Documentary Night: Order And Disorder With Jim AI-Khalili

Yet another amazing documentary with Jim Al Khalili. Why don't these ever make it to the US? Come on Discovery!

How Small Is The Universe?

BBC Horizon has rather hit the skids recently. The quality of the show is abysmal. So it's a pleasant surprise when an episode manages to be both entertaining and informative, while not having the pandering crap evinced in episodes like "The Truth About Looking Young," which was unwatchable.

Only Time

I'm going to post one of my more "out there" ideas.

First, some points. There's a growing feeling in the world of science that the world is the way the world is because we are built to perceive it that way.

Many people know that colors don't actually exist, only light waves of particular frequencies. Our eyes detect those light waves which are then translated into the abstract experience of "color."

Old philosophers had a terribly hard time explaining these subjective experiences and would frequently refer to them as secondary, or subservient qualities. Primary qualities were those that could be measured across observers, such as height, weight, and perhaps speed. These were supposedly objective.

I'm beginning to think that existence itself is not objective. Everything right down to our very perceptions is an objective experience that tells us little about the actual workings of the universe.

Kant argued that meta-physicists try to reach beyond what humans can know, which results in chaos in inquiry. Perhaps the reason why current physics can't explain some things is because the nature of reality is imperceptible.

Physicists have a tendency to say that what we see is not truth, but mathematics is. What are mathematics but discreet measurements. What is one? What is five? You can spend your time in theoretical math, but it must eventually leave that and become part of the "real" world. It must be testable. And where did the very first numbers come from? I argue they came from having one, or two, or three apples. Numbers were born of perceptions and are forever tied to those roots.

Psychology has a primary tenet, that our perceptions are fundamentally disconnected from reality by multiple steps.

I think time is disconnected from our perception by multiple steps. What is time? It is things moving forward. I argue that there is no time, only position. Discreet, unmoving position. Position becomes time when two things interact. Then, two more things perhaps farther apart interact. This could be two theoretical particles in a detector, or the light hitting our eyes. Time appears to move forward because our very perceptual construction is based on impact.

In reality, the only position we are aware of is that collision. Namely, the collision of an event with our senses. Be it light, smell, taste, or touch. The combined multitude of these collisions gives us the illusion of things moving, much like a movie is not movement, it is multiple discreet moments combining to give the impression of movement through time.

Discworld

Here's something I've thought about quite a bit, and I've never had a chance to pose it to any theoretical physicists I come across.

What would happen if you had a disc, say, 10 million miles across, and you spun it. The further out you go, the faster the disc travels, so what happens at the point where the spin speed would exceed the speed of light?

Would the atoms merely separate? I assume the consistency of the disc would have to be broken in some way.

Any thoughts, oh internet?

Set Pasers to Stun.

We're so close! If we add just one letter we'll get a phaser! While paser sounds cool, too, phaser is far cooler. Because, let's face it, the phaser is way nicer than the Star Wars blasters. You never saw a blaster actually incinerate anyone, did you? No. No you didn't.

Particle Acceleration by Stimulated Emission of Radiation -- PASER for Short (Via AIP.org)

I Can Feel It! It's Pulling Me Down!

I've been phutzing around with physics, recently. The thing consuming all my time is problem of "knowing" where a particle is and the resulting decay of interference. Still, because of the all the press coverage it gets, I work on gravity, and the resulting references to dark energy and matter.

This adds an interesting perspective on the problem. What if all of gravitational theory was wrong? If that's the case, I'm giving it up. I don't have the time nor the knowledge to actually go back and re-work GRAVITY. Regardless, whether it proves correct or not, it's very Einsteinian in its approach. Einstein didn't take aything for granted, well, at least early on, and these guys aren't, either. Bravo, I say.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter – The Results of Flawed Physics? (Via Pysorg.com)