 sj |
||
|
||
What DO Physicists Think About?
|
|
|
Subject: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Amos Date: 01 Mar 01 - 09:16 PM What Physicists Think About?Regards,
8 levels of harmony and 8 concepts of Complex SystemsAbstract A set of general physical principles is proposed as the structural ba-To understand complex phenomena [1] we suggest to detalize the concepts of harmony and re ection [2]. 1. Harmony. Considering Random Energy Model (REM)[3] in physics , swan neck as a If there is a hierarchy in a system and it is possible to dene the essence for each of its levels (a word, a number or a sign), there is a harmony, if they coincide. For the case of reflection one can define a harmonic reflection when the essence of reflected reality coincides with the essence of reflection. Every deep truth has several faces and any interesting physical system allows different ways of solution-REM, Hydrogen atom, 2d Ising model.... Such situation was essential for evolution [5],[6], d=1 barrier in strings also be- longs to this case [7],[2]. 6. Modalities.R.S.Ingarden,A. Kossakowski,M. Ohya introduced [8] modalities as "possible non- categorical attitudes to reality". From this point of view space, potential energy, classical entropy, classical information, quantum entropy and informa- tion are steps of the hierarchical staircase. I add to this list the number of replicas . Perhaps there are some harmonic situations here: "golden section", two replicas as multicritical point in generalization of [9]... One can distinguish dierent modalities by the level of complexity, so it will be reasonable to expect, the more is complex the system, the higher it should climb on the modality staircase. 7.Principle of purity.It is connected with the points 2. and 5., but it is something more. The sur- vival of system (vital energy!) is connected with the degree in which system 1•can reveal almost opposite pure properties. This property is crucial for human, without it any serious harmony is impossible. It will be interesting to dene it on quantitative level for other complex systems. Here it could be connected with conservation or circulation of some free energy among the hierarchy levels and while losing this property system becomes dissipate. 8.Principle of minimal reflections.This principle explicitly works in ethics (nobody likes words "not","but" and likes modesty) and economics (too much stocks create crush). The rest is at http://arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0102510. Enjoy!! Amos |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Joe Offer Date: 01 Mar 01 - 09:37 PM Isn't that the science class where you get to play with Slinky toys? -Joe Offer- |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Sorcha Date: 01 Mar 01 - 09:50 PM And invite "guest fiddlers" to come in and play tunes while the students watch the waves on the O-scope!! Got paid for that one! |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST Date: 01 Mar 01 - 10:27 PM So what real problems has it solved?. Theories and classification schemes are a dime a dozen, but the proof of the pudding remains in the eating. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Bill D Date: 01 Mar 01 - 10:38 PM "guests" are a nickle a dozen,,,,, |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: JenEllen Date: 01 Mar 01 - 10:56 PM Thanks ever so much...Very Timely! |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Bev and Jerry Date: 01 Mar 01 - 11:32 PM We were just thinking the very same thing. My, what a coincidence. Bev and Jerry |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Amos Date: 01 Mar 01 - 11:53 PM I've always believed in my heart that the structure of the universe was really scads and scads of beauty and truth just packed in too tight. This guy finally seems to have figured it out!!! A. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST Date: 02 Mar 01 - 12:24 AM Bil D. this nickel a dozen guest is a Ph. D. physicist. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Amos Date: 02 Mar 01 - 12:46 AM Gee, Guest, it takes a lot of guts to defend a thesis in physics. I would not have imagined such fortitude from someone who logged in anonymously. But I am glad you're here because I need good physics guidance from time to time. As to the answer to your question, it remains to be seen what good such a classification scheme might or might not be. I assumed the paper was a peer-reviewed work. The real test, I expect, is whether such a scheme can reveal or predict hitherto unnoticed phenomena. Regards, A |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: wysiwyg Date: 02 Mar 01 - 01:24 AM Oh Amos, you HAVE been listening!!! That number 5-- perfect! It's the and/and thinking in a very large nutshell! ~S~ |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,paul dirac Date: 02 Mar 01 - 01:29 AM I am reminded of John Bell's theory when I hear the sweet harmonies of the Presley brothers up here in heaven. