Kaysville, UT homeowners show up in large numbers to oppose warming center

[malkie]

Perhaps in the bar at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe the server may eventually manage to make another boilermaker for Arthur that is - atom for atom, electron state for electron state - identical to a drink that my dad once consumed. To Arthur's delight, it turns out not to be 'an undrinkable tea-like liquid that is "almost but not quite entirely unlike tea".'

My dad used to amuse himself (and probably nobody else) with his reply whenever a bar tender asked him: "Same again?" "Not possible", says dad, "but I'd be happy to have something very similar."

Even posthumously, he just now amused me.

You're very kind, Morley, and for that I'll relate another of his stories.

Dad: A pint of beer, please. (unfailingly polite)
Bartender places the drink on the bar in front of him: There you are, sir.
Dad: Do you think there enough room there for a good shot of whisky?
(which would make it a boilermaker - and would increase the profit for the bar)
Bartender (happily reaching for the whisky bottle): Certainly, sir.
Dad: Then would you mind filling it up with beer, since I paid you for a full pint.

[malkie]

I don’t whether this should be reassuring or disturbing, but on a small enough scale things really can be the same. Two atoms of the same isotope, in the same electronic state, are mathematically identical. The qualifier “in the same electronic state” isn’t much of a weasel, either, because electronic states are discrete, and are ranked by energy in quite big steps, so that most atoms are in the same electronic state most of the time.

They’re not just indistinguishable in practice. They’re identical in the sense that switching them would not be a change, any more than it would be a change in a length of twelve inches if you switched inches seven and three. We know that they are identical in this logical sense from strong statistical evidence.

If you play a dice game like craps, you quickly learn that doubles are rarer throws. With two dice, there is only one way to throw 12: both dice need to be 6. There are two ways to get 11, though. You need one 5 and one 6, but there are two ways to get that: one die could be 5 and the other 6, or the other way round. So in a lot of throws, you get twice as many 11’s as 12’s.

It’s not like that with identical atoms. Instead, if atoms were dice, there would still only be one way to get 11, just as with 12, because switching which atom is 5 and which is 6 does not make a second possible case that can happen. And we can tell this from observing the motions of cold clouds of identical atoms. Lots of kinds of motional states of the cloud show up much less often than they should if switching atoms made a distinct situation.

This means that it is in fact possible to have the same drink again, or step in the same river twice. It’s just very unlikely.

Or maybe even not so unlikely. Can one sing the same song twice? Anyone who has driven with children knows Yes. It may be very unlikely to hear exactly the same rendition of the song twice, but to be the same song, only the words and the tune need to be the same, and those can indeed be duplicated indefinitely. There may be infinitely many styles of playing Yankee Doodle, or intonations in pronouncing “macaroni”, but they are all exactly the same word and tune, as long as they are the same phonemes and notes, because that’s all that “word” and “tune” mean.

Do you think it was always so - from the time that matter made its appearance in the newborn universe?

Or was it a bit like how the industrial revolution both required standardized, interchangeable parts, and made their production possible? At one time, it seems to me, every entity in the universe was, of necessity, sui generis. Or am I simply experiencing a failure of imagination?

By the way, for anyone who has had the experience of driving with children, I suggest a couple of variations on one of the usual songs. It's possible, and very simple but not easy for everyone, to sing Row, Row Your Boat, and Row Your Boat to the regular tune, ending up with, respectively, one and two beats at the end with no vocalization. Try it! I got a great feeling of accomplishment when I was finally able to sing all three versions, one after the other.

[Limnor]

Perhaps in the bar at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe the server may eventually manage to make another boilermaker for Arthur that is - atom for atom, electron state for electron state - identical to a drink that my dad once consumed. To Arthur's delight, it turns out not to be 'an undrinkable tea-like liquid that is "almost but not quite entirely unlike tea".'

Even posthumously, he just now amused me.

You're very kind, Morley, and for that I'll relate another of his stories.

Dad: A pint of beer, please. (unfailingly polite)
Bartender places the drink on the bar in front of him: There you are, sir.
Dad: Do you think there enough room there for a good shot of whisky?
(which would make it a boilermaker - and would increase the profit for the bar)
Bartender (happily reaching for the whisky bottle): Certainly, sir.
Dad: Then would you mind filling it up with beer, since I paid you for a full pint.

Malkie Sr was a wise man lol

[malkie]

Perhaps in the bar at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe the server may eventually manage to make another boilermaker for Arthur that is - atom for atom, electron state for electron state - identical to a drink that my dad once consumed. To Arthur's delight, it turns out not to be 'an undrinkable tea-like liquid that is "almost but not quite entirely unlike tea".'


You're very kind, Morley, and for that I'll relate another of his stories.

Dad: A pint of beer, please. (unfailingly polite)
Bartender places the drink on the bar in front of him: There you are, sir.
Dad: Do you think there enough room there for a good shot of whisky?
(which would make it a boilermaker - and would increase the profit for the bar)
Bartender (happily reaching for the whisky bottle): Certainly, sir.
Dad: Then would you mind filling it up with beer, since I paid you for a full pint.

