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Author | Topic: Big Bang Found | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NoNukes Inactive Member
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As long as I've been participating in this discussion you've had a physicist commenting. A physicist who believes that the surfaces of pillows can attain infinite rates of acceleration? I think I can be forgiven for not recognizing your expertise. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Like the YECs, you can't attack the content, so you attack the person. So you still maintain there is some way for a ball to cause a depression in a cushion in zero time that I ought to 'understand' better? Then why did you not address any of the arguments that such a thing was not the case. If you thought that my post was disrespectful, you could have addressed Paul. No, attacking the person is not a substitute for understanding addressing the content. I agree with that. However, any honest person reviewing the discussion to date can see that I have addressed your arguments with substance, on point argument at and even some citing of references. It is your own responses that lack an element of rigor. And let's not pretend that your own posts have been insult free. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Wouldn't the fact that different materials have different half lives indicate that there is in fact some mechanism at work? I don't think so, but I am not completely sure what your argument is. Could you expand on your thinking? As I see it, there is an energy hurdle that must be overcome or tunneled through to escape, and surely that hurdle is different for different nuclei. That is enough distinction to explain the difference in rates. But unless nuclei age in some way, there is no reason why an old nuclei would be more likely to emit a radioactive now particle than would a young one. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
I've tried to explain repeatedly that nuclear decay DOES have a cause, but he (and others here) have fought this in every way possible. Will they pay more attention to cavediver? Amusing. Did you read cavediver's opinion that decay was uncaused?
cavediver writes: As I tried to explain in my reply to SG, yes there is a more fundamental mechanism (nuclear QCD) and that is where the half-life is determined, but I'm not trying to discount the uncaused nature per-se, just that it occurs at a deeper level. The problem with your definition is that it covers everything that occurs in this universe regardless of it's relationship to any other events or the fact that we can readily identify the trigger. The for Venus being closer to the sun than earth is that is its creation. The cause for Usain Bolt being the fastest man alive is his creation. In short, when identifying causation becomes problematic, in the case say of the triggering of an electron's fall from a higher state, you avoid making an explanation of a trigger and simply say that it was the placing of the electron in the higher state alone that is the cause. Let's contrast that with the fall of a rock back to earth after being thrown into the air. We could attribute the fall to the initial throwing, but we don't need to do that. Gravity acting on the ball from its peak height, or from any other point in its trajectory is sufficient explanation for both the falling and the path of of the rock. We don't have to instead explain the rock cycle and the placement of the rock in front of a throwing boy. You ignore that fundamental difference as being of no consequence. That's fine until you begin to generalize all of that to the universe itself. Because you insist that it must have a cause of the type that you don't require for decay. Then you couple that with a bad argument that we routinely observe causes where the effect does not proceed them and make no response to anyone who points out what they see as an obvious flaw in your argument. You can complain all you want about my manners, but you are not giving any better answers to anyone else regardless of their politeness. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
The ball can be said to cause the state of deformation, with no reference to time. Simply being able to make a sentence without the word 'time' in it does not mean that the deformation could occur without the passage time. You claimed that our experience was that causation could occur without time being involved. You made that claim because people were claiming that the creation of the universe included the creation of time. Simply saying that you can describe the event without reference to the time that was surely a part of the event is a non-argument. And without getting into whether your argument makes sense, we can say that it is irrelevant and does not address the issue of causation without time. It simply involves grammar.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Really though, I think that I just have trouble with the idea of events that have no preceding event. Well to be completely frank, I don't have any ability whatsoever to understand why the world works the way those silly equations say it should. It is not the least bit intuitive, and I cannot rule out the idea that I have completely misunderstood them. What I can say is that the arguments in this thread do not convince me that not having a cause is an issue; at least for decay and for electrons changing state.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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Here are some questions for those of you who still want to maintain that nuclear decay is "uncaused". How can a large collection of these "uncaused" events have extremely predictable, deterministic behavior? What you are asking is how the aggregate behavior can be deterministic when we claim that the events themselves are clearly not. I take that as an indication that you are arguing that decay from a nucleus is deterministic in some way. But I am probably wrong, so let me deal with the question as phrased. Have you ever done the Graham's law of diffusion chemistry experiment where you introduce two gases at each end of a glass tube, and you measure the rate of diffusion by noting the "ring" that forms when the gases combine to form a visible reactant? Well despite the fact that we cannot predict the position of any individual molecule of either gas, we find that the position of the ring is determined by Graham's law of diffusion. Is that remarkable? Is it remarkable that all of the molecules of a gas in a container have different velocities, but that yet the pressure of the gas, which is generate by the molecules striking the wall of the container is a constant value closely predicted by the ideal gas law? In short, there are plenty of examples where the aggregate behavior is deterministic despite the fact that the individual, microscopic events are not. