quote:Lets consider the power of imagination it takes to think up string theory and black holes and black matter or energy and then imagine all that power of imagination turned to things sexual.
I don't hope to be able to explain the "doings" of the theoritacal physics set and their groupies, but you should hope some day to be there and have just a glimps of pure heaven.
If my limited knowledge of quantum physics is correct, it would be theoretically possible to have a single groupie exist in two different places at the same time, correct? In doing a visual measurement of myself, I'd like her to exist simultaneously, oh, about three feet or so apart from her other self.
Posts: 5729 | From: Wisconsin | Registered: Sep 2003
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Quantum mechanics assumes that time is what a mathematician would say is homeomorphic to the Real line (the x-axis for all you geometric wizards), which is a complete separable connected homogeneous one dimensional hereditarilly decomposable metric space.
I've never been entirely satisfied that that is a reasonable or satisfactory assumption, and without it, but with other models for the internal structure of time, it turns out that neither mater nor energy need to be quantized. It is certainly not a necessary assumption. One may instead assume time is quantized.
Even accepting the normal assumptions about the structure of time, I don't think the inability to determine the exact probability of someone being in one of two places simultaneously necessarilly results in a conclusion that a person may exist in two places at the same time.
Posts: 11304 | From: Fort Worth, Texas | Registered: Mar 2005
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a photon seems to be the smallest quanta of spacetime, and yet we can't seem to pin one down... every time we try to catch it? it turns into something else...
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
You needn't find it, actually. The "size" of quanta as now recognized are not "found", but logically deduced. And the reason we "can't seem to pin one down.." is that in so doing, we alter either it or its position/momentum/size/etc. with whatever we used to locate it. Thus, somehow what we mean by "found" becomes significant. Or, another fact emerges....there is a serious and logical basis for saying, "that depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is."
Moreover, it would be possible for time to exists as a thing set into what is called a Souslin space as a totally disconnected nowhere dense subspace, so that it's smalest parts are the actual points of the space.
Posts: 11304 | From: Fort Worth, Texas | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
Well, from my original "same girl in two places" hypothesis, we've gone into "packets of time" and "dense subspace." I'm not ashamed to admit that it's well beyond my level of thinking so I'm gonna go fishing, in large packets of water for some hopefully dense subspecies of the animal kingdom. See you all next week.
Posts: 5729 | From: Wisconsin | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
Souslin was a Polish mathematician that died around 1925 at a very young age (23?).
He posed the question, can there exist a totally and linearly ordered space, topologized by the order topology, that does not contain an uncountable collection of mutually exclusive "segments" (things like the set of all point between some two two points) and which is non-separable (that is, no countable set has closure the entire space)?
Upside, I have spent many many hours waving a fly rod back and forth, thinking as it went farward of how to drop the "bug" in just the right place to fool old Mr. Big Mouth and as it went back, how could one place time inside other spaces so as to cause certain of the conclusions of quantum mechanice to be altered. Wonderful hours, I might add.
The problem was not settled until the early 1970s. it turns out there can be such a space as Souslin suggested.
Posts: 11304 | From: Fort Worth, Texas | Registered: Mar 2005
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