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Why Are We Made of Matter?
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "The Universe began with equal amounts of matter and antimatter after the Big Bang, and yet when we look out at today's Universe, we find that, even on the largest scales, it's made of at least 99.999%+ matter and not antimatter. The problem of how we went from a matter-antimatter-symmetric Universe to the matter-dominated one we have today is known as baryogenesis, and is one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics. Where are we on the quest to understand it as of April, 2014? A wonderful and comprehensive recap is here."
God hid it.
God is made of it.
Okay, that's the god excuses out of the way... now on with the physics!
What does it matter that we're made of matter? Were we made of anti-matter, would it anti-matter to anyone? Don't lose any energy on this matter, because it doesn't fucking matter.
By mass, I'm currently ~70% water, ~29.5% matter, and 0.5% cookie dough
Disclaimer: Do not eat raw cookie dough made with unpasteurized eggs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If we were made from anti-matter, we'd call that matter, and call matter anti-matter. TFS summary starts out with the statement that the universe began with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. Are we sure there were equal amounts? It seems like there must have been more of one than the other. Why that would be is the real question in my mind.
Actually, the big bang theory simply says that the universe started in a hot, dense state and expanded into a cold, sparse state. It doesn't even try to explain how the universe came to be in that hot, dense state. It is similar to how evolution does not even try to explain how life started, just how species evolve once they exist.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The beginning probably had a spin one way or another that predisposed one type of matter VS the other.
The effect was probably small, but over the vast space and energies involved that small difference made a giant outcome.
Butterfly effect and all that.
This would be my completely uneducated guess. Physics persons can freely rip on me as an idiot lol Please when ripping on me, tell me something in terms an idiot would understand though, I do enjoy learning some things. Especially the why of things! :)
One of my other stupid persons theories, maybe energy just likes to form matter under the right conditions and when matter and anti matter meet they create energy and this destruction and creation cycle trended to making the universe just matter.
In spite of my better judgement I'm about to attempt an analogy, so bear with me here. The lowest number of moves to unscramble a maximally scrambled rubik's cube (a 3x3x3 one) is 20. That is, for every configuration of a rubik's cube, there is a sequence of 20 moves or less that will unscramble it. However, there is no algorithm to generate those solutions. They are unstructured; they're simply lists of moves. The algorithms used by human (and computer) rubik's cube solvers are far from move-optimal, but benefit from being executable by non-omniscient beings. They pick out some pattern that is applicable to the rubik's cube, and then direct you in manipulating it according to that pattern until it's solved.
The way science understands the world is by comparing new data to what we already know. For example, we know penicillin kills bacteria; if we discover a new disease, and then discover that it is caused by bacteria, we can safely draw the conclusion that we'll probably be able to treat it with penicillin. We've used science to discover a pattern in the world ('penicillin kills bacteria'), then use deduction to determine where it is and isn't applicable, and form new categories based on what happens when we encounter new data (like bacteria not killed by penicillin being classified as anti-biotic resistant). Science is basically a collection of patterns like this, and because they're patterns (structures, structured rules, whatever you want to call them) we can understand them.
Now, what I wonder about is this. What if the fact that we live in a matter universe now (rather than an anti-matter one) is like the set of move-optimal solutions to a rubik's cube? They both describe a certain state of affairs, but they also both completely lack (could lack) any kind of structure. And because they lack this structure, there is nothing for us to latch onto, nothing for us to understand, no pattern to detect. It is simply the case, and there is no further reason. There is no reason why there is no structure in the move-optimal solutions to a rubik's cube. There might not be a reason why there is a massive matter/anti-matter imbalance either.
This is something I've been trying to work out for a while, so please excuse me if my explanation is unclear. I just think it would be a really interesting possibility, something which isn't often discussed, maybe because it simply gets overlooked.
Why Are We Made of Matter? Why Am I Reading This Website?
we don't know we are made of matter. What if what we call matter is in fact anti-matter ? Or to put it differently, if the universe was made of "antimatter" wouldn't we think we were made of matter and the definition of antimatter (positron etc.) would be the opposite of what's now? Isn't it just a matter (no pun intended) of definition ?
because we are almost surely living in simulation. and in that simulation, things just have to be so for us to be simulated.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Is the question about what happened to the anti-matter, or what happened to our theory?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I wonder if it is possible that the Universe has some regions of matter and some of antimatter. In between there would be mixed regions and the resulting explosions could tend to keep the different regions separate. Initially asymmetry in the distribution would leave some small regions of each type. The m-am explosions could force separation and a certain portion of the matter regions would merge with other matter regions and the same for antimatter. This seems like a fairly obvious thought, so I assume that it has been considered and ruled out. Why or why not?
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
Unlike the energy from nuclear fission or fusion which we essentially get for free because its already in a sense locked up in the atoms, for an anti matter bomb you'd first have to make the antimatter - from scratch. And the amount of energy you'd have to put in to do that would have to be at least equal to the amount of energy you'd get out. So to create an anti matter bomb to physically destroy a planet (rather than just laying waste to the surface) you'd have to put in enough energy to do that in the first place which if you used the entire earth electricity generating capacity would - at a guestimate - take a few hundred years minimum.
