BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II

Subject: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 17 Apr 01 - 09:31 PM

And sometimes they go back scores of years in time just to think about things in a new series or a new direction, as here:

Title: A speech for the luminiferous ether
Authors: Norbert Feist
Comments: 20 pages in German, inclusive of 15 figures
Subj-class: General Physics
\\
  There is no aberration of terrestrial sources, because the light-vector has
an inertial component. A new analysis of the Michelson Morley experiment shows:
Light propagates anisotropically relative to a moving system, dependent on the
velocity and the angle between the velocity and the direction of motion. The
two way (back and forth) velocity is isotropic, but also dependent on the
velocity of the frame. There is no Lorentz contraction. - A real ultrasonic
experiment shows: Also the propagation of sound follows the given general
conical section equation and an acoustical Michelson Morley experiment gives
the same zero result as the optical experiment in contrast to the school of
thought. - The theory of relativity is incorrect and the existence of a
luminiferous ether as a propagation medium and an absolute frame of reference
is again obvious. Some properties of the ether and a fundamental cause of the
dependency of the velocity on the mass and the frequency are presented.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0104047 ,  184kb)

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 17 Apr 01 - 09:34 PM

Part I of this stimulating scientifistic thread can be found over here.

Regards,

A

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 17 Apr 01 - 10:45 PM

I'm not sure that Norbert Feist stuff isn't quackery. Some sleuthing on the web turns up an abstact of a paper he gave which goes back to even more ancient history. He's at a small town, Gersthofen, a few miles north of Augsburg (NW of Munich).

I might get a read on him if I could locate a friend, Prof. E. S. at Technical University, Munich, but can't find his email address, and he's apparently back in the USA giving a talk at Wesleyan Univ. this week, but their website calendar is screwed up- at least I can't find him on the page that Google turns up for him [his father was German and his mother was American (as is his wife Angela) but I'm not sure whether he consider himself a German or an American]. We studied together to get through the French reading exams as grad students. He pronounced French as if it were German, and I did it as if it were English, and it got pretty funny at times. We got through the exam, because we didn't have to pronounce any French for it.

The Michelson-Morley (ether drift) experiment has already been reanalyzed to death, without turning up anything new of any importance. Michelson was a really great experimentalist, and not many would want to try to duplicate his work in order to do the experiment over.

[My last specialty of high resolution Fourier transform spectroscopy is based on the insrument's Michelson interferometer. You move the moving Michelson mirror, then measure the light intensity, you move it again by the same amount and again measure the light intensity. After 100,000 to a million such move/measure cycles you have the interferogram]

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Susan from California
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 12:40 AM

Hi Bruce O

And another thing: the thing Amos quoted says that Einstein's relativity is wrong, but given that radioactive decay of accelerated particles seem to be slowed down as predicted by relativity, wouldn't a refutation of relativity call into question a whole lot of what we know about physics in other areas?

your "not a physicist, just a physics teacher" friend Keith

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 01:16 AM

Einstein's Theory of Relativity is far from my area of specialty. I had a course in it, but at that time I was still a chemist, and didn't understand much of it.

I don't know that radioactive decay had anything to do with relativity. So far as I know it's the simple first order decay found in many chemical and physical processes. The basic statement leading to the equation below is that the rate of decay is proportional to the amount you have.

A = A₀e^-t/tau

where (Greek) tau is just a constant times the half-life. (half-life is really an awkward way to specify the decay parameter, and I think it's done that way so a layman can get a sort of feel for it) A is the amount that was radioactive at time = t and A₀ was the amount that was radioactive at time t=0, and when you start is arbitrary as long as you measure t from the time you start (A being measured in number of atoms (or units of mass) in your fixed sized sample, no matter what the actual size is as long as it's constant (previously decayed + undecayed).) I think you can probably find tables (the most up-to-date ones) of half-lifes on the NIST website, if not, then almost any handbook of physics will have such a table.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Wolfgang
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 09:56 AM

The last time I heard a lecture on special relativity was more than 30 years ago.
If someone single-handely in one article (1) revises one of the best-tested theories of a century, (2) performs an experiment that defies all standard predictions and (3) derives some new math for ellipses, if this person has no university affiliation, if he is given the last possible time slot in a German physics conference in a subgroup titled 'alternative approaches' (if you have ever organised a conference you know what that means) then the probability is extremely high that he's a crank, a maverick, a quack.

