Over-complication of science
Discussion
Gene Vincent said:
I have explained this too, numerous times, the conditions are totally different, Cosmic ray collisions are much colder, there are not the correct conditions in the atmosphere to create quarks, whereas in an accelerator we connive to produce such for as long as we can.
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Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the particles. You can't say that a high energy collision is cold, it makes no sense..
Gene Vincent said:
No they don't disagree with me... their computers are weighted to take account of the differences, thereby giving usable results. (just like the head-ons in my useful analogy)
I really will have to get the accelerator thread up and running soon, the deep-seated lack of understanding needs to be addressed.
One of us worked there Gene. It wasn't you.I really will have to get the accelerator thread up and running soon, the deep-seated lack of understanding needs to be addressed.
We don't "weight" our computers at all. What do you even mean by such an asinine statement?
But please, do explain to this ex accelerator scientist where people's understanding is lacking.
So far you are dead wrong in every pat, so it'll provide amusement.
Gene Vincent said:
The Cosmos at this time will not allow the production of Hadrons or Baryons, right up there where Cosmic Rays bang into each other regularly, not a single Hadron or Baryon is formed.
Oh look, here's an article pointing out that Lambda baryons were first observed in cosmic ray events.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_baryon
As it says;
"The first Lambda particle discovered was Λ0 in 1947 during a study of cosmic ray interactions.[2] Though the particle was expected to live for ~10−23 seconds,[2] it actually survived for ~10−10 seconds.[3] The property which caused it to live so long was dubbed strangeness, and led to the discovery of the strange quark."
Gene, you are even getting confused by the names of the various types of particle families. Everyone is laughing at you now.
...all that and it's still too cold to create quarks. 
You still have a fundamental failure to understand that all the energy is divided to produce certain groups of subs... i.e. total energy in equals a multitude of subs not just a single type.
Nature is prone to parsimony and all natural cosmic rays suffer this fate too.
It will form the easiest to produce subs, that is useless for us today.
Perhaps the easiest way to see this is the huge difficulty in finding the Higgs.
Now why is that?
If you are right then naturally occurring Cosmic rays would produce millions of them, they'd be quite abundant, but they're not.
We have to contrive the circumstances that are very quite unnatural in this Cosmos to even see one with any degree of confidence.
Now let's go on to the claim that the detection mechanism from start to finish isn't weighted to find what we need, without weighting there is just noise, it would be like trying to hear a whisper whilst standing at the side of a large jet engine.
The intricate detail of all the scans you ever receive are there because all the work has been done before hand by the computer, take out the weighting algorithm and you have the pictorial equivalent of flash of white noise.
Put a camera in there and feed it directly to a viewer and he'll get just that an incomprehensible flash.
Take that same camera and feed its signals to a suitably set up computer and we get all the useless information taken out and something useful is viewed.
This is even more spectacularly important in the instrumentation, all of them too suffer from noise.
This is algorithmic filtering, weighted to present something that makes sense.
So... where are we.
You claim quarks exist, because (presumably) you still hold to the previous idea of the Bag Model.
The Bag Model was always circular thinking and thankfully recent elements in QFT has finally proved it wrong.
No quarks as particles of any kind, just the inherent properties of field interactions and you need at least two fields for any interaction (think: one hand clapping, you'll get the idea) and by trying to remove one part of the interaction, it disappears.
You see, in this Cosmos that is all a quark is... a bit of behaviour, at this level there ain't no particles, just the potential to combine a group of behaviours and probabilities that can and do form particles, thanks mostly to electrostatics.
You still have a fundamental failure to understand that all the energy is divided to produce certain groups of subs... i.e. total energy in equals a multitude of subs not just a single type.
Nature is prone to parsimony and all natural cosmic rays suffer this fate too.
It will form the easiest to produce subs, that is useless for us today.
Perhaps the easiest way to see this is the huge difficulty in finding the Higgs.
Now why is that?
If you are right then naturally occurring Cosmic rays would produce millions of them, they'd be quite abundant, but they're not.
We have to contrive the circumstances that are very quite unnatural in this Cosmos to even see one with any degree of confidence.
Now let's go on to the claim that the detection mechanism from start to finish isn't weighted to find what we need, without weighting there is just noise, it would be like trying to hear a whisper whilst standing at the side of a large jet engine.
The intricate detail of all the scans you ever receive are there because all the work has been done before hand by the computer, take out the weighting algorithm and you have the pictorial equivalent of flash of white noise.
Put a camera in there and feed it directly to a viewer and he'll get just that an incomprehensible flash.
Take that same camera and feed its signals to a suitably set up computer and we get all the useless information taken out and something useful is viewed.
