I used to play it in the dark, for hours..it is in my opinion still one of the half-dozen best games ever...anyway, there was this one time I visited Arundel Castle (West Sussex) and at one point I found myself in this round central courtyard area where I had the spookiest feeling I'd been here before - while knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was my first time in Arundel. Anyway a few seconds later it struck me that there was one location in Heretic that was very similar, if not identical - not so surprising really since many castles share some common features. But for a moment it really felt as if I was "there", inside the map !
Too bad I'm late to the party. How come nobody can see what's obvious? For the hard of thinking among you, here is what this is all really about:
In the season finale, "a mysterious probe from space will blast a swath of destruction across North and Central America, [...] annihilating everything between Florida and Venezuela
*cough* 9/11 *cough*
this is a preemptive strike by an alien race known as the Xindi, who have obtained knowledge that Earth will destroy their home world
Equates to some nebulous, distant and hidden enemy like Al Qaeda or Saddam's Iraq.
"In the past, our captains have had the general mission to explore outer space [...] But there has never been a Trek series built around a specific mission and specific stakes-in this case, the very future of mankind".
Now they are clearly looking to cash in on the American people's warlust. By equating the Federation with the United Stated rather than, as it was, the United Nations; by concocting a hidden, distant enemy in the style of those created by GWB, by creating a threat that will justify the Federation blowing up lots of stuff while making them look good (well, in their own eyes anyway).
If you look back at the history of Trek you will see that on the whole, Trek has always espoused a tolerant and inclusive humanity, exploring the galaxy peacefully, reacting in a warlike way to direct threats only, and even then only with appropriate force.
But this does not go down well with a population who have accepted a president ready to drag the whole world into war because of a single terrorist incident. This does not go down well in a nation that has embraced "shock and awe" tactics rather than proportionate military response.
It looks like Star Trek is finally about to lose its idealistic platform; the one thing - according to all the documentaries and interviews about the show - that made Star Trek special and different from everything else. If that happens it becomes just another yawn yawn space opera and I think it would have to presage the end of the franchise, for all the old fans at least. Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave.
But perhaps this is good thing, huh? After all, the biggest threat - no, the only threat - to a US government intending to dominate the world through overwhelming military force, is having their own population confused by old-style Star Trek hippy ideals of peace, tolerance and justice for all. Far better for them to be properly inspired with the good old boy Yee-Haw style of gunboat diplomacy that passes for US foreign policy in the 21st century.
It's fairly obvious, isn't it, that the US will not leave until they have installed a puppet regime. If and when elections occur, they will be safely rigged. Hell, even US elections are rigged now anyway.
Consider this: If free elections in Iraq *were* to take place this would inevitably result in a Shia-dominated government. Which would necessarily be aligned with neighbouring Iran which is also Shia. So now there would be a basically fundamentalist power bloc the size of Iraq PLUS Iran - both quite large countries by themselves, awash in oil money - and therefore good-bye to all US interests in the region, and rather a lot of pressure on Israel.
So there will be *no* free democratic elections in Iraq.
Hello again sir! I have actually posted a link to a reply - but it's not in a story comment thread, it's on my journal page. By all means you may contact me if you can figure out where I am and you feel the urge to have the last word...;o)
Re:Real video games now!! comanche here I come
on
Micro-Helicopter Fun
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Or even strap on a teeny camera with a bluetooth transmitter and send it...... places......
Bluetooth has a VERY limited range. It's for PANs...Personal Area Networks.
I guess you could send it......places......like...... up your own ass.
The Bohr and Feynman quotations were broadly true (and esoterically funny) when they were spoken decades ago. But we've all had a long time to mull over what QM means since then.
Secondly, for your patronizing remark to mean anything we'd have to agree on
what "understand" means. Since hardly any two people can actually agree on what "mean" means where QM is concerned, that is going to be difficult. But what this argument seems to be increasingly about is who understands QM better, you or me. If your quotations were still true, neither of
us would understand it at all and this debate would be pointless.
quantum mechanics bizzare [google.com] 8910 hits.
Yes, of course it's bizarre to most people because it is counter-intuitive to those people whose entire experience of the world is classical and who haven't devoted a great deal of time trying to understand QM to any meaningful depth. A google search on "roswell ufo" yields more than ten times that number of hits but it doesn't mean there were really any flying saucers at roswell. A match count on google for any gee-whiz phrase is only a measure of laymen's preconceptions, not a guarantee of truth.
To paraphrase Clarke's Law, any sufficiently advanced science is indistiguishable from nonsense.
That's your opinion only. I don't think you would get many professional scientists to agree with you. As a bunch they're notably averse to science that's indistinguishable from nonsense.
Packets of EM energy really can collide.
The papers themselves don't seem to be online but OK I'll grant you that the collider people do tend to use the term "collisions", most likely because they happen to be using a collider to get sufficient energy into a small enough volume. I do still think "collide" is as poor choice of word because of the mechanism involved though. You yourself quite early in this discussion mentioned the propensity of waves to pass through one another (interacting briefly en-route). EM waves with sufficient energy, which can be produced during constructive interference, may give up mass. But this actually happens wherever sufficient energy appears. It could originate from a single emission, there doesn't even have to be two waves, let alone two waves with different vectors. Even if "collision" might be redefined to apply to ghosts passing through one another without any change in vector (in fact even if the post-event photons' trajectories were altered as a result of the interaction) it would still be incidental to the conversion process.
according to quantum mechanics the concepts of particles and waves are both wrong. The idea that an electron is a particle with a real position is completely incompatible with the "double slit" "single electron" [google.com] experiment.
