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It's [Science!]
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GNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam WeRegistered User regular
GNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam WeRegistered User regular
To start off with, most Scientists could also double as stand up comedians.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." - Wernher von Braun
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov
"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true." - Niels Bohr
Okay that's done.
So! I haven't seen a dedicated thread in D&D about Science and I find I've had a slowly growing problem with that and today I decided to do something about it.
This is a thread for anything Science. Everything from discussions about biology (I've always loved the discussions about Viruses either being a true living organism or not to be interesting) to physics (Black Holes anyone? The nature of a singularity is always fun to think about.) to just dreaming about and doing our own theorizing about future tech and discoveries.
This isn't limited to us discussing stuff either. The best things about scientists is that they're usually an adaptable creature capable of fully utilizing new tools in a quick and efficient manner usually to the benefit of their community. So there are plenty of youtube videos and other media items that you can post here.
In fact I'll go first.
Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss are two of my most favorite scientists that are alive today. Not only that but "Something From Nothing" gets around to a huge variety of topics so we'll have a broad jumping off point to start us off.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." - Wernher von Braun
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov
"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true." - Niels Bohr
Okay that's done.
So! I haven't seen a dedicated thread in D&D about Science and I find I've had a slowly growing problem with that and today I decided to do something about it.
This is a thread for anything Science. Everything from discussions about biology (I've always loved the discussions about Viruses either being a true living organism or not to be interesting) to physics (Black Holes anyone? The nature of a singularity is always fun to think about.) to just dreaming about and doing our own theorizing about future tech and discoveries.
This isn't limited to us discussing stuff either. The best things about scientists is that they're usually an adaptable creature capable of fully utilizing new tools in a quick and efficient manner usually to the benefit of their community. So there are plenty of youtube videos and other media items that you can post here.
In fact I'll go first.
http://youtu.be/YUe0_4rdj0URichard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss are two of my most favorite scientists that are alive today. Not only that but "Something From Nothing" gets around to a huge variety of topics so we'll have a broad jumping off point to start us off.
+10
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The topic that I refer to is how technologically dim our species is currently. Kaku describes at least three levels of technological advancement that a species could be categorized as. In type 1, a species has mastered their planet, capable of harnessing and controlling the power their planet generates. For a type 2 species, you see the mastery of their solar system where they can travel and work within their solar system with relative ease and have figured out how to harness the energy being outputted by their star. And finally in a type 3 species, they have mastered travel between stars and can muster nearly limitless energy because they kinda have to be able to in order to move among star systems in relatively short time periods. Clearly our species has yet to fathom type 2 or 3 abilities. And although type 1 is seeming to be close to us, Kaku describes our species as a type 0 organism, still reliant on dead organic material for energy and since we haven't branched out to beyond our own planet yet to sustain the species in an extinction level event occurrence then we may be destined to never make the leap to a type 1 species. I'm running off my 17 year memory of the book and the quick blurb Kaku got on the tv program, but I think I hit the major points of that particular part of the book that I found most interesting.
Another book I read a long time ago about popularizing scientific theories was Probabilty 1. It speaks about Fermi's Paradox of where is all this life in the universe and breaks down Drake's Equation for determining how many species of intelligence there are. I highly recommend this book if this topic is of interest!
I kind of rambled here on my cell phone trying to coo my daughter to sleep but I saw this thread jump off the first page with no responses and was sad about that.
NASA New Horizons is still over a year away from reaching Pluto, and it'll be orbiting at 10,000km and taking high resolution photos of the surface as well - the first time we'll ever have seen Pluto up close. The resolution will be like high-resolution satellite photography, detailed enough to make out buildings were we doing it on Earth.
The cool thing is, Pluto is so distant that New Horizons will wake up a long time in advance of establishing an orbit since they need it to take starfield pictures so they can firm up where Pluto actually is for the injection burn. This mission should also provide some evidence for or against the hypothesis that Pluto might have enough radioactive decay to maintain a liquid ocean under it's ice (potassium powered) which has got some people thinking about if you could have limited alien life there.