This is even more spectacularly important in the instrumentation, all of them too suffer from noise.
This is algorithmic filtering, weighted to present something that makes sense.
So... where are we.
You claim quarks exist, because (presumably) you still hold to the previous idea of the Bag Model.
The Bag Model was always circular thinking and thankfully recent elements in QFT has finally proved it wrong.
No quarks as particles of any kind, just the inherent properties of field interactions and you need at least two fields for any interaction (think: one hand clapping, you'll get the idea) and by trying to remove one part of the interaction, it disappears.
You see, in this Cosmos that is all a quark is... a bit of behaviour, at this level there ain't no particles, just the potential to combine a group of behaviours and probabilities that can and do form particles, thanks mostly to electrostatics.
STOP!
So the title of this thread is "Over complication of science" so for an ignoramous like myself could the conversation here between Northern Boy and Gene be simplified a little i.e Physics v's maths. Do particle exists as a reality like grains of sand on the beach or does particle physics merely represent a way of describing possible outcomes for changes in energy states?
So the title of this thread is "Over complication of science" so for an ignoramous like myself could the conversation here between Northern Boy and Gene be simplified a little i.e Physics v's maths. Do particle exists as a reality like grains of sand on the beach or does particle physics merely represent a way of describing possible outcomes for changes in energy states?
Description.
Think of a flat roofed building a few storeys high.
We humans are standing on the that flat roof and we can see all the Cosmos.
We go down a floor level and we enter the domain of 'substance', this floor holds all the Chrystaline substances, metallurgy etc.
Down a further floor and we enter the domain of the Periodic table, elements that form the stuff on the floor above.
Down again and we enter the domain of Atoms, that combine to form the Periodic table above.
One more down and we enter the domain of the sub-atomic particle, electrons etc. Because this domain is so individually small it is quite vexing to the mind.
There is a floor below and there are no particles at all. There is only energy and forces that act on this energy, energy 'clumps together' due to those forces and also can be depleted by one of them. But down here there isn't energy nor is there any forces as such. They are the same thing. This is sometimes given different names, Quantum Foam, Quantum Fields, Brane Theory, Quantum Condensates even... dependent on where you came from to get here.
Down here, what the floor above sees as Forces we know to be 'types' of interactions between the Fields and Energy is the 'compaction' of the field that allows it to interact with other fields.
Think of a flat roofed building a few storeys high.
We humans are standing on the that flat roof and we can see all the Cosmos.
We go down a floor level and we enter the domain of 'substance', this floor holds all the Chrystaline substances, metallurgy etc.
Down a further floor and we enter the domain of the Periodic table, elements that form the stuff on the floor above.
Down again and we enter the domain of Atoms, that combine to form the Periodic table above.
One more down and we enter the domain of the sub-atomic particle, electrons etc. Because this domain is so individually small it is quite vexing to the mind.
There is a floor below and there are no particles at all. There is only energy and forces that act on this energy, energy 'clumps together' due to those forces and also can be depleted by one of them. But down here there isn't energy nor is there any forces as such. They are the same thing. This is sometimes given different names, Quantum Foam, Quantum Fields, Brane Theory, Quantum Condensates even... dependent on where you came from to get here.
Down here, what the floor above sees as Forces we know to be 'types' of interactions between the Fields and Energy is the 'compaction' of the field that allows it to interact with other fields.
Gene, building a construction from the top down is always going to provide a challenge particularly for those in the business of scaffolding.
Perhaps the floors between ground floor and the roof, from whence I gaze upon the cosmos, are in fact little more than the construction of human imagination, they represent no more of a physical construction than any other magical explanation, the tests (no matter how stringent you think you're being) upon their nature are self serving because our world view deems that floors 1 to 4 are necessary and necessity is the essence of existence, or as they say "essence precedes existence".
My dog can stand on that roof with me, but it's not necessary for him to construct those other floors, he can simply just be there with his brave heart - Freedom.
Perhaps the floors between ground floor and the roof, from whence I gaze upon the cosmos, are in fact little more than the construction of human imagination, they represent no more of a physical construction than any other magical explanation, the tests (no matter how stringent you think you're being) upon their nature are self serving because our world view deems that floors 1 to 4 are necessary and necessity is the essence of existence, or as they say "essence precedes existence".
My dog can stand on that roof with me, but it's not necessary for him to construct those other floors, he can simply just be there with his brave heart - Freedom.
But the truth is nobody knows how many floors exist between the subatomic particles (hadrons) floor and the planck scale on the ground floor. Fermions are one level below but what's directly beneath them? It would be foolish to assume that a fermion is indivisible (especially in light of recent experiments - spinon, holon and orbiton), the Greeks thought that of the atom, hence the name.
