I’m of the opinion that particles are like galaxies, the more we zoom in the more we’re going to find, there won’t be an end only another achievement of zoom level.
Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
261–270 of 591 posts
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean it's not just a hypothesis. I would really, really expect users of this site to know the difference.
Users of this site who pay attention to how science is actually practiced, and not the oversimplified cartoon version they teach us in school, know that the boundary between a "theory" and a "hypothesis" is rather blurry. For instance, have you ever noticed how it's called "string theory" despite having no real evidence for it? Have you ever heard anyone, let alone a real scientist, complain about this nomenclature?…
String theory is supported by a ton of evidence in that it can produce many predictions and hypotheses that match observed data. That’s why it’s called a “theory” and why people continue to study it.
What’s missing is a test that would produce evidence that would allow us to distinguish between string theory and competing theories. But that’s not nearly the same thing as saying it has “no real evidence.”
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
AKA the "anthropic principle."
AKA “God did it” with a sciencey sounding name. An answer which explains nothing, predicts nothing, satisfies no curiosity, and closes the book on any further questions.
The Anthropic Principle explains why you are asking the question, not why the proton has that charge. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#264Wait till you see the sophon.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, such a universe would create all states, but if perception from chaos were possible, then there would be overwhelmingly more chaotic states to perceive than sensible ones, so you would expect to find yourself perceiving chaos. I think perception cannot exist without a robust evolutionary history to build upon, which is why you perceive something sensible.
It depends on what we see as "perception". Imagine in our regular universe model, the "perceptor" quickly switched between all creatures just like a CPU core switches between all busy processes. That wouldn't invalidate any of the creatures/processes "experience" and wouldn't mix them (ignoring cache, processes aren't that isolated really). All these processes are transient states of the same physical CPU core. Back…
That would still make the human brain an exceptionally rare state, compared to all the other chaotic states the perceptor perceives.
This particular human brain refuses to believe that the perceptor perceives anything when selecting a chaotic state. If you'd like to hear chaos' opinion on the matter, please pound on your keyboard for a while.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one knows. That's part of the great mystery. But also in some sense "it has to be that way," since without charge balance atoms wouldn't exist as we know them, and thus neither would all the chemistry that creates the macroscopic world we inhabit.
That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexity in matter, we wouldn't be here to point out how seemingly-perfect it seems. (If you subscribe to a multiverse interpretation, perhaps most of the infinitely many other possible universes are dead and void.)
I'm not very sympathetic to the view that we're very lucky to be in this universe. That said, there is an interesting response to the anthropic principle response, which I'll mention here just because I think it's interesting to think about what's wrong with this objection:
Suppose you and I were living in a totalitarian state. The state decides that you and I are to be put to death. They drag us into a field, and a shooting squad of several marksmen surrounds us. They all fire - but miraculously, every single one of them misses us.
I then turn to you and say, "Wow, the odds that all of those bullets missed us by sheer chance are so incredibly low. Clearly, it wasn't by chance - they must have coordinated to ensure they missed us, intentionally."
You then turn to me and say, "No, that's silly. It's simply that if any of the bullets had hit us, we wouldn't be around to talk about it."
Your line of reasoning here doesn't seem to be very compelling. Why?
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
AKA the "anthropic principle."
AKA “God did it” with a sciencey sounding name. An answer which explains nothing, predicts nothing, satisfies no curiosity, and closes the book on any further questions.
> AKA “God did it”
+ "Just for us" ^^
e.g. Earth is the only place where life could have formed. We have yet to set foot on even 1 another planet but we are pretty sure we are alone in the entire damn Universe.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t get behind all these fine tuning arguments. Who’s to say what life might form if the proton had a charge of 1.01e or if the fine structure constant was 1/138? Something about the line of reasoning that there is a multiverse and we just happen to live in favorable conditions reminds me of Pascal’s wager. It doesn’t do anything other than unfalsifiably assure the wagerer that they are important
Which fine tuning arguments are you referring to? As I understand it, 'fine tuning' is simply a fact of the universe: that the fundamental constants have values that allow for the emergence of complexity, and that even slight changes to those values would lead to homogeneous and featureless universe. I don't have the physics background to demonstrate this for myself, but I believe it. To then reason from that fact to…
Ok here’s the problem. What hubris does it take to assume the fundamental constants could be changed? Just because they appear in math equations doesn’t mean they can be twiddled and tweaked like programming variables. We have no prior knowledge or justification to believe any constants have been “tuned”, because we have no justification in suggesting other possible values.
We could just as easily say that life on earth was “tuned” to make ”intelligent life” evolve, but we don’t have any other 4 billion year test runs of earth to see what else might have evolved. In the same way we have no data at all about the phase space of other possible universes, their constants, or how their physics would play out on cosmological timescales.
It’s not that it isn’t fun to think about. It’s just that it is unscientific.
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, yes, I also understand this. But why are they in units of 1/3(e). Why are down quarks not -0.398390847895...(e) and up quarks not +0.6234098129034809234...(e). Why do they add up so damn neatly?
It’s essentially asking why is the speed of light 299,798,452 m/s or the gravitational constant 6.67x10-11 Nm2/kg2 I’m sure a universe could work with those constants varied but that’s the one we have in our universe. There could be hypothetical universes with protons being half of electron and atoms would have twice the protons. However the fundamental constants are just that. A number that allows us to reason about…
Or, there's some more fundamental rule that's being followed that we haven't discovered yet that explains these numbers.
Physicists have been searching for the Grand Unified Theory since forever, and so far, no real luck. The closest is something i'm not too familiar with called M-theory (which is a derivative(?) of string theory).
Re: Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe all the other instances crashed, but we got lucky and get to apply the anthropic principle. The real question is, are we running on bare metal, in a VM, or in a container?
> The real question is, are we running on bare metal, in a VM, or in a container? We can't be running on the bare hardware; there is clearly an OS enforcing the hardware abstraction (e.g. every electron is identical). But is each universe its own process? What happens if you fork()?
Universe is a quantum computer, forking every Planck interval.