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<p>instead of making up crap, do science and show that it’s the opposite. yeah, as ive said previously, it’ll take a while . . .</p>
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<p>yeah. this is how the real line works. i get it. is this how real life works?</p>
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<p>let me think about this. im going 2 bed.</p>
<p>Yes, it’s how real life works. Even when you delve into the HUP and quantum mechanics, there is nothing suggesting that spacetime is somehow discrete (although there ARE certain elements of “discreteness” with respect to “quantum foam” and Planck length it isn’t of the nature you are thinking of).</p>
<p>LegendofMax putting on a clinic. Bravo.</p>
<p>Are there aliens in heaven? This is an honest question. Do religious people who believe in an afterlife where there are non-humans in heaven? </p>
<p>Or what about primitive humans? At what point of the evolutionary stage are you still allowed to get into heaven? And if you do, do you rapidly evolve into homo sapiens? If yes, then do we rapidly evolve into some super evolutionary version of homo sapiens as well, since evolution is continuous?</p>
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<p>Then why does it take so many years to get a Ph.D.? Why are there age minimums for certain political positions?</p>
<p>The fact is, old people have had more time to experience and learn. While age does not always equate to intelligence, most of the “experts” in any field are far beyond their college-aged years. This includes both liberal and conservative politicians alike. This was the foundation of my original post.</p>
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<p>Great rebuttal… not. I was not necessarily talking about political ideology, I was mainly referring to knowledge and choice of action. These are often tied hand-in-hand with political ideology, so that may be hard for your to wrap your mind around. Not to mention my reference of the “older” generation was not exclusively people of age 50+…</p>
<p>gstein: </p>
<p>Although wisdom may take time, we can’t assume that everyone who has taken the time is automatically wise. That’s all zinc is saying.</p>
<p>While plenty of older individuals have more experience, there is certainly a lot of traditionalist thought that may be deleterious or inherently hindering to progression of certain socially-beneficial concepts or human rights in general. A prime example being gay marriage. It’s really, really, really hard to come up with any good arguments against it in today’s day and age without simply resorting to an underlying impetus that is soaked in bigotry/hatred/ignorance.</p>
<p>I generally don’t like to use the words “liberal” and “conservative,” but I do think it’s generally a good idea to be adjustable and dynamic to the times. You can still be dynamic while also pushing society in a direction that yields utility gains, which is, at the end of the day, what we all want.</p>
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<p>I think we can observe these numbers while counting things and then calculating ratios, (example: one out of nine apples is rotten) but yeah, if we are observing something like a current, a length, a time, then yeah, we probably can’t certainly say that we measured 1/9th of an ampere. or whatever.</p>
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<p>I don’t know what HUP or planck length or quantum foam are.</p>
<p>Yes, in QM, both the wavefunction of a particle in a system and the potential V it experiences are modelled as continuous, real-valued functions. However, this is done so that you can do calculus with these quantities. There is no measurement confirming that the wavefunction psi (you can’t even measure psi!), and V are actually real valued and continuous because that measurement would be impossible. </p>
<p>Have you taken a science class? I have (upper div. QM, a couple of E&M classes, & right now i am taking a class in solid state physics). I think you’ll find when you actually study these subjects you’ll find that these scientific theories often employ abstractions that are impossible to strictly verify. </p>
<p>Even worse, they often employ ideas that, while they give answers that are pretty good, are strictly, according to the theory, physically impossible! I give you two examples:</p>
<p>1) the plane wave in electromagnetism. this object transfers infinite power from place to place and is infinite in spatial extent. It does, however, propagate in one particular direction, and doing math with this object is not so bad. Real fields, ones that aren’t infinite in extent, in a homogenous medium (another physically impossible abstraction!) can be thought of as sum of these plane waves propagating in different directions. </p>
<p>For example, when you study how short-wavelength light reflects off of a crystal (because it is such short wavelength, it can reveal information about how the atoms in the crystal are arranged), you use this plane wave concept to describe the light incident and the light that bounced off of the crystal. </p>
<p>2) the particle with definite momentum in quantum mechanics. this particle, would, roughtly, need to be anywhere within an infinite space with an equal probability density. This is obviously absurd, and impossible for us to verify. Particles in QM need to have a spread in momentum, so that they aren’t distributed across the entire (infinite?) universe with equal prob. </p>
<p>For example, when you want to design a scanning tunneling microscope, this abstraction is used to describe how electrons can ‘jump’ from the surface of your sample to the microscope probe.</p>
<p>There is a TON of symbolic stuff that gets involved with scientific theories that, while they allow you to get good answers, aren’t able to be observed in any way, and as such, can’t be verified to be ‘real’.</p>