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Wolfgang Date: 02 Mar 01 - 04:34 AM If you've enjoyed the paper above you'll surely also enjoy this article. On a more serious note, I am completely unable to tell whether what this physicist has to say has any value or not. Only peers have a chance to judge that. The history of physics is full with peer reviewed ideas or experiments which later turned out to have no value. So what. Future will tell. However, I#d be surprised if we'd hear again of this particular idea. I have always been amazed how eagerly concepts from physics which have a clear meaning in a particular context (energy, force, harmony,...) have been used e.g in a New Age context as if these concepts meant anything remotely similar to what non-physicists mean when they use these words. Wolfgang |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Gervase Date: 02 Mar 01 - 04:55 AM I've always loved the apparent interplay between physics and metaphysics. I remember being touched when particle physicists working on the nature of quarks concluded that there were more ways needed to describe them than simple positive and negative charges, and therefore came up with the attributes of charm, truth and beauty. And it's amazing how many novellists and story-writers have fallen in love with Werner Heisenberg - his uncertainty theory, along with Schrodinger's moggy, have kept people like Stoppard in jam sandwiches for ages. But, as for the original question - "What DO physicists think about?", I'm afraid in my experience it's usually beer, fantasy role-playing games and unattainable women. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST Date: 02 Mar 01 - 04:55 AM With nearly 30 years experience in that publish or perish environment I came up my estimate that of the new theories, classifications, and promising new techniques, about 15% survived their first 5 years. Cold fusion, polywater, the Raman spin flip laser, water dimers, and several others didn't last that long. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Pete Peterson at work Date: 02 Mar 01 - 09:18 AM What I admire about the polywater controversy is it was Deryagin himself who did some of the critical experiments proving himself wrong. . . he did great work before and after this and was, as Feynman says one should be, his own worst critic. Note that Fleischman and Pons (cold fusin) did the exact opposite. Amos, nothing I found mousing around (in a short time) led me to believe that this was peer-reviewed; I agree with you that I didn't see any testable consequences set forth. I find myself quoting Mr. Scott all the time: "Captain! Ya canna' break the laws of physics!" |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Lady McMoo Date: 02 Mar 01 - 09:22 AM I'm mostly with Gervase on this one. Don't know about role playing games but, bearing in mind the physicists I know, beer definitely and unattainable members of the opposite sex certainly (there are also female physicists!). These attributes are, however, even more highly developed in biologists! mcmoo |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Bill D Date: 02 Mar 01 - 11:10 AM " this nickel a dozen guest is a Ph. D. physicist. " ...then sign in as one..call yourself Schrödenger, or Heisenberg...or John the Baptist...but for the duration of the thread be someone, if you don't feel like being yourself. I'm not trying to get your address & phone#, I just hate blank voices from the air. If we met in person, I could have a face to talk to, but sometimes we get 2 or 3 'guests' in one thread, and it is maddening having a discussion with graffiti on a wall. (Seems like I am on some sort of crusade, huh? Maybe so..) |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: wysiwyg Date: 02 Mar 01 - 11:16 AM Hi Bill! (Wasn't me.) ~S~ |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Gray Rooster Date: 02 Mar 01 - 01:01 PM Would the guest who introduced this thread please ID himself firmly? Please tell us your line of speciality. I was in the thick of the theory during the attempt to slow down light back in the early 90's - also one of the first to propose a method for doing same (way back). |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Gray Rooster Date: 02 Mar 01 - 01:12 PM Pardon my fingers - the guest who introduced himself as GUEST in this thread. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Bill D Date: 02 Mar 01 - 03:02 PM I have suspicions about Mr "guest"..*smile*..but I still wish we had a name....ANY name |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Nonblack Hole Date: 02 Mar 01 - 04:09 PM Satisfied now Bill D? |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Nonblack Hole Date: 02 Mar 01 - 04:29 PM I should probably state for those not in the math or the phyical sciences that describing accurately in words is practically impossble. They don't think in terms of words. It's in 3D mental pictures and equations that the thinking is done. modlity, harmony and such have no real meaning until you have the picture and equations that define precisely their valid ranges. a priori those words can mean just about anything, and no two people will interpret them exactly the same.P>. I suspect E. Wigner would be appalled at what's called symmetry now. His book on it was very difficult to read, and his lectures were worse, because he never lost that heavy German accent, and was his spoken English wasn't very good. I've found that spoken and written pieces, the same pieces, from the same person, are often expressed very differently. With written pieces you can go back over and over again until you're satisfied that you've got it as well as you can do it. Enough, I don't come to Mudcat for math and physics.
