"Timo Nieminen" wrote in message
news:Pine.LNX.4.50.0510100749210.7418-100000@localhost...
| On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, Androcles wrote:
|
| "Timo Nieminen" wrote:
| |
| | You're a lousy troll, too, Androcles
|
| [cut Androclean potty-mouth]
| , you don't even know how a TV works.
|
| You think you have a megavolt TV?

Refusal to discuss physics noted, what I think is not a physics
question.

| You think there is room-pressure air inside a CRT?

Refusal to discuss physics noted, what I think is not a physics
question.

| Why do you think a vacuum tube is called a VACUUM tube?

Refusal to discuss physics noted, what I think is not a physics
question.
|
| And while we're at it, here's another simple question you keep cutting
and
| running from:
|
| When is 5 hours earlier than 5 hours later than now?

Non sequitur.
Refusal to discuss physics noted.

Androcles

That's right Don - I remember. Emergent systems. I think it's beatiful,
especially in the context of cellular automata.

I still dont think that it's deterministic though -

Everything is a mix of order and disorder. Billiard balls contain alot
of order, but not %100 ordered.

Just like tossing dice. It's never really %100 random. Even a
conceptualized abstract perfect 6-sided die still contains a small
amount or order because by definition - it has 6 sides. That's a rule.
That's order.

"LEFTY" wrote in message
ups.com...
|
|
| [ Flipping right index finger up and down repeatedly over the lips,
| humming / vocalizing ]
|
| bbbbbbrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeaahhhhhh ableaaaaaaaaaaab
| blaeeeeeeeaahhhhhbbbbb, bbbbb bbbbbb bbbbbbbb
|
|
| For any two points A, B, in spacetime, there is a path of zero
distance
| from A to B.
|
| Determinism died on Sept 15, 2005.
|
|
| ableaaaaaaaaaaab, bbbbb bbbbbb bbbbbbbb

Glibs nube noggety nog.
Androcles.

LEFTY wrote:
Existence is relative. If you cant observe time, it "appears" to go
away. I think that it cant be observed on extreme scales, hence, the
Oreo Cookie Universe Theory. A sweet creamy filling of pure
unadulterated existence, sandwiched in between two crispy wafers of
nonexistence

[snip]

In this scenario, "nonexistence"...exists...as that which sandwiches
existence...

Who says the universe is restricted by yes/no,
beginning/middle/end...or *any* of the restrictions on our methods of
perception?

p

I think that the discussion regarding randomness, whether physical or
abstract, that discussion could get very long.

I know that there are probably lots of math folks who think that it's
just plain stupid to say that an abstract 6-sided die is'nt %100
random. Afterall, it's abstract, you defined it to be random, no
succesive digit can be predicted from any previous digit, so it cannot
contain order. I know that there are many who would say this.

But, you still have this "rule" that all digits will be members of the
discrete set {1,2,3,4,5,6}. And, by definition, this is in and of
itself a "rule" which the process must obey - hence order. If it were a
12 sided die the rule would be different. You have uncountably
infinitely many such rules which could have been imposed on the
process.

The process is almost completely disordered, but not %100, not even in
the abstract case.

And what I'm doing is analyzing math like a physicist. A mathematician
dose'nt care about that stuff, because all he needs a sequence of
random digits and dose'nt care if he overall process still contains
order - each digit is random and that's all he cares about. He dose'nt
care if the digits were generated in a perfectly orderly fashion from a
little machine - as long as no digit can be determined relative to the
sequence itself.

And this is where that argument would begin - because physics is'nt a
gedanken experiment. It is real.

I cannot rule out the possibility of a perfectly ordered or a perfectly
disordered dynamical system in the universe, but I do have my doubts. I
think that these two extremes might only manifest physically in trivial
space - i.e. nonexistent relative to you and I. The reason I say this
is simple - you can consider nonexistence to be perfect order because
it is absolutely uniform. But you can also consider nonexistence to be
perfect disorder because anything can be defined to exist there, and
any "rule" which you define [here] will not exist relative to an
observer in that space [there]. This is starting to sound like word
salad, but I'm just thinking out loud, and these things seem reasonable
to me. It's very speculative, but seems reasonable and straightforward.

