Toda persona que afirme que la relatividad, la mecánica cuántica o la física de partículas son “obviamente” falsas, que proponga teorías “clásicas” que las sustituyan basadas en imágenes “intuitivas” más o menos ingeniosas, utilice o no matemáticas en sus descripciones, puede y debe ser calificado de quack, crackpot, crank, … o sus equivalentes en español.

¿Es tu caso? Puedes hacer varias cosas. Una, puedes calcularte tu “crackpot index” siguiendo el test de John Baez. Aunque muchos crackpots consideran que es una idiotez hacerlo. Como alternativa puedes aplicarte el test de quacks de Warren Siegel, al que ya le dedicamos una entrada en este blog (Cuá, cuá, cuá, …, para quienes prefieren pensar o soñar a trabajar o estudiar (o Siegel’s “are you a quack?”), Publicado por emulenews en Febrero 22, 2008).

Claro, me dirás, cómo voy a perder el tiempo haciendo dichos tests, prefiero dedicarme a hacer sudokus. Sin embargo, otros sí que se han atrevido a pasar los tests, por ejemplo, “A Discussion with a PhD Physicist Professor,” presenta la discusión entre el autor del Modelo Físico del Éter, que explica toda la realidad física conocida en la actualidad, según el autor, claro. El autor pasa el test de quacks de Warren y discute con Warren al respecto. Muy curiosas las respuestas de Warren (obviamente está en inglés). Os extraigo un trocito para que veáis de qué va: [Author] ”I’m not asking for a Nobel prize, I’m asking for the scientific community to carefully consider my theory and test its validity.” Su teoría numerológica (por llamarla de alguna manera) ”predice” 5 dígitos del momento magnético del electrón. [Warren] “The point is that 5 digits is nowhere near as good as 9. (…) As I said, no one will spend their time when you are still so far behind QED. QED agrees with experiment, yours doesn’t.“

Por cierto, si alguien quiere criticar a Warren, le facilitaré la vida, basta con que se lea su artículo Kiyoung Lee, Warren Siegel, “Simpler Superstring Scattering,” JHEP 0606:046: 2006 [ArXiv preprint gratis] donde es clave la suma “1-2+3-4+5-6+… = 1/4.” Curioso, pero así de sorprendentes son las técnicas de regularización infrarroja en teoría de supercuerdas. Fuera bromas, el artículo es bastante interesante.

Todo esto me recuerda al libro, que recomiendo, ”Voodoo science: the road from foolishness to fraud,” de Robert L. Park, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Sobre estos temas también me veo obligado a recomendar la refrescante lectura del artículo técnico de Justin Kruger y David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77: 1121-1134, 1999 (versión de acceso gratuito), del que extraigo parte del resumen.

“People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. This overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.”

Esta entrada está dedicada a MiGUi por su comentario “Me asombra tu magnanimidad. Dedicarle un artículo a alguien que spamea y no dejarlo por los suelos xD.”

A Simple game of UNO Stacko can become extremely complicated when there are 3 Engineers from the School of Environmental and Civil Engineering.

Here we were, a group of 7 girls.

3 Engineers, 3 Accountants and 1 Political Scientist.

The game started out fine.

Then as the stacked-up blocks were becoming unsteady, Engineering jargon was spewed.

One Engineer said, “Watch the foundation, its getting very unsteady”.

Another contributed with, “If you are gonna take that block out, its gonna be unstable”.

The third one suggested that the fan, an external element be shut off cos it was affecting the stability of the Stacko.

But seriously, i was more interested in making the stacko fall noisily. I thought that was the fun element in the game. So due to my utmost desire to curtail the playing time, i was banned from touching the UNO Stacko unnecessarily. Furthermore i was instructed by the Gurus of structures on which block i could take out in order to keep Newton’s law of gravity at bay.

I am sure if it was given a while more, steel reinforcements would have secured our Stacko.

Richard Feynman was a great American physicist.  Who wrote books on Quantum mechanics and a personal idol of mine ( for making quantum mechanics seem so easy). Explains my view on the world, and his , and countless others’ , who believe that asking questions is the best way to find out answers.

The periodic Table of Videos
Sixty Symbols: Videos about the symbols of physics theory and astronomy

These days, it only takes a little curiosity, access to the Internet, and a bit of patience to find explanations of progressive spatial dimensions or examples of four dimensional geometry, such as the old favorite the hyper-square. Some of the things you will find use analogies like Flatland, or animations which is a way of using time and motion to reveal a higher dimensional object using a lower dimensional cross section — the advantage of this kind of intersection or interface is the ability to scan through what is too dense to actually see through. In this way, we can emulate the ability to observe, say, the details of the internal structure of a three dimensional body in a manner similar to seeing it directly from the fourth dimension. Of course, we did not have to wait for the invention of magnetic resonance imaging to be able to perceive the insides of our bodies; our sense of touch gives us the closest thing to a physically four-dimensional perception. Our kinesthetic or spatial sense is annexed to our visual perception to give us an integrated sense of physical reality. In addition, we supplement our active field of vision with the memory of what we have previously seen, and studies on perception have revealed that we often rely more on our visual memory than our active sight in familiar settings. This ability to fill in the blanks around us is one that we can use to “see” into higher dimensions.

