What Is It? game 308

Argh! You beat me to this story by under a minute!

Time must be slowing down for you, John ;)

Stopped reading at "string theorist".

K. This gets us closer to understanding it how?

It seems he's answering the 'why' and not the 'what'.

"your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight"

Yes, pretty much any chaotic influence on an orderly system will induce chaos in that system. But chaos is somewhat of a copout - it's a catch-all for patterns or interactions too complex to model or predict, but that doesn't make chaotic systems fundamentally different from ordered ones since the only distinction is whether or not us humans can understand and make accurate predictions. A bullet fired in space and a bullet fired on the earth only differ in the degree to which the environment affects the predictability of the bullets trajectory. But they're still just bullets traversing a distance according to fixed laws.

"the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder."

This makes almost no sense, since if nature wanted to maximize disorder, physics would be inconsistent. Stable gravity is a huge help in creating ordered systems - what if gravity flipped erratically? or if time wasn't sequential? it seems to me there's no end to the kinds of things nature could do to maximize disorder that it defiantly isn't doing.

@nutbastard - I've diagnosed your problem: you're trying to impose Newtonian logic on quantum physics ;)

@Alex

Be that as it may, even the seemingly random orbits of electrons can't be truly random, they're just determined by influences that we have no way of measuring, because even though they appear chaotic, they're *consistently* chaotic, which implies that they aren't chaotic at all since as a phenomenon all electron orbits resemble each other. That implies there are rules at play.

A dice throw isn't really random or chaotic, it only appears to be - if one had enough information about the initial state of the throw one could determine the result before it happened. Because as humans we do not yet possess the means to extract that information we call it random or chaotic.

Even the whole issue of interference of a system caused by merely measuring it is dependent on the technology we use to measure things. We know no better way to measure the velocity of an atom than to bounce a photon off it, and maybe there IS no better way, but in either case it's an engineering problem, not an indication that randomness exists.

@nutbastard - actually, that's completely wrong (this was the whole part of physics that caused Einstein to throw up his hands and say "God doesn't play dice with the universe"). Later on, Stephen Hawking said, "God not only plays dice. He sometimes throws them where they can't be seen."

By the way, electrons don't have orbits - they have wave functions (which is a fancy way of saying that you can only predict the probability of finding an electron at a given point in space away from the atom's nucleus).

Quantum physics is unreal. I don't know anyone who can say that they truly understand it (including myself).

My hair does not frizzle in the heat and humidity...it hangs lank and lifeless, but that probably has more to do with my choice of shampoo than nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bulls**t. Works every time. Also helps justify those research grants....

worst explanation of a staggeringly divergent scientific theory ever

string theory really is pretty weak these days

at first it was at least beautiful and interesting

but with it's ever increasing accolades who now seem to find their baseless equations a reasonable grounds on which to try and degrade the most respected and established scientific theories in history

i might suggest that people move on to a more fruitful field of scientific inquiry

"Man then goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed at the next zebra crossing."

Any chaos we perceive is really misunderstood order.

Any order we perceive is really misunderstood chaos.

May I have a grant now?

"gravity doesn’t really exist."

That's a heavy thing to say.

Yeah, I'm not falling for this.

*sigh* i suppose i have to be the one to say it...there is no gravity, the earth sucks

@SuperCrap: me too.

... Do we exist!?!

Utter rubbish, but good for a grant.

I didn't know John Laroquette was a physicist. Good to see he still has a job after Night Court.