Misc. Science Topics

[dleviwing]

Maybe at the very small scale the process we call gravity is transformed as if to be a different force. Maybe we would then call it a "weak force" and then a "strong force". Maybe it's the other way around and we start with a strong force that expands to the weak force that expands to gravity.
Maybe you shouldn't look at the forces as being different entities but as being the result of the same process; the condensing of a fundamental substance of the universe.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Hi Fredrick,

The superpositioning referred to is the supposed wave function, taken as a real description or not, about quantum "entities" such as electrons being everywhere, but nowhere in particular, until they have to be [absorption, interaction, observation?], according to their probabilities. I think that scientists have isolated such entities into two states and then referred to it as a "vibration".

Gravity seems to be a universal "force", although its sources [of the other forces] are not, plus the weak and strong forces are short range, which, of course, leaves e/m still to be considered. Gravity may be feeble only because of the lightness of being of protons and neutrons (according to Wilczek).


Hey David, good to see you. True that the forces could be secondary condensations. What's up these days? (GodQuest is still going strong.)

[austintorn@aol.com]

Victor Stenger is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is also founder of Colorado Citizens for Science. He’s held visiting faculty positions at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and at Oxford in the United Kingdom, and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy. Stenger’s search career has spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model. He participated in experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos and has also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high energy gamma ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Vic collaborated on the experiment in Japan which showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. He is the author of many books, including Comprehensible Cosmos, The Unconscious Quantum, Not by Design, Has Science Found God, The New York Times best-seller God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist, and The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason.

In this, the second of three special-edition epsiodes featuring D.J. Grothe, Vic Stenger discusses who the New Atheists oppose: not just anti-science activists, but even those who have faith in God even if they support science to some extent. He explores if science is itself based on faith. He describes ways in which faith may appear to be based on evidence. He compares evidence supporting God's existence coming from the appearance of design in nature with evidence from the sciences suggesting a total lack of design in the universe. He debates which should have priority: science or atheism, and whether learning science will lead to atheism, or if being an atheist will lead to an natural acceptance of the scientific worldview. He defends causing offense to believers in the name of truth, and explores to what extent such an approach may be counter-productive at times. He explores the best ways to "frame" atheism so as to have the most impact. He recounts his appearance on Christian radio, and what it illustrates about communicating atheism and rationalism. He explains why natural explanations for events are better than supernatural explanations. He reveals who the real audience of the New Atheists is. He talks about the growing student freethought and skeptics movement, and why young people are one the target audiences of the New Atheists. He explains why he thinks within mere generations religion will fade away. And he talks about the righteous indignation of the New Atheists, and the moral imperative of atheists to speak out because of the harm resulting from religion.

He recently recieved an honor for ‘Quantum Gods’ [there being none of those].

[Fredrick]

Maybe at the very small scale the process we call gravity is transformed as if to be a different force. Maybe we would then call it a "weak force" and then a "strong force". Maybe it's the other way around and we start with a strong force that expands to the weak force that expands to gravity.
Maybe you shouldn't look at the forces as being different entities but as being the result of the same process; the condensing of a fundamental substance of the universe.

That perspective comes quite close to what I am trying to say, but I believe the answer is one step simpler. If we indeed live in a state of incompleteness, and so far I have only heard people agree on this (with as notable exception the spiritual level), then we always have a contraposition between the local and the overall level. So, if we populate the local level with forces, then the these forces will not be the same at the overall level.

Just imagine a man, a woman, a child. Quite the significant identification (though other identifications are possible, too). Yet when we multiply these three by 100,000 and have them rally for a good cause out on the streets in front of parliament, then we do not look at the specifics as mentioned with just the three we started out with. The large group of people are expressing their power, and it is quite different from the power a single individual can hold. Still, there is no difference between the power of 300,000 individuals, and the power of a single group of that size. The only difference is that in the example of the group all individuals came together to stand behind a single issue. The difference, however, is no small potatoes, because if we only had the power of individuals at just the individual level, we would not have had nations, companies, the most powerful human entities on this planet.

What we call gravity is nothing other than the collectiveness of the forces. It exists because the forces at the local level exist, and it is different at both levels because not the specific force is delivering the outcome at the overall level; the overall direction of the collective is delivering the (larger) outcome. Same in reverse, the overall direction of the collective still does not build the individual forces (though the individual is influenced by the overall direction in which he/she/it exists).