There is no evidence for this hypothesis, but I plan to capitalize on the first mover advantage. When the internet completely destorys all vestiges of religion and make everyone atheists, they will be looking for someone to mouth of fantastic things without any evidence to provide "meaning for their lives". I am going to be there on the mountain, mouthing of stuff like matter, anti-matter, quantum horizon etc etc.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Because we travel the way we do through time.
Antimatter travels through it in the other direction.
And we when we and the antimatter get all the way from one end of Time to the other--BOOM! It's the end.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Uh, where do YOU think it came from? If you say "God," then you have to explain why God can pop up from nowhere, or why he can be eternal, but nothing else can.
Actually they don't have to explain it. That's why it's called faith.
I'm not a particularly religious sort, more agnostic than anything, and faith doesn't really enter into my daily life. That said, there's plenty of things about the universe we just can't explain, so I would think there's room left for faith if that's what a particular person finds to be fulfilling. It doesn't do much for me, but to each their own, and I certainly don't derive a sense of smug superiority from mocking the religious people among us.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I think the edge of the universe is just unrealized potential, or grasping at straws another way... lol
I always think of the edge of the expansion like Schrodinger cat, it neither exists or doesn't exist until you go there, then it exists and would be part of normal space.
P.S. I am not a physics expert by any means.
Nobody in science actually claims it just popped up from nowhere. Best guesses range from "we don't know" to "we cannot ever know".
And that is why we do not hear any intelligent radio transmissions from other star systems.
But does it explain why there's apparently no intelligent postings on Slashdot?
There were originally equal amounts of facts and anti-facts. Computer Scientists are still trying to explain why anti-facts now make up 99.999% of the postings.
Same reason why my martinis are 99.999% gin. I just rely on the probability cloud from the vermouth sitting on my bar shelf.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
That the universe started out with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter is an interesting hypothesis.
Greed is the root of all evil.
of course matter can pop out of nowhere - it happens all the time, see Virtual Particle. What is different here is the vast scale at which it happened, and where this phenomon applies to the origin of the Big Bang
Don't throw away a theory because you don't understand how it is started. The Big Bang Theory is simply stunning in it's ability to explain almost everything in the know universe that we observe. It is up to someone else to work out what may have triggered it.
This is just like Evolution which brilliantly explains almost everything we see in terms of life as it is. but evolution is not Abiogensis
When you understand that Evolution and Abogenesis are different things, as are sex and embryology, you will also understand how you mixed up the Big Bang Theory with another area of study which is about multiverses, unverse bubbles, oscillating universes, God's Poke, and other interesting ideas that are today all still in the realm of speculation - because we have no way yet of seeing which of them could be true.
Big Bang cosmologists work on what is observable and testable and predictable. Big Bang cosmologists are not expecting to find out how to create a big bang, but describe what happens after it occurs.
Why do people think these simple questions are hard???
I agree. It's almost as if they don't read past the headline.
It's way worse than that. There's a video of someone asking astronomy graduates from an Ivy League university what causes the phases of the moon and the seasons, and most cannot answer. What most people do is choose a belief, then actively look only for confirmation of that belief, even if it's an obviously lame excuse to desperately cling to that belief -- they act with willful ignorance. The Doobie brothers say it best -- see my signature.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
There are only two possible outcomes:
- either matter and antimatter annihilate each other and the universe is mostly void
- either one eventually wins over the other, leaving majorly one in the universe and pockets of the other
Out of those two, one is clearly more likely to lead to intelligent life.
Well....there is your problem....asking (pure) astronomy grads a question about physics is like asking a (pure) physics grads questions about math. Sure, they know the stuff they need to know to do their work but they can't answer the deeper "why" questions related to the field.
Maybe the anti-matter went backwards in time. Take a look at Paul Dirac's equations.
Personally I don't like this idea because I perceive time as an emergent phenomenon of the expansion and disturbance of space and as such is not a dimension.
Its more likely that the energy released by annihilation in the early universe reconstituted to form ordinary matter.
Greed is the root of all evil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour is a common concept.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
How do we know that there was a 50/50 distribution of matter and antimatter? Perhaps antimatter is rare, or more common in the anti universe in a parallel dimension?
... Bacon is made out of matter. Had the universe evolved without bacon, we wouldn't be here to discuss the issue.
Have gnu, will travel.
As soon as physicists solve the problem of antimatter the antimatter bomb will be created.
It will be the size of a coin and could literally destroy literally a quoter of a planet. This is how civilizations end in the Universe.
You vastly overstate the yield of an antimatter weapon.
antimatter weapon yield calculator
From an astronomy perspective it's a hard question. Sure, there is the junior high version with the earth's rotation being tilted yada yada, but why is the earth's rotation like that?
in the studies that i've been doing for the past four months the best explanation i've encountered is one where particles are actually photons obeying maxwell's equations *to the absolute* letter, on some form of circular (or knotted, or hubius helical) path, where the epicentre creates a synchtronic electro-magnetic field that it in symbiotic support of the epicentre. there is actually a lot of research recently into optics which shows that it *is* actually possible to create phased laser beams that will literally bend in a semi-circle.
with that description in mind, the definition of a "particle" is therefore that the phase of the photon at the centre rotates in one direction.... and that for an anti-particle it rotates in the opposite direction. the string theorists / knot physics people have this down as "the knot being tied left-handed or right-handed".
it's really that simple... but it requires a bit of explanation otherwise it makes no sense. why did the universe choose one in priority over the other? who knows: who cares. the choice has been made.
