Hm, I don't agree that this is just nomenclature. Also my lecturers where very careful about it. So, no, it's not taught like that in every QM course in the world.
Actually one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, namely Niels Bohr himself, speculated about a conscious mind being necessary to determine a state. For him this was clearly not arbitrary nomenclature.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that this way of talking about it might be confusing, especially to the layperson.
I think this way of putting it is misleading. It actually has caused quite a lot of confusion. Observed by whom? A fly? Another cat? A phycicist? What if the phycicist is drunk? The term 'observation' suggests the presence of a conscious mind. Mangling that with (btw. completely deterministic) processes in quantum mechanics can only cause confusion and will not yield physics insights.
Let's say the system 'cat' needs to interact with another system to determine its state. No observer necessary.
Does it matter which direction they are travelling, is it not possible to technically flipflop between one year and the next based on where you are flying over?
I do not know, but I would assume the mission time is always the same time zone. Possibly GMT.
Right, but an element is defined by the composition of the nucleus, more specifically the number of protons in it. One proton, for instance, is hydrogen.
While I could not agree more with the overall message of your post, I can not help but commenting on one detail.
A) all Galaxies are all diverging from the same point
Not quite. There is no such point. Wherever you are all galaxies are diverging from you in the same way, in whatever direction you look. This would not be the case if they diverged from one point in an absolute space.
How do we know, since we only observe the universe from our galaxy? Well, among other things, we would have to conclude from the observations that we are sitting at the centre of the universe if we dropped this symmetry assumption. A notion that was proven wrong on different scales several times.
This might be little bit hard to imagine. But in the framework of General Relativity it makes perfect sense.
Probably not. Just because an object passes by at roughly the distance to the moon does not mean it comes anywhere close to the moon. There are two more dimensions, you know.
Well, I have to confess I did not make that up myself. Ironically, I am german (I live in England, though) and the Euro-English post was sent to me by a friend from Bulgaria this morning. It fitted so well, I could not resist the urge to paste it in.
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan that would be known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the"k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be ekspekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi to understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru!
[...] with irrefutable scientific proof that it could not possibly have occurred without a supernatural explanation [...]
Such a 'scientific' proof is impossible. But actually that's not a problem, on the contrary: once a phenomenon is established, it thereby ceases to be supernatural. It might be beyond our current understanding. But that is something we can work on, preferably with scientific methods.
All right. Slightly more seriously, then. Your "frog becomes horse" example tries to ridicule the whole concept of evolution, using the fact that nobody ever saw a frog becoming a horse (or a gay prince, for that matter) over night (or in an instance, after being kissed).
Nobody claims that ever happened. The distinction between micro and macro evolution you invoke is pretty artifical. This is all about timescales. The point is that it is indeed possible to increase the complexitiy of an organism by variation and natural selection, but only by a sequence of very small variations, accumulated over a very long time. If you want "macro evolution", just wait. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe complexity decreases. There is no goal. But it can happen. So, indeed, in principle a horse might have ancestors similar to frogs. Whether this is true of the species we call horses today is a completely different question -- a "just so story". Nevertheless, the species we call horses today almost certainly has some ancestors not looking like horses at all.
A famous example is the question how the human eye comes about. It was invoked by critics of the concept of evolution in order to prove that it must be wrong. The argument goes like this: "You can not seriously claim that something as comlex and wonderful like the human eye just accidently popped into existence!" But nobody claims that. It takes time. Big leaps are dangerous -- there are many more ways to be dead than to be alive. This is reflected by the fact that the organisation of the human eye has serious flaws. Evolution has no way to "correct" them because fundamental changes to the way it is organised are not favoured by small inceremental changes. This, in combination with the completely different types of eyes observed in nature (like, e.g. the eyes of squids), provides a strong hint towards evolutionary mechanisms at work.
So where do we come from? I do not know. I find it plausible that we are the product of accumulating small changes, and that we are actually still subject to change. I have to confess, I like the idea. What I like most, is the idea that we are going to learn more and more about all this, thereby, on many occasions, proving our previous assumptions wrong. If we find evidence that life on Earth was designed to some extent this would be thrilling news. Imagine! Somewhere out there is (or at least was) somebody who visited our planet! If so, let's find out where, when and why she did this. In my opiniion, this would be worth every effort.
One more thing, independent of the topic we discuss here. Science indeed has no means to "rule out a discussion of God". I never claimed that. Science is simply not interested in God. Supernatural entities are by definition not a subject of science. All I am saying is that God (which one?) is not a valid way to explain natural phenomena. Personally, I think the term "supernatural phenomena" consitutes a contradiction in terms.
And yes, you are right, scientists are ordinary people. And yes, there is bias and intertia in the communitiy. But the very method is constructed to overcome these flaws in the long run (a certain amount of intertia is helpful, though). This eveidence based approach is the most successful one ever applied. You and I, and very likely a significant number of/. readers, have had a good chance of dying before the first post without some rather simple, evidence based, procedures applied in the maternity room.
You say you are a Christian. Fine, I do not see how this is related to the subject at hand. As I understand, however, it is very much related to the way you are supposed to treat people. I, for one, wish you love and peace. Live long and prosper.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, I don't agree that this is just nomenclature. Also my lecturers where very careful about it. So, no, it's not taught like that in every QM course in the world.
Actually one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, namely Niels Bohr himself, speculated about a conscious mind being necessary to determine a state. For him this was clearly not arbitrary nomenclature.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that this way of talking about it might be confusing, especially to the layperson.
