User talk:Patrick0Moran

User:Patrick0Moran/Archive1

Assertions

For what they are worth, hereinunder begins a collection of assertions:

• http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_4_public_health.html

Introduction to quantum mechanics

Hello. As you know, the above article is intended to be a relatively simple intro to the subject, but it actually now has 82,419 bytes, compared to the "expert" article, Quantum Mechanics, which has 51,037. Based upon the comments in Talk: Introduction to quantum mechanics, I've gone through the article and enormously simplified it, omitting all the charts and graphs which should be rights be placed in the "expert" article. I wonder if you could take a look at the result, which I am storing at User:GeorgeLouis/Quantum before I launch it on an unsuspecting world. Any suggestions will be gratefully received. Yours, GeorgeLouis (talk) 00:58, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Hello, again. I got to your message just before going out for my evening walk with my little dog. Well, I'm not a physicist, but a writer and editor. I was appalled at what passed for a Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, with all the charts, digressions, lack of organization, etc. What I suggest is for you to go through my draft and see if there are any scientific mistakes because I plan to use it more or less as it stands. If nothing more, I think it organizes the subject a lot better than the original, and it presents a basic intro to each subject: The details are in the other articles, the ones for the experts. Sincerely, your friend, I'll await your answer on this page. GeorgeLouis (talk) 01:22, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

I hope that you will be collaborative in your efforts to edit.

The reason for charts such as the one on light interference is that they enable readers to see without very much trouble something that is absolutely vital to understanding quantum phenomena. Most article critiques suggest more graphics. I have never heard of an article review that declared that there should be no graphs, diagrams, or pictures whatsoever. P0M (talk) 01:29, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

The charts are totally incomprehensible to the average person — and severely offputting. They can be put into the main article, the one for people who might be able to understand them. You can find all the deleted material at User:GeorgeLouis/QM.Rejects (or in past versions of Introduction to quantum mechanics. I invite you to put them into the experts' article where they will do some good. (Frankly, quantum mechanics is not so hard to figure out if presented simply enough.) Sincerely, your friend, GeorgeLouis (talk) 07:05, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Quantum

Hi there.

Thanks for the input to Talk:Introduction to quantum mechanics#Rewrite.

I have two 'tidying-up' requests, if you wouldn't mind - it is not considered appropriate to edit comments left by others, therefore I'm asking that you do it.

Firstly, because you used == Headings == to list your suggested sections, these appear as actual sections on the talk page. This makes the page somewhat confusing, as they appear in the table of contents. Please could you change it to a simple bullet-pointed list of suggested sections instead, using an asterisk at the start of each line.

Secondly, please "sign" your name at the end, by putting ~~~~. This will add your user name, and the date/time.

Many thanks,  Chzz  ►  08:13, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I think you are addressing your critique to the wrong perso. I did not add sections where you said I did. I have added information under the "lede" section, but I did not create that section.

I generally sign. If I failed to do so I apologize. If you know that I wrote something then I believe there is an automatic process for adding the signature that serves to identify unsigned material and remind the forgetful contributor at the same time.

P0M (talk) 14:53, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Patrick0Moran. You have new messages at SarekOfVulcan's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

SarekOfVulcan (talk) 23:55, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

You asked for help but I don't know who changed what ... Gill110951 (talk) 08:30, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Basics of QM: Uncertainty principle

I had a go at improving this section - what do you think? Djr32 (talk) 21:44, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, the errors are back... Djr32 (talk) 06:24, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Strange how that could happen. Maybe the easy way is just to document everything with perfect citations. A good place to start would be Introducing Quantum Theory by McEvoy and Zarate. Another good place to look would be the popularizations written by Feinman.

The main problem is that you cannot exactly prove a negative, i.e., it is going to be difficult to find someplace where Einstein or Heisenberg says, "Such and so is pure nonsense." So you will be stuck proving the contrary and then arguing that, e.g., "All swans are white," is disproven by the fact that, "Some swans are black."

If that does not work then you may have to ask for a citation to establish that "All swans are white."

Some day a sociologist should investigate how power is acquired and either used or misused in this part of the Void. It isn't always easy to make reason prevail. I can't always follow my own advice, but it is best never to get angry and never let one's own ego get the upper hand. P0M (talk) 08:00, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure it's worked out too well for me so far... [1] [2] [3]. Nice work on the Trojan WP article, by the way - something that really isn't a basic concept of quantum mechanics! Djr32 (talk) 22:55, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Others have noticed the perturbations. At least the article no longer maintains that "speed is velocity per unit time" -- or was it "velocity is speed per unit time."

The article on Trojan particles was largely the work of Ti-30x. I just got it started.

Several people have taken an interest in the "intro" article and have improved it. Somebody put the "introductory" boiler plate up again, and took off the part about the article requiring high school math. I left the boiler plate up and reintroduced the qualification about the needed math. Having several people actively involved makes it much less likely that the article will get disappeared. P0M (talk) 01:10, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Electrical permittivity

Patrick you were wondering what the symbols ε, ε₀, and e represent.

• ε is the small epsilon symbol and represents electrical permittivity.
• ε₀, is a constant equal to 8.854 187 817... x 10-12 F m-1. But I don't know when exactly the constant is used. Here it is on CODATA: electric constant ε₀.
• Truthfully, at this moment I can't figure out what "e" could be. It may that the author interchanged this, at will, with the epsilon, even though it doesn't make much sense to do that.

I went over to the "Understanding Heisenberg's 'Magical' Paper..." link. It looks interesting. I will explore later today. I don't know how much help I will be able to give you on this. I hope the "permittivity" information, helps. By the way, this property is very important in metamaterials. I could give you some links to AAAS Science Magazine articles that show how this, and magnetic pemeability, are important parts of their research. Maybe it will give you some insight to the article you are working on. Well here is one anyway (very interesting by the way):

Pendry, J.B. (2006). "Controlling Electromagnetic Fields". AAAS Science Magazine. Vol. 312 (5514): pp.1780 - 1782. doi:10.1126/science.1125907. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help); |volume= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

If you haven't already, you can register for free, and this is one of the articles you can access with your free subscription, otherwise all you will be able to read is the summary. Ti-30X (talk) 05:16, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Patrick I may have discovered what "e" symbolizes - it may symbolize "elementary electric charge". I discovered it in a list of symbols at the beginning of "Elementary Particles" by Enrico Fermi. Then I managed to get to page 36 of this book in Google Books. The book is open to page 36 below, take a look: (see page 36 and 37).

• Fermi, Enrico (1951-03). Elementary particles. Yale University Press. pp. 36, 37. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Also see Wikipedia article: Elementary charge

Hopefully, these help. Ti-30X (talk) 22:23, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. The trouble is that there are so many es. Somebody told me that in the context of the equation involved it is the base of the natural logarithm and appears where there are indications of phase. At some point I am going to have to put in some numbers and find out whether the answers are plausible.