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Any random process, repeated trillions of times, will begin to display seemingly deterministic behaviour. It's just math, nothing more. To be specific, if we assume that all of the atoms are exactly identical and that the decay probability is fixed, but the decay time is not deterministic, we would expect the distribution of decay events to be exactly a Poisson’s distribution, the characteristics of said distribution being mathematically predictable and well understood. And generally we are not talking about mere trillions of atoms. A 1 micro-gram sample of U238 has on the order of 10^15 nuclei. The probability of the number of decays in one half life lying outside of an undetectable range around the expected value is extremely tiny. Maybe not a relevant result for U238 because nobody is going to count them for 2 billion years. But we might reasonably count a measurable fraction of C-14 decays. We should not be surprised that carbon dating does not involve any problem with the half life not being constant. On the other hand, if you measure the radioactivity directly by counting the alpha particles emitted from a small sample of U238 each hour, you will find easily detectable variations in the number of particles emitted. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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Exactly. The probabilities of decay are caused by the nuclear details and energetics. The radioactivity, the radioactive decay, has a cause. Hence, it is very misleading (if not outright wrong) to say that radioactive decay is uncaused. This claim relies on a different definition of "causation" than is normally used by scientists who work with radioactivity But is such causation different from the "causation" under discussion here? I submit that the causation you are insisting on is not, as Paul has labeled it "begin to exist" type causation. The wikipedia article on Poisson distributions includes the following:
quote: Apparently, the time distribution of horse kicks could be modeled using a random distribution. We could then say that the horse kicking probabilities were determined by whatever physical parameters were involved with the arrangement of horses and men in the Prussian army. Of course one might also point out that the horse kick was itself provided by an actual horse in reaction to provocation of one type or another. So what constitutes the horse kick for alpha decay. Your story of causation is all about who ordered the army to form up and lacks any detail about the startled horse. The reason for that is that in the case of decay, there is no horse to blame and not because we choose a different form of cause to talk about.
But the probabilities for radioactive decay are not unique or mysterious at all; they just follow a simple Poisson distribution Do you understand that saying "Poisson distribution" says nothing at all about the underlying structure of the nucleus? Did you look up the Kochen—Specker theorem or Bell's inequalities, or did you just assume that those things were double talk.
Classical problems, such as the frequency of calls into a call center, have probabilities which follow the same relations and are just as fundamental, with no "deeper truth". This statement is at the heart of the disagreement. The deeper truth is that people call a call center because they want help, or to make a reservation, or whatever the particular call center does. They time of their calls are triggered by the problems they want to solve. Yet the call center can ignore all of that when analyzing their queues. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
For the nuclear decay, it is the details and energy levels of the nucleus. Why does tritium decay so much faster than uranium? And the two identical uranium nuclei... What are the details for the difference in decay times? You seemed bound and determined to talk about anything else but the example before us.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
kbertsche writes: The radioactivity, the radioactive decay, has a cause. Hence, it is very misleading (if not outright wrong) to say that radioactive decay is uncaused. Son Goku writes: The capacity to decay is caused, not the actual event of decay. I believe that kbertsche has admitted to this and most of what you say in your post. At this point his position seems to be that if he can say that decay is caused in any sense, including saying that the probabilities of decay are caused, that we cannot say decay is uncaused. While he's not the first person to take that position, I'll note though that even William Craig accepts that nuclear decay being uncaused is a legitimate interpretation of QM. Kbertsche seems loathe to concede even that. In my mind, that means that the distinction is no longer about physics at all. Kbersche's position is more of a semantic argument whose point is merely to establish that there are no exceptions to premise 1 of the Kalam cosmological argument. ABE:
quote: Excellent point. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
1. There probably is such a thing as uncaused. I think so, but I don't know if the implications are as significant as this discussion may have suggested. My personal belief is that trying to obtain evidence of the answer to important theological questions at the bottom of a test tube or by peering through a telescope are will always be futile. During this discussion, I argued for a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, and no one argued for any alternate interpretation. I myself am woefully under equipped to discuss them, but they did not come up. I'm guessing that some different area of physics than what we are discussing is actually kbertsche's speciality. In any event my negative comments about kbertche's abilities were unwarranted and unfair. I do believe my error resulted from an attempt to impose a sensible implication on an argument of his that made no sense. But that's no excuse for attributing my fabrication to him. Here is a link to some discussion. I'll admit that the link follows arguments very similar to my own position, but it does provided mention of places to find critics. Craig, Kalam, and Quantum Mechanics: Has Craig Defeated the Quantum Mechanics Objection to the Causal Principle? » Internet Infidels
2. 2. The Big Bang and some other quantum phenomenon could be examples of such. Maybe. Definitely for quantum phenomenon.