I haven't tried to understand all he writes, but my quack detector has sounded alarm:
(1) Feist's way of citing is quite unconventional (only very old articles and of recent times only more or less popular books).
(2) His way of formulating hypotheses is not that of someone open to refutation but of someone who knows beforehand what he'll find.
(3) He doesn't ask the obvious questions (assuming for the sake of argument he is right) like why the myons arising from cosmic radiation reaching the outer atmosphere can be detected by counters on earth when they on the average only travel for about 600 m without the benefit of relativistic time dilation (I think that is what is alluded to in Susan's post).

There are many lively debates about relativity and some alternative theories (relativity has won all tests yet except for those theories making identical predictions), but this is from a tiny subgroup of relativity revisionists. They are about as right as holocaust revisionists, though I guess much nicer on a personal level.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Liam's Brother
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 10:23 AM

It doesn't matter what they think about, I can't understand it.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 10:38 AM

Susan, whot reported the effects of relativity on radioactive decay rate, and where was it published (details please)

The obvious effect is trivial. Take your radioactive sample, and your Gieger counter (or whatever you measure with. It depends on what the decay products are, as to how you detect them) and your clock for measuring the time and run with all of it at about 99% of the speed of light. Now just what time do you use in that t/tau? You can only see one clock, and what other clock agrees with it?.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: gnu
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 10:46 AM

What Do Physicists Think About What ? or is that a philosophical question ?

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 11:58 AM

Yes gnu, and I'm about to give it up for the real thing.

I went on a clean-up rampage about 3 months ago, so I could store more books on folk songs and music and other old songs and music (The next step is to go naked, because my clothes closet is the only space left). I tossed out old notebooks of physics and chem lab experiments, and the lecture notes of Marcell Ries' short course on relativity theory, and the translations of early German articles on quantum mechanics. I kept the more modern works ones on quantum mechanics, chemistry, spectroscopy and math (methods including Fourier transform and convolution theory, polynomial transforms, Shannon's 'Information Theory', 1954, noise in measurments-basically stuff I still use)

Also missing is an old Dover reprint that had translations of Einstein's original articles on Brownian motion (basically the foundations of noise theory), photoelectric effect, and relativity theory, and I don't seem to have anything left on relativity.

I'm soon to be off here for a while, as I'm again a temporarily unretired physicist with an optical design job to do for a high resolution Fourier transform system. The long path absorption cell will be the same as that descibed in paper #53 in the VITA on my website. [Basic design equations are in pper #34.] It's still working beautifully according to the fellow that has it now. We'll just copy it for the new system, and the blue prints are in (ASCII) CAD files already sent. I'm waiting for JEPGs or GIFs of the lab so I see where I have space to put the transfer optics, and design a vacuum tank to put around them. [One on my retired co-workers came back to NIST and stuck up his nose at my White cell. He had gotten excellent data from the one at the Justus Liebig Institute at Giessen. The builder of the one at Giessen told me in an email Monday that she had bigger mirrors, surplus and for free, so she just scaled up my design to fit with their mirrors, even copying my zero astigmatism White cell image arrangement. If B. W. isn't the best in the world in that business, she's probably tied for it. Such is life some times. Some body else gets most of the credit for your work.]

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 01:28 PM

Susan was correct. If particles of a radioactive isotope are accellerated to relativistic speeds, their decay rate becomes slower than predicted by the formulae because of time dilation
Keith.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 02:00 PM

That's just the theory I've already outlined. I repeat: who proved it by experiment, and where were the results published?

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 02:10 PM

I can't give you a reference yet, but you can see two clocks, your own and that of the particle as indicated by it's decay rate.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 03:30 PM

I see what you mean Bruce. You don't run with the particle. You watch its track in a bubble chamber. For a known energy the track length gives you its lifetime.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Scotsbard
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 05:09 PM

What a discussion ... I sorta wish that I'd looked into this thread earlier, but then would really have started goofing off too much at work. That delightful piece on harmonies made for fun reading.

While you guys are somewhere remotely close to the topic, what's your take on Lewis Little's Theory of Elemental Waves? It slipped under my casual physics radar back in 1996, and I still can't remember how I stumbled across it.

http://compbio.caltech.edu/~sjs/tew.html

~S~

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 05:31 PM

Scotsbard, don't know what harmonies you're talking about. If you want a true diminished 7th: 1 3b 5b 7bb, then use program SCALE35D.TRU on my website.