Using undefined symbols is often a problem with Wikipedia articles, by the way. At one point there was a list, but I'm not sure what happened to it. P0M (talk) 23:51, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, at least permittivity worked out - that's two out of three. You're right, there are so many e's in the sciences. Good luck. So about, Trojan wave packet. I added some content with references. Here is an idea that I am using that you may want to use. The original link from the "Q basics" talk page led me to this article, in PDF Nondispersive two-electron Trojan wave packets.

Then I came across this: References for the article itself with active links for the references. In other words, you can click on the link and read the abstract or the article, that is used as a reference. If you read through the article you can see the reference number, for which the prior research is referenced. I will continue to help out on this. Ti-30X (talk) 03:12, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

I just copied some stuff out of the Polish article. I don't know whether it will all be useful, but I thought I'd grab it all while I was accessing that article. P0M (talk) 03:14, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Good idea. Right now I am adding more content with a reference or two. Ti-30X (talk) 03:33, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

DYK nomination

Hi. I've nominated Trojan wave packet, an article you worked on, for consideration to appear on the Main Page as part of Wikipedia:Did you know. You can see the hook for the article here, where you can improve it if you see fit. Bruce1ee^talk 09:58, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Patrick - Wow! What do you think? I know that I am surprised.Ti-30X (talk) 12:39, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I re-worded some parts of the article to reflect our personal writing styles Ti-30X (talk) 13:44, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

You mentioned "it wasn't easy to tell whether the two-electron work in helium has actually been accomplished or is still in the works." Well, that's the "cliff-hamger", as in a novel. Like, does he or doesn't he beat the bad guys and, at the same time, get the girl? It will keep people coming back for more, right? (Just joking, of course). The writing for this aricle is following along with the orginal PDF, and I didn't get to that part, yet. I wasn't expecting a DYK nomination :-) Ti-30X (talk) 13:58, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

DYK for Trojan wave packet

On July 28, 2009, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Trojan wave packet, which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits your article got while on the front page (here's how) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

BorgQueen (talk) 06:07, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

You're on the Main Page, congratulations! --Bruce1ee^talk 06:15, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Patrick, we made the big time. Have a cigar! Ti-30X (talk) 01:03, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

BTW check this out. trojańska. This is on the Polish Wikipedia. Let me know what you think. Oh, it just dawned on me. Were you translating the Polish version of Trojan Wave Packet? Ti-30X (talk) 01:03, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

I visited that page and copied over the list of papers that weren't in Polish. So that was about all that I have done since I looked at a couple papers and created the original page. You are the one who deserves the congratulations. Good work. P0M (talk) 04:19, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

You may be interested to know that Trojan wave packet attracted 9,300 page views while on the Main Page yesterday. See DYKSTATS. --Bruce1ee^talk 05:29, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Chinese languages/dialects

I noticed you had contributed in the past to discussions on the Chinese languages/dialects. If you have time, please take a look at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Chinese)#Language.2FDialect_Names and offer your opinion. Colipon+(T) 23:42, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Aitchison etc.

Hi, Patrick, glad to see you over at Introduction to quantum mechanics. Have you been researching your Aitchison article article? I went over to Trojan wave packets earlier to make sure no one was messing with it (if you catch my drift). I got an unexpected entry on my talk page, today. Ti-30X (talk) 03:20, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

I just went through the entire Intro article and found only a few typographical errors and minor things that looked out of place. I think the article has everything that a person would need to get into the subject and get as far as is practicable without higher math, so I am pleased with it.

I am going to be teaching a course on the Dao of martial arts next semester, so I have been working on a "trot" to the Dao De Jing and a draft translation of Master Sun's Art of War. I have a couple of weeks left before administrative sorts of things will start pulling me away from my desk, and I need to work out a new syllabus for that course in the meantime. Oddly, quantum mechanics is a good illustration for the part of the metaphysics in the DDJ that is not right out there in the open. The DDJ is all about what somebody once called an "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" and how human minds fabricate the equivalent of the molecules in organic systems that detect things like sugar by the fact that the sugar molecule fits into them as a key fits into a lock. So humans fabricate something like the molecules that trigger immune defenses or that detect sugar, but we do it in a free-form and experimental way. We make a "molecule" for waves, and just as regardless of whether it is a nutrasweet "wave" or a sucrose "wave" it will get caught by the same molecular trap, the wave "trap" will catch water waves, sound waves, photons, electrons, etc. But the fit is not equally good. We also have a particle "trap," and it catches lots of photons too. The Daoist idea of "traps" comes very close to the idea of "useful fictions" seen in modern philosophy of science discussions, although it is also interested in the maladaptive "traps" like "witch" that cause so much human misery.

Dr. W. M. de Muynck (another Wikipedia contributor) has been very patient with me and my attempts to figure out the symbols used in the Aitchison article. And I got into a discussion with another advanced level person over some of the issues involved. In the beginning of that discussion I was just dissatisfied with a single word, but the discussion that developed has helped me see that I probably am not too far off the mark in the way I have been thinking about the matrices and the kind of model of reality they provide. I really should study Fourier analysis, but that would mean re-learning first-year calculus and then going beyond for a second year of course material. One of the advantages of being in a physics program as a major is that somebody is doing the planning and coordination between what is available in the math classes and what is being presented in the physics classes. Right now I don't even know what the best textbooks would be. The textbook we used when I was an undergraduate was not badly written, but it did not have the lucidity of the classroom presentations by my favorite calculus teacher. (He, unfortunately, never wrote any textbooks. Maybe he did not get tenure and went off in some other career direction.) What textbook to use as a follow-up is even less clear. Anyway, I think I may have all the math figured out well enough to try to populate a corner of the amplitudes matrix. I am interested in whether it can actually predict the observed intensities of the hydrogen bright-line spectrum. Logically, since Heisenberg was happy with his own math, I should be too. But I am stubborn in my desire to see it actually work. At least I am now reasonably sure that the article is not going to mislead people about the matrices, so my compulsion to work on it has been attenuated somewhat. Probably it will be back as soon as I need to procrastinate. (Doing things like the two little books I mentioned above can be amazingly boring and tiring once one gets to the drudge work needed to format everything for the computer screen, the PDF file, etc.)

Thanks for all your good help with the article. P0M (talk) 07:05, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Double slit experiment

I think some of the facts in the double slit experiment are inaccurate. (No offense to anybody). I am doing a quick rewrite. Please, go ahead and take a look, and see what you think. It seems there is too much emphasis on the wave functon collapse. A wave function collapse is not an observable phenonmena, per se. A wave function collapse is part of the "wave function" . The wave function, is just a predictor of probabilities. It is more a calculation, and not really observed in physical reality. What is observable is the intereference pattern, of light and dark fringes. Take a look at the main article: Double slit experiment. If wave function is mentioned at all it should be after describing the fringes. But, wave function collapse may not fit like it is being inserted into this section right now. "Wave function" and the "bright, dark fringes phenonmena" are two different things.

