Science is a body of knowledge that helps us unravel and understand the unlimited mysteries of nature.

With this knowledge, we can develop our world and solve the myriads of problems nature throws at us, without necessarily being at the mercy of a divine entity that hasn't been proven to exist or if he/she/it exists, there's no scientific evidence for such.

Formerly known as natural philosophy, Physics is the fundamental discipline in science that deals with the study of matter, its motion and behavior through space and time, as well as the related entities of energy and force.

In this thread, I will be sharing key facts, discoveries, researches in Physics. The thread is for scientists and lovers of science.

Here we go: What's time? Does time really exist?

IMO, time doesn't really exist. It's the limited processing power of our brain that makes us see events (reality) sequentially.

Space-time is a continuum, a mental/ virtual construct. It's an illusion. More on that later.

The Earth in comparison with the Sun.

Galileo Galilee is one of the most influential physicists in history. So is Albert Einstein.

Wow.. Hmmmm...

There are four fundamental forces of nature (universe):
1. Strong (nuclear) force
2. Electromagnetic force
3. Weak (nuclear) force
4. Gravity

In the subsequent updates, I'll discuss these forces briefly. More forces, I believe, will still be discovered in the coming years.

There are likely candidates of a fifth fundamental force of nature.

Everything is connected: understanding the fundamental forces of nature.

Electromagnetism: Electricity and magnetism

As you're looking at your phone's screen and going through this thread, you're applying some of the most important principles of electromagnetics or electrodynamics.

In the beginning (about 5-6 centuries ago), electricity and magnetism were regarded as separate subjects, until Clark Maxwell revolutionized Physics, and indeed the world, by merging the two as one: electromagnetism.

The second picture is for religious folks.

A001:
Science is a body of knowledge that helps us unravel and understand the unlimited mysteries of nature.

With this knowledge, we can develop our world and solve the myriads of problems nature throws at us, without necessarily being at the mercy of a divine entity that hasn't been proven to exist or if he/she/it exists, there's no scientific evidence of such.

Formerly known as natural philosophy, Physics is the fundamental discipline in science that deals with the study of matter, its motion and behavior through space and time, as well as the related entities of energy and force.

In this thread, I will be sharing key facts, discoveries, researches in Physics. The thread is for scientists and lovers of science.

great topic, in the right section. but these are fundamentals i think there is a better way you can present it to benefit those at this level to learn more easily.

HardMirror:
great topic, in the right section. but these are fundamentals i think there is a better way you can present it to benefit those at this level to learn more easily.

Okay. Noted. The thread is basically for undergraduates, graduates, researchers, and science-enthusiasts, not really for secondary school students.

Following

Nikola Tesla: a man ahead of his time.

Food for thought...

What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Have in Common

In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated and rich, heir to a family fortune. I’ll call him Gallagher. He could do anything he wanted.

He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law, philosophy and other fields. But he was so critical, so picky, that he never settled on a career. Nothing was good enough for him.

He never found love for the same reason. He also disparaged his friends’ choices, so much so that he alienated us. He ended up bitter and alone. At least that’s my guess. I haven’t spoken to Gallagher in decades.

There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things like work, love and nourishment (even the pickiest eater has to eat something).

That’s the lesson I gleaned from Gallagher. But when it comes to answers to big mysteries, most of us aren’t picky enough.

We settle on answers for bad reasons, for example, because our parents, priests or professors believe it.

We think we need to believe something, but actually we don’t. We can, and should, decide that no answers are good enough. We should be agnostics.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). Take Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health.

He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died for our sins and rose from the dead. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.”

Collins apologized. “That was a put-down that should not apply to earnest agnostics who have considered the evidence and still don’t find an answer,” he said. “I was reacting to the agnosticism I see in the scientific community, which has not been arrived at by a careful examination of the evidence.”

I have examined the evidence for Christianity, and I find it unconvincing. I’m not convinced by any scientific creation stories, either, such as those that depict our cosmos as a bubble in an oceanic “multiverse.”

People I admire fault me for being too skeptical. One is the late religious philosopher Huston Smith, who called me “convictionally impaired.”

Another is megapundit Robert Wright, an old friend, with whom I’ve often argued about evolutionary psychology and Buddhism. Wright once asked me in exasperation, “Don’t you believe anything?” Actually, I believe lots of things, for example, that war is bad and should be abolished.

But when it comes to theories about ultimate reality, I’m with Voltaire. “Doubt is not a pleasant condition,” Voltaire said, “but certainty is an absurd one.”

Doubt protects us from dogmatism, which can easily morph into fanaticism and what William James calls a “premature closing of our accounts with reality.”

Below I defend agnosticism as a stance toward the existence of God, interpretations of quantum mechanics and theories of consciousness. When considering alleged answers to these three riddles, we should be as picky as my old friend Gallagher.