I'll believe that relativity effect on radioactive decay when I see experimental proof.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Susan from California
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 05:44 PM

Much as I (Susan from CA) would like to take credit for knowing ANYTHING :-) about Physics, the post above was written by my husband, Keith. He is at work, has a lab this afternoon but I will point him in this direction when he gets home, Bruce O.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,joe
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 06:46 PM

wow! cool.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Bill D
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 09:45 PM

Physicists sing X-mas(s) Carols

We Three Quarks

We three quarks fine particles are
Bearing charm we travel afar
Fields and forces, spin of course is
Multiplied by h-bar.

Oh, quarks are wondrous, quarks are light
Quarks have colors clear and bright
Still misleading, still exceeding
All physcists' insight.

We three quarks trade gluons all day
All baryons are made this way
Confined inside, we always hide
Unseen forever to stay.

Oh, quarks are wondrous, quarks are light
Quarks have colors clear and bright
Still misleading, still exceeding
All physcists' insight.

Frosty The Photon

Frosty the photon
Had a very merry soul
Though he spent his life
Running back and forth
To the ends of a dipole.

Frosty the photon
With momentum h-bar-k
Though he had the right
To be known as light
He was called a gamma ray.

-------------------------------------------------

The Ideal Physics Song

(sung to the tune of "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire")

Masses slide down frictionless inclines
Wheels will spin eternally,
Light rays converge from perfectly straight lines
And functions change incrementally.
Everyone knows things really don't behave this way
And still we all pretend they do.
Tiny tots have no spin, so they say
And we convince ourselves it's true.

We know it's true only to first order
That crystals act as if they haven't any border
And only freshman have to try
To see that E and B point just in X and Y.

Remember one is on the order of infinity
And dividing by zero ain't so bad
With these helpful hints, all is simplicity
It's the real world,
It's the real world,
It's the real world that's sad.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 10:02 PM

Bill D., if you think dividing by zero ain't so bad, go look at Don Nichols' motto. And come up with a reasonably traditional tune for that beast of a song!

My work bench didn't stay clean long. I forgot to ask you if you ground and sawed and polished rocks. My Graves Cabmate diamond saws and polishing compounds and such are in a closet. If you need to route or drill some small holes in anything hard, I've still got a few 3/4 mm dia. diamond drills that work very nicely for that sort of thing. They fit fine in a Moto-tool. Clamp the Mototool to a rod with a point on the end and you can swing it in an arc. That's how I made curved slits in graphite rods used as blackbody sources. (Matched to curved slits of Ebert spectrometer)

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 10:31 PM

That slot in the graphite rod (about 1/4 in dia) gives an emissivity much higher than the surface of the rod. You just put 180 to 200 amps through it to make it hot.

I forgot to turn on the argon flushing supply once and the source box showed HCN spectra (hot hydrogen, nitrogen or carbon always manages to find the other two to make HCN, and sticks to the box walls practically forever, and you never get completeley rid of it. There presumeably wasn't any carbon in what eventually proved to be the HCN laser.)

Well, I figured I'd just pump out the HCN poluted air, then turn on the argon flow. That's when the fun started. The saphire window immediately turned black. The carbon evaporated. Oh well, just dust off the lampblack and put in a new rod and start over. It took me two days polishing with Linde Alumina A (fine sapphire powder) to get rid of the thin sheet black diamond I'd made on my saphire window. [You don't just toss single crystal saphire windows 2 in dia. and a 1/2 inch thick in the trash can and put in a new one.]

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: harpgirl
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 10:53 PM

Wonderful songs, Bill!! Isn't there a verse about strange attractors in the first song? hehehe

Feist was correct. Reality is definitely a luminferous ether....*wink*

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 11:10 PM

Here's my entry for the Optical Society of America's limerick contest.
It didn't even get nominated for the booby prize.

A helical wiggler quite perverse,
When amok ran obliquely tranverse
. The photons emitted,
Were in strings tightly knitted,
And were polarized square or much worse

.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Bill D
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 11:37 PM

aww...those optical types just have no taste! That is a winner if I ever saw one!

(and I do 'occasionally' have a need to drill or smooth a piece of agate for my crafts...will sure call you!)

....here's one more song..

I Might Surmise

.....Chorus: I might surmise when the sun she rises,
Early in morning
Sunlight still tries to go on winging
Merrily along a straight line.
Oh, for the light which still acts classic,
And rambles through inertial frames.

