Is there a scientific method that provides proof for the meaning of life?
Maybe if you started using English words normally you wouldn't be so confused. As it is, you're just jumbling words together. Let me start with "meaning of life". What could that possibly mean? I understand what it means to say "what is the meaning of this word?" 'Meaning' makes perfect sense when talking abount communications. But what does it mean to ask for the meaning of life? Unless you're asking for the meaning of the word 'life' I haven't a clue what you're talking about. Douglas Adams dealt with this issue best with his notorious '42'. Unless you ask sensible questions you're going to get confusing answers.
But even supposing that we found a 'meaning' for life, what could it possibly mean to ask for "proof for the meaning of life?" Do people ask for 'proof for' the meaning of the word 'dog' or 'elephant'? Meanings simply aren't the kinds of things we ask for proofs of in this way. Modifying your question slightly, "Is there a scientific method that provides proof for the meaning of 'elephant'? It simply doesn't make any kind of sense.
To me, the chances of everything being as they are now by cosmic chance...
The chance of something being by chance. Now that's a weird idea.
Yes, I know this and agree with it, though many others don't. This is ultimately why I'm sceptical about all quantum computing. But, and I'm guessing a bit here, it seems like this device has a different failure mode from other quantum devices in that it might appear to function, but still actually be doing nothing that you couldn't do classically.
It seems to me this thing is essentially an analog device to minimise a function and the same result could be achieved classically, but maybe it'd be slower. In which case I don't see how they're going to demonstrate that what they have is genuinely a quantum computer rather than a classical one. In fact, it seems to me that the whole thing is doomed to suffer from the same problems as any analog computer.
You really aren't getting the rules of this game at all. If you're going to compare refurbished PCs with Macs then you should compare with Macs on eBay. These rules really are simple - it's hard to understand how anyone could fail to understand them.
Too bad that we have yet to invent an encryption algorithm that can be applied iteratively in one order, and un-applied in a different order
Diffie-Hellman. The above post is a beautiful description of Diffie-Hellman and I'd never seen it explained so elegantly before. I'd mod the author +5 Bloody Fantastic if I could.
It's this that alters it, not the actual act of looking.
You are incorrect. The nice thing is that you can verify this experimentally so we don't need to debate about it. In quantum erasure experiments you 'strike' the object with a beam. The state of the original object (speaking loosely) can then be restored by erasing the information in the beam. So it's clearly not the act of 'striking' itself that messes up the original object state as it makes a difference what happens to that beam after the 'striking' event.
This strategy has never yielded a financially-successful console.
Nonetheless, it has been employed as a strategy, companies have sold cheap hardware because of it, and customers have bought cheap hardware as a result. So I'll turn down the enlightenment, though not without thanking you for the kind offer.
One possible explanation is that by using the two forms simultaneously enough times it promotes the use of IANAP as a synonym for "I am not a physicist" and eventually the author can drop the more verbose form because it will be understood from the acronym. But I prefer my explanation: IANAP is an idiom with its own meaning and the author wanted to stress that it is also literally true.
Why not actually contribute some content? If I'm wrong, say why, that way either you or I will learn something. If you have a talent beyond recycling old quips, why not use it? (FWIW I got my PhD in theoretical physics.)
The people I know who earn a lower salary rent just part of a house or share with other people.
In my immediate neighbourhood (a couple of blocks in each direction) prices vary from $600,000 to about $2,000,000 so this exercise works for me. (At least according to zillow.)
You are so in for a surprise when you find out what people around you are earning. I don't mean this as humor, I'm entirely serious. Try this as an exercise: go round your neighborhood and estimate the cost of property. Now compute the price of a mortgage on those houses. Add in property tax. Now compute what salary you'd need to be able to afford those houses (and possibly maintain a family, two cars etc.). See what I mean?
You are so misinformed I have no idea where to start
Frame of reference is an idea that actually had it's beginnings in Einstein's work
No it didn't. I don't think this point needs arguing. A frame of reference is an ordinary everyday concept that has been in use by physicists and mathematicians for centuries.
For example, from the frame of reference of the earth, my car goes 65 miles per hour.