If we were made of anti-matter, we would see matter as anti-matter and the anti-matter that we are made of as matter.
...and Spock would have a Van Dyke and (gasp) Sulu would be hitting on Uhura.
and all the matter went to this universe and there is an alternate universe made with antimatter and there is an alternate of everything in this universe only made with antimatter, an antimatter version of me an antimatter version of you, an antimatter version of everybody in an antimatter world orbiting an antimatter sun that is in an antimatter milkway galaxy in an antimatter universe
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Is there any difference between a Black Hole/Singularity formed from Matter vs. Antimatter?
Did galactic-sized magnetic fields push the antimatter into the supermassive black holes in their centers?
If you're looking for something missing of the cosmic scale, black holes seem like a good place to look; although I suppose it'll also be the last place you look...
Antimatter is so derisory. Must we put such a polarizing label on something we do not fully understand? If people referred to me that way, I would not hang around, either.
Of course it matters that we are made, and whatever we are made of quantum-wise, we should be proud, even if it destroys us when we come together.
I vote for calling it 'matter-of-fact'.
P.S. I appreciate StartsWithaBang renaming it from, "Why are we layered fatter?"
As I understand it, consciousness arises from the evolving state of the phonological, visuospatial, and episodic working memories. If someone "walked and talked etc like before", he or she would still be using the working memories to maintain balance and communicate.
I should have linked to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Maybe it all just dropped through to the other side.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
You appear to be confusing "most people" with "thick people".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Those weren't physics questions. Those were astronomy questions.
....contained energy and energy is what we all are, doods!
Yes, many people don't see these distinctions. But it's quite worthwhile to understand things anyway.
it's actually a Defense of Darwin's ideas to avoid thinking he wrote "The Origin of THE Species" or something like that. He was out to explain, in modern terms, why we see life organized into somewhat fuzzy sets that change with time, and personally, I think the man did a pretty good job. Unfortunately, I'd estimate that 60 - 70% of the people who thinkthey believe in Evolution either think Evolution proceeds towards abstract perfection, or that it explains the origin of life question. Slashdot is a lousy place to debate religion, because so many people have a religiously fanatical attachment to one or both of these bad translations of Evolutionary theory, and don't know the facts of the matter are the chief thing that disagrees with them, not the people they are criticising.
Who is John Cabal?
So today the universe apparently is 99.99999% matter / 0.000001% antimatter -- What about the possibility that when the universe started it began as 50.00000000001% matter / 49.99999999999% anti-matter, and the observable universe today is 'simply' made up of the remaining 0.000000000002% that didn't annihilate itself billions of years ago? Even if matter/antimatter each have an equal chance of getting created, randomness is not perfectly distributed. If you roll a set of dice an infinite amount of times, you WILL from time to time end up with weirdly skewed results that may appear non-random, even though they are. Since we happen to live inside this universe and have no way of observing any potential failed precursor universes, we have an observation bias to our particular outcome -- there could be a near-infinite amount of alternate universes with matter and antimatter perfectly distributed which completely annihilated themselves before the universe as we know it today ever came info being.
because if we were made of anti-matter, we could have called it matter and we would be asking the same question of the newly named anti-matter (that used to be matter).
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
>Time never 'started'. It has always been.
That's certainly not the currently accepted theory, which holds that space and time were created in the big bang, and "what existed before that" is a meaningless question, because there *was* no before. At least not in a traditional temporal sense.
>Humans have a 'will'
There is actually a great deal of debate about this question, it's very possible that "will" may be an observer-based phenomena that only appears to exist from a very specific perspective, not unlike centrifugal force. Personally I find the theory counter-productive since by definition if its true it doesn't matter, while believing it if it's false is potentially horribly destructive to the human spirit (be it metaphysical or metaphorical)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I remember asking Dr. Forward that at LACon II, back in '84. He pointed out that a sphere of antimatter could only react to normal matter on its surface, limiting the speed of the reaction. He said that it wouldn't explode, it would evaporate and that it would look something like a drop of water on a hot griddle.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
You vastly overestimate the importance of a comment made by someone who cannot spell "quarter".... ...or posts on slashdot for that matter. (haw haw)
Reincarnation is actually part of the core teachings, and was not tacked on later as you allege.
I suspect you're making the classical error of confusing it with resurrection, which is a mostly if not purely Western/Christian concept.
Resurrection: After you die, you'll be brought back to life as yourself, just as you were when you were alive previously. Which is poppycock.
Reincarnation: After you die, you won't come back, but bits of you will be included in and live again as parts of new life. Which is perfectly true.
Finally, you're under the mistaken impression that Buddhism is a religion, and it is not. Religion is about accepting dogma. Buddhism is about discerning the truth to the best of your abilities, and accepting it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It just doesn't matter.
soylentnews.org
The article makes the point that there's a significant amount of matter in the interstellar space within our galaxy, which suggests that if other stars in our galaxy were made out of antimatter instead of matter, we would know about it because we'd detect annihilations. But can we say the same about intergalactic space? The article glosses over this question and skips to pointing out that we don't detect annihilations within other galaxies. What if those other galaxies are mostly antimatter, but there's essentially no matter to annihilate in intergalactic space? (Perhaps because it already annihilated in the early universe. Could that be the source of the CMB?)
