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Malkuth

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Everything posted by Malkuth

  1. Hi my friend,I know you want a iphone.

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  2. Hi my friend,I know you want a iphone.

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  3. Actually, that's pretty easy. Spatial translation. If you translate space by an amount in one direction, then N of your 3N parameters will change by the same amount. There are translational and rotational symmetries between your 3N parameters that make them behave as N points in a 3D Euclidian space.
  4. I'm not sure how spacetime doesn't exist with many worlds. You have physical matter which is described by the wave function and is parameterized by space and time. Basically, as you said, it'd be QM (or QFT) without measurement axioms. Perhaps you could explain?
  5. Edit: Okay, I apologize to ttn for polluting his thread. Just ignore this post ...
  6. It would depend on the way that consciousness/perception works. I don't think the mechanism is known, and I definitely don't know it. But we don't consciously perceive the cat as both dead and alive, only one or the other. In the same way that measurement devices geared towards measuring the position of a particle see it localized in space, and not having multiple localizations in space. I'll give you the lack of measurement axioms adds parsimony. Apparently I wasn't considering that. I don't really try to advocate many worlds, I just brought it up to say I actually believe it. When it gets to metaphysics, I'm not particularly good at it, and it far too often seems to be just playing around with words (less with this crowd than with "mainstream" philosophy), so I don't like to argue my ontology over other ontologies (especially since mine is considered rather fringe, and because I find it hard to convey verbally and have obviously accepted it because I have an unorthodox way of even thinking about things), though I do somehow end up doing it anyway. You did make the point that Bohm subtracts off the measurement axioms, though, so I can't argue it's any less parsimonious. So I have no reason to argue against it, though I still would like to defend Copenhagen. I'll look into it, thanks for the recommendation.
  7. I have stepped back and looked at the story, and I gave you my (rather messy and inarticulate) description of, which you dismissed as "solipsism". Which, from what I recall, is a philosophy that claims that only one consciousness exists and reality is its making. Not a philosophy that claims statements about reality must be made from the perspective of an observer, which exists in a universe bound by the laws of physics and must obey those laws like anything else. Yes, it does. If you were to measure the state of a particle, e.g. an electron's spin, your state would become entangled with its--you'd be in a superposition of having measured spin up and of having measured spin down. You only observe one of them; you're one of the basis states making up the superposition. One of the "many worlds", so to say, that make up the total state of the universe. The fact that the electron could've had the other spin is completely lost to you, so you observe the wavefunction as having "collapsed". That's how wavefunction collapse emerges. Quantum mechanics postulates the existence of something-or-other with both particle and wave behavior. It predicts that one gets random results from measurement that follow some probability distribution. Pilot wave theory postulates that the waves and particles are completely different things and that the particle has a trajectory in the classical sense (that is, you can (in principle, if not practice because of lack of precision) predict exactly where it is and what exactly its velocity/momentum is at any time with a set of 6 parameters (initial location and initial velocity) and the Hamiltonian; by the way, this is what I meant by "classical trajectory"). Therefore, pilot wave theory postulates the existence of more things than quantum mechanics does. If it's true, then there should be a way to empirically verify that these particles with well-defined, classical trajectories exist. It's not the job of "orthodox QM" to prove they don't exist.
  8. The primary entity should be Jesus. ... Or maybe not. Maybe if only he were a raptor. Then it'd be awesome. We could get paleontology and physics and religion into the same sphere of thought. Yes, what I said in this post is just as meaningful as all this banter about "instantaneous velocity being contradictory".
  9. *facepalm* altonhare, I don't know about you, by I'm able to see things because photons interact with my retinas. I see on my desk a mess of quarters, a flash drive, a cell phone, a book (Jacques Derrida's "Dissemination"), empty soda bottles, etc. They are solid objects--they have a "shape". I think about things that have "shape" and particles that behave like solid objects because that's what I'm used to seeing. Because I'm built that way--according to the laws of physics and my biology. Fundamental entities (there, I'm not giving them a specific name, don't complain) are not visible. They are too small to see. The photons they emit--if they even emit photons (see neutrinos)--can vary with energy, so even if we did see individual photons, they'd vary in color. We can't bounce streams of photons off them without altering their extent over space to allow us to sense a shape. We can't feel them. There's no way to picture them geometrically in a way that's entirely accurate. It's the limits of the way we're constructed by humans. The only way that we have to describe them is with our mathematics. Does this mean they're MADE of mathematical functions? Certainly not. And no-one (well, except for those Platonist idiots who think that 3's and rednesses exist) would claim that they are made of functions. They're made of something or other that doesn't behave like the things we're used to. So what do we do? We name them. And how do we name them? Through analogy to things we're used to. We've always done