Why do we exist? The answer, according to the major monotheistic religions, including the Catholic faith in which I was raised, is that an all-powerful, supernatural entity created us.

This deity loves us, as a human father loves his children, and wants us to behave in a certain way. If we’re good, He’ll reward us. If we’re bad, He’ll punish us. (I use the pronoun “He” because most scriptures describe God as male.)

My main objection to this explanation of reality is the problem of evil. A casual glance at human history, and at the world today, reveals enormous suffering and injustice.

If God loves us and is omnipotent, why is life so horrific for so many people? A standard response to this question is that God gave us free will; we can choose to be bad as well as good.

The late, great physicist Steven Weinberg, an atheist, who died in July, slaps down the free will argument in his book Dreams of a Final Theory.

Noting that Nazis killed many of his relatives in the Holocaust, Weinberg asks: Did millions of Jews have to die so the Nazis could exercise their free will? That doesn’t seem fair. And what about kids who get cancer? Are we supposed to think that cancer cells have free will?

On the other hand, life isn’t always hellish. We experience love, friendship, adventure and heartbreaking beauty. Could all this really come from random collisions of particles?

Even Weinberg concedes that life sometimes seems “more beautiful than strictly necessary.”

If the problem of evil prevents me from believing in a loving God, then the problem of beauty keeps me from being an atheist like Weinberg. Hence, agnosticism.

THE PROBLEM OF INFORMATION


Quantum mechanics is science’s most precise, powerful theory of reality. It has predicted countless experiments, spawned countless applications.

The trouble is, physicists and philosophers disagree over what it means, that is, what it says about how the world works.

Many physicists—most, probably—adhere to the Copenhagen interpretation, advanced by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. But that is a kind of anti-interpretation, which says physicists should not try to make sense of quantum mechanics; they should “shut up and calculate,” as physicist David Mermin once put it.

Philosopher Tim Maudlin deplores this situation. In his 2019 book Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory, he points out that several interpretations of quantum mechanics describe in detail how the world works.

These include the GRW model proposed by Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber; the pilot-wave theory of David Bohm; and the many-worlds hypothesis of Hugh Everett.

But here’s the irony: Maudlin is so scrupulous in pointing out the flaws of these interpretations that he reinforces my skepticism. They all seem hopelessly kludgy and preposterous.

Maudlin does not examine interpretations that recast quantum mechanics as a theory about information.

For positive perspectives on information-based interpretations, check out Beyond Weird by journalist Philip Ball and The Ascent of Information by astrobiologist Caleb Scharf.

But to my mind, information-based takes on quantum mechanics are even less plausible than the interpretations that Maudlin scrutinizes.

The concept of information makes no sense without conscious beings to send, receive and act upon the information.

Introducing consciousness into physics undermines its claim to objectivity. Moreover, as far as we know, consciousness arises only in certain organisms that have existed for a brief period here on Earth.

So how can quantum mechanics, if it’s a theory of information rather than matter and energy, apply to the entire cosmos since the big bang?

Information-based theories of physics seem like a throwback to geocentrism, which assumed the universe revolves around us.

Given the problems with all interpretations of quantum mechanics, agnosticism, again, strikes me as a sensible stance.

MIND-BODY PROBLEMS

The debate over consciousness is even more fractious than the debate over quantum mechanics. How does matter make a mind?

A few decades ago, a consensus seemed to be emerging. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his cockily titled Consciousness Explained, asserted that consciousness clearly emerges from neural processes, such as electrochemical pulses in the brain.

Francis Crick and Christof Koch proposed that consciousness is generated by networks of neurons oscillating in synchrony.

Gradually, this consensus collapsed, as empirical evidence for neural theories of consciousness failed to materialize.

As I point out in my recent book Mind-Body Problems, there are now a dizzying variety of theories of consciousness. Christof Koch has thrown his weight behind integrated information theory, which holds that consciousness might be a property of all matter, not just brains.

This theory suffers from the same problems as information-based theories of quantum mechanics. Theorists such as Roger Penrose, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, have conjectured that quantum effects underpin consciousness, but this theory is even more lacking in evidence than integrated information theory.

Researchers cannot even agree on what form a theory of consciousness should take. Should it be a philosophical treatise?

A purely mathematical model? A gigantic algorithm, perhaps based on Bayesian computation? Should it borrow concepts from Buddhism, such as anatta, the doctrine of no self? All of the above? None of the above?

Consensus seems farther away than ever. And that’s a good thing. We should be open-minded about our minds.

So, what’s the difference, if any, between me and Gallagher, my former friend? I like to think it’s a matter of style. Gallagher scorned the choices of others. He resembled one of those mean-spirited atheists who revile the faithful for their beliefs.

