Yes, the 'vacuum' energy could be the source of the push of dark energy, the fuel that ever keeps on giving. In the Casimer experiment the 'vacuum' pushes two plates apart — PoeticUniverse

That means on one side there is a different force then on the other. What's different in between?

I'm not sure I get you. There is no empty space?

What are field points and how can they oscillate? Are it not the excited wavefunctions that show oscillating behavior?

There is no such thing as a ‘true vacuum’. — PoeticUniverse

The quantum vacuum might even be negatively curved, thereby offering, when matter is confined to three spatial dimensions, a negatively curved spatially 4d structure, a Planck-sized wormhole between two extended 4d structures. From this wormhole, kept stable by the nature of the quantum vacuum, the virtual fields could be pulled into real existence. Quantum bubbles pulled into reality. inflation would be solved.

It honestly sounded like a VERY roundabout view of realism, or a version of it. — TerraHalcyon

Exactly. He sees his way of being and his superposition states as reality. We are not only superpositions though. I think he is a very strict follower of the foundation fathers of QM. Only if an observer measures a quantum state, the wavefunction will collapse, be it yours or an electron's spin. Regardless what you feel. Maybe that's solipsistic, but clinging strictly to the quantum rules, you cannot conclude differently. That's why hidden variables seem more realistic.

Many physicists believe that "the vacuum holds the key to a full understanding of nature"[8] and that studying it is critical in the search for the theory of everything. Active areas of research include the effects of virtual particles,[15] quantum entanglement,[16] the difference (if any) between inertial and gravitational mass,[17] variation in the speed of light,[18] a reason for the observed value of the cosmological constant[19] and the nature of dark energy.[20][21] — PoeticUniverse

Virtual particles are a weird ingredient of empty space. One might even argue that it's the source of dark energy. For sure it has a different effect on empty space as normal, real matter does. The negative energy contributions give negative curvature. It is said that the vacuum fluctuations have a very high energy, while in fact it should be negative.

As I understand it, at every point in spacetime operator valued distributions are assigned and these operators excite states in a Fock space of particle states. All these states have frequencies and wavelengths and can indeed be seen in the light of oscillators, or rotating complex vectors. But are there really operators present that excite a particle state? Is not a particle state, and it's demise, propagation, or creation what comes first? Are it really creation, destruction, or propagating operators, that govern?

Maybe you should skip Bible Study Group next week. Take a breather. :roll: — jgill

Catastrophe theory makes it perfectly clear: the Heavenly Holiness should be worshipped with every divinely created bone in our submissive and humble bodies. If not,
He will, without remorse, and firmly, strictly, and justified, bestow humanity with his Ivory Bashing, and catastrophe will descend from His untouchable and unshakeable Sacred Realm, cleansing the Earth from a God-forgotten species, unwillingly to bath in His immaculate light and conform to His unquestionable Will. Brothers and sisters, let's hold hands and prey together. Let's ask the Great Annointed to release us from our pagan ways, and to restore his blissful order before too long. Oh unparalelled Being, our blessed King and Savior! Bless Thou Glorious name, leading us to Ultimate Victory. :wink:

there will need to be a vanguard of the truthful, the spirited to guide us from our wicked ways and we might still be spared. — Tobias

That's exactly what is going on already. The spirited being the advocates of the one and only way and their representatives in current institutes of power, law-making, and education. Excluding other ways, in spirit and in practice. It's not wrong to advocate for the one and only way, but imposing it by law, while maybe not in spirit (though from young age we are already subject to it), while excluding the others is no less than..., well, I will not use the word. The scientific way is not good or bad as it is. I love science! It seems to me that its consequences are pretty clear too. And because it's one way amongst many (though not many left), we can better learn from each other in a peaceful state of coexistence, for who has the ultimate measure of truth?

I'm not sure I understand. Why isn't the number 20? Shouldn't there be just two massless base matter fields, one electromagnetic field, sixteen color fields and one gravity field? This could explain the families of quarks and leptons, like quarks once did for hadrons and mesons.

The whole field fluctuates from the continuous field points oscillating; the points are not separate from one another; there can't be any spacers of the impossible 'Nothingness' anywhere — PoeticUniverse

Are the continuous field points fluctuating? How can poits be continuous? What is a field point? A point in space? W

Is there an oscillator attached to all points in space? A quantum oscillator? Is this oscillator attached to the particle? Is a particle the oscillation? So if the oscillator is in its ground state, there is no particle, and there is only the zero point oscillation, and when the oscillator is excited particle is created? But what then excites the oscillator? Other oscillations?

