wow, this thread went to hell pretty quick...


I really want to argue this, really I do... Actually argue isn't the word for it, I really want to pull you head out of the sand, hit you in the face with a big kipper, scream obscenities at you and then place your head back in the sand where it has quite clearly been for most of your life.

How can you compare the sudden existence of a singularity in the form of a super massive point like particle to the sudden existence of a 13 billion year old universe with trillions upon trillions ... of particles all perfectly arranged into atoms, molecules, elements, people, planets, stars, nebula and galaxies??? Well it totally, and I mean totally, violates the uncertainty principle, but hey you probably don't care about that.

You must be talking about a divine being that is all knowing and all powerful...yawn...read the book, went to the sermons, didn't think much of them.

But hey, I'm not one to judge, if you want the universe to have started on July 6, 1987 you go for it son :neckbeard:, some people even like to think the universe is only 10,000 years old, whats a few thousand years between friends?? Others like to think the universe is as old as we scientists think it is but the Earth is ever so special and is only a few thousand years old.

Round and round the wheel goes, where it stops nobody knows, as it's all based off one book you'd think people might be able to agree, alas no, they each even think the other is wrong, it's not opinion, it's fact they say, I press the back button and move on.

I like banging my head against a brick wall but after a while it gets old and I have a tendency to pass out.

anyways...

Martyn pointed out that a particle and it's anti-particle "wink" into existence all the time from energy and annihilate again, sometimes leaving something behind in the form of matter (matter-antimatter asymmetry) and sometimes going back to pure energy.

The pre-universe could well have been a "sea" of energy that coalesced (talking about one heck of a quantum/wave-particle duality effect here) to form a pair of super (and I mean super) massive particles which annihilated. This could have well have gone on and on, but there would be no meaning of time in this existence and all evidence of it would disappear with each cycle.

But once, just once, the small CP asymmetry we see in matter-antimatter collisions would cause a piece (the "original") of matter to be left over with a good chunk of energy surrounding it and hey presto, the first "big bang", the beginning of the cycle.

That's a theory I've just made up now, it's awesome.

(I've also totally ignored the "where does the "sea" of energy come from" question, I go back to my previous post, it just is)

I'm going to bed now, I have a meeting tomorrow where no doubt the oh so important topic of how much to cut off the silicon tracker (SCT) test box will come up again...for the past 3 weeks we have probably spent nearly 3hrs in total talking about how much to cut off a box...I mean, come on!!! it's a frigging box!!! I also know I will wake up with a hangover after going out tonight...good times a coming...:downswords:

The good ole W and Z bosons.

Quantum physics is like a scientist E-Peen contest
"My theory has 11 demensions!"
"WELL MINE HAS 21!"

I think this thread alone is proof that humans are stupid. Or at least are capable of unsurmountable stupidity. Some humans, anyway. That is, you guys. I have so many issues here, I'll respond only to the most vaguely coherent.



In principle, you could go out and collect a load of experimentalists and take them to a field and shout OBSERVE and have them collect all the data they can possibly get and take all this data to the theorists and shout EXPLAIN and the theorists will sift through all the data and come up with a theory that explains that.
Sure, maybe in Psychology or something this sort of approach might work where the 'evidence' lies in surveys and you have to interpret this data.

In Physics, this never happens. In Physics departments there is always jovial banter between the theorists and the experimentalists (it was once suggested that we ought to redecorate our physics department and paint some nice equations on the walls, but the experimentalists were afraid the theorists would just end up using the walls and ceilings as a huge blackboard) and historically there has always been dispute as to which is the most 'important' or 'fundamental' to science, the experiment or the theory. This is an interesting philosophical discussion (in the 19th century, the British generally favoured empiricism while Europeans favoured the mathematics), but it is obvious to both that science progresses by both theory and experiment.

It is easy for the layperson to understand evidence that we 'see' or by taking measurments. It is less easy to understand evidence that is obtained mathematically.

The very fact that you include the 'play with math until numbers work' step proves how you (and the general population) have such a gross misunderstanding of how theoretical physics works. You have a vague memory of doing arithmetic at school and assume that 'complicated' mathematics is just the same, but more! I really wish it were. I'm in the last year of my Theoretical Physics degree, and it's been such a long time since I've even used numbers. Plugging numbers into an equation is so easy they don't even ask us to do it anymore.