I try not to be dogmatic in my disbelief, and to be sympathetic toward those who, like Francis Collins, have found answers that work for them.

Also, I get a kick out of inventive theories of everything, such as John Wheeler’s “it from bit” and Freeman Dyson’s principle of maximum diversity, even if I can’t embrace them.

I’m definitely a skeptic. I doubt we’ll ever know whether God exists, what quantum mechanics means, how matter makes mind.

These three puzzles, I suspect, are different aspects of a single, impenetrable mystery at the heart of things. But one of the pleasures of agnosticism—perhaps the greatest pleasure—is that I can keep looking for answers and hoping that a revelation awaits just over the horizon.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-god-quantum-mechanics-and-consciousness-have-in-common/

Quantum Mechanics, Plato’s Cave and the Blind Piranha

Can we ever really know the world?

My quantum experiment, which has consumed me for more than a year now, has dredged up a creepy, long-buried memory.

It dates back to the late 1970s, when I was a housepainter living in Denver. One day I found myself in a grungy saloon on Denver’s dusty eastern outskirts.

Behind the bar was an aquarium with a single, nasty-looking fish hovering in it. A silver, saucer-sized, snaggle-toothed, milky-eyed, blind piranha.

Now and then, the bartender netted a few minnows from a fishbowl and dropped them into the piranha’s cubicle.

The piranha froze for an instant, then darted this way and that, jaws snapping, as the minnows fled.

The piranha kept bumping, with audible thuds, into the glass walls of its prison. That explained the protuberance on its snout, which resembled a tiny battering ram.

Sooner or later the piranha gobbled all the hapless minnows, whereupon it returned to its listless, suspended state.

What does this poor creature have to do with quantum mechanics? Here’s what. Our modern scientific worldview and much of our technology—including the laptop on which I’m writing these words—is based on quantum principles.

And yet a century after its invention, physicists and philosophers cannot agree on what quantum mechanics means.

The theory raises deep and, I’m guessing, unanswerable questions about matter, mind and “reality,” whatever that is.

More than a half century ago, Richard Feynman advised us to accept that nature makes no sense. “Do not keep saying to yourself … ‘But how can [nature] be like that?’” Feynman warns in The Character of Physical Law, “because you will get ‘down the drain,’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.

Nobody knows how it can be like that.” Most physicists have followed Feynman’s advice. Ignoring the oddness of quantum mechanics, they simply apply it to accomplish various tasks, such as predicting new particles or building more powerful computers.

Another deep-thinking physicist, John Bell, deplored this situation. In his classic 1987 work Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Bell chides physicists who apply quantum mechanics while blithely disregarding its “fundamental obscurity”; he calls them “sleepwalkers.”

But Bell acknowledges that efforts to “interpret” quantum mechanics so that it makes sense have failed. He likens interpretations such as the many-world hypothesis and pilot-wave theory to “literary fiction.”

Today, there are more interpretations than ever, but they deepen rather than dispel the mystery at the heart of things. The more I dwell on puzzles such as superposition, entanglement and the measurement problem, the more I identify with the piranha.

I’m blindly thrashing about for insights, epiphanies, revelations. Every now and then I think I’ve grasped some slippery truth, but my satisfaction is always fleeting. Sooner or later, I end up crashing into an invisible barrier. I don’t really know where I am or what’s going on. I’m in the dark.

The main difference between me and piranha is that it is inside the aquarium, and I’m on the outside, looking in. I can take solace from the fact that my world is much bigger than the piranha’s, and that I know many things that the fish cannot.

But it’s all too easy to imagine some enlightened, superintelligent being standing outside our world, looking at us with the same pity and smug superiority that we feel toward the piranha.

Plato presents himself as this enlightened being in his famous parable of the cave, which I make my freshman humanities classes read every semester.

The parable describes people confined to a cave for their entire lives. They are prisoners, but they don’t know they are prisoners.

An evil trickster behind them has built a fire, by means of which he projects shadows of everything from aardvarks to zebras onto the cave wall in front of the prisoners. The cave dwellers mistake these shadows for reality. Only by escaping the cave can the prisoners discover the brilliant, sunlit reality beyond it.

We are the benighted prisoners in the cave, and Plato, the enlightened philosopher, is trying to drag us into the light.

But isn’t it possible, even probable, that Plato and other self-appointed saviors, who say they’ve seen the light and want us to see it too, are charlatans? Or loons?

Given our profound capacity for self-deception, isn’t it likely that when you think you’ve left the cave, you’ve actually just swapped one set of illusions for another? These are the questions with which I torment my students. Here are some of their responses:

Clearly, some people are ignorant and deluded, like flat-earthers, and others are well-informed. So yes, we can and do escape the cave of ignorance by going to college and studying physics, chemistry, history, philosophy and so on.