that. Newton used the term "force", which was previously a term encountered in religion, to describe motion. Does this mean the "forces" such as electromagnetism, gravity, etc. are due to God's will? Is the fact that someone uses the term "force" indicative of a cultish religious nature? No. Nor does the fact that we call these fundamental entities "particles" signify that we think they're beads or little specks of dust or quarters or balls or anything of the sort. And these things that we call particles--which are NOT particles in the classical sense; the equivocation is yours, not mine--are also called waves because they obey wave motion. Things that obey wave motion are called that. When people see waves in the ocean, they say "let's jump over the waves!", not "let's jump over the heaps of water that are caused by the propagation of energy through water via wave motion!" I'm not contradicting myself. You're equivocating and accusing me of contradiction.
  10. I'm not sure what you mean. I thought Böhm's interpretation was completely non-relativistic. Besides, you can have plenty of "things" (which are human constructs, "nominal" things, rather than "real" things) that travel faster than the speed of light without actual information or matter going so fast. Presumably the group velocity of some microwaves have achieved such a thing (though I don't know the details, and am too lazy to look it up.) A signal, or information, does have a meaning independent of human interpretation. It's something that has a causal effect. How so? Once again, I'm not sure how this is. I'm only a student, but I've been familiar with quantum field theory for a while, but the axioms (with a few modifications to use the Heisenberg picture instead of the Schrödinger, and to account for the infinitely many degrees of freedom) have seemed to work just fine. Perfectly Minkowski spacetime and all. I believe many world myself (just to say), but because it has wavefunction collapse as an emergent phenomenon rather than something fundamental. Seems more parsimonious. But it's just metaphysics, and is indistinguishable from Copenhagen empirically, so I don't really argue it. And I've never seen it as "necessary" to relativistic QM. This isn't true. It is speculative because it postulates the existence of things that we have no evidence for. There are particles and pilot waves, and they are separate things. And the particles have a well-defined classical trajectory. If this is true, there should exist an experiment that confirms the pilot wave theory and at the same time contradicts quantum mechanics on some scale. ... Anyway, if we're going to mix relativity with QM (which has been successfully done), I may as well throw in some relativistic jargon and metaphysics. Everything has to be described from an observer's point of view, an observer within the universe who obeys the laws of physics. We'll call this observer Mufasa, because I'm sick of Anne and Bob. Let's say you have the typical two particles in an entangled state. Two electrons, say. Each is spin up or spin down, but each has the opposite spin of the other. So the state looks like this: |e1=up>|e2=down> - |e1=down>|e2=up> You have two observers, Simba and Scar, who measure the states of e1 and e2, repsectively. The observation events are outside of each other's light cones. According to Mufasa, the state of the system is now: |e1=up>|e2=down>|Simba measured up>|Scar measured down> - |e1=down>|e2=up>|Simba measured down>|Scar measured up> Simba and Scar both relay the result of their measurements to Mufasa. The brain is complex and made up of many particles, and the exact mechanism by which thought occurs is unknown, but for the sake of simplicity let's assume (extrapolating the fact that electrons can interact with only one photon at a time into the assumption that Mufasa can only process one of the results at a time) Mufasa must take the results one at a time. Simba tells him what he measured. The wavefunction collapses, and it's now determined what Scar will tell Mufasa. No information had to be transmitted between Simba and Scar for this to happen. To try to say it in a different way, hoping to make myself clearer (it's pretty clear right now that I'm not particularly articulate), the only event causally influenced by Simba relaying his result to Mufasa is the event at which Scar relays his result to Mufasa, not the event at which Scar actually measures his result. And the events of Mufasa getting both results are, of course, within each other's light cones, so the causal influence is allowed. Trying to talk about the actual events of both measurements as though from an omniscient observer whose observing powers violate relativity is meaningless, by contrast, since relativity and QM both teach us (albeit in different ways) that observers are bound to the laws of physics.
  11. Thank you, ttn, for your criticisms of that silly elementary wave theory. I'd like to throw a few things out there regarding quantum physics, though. First, quantum mechanics isn't incompatible with relativity. No matter or information is transmitted faster than the speed of light when a wave function collapses, even if two entangled particles are measured at events outside each others' light cones. No particle is transmitted between the events. The system as a whole happens to be in one state or another, and as a whole is irreducible to the two separate particles. Since the outcome of a measurement is random, there's no way to influence the outcome and use it as a sort of code to send information to the other measurer. Anyway, to use better jargon, local causation is still possible in theories. Local hidden variable theories aren't. Non-local hidden variable theories would violate relativity, and are extremely speculative anyway because they assert the existence of unknown properties of a particle for which we have no way to test. Quantum physics, with its random, non-deterministic results, and its relativistic (with local causation) version, quantum field theory, work just fine. Another thing is that classical mechanics, on the observable scale, emerges from quantum