Wouldn't any other setup be unstable? M/A collision leads to burst of energy. Energy gets converted back into MAtter via some other process. Does it get converted into M or A? If there's a bias on one direction or another, that one wins; but if it's a 50/50 split than you just need a little push in one direction or another and one side wins because the "wrong" side keeps getting hit with stuff that kills it and pulls it back through the energy cycle.
Of course IANAPhysicist and this seems like a very obvious PoV which means it's almost certainly wrong.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Actually, they don't have to explain it, because science doesn't require everything have a time or point of origin or first cause, only things that proceed through time from a beginning to an end. It was a perfectly good scientific theory that the universe itself was Steady State. It had no beginning, just limitless forming of new stars as old ones died off, for eternity. Steady State didn't lose out in scientific circles because it was considered basically illogical or unscientific, but because evidece accumulated pointing to a moment of origin, the Big Bang. Science allowed for things which didn't need an origin or a cuae for that origin just fine. Ergo, an uncaused and eternal God is only unscientific if you believe that it's fundamental to science that all explanations be natural, but said God is not knocked out as a hypothesis just because it is causeless.
You're offering an argument Carl Sagan made in the book version of Cosmos. It only works as seemingly logical because he treats something as a rhetorical question, even though he gave a factual answer to that question 20 pages earlier, and that's the real reason why it's not a good argument. Science didn't get to throw out the Steady State because it violated a fundamental rule of science itself, it had to amass evidence, and that's why science is worth admiring. That puts the ball in the Atheists court - It may be up to the religious to offere evidence for God, but it's also up to any person using science to support their position, to consider all hypothisi they know of that might contradict the one they favor, and not exclude them a priori. I don't have any particular evidence for God as a scientific hypothesis. If you have active evidence for Non-God as a hypothesis, go for it, but you should stop trying to take the shortcut of throwing the idea out before actually allowing weighing the evidence. That shortcut is an a priori assumption, it's not one that is standard to the scientific method, and using it means you just turned science into a religion. .
Who is John Cabal?
I don't know why it's assumed that the universe started out with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, but assuming that it did, it still seems to have started out with some seed of asymmetry in the manner in which matter is distributed, as we see in the distribution of matter in the cosmos today.
So couldn't the asymmetry in amount of matter and antimatter arise from that?
For example, here's an idea I've had using my very limited understanding of such matters and I'd be happy if someone explained why I'm wrong.
I was wondering what would happen if a matter and an antimatter black holes collided, after reading a bit on the subject it seems that once the black hole is formed the information about what it was formed from is lost so they would be both just black holes and merge if they collided.
Now another aspect of black holes is Hawking Radiation which is supposed to produce radiation at the edge of the event horizon drawing on the mass of the black hole for energy.
So assuming the black hole doesn't retain the information about what formed it, the radiation would constitute photons and equal amounts of matter and antimatter by the random chance of which particle from the pair formed at the event horizon falls in and which escapes.
So then if a star formed from only matter or only antimatter (since a mix of both would fly apart) and collapsed into a black hole, and it was left to radiate Hawking radiation, wouldn't it essentially convert one type of matter into energy and equal amounts of matter and antimatter, violating the symmetry?
And if the universe happened to start out in such a distribution of matter and antimatter that there were slightly more denser regions of antimatter than matter, then a small violation of the symmetry would emerge, the rest of the matter and antimatter annihilate and there would remain a small remainder of matter.
Everybody on this site should know it takes a full pound of antimatter just to destroy a sweet smelling, funny looking cloud of fog with sparkley bits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
.
Who is John Cabal?
As soon as physicists solve the problem of antimatter the antimatter bomb will be created.
It will be the size of a coin and could literally destroy literally a quoter of a planet. This is how civilizations end in the Universe.
And that is why we do not hear any intelligent radio transmissions from other star systems.
I think you're overestimating the yield a bit there. From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Antimatter production and containment are major obstacles to the creation of antimatter weapons. Quantities measured in grams will be required to achieve destructive effect comparable with conventional nuclear weapons; one gram of antimatter annihilating with one gram of matter produces 180 terajoules, the equivalent of 42.96 kilotons of TNT (approximately 3 times the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
You'd need several kilograms worth to do as much damage as the current collective nuclear arsenals on the planet, and even all of those would barely scratch the surface of the planet, the real long-term damage would be from the radioactive fallout, which wouldn't be an issue with antimatter.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Speak for yourself! I'm made of melancholic and caring disapproval.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
There's a video of someone asking astronomy graduates from an Ivy League university what causes the phases of the moon and the seasons, and most cannot answer.
And I graduated from a state school known for its quality engineering programs with a degree in CS, and half my graduating class could barely write HTML, much less actually code.
Unfortunately, the reality of a modern college education has become more a matter of opportunity than actual rigor. I would love to see colleges failing out half their freshman classes - except, that ignores the reality of the modern college as a business rather than an institution of higher learning. Bad for business, having a reputation for "firing" the majority of your clients.
