Posted on 06/09/2003 6:11:13 AM PDT by andy224
I guess I'm behind on my cosmology. Could you quickly expand on the above statement? Thanks.
The book is very intricately constructed, and at times I felt that if any paragraph had been lost, the whole thing would unravel like a tapestry with a broken thread.
That is EXACTLY the way I'm reading it. Each statement seems to build on the last, so I spend a lot of time working my way through it.
But I'll take your advice and try to enjoy the reading more.
Thanks again.
That's pretty much what it says, just that the agreed-upon human logic is mathematics.
Math is something men have, it defines man. It is the ability to learn. It was required of those wishing to enter Plato's Academy.
This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke-the night of July 19-the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.
We lived on Long Lake, and we saw the first of the storms beating its way across the water toward us just before dark. For an hour before, the air had been utterly still. The American flag that my father put up on our boathouse in 1936 lay limp against its pole. Not even its hem fluttered. The heat was like a solid thing, and it seemed as deep as sullen quarry-water.
The air began to move, jerkily at first, lifting the flag and then dropping it again. it began to freshen and grew steady, first cooling the perspiration on our bodies and then seeming to freeze it.
That was when I saw the silver veil rolling across the lake. It blotted out Harrison in seconds and then came straight at us. The powerboats had vacated the scene.
I went downstairs again. All three of us slept together in the guest bed, Billy between Steff and me. I had a dream that I saw God walking across Harrison on the far side of the lake, a God so gigantic that above his waist He was lost in a clear blue sky. In the dream I could hear the rending crack and splinter of breaking trees as God stamped the woods into the shape of His footsteps. He was circling the lake, coming toward the Bridgton side, toward us, and all the houses and cottages and summer places were bursting into purple-white flame like lightning, and soon the smoke covered everything. The smoke covered everything like a Mist.
That was the direction that funny fogbank had come from. And it was the direction Shaymore (pronounced Shammore by the locals) lay in. Shaymore was where the Arrowhead Project was.
That was old Bill Giosti's theory about the so-called Black Spring: the Arrowhead Project. In the western part of Shaymore, not far from where the town borders on Stoneham, there was a small government preserve surrounded with wire. There were sentries and closed circuit television cameras and God knew what else. Or so I had heard; I'd never actually seen it, although the Old Shaymore Road runs along the eastern side of the government land for a mile or so.
No one knew for sure where the name Arrowhead Project came from and no one could tell you for one hundred percent sure that that really was the name of the project-if there was a project. Bill Giosti said there was, but when you asked him how and where he came by his information, he got vague. His niece, he said, worked for the Continental Phone Company, and she had heard things. It got like that. "Atomic things," Bill said that day, leaning in the Scout's window and blowing a healthy draught of Pabst into my face. "That's what they're fooling around with up there. Shooting atoms into the air and all that."
A tentacle came over the far lip of the concrete loading platform and grabbed Norm around the calf. My mouth dropped wide open. Ollie made a very short glottal sound of surprise - uk! The tentacle tapered from a thickness of a foot-the size of a grass snake-at the point where it had wrapped itself around Norm's lower leg to a thickness of maybe four or five feet where it disappeared into the mist. It was slate gray on top, shading to a fleshy pink underneath. And there were rows of suckers on the underside. They were moving and writhing like hundreds of small, puckering mouths.
Excerpts from The Mist, a Stephen King story.
But can an Electrolux be modified to work in the Arctic? ("polarized vacuum" - nyuk-nyuk!)
I'll try to give the "Cliff-notes" version:
First, gravitational fields have a negative energy associated with them; the stronger the field, the greater the negative energy ("Physicist" can give you an example which illustrates that gravitational fields have negative energy.)
Whatever matter/energy existed immediately after the BB took place has some gravitational field(s) associated with it. The Inflation phase creates new space that wasn't there before (again, see "Physicist" for an explanation of the mechanism by which the rapid expansion of space occurs).
Now, for the really cool part: whenever new space is created, it gets permeated by the existing gravitational fields, which means the negative energy associated with those fields is decreasing (meaning increasing negatively). But the Law of Conservation of Energy says you can't create (or destroy) energy like that, so something has to happen to balance the energy equation so that the net result is zero energy change. That mechanism is the creation of new matter/energy in the newly created space! And the really cool thing is that the Conservation of Energy requirement means that the quantity of new matter/energy being created is EXACTLY equal to the negative energy of the gravitational fields! This means that as the Universe Inflated, the end result HAS TO BE a Universe in which the matter density is equal to the "critical" value at which the energy of the gravitation fields is counterbalanced by the positive matter/energy in the Universe.
IOW, the "perfect balance" isn't a case of extraordinary "fine tuning" or dumb luck, but rather is a consequence of one of the most basic Laws of Physics, the Conservation of Energy. The Universe had no choice but to turn out this way.
[Another geek alert]: Conservation of Energy is intimately connected with a fundamental feature of the Universe, by way of Noether's Theorem. Energy is conserved iff the rules of physics are invariant under continuous temporal transformation, which is true iff the Universe is temporally homogeneous. Similar relations exist for Conservation of momentum, and angular momentum, which relate respectively to the spatial homogeneity and isotropy of the Universe.
Or so I understand....
You said as an example that 50th decimal place values could be significant without Inflation. Above you seem to be saying that there is still some sensitivity to initial values even with inflation. Is that correct?
BTW, I really enjoy your Geek Alerts!
What I say is stuff your "stuff stuff is is" stuff, is that clear?
Of course. It is a classic, and for good reason. It isn't really written for Joe Layman, unlike many of the pop-sci books. GEB is more like a clever and lucid introduction to computational theory for people who are at least somewhat mathematically inclined but not requiring a rigorous mathematical education to understand. When it was written, a few of the ideas in the book were pretty cutting edge, but that is less true now. Nonetheless, it is a worthwhile read if one is inclined.
,,, an emerging market in particles? Whoa! Got one in your size.
Were you not suggesting that there is some "Greater" logic outside what science knows through measurable natural law.
We don't live in the 5th dimension...we live in this one.
So what ever discoveries we have must be explained by the mathematics or science of where we are now.
No, but because there is only one kind of electrical charge, any other charged particles can simply be treated as a heavy kind of electron. The calculation is otherwise the same.
Or has a similar calculation been done for all virtual particles?
For the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces, yes. That, for example, is what makes the muon g-2 experiment so sensitive a test of new physics: any new particle that hasn't been accounted for will change the experimental value at some level of sensitivity. As that sensitivity gets pushed to finer and finer levels, new physics gets discovered (or excluded, as the case may be).
2 Timothy 3:7
Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
No, it's not. Most people don't know any math above arithmetic. And Plato is dead. Math has evolved over the ages.
Prior to t=0 the Laws of Physics were already firmly in place?
Quite clear, but ... really! Just stick the whole string in a quote!?? Talk about your cheap gimmicks!
Of course, my original example is worse. I was simply writing a sentence, noted that it contained a couple of awkward repeats, and was getting ready to recast the whole thing to get rid of them ...
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