Not at all. The photon explores all possible paths available to it. Everything neatly cancels out in the wash leaving the geometrical optics result (and fringes if there are two equal paths).
You have stamped on the probability envelope of the photon wavefunction by forcing it to zero outside a given gate time. This is pretty much like fitting a carpet by jumping up and down on the bumps. Tightly constrained in time the wavefunctions must become broader in frequency to match their new boundary conditions. The same way that a short burst of a pure sine wave audio tone has sidebands and sounds different to CW.
What you see as "mysticism" I see as a natural consequence of the Fourier transform relationship between the conjugate variables of time and frequency.
I think the problem here is that you imagine photons as little bullets.
Here is a paper (warts and all) where they have attempted to measure the probability density function of a photon using a cunning two photon correlation experiment:
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You don't do maths so look at fig 8 and inset. Another one but less convincing is
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Most of the ultra fast lasers now suffer from the problem that making them any shorter pulses broadens the frequency.
Quantum mechanics is rather easier to test experimentally than the existence of God. When I was an undergraduate the particle in a box energy states was a standard theoretical thing to learn how to compute.
Now with bucky balls and single trapped atoms we can actually construct them and measure their properties. OK not a nice square cubic box like the simplest physics teaching problem but close enough to show that our models do make the correct predictions.
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Quantum mechanics requires you to understand the mathematics. Since you don't do mathematics you substitute mysticism instead.
The preservatives in food one is particularly funny since badly stored organic peanut butter harbours fungi producing aflatoxins that are completely offscale in terms of their carcinogenic potential.
Even if the preservatives are dodgy they are the lesser of two evils.
One thing that is becoming clear as better functional NMR scans become available is that right wingers are hard wired to see everything as a threat and fight against any and all change. There are also a smaller bunch of people who are hardwired to explore new things and take risks. Both are needed for a human society to develop and progress otherwise you have stagnation with nothing new being discovered. Most people are somewhere in the middle of this risk taking/risk averse spectrum.
Obsessive cleanliness probably plays a part in leaving the way open for the immune system to latch onto false positives.
Actually it is looking more like the fault here lies in massively over processed baby foods containing trace amounts of compounds that act as sensitizers at least in the case of increasing peanut allergies.
Exposure to decent amounts of peanut in the diet doesn't seem to have the same effect but trace amounts are implicated in rising allergies. Pollen allergies have been around ever since primitive wind pollenated flowering plants evolved - it is one of the other things that may have finished off the dinosaurs or at least hastened their demise.
Making people afraid is one way politicians cling to power. Terrorists find it useful too (hence their name).
I don't see that that is at all true. Logical causation influences it because *the brain evolved in a universe that operates according to logical rules*. It is indeed an "evolutionary optimisation", to be able to e.g. make predictions about what is about to happen using logical thought.
Now the reason *why* the universe operates like this - the question of where the laws of physics come from - that is the deep mystery. And you are free to say "because god made it like that" if you like. But it seems to me that does not get you anywhere, raising more questions than it answers, not an explanation at all really.
The classical theory is the same as that for varactor paramps--f_signal
f_idler = f_pump.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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Dr Philip C D Hobbs
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ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
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That's a bit unfair, I think. Wave propagation is the easy part--solve a PDE or two and you're done. What's deeply mysterious is that nice continuous Maxwell's equations calculation giving rise to light absorption by exactly one electron, no more and no less, at a position that cannot be predicted exactly even in principle, and accompanied by the disappearance of the rest of the wave.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Do you have data to support the picture of dinosaurs sneezing themselves to death? (It's a pretty funny picture.)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
That's just arm waving--you haven't provided any mechanism. It's the one-to-one correspondence between states of the brain and stages of the argument that can't be maintained--there's no way for the logical causation to influence the physical brain in the mechanistic picture. The reason mechanists find it mysterious is that it is in fact a flat contradiction, as all philosophers knew from the time of Plato until about 1950. (With a few outliers like J. S. Mill and Karl Marx.)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Hi John, Don't bother returning them... they cost us ~$0.07 each so mailing them back is not worth it. (I've got several hundred here.) Put 'em in your junk drawer, or the cylindrical filling cabinet.
