Recent content by Eelco

Let me get this straight: we havnt actually ever seen electroweak symmetry, the unification energy being far out of our experimental reach; yet somehow I am supposed to be convinced that it exists, yet is hidden? Would you excuse me if i said that sounds fishy? I don't doubt the electrical and...

Or that this symmetry doesn't quite exist. I am more than a little bothered that no one is willing to put down a number at which energy we will find a higgs boson; or I believe many people have, but they have all been wrong so far. I am more than a little skeptical we will ever find one; I am...

The reason why I asked is that it might make objective versus subjective wavefunction collapse an experimental matter; but I am not sure even if it should. On a related note: decoherence doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a solution to the measurement problem (and many people dispute it...

Im not quite sure I am following. When you say they are the quantized particles of the weak field, you mean we can treat them analogous to photons (quantized paritcles of the electric field), for instance. I would agree this gives some intuitive sense to considering them as force carriers. Are...

Both, now that you mention it, but I was thinking of purely collapse originally. I am superficially aware of decoherence, but I am unsure how it would answer my question. If it does, can you sketch in a few sentences how?

I have a question I havnt been able to figure out by reading or googling: If we have an entangled pair of particles, and we measure one, thus collapsing its wavefunction, 'when' does the other particle collapse? 'Instantly' begs the question of 'in which reference frame?' For instance...

This question has always somewhat perplexed me; if the W and Z boson are force carriers, then why arnt cannon balls force carriers too? Ive read before that the line between force carrier and matter is somewhat arbitrary, but what makes the W and Z fall on the force-carrier side? Sure, they...

Yeah, I agree. non-finitary mathemathics is horribly confused, AC or not.

I agree with you here: the axiom of choice is horsegarbage, and the tarski paradox a figment of the imagination of mathematicians. As is the continuum, and completed infinity in general. It starts with Gallileo's paradox, and it goes downhill from there. Non-finitistic mathematics is not...

I never made any such indications, I made an analogy. A perfectly valid one. People like you are the Kant of the 21th century. He 'proved' space was Euclidian, didnt you know? After all, how could it be any different? You are bringing forth the exact same kind of arguments with respect to...

Neither was Euclidian geometry. Euclidian geometry is no religion, but asserting that geometry could only ever possibly be Euclidian, because you say so, is a religious attitude, even without any observational evidence to the contrary. Does the fact that you cannot conceive of any other...

Or so you assert. I agree with you, that the role of science is to reduce a mess of observational data to a minimum of elegant principles, that reproduce the observational data as an emergent feature. Sometimes, one makes missteps along the way. One embraces fundamental truths, which turn...

Lubos: While I am myself unsure of the merits of LQG, you make some fundemantally flawed claims concerning discrete spacetime. Small scale physics that breaks some laws deduced from macroscopic observations are perfectly capable of reproducing these macroscopic properties in the large scale...

I define it as 'that which I can see'. That makes it easy, as you don't have to bother to expend any energy going looking for it. Models should fit the data, and they should not contradict themselves. Within those constraints, anything goes as far as I am concerned.

Reality is an assumption I hold on to, yes. If you dont, good for you, but then this discussion is over.