Ah...at least you're giving me enough information to tell me what you mean by "your frame". By "the frame of X" you probably mean the inertial frame in which X is at rest. (On this interpretation, the original poster's claim that you can't exceed the speed of light in your own frame becomes trivially true because your speed is always zero, so clearly this isn't what the original poster meant, unless you're accusing them of being really stupid.)
there is something about spacetime that makes it seem that way
Your frame of reference is (metaphorically) the set of rulers and clocks that you use to make measurements. Different people using different frames make different measurements. That's nothing new. But what Einstein showed was that the formula relating the measurements that people make relative to different frames was quite different from what previous people thought it was. (In particular distances and times become combined in a surprising way.) None of this in any way contradicts what I said and your statement "despite the fact that it's wrong" is simply unjustified.
If you say "IANAP" in your post it gives you a license to say whatever you like about physics. Here's an example:
IANAP but I think that when virtual particles interact in a magnetic field then in the frame of reference of a photon the wavefunction collapse allows faster than light communication except when in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
You cannot travel faster than light in your current frame of reference.
What is a "frame of reference"? What does it mean to be "in a frame of reference"? What does it mean for one thing to be in a different "frame of reference" to another?
Why is it that when people talk about physics they completely discard most of the contents of their brain and start spouting drivel. Just speak ordinary English and you'll find that your physics makes sense too. A frame of reference is nothing more than some rulers and clocks. You use the rulers to measure your position and the clocks to measure the time.
If any object travels by I can use my ruler and clocks to determine its velocity. That's what a frame of reference allows me to do - measure things. It's nonsense to speak of something being in a "different frame" from you. You aren't "in" a frame. A frame of reference is what you can use to measure whatever you like.
I'd love to know where you got this "in a different frame" nonsense from. Did you just make it up? Saying "IANAP" is no excuse for saying these things. I'm sure that if you were talking about measuring the speed of a car or the height of a building you'd use the term "frame of reference" without difficulty. The fact that we're talking about physics doesn't give you an excuse to simply hang your brain up with your hat at the front door.
Check out Grover's algorithm which could be used in countless different ways to speed up cryptography.
Someone has a very fast factoring algorithm for quantum computers. Existence of said theorem does not imply that there aren't fast algorithms for other ciphers. But this is a/. quantum computing story whuch means people are allowed to post whatever BS they want and it'll get modded up.
Repeat after me. "Quantum computers aren't simply parallel computers." Quantum computers aren't simply parallel computers." Quantum computers aren't simply parallel computers." Quantum computers aren't simply parallel computers."
Got it yet?
In a quantum computer you can't simply run a bunch of processes in parallel and then check the result for each thread. You can view them as running processes in parallel, but you can't check each individual process, so in some sense they're less powerul than parallel machines.
Quantum computers even if they can be made practical , will only solve a small subset of problems in computer science
Quantum computers are not simply massively parallel machines and there's no reason to expect problems that have significant branching to be any more difficult for quantum computers than problems without branching. Your statement about a "simple mathematical formula" is meaningless - there is (1) no simple formula for factoring and (2) all computer programs (classical of quantum) are built from simple mathemaical formulae.
I swear, stories on/. about quantum computing are nothing but field days for people to post science-fiction they just made up.
I don't know why this was modded up. It bears no relationship to any physics I know. Quantum mechanics doesn't say anything about expanding spheres that collapse on contact. Certainly nobody expects wavefunction collapse when two particles interact.
Really, don't just mod something up because it's in scientific language that you don't understand. Just leave it unmoderated for someone else who knows what they're talking about.
This gives the government a nice hold over people. "You don't want to tell us what you were doing last night...I'm sure your wife would be interested to hear about the tagged web pages you visited last night". I guess about 90% of married males would end up caving in to such pressure.
My closing line was an attempt at irony (in the wrong sense of that word) to give my comment a sense of closure. I failed. But if you confused it with the actual message you may need to reread everything you've ever read in your life because you might be missing the point of a lot of things.
Slashdot Mirror
But even supposing that we found a 'meaning' for life, what could it possibly mean to ask for "proof for the meaning of life?" Do people ask for 'proof for' the meaning of the word 'dog' or 'elephant'? Meanings simply aren't the kinds of things we ask for proofs of in this way. Modifying your question slightly, "Is there a scientific method that provides proof for the meaning of 'elephant'? It simply doesn't make any kind of sense.
