Heh, now there is a non sequitur!
There are many things computer have done and may eventually do, but saving our personal time has never really been one of them.
I remember when we were told they would be great for keeping recipes… whoopie!
Ahh, errm, was there a topic around here?
[quote]Professor X wrote:
It isn’t that we were taught a simple “solar system” model, it is more that the unknowns were more related to quarks. It was taught that electrons were not in some predictable traveling pattern around atoms, however, they assigned certain positions in order to discuss molecules and how they were configured. [/quote]
Yes, you can do a lot (most, I’d guess) of chemistry without ever bothering with QM at all. That’s probably true of much of biology too.
For most practical applications, it doesn’t matter where the electrons actually are, only that they are. Using simpler models is quite acceptable for applications where using the more complicated one brings no valuable result for the additional effort.
[quote]danmaftei wrote:
Two points:
1 - Wikipedia is not the answer to all sources. Just like to point that out. =P If someone who understands science says it’s a good starting point, I’ll agree with him, and Pookie seems like he knows what he’s talking about. But I will say that I have found many inaccuracies on Wikipedia. It’s a great website and tool, but you need more than just that to truly learn.[/quote]
Of course the Wikipedia is not definitive in any sense, but it is often a very good starting point.
If you’ve never heard of QM and are interested in learning about it, the WP will give you enough “keywords” and names of famous physicists for you to search quite a bit.
In matters where there is some controversy, the “discussion” pages of the wikipedia articles will often help distinguish the various camps and here too, allow for someone to continue searching by themselves.
You can also give book titles, but honestly, who’s really going to go and buy a handful of books to learn about a subject that came up on T-Nation?
[quote]vroom wrote:
There are many things computer have done and may eventually do, but saving our personal time has never really been one of them.[/quote]
What generally happens, at least in an office setting, is that any time saved eventually results in people being fired/reassigned to other tasks.
There are also many things that simply aren’t possible (or at the very least impractical) without computers.
Digital audio/video? Anyone miss those vinyl LPs and 4-track cassettes? Now you can carry around about 5000 songs on something smaller than a pack of cigarettes.
The internet itself has pretty much replaced the public library for accessing information quickly. You can get text, of course, but also sound, video, programs, etc.
Cryptography. Anyone with a personal computer can secure his data and communications with a 2nd party from eavesdropping/interception/tampering. You can do it orders of magnitude more securely than the German’s Enigma machine that was the nec plus ultra during WW2.
[quote]pookie wrote:
Professor X wrote:
I am very interested because I have never been taught this. While they may be difficult to track. I have never heard anyone refer to them as if they were truly popping in and out of existence.
They’re not “difficult to track”, they’re impossible to track precisely. That’s what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle refers too. In the quantum world, it’s impossible for an observer to assign with precision values for both position and momentum. The more precision you have for one of those values, the less you’ll be able to have for the other.
The consequence of that is that, at the quantum level, deterministic physics goes out the window; the old Newtonian idea that if I knew all the positions and velocities of every particles in someone’s brain, I’d be able to predict their thoughts in advance is dead.
It’s what prompted Einstein’s famous “God does not play dice with the universe” quote. Einstein spent a huge portion of the end of his life trying to show that QM was wrong on that assertion, but he never could.
As for schools, as far as I know (from nephews) they’re still teaching the atom using the “miniature solar system” model of the nucleus as the “sun” and show the electrons on nice regular orbits around it. That “mental image” of the atom is extremely difficult to get rid of, and confuses the modern view of an atom.
I’m a bit worried that whatever college/university/place-of-higher-learning you attended apparently didn’t correct that misconception.
I wouldn’t describe the electrons as popping in and out of existence (although that’s still a better way to think about them than the “solar system” model) but more as a “cloud of probability” that encompasses everywhere the electron might be at any given moment. Only when an observation is actually made does the electron reveal it’s actual position OR momentum.
Reading the Wikipedia entries on “Quantum Mechanics” or “Uncertainty Principles” are good starting points for anyone interested in learning a bit more about QM.
[/quote]
So, what would be a better “mental model” for picturing an atom?
[quote]pookie wrote:
You can also give book titles, but honestly, who’s really going to go and buy a handful of books to learn about a subject that came up on T-Nation?
[/quote]
This is true. I myself tried to rise above this and get some books on WWII after an interesting discussion on the Politics forum.
I have yet to go out and buy those books. I think I’ll just wait until this fall and take a college history course.
[quote]danmaftei wrote:
As is often the case with me, I find it very odd that people who don’t know the first godamn thing about astrophysics are questioning these findings.