In the double slit experiment two wave functions have been made out of one wave function -- whatever that means. I would call those two wave functions entangled, but that is just my way of thinking about things perhaps. What is clear is that mathematically we have to treat the experiment as the propagation of two wave fronts, each originating across the width of its slit. (More below.)P0M (talk) 19:40, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

I get it, that there is an attempt to express wave function and wave function collapse, but it has to be expressed differently than it is currently being expressed in this section. I hope you don't mind me pointing this out.

Anyway, it sounds like you have your hands full and they are going to be fuller very soon. :>) Ti-30X (talk) 10:14, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

I added some content to this section, and corrected a couple of grammar / spelling errors. I didn't remove anything. I am out of time right now, so I will have to come back later today. If you don't mind, take a look at this video: Dr Quantum - Double Slit Experiment. It is an animation, and at first may seem to be childish, but it turns out to be a good visual description of the double slit experiment, and is not childish after all. Have a good day now, Patrick Ti-30X (talk) 11:12, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that I've seen this. It is well done, although I am not sure that it takes proper care to mention diffraction patterns if there is only one slit.P0M (talk) 19:40, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

OK, sorry if I missed the diffraction pattern. I will look into it. Ti-30X (talk) 19:46, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

More:

You are right. The wave function is not an observable phenomenon. The wave function collapse is not an observable phenomenon. The photon is not an observable phenomenon either. What is observable are the various ways that humans can do something at one point that will create physical effects at another people, and these ways include lighting a match, connecting a wire filament to a car battery, supplying power to a LED, etc. When any of these things are done the observer's eyes may get stimulated by "light." A photographic emulsion may get exposed by "light" that nobody ever sees. We have models that try to explain these cause and effect relations, but the map is not the territory.

If we look at the physical apparatus, we note several things. Starting with a laser or other source of [light] (whatever that means), a bounceless switch, a photo-detector of some kind, and a very good clock, we can measure the amount of time that elapses between activating the light source and detecting the disturbance at the detector. Humans have been performing informal versions of this kind of experiment for a very long time, perhaps for as long as the species has existed. So we are pretty confident about the process, aware that we need to screen for ambient light if we want to measure the speed of one photon or one "blip" from a laser pointer, etc.

When we add in a median wall with a single narrow opening (slit or circular hole, for instance), we get a diffraction pattern. Humans could see the same general kind of phenomenon occurring after ocean waves pass through a break in a sea wall and in other such situations. Huygens and Fresnel analyzed diffraction on the theory that light spread out in what would be analogous to a series of wave fronts caused by a jiggling bobber in a still pond, and some assumptions about how things work in the "vibrating medium" that led to a very close approximation to the right result. When Young did his experiment, it was learned that the same analogy could be used to explain the interference pattern that will be discovered on the detection screen (the shore). I need to go back to the physical apparatus then, because the basic picture of Huygens and Fresnel appears to be wrong. Light consists of photons. The disturbance shows up on the detection screen as a pattern built up of single blips at highly localized positions.

Experiment with the slits makes it clear that it matters whether there is one slit, two slits, or some larger number of slits. It also matters what the dimensions of the two slits are, and what their separation is. Treating light as something that involves wave lengths permits us to predict things like Newton's rings, the colors on puddles that have a little layer of oil on their surface, and Young's fringes. To account for interference patterns we have to do calculations that involve the "waves" that would arrive at the detection screen from two (or more) slits, and how they reinforce or cancel each other at different points along the screen.

That's basically all we know. Do we speak of light going to the screen by all possible paths, do we say that the photon goes through one slit and not the other, do we say that there is a "wave function" that passes through both slits but then delivers all its energy as a single point as though it had been a little bullet all of the time? All of these ways of making the results comprehensible to ourselves have their defects. What does not seem arguable is that there are two sets of values (each associated with one of the slits) that can be computed and associated with points on the detection screen, and that summing the values at each point (and then squaring that value) gives the probabilities for a blip to appear at that point.

If something is "real" when one can go to x,y,z,t and find something measurable (the fingerprint on a living finger of Joe Biden, for instance), and something is not demonstrated to be "real" when checking any suggested value of x,y,z,t doesn't show evidence of that thing, then (to me) the wave functions, or whatever you want to call them, are "real," and the photon in flight is "not real." The laser or the LED is real, the exposed silver that makes a "grain" in a photographic image is real.

Is "collapse" real? Wait a minute. I forgot to mention that the detection screen and its distance from the double slits is also important. What happens if there is an interference pattern on the detection screen and then we cut out and move some portion of the screen back? The pattern that appeared there before will now be seen "projected" on the more distantly positioned portion of the original screen. Why doesn't a spectral interference fringe pattern occur in the hole in the wall? That would be really cool!

Remember that the wave functions that move out of each slit in our model have been in interference for most of the distance between them and the screen. So why do the scintillations mostly appear on the detection screen? It can't be a pre-programmed distance-from-slit value, else the "projections" would get messed up. There seems to be something essential to having a photon "show up" -- and the essential requirement is that there be an electron available to absorb it. So on the one hand there seems to be genuine randomness (not the pseudo-randomness of dice throwing or computer random number generators), and the necessity of there being an electron (or may some other elementary particle) to absorb the photon and change state. (On rare occasions photons tunnel through the screen, so presence of the screen is not a sufficient condition for the photon to show up there.)

I think the idea of "collapse" is not to be considered anything more than an analogical way of thinking about what happens when a photon "decides" to show up at one place or another. I think speakers who use this method of talking are saying that it is as if there were something like a soap bubble floating through a the air and encountering a mesh screen. At whatever point on the screen the bubble first touches, the screen starts to absorb the soap and water, and the surface of the bubble shrivels up in such a way that all of the soap and water ends up at essentially the same point. That's a way of visualizing the phenomenon, but it does not explain anything. Saying that the "wave function" touches the screen, that it interacts with the screen where it finds an electron it likes, and that then "the rest of" it all drains into that point (instantaneously, over infinite distances if you believe the model and the math), is just a way of talking about something and making ourselves more happy with the mystery of true randomness.

If the probability for the photon to be at x,y,z,t is 1, then at that time its probability to be anywhere else has to be 0. If that is an instantaneous change then it would not fit in with ordinary ideas of causation. But humans do not like causeless changes and timeless events. That's why they are uncomfortable with entanglement. It suggests too much about the tangle of useful fictions by which we explain the world to ourselves.P0M (talk) 19:40, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Good to Go

Thanks for your time here on the talk page.

Patrick, I just read over the double slit experiment. I say this section is good to go. It's ready for the world! Also, I notice that you are satisfied with the entire article, right now. OK great! (It is a good article BTW). Ti-30X (talk) 21:16, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Anyway, on to other stuff now. See you around. Ti-30X (talk) 21:24, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. Not only QM is unfathomable. P0M (talk) 21:32, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Featured Article and Good Article

I was thinking of nominating Introduction to QM for Featured Article status. I looked at the archived page, for the previous nomination, and it was one oppose after another. One oppose emphasized the lack of in line citations. It seems that people, (the reviewing editors) couldn't get it that this stuff is basic and found in hundreds of texbooks if not a couple thousand textbooks. Not to mention the populariaztion of this subject in other books, which can give some understanding of the concepts. Also, I am sure the Feynman and Einstein can be counted on knowing what they are talking about. (Einstein wrote a book right?). I still might nominate anyway, since there is a big block of references and links listed.