Heh! Yes, and the idea that an electron is a probability distribution is completely incompatible with the Millikan oil drop experiment where the electron is clearly either in the oil droplet or outside it. Or any experiment where particle interactions are observed. The fact is that you can't dispense with either model.
[I think you can dispense, though, with the google links for basic high school experiments, I doubt anybody would be reading this who isn't already familiar with them. In any conversation some things have to be treated as "given"]
Point-like particles do not exist...[and neither do waves]
I don't really know what you are trying to say here. You appear to contradict yourself several times and then contradict the contradiction. I know that duality is basically handwaving but so what? Despite its stubborn refusal to frame itself in simple terms easy for humans to understand, QM has nevertheless been described as the most successful physical theory of all time (because of its predictive power). Internal contradictions notwithstanding.
If you allow me to assume string theory
Well, that would be allowing a lot! I happen to like string theory mysel
The article points out that a number of individuals were involved and that the copyright offences album covers. If they were copying covers as well as the music doesn't that tend to indicate that they may have had a fully fledged commercial pirate CD manufacture operation going? Not the same thing as a kid innocently downloading MP3s onto the PC in their bedroom.
*sigh* Mozilla crashed and ate my detailed reply. I haven't the heart to type it all in again. So here's the shorthand blockquote-free version (my apologies if it appears a bit curt, it's late and I have to get to bed:o\ ):
Your arguments, where they attempt to rely on physics, are strictly pop-sci, littered with implausible and incorrect layman-friendly analogies and accompanied by several diversionary straw men. (I'm trying not to say 'barely sophomoric', but you do tend to labour the most basic points with which everybody with a first-year college science education is already well acquainted. eg. that stuff about wavicles, force unification and symmetry breaking.)
For example:
1) We all know particles can spontaneously "freeze" out of energy, but this doesnt help your argument (which was: that an energy-only universe can contain waves which form replicators). If you have to invoke matter then you already gave up on your own argument.
(Also: To talk of photons colliding is nonsense. Photons are packets of EM energy; they don't "collide", they interfere. *IF* the interference produces a wave amplitude that is near enough in energy to the rest mass of a relatively stable particle-antiparticle pair, there is a calculable probability that such a pair will be formed with the excess energy being carried away in the form of those particles' individual momenta with opposite signs - this rapid separation being the only thing that prevents them from immediately annihilating each other.)
2) It's disingenous to suggest that Bohr won the *entire* argument. We still need classical mechanics, and it still works as a method even at small scales once you take uncertainty into the picture. In fact, the point-like particle not only exists, there are some types of experiment where it's all you get to see. That's why we have duality and not just "wavality".
3) Matter and energy are not "views" of the same thing - there is an objectively real state change involved. It's true that QM says material objects can be viewed as a wave, but I think you may be confusing the energy waves that exist in eg. EM radiation, with the probability waves associated with a particle's position or momentum QM. They are not the same thing at all. The former are oscillations in a field of force, with a specific and measurable spatial extent, and which are always forced to propagate at the speed of light. The latter are standing waves indicating a probability distribution in some abstract mathematical space - which in the single unique and specific case of the "position" property, happens to map simply onto the spatial coordinates of our universe. The probability wave associated with (for example) momentum does not.
4) Our universe hosts or has hosted/will host 60 orders of magnitude of physical conditions from one extreme to the other- but ordered, dynamic structures (life) do not have to be able to exist in the whole range, it's only you that's saying that they do - insistently enough that it appears to be axiomatic for you! But it's not an objective position to argue from. Life will appear where "convenient", yes, but some times/places have to be more "convenient" than others in order for the probability of a given event to be maximized. *That* is axiomatic for me, if you like.
5) The first replicators here were indeed spontaneous but this single *extant* (i.e. what evidence we have to hand) example may have benefited from favourable local circumstances. There's no evidence to suggest it should happen everywhere. On the contrary, if we are to assume that life often progresses toward intelligence, civilization & therefore manipulation of the environment then we have to answer the paradox Enrico Fermi found in the Drake equation.
Finally as regards your claim that QM is bizarre - actually I find QM quite rational and satisfying. But then, I don't try to make QM responsible for everything including things we haven't even observed to be true. It's only a model (shh!)
The contestants motivated by a substantial cash prize... with
Tony Curtis
as the intrepid hero,
Susan Hampshire
as the love interest,
Eric Sykes
(and/or
Dud
and
Pete) as the clumsy no-hopers and
Terry-Thomas
the upper-class scheming rotter. etc.
I'm well aware of all that but I don't draw the same conclusions, obviously.
Also you kind of glossed over the answer to my question about whether waves could be used to make replicators. I see nothing proven about this.
Your speculations about mass,energy,space,time etc are only half right. For starters, mass != energy. There is an equivalence but not an equality. Otherwise there would be no distinction. If your mass were to suddenly become indistinguishable from energy we'd all be the worse for it:o\
Space and time are interrelated in the equations of GR, and even potentially interchangeable in the exotic equations attempting to analyze spacetime near a singularity, but this is not so in QM. Time and space are clearly not identical and in fact the very nature of time is still very much a matter for speculation even as far as conventional physicists are concerned.
If matter, energy, particles, waves, space, time, position, and momentum all lose their usual meanings at other layers in our own universe why should they be meaningful in a different universe?
