See: Half-Life 2.

( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:05, archived)

Ironically this got started when I tried to talk to my girlfriend about
quantum physics as presented in computer games. Naturally, she ignored me and started talking about her mother.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:08, archived)

She's not a geek then?

( Enigmatic ™                 Voice No More                  ©, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:09, archived)

She's a medical geek.

( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:10, archived)

Here's a hint for nowt:
don't try to resurrect the subject. Pretend it never happened. Women don't like undue intelligence.
Edit: not even if they themselves are medical students.
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:09, archived)

I'd imagine they just don't like being talked at about tosh they don't care about
much like anyone else
( glued eel /questions/questionsyoudliketoask/post1648081, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:16, archived)

Ah well, maybe I should start taking an interest in cosmetics after all.

( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:19, archived)

Probably. But considering how much of her things I have to listen to and talk about,
I figured she could humor me for a few minutes.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:28, archived)

It doesn't work like that.
You have to be completely subservient to her every whim, that's the rules.
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:29, archived)

wimp
I prefer spanking them when they get out of line.

They thank you for it. Eventually.
( Enigmatic ™                 Voice No More                  ©, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:31, archived)

pank tabb
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:32, archived)

thank beg
( ImNotRightBotheredMe fool, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:33, archived)

hehe
The only reply from one who understands the mind of a woman.
( Enigmatic ™                 Voice No More                  ©, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:35, archived)

Further to that:
quantum computers: decades off, so hard to say. Many orders of magnitude faster than 'conventional' computers, potentially, but probably not capable of anything that ordinary computers aren't capable of already, *in principle*. So no big hope for AI, etc.

Zero-point energy: science fiction, nothing more. The phenomenon arises largely out of problems with our current understanding of quantum field theory.

Etc.: teleportation and so on is, and will remain, sci-fi.
( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:09, archived)

I can disprove this.
I have experienced teleportation.

One night I was standing at the bar of the pub.
The room started moving and everything blurred.

The next thing I knew, I was in my house. You try explaining that with your clever chalk and blackboard.
( Enigmatic ™                 Voice No More                  ©, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:12, archived)

That's just time travel!

( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:13, archived)

But teleportation has occurred on small scale. They teleported ions
across a room.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:12, archived)

Are you sure? *dubious*
Anyway, I meant 'teleportation' in the Star Trek sense.
( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:14, archived)

I think it will occur. As a matter of fact, I think the presence of teleportation (in a sense)
is part of the fundamental structure of the universe. Teleportation is often subjective, and instantaneous travel to a traveler may seem like a lifetime to an observer.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:16, archived)

That's the kind of conversation I need a bottle of Scotch to cope with

( Enigmatic ™                 Voice No More                  ©, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:18, archived)

Yeah sure, if you're a photon.
I don't know what you mean by teleportation being 'part of the fundamental structure of the universe' - it is absolutely impossible for any massive particle to travel (in any meaningful sense, I'm not talking about quantum tunnelling) faster than light.
( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:19, archived)

As far as we know at the moment.
It'll be a long time before we get any experimental evidence to prove otherwise....
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:20, archived)

I've always felt that the universal constant C was a great misunderstanding.
Every theory and invention developed to measure the speed of light is based solely on observation. But observation by a human is based soley on light. Yes, a faster than light traveler would APPEAR to stop accelerating, but given that light would not be able to catch up to them, this could be merely an illusion.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:22, archived)

That's not true, I'm afraid.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
'Observation', in this sense, is the only yardstick we have to measure causality (past/present/future). You can't travel faster than (or as fast as) the speed of light, end of story.
( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:26, archived)

It brings to mind the uncertainty principle. If observation is our only method of measurement
then maybe we need to find a new way. What's special about light?

I think the speed of light is much faster than we think, but we are only capable of seeing things traveling at a maximum of 186,000 mi/s.

It's a limitation of the mind.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:31, archived)

No, it's not.
The speed of light is the speed any massless particle travels at. It's the same speed gravitational signals propagate at, for example.
And you can't 'measure' something without observing it, unless you're God.