Make no mistake, you can still get a lot out of a college education - I like to believe I took full advantage of my time there. But you can also get by with an insultingly high GPA (we can't just "pass" them, every precious little snowflake deserves A's, dontchaknow) just by showing up.
That said... I have trouble believing that astronomy graduates can't visualize how the steadily changing angle from which we view a 50% illuminated sphere gives rise to the appearance of "phases"... The light half of it shadows the dark half, and we see part of both from a sideways perspective.
What confusion? There's no contradiction there.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
We wouldn't be calling it anti-matter, we would just call it "matter" and would be still asking the same question.
So there are really only 2 scenarios.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
I've always been suspicious of the Standard Model's insistence that the big bang consisted of nearly equal parts matter and antimatter. The assumptions made by observation of certain particle collisions need to be reevaluated. Much of this seems to because of a belief that time is single dimensional and that mass has no effect on the flow of time, although if you really look at relativity and quantum phenomenon it is obvious that neither of these is the case. Instead we invent the artifacts of dark matter and dark energy to explain away inconsistencies that these assumptions make.
The observable universe is not the entire universe. Our observable universe could be surrounded by antimatter.
Maybe the antimatter surrounding the observable universe is destroying the outer parts of our matter pocket and that is why our universe is expanding -- into it!
Finally, you're under the mistaken impression that Buddhism is a religion, and it is not.
It wasn't at first. Unfortunately whenever someone has a philosophy that they try to make accessible to people who don't entirely understand it, those people invariably built rituals around it that have little to do with the actual philosophy. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, etc all started as philosophies but were gradually converted into religions, albeit not ones centered around a deity in the Judeo/Chrisian/Islamic tradition. Buddha is definitely revered as a sort of god.
It's possible to practice Buddhism without treating it as a religion but this appear to be relatively uncommon in actual practice.
Not this crude matter.
Depends what field of astronomy you work on. The seasons are a product of the specific orbital dynamics of Earth - and only Earth. They're not generalizable to any other planet, and they only matter to planets in the first place provided the planet has sufficient tilt or the orbital plane is suitably inclined (but not so much as to be non-sensical - i.e. Uranus).
They also only matter really if you're studying planetary atmospheres/surface conditions.
"An object stays at rest unless acted on by an outside force" I find it amusing that you use pseudo-scientific language to "disprove" scientific claims.
weinersmith
The phase of the moon isn't an astronomy question? I recently went through the phases of the moon with my 7 year old in preparation of his first eclipse. He knows the difference between waxing and waning, and how to tell the difference (in multiple unrelated ways). I'm sure I'll have to explain it another 10 or so times before he gets it, but any high school student with an interest in astronomy should understand the phases of the moon and tides (including perigean tides) and shouldn't get dumber in college.
Learn to love Alaska
I have "faith" my car will start in the morning. That doesn't mean I am disallowed in understanding cars, or that understanding them is hard.
Learn to love Alaska
That's certainly not the currently accepted theory, which holds that space and time were created in the big bang, and "what existed before that" is a meaningless question, because there *was* no before. At least not in a traditional temporal sense.
I didn't think a rejection of functioning time before the big bang was a requirement of the big bang. It's undefined. Whether it did or didn't happen doesn't affect what comes after, so it's an irrelevant question, not proven wrong.
Learn to love Alaska
The big bang and evolution are orthoginal.
Learn to love Alaska
Everyone successfully avoided reading the articles and launched into wild speculations that ignore all the evidence presented in the story.
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Meat, by Terry Bisson
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Is it feasible that a sentient being could be made of energy?
The reason for the seasons is a fourth or fifth grade science subject. Of course astronomy graduates ought to be able to answer such simple questions.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
And your orthography is original.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Humans have a 'will'
There is actually a great deal of debate about this question, it's very possible that "will" may be an observer-based phenomena that only appears to exist from a very specific perspective, not unlike centrifugal force. Personally I find the theory counter-productive since by definition if its true it doesn't matter, while believing it if it's false is potentially horribly destructive to the human spirit (be it metaphysical or metaphorical)
Ahh, the illusion of agency. We have no idea how our brains do what they do, but we're more than happy to take all the credit for it, as if we were somehow responsible for the particular configuration of neurons and electrical impulses that create whatever the hell sentience is. Don't get me wrong, I'm just a guilty of doing it as everyone else, it's just something I've thought about frequently. I've found myself doing things I can't explain enough times to realize there's more going on with sentience, will, and the like than meets then eye.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
Were you making an alliterate joke, or was that a serious complaint about my use of orthoginal?
Learn to love Alaska
I don't think 1960s Michelle Nichols had to travel to an alternate universe to get hit on.
If we're sure everything started as 50% matter and 50% anti-matter, and now we are nearly a pure matter universe, my uneducated guess would be that there is something in the nature of matter-antimatter collision that, in addition to creating energy, would also leave behind a small amount of residual matter. That could explain how over these billions of years, we are left with a mostly matter universe. If this has been proven impossible, please someone yell at me and tell me otherwise. I recall reading that they often generate antimatter in particle accelerators... have they ever done specific research on the results of matter-antimatter collisions?
And that is why we do not hear any intelligent radio transmissions from other star systems.
But does it explain why there's apparently no intelligent postings on Slashdot?