|
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Gray Rooster Date: 02 Mar 01 - 04:57 PM Actually, 99.9999 % of physics is easy to picture. On a very banal level, you see it all around you every day - lets not get picky about lost senses, please.
As for harmony and things musical, the physicist, to his credit and undoing sometimes, is trying to get to the math (read, THE BOTTOM, or THE WAY, or THE WHY or CAUSE AND EFFECT, or
All kinds of sound modeling can be done this way. Check out the new and next generation versions of amplifiers for guitars if you doubt this. The scientist gave the engineers more than just their ears to base the new modeling technology on.
About the remaining percentage: In some very serious scientific circles, it is now believed that a combining, synthesis or even basic understanding of the relationships between quantum and traditional theory in experiment will result in the erasure of life as we know it. I've read on it a bit and I see some valid points that do indeed point to a possible closure of everything we know if a successful measure is achieved.
Let's hope the MAD Scientists of the world really think about what they're doing in future.
As for the Mudcat physics: It is. Just a different point of perspective, thank God. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Bill D Date: 02 Mar 01 - 06:02 PM Nonblack hole will do very nicely...(let your little light shine!) |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: John Routledge Date: 02 Mar 01 - 06:39 PM I studied Pure Physics at Uni for three years. Now I know why 34 years later that I am delighted that I chose another career. Geordie(Non-Physically)Broon |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Nonblack Hole Date: 02 Mar 01 - 08:22 PM I overlooked that real celebrity we have above P. A. M. Dirac. Paul, do you still sleep through seminars? Or is it only ones like that crap Gray Rooster tried to feed us. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,pd Date: 02 Mar 01 - 09:18 PM Yes. I was awake for Wigner in 1934!*wink* |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Gray Rooster Date: 03 Mar 01 - 12:52 AM Dear Nonblack Hole, Why don't YOU try and feed me as well as the rest of us with your obviously incredible intellect instead of wasting it with sophomoric insults that have no mass or inertia? In other words, you are acting the imbicile. With your silly words, you maligned everyone here at the Mudcat - or were you too ignorant to realize the logic directly implied by my observations. Please re-read my thread notes and do so between the lines - you are in there. I do indeed hope you ponder your next exchange and use a wee bit more of your intellect. I'd hate to think you were really thrusting out at everyone here, not to mention the likes of the Steven Hawking's and Dirac's of the world, too name a couple of people who subscribe to things you haven't had time to learn or consider. Altogether, I'd suggest you fail to respond to this challenge, you will only make it worse for yourself. And that's a promise I can keep. Don't you just love Mudcat? |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Amos Date: 03 Mar 01 - 01:08 AM Well, that little Gray Rooster, yes, she got fire in her soul She got that -- uh huh! -- fire in her soul She gonna duke out high science With a Non-Black Hole! Deeteedee dumtedum... :>_) You guys are both very smart; let us not quibble or stoop to ad hominemities. But, Gray Rooster, can you give me some references from which I might learn what this "end of the world through harmonics" proposition is all about? Sure sounds like a long draw -- on the other hand I have read that Nikolai Tesla once threatened to cause an earthquake in the bedrock of Manhattan because he was reinforcing some harmonic or other with a timed pulse on a foundation pillar in his lab. Dunno if its apocryphal or not. Not the same thing. But look what happened to Galloping Gertie, the Tacoma Narrows bridge, due to reinforced oscillations. Hmm. Thanks for the sparks, folks! Enjoyed it. Regard, A |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST Date: 03 Mar 01 - 01:44 PM Prehaps Gray Rooster will show us his simple picture of a photon, demonstrating the properties we know about if from corpluscular, wave, and quantum electro-dynamics models. Picture please, too, the Heisenberg uncertaintly principle, and show how this becomes the reciprocal spreading of electronic circuitry (few electonics engineers know of this identity). Gray Rooter has identified the 'harmony' in the original posting with music, which is completely unwarranted. Music harmony itself is rather complex. In Juan Roederer's recent book "The Physic and Phsyco-Physics of Sound' is given a graph of an experimental determination of the limits of consonance between two notes (frequencies) and within 75% confidence limits any thing from a minor 3rd to major 5th is consonant. Applying it again between that second note and a new note we find the minimum for a three note chord as the diminished 5th, but the maximum puts the last note as 9/4 times the base note, so it's two octaves away from the base note. The diminished 7th involves the minimum separation for a 4 note chord. A 12TET scale, like from a piano gives a rotten approximation to a true diminished 7th. Once can come close to that last note (the 7th double flatted) with a 21 note just intonation scale, but to get it right on you need the whole 35 note just intonation scale, having all the double flats (and sharps). Now let's see if Gray Rooster knows anything worth while about the subject of physics. From what I've seen so far he seems to have a good command of the pseudo-science equivalent of psychobabble, but nothing more.