In theoretical physics, you work within a theoretical framework and your work is judged upon that. You'll start from some sort of assumption. In my most recent project, we take the Schrodinger equation as a given so you could call that our 'assumption'. You can work backwards and see how the Schrodinger equation is derived, what assumptions are made and how to derive those assumptions etc. These sort of steps are all in any standard Physics textbook, so we don't bother repeating them and the really fundamental assumptions are usually very simple geometrical statements.
So anyway, I take some situation (a particle in some potential, say) and first of all I look for some obvious simplifications (some sort of symmetry in the potential, maybe).
This is the art of theoretical physics, to try and find some symmetry in the problem which will hint at how you should proceed, what mathematical objects you should be using and the such. Despite the rigor and logic you employ when working through the mathematics, often times you just get a 'gut instinct' of how to proceed at every step and you just go with it. (Our theory class was fairly small, so we'd always be working through a problem on the board sort of like House does his differential diagnosis, we'd suggest different sort of approaches and our crazy Russian lecturer would shout back why that approach would be absurd, unnecessarily difficult, or just plain wrong. eventually we'd get there!)

But at every major step of the calculation, you have to stop and work out whether your answer is physical. Even the best theorists make mistakes in their algebra, so checking is essential and finding mistakes is another art in itself. You have to make sure your calculation doesn't violate conservation laws, doesn't exceed boundary conditions, and all sort. Sometimes you will have to make approximations to solve an equation, and this will sometimes limit the scope of the answer (perturbation theory is something we use all the time, I hate it).

As long as you do all of this, and you clearly state the assumptions and approximations (which themselves will be fairly obvious within the calculation), there cannot be any argument against your result. In physics, a radical theoretical result is much more respect than a radical experimental result. In experiment, anomalies and mistakes will occur and radical experimental results will be very difficult to reproduce. A radical theoretical result with mathemtical proof cannot have 'anomalies' (mathematics is intrinsically perfect), and a radical result will prove fundementally new physics.

The most famous example of this is Relativity. Einstein discovered fundamentally new physics, using remarkably simple mathematics. Obviously all of this was an entirely theoretical framework, based upon various very nice and easily accessible thought experiments (much cheaper than real experiments!) and proved through beautifully simple mathematics. When you study it, your first question is always why did no-one think of this before?. Such simple mathematics results in completely new concepts. Einstein was hailed as a genius and became a celebrity face of physics, long before 'experimental verification' was even remotely possible. In fact, the experimental verification of time dilation was little more than a triviality because the mathematical proof was so simple and the assumptions behind Special Relativity are almost self-evident.

The reason I take such issue with your outright dismissal of theory (and others', in a fairly arrogant oh it's just a theory! manner) is because theory leads experiment. Theorists tell the experimentalists where to look and what to look for. The LHC is designed specifically to investigate certain things, not just to smash things together and 'see what happens!'.

Even if the LHC does discover something radical and new, they will be very tentative about making a conclusive statement. They will really have to wait for independent verification (some other accelerator colliding the same particles at the same energies giving the same results), which will be quite a long time. In fact, the LHC will run for months just collecting data and then it will take months to analyse the data. It may be over a year before any sort of result is found at all. It's of course very exciting, but it's a lot more complicated than just timing the swings of a pendulum (or whatever lab monkeys do these days, it's been a long time since i've set foot in a lab).



I can solve nonlinear differential equations. How is that going to cure AIDS?



To work out what is going to happen to the Universe, we need to know what has happened to it before.

The thing that this 'Big Bounce' model (in the original URL) proposes is that the Universe didn't begin as a zero-dimensional point source, but rather as an extremely tumultuous quantum foam. It uses well established concepts in Quantum Field Theory (the same concepts particle physicists use all the time), combined with something called 'Loop Quantum Gravity'. I'm not going to lie to you, I don't know anything about LQP beyond the wikipedia article you can all read as well. It's well beyond the scope of anything I've done, but I do understand that there is it considered much more seriously than String Theory.

I may backtrack over much of what I've said when it comes to String Theory, because personally I really don't like String Theory. For various fairly complicated reasons, but also because it does suggest that theorists are happy to accept 'unphysical' and 'untestable' models (which we're not). String Theory is still taught in some American universities because it involves a lot of complicated mathematics that is useful in other areas, but for all serious theorists string theory is dead.

On an unrelated note, you guys might be interested that my Masters project is on Topological Quantum Computing. Read on it on wikipedia, it's fascinating.



