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Physics Articles For Hackenslash

arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
As always, there's a lot, and I'm quite stoned and otherwise intoxicated, so I'll pick this up when I'm more coherent.

Hold on a minute! Next time you're compos mentis, I want some insights into quantum decoherence - which I actually think from my limited understanding of it is wholly apposite to this thread of discussion too - it's basically part and parcel!

To bring the comment over from the other thread to keep this all focused:


The collapse of the wave function is an illusion; the wave function continues forever.

By observing the wave function, you don't collapse it, you become entangled with it



Nigh on completely irrelevantly, yet with some intriguing echoes, in my own field the early naive notions of observing the natives do their thing to learn what they do was eventually dismissed as being the product of intellectual supremacy, and the very act of observing the behavior of a group of people meant that you were changing how that group of people behaved; your presence became part of the act making it unlike all the prior acts where you, the observer, were absent thus defeating inferences and making any conclusions drawn either false or invalid. This then led to the idea of participant-observation which recognized that to describe what X group of people were thinking, doing, motivated by.... you had to do everything you could to immerse yourself in that situation as close to the manner in which they participated as you could. The only way to know someone else fully is to become that person - to become maximally entangled with them.
 
arg-fallbackName="Dragan Glas"/>
Greetings,

This thing about the Universe being logical :
I do not like to apply logic to empirical reality because for me logic is an abstract and empiricism is real
However I do accept that the laws of physics are mathematical statements pertaining to observable reality
I just like to keep logic and empiricism as separate from each other as much as I can is all I am saying here
Logic and empiricism do not always agree with each other so that is one reason why they should be separate

Also if we did not understand the Universe then would we still think of it as logical [ presumably not ]
And is it possible that a Universe could exist that was not logical and so had no laws of physics at all
Would the Many Worlds Hypothesis allow for such a Universe or must every one have some laws of physics no matter how tentative
As Hack and Spar have pointed out, your misunderstanding of how logic and empiricism are related is a basic flaw in your reasoning.

Look at it this way:

We have the set of "Anything's possible".

Then - within this - we have a sub-set labelled "Logical possibilities". The law of non-contradiction in particular filters out a lot of things.

Within this, we have a further sub-set: "Physical possibilities".

This means that only physically possible phenomena - those allowed by the laws of Nature - are possible amongst those phenomena that are logically possible.

Empiricism is contingent on logicality.

Kindest regards,

James
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
While waiting for some changes to the environment, I penned something. A bit of physics fun with a sting in the tail.

Sitting down to write about decoherence in the next day or so. Got a plan for how to do it that I think is simple and elegant and not at all mystical.

Anyhoo...

Poles Apart

I'm still lurking, just staying out of the way a bit for my mental well-being.
 
arg-fallbackName="Greg the Grouper"/>
I actually have a physics question.

I probably don't need to know for the purposes of my work, so I imagine that's why my teacher was pretty vague about it: he told us about atmosphere in terms of psi (1=14.7) at ocean level, described it as "the earth pressing down on the water".

I assume that this is reductive to the point of basically being wrong. What actually is atmosphere? (I dunno if it's actually called atmosphere, notation was ATM).
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Sounds like he was less than entirely clear, because there's potential for equivocation.

The word 'atmosphere' has two definitions. The first if the vernacular term for the fluid outer composition of the planet. Basically the bit between the hard bit and the empty bit (some would no doubt exclude the oceans, etc, but it's all one).

The other is purely a term of art, in which an atmosphere is a unit of pressure. Specifically, 1ATM is the air pressure at sea level.

Not one I've seen used a lot. Most courses tend to the SI units these days, Pascals or Newton-metres squared. Reason being, of course, that sea level is a variable.
 
arg-fallbackName="Greg the Grouper"/>
We were discussing it in the context of actual units. We didn't really go into atmosphere, beyond the conversion rate. Even then, the purpose of it was to distinguish between PSIA and PSIG, where Pounds per Square Inch [Absolute] is equal to Pounds per Square Inch [Gauge] + ATM, which is equivalent to 14.7 PSI.
 
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