I took a look at GA, but I am not sure yet what it would take for GA, and there is a backlog. With the backlong why not just go for FA (I ask myself)? Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I was checking this stuff out.

Well, this page gets attracts a lot of viewers anyway. Checking the stats: 16,386 views in June, and 16,788 views in July. (Some of those would be mine ha ha). Ti-30X (talk) 23:11, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

On second thought, I don't think I want to put in the time to go through the process right now. I have other things I want to do at the moment. See you around. Ti-30X (talk) 23:39, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

That's really good news. I thought the only people who read it were the ISP guys who deleted illustrations. It kind of makes all the work worth it. Maybe some of those 16k readers/month are the next crop of 8 year old Richard Feinmans or something.

Actually, I have been starting to go through my books, starting with one on entanglement, so I can probably add in-line citations as I go along. I worry a little about the matrices because nobody has done them the way Heisenberg's original article would indicate before. (I am pretty sure that Born made them more general and more in accord with the way matrices are usually written.) But the formula/"recipe" can be very clearly documented. The third person to put time into this article proposed it for FA status, but it was not ready at that time. I think we have now cleaned up the language and conceptual issues. I'm sure if somebody wrote that spiders have eight legs somebody else would want an academic reference.

Thanks again for your good work.P0M (talk) 00:18, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Char

Char is a British English slang word for 'tea'. Perhaps you should check a good comprehensive dictionary. English is more diverse than you think.

Bathrobe (talk) 00:50, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

DYK redux

Patrick, since Introduction to QM has been recently expanded I am going to put it in for DYK nomination. I hope you don't mind. Ti-30X (talk) 23:25, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Is there anything that you would like to use for the hook, or do you want me to pick one? Ti-30X (talk) 23:29, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Patrick, sorry, according to the DYK rules, Introduction to QM doesn't qualify. There would have to be a very recent five fold increase in article size, for this article to qualify. BTW I like the spider picture on your front porch. It looks like a very humorous situation, as well. Ti-30X (talk) 01:07, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Originally I thought it was a wolf spider. Wolf spiders will bite, but except for a few in S. America their bites are not likely to be medical problems, and generally the largest wolf spiders in the U.S. are so totally devoted to getting away from humans that probably the only time people get bitten is when they put on a shoe without thinking about the possibility of something being in there. Even so, I always take things that large seriously. The one in the photo turned out not to be a wolf spider. Some of the spiders in the same Family that are found in England are known to give really unpleasant bites, but I've never seen reports about bites by this species. I recently caught another one. I ran across it unexpectedly when I was moving a fallen log for a neighbor lady. I had gloves on, so I just grabbed it. Fortunately it did not try to bite. After I got it home I took a few pictures and it let me move it around with a pencil without showing any aggression.

Somebody gave me a baby Grammostola rosea (AKA Chilean Rose tarantula) that is one of the atypical kinds. Mostly they are known as "living rock" because they are slow moving and seem hardly ever to do much. Some small percentage of them, however, are very scrappy. The one I got was always eager to make physical contact with anything that came into her cage, and as an adult she has shown a proclivity to grapple with things and then bite them. (The venom is being investigated for its medical properties in treating certain conditions relating to heart attacks. It isn't known to be a medical problem. But those fangs are about as long as a hamster's front teeth.) So her cage is where I put my credit card.  :-) Contact me by e-mail, o.k.? Not only spiders... P0M (talk) 02:07, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I just back to your talk page yesterday. I've been busy lately. How do I get in touch with you by email? Then I can tell you what I have been busy doing lately - the Wikipedia adventures I have been experiencing. Respond here and I will read it here. Ti-30X (talk) 21:19, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Click on "E-mail this user" in the toolbox at the left side of this page. (Your page does not have one unless you have supplied an e-mail address in your user prefs.) P0M (talk) 21:31, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Heisenberg etc.

You could try {{Inuse}}, or developing in your user space. I am interested you say it will be "a sub-page", how will that work? Rich Farmbrough, 01:53, 17 August 2009 (UTC).

What was your objection to the following entry in the Uncertainty Principal article?

==Simple Uncertainty==   

- - Consider a car moving one mile in one minute. One measures its position A at time T then measures its position B at time T+1 minute and finds position B to be 1 mile away. One might naivly conclude that the car is moving 60 MPH. One could thus predict where the car will be in the future or in fact where the car was at any time in its journey. This assumes the car to be moving at a constant velocity over the measured mile. Consider that the car is accelerating over the mile. Considering only the data points A at time T and B one mile from A at time T+1 minute one could still conclude erroneously that the car is moving at 60 MPH. In order to resolve a constant acceleration one needs 3 data points. Consider that the acceleration is not constant, that it is also accelerating. One would need another data point to resolve that. Since any acceleration can accelerate one would need data points of N number to resolve accelerations to N accuracy with N<=infinity. - - In measurment with light the shortest wavelength postulated as the Planck length puts a finite limit on the number of data points in a finite length of measurement. Since one cannot have data points of N number in a finite length of measurment one cannot resolve accelerations to N accuracy with N<=infinity. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.164.95.126 (talk) 00:35, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

Your addition to the article is original research, for starts. If you are reporting on research published in professional peer-reviewed journals then you would need to cite those articles and show how they support the conclusions you claim.

Your first paragraph argues from objects that exist on the scale to which classical physics applies. If one extrapolates from events and measurements at a classical to events and measurements at a quantum scale, problems appear because of the indeterminacy of positions, etc. on that scale. One can measure the positions of a car and one can increase the accuracy of knowledge about the changes in time of the positions of a car both by improving the quality of the measuring apparatus used and by taking more and more data points. The indeterminacy of position of a car, due to its large mass and correspondingly small wave length, is so small as to be impossible to detect by existing instruments. Moreover, the calculated indeterminacy will be smaller than the experimental (measurement) error of the experimental apparatus. So what is "uncertain" on the macro scale is due to slop in the experimental apparatus.

The indeterminacy of quantum scale events is due to factors other than experimental error, so the indeterminacy cannot be removed by improving the experimental device.

The indeterminacy of quantum scale events was discovered to be a mathematical consequence of the calculations that led Heisenberg to his breakthrough in quantum mechanics. That there would be a mathematical problem was clear to Heisenberg before his calculations were even put into matrix math format. When Born realized that Heisenberg's new equation provided the recipe for matrices and for a multiplication of two matrices, he also saw almost immediately that the order in which the matrices were multiplied would always produce different results. Born could calculate the necessary difference between the two matrix multiplications. Heisenberg later developed these insights and calculations into his indeterminacy principle.

If you were to propose your analogy to Heisenberg, I believe that he would point out that even on the assumption that a classical model could be applied to quantum scale events, the measurements that you propose making on the quantum scale car of "its position A at time T" and so forth would inevitably change what you had just tried to measure. (See Heisenberg's microscope.)