Another example is: ingredients to a meal. While a certain dish can be lovely and one can eat as much as one could possibly eat, when the meal's ingredients are separated the hunger may dissipate rather quickly. Salt, for instance, helps increase the taste of a meal, yet try eating just salt and the enticement will dissappear like snow in the summer; no matter how hungry. Same goes for vinegar, olive oil, and pepper. Yet together in the right combination these ingredients are already enough to make a simple dressing for a salad.

Scientists love to give everything their own name, just like everyone else. We have the word dressing, too. Yet no one will argue that the dressing did not come into being until the vinegar was added, or when the olive oil was added. That is too unimportant to even discuss, because the word dressing is already understood as that what is based on a multitude of ingredients, and no ingredient is more important than the other because when taking out one ingredient or adding a different, the specific name of the dressing changes, too. Still, only at a certain level of combination of ingredients will we start talking about a dressing.

Just because scientists now talk about salt, pepper, vinegar, olive oil, and dressing, does not mean we have five fully-separate forces.

[Fredrick]

Hi Fredrick,

The superpositioning referred to is the supposed wave function, taken as a real description or not, about quantum "entities" such as electrons being everywhere, but nowhere in particular, until they have to be [absorption, interaction, observation?], according to their probabilities. I think that scientists have isolated such entities into two states and then referred to it as a "vibration".

Gravity seems to be a universal "force", although its sources [of the other forces] are not, plus the weak and strong forces are short range, which, of course, leaves e/m still to be considered. Gravity may be feeble only because of the lightness of being of protons and neutrons (according to Wilczek).


Hey David, good to see you. True that the forces could be secondary condensations. What's up these days? (GodQuest is still going strong.)

Okay, but the excellent use of words does not address the question I had. Why do you see gravity as the universal force? Desire or knowledge (or as you explain, just because of the commonly accepted use of the words are considered standard knowledge by a large scientific community; it sounds good but still leaves the question unanswered)?

At issue is of course the overall existence of gravity. How do you reconcile the incompleteness of the universe with a universal force? It is a contradiction in terms.

[labelwench]

Just because scientists now talk about salt, pepper, vinegar, olive oil, and dressing, does not mean we have five fully-separate forces.
Originally posted by Fredrick

This analogy is working for me.

Each component is part of a greater structure, no matter which direction you pursue it in, to the greater or to the least.

Likewise each concept fits within a broader framework of concepts, as Science is an umbrella for all the branches that it studies.

Forgive me if I am but summarizing the obvious. Merely demonstrating that I am 'two feet and a heartbeat' and still following this thread, lol...

[austintorn@aol.com]

Gravity…

On the scale of atomic nuclei, the weak and the strong forces dominate, but are limited in range. Over larger distances, e/m takes over, its interactions accounting for almost all of the chemistry and physics of materials; however, charges come in both positive and negative forms, and so they tend to cancel into neutrality for large objects.

So, on the very largest scale, gravity dominates, although it is the weakest of forces, for it stretches over a long range and always accumulates, there being no such things as a gravitational charge. Nor does dark energy count as “antigravity”, since its energy density is positive, even if it exerts negative pressure.

[austintorn@aol.com]

GRAVITY EXPLAINED

The Strength of Gravity, the Feeble Apparent

Gravity is a universal force—for any body:
The force felt by a body is mass proportional;
Yet, the acceleration that’s felt is the inverse!
This coincidence removes all mass dependence.

(Einstein transcended this amazing “coincidental” race
By bodies going straight through curved space.)

Gravity might be derived from the fundamentals,
The byproduct of a small residual after cancelations
Of opposite electric or color charges, and more.
Why then is gravity universal, for its sources are not?

Perhaps the appearance of feebleness is deceptive
Since protons and neutrons are but lightweights.
But why are they so light? Their mass is a compromise
Between a disturbance energy and its cancellation.

The quarks’ color charge
Disturbs gluons around them,
Small at first,
But larger growing farther from the quark.
These disturbances cost energy,
But, how to cancel them?

With an anti-quark
Or two complementarily colored quarks.

But the qualifying quarks
Can’t sit atop the originals,
For quarks have no definite position,
Just a wave function,
And they can’t be localized
To a small spread of position,
For this requires a larger energy—
So forget nullification.

The compromise is that
Some residual energy amounts
From the not-completely-canceled
Gluon field disturbances
And from the not-completely-canceled
Quark positionings,
Thus, the proton mass from m=E/cc,
With this tricky element
Of how the gluon disturbance field
Grows with distance.

