If a tree falls in the woods, and no one was there to witness, does it make a sound? No. It didn't even fall. Actually, it wasn't even there. Years later, when a witness comes upon the site, all the events since the last witness came by are quickly approximated and the end results are what the new witness sees. What constitutes a witness? People? squirrels? I dunno. Doesn't matter, really.
Can't remember if you left the oven on? Well, both options are possible, and both have been approximated. The appropriate one will be chosen when someone sees the end result (either your house burns down, or it doesn't).
Lots of strange events can be explained with this model of the universe:
Reincarnation/past lives/Ghosts? Bad garbage collection, or the Divine Coder forgot to unallocate memory.
ESP? Packet snooping.
Why can't objects with mass go faster than the speed of light? Think of everything like an object in C++. If you have a "mass" property, your object is too big to fit through the "bus" in one "fetch cycle", so your "position" property can't be updated as fast as say...a photon, which fits through the bus in one cycle.
Why is the rules of Quantum Mechanics so strange/Planck's Constant? In the world of computers we know, what's smaller than a bit? Looking at things on that small a scale, we're seeing the individual bits flip from 1 to 0 in God's workstation. Of course it will look odd, and it won't mean much when compared to the world as we perceive it. Combine that with the fact that most of the universe is approximated, and you end up with really strange things happening on that small a scale.
Why are some people luckier than others? Not all people call the same random number generator, or maybe some people can call it with a certain "seed value".
Bermuda triangle? think of something like a bad sector on a disk, or a faulty RAM stick - of course, the computer this runs on doesn't use disks or RAM sticks, but it's still a decent analogy.
Jesus? You play Quake/Unreal/The Sims, don't you? It just so happens that God's version of "The Sims" is a hell of a lot better than yours.
Don't think of this as something akin to the movie "The Matrix" - because these rules we live by in this universe can't be broken. There's no dodging bullets. there's no agents... We were created parts of this simulation, and are ourselves simulated and no more or less real than the world we live in - and there's no way to get out of this simulation.
However, maybe there is a way to use the rules to our advantage? But to do that, you need to know the real rules behind the physics we see. We'd need to know what's happening to those individual bits in the processor. If we can affect those often enough, maybe we could effectively beat the rules...?
More important is this question: Were we created on purpose, or is this entire universe of ours that exists inside God's Workstation meant to be something else entirely? Maybe we were supposed to model plasma dynamics, and the system taking on intelligence was a by-product of the genetic algorithm that was used? Or maybe we're something like an AI experiment?
I would just like to take this opportunity to point out that no other science has quantities in it that have names as cool as the fine structure constant or the permeability of free space.
From the article, it seems that the thing they are measuring to understand the nature of how this 'constant' changed is the light that eminated from the rest of the universe that is just reaching earth. The older light appears to show matter generally acting in one way, and the newer light appears to show matter acting in another way.
How did they isolate this one factor in sub-atomic formulae as the only feasible explanation? How did they eliminate things like universal gravity effects (gravity appears to be instant and with unlimited range), forces acting on the light over billions of years, or changing nature of the stars as that portion of the universe ages, thus changing the light coming from them?
This does qualify as one of those 'extrordinary claims' that themselves need both extrordinary proof and extrordinary qualification of what they are really stating.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Dating techniques are sometimes inaccurate, and some methodologies in the past have turned out to be flawed. No one denies this, only the bible thumpers claim to be infallible.
But, rather than give up after a first try, a scientist attempts to figure out what the problem was, and design a new test that may be more accurate. That is what science is about.
The earth is, by all accounts, not millions of years old. It is billions of years old. Order of magnitude. Or at least, that's the best guess we can make, knowing what we know. If someone came up with something approaching evidence that it was only 600 million years old, I would listen. It would have to be pretty damn convincing, but I like oddball theories, and everyone gets a chance with me... somtimes two of them. But even 600m, which is a slighter difference than you are suggesting, is rather big. 3.7 billion yrs difference. And it would have to offer alternate explanations for all sorts of different things. Frankly, I can't imagine anything that might allow for it to be that young.