mechanics, not the other way around. It's extremely naive to try to interpret physical entities on a very small scale as being entities on the big scale but shrunk. I think this is where people have the most trouble with quantum physics. It doesn't look like what they see, so they reject it. And the difficulty with which one pictures QM probably messes up some concepts in their heads. A wave is something that propagates as a wave, can be built from sine/cosine functions, and experiences constructive/destructive interference. The fundamental particles satisfy this. They do, in fact, propagate as waves. And they come in discrete packets of energy--that is, if you have a wave of electromagnetic radiation with frequency f, you can only have E, 2E, 3E, etc. as the energy of that wave. Each packet of E in the wave is called a photon. And the packets we observe in real life tend to be localized in space--something localized in space with a set energy. It's convenient to think of it as a particle. (Though I should also say that since it's localized in space, it's really made up of waves of multiple frequencies. But is still only a single packet/particle. So rather than have a set energy, it's A% a wave with one such energy, B% with another energy, etc., and has those probabilities of interacting with a charged particle as though it definitely had that energy.) And this is what they're typically called: "particles". On the large scale, we observe waves that are due to the dynamics of particles. This is because the conditions needed to result in wave motion are extremely simple and general, and appear in many places throughout nature. That doesn't mean the wave motion in quantum physics is due to smaller component particles, or ropes, or disturbances in an aether, or anything of the like. For others here who are still attracted to fringe theories...
  12. Velocity -- the rate at which the position of an object changes as time progresses. To say that an object has a velocity is to say that the position of that object is changing at a certain rate. Instantaneous velocity means that, at the instant in question, the position will change at a certain rate were time to progress from that instant. (And time progresses. I'd cite a source, but I think you can find one on your own.) It makes sense because the particle is at a different position (unless the velocity is 0) at any time before or after the instant in question, regardless of how little before or after. Don't like derivatives? Don't like calculus? Feel free to go back to the 16th century.
  13. For those still struggling with the idea of space not being a physical 'thing', but rather a mathematical 'thing' (in the same manner that a set, group, etc. is): Quarks have a property called 'color charge'. A quark can be either red, green, or blue. (And an anti-quark is anti-red, anti-green, or anti-blue.) There are several mathematically ontologies one can assume when dealing with the three different colors of quarks. The first is that the 'color charge' labels entirely different particles. There are red up quarks, blue up quarks, and green up quarks, and each is an entirely different kind of particle. Another ontology has that there is one particle called an 'up quark', and the up quark can have a color of either red, green, or blue. And, of course, since this is quantum mechanics, any superposition of the three works, too. The quark is described as being in a "color space", with positions along a 'red' axis, 'blue' axis, and 'green' axis. All that's required of the position is that its distance from the origin is 1 (normalization), a mathematical way of saying the quark has exactly one color, even if that color is a mix of colors. And, of course, the space can be rotated about so that red becomes blue, or green. You get the same physics, just what you call what color changes. This "color space" is not a physical entity, though. It's just a geometric, intuitive way of picturing this stuff in our heads. There is no fluid or aether or whatever permeating it, whatever that means. Because you have, say, a red quark, a blue quark, and a green quark (together forming a proton), doesn't mean you have to have something at every point in the color space between each of the quarks. And the fact that it doesn't mean this doesn't imply that there's some weird, spooky non-entity called a "nothing" between them either. If you're arguing about entities/non-entities called "nothings", you're just playing with words rather than discussing anything meaningful. Four-dimensional spacetime is more complicated because of its direct link to what we consciously perceive. There isn't a set origin, positions in it don't have to be normalized, etc. (And, in quantum field theory, space is a parameter rather than an observable anyway.) But similarly to the quarks, you can use multiple ontologies. Say you have the electromagnetic field (of which photons are excitations). You can say that there isn't one electromagnetic field defined everywhere, but instead infinitely many different kinds of particles, each one defined only at one point in spacetime. And a given observed photon could then be a superposition of different kinds of particles. But that's not the way we do things. Instead, we say that a photon is a photon regardless of where it is, so the photons we observe (which are wave packets, and have extension over space) are in a superposition of different positions. We consider position a property of the particle, just like color a property of the quark, and can build a 'space' from it. Just because one 'photon' (say a hypothetical photon with a definite location, rather than a real photon with extension over space) and another 'photon' are at positions with a finite distance ('distance' being a mathematical notion, not a physical object) between them doesn't mean there's some sort of object, fluid, aether, "nothing", whatever between them. There's no logical way to derive that there is. There are no laws of physics saying there is.
  14. I like classical music, especially twelve-tone. But I'll also listen to small amounts of jazz, rock, hip-hop, etc.
  15. Malkuth

