Kenosha Kid

Also see the hypothetical inflaton field, which has a constant energy despite expanding... EDIT... in a metastable state, and may do in its ground sta...

Hey, if Hooke's law gets to be a law, thermodynamics is a cert! Btw , I recall a paper Hawking gave on how multiverses _restore_ the second law, solvi...

QFT is valid for flat space-time only. There's no general, relativistic quantum theory, so nothing to say what happens to vacuum energy as the univers...

That's not really the way it works. The values we have are based in large part on the qualities we evolved. Answering questions about what we'd be if ...

Anything to back that up, or just sticking with the "probably a thing will happen"? Anyway, if you were immortal, you'd never have evolved a dopamine ...

But what value would each experience have if we were likely to experience everything an infinite number of times? Experiences are precious only if the...

oops! I misspoke. I have corrected my post.

It can, it's called scattering. Basically the shorter the wavelength, the higher the probability of scattering.

And what is a neutrino famous for? Not interacting with matter. :smile: Which frequencies of light a material can absorb depend on the properties of t...

I don't think any physicist or neurologist or psychologist believe that our thoughts are random electrical signals (if that's any reassurance). In fac...

Not a clue, sorry. Event-related optical signal (EROS) scanning measure activity at the neuron level. Might be a good place to start. Problem is, most...

Hi Enrique. It's an inverse square law. Take for example a pulse that spreads out spherically (you can extend to multiple pulses by summation or a con...

I'll just add this to the (very long) list of Mad Fool threads derailed by his own insecurities. Like I said, the historical picture you painted wasn'...

You're not using reason. You've presented a historical inaccuracy. I was just pointing it out. If something didn't happen, there's nothing reasonable ...

Nope No offense but I'll take Einstein over yourself as an authority on relativity :D My previous post treats this.

It's a terminological problem. No one acts without cause: I am free to write this post however I choose, or to not write it, but I have a sufficient s...

Hi Fool. I'm not going to get into the physics so much, more the history. But one thing to mentally separate is a particular cosmological model from t...

Well the classical limit ensures that, for the most part, material properties of large many-particle systems themselves are well defined. This doesn't...

It was performed ages ago using crystals to diffract the electrons, and more recently in a way more similar to how the experiment is actually describe...

Please remember this is the internet. For all you know, I'm just frantically Googling my way through my own bullshit. And Prishon certainly is, don't ...

And where do you feel I diverged?

:up:

You should have paused to understand it en route. At least you'd have been exposed to more than the position operator. Unless you're suggesting you ca...

That's not the wavefunction. The wavefunction is a probability amplitude. The Wigner function is a probability field. You lose information going from ...

Then the wavefunction doesn't merely encode position, but also momentum. In fact, the wavefunction encodes any property for which you can construct a ...

Honestly the first thought that came into my head when you @ed me was, "I think this guy's gonna be a waste of time." Unfortunately the second thought...

I'm not going to reply to each of your daft comments, but as a physicist I guess I'm obliged to treat this. What you've just said is equivalent to "On...

Entropy is a function of the number of possible messages. Information is still afaik the content of those messages, i.e. the values of the degrees of ...

It's quippy, but it's wrong as Pop pointed out. The wavefunction is the total information about a system, that's what I had in mind.

Yes. As I said above, entropy is the _number_ of microstates available to explore. The actual microstate occupied by a system would be the totality of...

Not something I've heard said, but I guess any microstate is a unique collection of information. If that microstate has a probability of p, then the p...

:rofl: Exactly!

Ha! I don't think we're even inclined toward it as a society. If we were, sure. Things like this can be little nudges or sudden paradigm shifts. In th...

Sorry Andrew, I missed your post. I'll have a re-read when I get a mo, but iirc the friend records that a measurement had taken place but remains unen...

Mmm. Hence "You never notice what I'm wearing" being a common complaint of wives and girlfriends. People tend to know people much like themselves: I p...

I have been known to try to influence the youngest towards slightly higher aspirations, although his real dad is trying to make an anti-vax conspiracy...

You know _I'm_ not gay, right? ;) Very occasionally the way someone is dressed will knock me off my socks, but no, generally it's face, particularly e...

How did that work out for them in the end? :wink: The options aren't my spawn or no one though: if there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that by the tim...

I have to admit, I went from really looking forward to fatherhood to totally going off it, pretty much on this basis. I find it hard to rationalise ho...

As someone whose job it was to calculate exact solutions to the many-body wave equation for simple, symmetric systems, I can tell you that is not true...

Do you find that such women are generally creative in other ways, like writing fiction or playing saxophone? Because otherwise that's rather a bootstr...

:rofl: Sorry :rofl: :up:

I don't think that can be right. The cost-of-egg+birthing v cost-of-sperm disparity is common across almost all mammals: the fetishization of the fema...

Nor was I. My example was: which was more about self-image generally. Yeah, I got this from your last post, but I'm intrigued -- and there's no reason...

Agreed, but not uncommonly bad. The kind of hate and violence we both despise has a strong (I'd argue dominant) culturally-propagated aspect. I'm not ...

Thanks K. I'm probably not best placed to understand that: as my partner was saying just this morning, it's taken me decades just to start running a c...

You got from your inability to follow your own argument to me being a Trump supporter?! As I said, a one-person race to the bottom.

I made no claim; I expressed an interest in someone else's point of view. You weren't particularly on my radar before but I find you replying to all o...

That's about as random and pointless as you're training me to expect. You're a one-person race to the bottom.

I've nothing particularly against it, but I'm just wary of the instinct to reach for an old book when societal problems occur. As I said, I'm aligned ...