|
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Gray Rooster Date: 03 Mar 01 - 02:08 PM Amos, The "end of the universe as we know it" was pertaining to the combination of quantum and traditional theory tied together (or in other words to a unified theory, the Holy Grail of many). It seems there may be the chance of a tear in the fabric of the universe should someone stumble upon a way to unlock dimensionality. Please, I use fabric as a metaphor for convenience only. By the way, string theory grabs this very bull by the horns, Mr. Nonblack Hole. It suggests a temporal edge. Where HAVE you been? There are several dozen papers on the subject and I believe one or two popular editions that include the layman and scientific views. They aren't really that new. And I never said I subscribed to these views, only offered them as a point of reference for the remaining percentage (remember the 99.999?). Pure speculation does have a place in physics and the example I chose was only one of an incredible array of choices. On inspection of harmony, I do think a case could be made for the end of the universe if we suddenly found ourselves without it, but I don't want to open up another can of worms. Remember, there are many other harmonic forms, not just music (but again, I could make a case for everything being musical, couldn't you?). I suppose I could have been more mundane in that "last percentage" effort. I could have pointed to the RHIC finally "making" what appears to be quark-gluon plasma (the building blocks of protons and neutrons). Not that long ago, this wasn't even in the theoretical catalog. Today, it is commonplace to think we are able to erect structures available only in the first microseconds of the Big Bang. And I'm SURE Mr. Nonblack Hole subscribes or not to the BBT. This would at least gives us a common point of discussion. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Bruce O. Date: 03 Mar 01 - 06:00 PM What end of the universe? Recent publicized observations from the Hubble space telescope have shown the the universe is vastly bigger than previously thought. However, the speed of light is so low that much of it may have disappeared eons ago, and we'd just don't know it yet.
No answers to my questions, and not a single reference to any known expert in the field, (as already requested by Amos, and unanswered) so we know nothing about what Gray Rooster's terms might mean. It's in the academic journals, and at seminars and symposia that one finds the real meat, not in the pop magazines. Some science writers are pretty good at writing up a popular account, but that's not always the case. And a few scientists have done well, too (as in Scientific American), and Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov. The latter had been a physicist, but not a terribly good one, and found pop fiction to be his real forte, and knew how to make a lot sound scientific.
Every schoolkid can expound on black holes, but the precise modeling and it's solution are beyond me, so I only know the highlights and jargon of the pop pap.
As I pointed out with respect to music, harmony is advanced in practice, but remains extremely primative in theory, so we really don't have much theory of harmony in the field of music, let alone elsewhere.