Your second paragraph is not entirely clear to me. It appears, however, to argue that our knowledge of positions is limited by contingent factors, and not to apply to Heisenberg's point about there not being a position defined by a geometrical point to which a quantum scale object can be assigned.

The object of Wikipedia articles is to make available to the general public the "state of the art" conclusions reached by recognized authorities. It is not to gain publication for our own attempts to arrive at conclusions to rival those with professional qualifications.

If you want to take this discussion further, you should probably take your objections to my reverting your insertion to the discussion page for the article.

It might also be helpful to study Introduction to quantum mechanics and in particular Heisenberg's entryway to matrix mechanics where I have attempted to trace out the way Heisenberg reached his conclusions. Ultimately you will need to study the physics books starting from Heisenberg's own paper of 1925. P0M (talk) 07:16, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

And the name of the article is...

The name of the article, that I mentioned, is Negative index metamaterials. Oh by the way there is a little blurb that I lifted from QED in Introduction to quantum mechanics. I attributed it of course. It is in the first part of the section entitiled "Controlling electromagnetic fields". Ti-30X (talk) 02:27, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Articles for deletion nomination of Introduction to Dirac's constant

I have nominated Introduction to Dirac's constant, an article that you created, for deletion. I do not think that this article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and have explained why at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Introduction to Dirac's constant. Your opinions on the matter are welcome at that same discussion page; also, you are welcome to edit the article to address these concerns. Thank you for your time.

Please contact me if you're unsure why you received this message. TimothyRias (talk) 13:00, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

• See the AfD discussion. I think this article probably should be merged into the article on Dirac's equation. I do not feel qualified to do so - could you do it? My sense is that Dirac's constant is more than a convenient shorthand, but has significance in itself. What that significance is, I don't know. It has been over forty years since I read about quantum mechanics. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:16, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Dirac's constant has historical significance, perhaps. Numerically, it is just a variant of Planck's constant. On top of that, many physicists now prefer to adjust the units of measure so that in the system of "natural units" these constants equal 1. That way you can forget about them. (That's their argument, anyway.)

When another contributor was putting a great deal of energy into writing the Intro to QM article I think we were both a little confused by the difference between h (Plank's constant) and h-bar (the "reduced" Plank's constant). The other contributor wanted to make a big thing of the difference, but to me it was just a notational issue and/or a way of not having to compute some value in an equation divided by 2π every time. If you already know the numerical value of h, then why not just divide it by 2π once and then remember that value?

My guess is that if more discussion of Dirac's constant were needed to make the article on Dirac's equation clear, then it would already have been done long ago. But I'll take a look. P0M (talk) 02:56, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

• When I say someone should do it, I mean the famous someone else - not me. Writing a clear explanation of a subject like this that a high-school student could follow takes exceptional skill and understanding. Once upon a time, long, long ago, I could at least follow the mathematics. No more. I can only imagine the horror and despair that my attempt would cause in the physics departments. :~) Aymatth2 (talk) 18:09, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
• Sorry to be slow replying. I did some reading and found I had forgotten even more than I thought I had. I can't find what I was looking for. If the other editors who do know what they are talking about don't see much significance in h-bar other than a convenient shorthand, so be it. At a more basic level, some of these articles seem a too detailed and technical to me, more like textbook entries than encyclopedia entries, particularly the one on Dirac's equation. I would expect the typical reader to be someone with a reasonable high-school level grasp of physics and mathematics who is interested in learning more, but does not want all the detail. They would want the history, an outline of the reasoning that led to the underlying concept and its significance. Much harder to do but more useful, I think. Writing articles like that need a rare combination of deep understanding of the subject and the ability to communicate its essence in clear and simple language. Let's hope some editors with the right skills try it. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:27, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree that many of the physics articles are "too detailed and technical," at least in the sense that they are not going to be at all helpful to a bright high school student (or anybody else in a similar position) who wants to get an entryway into the subject. One of the contributors, quite a while back, was of the strong opinion that classical physics and any approach through the history should be totally avoided, and that students should be given the "real" quantum physics -- by which I think he had in mind Bohm's particular version that includes hidden variables. Doing anything like that would mean keeping everyone totally in the dark who was not already a second- or more likely a third-year physics major, or maybe a math major.

Dirac is important, and I really like the introductory part of his QM textbook. By that I guess I actually mean that he confirms many of my hypotheses about how one should best look at the lab results and try to express them in everyday language. The good thing he does is to head off many of the "common sense" interpretations made by the people who would probably most vociferously argue for the "math only" approach to understanding QM. Their position strikes me as being one that tacitly says, "We won't use everyday English unless it supports my preconceptions."

I have yet to see an explanation of Schrödinger's equation that illuminates anything. There used not to be anything accessible about Heisenberg's matrix formulation, but I think I have managed to work out the main outlines of what he did. Part of the math is very high level, but I think beginners can deal with the simple fact that the math is there and can be done by anyone who has gone through the appropriate calculus classes. But Heisenberg's matrices are probably as close as anyone can get to penetrating the black box. For everything beyond that point the person without the math can only be told: This is the black box. You put in inputs at this end consisting of X, Y... and you get output from this end consisting of x, y...

The main thing that h-bar has to say is that there is something involving circles of different radii that is very significant in our understanding of quantum events, at least within atoms. There may be a slight entryway for the average well-informed reader at this point. The math was greatly appreciated by Heisenberg. I'm impressed by the people of that time and place because of their generosity to other researchers. Pauli seems to have been the "nastiest" of the lot, but he was Heisenberg's special collaborator in the sense of being both guardian angel and devil's advocate.

I think there may be much of value to report to bright beginners about Dirac's "take" on quantum mechanics, much that will help these novices avoid some beginners' mistakes. Right now I do not have time to do anything other than read a little when I have time and try to take good notes.P0M (talk) 15:19, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

• Slightly off topic, see the last revision to Planck constant and a message I left on the editor's talk page. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:11, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

I had a look. It seems somebody is convinced that there is no such thing as Dirac's constant. I am pretty sure that the editor who wrote the section that became an article and will now be deleted did not dream the term up on her own. It's too bad that she did not provide citations.

When I get time, or feel the need to procrastinate, I will start in on the Dirac textbook. I get the feeling that he was a really neat thinker, maybe a little like Leibniz in being very careful about what he said but also economical. What I like about Leibniz is that once I got on his wavelength I could very clearly follow what he was saying. (My favorite philosophy professor said he found Leibniz virtually incomprehensible, which I found pretty interesting.

In the earliest strata of records of the Intro to QM discussion page there are probably discussions/arguments between Voyageur and I about what was going on with h-bar. My argument was that h and h-bar are just defined by a mathematical relationship. Her question was, basically, "So where does the 2π come from?" She worked out that it had to have something to do with the electron in orbit.