But in general, everything in the universe is a mix of order and
disorder. I just dont know how to measure it. Yet.

LEFTY wrote:
For any two points A, B, in spacetime, there is a path of zero distance
from A to B.

Hmmm. If by "distance" you mean the 4-d interval of SR/GR, then this is
true but not useful. In particular, there are points A and B for which
no future-directed path of zero interval (null geodesic) exists. That
is, no timelike or null signal can be sent between them (in either
direction).

There are, of course, other pairs of points for which a signal can be
sent in one direction only.

And any manifold for which signals can be sent in both directions
between some pair of points is generally excluded from consideration (it
contains closed timelike or null curves which violate causality in GR).


Determinism died on Sept 15, 2005.

Hmmm. If by "determinism" you mean the classical notion, it was dead a
long time ago. But that is a consequence of the quantum nature of the
world, and is not related in any obvious way to the existence of null
paths....


Tom Roberts

I think that these guys
http://www.random.org/essay.html
have done the best that one could possibly do with the prevailing
theory.

But they still fail to convince me that they have harnessed randomness
in nature. There is an equivocation which is extremely common which
equates randomness with indeterminacy of outcome. These things are not
equal.

However, if nonexistence were a physically manifest phenomena, then
randomness could be given a more explicit and well defined meaning [as
existing in nature] - as I alluded to above.

There is a company which claims to have created a source of randomness
using a beam splitter mounted on a card that plugs into your PC. I had
doubted that this thing was really capable of producing random numbers,
but I'm not so sure now.
Here's the link to the quantum PC card.
http://www.idquantique.com/products/quantis.htm

I still have my doubts if it is random, but it might be. I just dont
know.

Actually, I was referring to nonlocality. It may sound really silly,
but a path which is composed of points which are relatively nonexistent
[because they are unobservable], that path will appear to have no
distance. So, an entangled pair is easily understood as being a single
cohesive dynamical system. It only "appears" that there are two
particles. It's an illusion.

I should say - after tweaking Planck time just slightly.


There are, of course, other pairs of points for which a signal can be
sent in one direction only.

In the lab or on the chalkboard ? Photonic crystals ?


And any manifold for which signals can be sent in both directions
between some pair of points is generally excluded from consideration (it
contains closed timelike or null curves which violate causality in GR).

LEFTY wrote:
I think that these guys
http://www.random.org/essay.html
have done the best that one could possibly do with the prevailing
theory.

But they still fail to convince me that they have harnessed randomness
in nature.


A stochastic process is a random function,
that is a random variable X

***defined***

on a probability space (Ω , Pr) with values
in a space of functions F. The space F in turn
consists of functions I → D. Thus a stochastic
process can also be regarded as an indexed
collection of random variables {Xi}, where the
index i ranges through an index set I, defined
on the probability space (Ω, Pr) and taking values
on the same codomain D (often the real numbers R).
This view of a stochastic process as an indexed
collection of random variables is the most common
one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_process

Note that the physical mechanism for

***defining***

relations is allways to be found between the
ears of the theorist.

Sue...



There is an equivocation which is extremely common which
equates randomness with indeterminacy of outcome. These things are not
equal.

However, if nonexistence were a physically manifest phenomena, then
randomness could be given a more explicit and well defined meaning [as
existing in nature] - as I alluded to above.

There is a company which claims to have created a source of randomness
using a beam splitter mounted on a card that plugs into your PC. I had
doubted that this thing was really capable of producing random numbers,
but I'm not so sure now.
Here's the link to the quantum PC card.
http://www.idquantique.com/products/quantis.htm

I still have my doubts if it is random, but it might be. I just dont
know.

But they still fail to convince me that they have harnessed randomness in nature.

***********

Maybe you just don't have the brains to understand it? Can one teach
quantum mechanics to a garden slug???

Randomness. There's no way to define the concept!!!!!!! As soon as you
stick a definition on it, it's no longer random, it's defined.