In the mind, it is possible to construct things in four or more dimensions, but that does not tell us if there are any objects in the universe that are constructed in four or more dimensions. Taking the example I gave of eight-dimensional time-space, we could surmise that the universe has height, width and depth in a kind of cellular structure in which every moment in time exists in strands of continuity along branches of probability in a network of possibility where multiple event paths lead to and away from any give moment. The instant is where-ever you happen to be focused on eternity. Time-travel would be non-paradoxical because time itself would be process based, a product of attention. The event you experience would largely be determined by the state of mind you are in as you approach the moment, so causal time would probably be the norm; that is the path of least resistance. The real challenge to time travel would be presented by the body and its influence on attention. As a three-dimensional spatial construct, the body predisposes us to move through time as a byproduct of moving through space. To arrive at a specific point in space and time, without transiting the intermediary space and time, would break the perceived continuity of events unless one could perceive space four dimensionally–in which case the intervening space was bypassed in an instant of time. The mind can conceive of four-dimensions internally, but the real question is, how would you move the body through a fourth-dimension externally?

A question like this is a question about matter as it relates to space. Among the things physicists know, matter occupies very little space and is distinguishable from energy only by structure. Attempts to understand the structure of matter has led to the identification of elemental atoms, primary particles and fundamental quarks; the last taking us down into the realm of quantum mechanics. In the process of getting down to the quantum level, physics theory has also run into fundamental forces, the electric and magnetic forces, gravity, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. These are all things that can be observed or inferred to exist based upon experimental observation, and for all that is known about them, there is much that is still not understood. The one aspect of matter that has captured my interest most often is the characteristic of mass and its association with gravity. A particle with mass is infinitesimally small and produces (or focuses) a force that has infinite range (though the strength of the effect diminishes over distance in a known, inverse-square ratio). Unlike electric and magnetic forces which are polarized, or both attract and repel, gravity seems only to attract and does so in a “like to like” fashion.

The “dent in space” model of gravity gets me thinking, as anyone who read my post on Gravity in a distributed, process driven, information-based Universe could tell. Einstein gave us the equation summarizing the relationship between matter and energy, but by itself, the equation does not explain what is really happening when energy is concentrated into mass. We have to ask, what is happening to the energy, and part of the answer lies in understanding how a point of mass is focused into a stable object and why that deforms the space around it. The answer is further complicated by the specific structure and electromagnetic properties of a given particle. Particle physics theory is a whole field of study unto itself, and if the great minds devoted to it will pardon me, outside the complexities that might be explored, the simple observation is that structure holds the answer. Energy is concentrated and structured into a more complex and dynamic state in which we find a focal point in three-dimensional reference and forces that produce one-dimensional (polarity), two-dimensional (surface tension, surface area), three-dimensional (height, width, depth) and four-dimensional (mass, gravity, inertia, vector) effects. There is so much going on, all of it debatable, but I always come back to the four-dimensional view of matter.

I would have to have a great deal of time and a decent amount of resources to formulate something more substantial from this speculation. I am sure there is a great deal more information available that could affect the assumptions I have about pervasive energy, pervasive space, particular matter in infinitesimal space, concentrated energy, mass, structure, gravity, spatial displacement, fields, force, electron shells, magnetic shells, and light. I have the interest and the fascination to keep probing and a desire for more reliable speculation, but until I find an opportunity to devote myself to it, I can only work with the insights I have now. The implication of four-dimensional structure in matter, or the idea of atoms as four-dimensional objects, does not make our world any less a three-dimensional environment. That is, matter may only be possible at the three-dimensional surface of a four-dimensional substrate of energy and space. There are particles that seem to spontaneously pop in and out of existence, if some of the reading I’ve done on particle and quantum physics theory is correct, and that might be an indication of structure transecting our three-dimensional “plane” but most atoms seem to be pretty well stitched into place.

I am not as confident in speculating on how energy and structure “bind” but that is what I see as a likely basis for fundamental forces. The forces seem difficult to understand or explain, but part of that is because the concept presents us with an inherent mental block. A concept allows us to hold onto an idea about an observed phenomenon, but in the act of grasping an aspect of reality in that way, we focus on the effect and become unable to see the cause. Stepping back and looking again, we might be able to see that what we call a force is simply a particular way the balance of energy in a structured system must behave to achieve stability. Seeing that way, we can begin to ask what imposes structure and how does it persist either as part of or apart from energy. The question brings me back to a notion I had about the nature of limits and how that impacted the perception of substance and solidity. If matter is mostly empty space, what keeps things from constantly falling through each other? The substance of matter is not in the mass, but in the repulsive forces of the electron shells of atoms. The thing that makes the world seem solid to our touch is the existence of forces associated with particles that prevent them from actually touching.

