What are you doing right now?

[EndOfTheEarth]

Besides posting on here and replying to this thread. Original credit for this goes back to Fate and Nathan on MX.

[Contradiction]

I'm stalking people.

 

Just kidding. I haven't done that in a while, actually. 

I'm drawing a coat of arms for western civ, and I happen to have 22 Chrome tabs up, one of which is this site. Which I come back to check periodically.

[Contradiction]

All this coat of arms is teaching me is that I can draw a fairly decent owl, but fuck me if I try to draw a cat.

[Xuut]

I always have tabs which always include this site.

No idea why, just do.

[Nighthawk]

Ditto. I have about fifteen tabs open on Chrome and I left my computer on for the last few days. I never close this site. >.>

[Tally]

Wasn't able to write anything today. >.< Slept in until noon, my mom forced me to go shopping with her (on the plus side I got four new pairs of jeans, as all of my old ones decided to tear in the same week), then I was at my friend Sean's Bar Mitzvah from 4:30 to now.

That was very fun, however. And I slow danced with the guy I like, who happens to be Sean. :D

[EndOfTheEarth]

Despite that, you're still beating me with regards to word count.

[Tally]

XD In fairness, I'm in 8th/9th grade classes, which are probably considerably easier and less time-consuming than yours.

[Omega]

Things that make 'meega happy:

 

- An update on a fic I've been following for at least 2 years - She only updates every couple of months - I think there was one in April and one in July. Sooo, happiness!

[Fake Fang]

So, a really famous CERN Quantum Physics guy came to lecture at my school.

 

I didn't go.

Maybe they'll figure out a way to solve all the problems of the universe through the study of Quantum Physics. If so, good for them. But if I'm not going to enjoy it, I'm not going to study up on something that I can't understand or that won't affect me in life if I have a choice in the matter, and I'm not going to go into a profession that full of people with wishful thinking and unbased optimism.

 

Also, science nerds at my school? Just because we don't understand it doesn't make it random. That is literally our modern day equivalent of saying that just because we don't understand lightning, the thunder god's must be drunk/upset/both. Maybe there is such a thing as randomness in the universe, and maybe we can eventually prove that. But you lot are idiots for jumping to the, "random," conclusion simply because a bunch of idiots who know only slightly more about it than you do say it's so. They used to think that dice were random, you know? And for all they knew, they were right.

 

But they weren't.

 

Again, I'll admit it as a possibility, but we don't understand gravity, so how do you expect to understand quantum fucking physics?

[EndOfTheEarth]

The science nerds at your school didn't give you the whole story. Quantum physics is NOT random, but it is probable. So, for instance, a dice will always land on one of its six sides, and you can mess with the odds by weighing the dice, or adding more sides, but the end result is still probability related.

 

You have a point though, and I assure you, you are not the first person to bring it up.

 

EndOf's short history of the Unified Field Problem

This element of probability pissed off the people who worked with macro and relativistic physics (namely, Al. Einstein) because they couldn't see how something could be probability related and not fixed, and so tried to explain it by shrinking their physics down to a micro scale--it didn't work, everything broke down. In response, the quantum physicists tried to prove that they were correct by expanding micro physics to a macro scale--it didn't work either, everything broke down.

This problem has been haunting physicists since the 1940s, because they keep getting to this point where if they go in the other's direction, their physics breaks down, but their physics perfectly explains everything above/below it. This breakdown is why science had yet to provide a "unified field theory" or equation that explains everything. It is also why scientists can't explain why the Big Bang happened, because it involves both types of physics working simultaneously in that gray area.

And gravity is arguably  quantum-quantum physics, which is why we have those CERN people there at all--to determine if the Higgs Boson exists and give us a better fix on what the hell exactly mass "Is". Because mass seems to affect both things on a quantum and relativistic level, any explanation on how it works would bring us closer to rectifying one theory or the other and getting that UFF.

And why does this affect you?