So this is where you get to tell me, that it's even younger yet, something on the order of 10,000 yrs old. Good luck trying to explain that.
I don't think that death, famine, disease or killing are ever good things. You see, that's a leap of logic there. I said that it simply was a process that can explain alot of the things in the world that we see around us, I made no statement that I preferred these things, that they were some kind of goal to be pursued, or anything like that. But they happened. They're still happening. If they tend to induce a phenomena known as evolution, and it's obvious they've been happening a very long time (though we might debate home long), is it so unbelievable that evolution might have been happening a very long time?
I'm sorry that I called creationists idiots. It is very frustrating for me. They are simply emotionally vulnerable people (and at one time or another, we are all vulnerable) that turned to the only people who claimed to want to help them. This is sad. Even their own bible warns against such, I believe. Something about the shepherd leading the sheep astray.
The universe is strange, without a doubt. And it's unimaginably large... there's plenty of room left for a supreme being to being hiding somewhere. But if such does exist, what will he have to say about you acting so silly and letting your emotions blind you to what you see around you?
Oh, and BTW, much of what we call suffering is the result of sin. People hurting one another, for malice's sake, hurting themselves. The bible thumpers don't have a monopoly on morality.
Everyone seems to love carbon. It is highly overrated if you ask me. Hydrogen, now there's an element...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
const double alpha = 1.0/137;
hack_universe() {
*(double *)&alpha += 1e-9;
}
// don't call this; the universe requires
// double-word aligned doubles
crash_universe() {
*(double *)(1+(char *)&alpha)) += 1e-9;
}
Maybe I'm missing something from the article, but I don't think that "constants" like alpha changing is a new idea (though it is very cool if alpha changing over time can be directly observed like this). Changing coupling "constants" is already a part of the established "Standard Model" of physics, and is an essential feature of Grand Unified Theories.
Grand Unified Theories rely on all of the interaction strengths for all known forces (Strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force, and sometimes gravity) becoming the same at some energy scale earlier on during the formation of the Universe. In the present Universe, the strong force that holds quarks together is much stronger than the electromagnetic force, but if GUTs hold true then they were much closer earlier on.
See here for a graph illustrating this effect, or rather its failure for one particular GUT theory. This is the first I found using a quick google search for "GUT" and "coupling constant"; it is a common plot shown for papers on GUTs in general.
Its been a couple of years since I studied this stuff. I'd be interested to know if this article is pointing to something new theoretically.
Everyone knows that constant's value is 42.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Sorry about the nipicking (millions/billions).
When I used the term "hiding", don't take offense at that. I meant no connotations of cowardice, apathy, etc. By "hiding", I meant something along the lines of "quarks hide well below the level of the atom". Which while we can probably agree they are there for certain (we can agree on that, can't we?), I sure as hell have never seen one. Have you? We found them, in such a way though, that they are mostly undeniable. Perhaps it may be that way for god too, some day (and he is certainly deniable by some).
Again, the bible says that it was "very good". (I don't know this, taking your word for it). In the KJV, it's greek/aramaic, translated to latin, translated to english. Do you know how many subtlies can be lost? Let's say you go back and read it in the original language though. Even there, can you be sure just which subtlies you're still missing? Perhaps it was meant, that the fact that there was a humanity finally was a good thing. The order out of chaos, the light of new souls burning in the universe. Good does sometimes come out of evil acts, you know, and does so without validating the cause.
If a women is raped, and raises the child, loving it, does that imply the rape was a good thing? No.
So the process of evolution isn't necessarily a morally good thing. Besides, most christians see nothing wrong with eating meat, or a predator hunting. Among animals, this is neither evil or good, in the sense that those words apply to mankind. Am I wrong? So the death/disease/famine doesn't even apply at all, up until you get to the hominids. I certainly don't sympathize with those first little amoebas that died in the first billion years of this planet. Should I? Even if a few starved? Now, I agree that once things got close, that is nothing to make light of. Then again, it's possible that a few of the gaps you see in the evolution of proto-human group, are actually gaps. Maybe "he" skipped over those parts. Would be a practical solution.
