Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

iannis

Musty Nester
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At least the mathematics work with string theory. It might not falsifiable at our current level of technology and might well be wrong, but the mathematics that are coming out of continued research in the field could likely be useful elsewhere.
Well yeah. What I know of string theory (which is basically at most the abstract) doesn't seem all that dumb at all. It may or may not be true, but it can be useful in the meantime.

What really attracts me to this nutter is his rejection of the idea that while as far as we can determine light is absolutely constant that fact THEREFOR AND FURTHERMORE (to borrow his phrasing) requires that it is constant throughout the duration of its existenz. That really would make it unique. Everything changes, up to and including the structure of creation itself. Except light? It can be diverted, reflected, refracted, absorbed, or anihilated -- but for so long as it exists it is immutable? That smells like prejudice. A greater part of our brain is wired for processing light, after all. It may be that for all purposes we might as well concede that, if only because the scale of the change will always remain bounded outside of our physical and mental perceptions.

Or maybe I did too many drugs when I was young and I really don't fucking know enough about light to be thinking these sorts of thoughts. It seems like the idea that this aspie is trying to pursue... maybe fraudulently. It seems like a potentially useful area of investigation at least. Which is what I mean by "no dumber than string theory".
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
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Here's a rule of thumb that is basically never wrong: if someone doesn't regularly publish in high tier peer reviewed journals in their field, any "revolutionary" idea they have is horseshit. Lots of people want an idea that makes big waves. Very very few are smart enough to actually do it. If they have the brains and the knowledge to do it, they are already publishing regularly about related things, even if (and it's a big if) their grand idea is blocked out by inertia in the scientific community.
That's a good rule. I'd love to see a listing of the revolutionary publications of the last century and how much publication and credentials the publisher had before that.
 

Furry

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That's a good rule. I'd love to see a listing of the revolutionary publications of the last century and how much publication and credentials the publisher had before that.
That rule of thumb is awful. A lot, possibly most major inventions come from people with no experience, publication history and sometimes even formal education in the areas where they invented something.

The thing to remember is that for every major insight like that, there are tens of thousands or more of shitty ideas which make no sense, and on top of that, when you're dealing with completely theoretical fields where nothing can easily be proven (Looking at u space), most peer reviewed stuff is shitty speculation that is just as worthless.
 

Tuco

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That rule of thumb is awful. A lot, possibly most major inventions come from people with no experience, publication history and sometimes even formal education in the areas where they invented something.
Any good examples?
 

Mudcrush Durtfeet

Hungry Ogre
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One of the wacky things about the speed of light is as you approach it, time slows down for you relative to the universe. If you went fast enough, you could go to Andromeda, and only a short time would pass for you, while millions of years would pass for the universe around you. Now the interesting part, is if you actually went at the speed of light, such as photons do, time would stop for you compared to the rest of the universe. The entire lifetime of the universe would be instant. This means that photons from their point of view are everywhere they ever go, all at once. This also means that from their point of view, their velocity compared to anything else, is infinite.

To the best of my understanding.

Physics is a wacky thing.
 

khalid

Unelected Mod
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What really attracts me to this nutter is his rejection of the idea that while as far as we can determine light is absolutely constant that fact THEREFOR AND FURTHERMORE (to borrow his phrasing) requires that it is constant throughout the duration of its existenz.
I think we need to be especially careful of supporting an idea simply because we find it attractive or start with disbelief just because we find the implications of something distasteful.

I distinctly remember the day I found out about the lightspeed barrier. I was horrified. It seemed to ruin so many stories of sci-fi that I read and I wanted so badly to reject it or believe in anything that would get around it. I actually said to my mother that I wanted to be a physicist just to disprove the theory!
 

Dabamf_sl

shitlord
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I think we need to be especially careful of supporting an idea simply because we find it attractive or start with disbelief just because we find the implications of something distasteful.

I distinctly remember the day I found out about the lightspeed barrier. I was horrified. It seemed to ruin so many stories of sci-fi that I read and I wanted so badly to reject it or believe in anything that would get around it. I actually said to my mother that I wanted to be a physicist just to disprove the theory!
To add to that, NDT was talking once about how there's basically no room for philosophers of physics anymore because the things that remain to be discovered are so unintuitive that they cannot possibly be reasoned about like things could in the past.
 