There are 25 quantum field types, all atop one another, making for one overall quantum field. — PoeticUniverse

It's more reasonable there 20 massless basic fields, which gather mass by interaction. This insight will get clear when higher energy experiments are done. Muon g2 is a warmer up.

What oscillates if you say that the field is a collection of oscillators?

But there cannot be 7 billion solipsists, by definition. — TerraHalcyon

Exactly. That's why he is not a true solipsist. A true s denies other s.

The up and down quark and the electron seem to be the most useful. There are also forces. — PoeticUniverse

Seem to be, indeed. But they are not. They principle of maximal economy applies to nature. You can construct all with two, the absolute minimum. Nature is dual. There are force fields indeed. The stillness can't exist. Nothing could be freed from the void.

Dunno bout God. Somehow they seem necessary.

So, if we didn't have clocks there would be no time? What if there was nothing used to measure time, would there be no time, and what would be its referent then? — Sam26

Basically, yes! It is us who have constructed clocks, and the periodic processes accompanying them, like pendulums and metronomes, atomic vibrations, or orbital motions of celestial objects (showing not the amount of time passed but only the periodic motion we measure it by). Time as a periodic motion, put in relation to process that are going on in the world is not a property that existed before we mentally and practically constructed it. You can make a clock tick aside a physical process, reversible or irreversible, and say that the periodic motion has occured 536.78 times, but this will be the case only after the introduction of the clock. The clock has to be a reversible process, which is why it's so difficult to make one, as almost, if not all, processes are irreversible (which means it isn't possible to simply reverse all motion, which can only be done for the perfect, ideal clock).

So, quantified time is a human invention. You can mentally place a clock near all events, like is done in relativity or Newtonian mechanics. The processes you put the clocks next to take a number of periods. The number of periods is our invention, the processes are real. It turns out that some processes, when compared with reversible process of the clock, take more periods than others. If there would only be reversible processes there wouldn't be processes, there would be no irreversible processes next to which the clock could be positioned, and it are exactly these processes which can be meaningfully be quantized by time, as they evolve in one direction.

You can mentally reverse all motion in the universe, reverse time, but then the problem becomes that the end conditions become begin conditions, and the much bigger problem that you simply can't reverse momenta universally. You can do it mentally, or introduce a god, but reversing the process introduces initial conditions (the reversed end conditions) which are determined by the initial conditions when the process was still going in forward direction. Which means that you have to impose initial conditions which are reversed end conditions of the process you reverse. So the reversed end conditions become dependent on the initial conditions of the forward process, which is different from a forward process emerging from initial conditions only.

So while the quantified time, the number on the time axis, is a human construct, the processes it refers to are real, and if you compare them with a clock, different events will read different times, and in relativity this proceeding of the clock, the quantity of time, will depend even on space and motion. The irreversible processes that are quantified contain amounts of time, and we also notice time without quantifying it. So time is not only the clock. It's not only the amount of periods, the number of seconds, clicks, or vibrations, that constitutes time. For time to have a meaningful existence, irreversible processes are needed. One can say that a reversible process has taken 10 seconds but then it's not clear if time ran forward or backward.

Something can take long, when it's boring, like what I write right now. People watch on their watch. Another 5 minutes... When having fun, the clock isn't looked on. Time over, when the end is there.


Something like that.

:cool:

Maybe it's a scary thought that behind all stuff we use there are other people having some divine knowledge about them. We send our children to school to make them acquainted with the divine so maybe later they can participate in the powers from which new stuff originates to surrounds ourselves with and stay ignorant about, as this knowledge is for the chosen ones only. How different from the way of the animals.

Total nonsense, but I can imagine people think like this.

The reason for making: most people don't know the workings of, say, a remote control, but they use it. Here you explicitly see the workings, without knowing what it's for. The construct just walks along the beach.

What's the problem with not knowing how your remote control function? You gotta have knowledge about everything you surround yourself with? Will it lead to disaster if you don't know?

Omniscience is a logical impossibility if interaction is involved, for interacting with that what the knowledge is about will destroy the knowledge you had before interacting. Hoisting the interaction aboard of the knowledge already there doesn't change the outcome. If the process of knowing becomes part of the process the knowing is about then the knowing itself becomes a hindrance to knowledge of it all.