Well, the theory goes
As I'm sure you knows,
Light at a constant speed forever goes.
But in younger days, force was still m/a,
And we rambled in inertial frames.

It was Winter when I sent my twin away
In Spring he came back younger by a day
And by Summer if his speed's near c,
He won't even look a bit like me.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 19 Apr 01 - 12:04 AM

Bring along you Dremel or Foredom, I'm not sure I still have one. {For rock you've got to do that drilling under water or heat will ruin rock and drill.)

Optical types aren't all bad. Those limerick were judged by a Russian born Canadian, Boris S.

Here's a click on for and optical type that I wish I could have kept. We saw eye to eye on everything although we had learned it in very different ways.

It looks from this that my former post-doc, Terry Todd has also gone into optical design. He's co-authored a book on it. Click Well, I knew he was good at it a long time ago, NIST offered him a job as a Section Chief, then found out internal politics required the job to be given to someone else.

Actually the other guy, Al, is pretty good too, and is pretty high up at NIST now, and is also a nice guy. I sort of hated to do it, but I got 'voluntered' (that means you don't have to do it the job, you just get fired if you don't) for a project at NIST. I got put under a very personable Group Leader, Jack H. The only trouble was that he didn't know what he was doing, and couldn't tell me very much about what I was supposed to do.(I proved my worth to them outside of what I was nominally supposed to do, by getting them back on the right track at one place where they were going about doing something all wrong on intensity measurement. they took engineers words for their photodetectors as photoresistors. They aren't! They are photoconductors, and they had their pramps designed for maximum non-linearity). NIST can't have know-nothings in that position. Their reputation (and funding by Congress) would quickly vanish. Nobeody else told Al what he had under him, so when I met him by accident at the Library of Congress, I suggested he look into Group Leader Jack's competence. Group Leader Jack was replaced soon after.

Strange internet. When I looked up Terry on Google what else should appear but our joint paper from the VITA on my website.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 19 Apr 01 - 12:12 AM

Bill D., forgot to mention that agate is pretty hard, but relatively easy to saw, grind, and polish. I haven't drilled any yet, but don't expect too much difficulty there if we can clamp it well in a fixed and stable position.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Scotsbard
Date: 19 Apr 01 - 05:09 PM

A couple of very old ones:

There once was a young man from Wight,
Who could travel much faster than light.
He set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.

There once was a chap named McBean,
Who drove a fast sporting machine.
At all intersections
He'd look both directions
Then blue shift the red lights to green.

~S~

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 19 Apr 01 - 05:18 PM

Better duck, because blue shift of red lights to green means it's coming toward you, not receding.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Chicken Charlie
Date: 20 Apr 01 - 04:42 PM

I b'lieve the last two posts exemplify Snow's idea of Two Cultures, not really talking to each other. Who cares about the physics if the silly thing scans well??

Variant ending to #1--

He left for Bombay on the following day And returned on the previous night.

On the subject of the latest wrinkle in the Big Bang, which is to generate it out of about ten dimensions:

Steve Weinberg, returning from Texas,/ Brings dimensions aplenty to vex us,/ But the new ones are all/ Wrapt up in a ball/ So tiny they never perplex us.

More on my level:

Starkle, starkle, little twink-- Who the Hell you are, I think??

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 20 Apr 01 - 06:52 PM

Chicken Charlie, Snow is ancient history, and even John Brockman's 'The Third Culture' is six years old now. Some of the scientic thinkers in it are still thinking, but there are new ones, too. Modern molecular biologists and geneticists (human genome mapper types) have weird hobbies, like folk songs and music. You'll find some on abcusers and rec.music.folk.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 20 Apr 01 - 07:43 PM

Couldn't find a website for molecular biologist Taylor. He's on the acbusers standards revision committee.

Here's Harry, one of my aquaintances that was a Steeleye Span fan (in the flesh that is) Click for Harry
Here's Joe, who likes Scots songs, and sometimes comments on them Click for Joe

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 21 Apr 01 - 12:35 AM

Sorry, the 'ml' of the '.html' got lost at the end of the second click-on for Joe's website address. Don't ask me how. It worked before I pasted it into this thread.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 21 Apr 01 - 01:02 PM

I learn a new way to screw up every day. My word processor put a line break between 'ht' and 'ml' in that '.html' of the second URL above. My browser knew how to interpret it in the file that I pasted to this Forum, but Mudcat didn't. Let's try again.