Questioning things is great, but only if you know something about it. I don’t, so I’ll stay out of this discussion, but I really am wondering why so many people are quick to call bullshit. Someone said “we don’t know if there’s a 10th planet in our own solar system but we know the make-up of the universe?” Unless you know and understand the methods scientists use to find either planets or the make-up of the universe, you have no right questioning this.
Advanced science is godamn weird. Electrons don’t “move,” they disappear and reappear in random places. String theory contests that all matter is made from vibrating strings of energy, based in something like 23 dimensions. Now I never believed this blindly, but I didn’t question it either until I learned something about it.[/quote]
As is often the case with me, I find it very odd that people who don’t know how to spell words like Goddamn (or goddamn for Pookie) are criticizing someone else for their opinions of astrophysics on an internet bodybuilding forum.
I can’t beleive I’m being talked down to about astrophysics by someone who actually used the phrase: “whatever the theory dealing with huge cosmic bodies is called”. I worry less about Prof. X having the ‘solar system’ model of the atom in his head than I do you spouting off about electrons when you use a phrase like that.
Taking a page from the Pookie playbook, go look up Newtonian mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, and General Relativity. While you’re at it, look up Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, James Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Michael Faraday, Sir George Stokes, Satyendra Bose, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Ludwig Boltzmann, and a whole host of others that I can’t name off the top of my head.
Or did you just close the science book and stop reading when class ended?
I always found the “raisin bun” model quite appealing…
[quote]harris447 wrote:
So, what would be a better “mental model” for picturing an atom?[/quote]
Electrons should be “represented” as “clouds of probability”. It’s a bit hard to put into words.
Scroll down to the bottom half of this page for a more “modern” representation: How Atoms Work | HowStuffWorks The red drop shapes are where the electrons are likely to be at any given time.
[quote]lucasa wrote:
danmaftei wrote:
As is often the case with me, I find it very odd that people who don’t know the first godamn thing about astrophysics are questioning these findings.
Questioning things is great, but only if you know something about it. I don’t, so I’ll stay out of this discussion, but I really am wondering why so many people are quick to call bullshit. Someone said “we don’t know if there’s a 10th planet in our own solar system but we know the make-up of the universe?” Unless you know and understand the methods scientists use to find either planets or the make-up of the universe, you have no right questioning this.
Advanced science is godamn weird. Electrons don’t “move,” they disappear and reappear in random places. String theory contests that all matter is made from vibrating strings of energy, based in something like 23 dimensions. Now I never believed this blindly, but I didn’t question it either until I learned something about it.
As is often the case with me, I find it very odd that people who don’t know how to spell words like Goddamn (or goddamn for Pookie) are criticizing someone else for their opinions of astrophysics on an internet bodybuilding forum.
I can’t beleive I’m being talked down to about astrophysics by someone who actually used the phrase: “whatever the theory dealing with huge cosmic bodies is called”. I worry less about Prof. X having the ‘solar system’ model of the atom in his head than I do you spouting off about electrons when you use a phrase like that.
Taking a page from the Pookie playbook, go look up Newtonian mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, and General Relativity. While you’re at it, look up Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, James Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Michael Faraday, Sir George Stokes, Satyendra Bose, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Ludwig Boltzmann, and a whole host of others that I can’t name off the top of my head.
Or did you just close the science book and stop reading when class ended?[/quote]
Quick things:
1 - Godamn is one of those words that doesn’t have one “right” spelling. In the three dictionaries I have in my house, it is spelled “goddamn,” “goddam” and “godamn.” Why did you even bring this up, it has nothing to do with the argument.
2 - Show me where I claimed to know anything about quantum mechanics or astrophysics.
3 - Explain to me a) how we know the matter in the universe, b) why we do not know if there’s a 10th planet in our solar system, and c) how the two relate to each other, as in “how can we claim (a) if we don’t know (b).” This was my criticism. If you do know those things, then I’m sorry I quoted you. I was talking to the general forum, as many were quick to call bullshit on a science article without truly understanding the science.
We can’t tell if there is a 10th planet because we haven’t really defined what a planet is. We know there is a lot of crap floating around past and near pluto, and recently found an object orbiting the sun that is bigger than pluto. However, the discovery of these has brought pluto’s planet status into question.
As for the electrons, their “orbits” (the cloud thing is right, but they have general shapes, for example the S orbitals are generally spherical, the Ps are figure 8s sort of) are the zone where the electron will be 98% of the time. The higher the energy level, the farther away from the nucleus the electrons tend to be. However, as stated, this is no sure thing. Electrons do seem to sort of blip around.
