Doing the Math

[bitRAKE]

Many people only concern themselves with what is functional with no desire to understand at a more complex level. Many people seem to believe that focusing on something makes it real.

Unification of all these vantage points is a lot of work - certainly beyond any individual. I am hard pressed to find blatant disinformation - usually it boils down to a skewed or limited perspective. This kind of gives us some insight of where people are at intellectually with respect to our own understanding. Once we've learned something it is always a good idea to question the validitity or applicability - lest we get carried away.

I've worked for the US government and it is real crap; but the people I worked with/for were not aware. Those that knew something was wrong had no idea how to fix it. So many abstraction layers have been put into place that there seems to be no bottom up solution.

Physics has some similarities - where is the universal simple truth to teach the children? Bohm had it right all along from a philosophical perspective - if science isn't simplified then it becomes it's own barrier to discovery. We've seen the results of this in mathematics for years. Maybe, there is no simple solution - just a constant struggle.

Thanks for reading my babble...

[mapsrg]

On the subject of new computers etc... there was a computer system in the sixties that used light.Like the laser ,its inventor got nowhere...Apparently the tech was lost but new research in this area is being undertaken.
On the math subject a system of maths using vectors was used in 19th century but was hard to use so another system was introduced around the same time as our modern theories of physics were developed.The old system could describe things mathematically that the new one cannot.Things got lost in translation ,the old system was based around Quaternions.It is interesting to note that they were investigating things like time travel with this maths.  

[Mr.Entropy]

Did you see the article about about light travelling faster than light and even reversing?

It's actually very interesting.  Whenever the press reports on one of these light-pulse-comes-out-before-it-goes-in experiments, they quote the scientists reassuring us that this does not violate causality or relativity.  The rest of the article text, however, which gives a description of the experiment for laymen, clearly says otherwise, and this makes the reassurances unconvincing.

What's needed is a layman's explanation of why causality isn't violated.  It goes something like this:

These systems that appear to transmit pulses backward in time only work for pulses that are confined to a very narrow band of frequencies.

When a pulse is confined to a narrow band of frequencies, its envelope has a somewhat predictable shape.  It starts at zero amplitude, builds slowly to full amplitude, maybe oscillates slowly a bit, and then gradually dies down, asyptotically approaching zero again.   The pulses that are best confined to a narrow band have the familiar bell curve shape.

The slowly-changing envelope means that the pulse is necessarily pretty long.  In the experiment, it's not like the whole pulse comes out before they decide to send it in -- the pulse is long, so that would mean sending it back in time by a significant amount!  Instead, the pulse that comes out is shaped just like the pulse that goes in, and the noticible features of that pulse, like the peak, come out before they go in.  But nothing noticable comes out until well after that slow buildup at the start of the pulse starts going through.

As I said above, confining a pulse to a narrow band of frequencies makes its shape predictable.  The narrower the band, the better you can predict the later parts of the pulse by observing the earlier parts, and that's exactly what these systems do.  As the pulse begins to enter such a system, it predicts the shape of the part of the pulse that is going to enter the system soon after, and emits that right away, making it appear as if the pulse has been sent back in time a bit.  If the scientist decided to shape the pulse in such a way that it defied those predictions, then it wouldn't be confined to the narrow band of frequencies, and what came out of the system would no longer resemble what went in.

We can do an exactly analogous thing ourselves.  Lets say that I agree to send you the full text of a shakespearian play every day, by dial-up internet, and you agree to forward it to my mother by e-mail through your broadband connection.  At 5pm, say, I begin my transmission.  A moment later, you begin to receive it: "ENTER Kent, Gloucester, and Edmund".  You say to yourself "Oh, that's King Lear", grab a copy of "King Lear", and e-mail it to my mother.  But I haven't even finished sending it yet... GASP!  MY MOTHER HAS RECEIVED MY COMPLETED TRANSMISSION BEFORE I FINISHED SENDING IT!

You can perform this miracle reliably, every day, at any time, because we have ageed to limit the transmissions to shakespearian plays, in exactly the same way that the scientists above have agreed to limit their transmissions to narrowband pulses.

Cheers,

Mr. Entropy

[raburgeson]

I ask this because I think it may be relevant. Have you seen the video of a toroid arraignment creating a vortex? Inversely does a vortex create a toroidal effect in the matter it passes through/by? Would this reaction to matter cause the spin of the electron? Could the electron now somewhat known as a plasma be a high flux density packet of magnetic field? I asked once a long time ago in here why water is an arraignment of atoms 104.5 degrees. Could this be an effect related to a lifter by interaction between magnetic fields?