There were originally equal amounts of facts and anti-facts. Computer Scientists are still trying to explain why anti-facts now make up 99.999% of the postings.
it's simple... facts are boring... anti-facts, better known under the scientific term "made up stuff", are much more fun....
you might want to read this "A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing" by physicist Lawrence M. Krauss
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Maybe we are the ones made of antimatter and what we consider to be antimatter is asking "why are we made of matter".
On the other hand, keep in mind that any and all of these "surveys" showing people being dumb will keep going until they've managed to cherrypick enough dumb answers to make the casual observer believe that this represents the norm. Maybe they asked 500 astronomy grads and 5 of them were dumb, and those are the only 5 they showed. Since those kinds of articles/videos/exposees tend to be looking to titillate, not inform, it is entirely believable that it's all just cherrypicking for the purposes of supporting a false pretense.
I've been to alot of the world. I'm guessing you haven't, because if you had, you'd find that this is generally a universal invariant among humans.
Maybe not everyone is as thick (literally) as the average American, but they're gaining ground rapidly, because it's generally only through economic inability to be "thick" that they are. Make everyone as rich as Americans, and everyone becomes fat. Seriously.
And in terms of mental "thickness", well I can assure you, that's the same absolutely everywhere, already.
At the time of the big bang, matter and anti-matter should have been made in roughly (if not exactly) equivalent amounts... but the distribution of that matter might not be perfectly even. It could be that in our half of the universe, matter slightly (percentage-wise) out-massed the anti-matter and annihilated it while in the other half of the universe, the opposite happened. We have to remember that much of the universe could lie beyond the limit of the visible universe. Another thought is that matter and anti-matter could have the same relationship as positive and negative numbers. If you add them together in equal amounts, you get 0, but if you square them first, then their sums are positive. So what does it take to "square matter?" Is it possible that anti-matter has it's own form of nuclear fusion? If you fuse anti-matter with anti-matter, do you get matter? I know this is all hypothetical and way within the realm of speculation, but it could be possible.
Look up the afterlife dysfunction on youtube for an idea that should challenge your perspective on reality... basically the universe is simply X amount of data that is in every possible superposition of quantum states. If the universe could be represented in 1's and 0's (quantum physics suggests it can be... or at least each of its possible configurations can) then the big bang is simply when all matter existed at the same point at (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... nth) where n is the number of dimensions. As this is a possible universe configuration, then it does exist in some sense. It's a lot easier when you stop thinking about the big bang as the beginning, but as the Null value of the universe.
It's like democracy: 51% tell 49% what to do.
Table-ized A.I.
The same basic principles involved in the phases of the moon are important in figuring out the albedo of other objects in the solar system. Or in other solar systems. Same with the seasons. These are basic concepts that apply throughout astronomy. I mean seriously, you do realize that, space telescopes aside, astronomy is done from Earth, looking out at the rest of the universe. Some basic understanding of how Earth moves is pretty critical to making any observations from the surface of our planet.
True generally, but I'm pretty sure it would have to be a topsy-turvy alternate universe for Ms. Nichols to get hit on by George Takei. ;-)
Actually, we are all made of antimatter. It was just misnamed "matter" because it's a shorter word.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Because it's all we've got.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
... not this crude matter.
http://blogostuff.blogspot.com/
1. What if - on the event horizon of black holes - when particles and antiparticles are created, only the antiparticles are sucked into the black holes and the particles (matter) is able to escape the event horizon?
Over time, (a crapload of time), there will be a surplus of particles in the universe.
2. Also, we can only see the universe as far as light has traveled to us since the universe started.
We don't really know its extent. What if antimatter and matter are compartmentalized in different regions of the universe, with only a smattering of "the other" in areas where one is prevalent?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The reason that we're given in 4th or 5th grade (the earth's tilt) is overly simplistic though.
There's certainly the possibility of causal linkages extending prior to the big bang, but they could not have occurred in the dimension that we consider time, because that did not exist yet. And without time, space, or the laws of physics as we know them, all of which are believed to have been created in the first instants of the big bang, what came "before" the big bang will likely remain forever completely unknowable.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No mod points, so I just wanted to say: Well done.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Never mind.
HK-47: Explanation: It's just that... you have all these squisy parts, master. And all that water! How the constant sloshing doesn't drive you mad, I have no idea...
Dammit, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a spelling geek!
But all those high energy gamma rays from the annihilations would give you cancer. So it's a cancer coin.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Oh my!
"Faith is belief without evidence.
Science is about getting evidence."
The problem is that science requires faith in measurement devices, faith that repetition provides a basis for faith, faith in logical postulates such as the law of non-contradiction and excluded middle.
"Religion is based on Iron Age superstition (Scientology and Buddhism* are excepted)."
Jainism is older than Buddhism, and has a highly developed logical theory called anekantvada. Jain theories of karma and pudgal use similar language to how physics describes the Higgs, for example.
Buddhism was driven out of India; it was forgetten for centuries that the Buddha had come from India. Jainism survived in India despite prosecution by Muslims and others.
Has this one got off on a wrong footing, or is it that conversations where most of the people who post have nothing knowledgable to say head off to some state of lowest energy, a Ground State, where all topics decay into political and religious memed canned arguments?