EDIT: Also, Pluto should be pink - cold enough to be covered in solid nitrogen.
Wait...is this about the Krauss / Albert kerfuffle?
Edit: Oh...it is. Fucking Krauss just needs to accept that he does not know what "Nothing" means.
Stuff like that is why we desperately need to hope that NASA's Warp Field Mechanics program actually finds something.
The single most frustrating thing in fundamental physics at the moment is that the existent, known to be incomplete theory's, keep being proved experimentally accurate. You calculate the mass of an electron to more decimal places and years later it'll turn out you're still right. As I understand it there's a lot of people hoping some routine super-accurate measurement of a fundamental constant will come out decisively wrong, because it'd finally let us start mapping out what we don't know.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
But it was about shitty low-energy universes where gravity is too weak to form planets or something.
Not cool universes where I'm a movie star and ride a motorcycle.
Don't worry. There are lots of stuff which the standard model does not explain (gravity, matter/antimatter asymmetry and so on). The discovery of higgs is considered to be probably the least exciting thing to come out of the lhc.
And if indeed we can not discover anything beyond the standard model, then that would be a very strong indication that we need to take a step back and reconsider a lot of our fundamental assumptions in physics!
See also http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Model
God damnit I just lost an hour to wikipedia again...
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + ..... and so on = -1/12
I have 549 Rock Band Drum and 305 Pro Drum FC's
REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS
I like to share Vi Hart videos just in case someone missed her.
Real life Space Engine! Cool!
what hath mankind wrought
I saw this on a few other websites and kind of skipped past it...but holy fucking christ that is insane.
I feel when people are explaining what infinity is, this is the thing you should be shown, to point out that infinity is not a number in any conventional sense.
Now, there is a way to analytically continue power series to give something called the Riemann zeta function, which is what they are trying to hint at in the video but handwave away. The sum is divergent, but the Riemann zeta function evaluated at what would correspond with that sum gives -1/12.
http://htwins.net/scale2/
http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/
Warning the last one will probably eat into your time, but it's well worth it IMO.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Basically they're adding up things which don't have values but treating them like they do.
* sum of two positive numbers is positive. Infinite sum of natural numbers is a set of positive numbers summed with positive numbers. Ergo its value is greater than zero ergo -1/12 is wrong.
They have a few extra videos that go through the proofs using the Riemann Zeta functions. But that level of math makes my brain hurt. I don't have the motivation to sit down and work out the exact proofs myself. It's like they're speaking another language at that point.
I have 549 Rock Band Drum and 305 Pro Drum FC's
REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS
The only way that it could be wrong is if transitivity of inequality did not hold. Which would break so many things it's really not worth considering.
It's like the second law of thermodynamics. No you did not break it. It doesn't matter what you thought you did right. You made some mistake
1-2+2-2+2...
S1-S1 = 1. So 1=0 which is false.
Same method same nonsensical result. If they're basing string theory on it they've probably made some pretty big mistakes
I think this is the problem. :P
Using their own method, we can break that set into two:
S1 = +1+1+1+1+1...
S2 = -1-1-1-1-1...
So we should have S1+S2 = S2+S1 = S
From there we can look at it from 2 perspectives.
First, since we are interleaving addition of positive and negative numbers then order shouldn't matter.
So S1+S2 = (0) +1-1+1-1+1... = S2+S1 = (0) -1+1-1+1...
However, their own evaluation is based on the first number, so according to them S1+S2 = 1/2 = S2+S1 = -1/2. Which is obviously wrong.
Second (and simpler), S2 = -1(1+1+1+1...) = -1(S1) = -S1
So S1+S2=S1-S1=0=S
These cannot all be true.
This very much reminds me of the "proof" that 1=2 by using variables to obfuscate the fact that at one point the proof divides by zero.