Malkie Sr was a wise man lol

Thanks, Limnor. I can't say I knew my father well, but I have some memories of him that I fond amusing, and a few that have quietly provided foundations for my liberal views.

If I remember, I'll pull out another story on New Year's Eve.

[Res Ipsa]

By the way, for anyone who has had the experience of driving with children, I suggest a couple of variations on one of the usual songs. It's possible, and very simple but not easy for everyone, to sing Row, Row Your Boat, and Row Your Boat to the regular tune, ending up with, respectively, one and two beats at the end with no vocalization. Try it! I got a great feeling of accomplishment when I was finally able to sing all three versions, one after the other.

At one time, I could sing both Row, Row Your Boat and Row, Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Both were good for keeping children entertained.

[malkie]

By the way, for anyone who has had the experience of driving with children, I suggest a couple of variations on one of the usual songs. It's possible, and very simple but not easy for everyone, to sing Row, Row Your Boat, and Row Your Boat to the regular tune, ending up with, respectively, one and two beats at the end with no vocalization. Try it! I got a great feeling of accomplishment when I was finally able to sing all three versions, one after the other.

At one time, I could sing both Row, Row Your Boat and Row, Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Both were good for keeping children entertained.

Row, Row, Row, Row Your Boat!!!

Challenge accepted!

I don't make NY resolutions, but I'll add this to my "structured playtime list" starting in January. Thanks, Res.

[Physics Guy]

Under the theories we currently accept, there is no way that rules as basic as the indistinguishability of particles could ever have changed. One basic and big thing has changed a lot over time: space has puffed like dough, by a lot. There’s a lot more room now than there used to be, everywhere. This has only happened on large scales, however.

Big collections of matter, like a galaxy or a star cluster, can keep space reined in. So the stars in each galaxy are still only about as far from each other as they always were, and they’re staying that way. The space between galaxies has expanded a lot, though, so on large scales the universe is much bigger. It’s as if the countryside stretched and grew so that towns moved apart.

That’s all still part of the unchanging basic laws as we now understand them, however, the way the continuing ascent of a baseball thrown upward is a consequence of inertia. And the growth of intergalactic space isn’t going to change particles. A crucial part of what space even means is that it’s always the same on small scales, the way the surface of the Earth always has a flat tangent plane even though on large scale the Earth’s round. Particles don’t change if space stretches. They live here and now, in the moment. That’s a big part of what particles mean.

Particles still aren’t really what they sound like. They’re not really little indestructible specks. They’re quantized excitations of fields. Don’t feel bad about having limited imagination for that, however.

No-one has an intuitive understanding of quantum field theory. We just learn the math like a deaf person learning music theory. People make little mental images and analogies here and there, for this or that aspect or scenario, but the theory itself is like a sacred text written in a language that no humans speak natively. In quantum field theory we are all adult learners struggling to manage the grammar.

[Chap]

the way the continuing ascent of a baseball thrown upward is a consequence of inertia.

Pardon the pedantry, but from the physical point of view might it not be less confusing to any innocent students reading this to say that the fact that the baseball does not continue to move at constant speed in a straight line after being thrown is a consequence of the force exerted on it by the earth's gravitational field, and the frictional forces exerted on it by the air through which it moves?

Inertia is not, after all, a recognised physical quantity like mass, momentum or energy.

(How did we get onto this in a thread about a warming centre. I wonder?)

[malkie]

the way the continuing ascent of a baseball thrown upward is a consequence of inertia.

Pardon the pedantry, but from the physical point of view might it not be less confusing to any innocent students reading this to say that the fact that the baseball does not continue to move at constant speed in a straight line after being thrown is a consequence of the force exerted on it by the earth's gravitational field, and the frictional forces exerted on it by the air through which it moves?

Inertia is not, after all, a recognised physical quantity like mass, momentum or energy.

(How did we get onto this in a thread about a warming centre. I wonder?)

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

[Physics Guy]

I’m sorry if it’s confusing, but while the fact that a thrown ball slows and eventually falls is due to force, the fact that it doesn’t just stop dead and fall right back right away, but keeps rising after release, is indeed called inertia. Inertia isn’t a quantity like mass or momentum, but it is a principle. A more modern way of expressing it is to say that the laws of nature are differential equations of second order, not first.

The continuing expansion of the universe after the Big Bang is indeed a similar example of second-order dynamics. No persistent force keeps on driving the expansion of space. It just started expanding, and keeps on, because gravity can’t make it stop right away.

The effect that has recently been called “dark energy” would be such an ongoing force making space expand faster. It may not be real, but even if it is, it gets stronger the bigger the universe gets, so it can’t have done much at the start, when the universe was still small. The inertia-like persistence of motion is the main story in how the universe has expanded so far.