It's misleading to claim they "lose their usual meanings" at other layers when they are fundamental quantities which apply right down to the quark level and maybe even below that. There may be wave particle duality and measurement may become a matter of statistics, but particles do have mass, position and momentum nonetheless. Speculation about universes without space, time, mass, energy etc. at any level has little to do with physics. It becomes indistinguishable from philosophy or mysticism.
[Examples of differences of scale]
The extremes aren't automatically habitable.
Then there was the ultimate plot of the book - that a reality would continute to exist even after the system it was running on stopped.
That isn't Egan's fault, the idea comes from Hans Moravec (whose relevant writings are available online). He poses some very interesting questions about the nature of self, consciousness, existence etc. The argument about the continuation of an externally terminated world line does actually make sense in the context of Many Worlds, both in Moravec's original theory and in Egan's story. Ping me back if you want me to explain.
Frank Tipler [...] Never heard of him [...] I see some of his arguments are based on the bible. That is usually a very bad sign, lol.
Tipler is one of the top GR physicists in the world. He co-authored The Anthropic Cosmological Principle with John D Barrow. Yes, his Omega Point theory is nothing more than Science Fiction but it does at least contain very interesting physics - and you and he do seem to agree about most things;o)
The first replicators [...] have no forebears. Therefore they must be simple enough to arise out of chaos in a single step.
No more than humans had to arise out of the nine hundred trillion trillion degree fireball of the big bang in a single step.
Ha! - here's yet more proof you're getting carried away with your own wild speculations instead of paying attention to what I am saying. I was talking about the first replicators. By definition these arose from non-replicators in a single step. The first replicators in our locality were not "humans", they were probably short segments of RNA or something of that nature.
Then there's also the fact that we blew 95% of that time just waiting for carbon and oxygen to show up.
Yes. Funny, that. I wonder why? (/irony)
Maybe because that level of complexity (atomic matter, complex chemistry, a compatible temperature range) was actually necessary for the next higher level - life - to be supported. Let's not lose sight of what the only extant example is telling us. And bear in mind the Copernican principle of mediocrity - which should carry some weight at least.
BTW, Any idea how long a story thread stays open for comment posting?
Kernels shouldn't crash due to software errors. At all.
Conventional wisdom says that the acid test is kernel compiles (this is because it works the machine harder than just about anything else). If you have a working kernel.config that in a repeated test sometimes completes compilation and sometimes doesn't, this is usually caused by segment violations due to memory errors. This can be caused either by poor quality DRAM, or a BIOS config or jumper configuration running the DRAM outside its rated spec, or by timing errors on the memory bus which is down to the chipset.
You could try putting memtest on a floppy and running a comprehensive memory check for 24 hours. If there is a problem with the DRAM or with bus timings it *might* show up there.
Take a look at your motherboard - does it have "Rev: 1.0" stencilled on it anywhere? Actually some motherboards didn't get stable until revision 1.4 or 1.5...this is most likely if the board was one of the first to implement a new chipset.
So does my Debian box running Gnome, and so does every other OS ("blue screen" being whatever passes for that elsewhere)
Hmm. I've been running a Linux network comprising a variety of hardware since Slackware 2.0 (about 1993 I think) and the only setup that ever forced me to reboot was Red Hat 5.0 (a famous turkey if ever there was one - around the end of 1998?). I replaced it with the then-current version of SuSE (5.4 or something) a few weeks later and that was the end of that. No system lockups or crashes in the past five years. Remember this is several machines too (three or four) so my data set is almost big enough to be a statistical sample:o)
If you really are getting crashes or lockups on Linux therefore it's most likely you have hardware problems, e.g. you're running your systems too hot, or you're using cheap RAM, or you have a motherboard with an early revision (i.e. buggy) chipset.
Yes and yes to the parent's parent's poster too. So the most significant UI advance of the next ten years will be when they give us a separate third mouse wheel *and* third button.
I've seen the expensive mice with four buttons PLUS a wheel/button and - honestly - who is going to learn to use five buttons? Apart from Quake players, anyway.
Akk! Netscape crashed mid-post and I have to start from scratch. Grrr.
That used to happen to me a lot back in my Netscape 4 days. Current Mozilla (since at least 1.2) is a hell of a lot more stable.
[orbital mechanics with various forces propitiously balancing 4d gravity etc.]
Now I do see what you mean. But the inverse cube law for gravity in 4-space means that everything would have to be a lot closer. Don't know what this would mean for orbital angular momentum - everything whizzing about madly? I'm relying heavily on intuition here (you'd probably have a better chance at working out the kinetics) but it seems to me that there are just too many "ifs" involved and stable star/planet associations are going to require such a fortuitous set of circumstances that they would be rare and certainly not a common motif as they are in our universe.
you assume life is impossible at interstellar distance... in 4-d it may happen... there could be more... or more intense stars,
Doubt it. With gravity acting only at relatively short range it's less likely that agglomerations of matter would form. And outer layers of candidate protostars would experience less gravity from the core so even if there was as much mass as in our own sun it still might not squash down enough to start fusion (there's just too much I don't know about this...this discussion is already well into territory where we need to start doing back-of-envelope calculations).
or life may run on far less energy, perhaps in liquid helium.