    Classical music

    Wrongheaded interpretations ... you mean hidden variable theories, or those fucking idiotic "consciousness controls the universe" ones? From my experiences, actual physicists reject both. I haven't heard of musicians having an opinion on QM though. As for heroic sounding stuff (to keep the topic from having cardiac arrest), there's: Haydn (London symphonies) Mozart (especially 41st symphony) Beethoven (especially the fifth and ninth symphonies) Wagner (Siegfried ... other operas are more tragic/downfallish types) Mahler (second ... other symphonies tend to be more downfallish type things) To name a few.
  16. Malkuth

    Classical music

    So are you saying that quantum theories are all wrong? (Just a quick question, I don't want to side track from classical music too much. I liked how thorough a discussion was occurring here.)
  17. Malkuth

    Classical music

    What about people who like Schoenberg? Would you say, "that's their taste, it's not our business", or would you say they have a "malevolent sense of life", or what?
  18. Malkuth

    Classical music

    Grant, that recording did help. It still doesn't do much for me, but it is an improvement, and I can appreciate the work a little better. So, thanks everyone for the input on Rachmaninov and Schoenberg. Now I'm wondering: are any of you familiar with Nikolai Medtner and his piano concertos? And what do you think--especially in comparison with Rachmaninov. And I'm wondering if there's familiarity and opinions on Bela Bartók, perhaps in comparison with Schoenberg.
  19. Malkuth