Dabamf_sl

shitlord
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That rule of thumb is awful. A lot, possibly most major inventions come from people with no experience, publication history and sometimes even formal education in the areas where they invented something.

The thing to remember is that for every major insight like that, there are tens of thousands or more of shitty ideas which make no sense, and on top of that, when you're dealing with completely theoretical fields where nothing can easily be proven (Looking at u space), most peer reviewed stuff is shitty speculation that is just as worthless.
That's a lot of pretty extreme and unbacked statements you have there. No wonder you oppose my rule of thumb.

You also change my wording to talk about inventions, which is a pretty broad topic and I feel like you're appealing to Bill Gates or something there. I'm talking about scientific discoveries in the realm of ideas (Though your "possibly most..." statement is not even remotely close to true even if we're talking inventions. I can intuit that one)

If someone makes some huge claim like "the physics community is way off," that requires some big evidence. How can they support that claim if they are incapable of even publishing small findings of their own? Oh I know the answer, it's always the same: "the scientific community is too rigid to accept revolutionary ideas." That's always the rationalization of someone who failed in or was afraid to try at the way that most scientists spread their discoveries. You never see some guy who publishes regularly suddenly abandon that way of life because "we're so rigid, I'm gonna publish my stuff on some random website from here on out."

Now that is a big assumption I'm making for the rationalization of this nobody "physicist," but science skeptics are always on the outside making assumptions about how the process works on the inside without any real knowledge. It's the same scam no matter the rationalizations. The occasional, ultra rare instance of some nobody actually changing a field just gives these people ammo to say "SEE!!!!??" as if the existence of an exception is some evidence thattheyare the next exception.
 

Alexzander

Golden Knight of the Realm
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That rule of thumb is awful. A lot, possibly most major inventions come from people with no experience, publication history and sometimes even formal education in the areas where they invented something.
Theoretical physicists and engineers, or inventors if you'd rather, are quite different animals. Learning the mathematics required to work in the field of astrophysics is a significant commitment of both time and intellectual resources. Many (admittedly awesome) inventions are developed simply through novel thinking and problem solving.

The thing to remember is that for every major insight like that, there are tens of thousands or more of shitty ideas which make no sense, and on top of that, when you're dealing with completely theoretical fields where nothing can easily be proven (Looking at u space), most peer reviewed stuff is shitty speculation that is just as worthless.
Since you appear to be better versed and up-to-date with the literature, perhaps you'd care to share with us some examples of shitty, worthless speculation you've recently reviewed.
 

Furry

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Any good examples?
I googled coolest invention of 2013, came up with oculus rift. Was invented by a college dropout. I don't feel like doing major research into the subject, but its nice to have my first shot in the dark be a hit.

I feel i should expand on my comment due to some people miss-interpreting it. Where useful things can be made or invented, people with a huge passion for it are people who often succeed. Many times people with these passions find that college simply slows them down from achieving their goals. In practical realms, the usefulness of the result matters far more than the credentials of the people who made it. Good things will find money. That said, there are lots of people with passion that are idiots. Terrible inventions and ideas are everywhere. Anyone who has worked a job ever can likely attest to this fact. These things get sorted out due to the fact that generally money does not support bad ideas forever (*except government.).

My problem is especially with the application of that idea to theoretical physics/cosmoslogy. There are AWFUL ideas that are taken as fact in the realm of theoretical physics. These ideas are taken as fact due the the problem that there is nothing you can do with any of the information that comes of it, so having credentials becomes the determination of whether things are viewed as useful. It's a weird and broken system, due to the fact that having credentials doesn't stop people from being idiots, just like failing to have credentials doesn't make people idiots. While a published paper is more likely to be worth your time due to the observable information contained within it, giving greater credence to conclusions can sometimes be problematic, and saying exclusively that published conclusions are the only way to go is silly. For a list of awfully conclusioned papers, simply search arxiv for quasars. Even stevie hawking has come around to say that none of the shit we understand about them makes any real sense in one of his peer reviewed publications on the subject.