Things would progress very slowly and there would probably be insufficient energy and materials around for intelligent life to evolve (there'd be nothing to do and nothing to do it with so there's no point in involving intelligence, from the infortunate helium-dwelling species' point of view).
the subtle intricacies of a four dimentional million-body ring system.... That's a hairy problem
In 3-space each particle's path is largely dictated by its own inertia and the curved space around the gravitational well. Slight deviations caused by encounters with other particles of similar size don't immediately throw the particle out into a drastically different orbit because the gravitational field is relatively uniform across significant distances. In 4-space the gravitational well is extremely steep if you are close enough to feel it at all. It's a bit like Hawking radiation...even a slight deviation in the particle's path would cause it to either plummet down the well or drift away. A ring system in 4-space would disperse within a very much shorter time than it would here (even Saturn's brilliant ring system will not last forever).
Anyway, in 4-d you probably wouldn't get conventional atoms and stars anyway. The physics would yeild radicly "things" at the lower layers.
But we can't talk about that.
Brane theory...how to reconcile gravity with the rest of physics.
I know GUTs. I think some of the theories developed from string theory are promising. Brane theory sucks. In my opinion.
[Greg Egan's novel "Diaspora"]
Diaspora is about a sentient computer -generated being who leaves its VR world in a robot body and takes a very very long journey indeed. The "Wang's carpet" chapter is about a floating mat they find on an oceanic world which is constructed out of molecules that behave like Wang's tiles. It's a Turing machine, growing at the edges by accretion, and...well I don't want to spoil it. As well as the rock-hard theoretical scientific angle, it's a very touching story even though the main character is artificial.
I think I know what floats your boat by know and I can guarantee that most of Egan's novels would blow you away completely. Even more than Diaspora you really must read Permutation City. It's just jaw-dropping. It's heavily inspired by Hans Moravec's w
More precisely, propellant. More precisely still, reaction mass. A big nuclear plant might give you the enough power to continuously heat your reactant supply but you'd have to chuck out a hell of a lot of reaction mass which means that averaged out over the whole trip you are having to carry that mass with you. For continuous acceleration trips, most of the reaction mass you leave Earth with is on board only because its needed to push the huge amount of reacton mass you need to carry. Maybe only a small fraction of a percent is actually there to push the craft itself, let alone the payload.
I'm afraid I was disappointed by your examples of how to maintain stable orbits in 4-space.
Sure, extra forces can be applied on purpose to rectify the orbit but there is no way for those forces to just handily appear all by themselves and give a little push at just the right point in spacetime with just the right vector.
The many-body example fails precisely because of the lack of stable orbits it is meant to address. The particles in Saturn's rings each have a stable orbit of their own to go to; in 4-space this isn't be the case. If the individual components don't have a nice gravimetric groove holding them in place then for your many body orbit to happen you need to have three or more moving objects simultaneously arrive in relative proximity each with an appropriate momentum vector. The set of such vectors is a very small subset of all those possible, so this is going to be a very rare occurrence. Bear in mind as well that with inverse cube law gravity there will be far less local concentrations of masses to play with so it will probably be very rare for three sizeable masses to even be near enough to each other to interact at all.
The whole point of a stable orbit is that it happens by itself. Your examples don't do that so I don't think they will be a factor in the evolution of life.
I do understand about the invented higher dimensional systems including e.g. a rough appreciation of eg Penrose's spinor and twistor theories. I'm not a fan; these are nothing more than fun intellectual exercises, they have yet to explain anything observable.
I do know about brane theory, though I'm not a fan of that either. I'll admit I'm prejudiced because it seems a rather ugly theory and I don't really see the point of it.
We have little data on how hard it is for life to arise, but our earth example tends to indicate life arises spontaneously almost immediately. Life appeared on earth almost as soon as the surface cooled enough to fcorm a solid crust.
All this tells us is that life arises easily in our universe. It doesn't say anything about the fecundity of universes with no heavy elements, or no hot stars, or no room-temperature liquid polar solvents.
I also do understand about emergent complexity but I was still stopped in my tracks by your impassioned examples of of tiers or nested levels of it. It reminded me strongly, for some reason, of the stunning "Wang's Carpet" chapter in Greg Egan's novel Diaspora. I have a question though relating to your specific example. Has it actually been proven that a Turing machine can be implemented using only waves in the way you suggest? Even if it has, though, there is still the very important question of whether any mechanism can exist for such a system to develop order and complexity spontaneously all by itself. Without such a mechanism the example doesn't really mean anything.
It's clear that in the absence of evidence, both of us are relying mainly on intuition to decide how easy or difficult it must be on average for interesting ordered structures to put themselves together in some arbitrary universe. We differ mainly in the degree of optimism I think.
The odd wacko aside, mainstream cosmology on the whole doesn't agree with you - the theory you are espousing is generally considered too speculative and optimistic to be really useful. That's not to say they're right and you're wrong, though. What you said about emergent complexity has made me uncomfortable about intuitive notions regarding causality and it's going to take me a while to digest that.
any probability distribution you could assign is surely only operative in this universe. All of your knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology must be checked at the door.
I will admit I've been largely influenced by mainstream thinking on this subject.
Insofar as any professional consensus exists, it would be that the there is an underlying set of laws common to all universes. These include various branches of mathematics such as statistics, number theory, information theory and so on. As it happens the laws of thermodynamics are fundamentally mathematical so if that's true then all universes will still have to obey the laws of themodynamics. And individual spacetime geometries may vary but they are still geometry. So I don't think physicists are completely helpless as regards the formulation of meaningful theories even if those can't be used to make testable hypotheses.