Here's Joe who likes Scots songs, and sometimes comments on them Click for Joe

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Bill D
Date: 23 Apr 01 - 12:32 PM

hey, all you physicists and wannabees...(well, maybe biologists & chemists mostly...)

I stumbled on a fascinating page offering *mostly* free software programs and info for labrartory stuff...

Take a look...

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Mary in Kentucky
Date: 23 Apr 01 - 01:32 PM

Thanks for the link Bill. I'm a real sucker for info and free stuff. During my early days on the Net, I would stumble around sites owned by college chemistry majors...then steal their links...usually some good stuff there.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 23 Apr 01 - 06:10 PM

Thanks, but no thanks, Bill D. One rare occassions if I'm lazy I'll use software somebody else wrote, but that's hazardous, because programs often don't things the way I like them done, and results are often misleading.

For one-shot through I use True Basic now, but for something like 3D raytracing through a system, (I do 225 rays at a time, through a system of as many as 60 optical surfaces), I wrote my own Fortran Program. I'll use it to check out the design of the transfer optics I'm working on now for a high resolution FTS spectrometer at Battelle Northwest labs.

The multiple reflection absorption cell will just be a copy of the NIST one I did, because it's zero astigmatism, and nobody's beaten it yet for long path length. Last info I need just arived by email, so it's off to my 3 concave mirror system Basic program to figure out the focal lengths I need, the to my ray transfer matrix program to find the diameters I need for the mirrors.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 28 Nov 01 - 08:21 PM

A couple of current excerpts from Nature which may be of interest:

Nature 414, 509 - 513 (2001) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
 
 

Attosecond metrology

M. HENTSCHEL*Ý, R. KIENBERGER*Ý, CH. SPIELMANN*, G. A. REIDER*, N. MILOSEVIC*, T. BRABEC*, P. CORKUMý,
U. HEINZMANN§, M. DRESCHER§ & F. KRAUSZ*

* Institut für Photonik, Technische Universität Wien, Gusshausstr. 27, A-1040 Wien, Austria
ý Steacie Institute of Molecular Sciences, NRC Canada, Ottawa, Canada K1A 0R6
§ Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, D-33615 Bielefeld, Germany
Ý These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to F.K. (e-mail: [e-mail]).
 

The generation of ultrashort pulses is a key to exploring the dynamic behaviour of matter on ever-shorter
timescales. Recent developments have pushed the duration of laser pulses close to its natural limit—the
wave cycle, which lasts somewhat longer than one femtosecond (1 fs = 10-15 s) in the visible spectral
range. Time-resolved measurements with these pulses are able to trace dynamics of molecular structure,
but fail to capture electronic processes occurring on an attosecond (1 as = 10-18 s) timescale. Here we trace
electronic dynamics with a time resolution of  150 as by using a subfemtosecond soft-X-ray pulse and a
few-cycle visible light pulse. Our measurement indicates an attosecond response of the atomic system, a
soft-X-ray pulse duration of 650  150 as and an attosecond synchronism of the soft-X-ray pulse with the
light field. The demonstrated experimental tools and techniques open the door to attosecond spectroscopy
of bound electrons.

---

Nanotechnology: Synthesis of carbon 'onions' in water

N. SANO*Ý, H. WANG*, M. CHHOWALLA*, I. ALEXANDROU* & G. A. J. AMARATUNGA*

* Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK
Ý Present address: Department of Chemical Engineering, Himeji Institute of Technology, Himeji 671-2201, Japan

e-mail: [e-mail]
 

The fabrication of carbon nanomaterials usually calls for expensive vacuum systems to generate plasmas
and yields are disappointingly low. Here we describe a simple method for producing high-quality spherical
carbon nano-'onions' in large quantities without the use of vacuum equipment. The nanoparticles, which
have C60 cores surrounded by onion-like nested particles, are generated by an arc discharge between two
graphite electrodes submerged in water. This technique is economical and environmentally benign, and
produces uncontaminated nanoparticles which may be useful in many applications.

---

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Murray MacLeod
Date: 28 Nov 01 - 08:26 PM

Well, that's a damn sight funnier than your contribution to my "Politically Correct Jokes " thread.

Murray

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 29 Nov 01 - 10:09 AM

Murray:

You just need to fine tune your sense of humor to the attosecond beat. Otherwise you miss my punchlines!!