I like the building analogy, but it will always make me wonder, what's in the basement?
I like the building analogy, but it will always make me wonder, what's in the basement?
Gene Vincent said:
...all that and it's still too cold to create quarks.
You still have a fundamental failure to understand that all the energy is divided to produce certain groups of subs... i.e. total energy in equals a multitude of subs not just a single type.
Nature is prone to parsimony and all natural cosmic rays suffer this fate too.
It will form the easiest to produce subs, that is useless for us today.
Perhaps the easiest way to see this is the huge difficulty in finding the Higgs.
Now why is that?
If you are right then naturally occurring Cosmic rays would produce millions of them, they'd be quite abundant, but they're not.
Or perhaps millions of them are produced, but they have a very short lifetime so we don't see them unless it happens right in the middle of a detector?You still have a fundamental failure to understand that all the energy is divided to produce certain groups of subs... i.e. total energy in equals a multitude of subs not just a single type.
Nature is prone to parsimony and all natural cosmic rays suffer this fate too.
It will form the easiest to produce subs, that is useless for us today.
Perhaps the easiest way to see this is the huge difficulty in finding the Higgs.
Now why is that?
If you are right then naturally occurring Cosmic rays would produce millions of them, they'd be quite abundant, but they're not.
Can you give me examples of things that are produced at CERN but not in cosmic ray collisions? You started out by saying 'Hadrons and Baryons' which was nonsensical. You changed that to 'in particular Baryons', also nonsense. Now it seems to be 'difficult to produce subs'.
MiseryStreak said:
But the truth is nobody knows how many floors exist between the subatomic particles (hadrons) floor and the planck scale on the ground floor. Fermions are one level below but what's directly beneath them? It would be foolish to assume that a fermion is indivisible (especially in light of recent experiments - spinon, holon and orbiton), the Greeks thought that of the atom, hence the name.
I like the building analogy, but it will always make me wonder, what's in the basement?
The Plackian limit on size/scale does not apply down here, it is the limit for the floor above, the domain of the substantive/product world.I like the building analogy, but it will always make me wonder, what's in the basement?
The probability spikes (compactions) in the fields are what we interpret in the floor above as our limits of scale. That is what the Planck size is.
When we have a fuller grasp of the geometry (such as it is) at this level we'll look for another, but my gut feeling is that will be the level at T=0 and probably non-existent now.
hairykrishna said:
Or perhaps millions of them are produced, but they have a very short lifetime so we don't see them unless it happens right in the middle of a detector?
No, trillions are 'used' (perform work) and we get a trace of this use, but not one particle is isolated, we notarise and record decay, the 'effect'.You speak of 'lifetime', but the reality is that we see only a residual memory with every trace.
The term 'lifetime' is an unfortunate one, it is too anthropomorphic and prone to setting the mind on the wrong path.
So it does seem to be a philisophical debate as to whether the "observable" holds any more necessary truth than the "conceivable".
As Gene has told me before and is hinting above he considers the granularity of the language of description as the main stumbling block to further knowledge. The precision of our means of communicating our reality is the key - if we could only break things down a bit more we'll be able to explain, this leads to maths and words, which birth ideas through neccessity not any actual reality.
If the cosmos is explainable to us (all of us and my dog), if there is an answer then it must be intuitive, it must contain the essence of our existence as the centre piece.
As Gene has told me before and is hinting above he considers the granularity of the language of description as the main stumbling block to further knowledge. The precision of our means of communicating our reality is the key - if we could only break things down a bit more we'll be able to explain, this leads to maths and words, which birth ideas through neccessity not any actual reality.
If the cosmos is explainable to us (all of us and my dog), if there is an answer then it must be intuitive, it must contain the essence of our existence as the centre piece.
Gene Vincent said:
hairykrishna said:
Or perhaps millions of them are produced, but they have a very short lifetime so we don't see them unless it happens right in the middle of a detector?
No, trillions are 'used' (perform work) and we get a trace of this use, but not one particle is isolated, we notarise and record decay, the 'effect'.You speak of 'lifetime', but the reality is that we see only a residual memory with every trace.
The term 'lifetime' is an unfortunate one, it is too anthropomorphic and prone to setting the mind on the wrong path.
hairykrishna said:
Gene Vincent said:
hairykrishna said:
Or perhaps millions of them are produced, but they have a very short lifetime so we don't see them unless it happens right in the middle of a detector?
No, trillions are 'used' (perform work) and we get a trace of this use, but not one particle is isolated, we notarise and record decay, the 'effect'.You speak of 'lifetime', but the reality is that we see only a residual memory with every trace.
The term 'lifetime' is an unfortunate one, it is too anthropomorphic and prone to setting the mind on the wrong path.