I forgot to note in connection with Paul Dirac's note above that I've had his book on quantum mechanics for about 30 years, but have not as yet managed to get through much of it. The Hamiltonian (Hamilton was a real genius during his all too brief periods of sobriety) model for the harmonic oscillator (a simple model which has not been found in nature. Vander Pol did some good work or real oscillators in electonics, and one can treat quantum mechanical models of coupled systems of anharmonic oscillators reasonably well by perturbation theory or Wave Shaefer's contact transformation theory) and adaption it to the Scroedinger equation and the subseqent solution is the most short and elegant treatment of it I've ever seen, indeed, almost magical. And while we're at magical, my congratulations to Paul his return from the dead, but could you please give us a hint about how you acomplished that? I'm getting old, and haven't nearly completed all I want to do, so it is a matter of no small practical inportance to me. 4 books reported a similar occurance of a case about 1964 years ago, but these were written long after the event from hearsay, and their accounts are at some variance with each other, and all in all it seems a bit suspect. As to my credentials, you can find me in Who's Who in the East, and American Men of Science, but real worth is in Citation Abstracts, where reference to your work by others is noted. That tells you where you stand in the field. (Of course, some are there many times, because many others published papers proving their work was all wrong). I am also co-inventor of laser stark and laser Zeeman spectroscopy (the latter now called LMR- laser magnetic resonance spectoscopy) as reference to Science, 1972, and a US patent will show. (That was a little showpiece on the side, not my main work. Administration wanted some pop to make a splash before the public for budget reasons, and that was the best our paltry imaginations could come up with). I've got about 55 publications in academic journals. I didn't do as well as my English acquaintance Harry K. (a Steeleye Span addict). He got one of those Nobel thingies. (All the other Nobelies I knew were older than me and have all died, even G.H. last year. Everybody was using the theory in G.H.'s book for analysis of data, until I found it wouldn't fit my very good data, so I had to correct it. G. H. didn't much like it at first, but finally admitted that he had missed the boat. That's what makes a good scientist and great man, admitting your mistakes. Everybody makes them, some time or other. In that paper in Science above, nobody caught about the simplest possible mistake. Our theoretician's oversight ended up in our having the sign of the charge on the electron wrong, and nobody ever bothers to check on such simple-minded things.) Some errors are rather humorous. We did a paper where we were supposed to use only SI units, so reported our pressures in Pascals-Pa. The Journal's copy editor obviously had an electrical enginering background, because in the galley proofs we got back we found the pressures had been changed to pA - picoAmperes. I hit an extremely rare type of Coriolis interraction in the rotational structure of a degenerate fundamental vibration that I couldn't find that anyone had treated before, so I set up the Hamiltionian and next had to solve it. I decided to do both by perturbation theory and the contact transformation method. The multiplictive factors of physical constants and rotational constants were the same in both cases, but the factor involving the frequencies of the interracting vibrations came out differently. That was perplexing, and even more perplexing was when I put the numbers for the frequencies in I got out practically the same result (well within experimental error). There was no transformation that could turn one of the frequency expressions into the other. I still don't know which method is the more reliable. Perhaps this will fall into Gray Rooster's 99.9999% simple physics, and he will enlighten me.
|
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Bruce O. Date: 03 Mar 01 - 07:43 PM Whoops, that was supposed to have been signed Nonblack Hole, but since the cat is out of the bag, be it known that I am Dr. Wm. Bruce Olson, now retired from the Molecular Spcectroscopy Division, Institute of Basic Standards, National Bureau of Standards (now NIST, 3 miles away, where I am still in touch with former colleagues).
My dual specialty area was instrumention, the design and construction (optical and electronic) for the purpose of obtaining well calibrated high resolution infrared spectra, and the analysis of vibrational bands of symmetric and assymetric rotor spectra. Techniques were initially plane grating spectrometers, then tunable solid state and fixed frequency gaseous lasers, then Fourier transform spectrometers (the last I didn't design and build).
I never saw the first laser in operation, but about two months later Bell labs people brought theirs down to Princeton (where I was doing a post-doc under President Kenney's science advisor, whom I rarely saw, because he was in Washington) and gave us a demonstration.