I think this way of putting it is misleading. It actually has caused quite a lot of confusion. Observed by whom? A fly? Another cat? A phycicist? What if the phycicist is drunk? The term 'observation' suggests the presence of a conscious mind. Mangling that with (btw. completely deterministic) processes in quantum mechanics can only cause confusion and will not yield physics insights.
Let's say the system 'cat' needs to interact with another system to determine its state. No observer necessary.
Chewie lost against R2.
From the very site you linked to:
Sputnik was just a satellite. The first dog in space was called Laika.
No, you got it all wrong. Element zero is zero protons and one neutron is just an isotope of it.
Right, but an element is defined by the composition of the nucleus, more specifically the number of protons in it. One proton, for instance, is hydrogen.
Not quite. There is no such point. Wherever you are all galaxies are diverging from you in the same way, in whatever direction you look. This would not be the case if they diverged from one point in an absolute space.
How do we know, since we only observe the universe from our galaxy? Well, among other things, we would have to conclude from the observations that we are sitting at the centre of the universe if we dropped this symmetry assumption. A notion that was proven wrong on different scales several times.
This might be little bit hard to imagine. But in the framework of General Relativity it makes perfect sense.
Maybe currently. Four more billion years to go...
Right. And in addition this works only once per pair. After the first measurement on either side the state is no longer coherent.
Probably not. Just because an object passes by at roughly the distance to the moon does not mean it comes anywhere close to the moon. There are two more dimensions, you know.
And when he walks out the door, it will be summer.
You must be new here.
Well, I have to confess I did not make that up myself. Ironically, I am german (I live in England, though) and the Euro-English post was sent to me by a friend from Bulgaria this morning. It fitted so well, I could not resist the urge to paste it in.
The European Commission has just announced an agreement
whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than
German which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations,
Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some
room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan that
would be known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the
sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of
the"k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less
letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the
troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like
"fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be
ekspekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are
possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters,
which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre
that the horible mes of the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful,
and they should go away.
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th"
with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be
dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be
aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor
trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi to understand ech ozer. Ze
drem vil finali kum tru!
[...] And the evidence for that happening--for bacteria turning into another life form--is lacking. [...]
/.!
Huh?! I am confused, but this might explain a lot -- must be all amoebae posting on
Now tell me which water molecules have pollutants and which don't.
That's easy: none have. H2O is H2O, always.
I do not know who James Orwell is, but "1984" was written by George Orwell .
If they expect Mr Average to carry a gun, they'll probably shoot first.
But he never inhaled.
[...] with irrefutable scientific proof that it could not possibly have occurred without a supernatural explanation [...]
Such a 'scientific' proof is impossible. But actually that's not a problem, on the contrary: once a phenomenon is established, it thereby ceases to be supernatural. It might be beyond our current understanding. But that is something we can work on, preferably with scientific methods.
I think the idea was to display the flight sim on all three screens in a triplehead setup.
242723920317613145364418177377134?
This is not even a prime number!
All right. Slightly more seriously, then. Your "frog becomes horse" example tries to ridicule the whole concept of evolution, using the fact that nobody ever saw a frog becoming a horse (or a gay prince, for that matter) over night (or in an instance, after being kissed).
/. readers, have had a good chance of dying before the first post without some rather simple, evidence based, procedures applied in the maternity room.
Nobody claims that ever happened. The distinction between micro and macro evolution you invoke is pretty artifical. This is all about timescales. The point is that it is indeed possible to increase the complexitiy of an organism by variation and natural selection, but only by a sequence of very small variations, accumulated over a very long time. If you want "macro evolution", just wait. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe complexity decreases. There is no goal. But it can happen. So, indeed, in principle a horse might have ancestors similar to frogs. Whether this is true of the species we call horses today is a completely different question -- a "just so story". Nevertheless, the species we call horses today almost certainly has some ancestors not looking like horses at all.
A famous example is the question how the human eye comes about. It was invoked by critics of the concept of evolution in order to prove that it must be wrong. The argument goes like this: "You can not seriously claim that something as comlex and wonderful like the human eye just accidently popped into existence!" But nobody claims that. It takes time. Big leaps are dangerous -- there are many more ways to be dead than to be alive. This is reflected by the fact that the organisation of the human eye has serious flaws. Evolution has no way to "correct" them because fundamental changes to the way it is organised are not favoured by small inceremental changes. This, in combination with the completely different types of eyes observed in nature (like, e.g. the eyes of squids), provides a strong hint towards evolutionary mechanisms at work.
So where do we come from? I do not know. I find it plausible that we are the product of accumulating small changes, and that we are actually still subject to change. I have to confess, I like the idea. What I like most, is the idea that we are going to learn more and more about all this, thereby, on many occasions, proving our previous assumptions wrong. If we find evidence that life on Earth was designed to some extent this would be thrilling news. Imagine! Somewhere out there is (or at least was) somebody who visited our planet! If so, let's find out where, when and why she did this. In my opiniion, this would be worth every effort.
One more thing, independent of the topic we discuss here. Science indeed has no means to "rule out a discussion of God". I never claimed that. Science is simply not interested in God. Supernatural entities are by definition not a subject of science. All I am saying is that God (which one?) is not a valid way to explain natural phenomena. Personally, I think the term "supernatural phenomena" consitutes a contradiction in terms.
And yes, you are right, scientists are ordinary people. And yes, there is bias and intertia in the communitiy. But the very method is constructed to overcome these flaws in the long run (a certain amount of intertia is helpful, though). This eveidence based approach is the most successful one ever applied. You and I, and very likely a significant number of
You say you are a Christian. Fine, I do not see how this is related to the subject at hand. As I understand, however, it is very much related to the way you are supposed to treat people. I, for one, wish you love and peace. Live long and prosper.