In nature parsimony rules, so all we get is a the weakest of memory traces, not the item itself, we get a record of the work done.
In Cosmic ray collisions, parsimony runs the game, in a collider we do all we can (quite successfully) to subvert parsimony.
Word salad. In one post you complain about the term lifetime, used by basically everyone, as being 'too anthropomorphic' and the next minute you're talking about the 'memory' of particles and the parsimony of nature.
Can you explain why nature's parsimonious in cosmic ray collisions, but less so in the LHC? Or what's produced in the LHC that isn't in nature? Explaining it in terms of the actual kinetics of the particle collisions rather than via an analogy that's so abstract that it's nonsense would be useful. Even explaining what you mean by constantly saying that it's 'too cold', in a context that makes no sense, would be a start.
Can you explain why nature's parsimonious in cosmic ray collisions, but less so in the LHC? Or what's produced in the LHC that isn't in nature? Explaining it in terms of the actual kinetics of the particle collisions rather than via an analogy that's so abstract that it's nonsense would be useful. Even explaining what you mean by constantly saying that it's 'too cold', in a context that makes no sense, would be a start.
Edited by hairykrishna on Tuesday 30th October 12:54
Oh bloody hell, this is like the Bluebird debate where one side sets itself up as 'anti' and then spends the rest of his life chipping away with inconsequentialities.
As an example:
The writing on the wall was when NB wrote 'Everyone's laughing at you'. In forumspeak this translates as 'I need friends, help please'.
As an example:
hairykrishna said:
You started out by saying 'Hadrons and Baryons' which was nonsensical. You changed that to 'in particular Baryons', also nonsense. Now it seems to be 'difficult to produce subs'.
All of those statements can be true. GV starts with a generality, then when questioned, adds more detail. Et repete. You are comparing one level of detail with another; they are not mutually exclusive.The writing on the wall was when NB wrote 'Everyone's laughing at you'. In forumspeak this translates as 'I need friends, help please'.
Simpo Two said:
All of those statements can be true. GV starts with a generality, then when questioned, adds more detail. Et repete. You are comparing one level of detail with another; they are not mutually exclusive.
Stating that “not a single Hadron or Baryon is formed.” is a fairly unequivocal general statement. It’s wrong, even leaving aside the fact that Baryons are Hadrons. He then modified his statement to say that higher mass subs couldn’t be created. This is also wrong. Where was the true statement again?
It's only useful science when you can make practical use of it... that also helps establish it's accuracy.
Going back to the OP's points, I've always had questions about the things said on these TV programs. I don't think you'd ever really get it unless you sat down with them over a pint and pie and had a long chin wag.
The biggest thing for me has always been this red-shift/age of universe/where it's come from and going stuff. That light has been travelling millions of years, billions in the case of fringe galaxies. But then I get confused. That light has been travelling the age of the universe, so we are seeing the light of it when it was expanding rapidly after the 'big expansion'?
So it's no surprise that it was expanding a few billion years ago?
What is it doing now? Well we won't know that for billions of years I suppose. But they SAY as if it's a fact the universe is expanding. Considering we can't see red-shift within our galaxy it stands to reason that the universe might be collapsing very rapidly right now and we won't get a sign for millions of years until light from galaxies far enough away reaches us.
I've had universe books since the 80's, from pop-up to more serious stuff as I got older. Just like my dinosaur books it's surprising how much the science has aged. Some stuff is actually quite comical in how wrong it has turned out to be!
So expect another 25 years of understanding to perhaps make lots of what is said today wrong, especially the stuff by Brian Cox
Dave
Going back to the OP's points, I've always had questions about the things said on these TV programs. I don't think you'd ever really get it unless you sat down with them over a pint and pie and had a long chin wag.
The biggest thing for me has always been this red-shift/age of universe/where it's come from and going stuff. That light has been travelling millions of years, billions in the case of fringe galaxies. But then I get confused. That light has been travelling the age of the universe, so we are seeing the light of it when it was expanding rapidly after the 'big expansion'?
So it's no surprise that it was expanding a few billion years ago?
What is it doing now? Well we won't know that for billions of years I suppose. But they SAY as if it's a fact the universe is expanding. Considering we can't see red-shift within our galaxy it stands to reason that the universe might be collapsing very rapidly right now and we won't get a sign for millions of years until light from galaxies far enough away reaches us.
I've had universe books since the 80's, from pop-up to more serious stuff as I got older. Just like my dinosaur books it's surprising how much the science has aged. Some stuff is actually quite comical in how wrong it has turned out to be!
So expect another 25 years of understanding to perhaps make lots of what is said today wrong, especially the stuff by Brian Cox
Dave
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