I have looked through most of my books and have been unable to find any mention of Dirac's constant, but it must be a term that some people have used. I'm prepared to let it go at this point. Maybe if I can dig something out of Dirac's QM textbook I can come back to the question. P0M (talk) 02:00, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Proof of Pythagoras' theorem

• Totally off topic, I remember coming across the picture to the right when I was 18 and thinking "why did nobody show me that when I was 12?" Maybe someone, somewhere has a picture that make QM as easy to understand as that! Aymatth2 (talk) 19:35, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

My physics career might have been different if Professor Restrepo had been my calculus teacher all three trimesters. He actually taught people how to think about calculus. If you would listen and write down everything that he wrote neatly on one blackboard in one hour, you would understand everything. Then he would give the class a problem that I always thought would take my whole weekend to solve and in the next couple of minutes he would show us how to work it in our heads. Unfortunately he did not stay at my University. I've always wondered whether they would not give him tenure. He disappeared from the world of mathematics as far as I can tell. You would like Max Wertheimer's Productive Thinking because he advocated teaching the way Restrepo did. He was one of the early Gestalt psychologists. (His son was at the University of Colorado.) P0M (talk) 02:00, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

• The term is certainly used by some. See http://books.google.ca/books?um=1&q=%22dirac's+constant%22&btnG=Search+Books Possibly there are different schools, some of whom use the term Dirac's constant and some who do not. Conceivably there is a sense that it is unfair to put Dirac's name on a term that is just a multiple of Planck's constant. Think I will move on to other things... Aymatth2 (talk) 13:04, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

More on Intro to QM

Hi, Patrick, I am going to send you an email, in about two minutes. Ti-30X (talk) 03:28, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Intro to QM

Thanks for your speedy replies. I'm also concerned that the article doesn't really introduce wavefunctions. Talking about the Schrödinger equation explicitly is probably out of the question (differential equations and all that), but I think it would be very doable to talk about the basic statistical nature of the wavefunction and what it tells us (finding the most probable location, etc), and maybe even introduce some explicit families of wavefunctions (like for the particle in a box). I think it would also be good to introduce the concept of a quantum state, since that term pops up a lot in quantum mechanics. I'd love to add these things in myself but I'm afraid my grasp of them is not strong enough to write an accurate and coherent explanation. Strad (talk) 00:46, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

I think I had a moment of clarity just after I gave myself a dope-slap a few days ago. Maybe I can piece together something that will not be too bad. But all of the secondary sources seem to be fairly down to earth up until they start talking about matrix mechanics. Then (I suspect because most of them are working backwards from current QM understandings) they start waving the magic wand and dispensing fudge. It took me about three or four years to gradually piece together clues and bug enough people to be pretty sure that I understood what was going on. The treatments of Schrödinger seem to all jump in without even showing the magic wand. That I don't mind, but they also seem to be jumping in at a point that would only make sense to someone who had gone through a university curriculum aimed at bringing students in at that point. Otherwise, they assume too much.

I picked up a book by Dirak from the library a few weeks ago, and I have been impressed by the way he writes. People say he didn't really try to communicate with others, but I don't see that. For one thing, he talks about the "photon in flight" as a state of the photon.

Superposition is another thing that more than one person has indicated needs treatment. I was trying to wrap up the top part of the article and get matrix mechanics under control when the forks started to fly, so to speak. Actually I've not done the math to let me see some of the matrices that I really want to see. Maybe it will end up meaning nothing to me, but I am a kinesthesic thinker -- if that means anything. I can't actually remember what a tree looks like. I have to actively generate the image by what are probably brain analogs to hand motions or something. It's all very foggy, but it is all I have. And I never know what I'm doing if I just have somebody's words or some equations. So superposition was put on the back burner too.

When the subject of Planck's constant came up four years ago I was seeing it as I now see it, and other people told me I was wrong. I found something in Sears that seemed to support exactly what they were saying, but I was missing context. Anyway, my point was going to be that I'd really like to be sure that there are not any other conceptual flaws lying around in plain sight.

It would be a help if there were reliable bridges to Schrödinger's math published somewhere. I'll keep looking. P0M (talk) 05:35, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Spider

As far as I can see, your edit messed up the article and it took me 10 minutes to fix, including finding that checking. If it was your, consider your self trout slapping. If it was one else, tell me and we can both slap. --Philcha (talk) 17:52, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Spiders by color‎

The article Spiders by color‎ has been proposed for deletion. The proposed-deletion notice added to the article should explain why.

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Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{dated prod}} will stop the Proposed Deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The Speedy Deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and Articles for Deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Kaldari (talk) 00:27, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

"Did you mean to write it this way? "

Please, see my talk page for an answer to your question about `causation'.WMdeMuynck (talk) 16:23, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Butterfly effect and causality

This is kind of an answer to your January 27 contribution to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Causality_(physics). I put it here because I have the impression that the Talk:Causality_(physics) page is not the appropriate place for general discussions.

It is my impression that your contribution is some reaction to my preceding edit of the Causality (physics) page. But I am not sure whether it is meant as an extension or as a correction of that edit. Anyway, it does not seem to regard what I think is the crucial issue of a Causality (physics) page, viz. the role played by causality in physics as expressed by the causal character of physical laws (to the effect that certain terms can be interpreted as causes and other terms as effects).

Note that the butterfly effect is usually presented as a problem of causality but treated as a problem of determinism (by pointing to inaccurate knowledge of initial conditions), thus employing a very special notion of causality (characteristic of the D-N model of explanation). It seems to me that the butterfly effect in this sense is actually a problem of retrodiction (is it possible to prove the necessity of the activity of that one butterfly given there is a tornado at a later moment?). Now Hume already knew that this can at best establish correlation, causality not being derivable. So, from this point of view I think the butterfly effect does not touch the heart of the causality problem.WMdeMuynck (talk) 14:29, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

However, I was pleased to find on the Causality (physics) page a small section entitled `Distributed causality', referring to the butterfly effect, and promising that "This opens up the opportunity to understand a distributed causality". It indeed seemed possible to me to live up to this promise. So, I added some sentences having the purpose to do so (although on second thought I doubt whether `triggering' is the correct expression for the activity of the butterfly). Indeed, causality can be considered to be distributed over those parts of the atmosphere that are in the past light cone of the tornado allegedly caused by the butterfly but intuitively felt to be caused by the temperature and pressure differences that were there independently of the butterfly. Indeed, mathematically establishing the contribution of that one butterfly is far beyond experimental accuracy, and even if that were possible Hume would not be forced to accept it as a cause.

The butterfly effect is quite analogous to the problem of a skier triggering an avalanche, the difference being that the skier might be more liable to be accused of causing an avalanche than a butterfly causing a tornado. Also here, however, it will be difficult to exclude alternative causes (other skiers, or small earthquakes, or even a marmot digging a hole under the snow). Probably this example would be preferable to clarify the notion of `distributed causality' (which can now be reduced to the distributed interplay between gravity and cohesive forces) without raising the commotion that can be expected in case of the example of the the butterfly effect.WMdeMuynck (talk) 14:31, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

It's a bad time for me to spend time right now, but I can't resist mentioning the main reaction that kicked up as I read your words above. What I am thinking is not for or against what you have said above. I'll have to carefully process that information.