The residual strong energy
From color charge also binds
The protons and neutrons
In the atomic nucleus;
The electromagnetic electron/nuclei
Charge residuals
Bind atoms into molecules,
And molecules into materials.

Asymptotic freedom
Is a subtle feedback effect
From virtual particles
Antiscreening the color charge.

This antiscreening builds up gradually,
Especially at first,
Then proceeds more quickly,
Building upon each building.

Whereas, screening happens
For electrically charged particles,
Being such as a positive charge
Attracts a negative virtual cloud.

Thus, at first, since it’s so slow to build,
The pressure
To localize the nullifying quarks
Is quite mild as well.
Thus, there’s no need
To very strictly localize and
So the energies are small;
So then is the proton mass.

This is the lightness of being.
(Ideas herein were gathered from readings,
esp. Frank Wilczek)

[austintorn@aol.com]

GRAVITY’S WELL

Gravity fell, from its fundamental throne,
Being a blend of matter and motion.
As with time, if we take away what’s known,
Its attraction fades into oblivion.

It is already gone in my dream sleep
In which I float, fly, and hover at will;
But, upon awakening from the deep,
The super bed-gravity holds me still.

Instead of dieting, I live on the moon,
Playing golf, but the bunkers are so deep
I have to take some giant leaps until noon;
‘Though I love the freedom of low-grav feet.

If there were none, life could really be tough,
Our stuff floating away—what losing brings;
What a mess, although it might help those fluffs
Mercilessly dominated by material things.

If gravity’s of movement and matter,
Like time, it could be a new dimension,
So to speak, but may still need the other three,
Although it’s just the right dose of tension.

We can conquer gravity’s whole world round
By the mere lift of a little finger;
Yet we get hang-ups about our hang-downs,
And thoughts of what the hell it is still linger.

[austintorn@aol.com]

ALCHEMY HAPPENS VIA RADIOACTIVITY
AND
HOW OLD CAN THE EARTH BE?

Through E=MCC we see that vast energy reserves
Are bound up in small amounts of matter, preserved.

Henri Becquerel carelessly left a packet of uranium salts
On a wrapped photographic plate in his drawer vault.

Some time later, he was surprised to discover that
The salts had burned a ‘light’ impression into it.
The salts were emitting rays of some sort, curiously,
So, he turned the matter over to Marie Curie, literally.

Madam Curie and her new husband Pierre, with glee,
Noted that the rocks poured out great amounts of energy,
But they never diminished in size or changed in any way.
They were converting mass into energy very efficiently.

They also found polonium and radium, and a Nobel prize,
Along with Becquerel, in 1903, Einstein yet on the rise.

Radioactive elements decayed into other elements,
Noted Ernest Rutherford and colleague Fredrick Soddy;
One day you had an atom of uranium that “bled”,
And the very next day you had an atom of lead.

It always took the same amount of days.
For half of the sample to decay,
And so this steady reliable rate of decay
Could be used in kind of a clocking way.

Tick-tock, how old was it?
More than 700 millions years worth!
This age was way more
Than anyone had given the Earth.
(5 billion would be closer to the answer.)

He lectured one day,
Taking out a piece of radioactive pitchblende,
Showing it to aging Kelvin,
But Kelvin rejected it to the end.

Dimitri Mendedeyev rejected it too,
As with everything new,
Ever storming out of labs
And lecture halls all over, too;
However, the 101st element
Was called mendelevium,
In his name meant,
And quite appropriately,
For it was a very unstable element.

Pierre Curie began to experience
Radiation sickness, getting weak,
But in 1906 he was fatally run over
By a carriage on a Paris street.

Marie worked on with much distinction,
But had an affair so indiscreet
That even the French were scandalized there,
And so she was never elected
To the Academy of Sciences,
Despite not just one,
But two Nobel prizes
(Physics, Chemistry).

Scientists yet thought that radioactivity was beneficial,
Putting thorium into toothpaste and laxatives as useful;
Eventually these products were banned, by 1938,
But for Madam, who’d died of leukemia,
It was much too late.

The radiation is so pernicious and long lasting
That even now her papers from the 1890’s,
And even her cookbooks, are dangerous and toxic,
So, all her lab books must be kept in lead lined boxes.
(One must wear protective clothing to look at them.)

Marie Curie was a very attractive lady, very much aglow,
For my great ancestor in his old writings such told me so.
She radiated warmth unto him as a rainbow of sparks—
“Great balls of fire!” he remarked,
“They now glow in the dark!”