More concrete sciences, such as base particle physics, don't have these widespread issues, but since topics here often drift to the theoretical side with string theory, ect, I think its fair to address it here. The thing to really remember is that most the shit you see is wrong, no matter what the source. Hell, I'm probably wrong, but so are they
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Alexzander

Golden Knight of the Realm
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I think I see where you're coming from now.

The thing is, college drop outs wouldn't be making cool stuff like the Oculus Rift without published, peer-reviewed contributions made made by the likes of Bohr and his peers. Mistakes and misunderstandings are made on the path of progress, and the debates they spawn are part of moving the football forward.

In comparison, failures of inventors are at least equally numerous. But can we really look at the Virtual Boy as an important step towards anything of consequence? Hell, can we even look at the Virtual Boy as an important step towards the Oculus Rift?
 

Numbers_sl

shitlord
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This is neat. Mice feel 36% less pain when in the presence of male researchers which may have implications for a lot of research.Male Scent May Compromise Biomedical Research | Science/AAAS | News

Jeffrey Mogil?s students suspected there was something fishy going on with their experiments. They were injecting an irritant into the feet of mice to test their pain response, but the rodents didn?t seem to feel anything. ?We thought there was something wrong with the injection,? says Mogil, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The real culprit was far more surprising: The mice that didn?t feel pain had been handled by male students. Mogil?s group discovered that this gender distinction alone was enough to throw off their whole experiment?and likely influences the work of other researchers as well.
 

Enob

Golden Knight of the Realm
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I froze mid-chew on that line. It's one of those self evident in your face the entire time thing that I never saw.
That's not really accurate. Photons like everything else are time dependent. Particles, photons and otherwise including those with mass, exist as probability densities. While a portion of the wavefunction (equation describing the probability, also synonymous and indistinguishable from the particle; the wavefunctionisthe particle) and thus the particle itself exists at all points, it does not behave that way in the real universe. As individual particle's wavefunctions interact with one another they constantly evolve, in time, into new wavefunctions that describe the system as a whole. This essentially sets boundary conditions to particles that are dependent on these sequential interactions and restricting on their probabilities. In an isolated system, photons would behave more independently of time but nothing to our knowledge can be a truly isolated system. So in a sense, if they could rationalize a thought, photons would not have a "sense" of time the same way we don't have a "sense" of anything but our observable spacetime dimensions, even though they are still passing through and interacting with it.

As I mentioned, all particles behave this way including those with mass. In general chemistry, shells and then orbitals are introduced. The orbitals have bubbly, cloud shapes and the introductory explanation is that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't let us know exactly where in the cloud it is, so we just draw it as a cloud. This explanation is just a glossing over of quantum mechanics, in which the electron isn't just unfindable exactly in the cloud, it exists at every point in the cloud with different probabilities. We call this "electron density" and is a major factor in atomic and molecular interactions. A large portion of introductory quantum chemistry courses goes in to the wavefunctions that result from the combination of individual electron interactions with one another in covalent bonding. While electrons move pretty fast on our time scale, they aren't that fast to the atomic world. If the electron were actually just moving back and forth around both atoms, all molecules would show a much higher fluctuation in energy depending on the electron's current location and also exhibit higher reactivities across the board. Thus, the bonding we observe can only exist if the electron's wavefunctions (and thus the electron itself!) are around both atoms at the same time.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty good with chemistry but am only 3 months into my first quantum mechanics course. The introductory course glosses over the time dependent Schrodinger equations as the math goes another major step up but we do talk about them qualitatively. Time dependency isn't until next year. So basically I may not know exactly what I'm talking about but the good news is that it's quantum mechanics, so no one does!
 

khalid

Unelected Mod
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The thing to really remember is that most the shit you see is wrong, no matter what the source. Hell, I'm probably wrong, but so are they
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You seem to be saying that published, peer reviewed papers are equally valid with other sources. Which I don't agree with. Not all sources are equally wrong, sorry. Yes, there are many peer reviewed papers that are crap, but it is still as good a source as we have for validating things.

Also, using the Occulus Rift as an example is kinda silly. The Occulus Rift didn't overturn any conventions, wasn't running against conventional science and contradicted no papers.