Only the evolution of neatly isolated material arrangements, given well defined initial conditions, can be related to omniscience. The science being about the material insofar it satisfies the criterion of being valid knowledge. If the arrangement is started and we let it evolve freely, without us intervening, the evolution can be known completely. The moment we intervene, the knowledge is frustrated. If the molded matter behaves not as expected the knowledge has to be adjusted. Which potentially involves changing the theory, or changing the mold and conditions.

There are no referents for words like, time, nothing, the, free will, etc — Sam26

Why shouldn't there be referents for these? Time refers to a clock, free will refers to the will, the refers to nouns, etc refers to a not mentioned part. Only nothing refers to nothing. All words have referents or meaning. Unless you use the words like words only, like can be done in poetry.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't! — Agent Smith

Being not damned only if you do and don't at the same time:

I'll be damned if I think I know nothing or everything and know or don't know that! Salvation lies in knowing or not that you don't know everything nor nothing. It's the only way out.

A distinction sans a difference. — Agent Smith

You mean knowledge is power?

I'm talking about lip service. — Agent Smith

Excuse me?

Yes, if I perceive mental content, I would say "I am conscious of the mental content", rather than "my mind is conscious of the mental content". — RussellA

Yes. The mind is there like the world is there. You are not your mind or the world, but you can't live without them. It's not you who does the thinking, it's you experiencing the thoughts. You can try to influence them like you can try to influence the world. Thoughts just happen like the world just happens.

To say one knows nothing is done with the same megalomaniac attitude as saying one knows everything. Sometimes it feels like the eye is too small, sometimes that it's far too big, but clinging to just one of those feelings uncovers a feeling superiority. To the minimal or to the maximal.
To say you know you know nothing is said by people who secretly want to know everything but can't even know one thing except that they know that.

(politics & religion the power-sharing couple of all time) — Agent Smith

Don't overlook the happy modern day power sharing couple. State and science, who were born in ancient Greek and grew up happily together as brother and sisterr. Their later fairy tale marriage thus basically is one based on incest.

Talk is cheap — Agent Smith

It depends who talks. Speaking fee:

"Motivational speakers, businesspersons, facilitators, and celebrities are able to garner significant earnings in speaking fees or honoraria. In 2013, $10,000 was considered a lower limit for speakers brokered by speakers bureaus, $40,000 a regular fee for well-known authors, and famous politicians were reported to charge about $100,000 and more."

When I say "My mind is conscious", I am speaking in the third person as an outside observer of my mind. — RussellA

I think this is a crucial point. You perceive the mental content, while someone else (or you looking in the mirror) sees looks at it from the outside, the material part. Though to look at a working brain is very difficult! You can only see tiny parts of its inside and to look at a working brain truly set apart from a body is just impossible. You can never see the working inside of the brain, except maybe by images given by scanning techniques.

The only thing left to do is to accept the wrath of the almighty Creator, succumb to His Divine Word, bow to His Infinite Creation, and show eternal gratitude for His Wisdom, given to us by His Word, to be heard by submissive prayer only. Let's pray He will get a grip and restore Natural order. If not, we are doomed for sure.

I know that the western train should slow down instead of race up, productivity shrink instead of inflate, energy be clean instead of smelly and portable instead of static, and products be renewable instead of disposable if we want Nature to survive. If we want future people to live.

Let's hope our Lord , Savior, and Great Redeemer Zeus, will award the chosen ones and give them a place in the paradise to come.

We could also fall prey to the current mode of living, and watch paradise fall apart while replacing it by an inflationary expanding artificial.Enjoy the artificial fruits growing on the tress of science, growing up high to the sky. Sucking Gaia empty, transforming Her life energy in artificially intelligent matter systems, programmed on mad rate and rythm. Propagating humanity within linear bounds and confines, so it becomes predictable and controllable.

I don't say that the creation is holy, actually. I think Zeus doesn't give a damn. He might restore paradise, he might not. If you mean by paradise nature as it was before unnatural intervention. Still, I think it's a good way to teach people at least some respect for nature, if not by endless admiration, then by pointing out that life won't be possible anymore soon if the modern way is continued.
Which might not be a catastrophe per se but still... And who knows? Maybe Zeus actually punishes people disturbing nature by the endless desire for inflation. Though it's probably me punishing. The biblical image of Sodom and Gammora comes close. It's not God destroying and the "sin" is not sexual. Nature will just be fucked up by the "sin" of the western way. It's of course no sin, but just one way amongst many, Though the many become less and less, and the one more one than ever. Let's hope the best! But if I look realistically, it's depressing. While it's so easy to give all a future of roses and sunshine.

