Large Hardon Collider

[Seraph]

Go to Houston, their huge there.

But it needs to suck in everything, not just ribs and burritos.

[Charismatic]

Okay, I finally lol'd at a Houston joke.

[Mizango]

Okay, I finally lol'd at a Houston joke.

About time lol, it only took me 2 years.

[Max™]

Going to laugh slightly if in that month Fermilab finds a Higgs.

Going to cry since it will completely throw what has otherwise been an excellent model of physics I'm developing right the fuck out the window if there is a Higgs.

[Neosutra]

Pretty funny when half the physics community is throwing a party when they find a higgs particle and me and Max are trashing our houses/apartments in a drunken rage fit.

[Mizango]

lol

[Kryssan]

Awww, but admit it. You're both secretly masochists anyway, so you'll still get enjoyment out of it. Almost all scientists/engineers have a tendency to be.

[Mizango]

I want to see the models you guys are working on, not for critique purposes but because you 2 are awesome for even doing it lol. I don't have the time nor the desire to do that.

I just want to be able to say "BOOYAH I saw it first" when it goes public and accolades start pouring in. As a matter of fact I am going to print screen this conversation for TIME magazine in the future

[Dimmauk]

Okay, I finally lol'd at a Houston joke.

I did too. LOL

[Max™]

I'm interested in Neo's take on Dimensionality, though he seems slightly offended by my extremely literal reading of the concept.

I can see that he and I had very similar realizations about the nature of lightspeed and spacetime though, by the language he uses about the (forbidden) reference frame of a beam of light.


I'm all about simplifying everything to the most basic mathematical concepts, lines, grids, interpreting the minimal scale of the planck length as an expression of the fine structure of spacetime itself.

Strip away everything, every concept of anything at all, no place, no time, no sense of here or now.

A sea of gray light against which you cannot distinguish any further sense of mathematical structure.

If there is an infinite dust of numbers between the integers, then this is what is left when you take away any ability to define anything against anything else.

It is a hard concept to even frame, as you can see by struggling at it with language.

Mathematically it isn't much easier, except to wipe the chalkboard clean, and throw it away.

If you start from nothing, what are the least complex concepts you can apply to that?

Directionality is a fairly simple concept.

Here or there, locations, spatial distinctions.

So you build up sets of locations, where you specify that somewhere is not that background, and it is not anywhere else.

This gives a mathematical structure, a shape, you can say something is here, and only give one location. 0 Dimensions.

You can relate something to that along a single set of coordinates, two locations, 1 Dimension.

You can relate something to that set of coordinates, three locations, 2 Dimensions.

You can relate something to that set again, four locations, 3 Dimensions.

We do not observe any spatial ways to relate against in more than 3 Dimensions, but we know that there is another way to relate events to each other, and it appears intimately related to those 3 Dimensions.

In fact it appears that the relation of those 3 Dimensions to themselves is described through this manner, and that it can be exchanged for the others through a specific rotation.

This rotation appears from our perspective within those 3 Dimensions as what we would call motion.

That ties us to Relativity, and Spacetime as a 4 Dimensional concept emerges surprisingly easily from a treatment as otherwise featureless 1 dimensional components bending through another dimension.


This is all a given, just a matter of the language used to describe it.

[Max™]

I asked why you should be able to adjust a direction by only your presence and relation against it.

The Higgs mechanism says that there is an intermediate element there, which adjusts that background structure.

So it's like beads glued to paper.

Particles are beads, Spacetime is the paper, and the Higgs is the glue.


All I'm saying is there is a description which emerges rather naturally from a tweak of General Relativity which only makes sense if Particles could be thought of as just folded up bits of the Paper, and the effect we're trying to describe as the Higgs is just the distortion of the rest of the sheet.

[zoobernut]

So Max are you trying to say that what we perceive as space being fixed and matter moving through it is just our perception and the reality is that as matter moves through space the space moves and adjusts with it?

[Mizango]

Smells like M-Theory.

[Mizango]

I like it! Super strings, roll out!

[Max™]

Close, but not really.

I'm saying that if you remember that dweeby belt trick I posted, what we call particles are merely loops in the belt.

We're not composed of magically stable particles that happen to be interchangeable with energy but resist blah blah blah blah.

We're composed of the simplest stable knots which you get when you compress a mesh of threaded directions to a certain point, and let it unfurl again.

The relationships between the forces are merely the topological details that resulted from this unfolding, not some amazing fine tuning.

When you attempt to pull quarks apart, you're adding energy to the system, and you get the effects you'd expect.

If you could figure out how to untie a proton, you'd just get a region of flatter spacetime where the particle was, and a shiver of neutrino's rippling away from it.

[Zalius]

do you guys seriously just kick it at your house and do physics and shit

DO YOU OWN FUCKING FLIP CHALKBOARDS

[Max™]

String Theory is like masturbating with a calculus textbook and noticing that your jizz on the wall looks kinda like a theory of everything.

Fascinating, but I don't think it's going to bear fruit, just chafing and those little beetles you get when you discover a cum towel fell behind the bed after a wild night on sleeping pills with your girlfriend... three weeks after the fact.



The discontinuous appearance of quantum physics is an illusion caused by our poor understanding of time, I suspect.

Quantum Field Theory is a hilarious play on words actually, as quantum implies a separable nature, and field implies the opposite.


I'm with Einstein, particles are not the correct route.


God I wish I had a flip chalkboard.

I have billions of notebooks full of this shit though.

[Mizango]

do you guys seriously just kick it at your house and do physics and shit

DO YOU OWN FUCKING FLIP CHALKBOARDS

Yes and Yes for me.

I should post a picture of my main bookcase at home. Its filled with Physics books, Biochem, and Cosmology and Calculus books out the ass. I have a chalk board and a dry erase board I jot shit down on hanging on my walls.

My daughter is 8 and is into it as much as I am lol and sadly, I am as astrophysical nerdy as I seem. The kicker is I don't look the part at all.


Edit: Oh and notebooks, I scribble tons of tid bits and notes on constantly. Have you ever seen the movie Pi? It's a bit like that. Woozie and I have talked about this many times because he has something close to the same problem, but I seriously have a weird sleeping issue where I can get 3-4 hours of sleep and feel great.

Sleeping in to me is on weekends waking up at 8am, even after a night of drinking I rarely sleep past 7:30am. Doing math and reading Physics books and learning Cosmology relaxes my mind in a weird way and puts me in a weird place of peace.

But yeah, I love science lol. It takes up much of my time here at work like I am now and even moreso when I get home.

[Max™]

http://cdn.channel.aol.com/aolr/fres...400a111306.jpg

?

[Mizango]

lol leave Ragnell out of this!