John Platko wrote:

John Platko wrote:

crank wrote:I'm afraid in reading that, most of the shedding was done by my brain as it tried to glean something I could grasp. One error, calling someone 'barely 5 ft' tall 'very short', at least for his time, average height was around 5' 5", not that short. Same with Napoleon, he wasn't short at all. Bah, humbug.

hmmmm. Well perhaps this will shed some light on the implications of reality being discrete rather than analog.

Edit: Mindful of Goldilocks, perhaps this will give you something more suitable to chew on.

It;s good you added the second video, I can't bring myself to watch anything with Michael Jackson if I can help it. I've seen this program 2 or 3 times, very interesting. And once again, there is someone talking about what Chaitin mentioned, real numbers not really existing in some sense in the universe. I already suffered through a torturous, long exchange not long ago in another thread about that.

crank wrote:

John Platko wrote:

John Platko wrote:

crank wrote:I'm afraid in reading that, most of the shedding was done by my brain as it tried to glean something I could grasp. One error, calling someone 'barely 5 ft' tall 'very short', at least for his time, average height was around 5' 5", not that short. Same with Napoleon, he wasn't short at all. Bah, humbug.

hmmmm. Well perhaps this will shed some light on the implications of reality being discrete rather than analog.

Edit: Mindful of Goldilocks, perhaps this will give you something more suitable to chew on.

It;s good you added the second video, I can't bring myself to watch anything with Michael Jackson if I can help it.

Yes, I didn't want to leave you with the impression that I was just being flippant.

I've seen this program 2 or 3 times, very interesting. And once again, there is someone talking about what Chaitin mentioned, real numbers not really existing in some sense in the universe. I already suffered through a torturous, long exchange not long ago in another thread about that.

Well I won't try to drag you into another one. The only actual point I have to make about all this is that I see no reason not to expect models to reconcile merely because they are discrete vs continuous.

John Platko wrote:
Yes, I didn't want to leave you with the impression that I was just being flippant.

How could you not? I hope that was deliberate.

Perhaps a new paradigm will help with the reconciliation. I saw this recently and really enjoyed it - not just because of the delightful presentation by David Deutsch but because we get to see how other physicists, etc., react to his theory in the frank discussion that followed the question and answer period.

http://knowledgestream.ru/en/lectures/61

One of the early (1970s) motivators to develop string theory was the realisation that the equations of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics 'fall out' from their consideration. Let the smiley people at Cambridge TV explain it better:

Cambridge TV

Elemental Ideas

String Theory Part One

(Part two soon…)

campermon wrote:

jamest wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:

Rumraket wrote:I can unambigously state that, with the exception of [1], I understood exactly none of that.

I can help with that.

10-12 meters is what we would call very, very small.

Herald a plethora of dick jokes.

Dick jokes eh?....

http://www.realclearscience.com/lists/b ... ynman.html

On topic -

GM is analogue
QM is digital

This is about it from my understanding which is better than a layman and nowhere near a practicing physicist. Calilassea used all the right words in his first post but the issue of quantizing space-time rather than it being a continuum presents some pretty drastic issues for GM. Also, the time variable is intrinsic to QM equations but extrinsic to GR. That is basically the same issue though from a different vantage point.

newolder wrote:...
String Theory Part One

...

Can you find a new version of the link. I just tried it and it failed. (I was not visiting this site when you first posted the link.)

DavidMcC wrote:

newolder wrote:...
String Theory Part One

...

Can you find a new version of the link. I just tried it and it failed. (I was not visiting this site when you first posted the link.)

You could try asking at their twitter account as I have no idea why the service should be down.
https://twitter.com/cambridgetvnews

The cambridgetv service has resumed.

Okay fair enough ....and I don't agree for a second that it's generally assumed. Something as simple as an electron jumping from one energy state to another and emitting a photon is discrete in the sense that it's either in one energy state or the other ....there is not a continuum between those states.

It decays and emits a photon, also discrete, coordinate enough of them and you have a laser. DIfferent materials emit the photo at different energy levels ( hence colours ) but they are still discrete packets.

That's far from a adequate explanation of the wild world of electrons and photons but you get the drift.

This is a good history of attempted reconciliation
http://www.superstringtheory.com/index.html