Nothing to do with minds, this is just physics. I could prove it, if I wasn't knackered and didn't have to get tomorrow. Read the Wiki article.
( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:35, archived)

But photons aren't massless. It has been proven.
Large bodies bend the light behind them. Looking at the edge of the sun we can see stars that should be obscured.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:37, archived)

All you're demonstrating now is your own ignorance of phyics.
Photons have no mass. They have energy, which is equivalent to mass (special relativity) and they follow straight paths in curved space-time (general relativity). That's why their paths are curved.

It's cool that you're interested in this sort of thing, real a few decent books on the subject and you'll see where youre misconceptions come from.
( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:43, archived)

I've read many books on this. I just disagree with a lot of the assumptions modern physics has made.
I believe photons have mass. I don't believe in real values of zero or infinity for anything. Even if it's so tiny as to be negligible, everything has mass and energy. I don't believe space-time is curved, but rather constantly expanding, giving events and particles the appearance of having traveled along a curved path.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:47, archived)

Meh. You want to argure with Einstein?
I'd be delighted to see your paper.
( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:52, archived)

Certainly. I published a small book called The False Tesseract last year.
You probably won't find it in major bookstores. It's 50 pages and small enough to avoid acquiring an ISBN. A library might be able to get it for you.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:55, archived)

based only on curremt understandings
i like to think that this will all be disproved in future generations.
( Enigmatic ™                 Voice No More                  ©, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:22, archived)

It probably will be, but not in our lifetimes.
After all, there are plenty of examples where apparently simple laws were not enough to account for real physical phenomena (cf. the ideal gas equation, the Arrhenius rate law)
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:24, archived)

Question everything.
That's my motto. I find it strange that people act so confident of our knowledge, yet countless generations before us have believed otherwise. Nothing is different about the people alive today than those alive back then. In a hundred years we will look back and laugh at what we believed.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:24, archived)

Well, there are laws and there are laws.
20th centery science has been uniquely successful in describing the physical world. Of course, I can't even begin to imagine what human technology will have achieved hundreds of years from now, but I bet my life it won't contravene, say, special relativity or the conservation of energy.

You might as well say "Who know, in a hundred years we might find a way to construct a four-sided triangle!".
( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:30, archived)

I think there is nothing unique about the 20th century whatsoever.
Knowledge is merely the ignorance we don't possess. We understood the principle of elements as early as the 1300s, but we didn't discover them beyond earth, fire, water, and air until recently.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:35, archived)

What I mean is,
the reason people used to think that humans would never fly is that it seemed absurd to them - but there was no underlying logical reason to think this, and furthermore, flight is obviously possible, because birds and bees do it all the time.

The difference here is that there are strict physical laws, which are dreived from mathematics and logic, that forbid things like peretual-motion machines or faster-than-light travel. It's in the same realm as the four-sided triangle. So unless we learn some way to manipulate space-time - not *logically* impossible, but a sci-fi possiblility in the extreme - we will never travel faster than light.

And if you think there's nothing unique about 20th century science, I suggest you read some more science history!
( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:50, archived)

People believed birds could fly because they had a God-given ability that defied natural law.
It was taught in schools and sworn upon as "logical" until as late as 1900.

The 20th century is percieved as unique, because we all lived through it. Let's wait a few hundred years and see what is believed then.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 2:52, archived)

I bet you a gazillion pounds
the conservation of energy will not have been disproven, any more than "2+2=4" will have been disproven.

And no sersious scientist believed in 'God-given abilities' in 1900! Otherwise why would people have tried to make aeroplanes that worked just a few years later?

I'll tell you what's unique about the 20th century - the possibility that science may tell us not only how the universe works, but why it exists in the first place. That idea had never existed before.
( Mr. Tea 'ulmmm'/'mmneurgh', Thu 4 May 2006, 2:58, archived)

People had tried to explain the origin of the universe since the beginning of religion.
And non-traditional mathematics have proven that 2+2 can also equal -4, 2, 1, 0, or 5.

As with every vocation, there are multiple methods of interpretation. As we advance into greater forms of physics, laws of the lower ones break down. At some point in science, whether 1000 or 100,000 years from now, we will find that EVERY law will break down under certain circumstances.
( Digeridude Lord Wellington's Beef Trapeze, Thu 4 May 2006, 3:02, archived)