**** you.

This thread is epic.

Mort-hog, you are my hero for that last post combined with that last line.

That's basically what I said except all mathy and brain-hurty.

So you're annoyed that scientists aren't bringing religion into their research and that physicists aren't working on "cancer and AIDS and stuff"?
I can imagine your perfect world.

Scientist 1: "Damn ever since Emperor Sarn forced us onto these medical problems I've had a hard time figuring out how to stop cancer using my knowledge in an obscure area of group theory"

Scientist 2: "**** it dude, why bother? God did it!"

He's sarcastic

1. No I'm annoyed that people can sit around and get paid to come up with bull****, unprovable theories and have it be some kind of "huge breakthrough" when quite frankly, there's enough evidence for this as there is for anything else, and the bottom line is at one point the universe didn't exist. Then suddenly it did. Who cares how?

2. I never even said "God did it." The article itself suggested that this was the realm of philosophy and religion and that the scientists were infringing on it. Don't get mad at me.

1) Finding out how the universe works has lead us to quarks. We now have a quantum processor, and it's quickly gaining strength. If we can perfect a stable, fast quantum processor, it will be LOADS better than anything we have now (think a supercomputer on a chip).

2) It's also helped with things like gravity, relativity (helping us with space travel, satellites, the TV you watch, the radio you listen to, everything communication-based is done via satellite and is probably only really possible because of the work done with relativity and gravity).

3) It's also helped us create things like MRI's, X-Rays, and other various high-tech medical instruments which help diagnose problems.

You look on way too small of a scale, and are way too ignorant of the subject to be commenting on anything in this thread. And I do say that in the nicest way possible.

But really what's the difference? If we're talking about the spontaneous leaping into existence of space time out of nothing (which you admit to being impossible to comprehend), why couldn't it have started at some arbitrary "developed" point. We don't have any other experience that indicate it wouldn't. We just have our experience with this universe whose laws may or may not be consistent. All of science presupposes that the universe is reasonable. Who's to day that that's the case? We have only one data point (our experience with our universe) with which to extrapolate. This isn't a physics question, this is a philosophical question.



Why would either of those matter out side of the philosophical implications? The point isn't that it's a waste of time, the point was that it just isn't really as impressive an achievement as aging and understanding of the way the world around us works so that we can manipulate it to our own ends. Especially when you consider that those theories have to come from that understanding.

also...

ha.. you think time travel would be beneficial to the human race? If the universe is going to end, then I predict that we'll cause it with time travel. There. Now those scientists can start working on curing cancer and AIDS and stuff.

Umm.. I know. Thanks.

Umm.. actually yeah. It all boils down to math anyway. They could probably have studied something different in school, and be just as good biochemists as they are physicists.

I'm in the process of joining the Navy. Until then, I work for T-Mobile as a corporate sales rep.

Oops.. too late.
Umm... "stuff" is a pretty big category. I think I'm safe... You on the other hand...

I agree. What's wrong with you?

Dude, you're bordering on tiberium_empire levels of retarded with that post.

Do you honestly believe a scientist who has spent his entire life working on fancy numbers is going to be at all useful when forced to work in medicine?

Its getting a lawyer to work as a mechanic.

He's using "curing AIDS" as a euphemism for "anything useful". Mathematicians are VERY useful.

Sarn, everyone has the right to live, but people also have the right to live their own lives the way they want. They are in no way obligated to help others.

Oddly enough, mathematics and physics have made tremendous contributions to modern medicine. Do you have any idea the number of lives that physics has saved? The entire field of medical imaging is thanks to our understanding of physics. X-rays, CT, MRI and PET scans would all be impossible without a great understanding of the physical world.

If Alan Turing had been a biologist, computers wouldn't have been invented, nor would the many modern medical techniques and devices that rely upon them. All areas of science benefit humanity. All of them. Do you have any idea how many fields have become crucial to our everyday lives that were once thought useless?

I don't know if research like this will be useful. Maybe it will provide foresight into physics that will one day be useful. I'm sure people mocked Wilhelm Röntgen and Marie Curie for investigating radiation. I mean, hah, alpha particles, what the **** are those? It's not like they are used for CT scans to say, find the cancer in a patient, and then used again to remove the cancer!! Hahaha, totally ****ing useless!

omg.. are you guys really taking me seriously? I thought if I layed it on extra thick in the 2nd post you'd GET IT.

jeez.