The problem is that anything for which there is no evidence can be conveniently swept into the "spiritual" domain and claim a free pass. How is that different than saying that since homeopathy and dowsing are in the domain of "pseudoscience", they don't require evidence?
The problem comes when people assume their subjective experiences are indicative of objective reality, without objective evidence.
Love can most definitely be corroborated by evidence, and the biological correlates of love have long been an active field of study. You may say that you are not yet convinced by the evidence, but that seems to me to be a "god of the gaps" argument.
But that's neither here nor there, since it's just showing the physiological basis for an emotion... and nobody doubts that emotions exist. The problem is when we try to infer an objective reality based on subjective emotions.
Love, like religious conviction, is a subjective experience. No matter how strongly you feel love for another person, that subjective experience alone does not indicate anything objective about the other person... such as if they feel reciprocal love for you. This can lead to tragic outcomes.
In the same way, the strength of religious convictions that are based on purely subjective experiences does not demonstrate any external reality for that deity.
If you want to say that your god exists and is true for you, fine. It's like the teenage girl who has a crush on a film star who doesn't even know she exists. And in fact, considering that the crush may be based on false impressions of the star's personality from fim roles, the star she thinks she is in love with may not really exist.
"That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence." -- Christopher Hitchens
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They are are attempting to answer different questions: Religion tries to answer the question : Why are we here? Science tries to answer the question : How does it work?
It is experimentally testable. Wisdom of Solomon - offering to cut the surviving child in two to determine which was the authentic mother. Kings 3:16-28
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Proof by dynamic assertion simply doesn't hack it.
Their brains may work the same in terms of signals and cells, but the network paths are very different. Arguably there is a *very* fine dividing line between a madman and a mathematical genius. Having external sensors like eyes and ears allows a brain to learn from its environment by experience - trail and error what works and what doesn't. Some madmen can be made sane by giving them lithium too.
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Known to help since its discovery in the early 1800's when it was used to treat gout it wasn't until 1998 that the mechanism was determined.
Untrue.
All a mechanistic universe requires is that the underlying rules have some logical internal consistency so that they can in principle be discovered and tested. The brain is a network with a very large number of interconnections and we are getting better at reading its internal states using functional NMR.
Anyway we know we live in a quantum probabilistic universe so things are never as clear cut as classical mechanics would have you believe.
It is far more difficult in a universe when you have capricious God(s) parting seas, making salt pillars, stopping the sun in the heavens, walking on water, turning water into wine and performing various other circus tricks. Under those circumstances it is completely impossible to predict anything at all as the God(s) can interfere on a whim.
There is sufficient complexity involved that only the higher functions of conciousness are rational. There is plenty of irrationality floating about in the subconscious. Conway argues that the mind is in part mixed up in the quantum states. I am inclined to think that we will be able to simulate a human brain on a large scale digital supercomputer within another couple of decades. A feat which will have serious ethical implications for how the new artificial intelligence is treated.
AI has had many false dawns. Things that sound hard like chess proved to be fairly easy whereas apparently simple things like walking in a park and seeing the 3D world in realtime proved to be very difficult.
There are now programs that pass the Turing test (and people that fail).
Non sequitur. The *only* way you can tell if someone loves you is by objective evidence... what *you* feel for *them* is irrelevant.
Faith in science is based upon objective evidence, *exactly* as in faith in a mother's love. If science didn't produce objective results, and if your mother never demonstrated her love, you would (rightly) have no basis for faith in either.
This is far different from religious faith, which is based subjective emotions in the absence of objective evidence. It's not an "acquaintance" because it is all one-sided... like loving a photo of a woman you've never met but have been told is your mother. No matter how strong your feelings, they tell nothing about the object of your affection... only about yourself.
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Your point is well taken. It has often been noted that the problem with religious claims is that they are not falsifiable. But I'd actually be willing to hold them to the much weaker standard of just requiring objective evidence. The problem with the falsifiability requirement is that sometimes it can be hard to say today that something can never be falsified in the future.