(1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ...) is a divergent series. So is (1 + -1 + 1 + -1 ...). Neither has a "sum" in the sense that a convergent series does. But we can identify methods to compute a "sum" for a divergent series. These "summation methods" are usually defined such that the result of using the summation method on a convergent series is the sum of the convergent series ("sum" for a convergent series meaning the usual limit of the partial sums as the number of entries approaches infinity). But, in addition to giving the same result for a convergent series, many summation methods give finite results for divergent series--this is why they're useful. Cesaro summation and Abel summation are summation methods.
The guys in the video are talking about zeta function regularization, which is a summation method often used in physics. Zeta function regularization of the series (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ...) does indeed yield -1/12.
I'm not sure about the video's attempt to demonstrate this with algebraic methods. They seem to be using the Cesaro sum of (1 + -1 + 1 + -1 + ...), which is 1/2, and then extrapolating from this using algebra to arrive at the correct value for the zeta function regularization of (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ...). That seems kinda sketchy to me, but I'm not a mathematician and my understanding of this field is limited to what I learned today from the Internets. I think what they're really doing is pointing out a weird coincidence of mathematics.
In this case it's a weird coincidence that there's another, actually valid method that gives the same sort of result but it means something very different there.
Do we have a better idea today than we did, say, about 4~ years ago of what is causing 'dark gravity', so to speak? Or dark energy?
until 1992 we had no evidence that planets outside of our own solar system existed
No direct evidence, no - but I believe we had some indirect evidence in the form of gravitational 'sway' shown by some stars prior to that.
I'm pleased that these days, Sagan's prediction is more or less being totally vindicated: every star we've been able to examine with our somewhat crude exoplanet finding method has planets orbiting it. It's quite possible that every single star, or nearly every single star, has it's own planetary system.
Fuck you 70s-era cynical astronomers. In your FACE! :P
They're 2xS2 sum is completely wrong. Which kinda fucks over their entire point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesàro_summation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan_summation
S = 1-1+1_1...=1/2 is Grandi's series and the value is a Cesaro sum value. The series is divergent and lacks a sum in the usual sense, but it's Cesaro sum is 1/2.
You can therefore conclude that 1-1+1-1+1... has no sum, but it should be 1/2. This has been argued since the 17th century or so. It's not a sum in the traditional sense but it has properties that make it mathematically useful to fields such as physics, specifically: quantum field theory, chasmir force, and other theoretical physics (namely string theory).
In the comments, they even link to http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/the-euler-maclaurin-formula-bernoulli-numbers-the-zeta-function-and-real-variable-analytic-continuation/ which discusses this a bit more indepth. For those of you unaware, Terry Tao is a Field Medal winner.
String Theory is not yet a widely accepted field of science, correct? Like, it's not (yet) useful in making predictions: it's just one possible sub-atomic model with some deep maths behind it?
My understanding from when I was in physics and talking to lots of profs and people doing research and such was that String Theory was really pretty but produced no testable results.
But it was the popular shit like 10 years back and you had to use the words "String theory" somewhere in your proposals if you wanted to actually get funding. All the non-theoretical-physicists I knew hated it with a passion because of that.
They're showing that the series has a property with 3 different values (based on summation method) and this value is what they observe in physics. The property is the most important part.
I believe some candidates for dark matter have been ruled out. There is a detector somewhere that has failed to detect any. Dark matter remains mysterious.
And "dark energy" is basically a term for "we don't know how the universe works on large scales". That definitely hasn't changed.
Though I shouldn't speak conclusively, I haven't studied the field closely in a long while. I'd be interested if anyone could correct me on my assertions here.
Last I remember, we only know ~4% of what actually makes up the Universe. We're still drawing blanks on what dark matter and dark energy are.
My favorite theory to come out of physics lately is the idea that black holes spawn universes: the parent universe seeps in properties and matter into the child universe, which is born in a black hole. Properties like spin direction, matter-to-antimatter ratio, time, heat uniformity, etc. So taken at face value, we're in a black hole that's in another black hole that's in another black hole so on and so forth.
Instead of tortoises all the way down, it's black holes.