Now, this is important stuff. Everytime we manage a finer division of time, historically, we get a bump up in our paradigm; for example, Da Vinci could not have made his breakthroughs without the ability to measure seconds with some rigour; shortly thereafter, science needed tenths of seconds to work with. Molecular macro-level chemistry measures things in hundredths of seconds, and atomic scale phenomena have been wrassled with at the nanosecond scale for some time now. If you can measure change an order of magnitude tinier, then you can see more of the pattern, obviously. There is also a lot of discussion of "invisible variables" being apossible explanation for discrepancies in quantum physics, implying that there is an order of magnitude of phenomena beyond quantum mechanics that needs to be understood for a complete unified model. The same transition occurred from Newtonian, molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic orders of phenomena. There was always more to be explained, and another order of size to measure in order to find the explanation.

So this attosecond stuff could be the very tip f an iceberg.

I'll just stand by here and wait for Wolfgang to shred my wooly logic all over the map! :>)

A.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Wolfgang
Date: 29 Nov 01 - 10:17 AM

attoboy

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 05 Apr 02 - 11:52 PM

Meanwhile, male phsyicists think about sex, while female phsyicists think about finances. Ort so I am told by thebest authorities! :>)

A

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: technission
Date: 06 Apr 02 - 10:20 AM

Ok, I'm only a wannabe when it comes to understanding the real imaginary world of how things work at nano-levels and below. Therefore most of this thread is too esoteric for me but thanks for the carols Bill D, they're going into my archives. LTCOML! Did you invent them Bill D or are there any writing credits you know of?

Here's my modest contribution, kids don't try this at home, and if anyone has writing credits on this one please post them, this was passed on to me years ago and this is all I have:

THE SEX LIFE OF AN ELECTRON

One night when his charge was pretty low, Micro Farad decided to get a cute little coil to let him discharge. He picked up Millie Amp and took her for a ride on his Megacycle.

They rode across the Wheatstone Bridge, around the sine wave, and into a magnetic field next to a flowing current. Micro Farad, attracted by Millie Amp's characteristic curve, soon had her to minimum resistance and her field fully excited. He laid her on the ground potential and raised her capacitance, bared her admittance and pulled out his high-voltage probe. He inserted it in parallel and began to short-circuit her shunt. Fully excited, Millie cried out "Mho, Mho, give me Mho!"

With his tube at maximum output and her coil vibrating from the current flow, her shunt soon reached maximum heat. The exciting current had gotten her shunt pretty hot, and Micro's capacitance was rapidly discharged and drained of every electron. They fluxed all night, trying various connections and sockets until his bar magnet had lost all its field strength.

Afterward, Millie tried self-inductence and damaged her solenoid. With his battery fully discharged, Micro Farad was unable to excite his transformer so they ended up by reversing polarity and blowing each other's fuses.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 06 Apr 02 - 10:38 AM

Geeze, that's dirty!! LOL!!

Good one. I tolja they thought about sex a lot!

A

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Bill D
Date: 06 Apr 02 - 11:56 AM

I didn't write any of those 'carols'..they are part of a standard collection which has been circulating for years....I think I just did a search on some phrase.(I actually have a cheap Xerox copy which someone gave me)

You could 'probably' find those, and more, by copying and pasting some distinctive line into Google....

There are whole sites full of technical parodies of various sorts, as well as techie orientied tag lines and computer humor...etc...it's fun looking...

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST
Date: 07 Apr 02 - 06:05 AM

The distinguishing characteristic of postmodernist theorizing is its rejection of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. The Western philosophical tradition itself is, of course, a record of debate rather than consensus. The postmodernists, however, claim to have rejected not one thesis or another but rather the entire philosophical tradition from Plato through George Santayana. Deconstructionists, pragmatists and New Historicists certainly make assertions and criticize opposing views, just as traditional thinkers did. Unlike traditional philosophers, however, postmodernists make no attempt to tell the truth about reality. They realize, what in their view their predecessors failed to grasp, that human reason is an inadequate instrument for achieving truth. They have therefore renounced metaphysics and philosophy in favor of what Carl Rapp calls "post-rational criticism."