The entire sci-fi universe of the game "Mass Effect" is based on this principle. Once this little bit of science is figured out, humanity will go through a tech revolution unheard of since full Victorian utilization of the steam engine--your luggage will weigh nothing, you'll be able to travel from New York to Sydney in the blink of an eye, and your retirement home will not be in Florida, but in a giant biodome on the moon...all because we've been able to mess with the reletivistic and micro mass of objects.

[Fake Fang]

To the best of my knowledge, a dice roll isn't random, it's just incredibly difficult to predict due to all of the data involved--hence why flipping a coin at a certain height at a certain speed will always, if you practice it enough, give you the same result. Unless you were using the die thing as an analogy...

 

But anyways, I believe in causality, not probability--at least, for now. I don't see the logic in assuming that just because we don't understand how every single micro-particle affects every other single micro-particle, it means that we can blame, instead of our relatively poorly controlled environments, "randumdidit," every time we attempt to reproduce an experiment with quantum involved and get different results.

 

In summary, we don't understand how this stuff works. Sure, we might get sci-fi esque results if/when we do, but we can't just make baseless assumptions that are pretty much excuses to not look into things further.

 

And yeah, maybe we'll be able to teleport, and produce anti-gravity, and all that jazz. And I guess it could be worth the money.

I'm just not going to go into a field in the hopes that people keep funding something that's getting no results because I hope it'll produce results.

[EndOfTheEarth]

An ideal dice roll is random, which is why it's used as an example. So yes, it's an analogy.

 

So you're a reletivistic physicist. Most people are.

But my point again is that the results aren't random. So say there's a quantum effect with 1/6 probability in each slot. Each time you run the experiment, the results will always be one of six answers, and will not deviate from those six. Hence, again, the dice analogy--it's probable, not random. This is regardless of experimental environment; you can run the same experiment a thousand times in the same environment (and these scientists usually do) and still get the same six answers.

To quote Michael Crichton (the guy behind Jurassic Park) on quantum physics, "If you're a bit confused, then that means that you're probably getting it."

 

Many people forget what "Science" is. The goal of science is not to explain "how" stuff works, it is only to build an answering structure to explain what something will do, hence why every scientific hypothesis is prhased

"If______ then______"

not

"______ because________"

This is why I laugh at people who say that something is "Magic" instead of "science", as so as long as it follows and If-Then pattern and can be plotted on a graph, it's still science. Strange as it may seem, "If Magwich shouts 'Abra Kadabra' then he will spray fire from his nose," if you can demonstrate it, it's science.

Discoveries, as you know them, are not science, they're disocveires. The science is not in the "what is that?" but the "If that thing messes with that thing, what will it do?" So the reason that people at CERN are ripping atoms apart is because they're hoping to stumble upon something to mess with.

So "Newton discovered gravity" is false.

"Newton showed that if X then Y, and called this equation 'gravity'." is true.

At that point, invention is applied science. "If X then Y, and if Q then M, and if E then A, then why not put it together and go to the moon?"

 

So in quantum physics, it is not "Particles do this because..."

Rather it is "If Particle A does B then C, D, E, F, or G will happen."

 

So again, applied science is invention or, more specifically, Engineering. There's tons of money in people saying "I want to do Y" and you saying back at them, "Then you need to do X". Almost every service job on the planet is like this, except Engineers are paid so much because X happens to look something like this:

v =

v + v0

=

(v0 + aΔt) + v0

=

2v0 + aΔt

= v0 + ½aΔt

 

And most people don't have the patience or intelignece for that. And before you claim that that's just high school algebra, you're correct, most people don't have the patience or inteligence for high school algebra.

 

The risky field is experimental physics, like what they're doing at CERN. In short, they're using earlier physics in hopes of dong something silly that will give them a new item to play with; if building a giant particle accelerator that spans two countries looks odd, overcompensating, and desperate, you're 100% right, because that's what happens when we're waiting for some discovery to interpret.