Recent content by logico

Yes; I have reread a couple of summaries. This is a vast universe which is basically a hard vacuum with a very low radiation density: then the baby universes arise as quantum (rather than Boltzmann) fluctuations, and somehow inherit the low entropy density but (as I guess is true of all...

bhobba It's a brave man who can say "it's really... superposition." Nobody doubts that the Schrödinger equation works; but "superposition" implies an ontological commitment to the unobserved states. Personally, since only particles are observed, I don't feel any greater need to regard the wave...

... (Whoops) ...which we observe by hypothesising an even more extreme low entropy uiniverse which we do not and perhaps in principle can never observe? I think that has been tried before by Moses...

Chalnoth You are saying that the very low entropy universes produced in the C-C model are the norm? My apologies - I thought there were a whole range of types, and that very low entropy universes would therefore be very rare. Leaving only the problem of why the parent universe has extremely...

Sorry, that was unfair. Do blame your teachers. They didn't sufficiently emphasise that dy/dx is not actuially a gradient. It's not actually a fraction.

I hope you mean that the masses of objects sharing the observer's frame of reference behave in the everyday way. That would be true, but irrelevant to my point. Two identical bodies making a close approach at relativistic velocities will each measure the mass of the other as greater than their...

The short answer is that we don't know any properties to be fundamental. Mass is more problematic than most. In GR mass depends on your frame of reference, and changes if you are in a changing frame of reference. But the big issue is not whether mass changes from one observation to another, but...

I'm afraid you got that wrong. Gradient is tan theta. It is only when there is no theta, no unique angle, that we use differential calculus - we extend a property of straight lines to curved lines by a clever mathematical argument. You are suggesting the opposite: that we can only discover the...

Hmm. The answer that a low intensity beam (modern experiments deliver one photon at a time) would flicker applies to any beam. I'm guessing (?) from your question that you are thinking about a flickering at each of the two slits. That doesn't happen, because to see/detect a photon you have to...

In words: When we look at anybody accelerating in response to an external force, we find that F=ka, and we call that constant of proportionality "mass". But A.M. wanted to know what happens if there is no F, no a. I think that you are ignoring the problem (and what has calculus fot to do with...

This model, like your suggested string solution, or like the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, smacks of a fudge philosophically. Basically, if x is highly improbable in the set (x, y, ...), simply devise a vast (even infinite) hidden set-of-sets within which the set where x is...

J.G. Sorry - Principle of Equivalence.

Feynman toyed with the idea of a checkerboard universe - discrete space and time - all his working life. Why? Because he didn't like the need for renormalisation as practised.

Aargh. 50 years ago I had to study this stuff. It is certainly important to resolve it. Godel's incompleteness theorem is one of a class of arguments depending on diagonalisation - preceded by Cantor and followed by Church-Turing. First of all, assume that you have a strategy for listing all the...

J.G. Your object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line until acted upon by an external force - law of inertia. You are right, obviously, that the parts of the object are attracted to its centre of gravity, but that attraction cannot contribute to nor create inertia...