    Classical music

    I'm fairly versed in music theory, and I am looking for depth, so feel free to go further in depth.
  20. As a physics student, my understanding is that space and time are relations between matter, rather than any sort of substance. There is a 'hole argument' (or was it 'hole problem'?), if you look at the philosophy of space and time, which is basically: you can change the way you label coordinates and get different spacetime metrics (since general relativity is invariant with respect to general coordinate transformations), and therefore different-looking manifolds (if you were to try to represent the 'shape' of spacetime graphically), but once you use the metric to describe particle trajectories, you get the same physical trajectory. The argument that Einstein and various philosophers take is that space/time are only relations between particles of matter, and are only meaningful in as much as they explain the way matter behaves. So as you said in before, space is basically just distance. There is no such thing as aether. That's been disproved long ago.
  21. Malkuth

    Classical music

    I have listened to them, and they haven't appealed to me too much, though they are nice. I can't really put my finger on why. (I usually find that to be the case for music I like or dislike, which is part of why I wanted to ask people who probably have a philosophy-based understanding of their musical taste, and are probably more articulate than me anyway.) I like his solo piano music more, however. What are your opinions on the concertos?
  22. Malkuth

    Classical music

    That's a very detailed blog, and more-or-less has the kind of detail I was looking for in making a query. Thanks very much. I'll check out the podcasts when I have the time.
  23. Malkuth

    Classical music

    I've read some posts here, and the opinions of various Objectivists, and have noticed some patterns regarding taste in classical music. I'm asking about types of classical music in particular because that's what I'm familiar with, and I'd like to know better--I'd like to hear described in more detail--why Objectivists have the particular tastes they do in classical music, where they do like the genre. One observation is that Rachmaninov is almost invariably exalted as the primal example of musical genius, and his piano concertos (2 and 3) are given as iconic examples. A description about what appeals about Rachmaninov, and these concertos, would be appreciated. Another is that 'modernist' classical music, by composers such as Schoenberg, is almost invariably despised by Objectivists. Reasons for this--and examples of other composers and works--would also be appreciated. Any other information regarding tastes in classical music, (e.g. performers, how taste fits into aesthetic philosophy) would also be appreciated. (By the way, I've already read The Romantic Manifesto, for those who would just point me to that. I'm looking for your opinions, judgments, and understanding of the philosophy.)
  24. Sleep paralysis can explain a lot of weird experiences quite easily. In a class of mine last year, some girl was telling a story about how she encountered ghosts one night, and everything she described was obviously the result of sleep paralysis. (In fact, she never said that she actually saw a ghost, just that she was paralysed when she woke up and could barely breathe, and interperted it as a visit from beyond the grave. Can't say she suffers from delusions, but only that she deliberately misinterperted a natural event to indicate the supernatural. I'm willing to bet that most the people who talk to God or are abducted by UFO's do the same thing. In fact, those who I know in person who claim to get "signals" from God seem to do the same thing--intentionally misinterpert natural events to indicate the supernatural.) While some advances were made in science after the Dark Ages, this was still widely believed, and rituals were practiced based on these beliefs for quite a while after the Dark Ages. The one particular instance I can remember is that the insanity of King George III of the UK was blamed on demonic influences, and one of the proposed cures was to suck out evil spirits by putting a cup to his back with a candle stick in it... the fire would react with the air inside the cup and eventually there would be little enough air in the cup for it to be stuck to his back, when it would be pulled off. Unfortunately, I can't remember my source.
  25. I didn't include neutronium because I didn't think it had been created in a laboratory; I was listing states which I knew had been created in a lab, but the list of all states created and predicted by theory would include neutronium and supersymmetric matter. "Also there are many substances which have multiple crystalline phases" Like carbon (ie, graphite and diamond) and sulfer (ie, monclinic and rhombic)... but the different crystalline phases are still all crystalline solids. Of course, they are different phases... By the way, I've heard something about water having an alternative crystalline phase to ice when enough pressure is applied; could you tell me anything about that?
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