In middle school we were taught the bohr model of the atom which is the one with newtonian behavior for electrons. It is all lies. Lies! But good filler for dumb 8th graders.
http://www.whatthebleep.com/trailer/
That is the trailer where they demonstrate the double slit experiment. Very intresting and worth a look.
[quote]danmaftei wrote:
Quick things:
1 - Godamn is one of those words that doesn’t have one “right” spelling. In the three dictionaries I have in my house, it is spelled “goddamn,” “goddam” and “godamn.” Why did you even bring this up, it has nothing to do with the argument.[/quote]
You’re right, godamn doesn’t have a “right” spelling because it’s not a word, m-w.com, dictionary.com, and google dictionary contain no entry for “godamn”. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, ad hominem attack for ad hominem attack.
You didn’t claim it, you unabashedly assumed it:
Electrons don’t “move,” they disappear and reappear in random places. String theory contests that all matter is made from vibrating strings of energy, based in something like 23 dimensions. Now I never believed this blindly, but I didn’t question it either until I learned something about it.
I think this is the main reason why quantum theory and whatever the theory dealing with huge cosmic bodies is called need a unifying theory, like the string theory. Also, on the cosmic level, Newtonian physics change slightly as well, which is what Einstein dealt with (as far as I know). Einstein didn’t “disprove” Newton’s ideas, but he needed to slightly change them, to tack on a little something extra when dealing with speeds close to the speed of light.
The easy answer, look at the stuff around us and guess:
For more in depth reading, look at the works of Frank Tipler http://www.math.tulane.edu/~tipler/, Freeman Dyson FREEMAN DYSON - School of Natural Sciences | Institute for Advanced Study (No, he doesn’t build vacuum cleaners), and Andrei Linde Stanford University -- Dept. of Physics -- Andrei Linde who have the three major hypotheses of the end of the universe, they always have good citations as to their estimates and methods (You don’t get to be where they are otherwise).
However, you’re right. I’m not an astrophysicist, but I am at least partly, a professional statistician. I know we can only see a little part of our universe. How do I know that? Well…
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/03/14/planet.discovery/
http://kepler.nasa.gov/sci/capabilities.html
So, until about a year ago, we couldn’t see a planet roughly the size of Pluto that’s only ten billion km away (that’s about 1e-6 light years, by the way).
How can you claim knowledge of the composition and expanse of the universe if you don’t know the same about your own solar system?
I agree, many are quick to call bullshit. Some will choose to believe the book of Genesis without even knowing who wrote it and then shun the science when they could know the full (or at least a fuller) story behind the claims.
This is just semantics, but what little I said about QM really was too general to be considered knowing anything about it. I thought electron “movement” was merely common knowledge too.
Science is a great religion…
Yeah… well at least it is a “religion” that can change it’s view of the world when the facts demand it instead of being tied to some ancient dying dogma.
[quote]jlesk68 wrote:
Science is a great religion…[/quote]
[quote]jlesk68 wrote:
Science is a great religion…[/quote]
Great quote!
Yes science is religion when it tries to “prove” things that are nprovable. Then it is pure ‘religion,’ of course without a god. Darwin is just its “guru.”
That is just dumb. You must not know a lot about science.
[quote]steveo5801 wrote:
jlesk68 wrote:
Science is a great religion…
Great quote!
Yes science is religion when it tries to “prove” things that are nprovable. Then it is pure ‘religion,’ of course without a god. Darwin is just its “guru.”
[/quote]
[quote]vroom wrote:
Computers are great but they have not turned into much of a time saver. The time they have saved has been wasted surfing the internet!
Heh, now there is a non sequitur!
There are many things computer have done and may eventually do, but saving our personal time has never really been one of them.
I remember when we were told they would be great for keeping recipes… whoopie!
Ahh, errm, was there a topic around here?[/quote]
I am just feeling like a cranky old fart.
To sum up my feelings on the subject, great science is great.
Most science is just feeling around in the dark. What they think they discovered today may or may not be true. I find it hard to get excited about some of these exciting things.
I am far more interested about finding liquid water elsewhere in the solar system than I am about some bozo saying the universe sprang into being in less than a second and it is 74% dark matter, which no one seems to even know what it is. Just seems like high level BS.
[quote]danmaftei wrote:
pookie wrote:
You can also give book titles, but honestly, who’s really going to go and buy a handful of books to learn about a subject that came up on T-Nation?
This is true. I myself tried to rise above this and get some books on WWII after an interesting discussion on the Politics forum.
I have yet to go out and buy those books. I think I’ll just wait until this fall and take a college history course.[/quote]
Go to your public library!