From the time of my discovery of perturbation allowed transitions in symmetric top molecules about 1970 until my retirement I was #1 or close to it in symmetric top analysis worldwide. Good work on symmetric top spectra was at best 3 rotational constants when I entered the field. My data and analysis were good enough that I was the first to get a 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th rotational constant from symmetric top infrared spectra. The structure of hydrogen peroxide in the chemical reference handbooks is from my Ph. D. thesis project. I managed (for the first time) to get a moderately high resolution spectra of it. Previously published spectra had proved to be nothing but interference fringes from the absorption cell. I have worked on joint projects with visiting scientists from Novosibirsk to Tokyo- the long way around. Those fancy computer programs that model complex molecules and and make a 2D projection of a 3D model on a computer screen, so you can rotate it around and look at it from all angles, use the bond distances and angles determined by me and fellow infrared and microwave spectroscopists at NBS. X-Ray diffraction can't come close to the accuracy we can get for bond distances and angles. We occasionally worked with the time and frequency division at Boulder, Colorado (where 4 of them, all of whom I know, extended direct frequency measurments into the visible region of the spectrum) and on one visit there I got a personal tour and explaination of the workings of the cesium atomic clock that is the time standard for the US (They wouldn't let me touch it).
I left a spectroscopy conference at a resort near Loveland pass, Colordo, one Friday morning at about 10 AM, and made it back to open the open sing at WES in Washington, DC on time (8 PM). Although not an astronomer, I have taken data on Jim Brault's FTS spectrometer at the MacMath solar telescope observatory at Kitt Peak. You could see through the window into the next room the aproximately 10 inch diameter blinding image of the sun at the focus of the telescope, and several astronomers (with very dark glasses) carefully observing it.
The long path-low temperture absorption cell I designed and built for the FTS instrument at NIST is still in use. It allows up to 58 passes of the two meter base path with pressures up to 10 atmospheres and temperatures to -40 C. The unusually high number of passes is from the vanishing of astigmatism in a configuration I discovered with my 3D ray tracing program. Absolute absorption intensities of high accuracy for N2, O2 and H20 have been determined with it (N2 and O2 only absorb from pressured induced quadrupoles moments.)
What's your name and what are your credentials Gray Rooster? |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Bruce O. Date: 03 Mar 01 - 07:57 PM Just a little side note. In threads here on railroad songs you'll find mention of Norm Cohen's compendium 'The Long Steel Rail'. He published so much on folklore, 'Journal of American Folklore, etc.,) that folklorists thought he was one of them. I guess maybe he was, but he was also a worldclass researcher in chemical kinetics. (He's now retired from that, living near Portland, Oregon and working on a temendous bibliograph of American songbooks. Although I had known about him from kineticists at NBS (who knew nothing about his folklore interrests) I didn't meet him until after both of us had retired from science. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Tini Date: 03 Mar 01 - 09:01 PM as a light aside and backtracking a bit back to the thread name- I was just at a high school theater festival, where various schools presented plays, most of which were badly done. One play was an adaptation of Marlowe's "Faustus." In this version, Faustus was a woman scientist of unspecified disipline. But she soul her soul to the devil in exchainge for knowledge! Hopefully most physics aren't like that ;) |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Bruce O. Date: 03 Mar 01 - 09:24 PM Mary Shelly wasn't a scientist. Another aside: the publisher of the first edition of Marlow's 'Faustus' had a woodcut made up for the title page. He also published it on broadside ballads, where the printed matter was deleted. It was passed on to subsequent printers, and can be seen throughout the 17th century. A rival printer, c 1680, who didn't have access to it, commissioned a copy, but it wasn't terribly good and is easily spotted as an imitation. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Sluefoot Sue Date: 03 Mar 01 - 09:37 PM May I ask what are the practical applications of your discoveries, inventions, or patents, Dr. Olson? And what is that nonsense about reality being non-local? I ask with the utmost sincerty. Thanks, Sue |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST Date: 03 Mar 01 - 11:04 PM D-n, a long reply was wiped out when my internet connection broke. I said nothing about reality being non-local. Also people don't think alike, and one person's reality is often another's chaos. Serious thinkers have questioned on what side of the walls of an insane asylum the insane are to be found.