Plus, he would have had a chance to fix the placement of some arteries (on the back of the head, iirc) that just wouldn't work for modern humans. It's still a mystery, how they managed to switch locations in a short amount of time... and without the switch, your brain would fry before you were 4 yrs old.
I don't have time to explain the various geological dating methods, or why and when they will fail. And I'm far from an expert, in any event. But you have to ask yourself if you'd even accept the results at all. If you're just nitpicky about bad results, science likes that. Let's us weed out all the bullshit. And remember, there are a few ultra-othodox rabi's that still believe the world is flat... simply because the Torah describes the "4 corners of the world".
Heck, unlike some, I don't even have a problem with you having sneaking suspcions what the results will be, before the experiment begins. Just as long as you accept them even if you don't like what you see. And just so you know I'm not picking on you, there are a few atheists with that same problem.
When creationists put forward stuff like the St Helens lava, they move themselves firmly into the fraud category (I'm talking about the authors of the research, not you). K/Ar dating cannot be used on young samples (30 years). This is widely known. I understand that the lab which Austin submitted the work to has a disclaimer about this. Yet there isn't a mention of this in the paper. What next will they try to do? Measure a atom with a meter ruler. What you have presented is nothing but fraud designed to trick laypeople.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
OK, first off, I applaud you for considering what is meant as "good". Now, this is hardly scientific, but here's what you have to do. You'll have to do it alone, because it seems you're much more well read than I.
Think of every single interpretation where good doesn't rule out evolution at all, and every single interpretation that absolutely denies it. Write all of them, even write down the possibilities that don't clean fall into either category. Then eliminate the ridiculous ones. If you come up with less than 10 total interpretations, you aren't trying hard enough. I'm willing to bet there will be several left, and at least one for each category.
I agree, it's not simple. And if it somehow shows you that evolution might possibly fit... what then? Will you be sent to hell for even considering such, if it turns out you were right all along, and God has to correct the mistaken notion? At the worst, it will give you some insight how creation might have worked, if only a little (much more interesting would be figuring out how the very first life forms would have developed/been created. No one claims to know that, after all).
Now, if you get that far, and realize I'm not some demon sent from hell to destroy your faith, I invite you to go just a bit further. It may take some work, mind you. But try to find some books that deal with geological dating. If you can (there isn't much of it), find the most rabidly atheistic texts on the subject you can. Chuckle to yourself all the time they waste promoting atheism, but look for some of the truths they may have stumbled onto, in their delusions. Then, move on to the religious-neutral texts (which you may have to do anyway). They will be full of history on the mistakes made in the past. Even scientists aren't often satisified with the results. Mind you, most don't have a stake in whether a rock is 13.7 million years old, or if it's really 13.9 million years old (though even then, sometimes if you're the person who first said 13.7, you're reputation is on the line). In many cases, there isn't alot of agreement. Sometimes, the best they manage, is "this one has to be really old, can't be any younger than 1 million". Other times, they are complete anomalies, that they won't even venture guesses.
But this isn't proof that it's crackpot science. It's evidence that the whole thing is undergoing refinement. No grand conspiracies lurk here, to hide the truth. Again, even if you become convinced that the age of the earth is much older than you once thought, does it somehow disprove the existence of God? Hardly. I might even have an explanation, if you care to hear.
You claim that he created the earth in seven days (forgive any minor mistakes). Yet, the earth itself determines just how long a day is. Not the sun, not anything external. Does the term day have any exact meaning, if the earth isn't fully formed, and rotating? The bible doesn't say that it was created in 3.45 x 10^29 vibrations of the cesium atom, or anything like that. Just "day" (or am I wrong?). And then, there is an old tradition of even using the term "day" poetically, when it doesn't mean ~24 hours at all. It is possible, that maybe it means that God created the world in seven stages, each of indeterminate (and not even equal) duration? And finally, it would be interesting to know which word is used in the original Hebrew, and if it was ever used in a context where it doesn't mean approx. 12 hours of daylight + approx. 12 hours of night. And the absolutely best part of all this is, I'm not even coming close to asking you to change a core part of your beliefs. Your morality, which I respect, isn't altered by this at all. And you might even come to appreciate yet another perspective of the bible... one where there is much more poetry in addition to the lessons it teaches you about life. I find it hard to believe that someone could be so inspired to write down the story of creation, without attempting to use metaphor of one form or another. Neither atheist or believer will deny that the entire event was anything but awesome, mind you (and what could be more awesome than a being that would think nothing of performing a creation that spans several billion years?).