But at least with some preliminary evidence, we could at least call it "pilot data" and justify additional expenditures of labor.
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It was resurrected again last year although myself I think the K-T boundary layer full of iridium and the big crater at Yucatan peninsula were a lot more significant in the dinosaur extinction. Against:
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Actually the argument now is a bit more subtle. I think this link is free access:
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The majority view by far is for death by asteroid.
"there's no way for logical causation to influence it, so Einstein's brain and a madman's are equally irrational."
Evolution in a logical universe *is* the reason brains can do logic. The general mechanism is selection by survival of the fittest combined with a source of genetic variation.
Or are you asking for a blow-by-blow explanation of each brain mutation and neuroanatomical detail?
(You seemed to be making a general argument that such an explanation is impossible even in principle. So I feel justified in responding with a general argument in turn.)
Any evidence to support this rather amazing claim? There is ample evidence that fundamentalist Christianity is trying to force its views on everyone else (especially other religions). We can see this in the countless blatant attempts to have sectarian prayers in schools, to teach religious dogma as science, to erect Ten Commandments displays and nativity scenes in government buildings, and even to get taxpayer funding for religious activities. And if anyone cries foul, the Religious Reich puts on a big show of being "persecuted" (and raising big bucks to "fight back").
Nobody is telling the Christians what to believe, only that they can't dictate what others should believe. It's all about fairness. Somehow, I'm fairly certain that some day when Christians really are in the minority, and some other faith has the muscle to try to force its tenets as the approved norm for the rest of us, suddenly the First Amendment will regain its popularity for Christians.
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No, just some explanation of how it is possible in principle for a purely mechanical universe to allow rational thought. Arm waving about unspecified adaptations doesn't qualify.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
It's not mystical at all in the wave model. It's just AM of a sine wave.
Yeah, at 40 ps, getting the signal out of the final chip, through a capacitor, and into the connector is the tricky part. The chip is so tiny, its exit traces can't be 50 ohms.
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Yes, and Bigfoot has been named and described. That alone isn't enough to demonstrate their existence, however. So far tachyons have not been observed.
Einstein's theory doesn't say massive particles cannot travel faster than the speed of light (at least, not all solutions of his equations say that). It says that massive particles cannot be sped up to the speed of light; and some solutions suggest that tachyons cannot be slowed down to the speed of light.
The Le Sage (note the correct spelling) particles are entirely hypothetical, and were invented specifically to try to explain the effects of gravity. These invisible, extremely fast particles bombard all matter from all directions. When an object is by itself, there is no net movement. But when there are two objects, they kind of "shade" each other from the bombardment, so there is a net movement towards each other. Hence, gravity.
There are a whole bunch of problems with this, such as the notion was invented strictly to try to explain gravity, much as the luminiferous ether was invented to explain how waves could move through empty space. Le Sage's notion offers a sort of half-assed explanation for gravity, but doesn't offer any testable predictions.
Unfortunately, the notion fails on other grounds, most notably that were there such a phenomenon as these Le Sage particles, the heat of their collisions with matter would quickly vaporize the matter. Also, since these particles interact with matter and are present in vast numbers throughout the Universe, they would cause moving objects to slow down and eventually "stop." A planetary body orbiting a star, for example, would experience a drag on its motion and spiral into the star as a result of this drag.
So we have an ad hoc "theory" that doesn't adequately explain gravity, that makes no predictions, and that operates contrary to what is observed. It seeks to explain nothing more than gravity, without offering a hint about other phenomena.
We are expected to throw out the theories of Relativity, which *do* make testable predictions, which have survived all of these tests so far, and which offer answers for a wide range of phenomena.
We already know that Relativity is not a complete theory. The Quantum theories are likewise incomplete. Within their respective domains they are all remarkably accurate and consistent with observations; but they fall apart when we try to generalize them. We'll have to come up with something that can address these shortcomings.
Until then, however, these theories are the best we've got, and they're excellent. It will require a much more complete theory to replace them. The Le Sage notion isn't it.
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A rolling stone gathers no moss.
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