Were it not for Dark Matter the OP would seem more relevant five or ten years ago than it does now. Given that it is now thought that matter as we know it, matter that interactls via Maxwell's Laws, is not the main mass constituant in the Universe, that the relationship of Dark Matter to cosmology is a tad more important than the lack of symmetry between matter and antimatter. The OP could have come from a time wrap, although I know that there are still important issues about symmerty breaking events in the early history of our Universe.
So there is good confidence that Dark Matter exists, but we don't know yet what it is, galaxy clusters and galaxy dynamics behaves as though matter. that has gravity but otherwise does not interact with the visible matter, can model how what is visible is moving. Here computers are key tools in the argument. I should say that it might be more important for us to pay attention to what Dark Matter might be.
It is overly simplistic on the surface but it is the correct answer, although the reason is far more complex and students are free to read up on it further in the library, or online.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You can charge what the market will bear, but you first have to establish a monopoly,
I would love to see colleges failing out half their freshman classes
Wouldn't you prefer that they create conditions where students learn a lot more? After all, failure isn't an objective.
You realize how many people believe there is a dark side of the moon? Even ones who haven't heard the song?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Yeth, they are mentally thick.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Because God has no material form or component. It's trivially easy to prove that He can't, as every body who puts in the 20 minutes or less to figure out that demonstrates; it's the folks who confuse existence with material existence that get stuck there. That brings up the interesting question, can something like a concept, or a Platonic ideal, or some such (Pythagoras' theorem, for instance) that exists in the theoretical universe exist before/after the universe? Of course, before/after has no meaning in the absence of matter, but let's say can it exist in the theoretical universe without the material universe? Or could you say "Pythagoras' theorem requires actual physical triangles for its existence"? that doesn't sound right either.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You of course have faith that the universe exists, existed previous to this instant, and will continue to exist for at least a bit in the future.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Is God on Facebook, and will He/She friend me?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
It's contingent causes all the way down.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Time is a function of matter and energy, and changes thereof; as with other such concepts, it only exists as an explanation of observed phenomena that answer certain questions. As in, how many swings of a particular pendulum, or orbits of a particular planet around its star, or random disintegrations of a radioactive isotope occur between event A and event B? We generalize on that and call it time. But it's as meaningless without material stuff as the concept of velocity would be. As Einstein (for instance) demonstrated, the concept of a universal time that extends throughout the universe independently is wrong, it's a local phenomenon, dependent on local parameters. As such, to think of it as some sort of universal metric that extends "prior" to the actual universe is meaningless.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Will is one of those intervening variables Skinner warned against, because they are unobservable in themselves and add nothing to the model. "Humans have a 'will' and try to further it most all the time". What does this mean, as distinct from "Human behavior tends to be organized so as to maximize certain results and minimize others". How do we measure the will? By looking at behavior. How do we affect the will? By subjecting the owner of it to certain experiences. Is there any way to see the will directly? Well, I feel like I can see mine but that's not very scientific, but I can't detect anybody else's other than by their behavior, and I can't affect it other than by altering their experiences. So, what does the will gain me, rather than the behaviorist statement "Human behavior is strongly affected by their experience and involves positive emotion when the results correspond with the stated aim, and negative emotion when they don't" or similar. More specific "If you starve a person, it develops and strengthens in him a will to feed. We measure this will to feed by how much effort he will expend to gain the opportunity to feed, and see that it is greater when he is starved, thus the will is increased." vs. "If you starve a person, he will expend more effort to gain the opportunity to feed." The will is the equivalent of those conceptual models of people which feature little metaphorical people who live in their heads and run the controls. Doesn't get you any further in explaining anything.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Actual real life example: the toddler who watches a lot of DVDs (remember those?) and roughs them up to the point where they mostly have some short periods where they hang, before going forward; and finds that clapping her hands "makes the DVD unstick itself". That's 'will' in action. That kid knows that her will is driving the DVD to unstick, via clapping her hands, just as much as you believe your will drives you to read this post. Of course, all the studies that show activity in the motor cortex before there is a corresponding activity in the frontal cortex, i.e. you start doing something before you decide to do it, and similar. All the subconscious and unconscious and so on activity that goes on; you can say there is an unconscious will, but that's starting to dilute the concept. However, if you think about it, that does leave a place for.... not 'will' but 'won't'. The brain activates in the motor cortex first, then the frontal cortex, then the motor activity stops. The guy says "I decided not to do it". I'm not joking; deciding to overrule automatic/reflexive/unconscious type activity might be the entire sphere of our conscious control.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Maimonides postulated that you can't say anything definite about God; you can just negate what others say. "God is a material being" "No, he obviously isn't". "OK, God has no material qualities" "We'll, he can affect the material world, so I don't know about that...." (for quibblers, see also: the mind/personality is not a material item, but it can affect the material world) etc.That was a thousand years ago, but people still haven't tumbled to the truth of it.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
No they don't. They say that the existence of God is not the kind of question that science can answer. Science can't answer "is blue prettier than red?" either, but that doesn't mean it denies the existence of colors.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Our whole universe was in a hot dense state, Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait... The Earth began to cool. Yep, that's the big bang theory alright, I'd know it in my sleep.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Quite so. Where things become interesting is in the closely related concept of free will. Do I possess a meaningful agency in the world, or can my actions theoretically be perfectly predicted from past experiences and the random quantum noise that influences the firing of my neurons? And if the latter, how can I possibly be held responsible for my actions, be they glorious or vile? How can we honor or condemn anyone for their actions if in truth they had no choice as to performing them? Rationally we must credit Hitler no more nor less than Ghandi, for both simply played out the role they were given with no more volition than a rock falling to the ground.
