Pushed Around by the Stars

Post by r_parthasarathy » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

antognini wrote: post #21

pfdietz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that for extremely small perturbations the discrepancy will be linear until it reaches a critical threshold An error of epsilon on the angle of a path toward the scatter will cause an error of ~(distance to scatter/size of scatter) epsilon in the angle from the center of the scatterer to the "impact point". So the errors should grow exponentially in the number of scatterings. The (effective) curvature of th…

I spent a bit more time thinking about this, and yes you are correct. Each scattering event increases the discrepancy by ~mean free path / atomic radius, which is about five orders of magnitude. So even starting from a 10^-78 discrepancy, it only takes ~10 collisions to get an order unity discrepancy. I was thinking that the discrepancy due to collisions was negligible compared to the accumulated tidal acceleration,…

Post by dsizzle » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 2:06 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #32

dsizzle wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I did think it was an odd example, but you also referred to beauty in an objective sense twice. Are you saying... everything is subjective?

Objective vs. subjective is a slippery concept. Everybody can have different opinions on a given quality of a set of things. Is this art attractive. Is this product worth more than it costs. But those "subjective" opinions can all be functions of objective, measurable properties. And if you poll or interview everybody, you can construct an average, a statistical distribution, a model, etc. which is objective in the s…