woozie

[Sera]

well since his family is jew and mine is christian and we're both heathens i thought it was perfect

[Mizango]

Indeed.

[Conrad]

I only have The Universe in a Nutshell on my desk, I really need to get around to finishing reading that.

[Mizango]

Yes sir you do.

[Kuya]

This is exactly right. Our laws of physics break down in space time singularities such as black holes or the big bang. When we try to do calculations for singularities, a lot of our answers become infinity. It's not because the singularity literally had these infinite properties, but because our math is no longer valid. It's related to the fact that our laws of physics are self-contradictory.

The self contradictory nature of our laws of physics is not apparent in most cases, though it's always there. Usually you can safely ignore certain parts of the laws of physics that would introduce the contradictions. But when you combine something that's incredibly small and incredibly massive, you cannot ignore any of the laws of physics, and thus, the self contradictory nature of our laws causes are math to become really screwy.

If you apply our laws of physics back as far as we can, then just extrapolate into the area where our laws do not really actually apply, it would seem that the big bang singularity really was infinitely dense or infinitely hot, but we can't really know for sure what properties it had until we discover laws of physics that are actually valid.

Ah, cool. I imagined that was why, since saying something is infinite really clarifies nothing. And i always liked physics, remember? I asked you for advice on some books that i could read to learn more about it, i haven't gotten to that, but i plan to read them after i'm done with Foucault, Chomsky, and Juan Cole.

Gotta finish the videos since they're very interesting.

[Woozie]

Oh yeah, that's right, I remember now. If you have the science channel, they have theoretical physics shows on occassionally. Yesterday was all about Stephen Hawkins related stuff, and there was also a show about Theory of Everything.

Also:

View Past Public Lectures - Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

VERY good site for non-technical lectures on theoretical physics.

You might also want to ask Miz about The God Particle Video if he still has it (and/or you can read the book).

[Shiroikage]

On the topic of science books, The Selfish Gene is very good, and it is a great example of Dawkins not being a prick.

[_chuchu]

I read a few chapters, my roommate has that book

[Shiroikage]

Dawkins is usually a prick.

[Shiroikage]

Don't trust anyone who denies that.

[Blarg]

Why do physics laws have so many things that are squared, and probably sqrt but I can't remember.

[Shiroikage]

rectangles and shit

[Blarg]

Oh so like circles and stuff?

[_chuchu]

those too

[Blarg]

Octahedrons and whatnot

[Woozie]

Many physics laws have second order derivatives, which looks like you're squaring something when you're really not.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/c/e...93cee10ed7.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/3/1...7176ff3fc5.png

Neither of these expressions involve actually squaring something, but they both look like you are (well, with the second, you can think of it as a dot product with a function and itself, but in practice, we just take the second derivative of the function so there's no squaring involved).