Back peddling.

you're right. it's a conspiracy.

A retarded one.

Wow, a coward, too. You'll be great in the Navy.

But he's totally against docking submarines in his port.

I hear thats what the Navy is really about.

Err

It's more like forcing a lawyer to work as an ibanker or something...

As in, a (pure) scientist shares at least some skill sets as or potential to be a doctor, and the relative amount of time + effort required for one to become a doctor > that of mechanic in most cases.

I suck plums at Chemistry. My pure maths isn't brilliant. I didn't *really* have the knack for biology.

I do however excel at mechanics, material physics (to the extent to which I need to understand it), engineering practice, problem solving and common sense.

I would make a TERRIBLE doctor, but I could build one a sexy, sexy office.

Mort-Hog, I totally respect theorists don't get me wrong, I did my far share of purely theoretically courses at university and beyond, I've just never liked pure theory.

My "playing with numbers until it works" comes from my experience of how the higgs mechanism was derived and I was never truly happy with the explanation I was given, I wasn't alone in the class in this feeling. In fact my whole experience with Group theory was a bad one, the lecturer was just....bah. I've tried by myself to read through textbooks on the subject and papers dealing with the higgs, but even now, I have this lingering impression that the higgs is no more than a fudge to make things work yet we have 100's of people working on it at CERN and probably the same amount working to dis-prove it....

Most of my experience with theory classes, quantum mechanics, relativity, most of the standard model, have been good, if not excellent.

Also taking Einstein's deriving of special relativity is always a favourite of theorists for their methods, from first principles it just such a nice, make that great, piece of maths that isn't all that complicated, just hard to get your head round the result and some of the initial premises. The actual maths isn't all that hard, even for a 1st year university student.

Not gonna argue about the pros and cons of theory over experimental approach and over who leads who, true the LHC was built to observe some current theoretical predictions, but both ATLAS and CMS were built on the understanding that we are going to delve into totally new areas of physics, areas where the current theories are at best only considered "guess work". Sure when we find something that doesn't fit in the standard model, or any of the other models we have been given, (like MSSM) we'll hand the data over to the theorists and then let them deal with.

Also we can prove new theory's and the existence of new particles at the LHC, we have 2 totally separate and distinct experiments, ATLAS and CMS. They may be running on the same beam but are different in so many design and operation ways that if they both detect something, it's there.

Do you purposefully say really stupid stuff?

wow.

the only appropriate response to this would be bannable.

Of course humans are stupid, Josef Mengele was never brought to justice.

... oh, this thread is about science! Well, what about them pineapples.

you already called me retarded. you might as well finish it.

duh, it was god silly

It's just incredibly naive to think that scientists are only trying "to come up with a theory about the creation of the universe that doesn't involve God".

Yeah Sarn, you've got them all figured out. Those evil scientists are only trying to debunk your god. It's all they do. Of course it is. Holy ****...

ha, wow. cause that's exactly what i said.

You don't have to say something to imply it.

So what DID you say? That math is useless?

oh jeez. so now it's ok to agrue against something you supposedly believe the other person "implied" rather than against what they actually said?

Since when?

ROB, YOU'RE AN IDIOT BECAUSE YOU THINK THAT TURTLES CAN TRAVEL BACKWARDS THROUGH TIME! I KNOW YOU DIDN'T SAY IT, BUT I GOT THAT "IMPLICATION" FROM YOUR POSTS, SO I'M GONNA CALL YOU AN IDIOT.

[and kirbs. again no. All I said was that theories about the creation of the universe are ultimately a waste of time, because we're *never* gonna prove anything. And I "implied" that this new theory is no more provable, and no less scientifically "outrageous" than the theory that God created the universe.]

Sarn you're a moron because that rant implied implied that your sense of reality is severely stunted.

Also. You're an idiot. Dr. Dino LAWL.

Wow.. you're right. this makes arguing so much easier.

Rob, stop implying that Dr. Dino likes fish sticks! We all know that he only like CHICKEN STRIPS. Moron.

also, stop using using words twice twice in a row row to pad your your posts so they seem seem longer. i'm lazy lazy and don't like like to read that that much.

I agree though. Sarn im not exactly sure what you're implying. The sarcasm really isnt helping advance whatever point you're trying to make.

ok.. I'll clear things up by quoting.. MYSELF.


There's no sarcasm. and I think it's pretty straight forward.