We can reduce our ignorance still further with the help of reliable news sources, such as the New York Times and Fox News, and traveling to other countries to learn how other people see the world.

Yes, we can escape the cave by studying physics and other fields, but we only end up in another cave, with equations projected on the walls instead of silhouettes of aardvarks and so on.

The new cave may be more interesting, comfortable and better-illuminated than the cave we were in before, but it’s still a cave. Only a few rare souls experience ultimate reality, like Buddha, Jesus and Einstein.

Plato wasn’t really talking about worldly knowledge, he was talking about spiritual knowledge, or enlightenment.

So yes, we can leave the cave and see the light of truth, but only by accepting the teachings of great sages such as Buddha, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad, and perhaps by practicing spiritual disciplines such as prayer and meditation.

With the help of philosophy, art, meditation and psychedelics, we can become more aware that we are in a cave, in a state of illusion; we can know, sort of, what we don’t know.

But no mere human ever escapes the cave, not even the greatest sages and scientists.

Not even Plato, Stephen Hawking or L. Ron Hubbard. Only God, if there is a God, can perceive absolute truth. And maybe not even God.

Who cares if we’re in a cave or not? If we’re having fun, that’s all that matters. (Although only a few of my students have the courage to voice this option, I suspect it’s what many of them think, especially the business majors.)

To be honest, the fourth option—that not even God can escape the cave, plus the references to psychedelics, Stephen Hawking and L. Ron Hubbard—is mine.

But my students come up with the other options on their own, with minimal prodding from me. By the time we’re done with this exercise, I start feeling guilty about rubbing the young, innocent faces of the non–business majors in the world’s inscrutability.

To make them feel a little better, I bring up another possibility that usually doesn’t occur to them:

If we realize we’re in the cave, isn’t that the same, sort of, as escaping from it? Actually, if “ultimate reality” is inaccessible to us, isn’t that the same, sort of, as saying that it doesn’t exist? And hence that the cave, the world in which we live each and every day, is the one and only reality?

And hence that the business majors are right, and we should just chill out and enjoy ourselves?

Maybe. On good days, I look out the window of my apartment at the shining Hudson River, crisscrossed by boats, and at the Manhattan skyline, a symbol of humanity’s ever-growing knowledge of and power over nature, and I think, Yes, this is reality, there is nothing else.

But then I remember the quantum mist at the core of reality, which not even the smartest sages can penetrate, and to which most of us are oblivious.

And I remember the piranha, bumping over and over again into the walls of its world, blind to its own blindness.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-mechanics-platos-cave-and-the-blind-piranha/

Hey @A001,

You’ve been trying to email me on TAO11 and TAO12, I can’t receive emails.

Could you please tell me what it is here? It shouldn’t be that private, or is it?

Thanks.

TAO12:
Hey @A001,

You’ve been trying to email me on TAO11 and TAO12, I can’t receive emails.

Could you please tell me what it is here? It shouldn’t be that private, or is it?

Thanks.

..

A001:

It's private, not what I can discuss here.

Please, say hello to me on •••

Then, I would reply. Thanks.

Oh okay. I emailed you.

TAO12:
Oh okay. I emailed you.

Okay. Kindly remove my email from that post. Thanks.

A001:

Okay. Kindly remove my email from that post. Thanks.

Okay oo.

.

That confused commenter that has no job offline and keeps himself busy by following me from one thread to the other, is better ignored.

A001:
That confused commenter that has no job offline and keeps himself busy by following me from one thread to the other, is better ignored.

Don’t mind me. Just catching cruise like they say.

Hmmmm

I love this

How of you will get the joke?

You need a decent physics knowledge

Workch:
How of you will get the joke?

You need a decent physics knowledge

It's quite straightforward. The picture is an illustration of Young's double slit experiment (showing that light and matter can display characteristics of both classically defined waves and particles) and also applies to the quantum superposition principle.

A001:

It's quite straightforward. The picture is an illustration of Young's double slit experiment (showing that light and matter can display characteristics of both classically defined waves and particles) and also applies to the quantum superposition principle.

Oh you think this is straightforward to a lot of people?

A001:
There are four fundamental forces of nature (universe):
1. Strong (nuclear) force
2. Electromagnetic force
3. Weak (nuclear) force
4. Gravity

In the subsequent updates, I'll discuss these forces briefly. More forces, I believe, will still be discovered in the coming years.

There are likely candidates of a fifth fundamental force of nature.

Still on the four fundamental forces of nature


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=669QUJrF4u0

When confronted with the question, "how did the universe come into existence?" this video (and others that will be posted on this thread) offers an insightful explanation to the problem rather than the simple, vague answer, "God created the universe."