And please, don't take this the wrong way. But christians in particular, seem to want to argue what I would think amount to insignificant details, when all it does it make them look like fools to the public. And the greatest irony is, instead you could be using that effort to teach them the real truths that you really do have, which the non-religious seem to lack. Why? A god that teaches his worshippers to run around trying to ban biology textbooks isn't very worthy compared to a God that can't be bothered to worry about that because his followers are busy trying to teach people to be decent to one another (no matter what the details of their origin are).
here and here.
Finally a changing speed of light is predicted in a DSR approach here.
This is interesting news.
Since modern attempts to unify the fundamental physical forces began, gravity in particular has presented a difficulty for scientists, and it appears that the solution may be changes in constants we previously believed to be, well, constant.
This could have far-reaching implications for the way we think about science, and especially our understanding of what science can tell us. It seems possible that our disciplines of science and natural history might actually be driven farther apart, as we lose any reliable base indicators on which to base assumptions about the past.
For some in the scientific orthodoxy, this is anathema and they will fight it tooth and nail to the bitter end, for it forces them to accept a reality that they have long denied. The liberals constantly tell us that because of the relatively slow travel of light from distant galaxies, it must have been traveling for long periods of time, and the universe must therefore be quite old (billions and billions... you know the drill). Now their rationalizing will be laid bare and they must admit that the Bible has again withstood vigorous attempts at disproof, that they have a Creator and are therefore accountable to Him.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Hmmm. Maybe in a dozen billion years or so, my slashdot Karma may be worth more also.
Table-ized A.I.
Actually it is possible to have both a group and phase velocity faster than c. For a cool applet demonstration by Greg Egan, visit this.
You can also do an experement yourself with a high bandwidth op amp. Make a current follower circuit (hook the output up to the - input) but introduce a long delay into that connection with a long cable. Now send a gaussian pulse into the + input and watch the output with an oscilliscope. If your op amp has high enough bandwith, the output pulse will appear before the input pulse. What is happening is that the very leading edge of the pulse is being amplified into the whole pulse in order to satisfy the golden rule of op amps: the two inputs must be at the same voltage.
This (and all other systems like it) only work on waves that are analytic functions, which means that then entire function can be completely reconstructed from the behavior at one point. Analytic functions cannot be used to transmit information, so we still cannot use this to communicate faster than light.
When a photon puts an atom into a higher energy state, and then is released from this atom, how long does this process take? The length of the atom at light speed? Or longer, and if so, how much longer?
Actually, in the history of evaluating pi, there are some people who evaluated the value 6.2831852 to large number of places, from which we can deduce their value of 3.14159...
All that is required of pi is to have the circumference of the circle expressiable as a product or quotient with just one irrational. Whether you call 3.14159265359 n/k or nk, and the value of n are pretty much free variables. Ergo, pi is not a fundemental constant.
Unlike pi, the values e, 0, and 1 would be the same for all cultures. The number e has only one meaning: e^(1/x) ~> 1+1/x as x gets large.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I imagine that the speed of 'light' is pretty close to the speed of 'heavy', provided that the vacuum is well-made and in good condition.
- undoware.ca
A more useful number for me would be the fraction of successful dates (*1), which, while non-zero, can be seen to converge to within espilon of zero as T goes to T(divorce) + infinity. We can represent this value by the lowercase Greek letter sigma (*2).
Raise sigma to the power of the money spent on those dates (which, perhaps counter-intuitively, appears to be inversely related to sigma itself), and we have a value that can be substituted for zero for most practical purposes, while remaining safe for division, though it may strain the limits of floating-point precision.
--
(*1) For any given meaning of "successful". I'll leave it to you sick monkeys to guess whether I mean what you think I mean.