And now, dear brothers and sisters, let's hold hands and prey... Oh heavenly Father, Great Creator of Being...

There wasn't much to 'see' in the Big Bang, because for the first 240,000 - 300,000 years, there was no light. — Bitter Crank

There was light from the very beginning. But it was continually scattered by electrons and protons. The photons that scattered for the last time were set free after electrons and protons formed atoms, thereby emitting new photons. Together all these photons formed the cosmic microwave radiation, which back then was still visible, giving the universe an orange hot glow of about 3000 kelvin.

does the JWT have (intelligent) life-detecting capabilities? — The Opposite

No. The exoplanets can't be seen. Let alone life on it. There will be another telescope in 2025. Together they look for planets that are possibly sustain life. By analyzing spectral data of the atmospheres. That's probably one around each star. So if we have to escape we can take off for Proxima Centauri. About 4 ly from us.

I think there are two truly elementaries. The absolute minimum. From these massless units, all quarks and leptons, and their excitations, the families, can be constructed.

The bedrock is in sight. That's good for now since my lady says it's time for bed. — PoeticUniverse

Go easy on her... And in any case, Gnight! Think I do the same!

:wink:

Maybe we should confine rational thinking to mathematical thinking. I think this can be regarded as the highest form of pure rational abstract thought.

Of course, every form of thought has is own rationality and content, but in western culture, started in ancient Greece, it is the kind of rationality and reality founded by the Greek philosophers which finds its culmination in the world of math. The thought processes can be strictly defined and maybe even located in the brain. Which doesn't explain the joy or true nature of mathematical thinking though, because therefore you have to be a mathematician. Showing the neural correlate of a mathematical thought is not the same as truly having the thought. It's interesting to know how a mathematician thinks when seeing math formulae or how he or she arrives from visions, or sounds, to theorems. How, for example, proceeds thinking to show that there are only 17 different wallpaper patterns? Or how one solves that riddle of two man and woman on an island? They have to go to another island by a boat and both wives cannot stay alone with the other wife's man.

True, and so to find the basic we look toward the simplest state. — PoeticUniverse

That is probably the state of the massless particles in quarks and leptons. There are only two kinds of them, the minimum needed to construct all of matter from. Again, dualism in the bedrock.

[

We can eliminate the complexities and even the composites as being Fundamental, for they would have parts that would have to be even more Fundamental. — PoeticUniverse

The basic fundamentals, the fundamentals from which all is made, cannot be eliminated. as these are fundamental.

We all have our teeny weeny pebble bedrock. For one it are quantum fields of massless 6-dimensional preons interacting by massless gauge fields on a curved 7-dimensional substrate containing a central wormhole as the singularity of creation, for others the bedrock is love, or the gods, others look for salvation in the constellations of the stars or precious stones, still others have randomness to 3-sigma or the observer and the universal wavefunction on many worlds in mind,
and still still other see consciousness as the bedrock. Can randomness be a bedrock? The philosopher who knows how to combine them all has yet to be born.

Will the sea rise 10 feet because of that glacier (on antarctica, I guess?). I heard it is "only" 65 cm. We can calculate it!

The will is the will. Claiming it to be free is just as stupid as to claim it to be not. It's not determined by natural laws standing above it and directing it. That's an image we project on it. Neither is it free in that it does anything it likes. Only in relation to the action following from it can you label it free or constrained.

That can be measured. As for the fact that we don't know what it really is, maybe we don't know what anything 'really is'. — Wayfarer

We can measure distance and we see what it is. A charge can be measures by looking at the effects it has on the distance between particles. But the nature of charge is not known. It's something that causes matter particles to interact with other particles. Mind is sometimes referred as necessary for the interaction with the physical world. Both involve interaction. Mental charge as well as particle charge.

Survival and replication are contingent on life. Life itself is not programmed and uses survival and replication as a means to an end.

The chaos mentioned by the OP has nothing to do with the chaos as is seen in physics. It is the chaos as comes about if we construct a physical order within the natural order. This construction of order is paramount to the reduction of order in nature. Which means that chaos in nature will appear. If the natural balance is disturbed, species will be wiped from the surface of the Earth, water will rise, fire and storms will rage, soil polluted, and life will be wiped out all together in the end. People have short term brains. Gain in a short period of time is preferred to long term thinking. Material heaven today, hell on Earth tomorrow. God would turn around in his grave...

