Topic: Re: $1 Trillion Bitcoin (physics derail) - page 2. (Read 1148 times)

You need to keep your story straight. Is light what something IS, or is it what something DOES? It is a noun or a verb? See the problem?


If I quoted something, I could easily be accused of strawmanning. I have to at least give you a chance to defend your doctrines. I'm not going to be a jerk and put words in your mouth. Instead you simply say, "NO U!!!" Calling them "demonstrably incorrect statements" comes of as rather empty and authority-enamored when you seem completely incapable of refuting even a single one of the statements I've made.

However, your point that this can easily become a wild goose chase is well taken, so if we continue this we'd better focus on one simple term and just try to find a physicist to give a definition of that term that can be used consistently.

I propose the word "particle," which you claim is straightforwardly and rigorously defined. To save you some work defending your faith, I googled "particle definition" and found a bunch of physicists looking confused:

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-41456.html

But they might just be students for all we know. Instead I found the Wikipedia entry for particle, which, refreshingly, starts off with a definition: "a particle is a small localized object." OK, small object. Pretty straightforward, got it.

However, what then is a photon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon claims that a photon is a particle, which means a photon is a small object.

So far so good? Perhaps you are starting to see where this religion is going to inevitably run into problems

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Now because I know people are going to come back and be upset we've filled this thread with off-topic stuff, I'm going to bring this back to investing.

In investing, making solid, clear, consistent definitions is just as important as it is in science. Clear definitions of bull, bear, trendline, support, correction, bubble, momentum, etc. These are paramount for clear reasoning leading to moneymaking.

Moreover, if you can reason clearly about something that is hard to reason clearly about you can take away money from those who fall into the trap. And one of the easiest traps for people to fall into are ones paved by semantic oddities. Just as Einstein confused himself into thinking space (nothingness? sometimes somethingness?) can be curved and ended up wasting most of his life on frivolities, investors confuse themselves into thinking that something being in a bubble (overbought? unsustainable? too much speculative value imputation versus usage value imputation?) means it should be sold.

"I don't even know what a bubble is." - Eugene Fama

"It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is." - Richard Feynmann

this is ridiculous. light is a wave phenomenon because it has the property that is given in the above definition and for no other reason. there is no metaphor, there is no equivocation. in fact, ANYTHING that has that property is considered a wave. this is the very definition of consistency.

Ah yes, the old "physics works" objection. No, engineering works. I actually anticipated this in my first post, though I edited it in later (though some hours before your wrote the above) so I can see why you missed it:


Do you think that the inventor of the wheel knew about geometry, coefficient of rolling friction, stress, shear, etc.?

Also, keep your eye on the ball: I never called "force" or "gravity" arbitrary. I said they were nonsense terms, or inconsistently used ones that make utterances using them nonsense - take your pic. Physics is thus rendered pseudoscience. If you ask a physicist why an apple falls to the ground, they'll tell you "gravity pulls it down." Might as well just cut to the chase and say "God did it." There is no educational value in such statements. We learn nothing we didn't know before.

Anyway, this is forum for real world practical endeavors, so I will cease making fun of those government-grant-fattened parasites known as physicists

Remember I said that the definitions have be able to be used consistently? You cannot define a wave as a "phenomenon," then turn around and say, as your source does, "More than any other concept, physicists are finding that waves characterize the structure of the universe." This is speaking metaphorically. I'm asking for rigorous definitions that are applied consistently. Physics has few, if any. It will call light a wave phenomenon, but then speak of photons as "particles." What is a particle? No consistent definition. It's supposed to be a little ball? No? Infinitely small? "No size"? All of the above


Unfortunately, "momentum" and "mass" are ill-defined, making this definition ill-defined as well.

i'm sorry, but you've just shown me that you have little to no understanding of how science works.

if the quoted were true, then it wouldn't work at all, as its virtue comes directly from its consistent applicability and nowhere else -- and so we'd have no computers to even communicate with, or GPS, or satellites at all, or cars, or phones, or microwave ovens, demos like Newton's Cradle wouldn't work consistently, and if 'force'  and 'gravity' were something really so arbitrary, you'd best be afraid of arbitrarily floating off of the ground because clearly the maths involved are not consistent, are mere figments of human imagination, and are susceptible to dissolution at any time.

please, please, please obtain a better understanding of things before you project your malformed assessments. i hope this is the last word on this off-topic rant.

that was easy.

as for force, the definition is not as rigorous or explicit, but it does have an entry for Newton's Second Law, which is the rigorous definition, so i'll give that:


otherwise formulated as:


so, it follows that:

a force is defined as the thing that causes a change in momentum (of a massive body), and is proportional to the magnitude of the resulting acceleration.

these are "not actual definitions"?

i think you need to double-check your own definitions, including the definition of 'definition', and that of 'nonsensical', too.

I'm not sure if you noticed, but although your source has little sections called "Definition," no actual definitions are given (I looked at "force" and "wave," specifically). Or if some kind of definition is given, it cannot be used consistently in the field. It cannot be used without equivocation. It cannot be used unless it is malleable enough for the physicist to speak out of both sides of his or her mouth, just like a theologian talking about God. This is the problem. Heisenberg and others simply doubled down on the inanity, enshrining it as a virtue.

I have my degree in pure mathematics, which is in many cases just as nonsensical as physics. I don't regret it, because I did learn some useful skills. Math and Physics are still two of the more useful degrees, just maybe not in the way you think

how the hell is this an appeal to authority? i supplied you with the definitions, which you had to have intentionally removed from that quote... or do you not know how hyperlinks work, either? i simply asked you to do some legwork to inform yourself a little about the field you're commenting about before passing such judgments. i don't think that's unfair in the least.

i'm sorry for my impatience but holding a BS in physics, it causes a little personal offence when my entire field is written off as nonsense.

again, sorry for OT, but i can't let this go.

Appeals to authority? All I asked for are definitions. Should be really, really simple.

i'm sorry that you don't know high school physics. i'm not going to be pedantic and type out the basic definition of these quantities if you're not going to do the legwork to inform yourself.


you can start here.

before we get back on topic, someone needs to speak in defense of physics after all of this genuine nonsense.

black holes are not nonsense, they are observable. we can't fully explain these observations, mainly because they 'break' our theories (giving results like infinite gravity, etc.)

further -- mass, force, and gravity are all very, very real and observable things. conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, for instance, are laws that every single system in the universe obeys (or so we've seen so far). to say that these are 'nonsense words' that are merely 'theoretical' is laughable.

anyway, carry on. and it would behoove you to honestly learn about a topic before passing such judgments.

You can't have projective geometry without the points at infinity.

Infinity is a useful concept that has been very rigorously studied.  However, I do agree physicists do use it to throw their hands up.

Exactly.

Infinity is necessary to deal with unbounded sets.  So the question becomes, does nature contain any unbounded sets?  Unfortunately, even if we assume it does, I don't see a way to prove a natural set is unbounded.  Maybe we just haven't found the boundary conditions yet.  Such is the nature of mathematics in light of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Infinite is just a way for mathematicians to say I give up. 

blackholes dont have infinite gravity. They have infinite density because they have no volume. So even if they only weighed as much as a feather they would still have infinite density. Infinite density for this reason doesn't mean infinite gravity, since the amount of gravity given off by an object is a function of its mass not its density.