<p>You’re still misunderstanding infinity. Yes, the plane wave operates with properties of infinite energy, but that is only because the nature of that abstraction requires an infinite upper bound in order for the math to be precise. A single planewave with a finite amplitude is nonsensical due to the fact that it requires infinite energy (much like how “dx” by itself, representing an infinitesimal change in x, doesn’t mean much on its own – only the properties with which you are describing), but you can use infinitely many planes to describe finite concepts which DO give us infinitely precise, accurate, physically-possible results in our real world. Again, look into cardinality.</p>
<p>I feel like you’re basically saying, “Well, we can never measure anything with 100% certainty and so we can’t prove that infinite precision exists.” You seem to think that the only way you can measure items is to think in terms of discrete units, however small. Fact of the matter is that, even if we find some subcategory from QM, there’s no proof yet that spacetime is discrete (QM does NOT imply this).</p>
<p>At any rate, it’s another assumption: “I don’t believe irrational numbers exist because of the imperfections of our measurement capabilities.” You don’t know one way or the other for ANYTHING with 100% certainty if you want to play that way, but so far, our math works. </p>
<p>A counterexample would be Newtonian physics pre-QM. They give accurate results but it depends on scope. Once you get to the very large, the very small, and the very fast, you need more precise mathematics/equations. The point, though, is that there is no proof so far that there is some sort of limit to our precision unless you start cracking down on the Planck length. This debate is nothing new – Hawking himself said that there’s no reason to abandon the spacetime continuum in favor of a discrete one, when the former has worked so well for everything – QM included. Discrete spacetime is really only debatable when we start talking gravity. But for everything else, the continuous model reigns supreme. </p>
<p>Again, like God, it <em>MAY BE TRUE</em> that spacetime is discrete, but why assume it to be true/believe in something that grinds against the massive influx of opposing evidence until the facts are in?</p>
<p>It just makes no real sense to say “This one bit of information has yet to be disproven, so I will randomly believe in that because I don’t trust all this other evidence which COULD be false.” Why do that? If you want to test that one bit of iota of currently-unproven information, that’s what science is for.</p>
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<p>The upper div QM classes mentioned nothing about the Planck length or the concept of “quantum foam” or even the widely-used acronym HUP for the uncertainty principle?</p>
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<p>no it didn’t mention planck length or quantum foam. it did talk about the uncertainty principle though. i just didn’t recognize that acronym. studying a subject in school isn’t like reading popular science books. different concepts are emphasized.</p>
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<p>I know what the cardinality of a set is. I don’t know why it helps your point that we can somehow verify that physical quantities are like the reals, an uncountably infinite set.</p>
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<p>Yeah. You need to be able to do this to conclude that you can see irrational numbers in real life. Otherwise, those numbers are only living in the realm of abstractions . . .</p>
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<p>There’s no evidence that it is a continuous quantity either. You were the one asserting that. You need to show how it happens in real life. Being a part of a theory isn’t good enough. As I said in the previous post, just because it is an object in a scientific theory, doesn’t mean that it is something we can verify, or even worse, something that could be physically possible according to the theory. There are convenient things to believe and even convenient fictions in these theories.</p>
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<p>it’s a convenient thing to believe in, but there’s no real evidence that it actually exists. just because currently we can measure lengths in the angstroms doesn’t mean that we will be able to measure lengths arbitrarily small. you aren’t doing science when you say with any certainty that ‘all physical quantities’ are continuous. That’s a very strong claim.</p>
<p>Okay, so for a moment let’s accept this. If you can’t tell one way or the other with certainty, what makes you believe in one over the other?</p>
<p>It usually ends up being: you pick whatever one you like the most. You seem to really like the idea that we can observe the real numbers!</p>
<p>In fact, this is how reasoning starts. You don’t use reason to establish why you want to get from A to B. It only is a tool that lets you do that.</p>
<p>Silence_Kit said:</p>
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<p>In other words, self-interest.</p>
<p>It always makes me laugh when religious people claim they are being selfless and humble when compared to egotistical and nihilistic atheists. </p>
<p>But like Silence_Kit said, in the presence of two uncertainties, why pick god? </p>
<p>Because you want to believe that you’re special and that you’re going to live forever.</p>
<p>Exceptionalism in the universe, as well as immortality? That’s about as self-important as you can get.</p>
<p>I really don’t have a problem with people believing whatever they want in order to remain happy. But certainly don’t pretend that your belief which mainly stems from your inability to accept death and insignificance somehow elevates you above the non-believers. And certainly don’t use the completely arbitrary, random rituals and stories that you use to address those existential fears hold science or society back in the public sphere.</p>
<p>while we’re on this tangent, please explain how you can change the state of the particle by measuring it. like how does the particle know it’s being measured? if an animal looked at the particle would it have the same effect?</p>