It might be that Leibniz was right and none of what I see is anything other than a modification of my unitary substance. But I have to start with my current understanding of the universe and then modify that understanding as I find problems with it.

What I see is a universe in which nothing is isolated. The only things that even seem that they might be isolated are the ones that are believed to appear out of pure vacuum. Leaving those conjectures or predictions based on theory aside, I will return to the basic picture that I create for myself. There are no discrete objects as I understand things, so that in itself rules out the possibility of objects that are not connected in any way with other objects by gravity of other such forces or consequences of the bending of space. As early as the mid 1950s the late Dr. Greenstein at Cal Tech was saying how the picture of the expansion of the universe indicated that at some distance from any observer no forces limited by the speed of light could be felt. I suppose he was not the only one with this understanding even at that early time. I heard of his ideas only indirectly so please forgive the inelegance or inaccuracy with which I represent them. I think this is basically the same idea you refer to by the current idea of one's light cone. So my universe picture has some kinds of "limits," but nothing that is limited within. I think it was Feynman who pointed to the possibility that some "different" kinds of atomic events may be the "same" kinds of atomic events but reversed in time. So I have to modify my original naive picture of a continuum that modulates in one continuous direction, but if one looks at it slightly "from a distance" the fuzzy outline of some events in time would not be apparent.

I can also imagine the universe as an immense collection of quasi-point entities that are discrete, but within that picture I imagine that the things that humans deal with are not those quasi-point entities but vibrations of them, and complexes of vibrations among them. So what I perceive as a rock shot from a sling shot is actually the propagation of a certain kind of wave through the sea of quasi-point entities.

I am not suggesting that anybody need take these ideas seriously (although the Daoists do construct their world in approximately this way), but that this model makes it perhaps clearer and easier to show that there is nothing that is not (in Buddhist terms) co-dependent. Everything is "dependent" on everything else. If I mentally isolate something from my perceptual "screen" and regard it as a discrete thing, then that [thing] (I put this word now in phenomenological epoche, i.e., by the square brackets I mean "don't assume I really believe in it.") is in interaction with any other [thing] to which I might direct my attention.

In this interpretation of the universe, or, if you prefer, when using this kind of a model to understand the universe, the "cause" of any [thing] cannot be limited to a finite set of [things].

When we are being practical and try to understand why there is boiling water in the tea kettle when we return from a hike to our supposedly isolated camp, probably only the physicist even thinks about air pressure, etc. Most people want to create an envelope in space and time that is just big enough to include a presumed recent visitor who lit a fire under a kettle of cold water hanging from its hook over the fireplace.

So in ordinary language finding a cause is always or almost always a process of making discrete entities out of a continuum and then focusing on an element that has "triggered" a change in the previous equilibrium. Sometimes we pick out the coincidence of more than one such [discrete entity], e.g., the road got iced, a child ran into the road, the truck was moving too fast for road conditions, and so the truck jack-knifed and nearly injured several people.

It's bad enough thinking in these terms using classical ideas, but if quantum statistical outcomes have to be taken into account it may require a new generation of thinkers simmered in quantum mechanics from conception onward. (I am told that nobody has ever become a go master who did not learn this game sometime before the age of about ten years old. It may be the same limitation that makes humans unable to learn language if they survive as "wolf children" and are found only after they are pretty much through their childhood eyars.)

I've already spent too much time, and I suspect I have accomplished nothing. P0M (talk) 18:49, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Today I discovered your above reflections on causality, with which I largely agree. Let me add some comments.

As you may infer from my treatment of quantum mechanics on my website [4], I am a bit reluctant to take too seriously the ontological models we think up with respect to the world we live in. I think that from Aristotle to Hawking we have had too much the idea that we are able to look into God's mind. What the world is like is discovered by gradually extending our domain of experience. Each following step has brought us unforeseen insights, and it is not to be expected that we have reached the deepest level today. Hence, in my view today's best theories just reflect the way we at this moment experience reality, they are not descriptions of reality as it "really" is.

Agreed.

With respect to causality I hold the Humean/Kantian view that it is a way to understand and explain our experiences. Independent of whether it has an ontological basis causality is an assignment, meant to order our experiences (note that the Kantian categories are to be applied to the phenomena). Of course, this assignment should preferably be implemented into our theories by giving physical laws a causal form. This induced Einstein's criticism of quantum mechanics, classical mechanics allegedly being causal. However, by the second law of thermodynamics causality becomes a dubious issue within classical mechanics too if this theory is applied to systems of molecules in (local) thermodynamic equilibrium. Causality can meaningfully be applied to thermodynamics if applied to macroscopic phenomena like the heating of a kettle of water by the heat of a gas burner. However, it does not make sense to try to reduce this process to the Newtonian equations of motion of all molecules involved, first because classical mechanics is not even applicable to molecules (since quantum mechanical processes are involved), second because even at the classical level of description we learn from chaos theory that, apart from some special cases related to strange attractors, the determinism necessary to implement causality cannot observationally be distinguished from indeterminism (it is impossible to unambiguously prove any causal relation between the onset of a hurricane and the clapping of a butterfly's wings far away).

This part seems completely reasonable to me, too.

With respect to application of the idea of relativistic causality within the theory of general relativity there is the extra element of the velocity of light as the upper limit of the velocity of physical influences. There are quite a few physicists believing that during an early period of the existence of our universe there has been a superluminal expansion (inflation theory). This is in disagreement with Einstein's theories of relativity. I have no strong preference for either one of these views. I find it quite possible that Einstein's theories of relativity will find their domains of application as limited as in the past have turned out to be the domains of most physical theories. On the other hand, our experience with relativity theory is such that it does not seem wise to abandon (sub)luminality too easily. So, I am afraid that a decision whether Dr. Greenstein at Cal Tech was right has to await further experimental and theoretical developments.WMdeMuynck (talk) 11:19, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

George Greenstein (the son, not the father) was a classmate of mine, and I still keep somewhat in touch with him. I guess sometime I should e-mail him to see whether he remembers our conversation of the early 60s or can be reminded of what his father actually said.) As I listened to what he said I had in mind Gamow's model of expanding space wherein buttons, representing suns, are spot glued to a gradually expanding rubber balloon. P0M (talk) 17:33, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

File:Yuanze.png listed for deletion

A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Yuanze.png, has been listed at Wikipedia:Files for deletion. Please see the discussion to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. FASTILY_sock^(TALK) 03:33, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Single slit interferenceindications

In your Single slit light passage image, you show an interference pattern. How do you explain that?WFPM (talk) 08:35, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

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Intro to QM once again

Hi Patrick, long time no confer with. There are two discussions regarding Intro to QM and the main QM article. I think you are one of the editors best qualified to add to these discussions. One is on the talk page of the intro article Content fork and the other is taking place over at the village pump - here. My words of psuedo-wisdom are down towards the bottom of the page at the village pump discussion.----Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 19:15, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Was this your Question?

Hi Patrick!

No, It was myself who deleted my question on the uncertainty theory, I have done some research on the subject, and now "partially understand the answer to my question.