And that to my mind is a hideously corrosive precept to adopt into society. Obviously if true we have no choice in the matter, but if false... Well, it behooves us to reject such a belief any time we seem to have the choice. It's the only rational option.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
As somebody pointed out to me once, if we truly had free will, then the concepts of things like punishment or advertising wouldn't work at all. The entire structure of civilization is based on the ability to alter other people's behavior to suit ourselves. "Give me food!" "My free will tells me to keep my food." "What does your free will say to cash?" "My free will has suddenly done an about face". At some point, the concept becomes meaningless if you can manipulate it.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Wouldn't you prefer that they create conditions where students learn a lot more? After all, failure isn't an objective.
If I believed in the trivially-false progressive delusion that no dumb kids exist? Sure. I would also prefer that the Rockefellers give everyone a gold-shitting unicorn when they turn 18.
In this world, however, a good three quarters of people shouldn't go to college. If we want to elevate the "trade" schools to have a "similar" status (with a wink and a nod), hey, great. But when we push everyone to go to college and then half the incoming freshmen need to take remedial math and English... Then no, failing half the freshmen out in their first semester would provide the greatest benefit to everyone. It would save those who don't belong there a ton of money; and when when you pack a real class with morons, they distract from the actual instruction time for people who do belong there.
TLDR: Yes, Virginia, there are stupid questions. And you waste the class time I paid for by asking an awfully lot of them.
/ Hint #1 that you don't belong in college: If you feel the need to waste class time arguing with the professor about how he grades (particularly about how much partial credit he gives wrong answers) - Just go home.
There is a whole spectrum that lies between 100% self-determination (immune to all outside influence), and 100% deterministic (no free will at all).
Think of it like gently rolling a ball down a hill with a complicated convoluted surface just steep enough to keep the ball rolling. It may be difficult, but you could theoretically predict the exact path the ball will follow. Make an identical throw a dozen times and every time it will follow the same path. Now try doing the exact same thing with an occupied gerbil exercise ball of the same size and mass - it will start out following the same path, but then the gerbil will spot something it wants to go toward or away from and start running, changing the path of the ball. Sometimes it may get stuck rolling down a channel too steep for it's efforts to dislodge it, other times it may cross wide smooth areas where it can change course easily. The one thing it won't do though is follow a predictable path. Each identical throw will follow a different path as the gerbil's attention is caught by different things. Your ball has, apparently at least, been bestowed with free will.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Uh, where do YOU think it came from? If you say "God," then you have to explain why God can pop up from nowhere, or why he can be eternal, but nothing else can. Oh, wait... it's "ineffable," sorry.
Besides, no one has given any reason why existence itself must be subject to cause and effect; only things that already exist can be observed to hold to that law.
They don't want to explain anything, they only want to attack and denigrate the evil, evil science at every crossroad. If there is *anything* that science can't explain, the cause must of course be supernatural (god). Look up the fallacy "god of the gaps". For some, this is not a search for truth.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Whatever you believe is the purpose of higher education, you can't really believe that freshman-level mathematics and sciences are delivered with adequate pedagogy.
Of course schools should not accept students unless they think those students will succeed. The reason only 35% of enrollees successfully complete freshamn calculus has little to do with the abilities or the descipline of the students. High schools have great difficulty finding good calculus teachers, but colleges just assign instruction to the lowest level graduate students who can pass a language-competency test.
"Maimonides postulated that you can't say anything definite about God"
God is just an undefined word in human language, it is a composite of a human being + magic. That's all god is, it is the ultimate 'tribal leader' it is imaginary and hence natural. It derives itself from the natural world (human psyche + magic). This is why ancient gods all have human qualities. So yes you can definitely say definite things about the "gods" of the past, since all words are derived and composed from the natural world. The problem you have is that you don't know enough science about how the language systems in the brain work and how it composes statements. Consider a Unicorn, technically "unicorns don't exist" but that statement is in fact meaningless because the Unicorn DOES exist, it is a composite of the concept of horse (drawn from the natural world) plus horn (aka a horn shape, idea drawn from the natural world of other animals).
So unicorns *do exist* in the sense that natural idea horse + natural idea (gemetric relation pointy edged shape called horn) = unicorn.
The way you naturally think in language obscures the reality of how concepts are conceived in language, if we go back to the original human being who first coined the concept of god we can put our modern selves in his place and see how he is deriving the concept from the natural world, first deriving it from his own psyche + the unknown (aka non scientific world, so he just plugs in "magic").
The problem is most people don't know that their brain is a simulation, it is a mere representational space created by unconscious processes they don't understand. So the mind REALLY doesn't live in reality to a large extent. Most people are not fit or educated enough to understand themselves or much of their worldview.
Check out the science:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
By coincidence, I just read this to my kid the other day.
We watched the video of it first, but the written text is so much funnier than an otherwise confusing-conceptually video set in a diner.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.