<p>Well, even if, somehow, spacetime was “discrete,” it has not been proven yet. So far, everything is <em>consistent</em> with the assumption that spacetime is continuous. Even Planck Lengths are, as of this moment, theoretical minimum-lengths (which are considerably smaller than even quarks – we’re talking like 10^(-35) meters versus 10^(-15) meters, which is like comparing your computer desk to the thickness of the Milky Way gas disc [thousands of light-years thick]). Even so, we haven’t really been able to tear into that sort of magnitude just yet. It’s an unknown – and so far, just a problem of observation.</p>
<p>Either way, the point is that you may be correct “that we’ll never know for sure,” but this can be said of anything. Everything we ever claim as “true” is only “true” within the scope of what we know. We can never claim anything more than that about something unless we control 100% of the parameters inherent to its scope.</p>
<p>That being said, it doesn’t make sense to say that one explanation is more correct than the other simply because “we like it more.” The very nature of infinity implies that no matter how far down we go, we’ll always have more that we could measure. But since science, on both the extremely large and extremely small scales, works just fine with continuous mathematics, things act, as far as we know today, <em>as if everything WERE really continuous.</em></p>
<p>Only until we hit a wall where we really, really can’t operate using continuous mathematics would we bother considering to look into the discrete side. The only problems that arise crop up in what’s called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), and I use the word “problems” lightly. Typically smooth, continuous manifolds are used to describe space under LQG and the calculus works out just fine – even at such small levels, you do not necessarily run into problems that require discrete operations. It’s still represented in a continuous way. As a result of some problems pertaining to what we can observe on a quantum level, it does result in a discrete solution set. </p>
<p>This is why it’s called a sort of “quantum foam” – a “choppiness” down at the Planck level. It still isn’t technically discrete like pixels on a computer screen may be “discrete.” The discrete nature only crops up in quantum observables AFTER the continuous quantum geometric states have been structured (directly contrary to what you have been proposing). </p>
<p>No matter how far down you go (thus far), you never run into a wall where you find that spacetime is somehow composed of “Planck blocks” or little clumps – it’s continuous despite the inherent uncertainty in the geometry. Spacetime isn’t composed of countable items. The manifolds we establish (which are continuous) allow us to see the effects of the actions on the space/manifold local to the entity/operator we’re considering – which may have values in the form of a discrete SPECTRUM (consider the hydrogen atom and its discrete energy levels as an analogy). The discrete nature of that spectrum is local to the operator, NOT to spacetime itself.</p>
<p>Very common misunderstanding of what it means to say something is “discrete.”</p>
<p>Either way, so far everything is in line with the nature of continuity. There’s no reason to assume that irrational numbers don’t exist because things might be composed of “discrete” blocks at some sub-Planck scale. The evidence is NOT there. However, every bit of evidence thus far shows that irrational numbers exist and that we can use them even if we cannot measure them with 100% observable certainty.</p>
<p>My whole point about science – about numbers – about God – is that there’s no reason to assume a baseless possibility as truth when we can rely on the known… on what works. If you want to test the possibility, there are all sorts of methods for doing so. If you want to challenge the known, then challenge it. But to invoke one arbitrary belief over another adds no new information when nothing is being contradicted. Of course, many people take this to a much greater extent of absurdity by invoking God in areas that DO contradict all sorts of things (such as those who believe the world is only 6,000 years old or that evolution is a lie and so on).</p>
<p>And that’s why college students are so liberal.</p>
<p>Yeah this baby got derailed pretty hard.</p>
<p>They are liberal because they are smart.</p>
<p>Unless they are rich, have rich parents, or deluded by God ie a religious fundy.</p>
<p>Then they are conservative.</p>
<p>And delmonico— you’ve proved yourself an idiot several times in this thread.</p>
<p>Don’t worry about me — I’m just sitting here, laughing, laughing, knowing that you will simply rot in the ground with the worms when you die, no matter what you delusions you have.</p>
<p>The only thing I regret is that you won’t ever realize it – there will be no “look on your face” moment where you realize you are wrong, because your brain will simply be turned off and dead. Have a nice life.</p>
<p>aight, the work-load’s back on and im gonna have to leave the thread. But some last words: </p>
<p>@peter_parker: classic. you couldnt answer what ive said, simply said “ill rot in the groud”. one day, im confident, ull find urself. You clearly were brought up or simply have a very strong predilection which is getting in the way of ur thinking, but the fact that ur giving the topic so much thought on the first place means ull prob end up coming to the reality, and opening up your mind a little. and although ur personality is disgusting, i wish u luck in finding out the truth. </p>
<p>@itachirumon: it’s been fun. and yes, i did make mistakes with certain terms in that last post, ill admit it’s my bad, nonetheless though the content and princcipals of what i was saying still stand strong. Good luck with ur roadkill and gay life.</p>
<p>^and good luck to you being a complete jack***, it’s really a flattering look, no, really.</p>
<p>How did this devolve into a ****ing contest? For a while, this thread was a good read.</p>
<p>And the **** is supposed to be a synonym for urinating. I don’t know why it’s censored. :(</p>
<p>You should probably stop bumping it then.</p>