If we don't want birds to fall from the sky, seas to devour, superstorms to rage, sweet water to taste bitter, unworldly screaming to be heard from within, the last trees to burn, the dark to enter daylight, and the light to ruin the night, the pace must be lowered this very moment. It will be too late tomorrow. Zeus' creation from Kaos will return to the Kaos it came from prematurely. Zeus won't give a damn. He will only laugh he created such stupidity and try again.

I don't think if we are constructed by the blind watchmaker of evolution. Genetic evolution might just as well be structured by the organisms themselves. The higher level behavior of organisms is far removed from genes that produce proteins. The dynamics of complicated structured of of proteins, the whole organism, is bound, for sure, but within the limits of their possibilities the behavior is not programmed. It depends on what you call programmed. If you mean a program like a program you can write or describe the moves then no. Every animal shows similar behavior as their fellow species, sure. All gazelles will flee for a lion, but that can hardly be called programmed. If lion then run...

The intelligent behavior of humans may have been programmed too - by natural evolution or by other intelligent beings. — litewave

Can you imagine? Evolution sweating buckets while programming our behavior? Human behavior is not programmed, though it certainly can look so.

Just wanted to add that!

In quantum field theory they are still considered point particles. As the wavefunction is a cross section of all the histories, also for QM they are considered so. This gives rise to infinities, as might be expected. Neatly wiped under the carpet.

Got an example of a non-material thing? — Wayfarer

Like I said, the charge in particles. Two color charges, giving rise to colored quarks, and colorless electrons and neutrinos, and electric charges loading both quarks and electrons. Neutrinos posses only two colorless combinations of color charge, no electric charge. Charge structures carried by matter can cause (holistically) consciousness. But what charges are? That can't be explained materialisticaly. But we can feel it.

What's 'an entity'? The definition is 'a thing with distinct and independent existence.' But the mind is not a thing, not an entity, not an object of any kind. Nevertheless, its reality is indubitable, as it is the pre-condition for speaking, writing and thinking or any kind of conscious activity. — Wayfarer

Why can't the mind be a non-material thing contained in matter? Things don't have to be material. It can relate to the brain the same way charge relates to particles. It's mysterious in the sense that nobody knows what a particle is. You can call it an excitation of a particle field but just an outside description we project onto it. An excitation of a quantum field is just a way to describe the various states states a point particle is in at the same time. The very concept of a point particle is problematic. It's an abstraction from everyday life, where objects move around through space. A thing like charge is projected in it to account for it's interaction with other charged particles. But nobody knows exactly what it is. It is something contained in matter which enables matter with other chunks of matter. That same load of matter we eat and it gets transformed into brain matter where these charges are bundled on the neuron structures to holistically give rise to a consciousness. No mystery involved. A purely materialisic vision of the brain ignores the nature of this side of the dual medal. Which is non-explainable by science as it can't be known what charge is from the inside of a particle. But we do know it from the inside of our brain as we experience these charged structures directly. All of our consciousness, be it a thought, a vision, a sound, or a feeling can be directly linked to charged structures.

As if an abstract non-entity can be a force — Mww

The mind an abstract non-entity? It is as real an entity as the material processes you take for the real non-abstract entity. You can even say that the mind is the cause of the force that propagates material processes. Like charge inside matter is the cause for material processes to evolve. If you look at the brain materialistically it are the mental charges, the thoughts, or the (un)consciousness that cause the material processes to move their ass, like the charge inside particles is the cause for other charges inside matter to move. So you can consider the brain a materialistic process but the combined electric charges form a part of it. If you look at an object it triggers dellicately tuned electrictrically charged patterns with such a property that you see a colored object. The color is then explained not by a material process but by the charge that's in them. As these charges reside in you you are aware of them. You perceive the color red. Someone else looking at your brain from the outside will only see the outside of the material process, while the charged load of the process is color for you. So the explanation of color is that it's a structured form of electric charges on your neural network. Which can be called a materialistic explanation, which it's not in fact, as electric charge is not understood. It's manifestation as mental processes can be understood though, as we all know what the mental is. We all know what a dream is. From the outside it is seen as structured processes in the brain, lasting five minutes, but from the inside you experience an entire world lasting a lot longer (neurons fire faster, cortex neurons in the waking state fire about 0.16 times per second while in the dream state they do this up to 70 times, condensing hours in minutes).