The foregoing rests upon one postulate (mostly unmentioned) and that is that a universe must be internally self-consistent at least, with some sort of laws and therefore a degree of predictability. This isn't just reasonable, it's necessary for purposes of definition. Otherwise we'd be including "universes" with disjoint, random histories. Nothing meaningful could ever be said about them. They certainly couldn't support intelligent observers, which leads me back to the anthropic principle...
The big question which vexes people is: How can our universe have arisen from a random quantum event and then escaped to survive for fifteen billion years? How can a whole universe be created out of nothing?
Then
((q -> p) ^ q) -> (p -> q) is a tautology
Yes, and that's precisely why. It's only because our relationship as observers with the universe is perfectly tautological, that the universe is possible at all. That is to say, it doesn't actually matter that a whole universe is created out of nothing because the only witnesses are the people inside it, and who the f*** are they going to tell?
The same argument applies to parallel universes of course. The only witnesses are all effectively out of the picture as far as we're concerned. Those universes needn't offend our slavish dedication to Occam's razor because we'll never be able to know anything about them.
Well, you have to set some definitions. In this context by "universe" we mean a physical universe, i.e. a spacetime continuum, so you can't then talk about a universe consisting of other universes - that's extending the definition beyond its intended meaning.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to play it in the dark, for hours..it is in my opinion still one of the half-dozen best games ever...anyway, there was this one time I visited Arundel Castle (West Sussex) and at one point I found myself in this round central courtyard area where I had the spookiest feeling I'd been here before - while knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was my first time in Arundel. Anyway a few seconds later it struck me that there was one location in Heretic that was very similar, if not identical - not so surprising really since many castles share some common features. But for a moment it really felt as if I was "there", inside the map !
*cough* 9/11 *cough*
Equates to some nebulous, distant and hidden enemy like Al Qaeda or Saddam's Iraq.
Now they are clearly looking to cash in on the American people's warlust. By equating the Federation with the United Stated rather than, as it was, the United Nations; by concocting a hidden, distant enemy in the style of those created by GWB, by creating a threat that will justify the Federation blowing up lots of stuff while making them look good (well, in their own eyes anyway).
If you look back at the history of Trek you will see that on the whole, Trek has always espoused a tolerant and inclusive humanity, exploring the galaxy peacefully, reacting in a warlike way to direct threats only, and even then only with appropriate force.
But this does not go down well with a population who have accepted a president ready to drag the whole world into war because of a single terrorist incident. This does not go down well in a nation that has embraced "shock and awe" tactics rather than proportionate military response.
It looks like Star Trek is finally about to lose its idealistic platform; the one thing - according to all the documentaries and interviews about the show - that made Star Trek special and different from everything else. If that happens it becomes just another yawn yawn space opera and I think it would have to presage the end of the franchise, for all the old fans at least. Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave.
But perhaps this is good thing, huh? After all, the biggest threat - no, the only threat - to a US government intending to dominate the world through overwhelming military force, is having their own population confused by old-style Star Trek hippy ideals of peace, tolerance and justice for all. Far better for them to be properly inspired with the good old boy Yee-Haw style of gunboat diplomacy that passes for US foreign policy in the 21st century.
I can't believe I just did that.....
first post !!!!
Mwhahahahah!
It's fairly obvious, isn't it, that the US will not leave until they have installed a puppet regime. If and when elections occur, they will be safely rigged. Hell, even US elections are rigged now anyway.
Consider this: If free elections in Iraq *were* to take place this would inevitably result in a Shia-dominated government. Which would necessarily be aligned with neighbouring Iran which is also Shia. So now there would be a basically fundamentalist power bloc the size of Iraq PLUS Iran - both quite large countries by themselves, awash in oil money - and therefore good-bye to all US interests in the region, and rather a lot of pressure on Israel.
So there will be *no* free democratic elections in Iraq.
Hello again sir! I have actually posted a link to a reply - but it's not in a story comment thread, it's on my journal page. By all means you may contact me if you can figure out where I am and you feel the urge to have the last word... ;o)
Bluetooth has a VERY limited range. It's for PANs...Personal Area Networks.
I guess you could send it......places......like...... up your own ass.
Apropos of something we were talking about earlier (Permutation City) I found this tonight - quite amusing...
quantum mechanics bizzare [google.com] 8910 hits.
Yes, of course it's bizarre to most people because it is counter-intuitive to those people whose entire experience of the world is classical and who haven't devoted a great deal of time trying to understand QM to any meaningful depth. A google search on "roswell ufo" yields more than ten times that number of hits but it doesn't mean there were really any flying saucers at roswell. A match count on google for any gee-whiz phrase is only a measure of laymen's preconceptions, not a guarantee of truth.
To paraphrase Clarke's Law, any sufficiently advanced science is indistiguishable from nonsense.
That's your opinion only. I don't think you would get many professional scientists to agree with you. As a bunch they're notably averse to science that's indistinguishable from nonsense.
Packets of EM energy really can collide.
The papers themselves don't seem to be online but OK I'll grant you that the collider people do tend to use the term "collisions", most likely because they happen to be using a collider to get sufficient energy into a small enough volume. I do still think "collide" is as poor choice of word because of the mechanism involved though. You yourself quite early in this discussion mentioned the propensity of waves to pass through one another (interacting briefly en-route). EM waves with sufficient energy, which can be produced during constructive interference, may give up mass. But this actually happens wherever sufficient energy appears. It could originate from a single emission, there doesn't even have to be two waves, let alone two waves with different vectors. Even if "collision" might be redefined to apply to ghosts passing through one another without any change in vector (in fact even if the post-event photons' trajectories were altered as a result of the interaction) it would still be incidental to the conversion process.
according to quantum mechanics the concepts of particles and waves are both wrong. The idea that an electron is a particle with a real position is completely incompatible with the "double slit" "single electron" [google.com] experiment.