The chance of something being by chance. Now that's a weird idea.It seems to me this thing is essentially an analog device to minimise a function and the same result could be achieved classically, but maybe it'd be slower. In which case I don't see how they're going to demonstrate that what they have is genuinely a quantum computer rather than a classical one. In fact, it seems to me that the whole thing is doomed to suffer from the same problems as any analog computer.
You really aren't getting the rules of this game at all. If you're going to compare refurbished PCs with Macs then you should compare with Macs on eBay. These rules really are simple - it's hard to understand how anyone could fail to understand them.
That would have been my dream job. Actually, I once helped in the design of a "warp" drive for a fairly major movie...
One possible explanation is that by using the two forms simultaneously enough times it promotes the use of IANAP as a synonym for "I am not a physicist" and eventually the author can drop the more verbose form because it will be understood from the acronym. But I prefer my explanation: IANAP is an idiom with its own meaning and the author wanted to stress that it is also literally true.
Why not actually contribute some content? If I'm wrong, say why, that way either you or I will learn something. If you have a talent beyond recycling old quips, why not use it? (FWIW I got my PhD in theoretical physics.)
In my immediate neighbourhood (a couple of blocks in each direction) prices vary from $600,000 to about $2,000,000 so this exercise works for me. (At least according to zillow.)
You are so in for a surprise when you find out what people around you are earning. I don't mean this as humor, I'm entirely serious. Try this as an exercise: go round your neighborhood and estimate the cost of property. Now compute the price of a mortgage on those houses. Add in property tax. Now compute what salary you'd need to be able to afford those houses (and possibly maintain a family, two cars etc.). See what I mean?
I would have just said "scam" but you expressed it so much more elegantly.
IANAP but I think that when virtual particles interact in a magnetic field then in the frame of reference of a photon the wavefunction collapse allows faster than light communication except when in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Why is it that when people talk about physics they completely discard most of the contents of their brain and start spouting drivel. Just speak ordinary English and you'll find that your physics makes sense too. A frame of reference is nothing more than some rulers and clocks. You use the rulers to measure your position and the clocks to measure the time.
If any object travels by I can use my ruler and clocks to determine its velocity. That's what a frame of reference allows me to do - measure things. It's nonsense to speak of something being in a "different frame" from you. You aren't "in" a frame. A frame of reference is what you can use to measure whatever you like.
I'd love to know where you got this "in a different frame" nonsense from. Did you just make it up? Saying "IANAP" is no excuse for saying these things. I'm sure that if you were talking about measuring the speed of a car or the height of a building you'd use the term "frame of reference" without difficulty. The fact that we're talking about physics doesn't give you an excuse to simply hang your brain up with your hat at the front door.
Yeah, but I'm pretty close to rational as you'd find if you tried computing that number.
Someone has a very fast factoring algorithm for quantum computers. Existence of said theorem does not imply that there aren't fast algorithms for other ciphers. But this is a /. quantum computing story whuch means people are allowed to post whatever BS they want and it'll get modded up.
Repeat after me. "Quantum computers aren't simply parallel computers." Quantum computers aren't simply parallel computers." Quantum computers aren't simply parallel computers." Quantum computers aren't simply parallel computers." Got it yet? In a quantum computer you can't simply run a bunch of processes in parallel and then check the result for each thread. You can view them as running processes in parallel, but you can't check each individual process, so in some sense they're less powerul than parallel machines.
I swear, stories on /. about quantum computing are nothing but field days for people to post science-fiction they just made up.
I don't know why this was modded up. It bears no relationship to any physics I know. Quantum mechanics doesn't say anything about expanding spheres that collapse on contact. Certainly nobody expects wavefunction collapse when two particles interact. Really, don't just mod something up because it's in scientific language that you don't understand. Just leave it unmoderated for someone else who knows what they're talking about.
This gives the government a nice hold over people. "You don't want to tell us what you were doing last night...I'm sure your wife would be interested to hear about the tagged web pages you visited last night". I guess about 90% of married males would end up caving in to such pressure.
My closing line was an attempt at irony (in the wrong sense of that word) to give my comment a sense of closure. I failed. But if you confused it with the actual message you may need to reread everything you've ever read in your life because you might be missing the point of a lot of things.
You offset the price of chips with the price of games and sell your console at under their cost of manufacture. So there are magical cheap chips.