3. The universe is determistic, except when it isn't. I'm not even sure what you mean by this. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
I meant that the universe principally operates deterministically Hmm. As I see it, even deterministic behavior is often an aggregate of a much larger count of microscopic behavior. In one of the episodes of Cosmos, Dr. Tyson talks about the fact that the surfaces of objects are actually made of an aggregate of electric fields all generated by electrons which exist in a probabilistic cloud around their respective atoms/molecules. So even a ball bouncing off of a wall represents the aggregrate of a huge number of non deterministic interactions. Okay, perhaps that's a bit silly, but is it principally deterministic? Not by count anyway. And is the ball's path completely deterministic such that there is zero probability of it tunneling through the wall instead of bouncing off?Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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I don't understand your objection. The physics causes the decay probability (hence the half-life and expected life) to be what it is. The decay probability remains a constant, independent of the age of the nucleus, hence gives rise to a probabilistic Poisson distribution. It's one thing to disagree. It is quite another to simply dismiss an opposing argument. I see a couple of problems with your current question. 1. First it has been asked and answered by three different people. There is a distinction between establishing the probability of an atom decaying and actually kicking out or otherwise allowing the alpha particle out of the nucleus at the time it leaves. Even assuming you don't think the distinction is relevant, it's pretty clear that at least PaulK, Son Goku, and I think it is. At this point it might be interesting to hear your explanation of why it is irrelevant. 2. As Paul has explained twice, the thrust of your original question appeared to be that something there was a 'deeper' explanation for the distribution of large number of particles. I thought that as well. But assuming we were both wrong about your question, you've been told the cause of the objection at least twice by Paul. Here is your question:
kbertsche writes: Here are some questions for those of you who still want to maintain that nuclear decay is "uncaused". How can a large collection of these "uncaused" events have extremely predictable, deterministic behavior? What causes this predictable and deterministic behavior, if the system is nothing more than a collection of "uncaused" events?!? Surely the most controversial implication here in your statement is that uncaused events should not have a predictable deterministic behavior. You certainly have not shown that, and besides that the question has been answered. What we see is exactly what we expect for an uncaused event. Here is a different answer. You claimed that the decay of particles in a sample having 10^12 nuclei was highly predictable. But is that really correct? Can you tell me within 40% how many U238 decays would occur in such a sample during a 1 week period starting right now? I submit that neither you nor anybody else can do so. Just as studying the Poison distribution of messages at network node says nothing at all about the cause of any call, neither does the distribution of decays say anything about the cause of a decay. So your question just does not advance your argument. Admittedly it does not settle the argument against you.
What about emission of a fluorescent photon? Emission of a photon from an LED? The molecular and solid state physics "only affects the probabilities" here, too. You do understand that an electron in an excited state can just stay that way, right? There is no difference between this example and a decaying nucleus. Son Goku inspired the following thought experiment. What causes an excited Hydrogen atom to produce a Balmer line? What is the reason for an excited H atom to transition to a n=2 state rather than a n=1 state? There is no cause. Nothing about the manner of creation, the fact of creation, or the application of the excitement generates a Balmer line. And then there is Dr. Adequate's point. If you climb to the top of a flight of stairs and the fall over a railing. Would you say that your cause for being at the bottom was your climb to the top, or the fact that you were pushed. Well excited atoms don't get a push. And neither does an alpha particle leaving a U238 nucleus. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
) In both systems, something deeper is fundamentally driving the behavior. For the caller, it is the individual psychology and all external and internal influences on the individual. For the nuclear decay, it is the details and energy levels of the nucleus. Why does tritium decay so much faster than uranium? Here you are writing so fast that you've skipped over the point. In the case of the caller, an individual impetus spurs a call, and the aggregate behavior is a random distribution. In the case of the nucleus, we just do not have an equivalent for a man falling and breaking his leg and his wife reacting by calling in an emergency. Tritium decays more rapidly than u238 because the probabilities are different and not because some impetus to kick particles out of the nucleus exists and happens more often for tritium. Only the probabilities are tied to the structure. You are asking only about a question on which we agree. Looking at another example, a coin flip is random only because we cannot accurately know all of the variables, but the fall is determined by how it is thrown. If the coin were in thrown the same way, then it would always land the same way. But not so a decay. There is nothing structurally different between an atom that ends up decaying in five minutes, and one that fails to decay in 5 billion years. Plenty has been written on this subject. Why not take a peak at what others have to say about it. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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