There is a great deal more needed in a comprehensive analysis of matter, but this is enough to return to the question of moving a body through four-dimensional space. A common observation is that an infinite number of objects of a given dimension can exist in an object of the dimension above it, being in effect an image of itself, but it would take the action of an entity acting in the higher dimension to manipulate or move the object through that hyper-space. In my example of a person attempting to jump from one position in space-time to another position in space-time without transiting the intervening space, either an outside agent would have to be involved, native to the higher dimensions, or the person would have to be constructed in four- to eight-dimensions to begin with. Not really a problem for the mind, assuming the mind is not exclusively internal to the body. The hard part, for a mind rooted in a physical body in a world such as ours would be figuring out that it did exist in more dimensions and that this enabled it to move through space and time in ways that transcend the physical limits of the body. No tool or technology grounded in the physical world would be of much use in discovering or exploiting this fact. Not that you could not discover it by accident if the mind should happen to wander; though you would have a hard time distinguishing random moments scattered over infinite probability from dreaming.

Some laughed, some cried … I recalled a passage from the Baghavad Gita:  I have become death, the destroyer of worlds …

This is the oft quoted (though I am praphrasing since I don’t have access to the actual quote) entry from Robert Oppenheimer’s journal on the day he witnessed the first nuclear explosion in the desert of New Mexico.  Our species collective inquiries into physics theory and science have revelaed many marvels, many of which led to positive advances.  The nuclear weapon has always had that special asterisk in history … it very well ended up saving lives by bringing WWII to a quicker end, but this was a creation that we have had to live with.

Today I visited Minuteman Missile National Historic Site.  It is relativevly new on the National Parks register.  After treaties ended the use of the Minuteman II missile, one command bunker and one silo were saved from implosion to serve as a historic education site.

Sadly, I was too late to register for the tour, and thus did not get to visit the bunker and go down to the launch room.  I did, however, get to drive the 15 miles back the way I came to the silo.  It is a few hundred yards off of I-90 at the end of a dirt road.  The silo itself was surrounded by a chain link and barbed wire fence, but from even a close distance would have seemed innocuous to any observor.  The 20 megaton thermonuclear warhead that used to reside there had the equivalent energy of nearly one-half the entire explosive force of the Second World War.

There was a very nice ranger there who answered many questions and told many stories (he wsa a retired USAF officer who had been stationed at nearby Ellsworth AFB during the 1970s and 1980s.  What in fact looked like an easy to invade space was protected by fairly sophisticated technology … ranging from ground sensors to motion sensors.  as he explained it, military police could respond to any silo in less than 15 minutes, though most of the alarms were cattle along the fence, jackrabbits, and in one case, several camels that had escaped from a live renactment of the Passion.  As amazing as the sheer destructive energy that used to be there (South Dakota ranked behind only the USSR and the rest of the US at one time in terms of nuclear forces), was the 90 ton steel and concrete door which covered the silo.  Partially retracted today to see down into the silo, it was designed to be completely blown up and away (on rails) of the silo (several meters) in the event of a launch.

The ranger gave me a lot of info on the missile system that finally triggered several “aha” moments as I was able to put together some history and some physics theory to explain how parts of the later Cold War had played out.  That was a cool moment.

The rest of teh drive was (sadly) quite boring.  Eastern South Dakota is not nearly as good looking as the west.  Far southern Minnesota looks exactly like central Illinois.

Home tomorrow …

What does art have to do with science? Just about everything. The art of fireworks is no exception. Fireworks get their color from chemistry. physics theory plays an important role too.

Fortunately, you don’t need to be a scientist to appreciate fireworks. I took the pictures below at my friend Terri’s annual Fourth of July celebration that ends with a trek to her town park to see a beautiful fireworks show.

Here are 20 facts about fireworks you probably didn’t know.

Sorry, sorry, i spent the last few days doing my economic assignment (so O_o). So finishing off my last post here are the pics from Transformers 2 Revenge of The Fallen as promised.

What made the movie worth watching…

And now Isabel Lucas.

Note how the hot girl is holding an astronomy textbook in order to appeal to the nerds.

I can’t find the other Isabel Lucas photo online yet, i will posd when i do.

On another note i’m gonna get my physics theory research task back tommorow…I’ve been dreading getting it back ever since i found out that the average mark was 18/25. Also apparantly poo^#%$ is using a retarted, gay and nonsensicle marking scheme, where marks were deducted for writing outside the line!! Like who the hell decided that for a 25 mark question we had to write a fact sheet and we only get 2 pages to write it on?! Judgeing my other people’s marks today, i won’t expect too much tommorow (i wrote half a page from border to border).

This Sucks.