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Joe_F
Date: 07 Apr 02 - 07:19 PM

The following story conflicts with Amos's statement: A doctor, a lawyer, and a physicist are having a drink, and the topic of conversation is: whether it is better to have a wife or a mistress. A wife, says the doctor: you are less likely to get various diseases. A mistress, says the lawyer: if it doesn't work out, you don't have the agony of a divorce. A wife *and* a mistress, says the physicist: then, when your wife thinks you're with your mistress, and your mistress thinks you're with your wife, you can do *physics*.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST
Date: 07 Apr 02 - 08:05 PM

And if a physicist has neither, he spends a lot more time thinking about how to get one or the other than he does on physics.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 07 Apr 02 - 08:36 PM

Looks like this paradigm is missing something, boys -- the stories don't jive!!! :>)

A

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Bill D
Date: 07 Apr 02 - 10:05 PM

"jive"?

ohh, wow...I get to be a pedant!! *grin*

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Bill D
Date: 07 Apr 02 - 10:08 PM

and, backing up into that site, we get hundreds of common errors to peruse!

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Bill D
Date: 07 Apr 02 - 10:26 PM

however, the author of the page pleads that links to it go through the home page so that he gets credit....so...click on the old pedants site, won't you?

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 07 Apr 02 - 10:41 PM

Ok, ok!! I said jive meaning jibe!! But how come mister pedant doesn't know the sailor's definition for jibing (crossing the wind with the stern, a sometimes risky manuver)? Huh?

Dern knowitalls know more'sn me!! :>)) Doncha hate it when that happens? :>)

A

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Bill D
Date: 07 Apr 02 - 10:46 PM

who knows, perhaps he does!.....you could write him a smart-alec(k) letter, but beware!...he has all sorts of warnings about that!

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST
Date: 08 Apr 02 - 06:51 AM

reminds me of the constipated mathmatician - who worked it out with a pencil.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST
Date: 09 Apr 02 - 12:17 AM

Physics

Just like musicians think of MUSIC - DUh!

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST
Date: 10 Apr 02 - 12:03 AM

Quantum approaches can explain enigmatic features of consciousness. However quantum coherent states must be isolated or shielded from environmental interactions and thermal noise which cause "decoherence". Critics of quantum approaches to consciousness point out that the "warm, wet and noisy" brain milieu would be particularly unfriendly to delicate quantum coherent states.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST
Date: 10 Apr 02 - 12:37 AM

I doubt that a physicist dreamt up that nonsense. What's a quantum approach? Quanta of what? What's a delicate and indelicate quantum state? Coherent states don't last forever in any kind of field that can change energy, elecrical, magnetic, gravitional.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 10 Apr 02 - 01:09 AM

Besides, why would you couple consciousness with the brain? That's kind of like believing that the telephone has all these different voices inside it somewhere!! And you can measure it, too!!

A

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST
Date: 10 Apr 02 - 10:53 PM

Nice one Amos. LMAO

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 10 Apr 02 - 11:43 PM

A flashing new insight from the current edition of Nature joournal. I am not prepared to comment on its far-reaching impications! :>)

A change in 'symmetry' is often observed when matter undergoes a phase transition—the symmetry is said to be spontaneously broken.

The transition made by underdoped high-transition-temperature (high-Tc) superconductors is unusual, in that it is not a mean-field transition as seen in other superconductors. Rather, there is a region in the phase diagram above the superconducting transition temperature Tc (where phase coherence and superconductivity begin) but below a characteristic temperature T* where a 'pseudogap' appears in the spectrum of electronic excitations.

It is therefore important to establish if T* is just a cross-over temperature arising from fluctuations in the order parameter that will establish superconductivity at Tc (refs 3, 4), or if it marks a phase transition where symmetry is spontaneously broken. Here we report that, for a material in the pseudogap state, left-circularly polarized photons give a different photocurrent from right-circularly polarized photons.

This shows that time-reversal symmetry is spontaneously broken below T*, which therefore corresponds to a phase transition.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST
Date: 11 Apr 02 - 12:03 AM

There goes quantum efficiency as a scalar quantity.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST
Date: 17 Apr 02 - 11:28 PM

Nothing - we think - Nothing

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: The Pooka
Date: 18 Apr 02 - 10:21 PM

Guest - LOL! Yeah, ya do, don'tcha? I've got a whole big book about Nothing, by K.C. Cole. 'Course she's not exactly a Physicist -- science correspondent for the LA Times -- but she'll surely do until one comes along. Anyway, she has a Friend who really is one. She says so, repeatedly. Saaay, would that be yerself now, Guest? :)

Well, as K.C. says -- thanks for Nothing! (Me, I don't even comprehend my Electrolux. Probably why I never use it. But you guys keep on Thinking, OK? It's important.)