Heh! Yes, and the idea that an electron is a probability distribution is completely incompatible with the Millikan oil drop experiment where the electron is clearly either in the oil droplet or outside it. Or any experiment where particle interactions are observed. The fact is that you can't dispense with either model.
[I think you can dispense, though, with the google links for basic high school experiments, I doubt anybody would be reading this who isn't already familiar with them. In any conversation some things have to be treated as "given"]
Point-like particles do not exist...[and neither do waves]
I don't really know what you are trying to say here. You appear to contradict yourself several times and then contradict the contradiction. I know that duality is basically handwaving but so what? Despite its stubborn refusal to frame itself in simple terms easy for humans to understand, QM has nevertheless been described as the most successful physical theory of all time (because of its predictive power). Internal contradictions notwithstanding.
If you allow me to assume string theory
Well, that would be allowing a lot! I happen to like string theory mysel
The article points out that a number of individuals were involved and that the copyright offences album covers. If they were copying covers as well as the music doesn't that tend to indicate that they may have had a fully fledged commercial pirate CD manufacture operation going? Not the same thing as a kid innocently downloading MP3s onto the PC in their bedroom.
*sigh* Mozilla crashed and ate my detailed reply. I haven't the heart to type it all in again. So here's the shorthand blockquote-free version (my apologies if it appears a bit curt, it's late and I have to get to bed :o\ ):
Your arguments, where they attempt to rely on physics, are strictly pop-sci, littered with implausible and incorrect layman-friendly analogies and accompanied by several diversionary straw men. (I'm trying not to say 'barely sophomoric', but you do tend to labour the most basic points with which everybody with a first-year college science education is already well acquainted. eg. that stuff about wavicles, force unification and symmetry breaking.)
For example:
1) We all know particles can spontaneously "freeze" out of energy, but this doesnt help your argument (which was: that an energy-only universe can contain waves which form replicators). If you have to invoke matter then you already gave up on your own argument.
(Also: To talk of photons colliding is nonsense. Photons are packets of EM energy; they don't "collide", they interfere. *IF* the interference produces a wave amplitude that is near enough in energy to the rest mass of a relatively stable particle-antiparticle pair, there is a calculable probability that such a pair will be formed with the excess energy being carried away in the form of those particles' individual momenta with opposite signs - this rapid separation being the only thing that prevents them from immediately annihilating each other.)
2) It's disingenous to suggest that Bohr won the *entire* argument. We still need classical mechanics, and it still works as a method even at small scales once you take uncertainty into the picture. In fact, the point-like particle not only exists, there are some types of experiment where it's all you get to see. That's why we have duality and not just "wavality".
3) Matter and energy are not "views" of the same thing - there is an objectively real state change involved. It's true that QM says material objects can be viewed as a wave, but I think you may be confusing the energy waves that exist in eg. EM radiation, with the probability waves associated with a particle's position or momentum QM. They are not the same thing at all. The former are oscillations in a field of force, with a specific and measurable spatial extent, and which are always forced to propagate at the speed of light. The latter are standing waves indicating a probability distribution in some abstract mathematical space - which in the single unique and specific case of the "position" property, happens to map simply onto the spatial coordinates of our universe. The probability wave associated with (for example) momentum does not.
4) Our universe hosts or has hosted/will host 60 orders of magnitude of physical conditions from one extreme to the other- but ordered, dynamic structures (life) do not have to be able to exist in the whole range, it's only you that's saying that they do - insistently enough that it appears to be axiomatic for you! But it's not an objective position to argue from. Life will appear where "convenient", yes, but some times/places have to be more "convenient" than others in order for the probability of a given event to be maximized. *That* is axiomatic for me, if you like.
5) The first replicators here were indeed spontaneous but this single *extant* (i.e. what evidence we have to hand) example may have benefited from favourable local circumstances. There's no evidence to suggest it should happen everywhere. On the contrary, if we are to assume that life often progresses toward intelligence, civilization & therefore manipulation of the environment then we have to answer the paradox Enrico Fermi found in the Drake equation.
Finally as regards your claim that QM is bizarre - actually I find QM quite rational and satisfying. But then, I don't try to make QM responsible for everything including things we haven't even observed to be true. It's only a model (shh!)
Well it'd be a lot more fun that way...
Great! Now please come over to my house and explain this to my kids!
The slashdot team are obviously spending more time doing amnesia-inducing drugs than they spend reviewing stories.
Well, can *you* come up with a more plausible explanation?
I'm well aware of all that but I don't draw the same conclusions, obviously.
Also you kind of glossed over the answer to my question about whether waves could be used to make replicators. I see nothing proven about this.
Your speculations about mass,energy,space,time etc are only half right. For starters, mass != energy. There is an equivalence but not an equality. Otherwise there would be no distinction. If your mass were to suddenly become indistinguishable from energy we'd all be the worse for it :o\
Space and time are interrelated in the equations of GR, and even potentially interchangeable in the exotic equations attempting to analyze spacetime near a singularity, but this is not so in QM. Time and space are clearly not identical and in fact the very nature of time is still very much a matter for speculation even as far as conventional physicists are concerned.