Thank you for your brilliant answer, It has confirmed much of my understanding.

I totally agree with your "non natural units" Planck's constant is merely the amount of "Quanta" in one Joule, which is not a orderly number, because the joule has no relation to quanta (other than it describes the same property of nature: energy)

This part is wrong. One way that you can get a little clearer on this subjects is to learn about "multiplication of units." Usually people do not learn about this idea until they get into college physics. For instance, if you are working with the formula "d = r x t" (distance = rate times time) in high school physics, most people will do the "units" informally. They won't say, e.g., "3 miles = 1 mile per hour x 3 hours," they will just write "3 = 1 x 3," or, since people usually think about what they know first and the answer that they want to get second, they would write "1 x 3 = 3," and then they would understand that if you travel at a mile an hour for three hours you will cover three miles.

Physics students learn to ignore the numbers for a while and just look at the units to make sure that everything is going to work out o.k. In this case it would be "miles = miles/hour * hour," and since the "/hour" and "hour" cancel, you would end up with "miles = miles," which means you are looking for an answer in number of miles and you are getting an answer that is a certain number of miles.

The joule is a unit of energy. If Planck's constant were the number of units of energy in one joule, then the unit of Planck's constant would have to be the joule -- but it is not.

Much of the problem understanding this thing is a kind of historical accident. Planck had no idea of what was going on inside something that is radiating energy. He was working backwards from one problem and making a model to explain what everybody was seeing in nature. He said, basically, "What if inside this heated chunk of iron that is radiating heat there are a number of individual things that are analogous to tuning forks. Just as each tuning fork has its charateristic frequency of sound, and how hard you hit it determines how loud the musical note will be at that particular frequency, each 'vibrating bar' in the chunk of steel can only give out one frequency of light, and the strength of light at that frequency depends on how many times per second that little bar is vibrating. So E = n * h, where n is some integer and h is my constant." That put the idea of "n * h" into people's minds just on account of the kind of Tinkertoys model that Planck was using. Doing things that way, the math turned out right and a big problem (called the Ultraviolet catastrophe disappeared.

But we are now pretty sure that there are no such "bars" in a chunk of steel. Instead, there is a huge number of atoms, and each atom has electrons, and (usually only the outermost of) the electrons can rise to a higher orbit and then fall to a lower orbit. Each rise to a higher orbit absorbs a certain amount of energy (probably caused by the heat from the fire warming the chunk of iron), and each fall back to a lower orbit radiates a single photon of a determined frequency and a determined energy. Just as you can talk about a quantity of water that weighs an ounce and the quantity of water that occupies an 0unce volume, and it will be the same quantity of water, you can talk about the frequency of the photon or the energy of the photon and it is the same thing. What determines how fast photons of a certain frequency flow out of the chunk of heated iron is the temperature of the iron and how much iron there is.

The important thing is that an electron does not fall by steps from one orbit to another, and the photon that is emitted is not composed of chunks of energy.

Right now, I am wondering if the universe is subject to "non viewable determinism" or complete "randomness"

There has been a dispute about that question since the time that Einstein first tried to put quantum mechanics out of business. There are some people who believe that there are "hidden variables" that account for everything that happens in a deterministic way, and there are other people who say that there is no evidence for there being any hidden variables. One physicist, Dr. Bell, discovered a way that appears to prove that there cannot be a deterministic factor, but the idea that things have to have a definite reason is so strong in some people that people still argue against him and are trying to find some experiment that will prove Bell's ideas are wrong. See Bell test experiments.

in other words, if "we don't know what particles are doing, or if they don't "Know" what their doing"

Maybe it's more like the question, "Where is a ghost when is hasn't materialized yet?"

Clearly I have a lot more to learn, and once again, thank you for your thorough and informative answer :-)

Is it possible that uncertainty, and randomness is just as much of a property of the universe as say; mass, momentum or direction is?

One of my Chinese friends thinks that probability is what is the most basic. Or you could say that potentiality comes before actuality. He believes that our normal way of thinking starts from where we are -- in some actual world (that has developed according to underlying potentialities) -- and so we tend to see the actual as primary and then say that the actual things have probabilities of doing this or probabilities of doing that, or even that actual things have actual reasons for doing definite things but that we just haven't figured out yet how to get to these actual reasons.

To me, it is easier to understand the double-slit experiment by saying that a photon in flight has no definite position and so must go through both slits, rather than saying that a photon always has some definite position even if we can't discover what it is, and that it therefor must go through one slit or the other. In that experiment, everything changes depending on whether there is one slit or two. If the photon is either in the left slit or the right slit, why would it matter that the other slit was open or shut? But it does matter. People make all sorts of stories up to account for the function of the second slit. Some kind of "un-photon" goes through the other slit. It must go through the other slit. Otherwise there is nothing to interfere with the "real" photon. To me, unless you can trap one of these "photon's invisible twins" you had better not assert that they exist.

Can I ask one more question of yourself, It is probably absurd, although it seems interesting. Does uncertainty in momentum (providing that uncertainty is a fundamental property of nature) allow for the creation and destruction of energy?

There are what are called "quantum fluctuations" that create subatomic particles even in interstellar space, or so the theorists say. I think this is essentially what you are looking for. Matter and energy are essentially the same thing -- another idea that most people can't deal with.

If you have one particle moving at a particular momentum, and it interacts with another particle, and then randomly "chooses" a momentum, that could be different from its original momentum, has it "created" or "destroyed" a small amount of energy?

You are treading on the ground that led Einstein to bring up what is called entanglement. But the destruction/creation part is not a big part of that discussion.

However, this creation, and destruction would eventually even out, much the same as "flipping coins" (the first three coins may yield an uneven ratio, although, when thousands of coins are flipped the ratio evens out)

I believe this "evening out" is what physicists to occur with the stuff created out of quantum fluctions -- the particles tend not to hang around for very long.

Regards, Mike :-)Mike of Wikiworld (talk) 15:57, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Think of things this way: It's all probabilities. The position of something as big as an elephant, or even as big as a flea, is not truly determinant. We don't really know where the bus is, but on the other hand the amount of fuzz in the picture is so very small that we can't detect it. We don't really know where a photon is on its flight between laser and target, and the indeterminacy is so great that we must take account of it to get any kind of accurate predictions of what we will see in the end -- and those predictions must reflect the high variability of the possibilities active in the physical apparatus. The double-slit experiment works so gloriously because the interference effects both spread out the most likely places for showing up and also strengthen the amplitudes of the fringes by removing the possibility that any light shows up in the dark zones.P0M (talk) 14:58, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I'll put a note on your user page unless to see this answer before I get back from a trip for some groceries. P0M (talk) 20:43, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

AfD

Please see:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of English words of Chinese origin Kitfoxxe (talk) 15:31, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Yenlin Ku

I don't remember creating the article but a Google search seems to confirm the form "Yenlin Ku" - see especially this article. Regards - Ian Pitchford (talk) 17:32, 8 April 2011 (UTC)