The Science article I noted was directed at determining concentration of common polutant of internal combustion exhaust. For other applications search the web for partition functions and planetary atmospheres. Also molecular modeling of pharmaceuticals (which I already came close to). |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Bruce O. Date: 03 Mar 01 - 11:13 PM Sorry about that trite 'one person's reality is often another's chaos'. Everyone who's ever give more than a casual glance at religion or politics already knows that. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Amos Date: 04 Mar 01 - 01:35 AM Bruce O: An impressive career and a welcome friend at the 'Cat! I hope you find it as enjoyable as we do; some of us come purely for the hsitories, some for the chatter, and some for some of each. But they are all bright minds and quick witted. Glad to make you ascquaintance. A |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Bruce O. Date: 04 Mar 01 - 04:09 AM I'm here for folk song and music, and have been since about the end of July 1997. You can find some histories on my website, which will soon be 3 years old. Also there a list of my scientific and a few folklore related publications. The last one's not in yet, but is a review requested by the editor of 'Folk Music Journal' of EFDSS of the Bodley Ballads website and Steve Roud's broadside ballad and folksong indexes. It's in the last issue (2000), which came out last December. If you search the forum for my name you'll find I've posted a few times previously. WBO in DT is me, but some credited to me are really from MS (Murray on Saltspring) Impressive carrer, well yes, I guess maybe, but exceptional, no. Good scientists are intelligent and highly motivated workers and very hard workers, and I know many that have had a lot more impressive carrers than mine. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Sluefoot Sue Date: 04 Mar 01 - 10:37 AM Dr. Olson, I didn't mean I thought you had said it. I was referring to the popular ideas evolving from Bell's Theorem, about the nature of reality. I heartily agree that one person's reality is another's chaos!! Ha Ha Ha sincerely, Sue |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Gray Rooster Date: 04 Mar 01 - 10:53 AM I'll second the welcome and hello from Amos, Dr. I am René Lawrence, performance coach, musician and composer (film, TV, radio, recording, concert, symphony), and children's concert specialist. I take on the cast-offs, special ed, and those children who have been expelled from the Dallas and Houston school districts and teach them "how to fish." I don't apologize for drawing you out like I did. I just couldn't understand the slap you delivered when I was speaking from an originally humorous position (read the first post again, please). You must have had a bad day. I warned you that you could not win. I was never in a fighting position. After your slap, my only tools were wit, the (I thought) evident humor and, to bait you and hope you took it. I was in the thick of the theory (and I just mean theory) that led to the reduction of the apparent speed of light. And, unpublished but witnessed and recognized by a few that I suppose you'd consider "intelligent enough to count," proposed a method to reduce the speed of light in 1958. I only knew "a super cold, reflective/opaque, particulate medium" might do it back then - when I was 8. I was accused of being counter intuitive. How nice. Funny, theorists start "in the head" - no matter what their names, ages or specialties are. As Amos allowed, there are those of us out here who have good minds and don't need a who's who to use them. I do read original papers on the subjects that interest me and I don't mean distilled versions for the layman. I read those as well, so I can have some more ammunition for the children I deal with. As I'm sure you realize now (and I hope with a smile), I use any tool I can get my hands on. I need people like you to point to and say, "Ask Him. He can really help you on that subject," when I run into someone with questions in your field. Here's to you. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Bruce O. Date: 04 Mar 01 - 04:36 PM Sorry Gray Rooster, when I saw that 99.9999% of physics was easy I sort of snapped, and failed to discover your subtle humour. When one's ire is up his common sense is gone. I thought mine was pretty subtle, and I've made a few enemies of people who didn't understand it and mistakenly thought I was insulting them. I never found physics easy. I've gotten rid of my copy of Eyring, (later a Mormon elder), Walter and Kemble's 'Quantum Chemistry' that was known familiarly as the green diamond. Green was the color of the cover, and it was very, very hard. [My research director in college (later director of the Mellon Institute, who combined it with Carnegie Tech) and had post-doct'd with Pauling at Cal. Tech, told me that Pauling had once gone to Utah to visit Henry Eyring to talk science, but Eyring had used the whole time trying to convert Pauling into becoming a Mormon. Pauling and Wilson's 'Quantum Mechanics' wasn't