It's misleading to claim they "lose their usual meanings" at other layers when they are fundamental quantities which apply right down to the quark level and maybe even below that. There may be wave particle duality and measurement may become a matter of statistics, but particles do have mass, position and momentum nonetheless. Speculation about universes without space, time, mass, energy etc. at any level has little to do with physics. It becomes indistinguishable from philosophy or mysticism.[Examples of differences of scale] The extremes aren't automatically habitable.
That isn't Egan's fault, the idea comes from Hans Moravec (whose relevant writings are available online). He poses some very interesting questions about the nature of self, consciousness, existence etc. The argument about the continuation of an externally terminated world line does actually make sense in the context of Many Worlds, both in Moravec's original theory and in Egan's story. Ping me back if you want me to explain.
Tipler is one of the top GR physicists in the world. He co-authored The Anthropic Cosmological Principle with John D Barrow. Yes, his Omega Point theory is nothing more than Science Fiction but it does at least contain very interesting physics - and you and he do seem to agree about most things ;o)
Ha! - here's yet more proof you're getting carried away with your own wild speculations instead of paying attention to what I am saying. I was talking about the first replicators. By definition these arose from non-replicators in a single step. The first replicators in our locality were not "humans", they were probably short segments of RNA or something of that nature.
Yes. Funny, that. I wonder why? (/irony) Maybe because that level of complexity (atomic matter, complex chemistry, a compatible temperature range) was actually necessary for the next higher level - life - to be supported. Let's not lose sight of what the only extant example is telling us. And bear in mind the Copernican principle of mediocrity - which should carry some weight at least.
BTW, Any idea how long a story thread stays open for comment posting?
Kernels shouldn't crash due to software errors. At all.
.config that in a repeated test sometimes completes compilation and sometimes doesn't, this is usually caused by segment violations due to memory errors. This can be caused either by poor quality DRAM, or a BIOS config or jumper configuration running the DRAM outside its rated spec, or by timing errors on the memory bus which is down to the chipset.
Conventional wisdom says that the acid test is kernel compiles (this is because it works the machine harder than just about anything else). If you have a working kernel
You could try putting memtest on a floppy and running a comprehensive memory check for 24 hours. If there is a problem with the DRAM or with bus timings it *might* show up there.
Take a look at your motherboard - does it have "Rev: 1.0" stencilled on it anywhere? Actually some motherboards didn't get stable until revision 1.4 or 1.5...this is most likely if the board was one of the first to implement a new chipset.
Hmm. I've been running a Linux network comprising a variety of hardware since Slackware 2.0 (about 1993 I think) and the only setup that ever forced me to reboot was Red Hat 5.0 (a famous turkey if ever there was one - around the end of 1998?). I replaced it with the then-current version of SuSE (5.4 or something) a few weeks later and that was the end of that. No system lockups or crashes in the past five years. Remember this is several machines too (three or four) so my data set is almost big enough to be a statistical sample :o)
If you really are getting crashes or lockups on Linux therefore it's most likely you have hardware problems, e.g. you're running your systems too hot, or you're using cheap RAM, or you have a motherboard with an early revision (i.e. buggy) chipset.
mod +1 (Funny)
where are my points when I need em.. guess I need to do some metamoderation.
Yes and yes to the parent's parent's poster too. So the most significant UI advance of the next ten years will be when they give us a separate third mouse wheel *and* third button.
I've seen the expensive mice with four buttons PLUS a wheel/button and - honestly - who is going to learn to use five buttons? Apart from Quake players, anyway.
That used to happen to me a lot back in my Netscape 4 days. Current Mozilla (since at least 1.2) is a hell of a lot more stable.
[orbital mechanics with various forces propitiously balancing 4d gravity etc.]
Now I do see what you mean. But the inverse cube law for gravity in 4-space means that everything would have to be a lot closer. Don't know what this would mean for orbital angular momentum - everything whizzing about madly? I'm relying heavily on intuition here (you'd probably have a better chance at working out the kinetics) but it seems to me that there are just too many "ifs" involved and stable star/planet associations are going to require such a fortuitous set of circumstances that they would be rare and certainly not a common motif as they are in our universe.
you assume life is impossible at interstellar distance ... in 4-d it may happen ... there could be more ... or more intense stars,
Doubt it. With gravity acting only at relatively short range it's less likely that agglomerations of matter would form. And outer layers of candidate protostars would experience less gravity from the core so even if there was as much mass as in our own sun it still might not squash down enough to start fusion (there's just too much I don't know about this...this discussion is already well into territory where we need to start doing back-of-envelope calculations).
or life may run on far less energy, perhaps in liquid helium.
Things would progress very slowly and there would probably be insufficient energy and materials around for intelligent life to evolve (there'd be nothing to do and nothing to do it with so there's no point in involving intelligence, from the infortunate helium-dwelling species' point of view).
the subtle intricacies of a four dimentional million-body ring system.... That's a hairy problem
In 3-space each particle's path is largely dictated by its own inertia and the curved space around the gravitational well. Slight deviations caused by encounters with other particles of similar size don't immediately throw the particle out into a drastically different orbit because the gravitational field is relatively uniform across significant distances. In 4-space the gravitational well is extremely steep if you are close enough to feel it at all. It's a bit like Hawking radiation...even a slight deviation in the particle's path would cause it to either plummet down the well or drift away. A ring system in 4-space would disperse within a very much shorter time than it would here (even Saturn's brilliant ring system will not last forever).
Anyway, in 4-d you probably wouldn't get conventional atoms and stars anyway. The physics would yeild radicly "things" at the lower layers.
But we can't talk about that.