(*2) For reasons that should be obvious.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Does not refute my arguement. You see, there is a number 3:16E8 E3... (base 120) = 3.14159265359 (base 10), but you have not established why we sould us it in preference tp something else, like 6.28318530718, or 12.566373144 or whatever.
Just because you can throw excellent links about 3.14159265359 at me, it does not mean that every culture, or separate mathematical tradition is going to write the circumference of the circle as 2k of the radius.
I've seen good cases for using 6.28318530718 as the fundemental constant for the circle.
Therefore "pi" is not a fundemental constant, but just a convenient expression for the circle and circular things.
On the other hand, "e" will always evolve from logarithms. "e" was not set before-hand, like pi was. The definition of pi is simply the circumferance divided by the diameter of a circle. Every other expression, formula and so forth relate to this definition.
But ... there are other properties of the circle that can set a ratio, such as the circumference divided by the radius. Given that the radius is the correct mathematical expression of the circle (all formulae relate to the radius), then the constant of 6.28... is "more correct".
The values of 0, 1, and e are determined from the outcomes of pre-existing conditions. 1 from a pre-counting era, and 0 as a symbol for an empty item [I recognise something like eight or nine idioms for "0", and several different symbols].
For example, remember that "0" is the "empty column". The "column" could be an empty tray by itself, or one in the middle of others. For example, if your purse is empty, it's a different story to if you have a $1 and a 5c peice in it (which involves a different kind of 0, $1.05, and this is a different kind of zero to the one in "3 hours [0 min] 22 sec". There's also the "dash zero", filling a column with a dash to indicate that it's empty.
My studies of Egyptian mathematics seem to indicate that the values pi/4 may have been the form used.
Pi as 3.1415926... seems to be established when the circle was described in terms of its diameter. A circular inch, for example is an area of a circle of one inch diameter.
The fine structure constant, and its related fine structure hundred [the latter is my name for 137.036...] is something that evolves from physics, and is not "set before hand".
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
This is not as silly as it may seem. If we're slowly dilating on a hyperbolic space, then the circumference of the circle may be getting bigger...
Yes, yes, but pi is a constant on a Euclidian plane, and therefore always has, is, and will be the same value. Whether or not the universe is Euclidian or not is debatable.
But are you talking about the phenominal world or the nouminal world? At the presision our senses operate, the outside world appears Euclidian, so our internal representation of the world, the nouminal world, all that we experience, IS Euclidian, and pi is always the same. But the world is, in fact, not Euclidian at all. Everything 'out there' operates according to a set of rules that operates very much like the set of rules 'in here', but not quite.
If we someday build a true artificial intelligence, it would be interesting to build it such that its internal view of the world was based not on our own Euclidian, newtonian minds, but instead on what we know to be a representation closer to actual external reality. What advances a research assistant that truely groked QM could bust out. Probably have a wicked curve ball too.
Your explanation is more or less correct for light passing through a low-density gas, but it's not correct for solids and liquids, and it's not correct for a high-density plasma like the sun (which is about as dense as water). Say light passes into some glass. What happens is that the electrons in the glass are disturbed, and they reradiate a new light wave. The new light wave adds onto the original light wave, and the sum acts just like a slower-moving light wave. It's not correct to think of the atoms as if they had individual energy states, because they're interacting so strongly. Also, your explanation incorrectly implies that the original wave is gone, and that the reradiated light comes in bursts from individual atoms.
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It depends on what your definition of Pi is. Is it the idealized circle? Or is it the measured circle? If Pi is defined and calculated by first principles assuming a non-changing flat euclidian plane, then Pi is a constant and calculatable.
If however you want to make Pi a measurement ratio, then you can never calculate it to arbitrary precision - you can only measure it. And general relativity already tells you that in our universe even if you had perfect measurement tools, you will measure a different value for Pi because of space being bent by mass.
Does that mean the value of Pi for the idealized circle is wrong? No.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
The issue here is that the named constant is 3.1415926..., and not 6.2831853 or 0.785398....
You can any of take these to arbitary precision.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.