easy, but with perseverance I could make it through their treatments. I knew both authors slightly and couldn't understand why E. B Wilson never got a Nobel prize (contrary to popular conception there's a bit of politics in those; any self advertizing instantly kills your chances, and you have to get recommended by the right people to get on the list of possibles). His son went into research in a different area and became what is probably the youngest Nobel winner ever. Wilson started out with World War II surplus radar equiptment, and did a lot of great microwave spectroscopy, but Walter Gordy and Art Shallow did a lot of the development, too. Art Shallow later got a Nobel prize for work one of his grad students-later post doc did, but it was really in recognician of his earlier work in microwave spectroscopy and his invention of the maser, which was later translated from the microwave frequency domain into the optical freqency domain to become the laser. I should confess that I don't have a Ph. D. in physics. It was in physical chemistry, but when I applied to NBS I was told they didn't have any openings for physical chemists but Earle Plyer had opened aposition for a physicist before he went off to Europe on sabbatical for a year, and with my unusual background in electronics (for a chemist that is) I should reapply as a physicist. That's how I got to be a physicist. [Life seems to be a bewildering series of accidents] Needless to say I had to do a lot of out of hours studying to get to be a real physicist. I'd had electonics as a hobby since about age 15, building AM radios (and fixing the neighbours), phonographs (nylon plastic broom bristles made great needles), small transmitters, etc. Jim Russell (inventor of the CD) was always better at that kind of thing than I was (but his family had some money and he didn't have to build everything out of junk. His wife Barbara was the only other one in my junior high school class who wanted to be a chemist, which she still does on a consulting basis, when her beloved viol lets her). At any rate I took senior level electronics courses in college, and though my BS was in chemistry I had a solid minor in EE. (In junior college an engineering prof had told me to forget the EE bit, that didn't mix with chemistry, advice I fortunately ignored). It was pretty funny in the advanced electricity course in the Physics Department at UW. (I never liked that instructor much, who I again had for classical mechanics. He didn't go for straight forward treatments of topics, but always had some trick mathematical transformation to get the answer to a different problem, then by a different transformation got that one back into the starting problem). I was far from the top in the physics treatment of electricty, (and still have to struggle with electro-magnetism) but the geniuses all came to my setup in the lab to find out how to get the wires connected to the right boxes, in order to do the experiment. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Bill D Date: 04 Mar 01 - 07:07 PM ...and you know, Bruce O. 'could' have had a career as a parking lot attendent, too!..*big grin*, but he's much too shy to list that in his accomplishments. (sorry for the earlier nagging, Bruce...I should have tumbled to who it was sooner..) |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Bruce O. Date: 04 Mar 01 - 07:54 PM There are a lot of things like that parking lot attendant business that I did't mention, and I hope no one ever does. Periods of stupidity seem to come much more often than those very brief flashes of brilliance. You've really got to grab the latter fast or they get away, and they aren't very sporting; they never give you a 2nd chance to catch them. I'm really quite disappointed in myself, because I've tried hard to control my temper until I was reasonably certain I had the facts straight, but I sure goofed it up this time. Subtlety on the internet is a completely new phenomenon to me. |
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: GUEST,Bruce O. Date: 04 Mar 01 - 08:47 PM Perhaps I should give a little background here for newcommers. There haven't been many 'in' jokes here, and let's keep it that way, because I don't think that would do the Mudcat Forum any good. There are several here that have for a long time been members of FSGW (fsgw.org) and Dick Greenhaus and Susan of DT have long ben regualar regular visitors, and more recently Max. Bill D. and I aren't what one would call real close friends, but have been well acquainted for over 20 years, and I was at his wedding to Ferrara. When Bill D. performs, with his autoharp for accompaniment, he's alway got a droll or subtle piece of humour to introduce his song. That lucky guy married a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice, who knows lots of great old folk and other songs.
|
|
Subject: RE: What DO Physicists Think About? From: Bill D Date: 04 Mar 01 - 11:40 PM 20 years?..but who's counting? It has been fun...yep, I AM lucky...thanks, Bruce ....if I had crammed 1/4 as much into my life as Bruce has, I'd be happy as a clam... |
| Share Thread: |