Brane theory...how to reconcile gravity with the rest of physics.
I know GUTs. I think some of the theories developed from string theory are promising. Brane theory sucks. In my opinion.
[Greg Egan's novel "Diaspora"]
Diaspora is about a sentient computer -generated being who leaves its VR world in a robot body and takes a very very long journey indeed. The "Wang's carpet" chapter is about a floating mat they find on an oceanic world which is constructed out of molecules that behave like Wang's tiles. It's a Turing machine, growing at the edges by accretion, and ...well I don't want to spoil it. As well as the rock-hard theoretical scientific angle, it's a very touching story even though the main character is artificial.
I think I know what floats your boat by know and I can guarantee that most of Egan's novels would blow you away completely. Even more than Diaspora you really must read Permutation City. It's just jaw-dropping. It's heavily inspired by Hans Moravec's w
All my own work :o)
More precisely, propellant. More precisely still, reaction mass. A big nuclear plant might give you the enough power to continuously heat your reactant supply but you'd have to chuck out a hell of a lot of reaction mass which means that averaged out over the whole trip you are having to carry that mass with you. For continuous acceleration trips, most of the reaction mass you leave Earth with is on board only because its needed to push the huge amount of reacton mass you need to carry. Maybe only a small fraction of a percent is actually there to push the craft itself, let alone the payload.
Sure, extra forces can be applied on purpose to rectify the orbit but there is no way for those forces to just handily appear all by themselves and give a little push at just the right point in spacetime with just the right vector.
The many-body example fails precisely because of the lack of stable orbits it is meant to address. The particles in Saturn's rings each have a stable orbit of their own to go to; in 4-space this isn't be the case. If the individual components don't have a nice gravimetric groove holding them in place then for your many body orbit to happen you need to have three or more moving objects simultaneously arrive in relative proximity each with an appropriate momentum vector. The set of such vectors is a very small subset of all those possible, so this is going to be a very rare occurrence. Bear in mind as well that with inverse cube law gravity there will be far less local concentrations of masses to play with so it will probably be very rare for three sizeable masses to even be near enough to each other to interact at all.
The whole point of a stable orbit is that it happens by itself. Your examples don't do that so I don't think they will be a factor in the evolution of life.
I do understand about the invented higher dimensional systems including e.g. a rough appreciation of eg Penrose's spinor and twistor theories. I'm not a fan; these are nothing more than fun intellectual exercises, they have yet to explain anything observable.
I do know about brane theory, though I'm not a fan of that either. I'll admit I'm prejudiced because it seems a rather ugly theory and I don't really see the point of it.
All this tells us is that life arises easily in our universe. It doesn't say anything about the fecundity of universes with no heavy elements, or no hot stars, or no room-temperature liquid polar solvents.I also do understand about emergent complexity but I was still stopped in my tracks by your impassioned examples of of tiers or nested levels of it. It reminded me strongly, for some reason, of the stunning "Wang's Carpet" chapter in Greg Egan's novel Diaspora. I have a question though relating to your specific example. Has it actually been proven that a Turing machine can be implemented using only waves in the way you suggest? Even if it has, though, there is still the very important question of whether any mechanism can exist for such a system to develop order and complexity spontaneously all by itself. Without such a mechanism the example doesn't really mean anything.
It's clear that in the absence of evidence, both of us are relying mainly on intuition to decide how easy or difficult it must be on average for interesting ordered structures to put themselves together in some arbitrary universe. We differ mainly in the degree of optimism I think.
The odd wacko aside, mainstream cosmology on the whole doesn't agree with you - the theory you are espousing is generally considered too speculative and optimistic to be really useful. That's not to say they're right and you're wrong, though. What you said about emergent complexity has made me uncomfortable about intuitive notions regarding causality and it's going to take me a while to digest that.
I will admit I've been largely influenced by mainstream thinking on this subject.
Insofar as any professional consensus exists, it would be that the there is an underlying set of laws common to all universes. These include various branches of mathematics such as statistics, number theory, information theory and so on. As it happens the laws of thermodynamics are fundamentally mathematical so if that's true then all universes will still have to obey the laws of themodynamics. And individual spacetime geometries may vary but they are still geometry. So I don't think physicists are completely helpless as regards the formulation of meaningful theories even if those can't be used to make testable hypotheses.
The foregoing rests upon one postulate (mostly unmentioned) and that is that a universe must be internally self-consistent at least, with some sort of laws and therefore a degree of predictability. This isn't just reasonable, it's necessary for purposes of definition. Otherwise we'd be including "universes" with disjoint, random histories. Nothing meaningful could ever be said about them. They certainly couldn't support intelligent observers, which leads me back to the anthropic principle...
The big question which vexes people is: How can our universe have arisen from a random quantum event and then escaped to survive for fifteen billion years? How can a whole universe be created out of nothing?
Yes, and that's precisely why. It's only because our relationship as observers with the universe is perfectly tautological, that the universe is possible at all. That is to say, it doesn't actually matter that a whole universe is created out of nothing because the only witnesses are the people inside it, and who the f*** are they going to tell?The same argument applies to parallel universes of course. The only witnesses are all effectively out of the picture as far as we're concerned. Those universes needn't offend our slavish dedication to Occam's razor because we'll never be able to know anything about them.
Existence is absolutely relative.
Well, you have to set some definitions. In this context by "universe" we mean a physical universe, i.e. a spacetime continuum, so you can't then talk about a universe consisting of other universes - that's extending the definition beyond its intended meaning.