Objectivity - a software development approach

[LMNO]

The biggest problem I find is that you can't just start with "What's a quark?"  A lot of this stuff came about because the math demanded it exist.  Like, you have to start with Maxwell, who's work pretty much destroyed Atomism.  In a sense, the Standard Model started there, because in order to explain the implications of Maxwell, you need Dirac fucking around with Schrodinger's model in order to reletavize it, which means instead of a single ampletude/phase pair, you needed a four component array, which led to "spin", but also that an additional particle was needed, the positron. 

So, they didn't say, "hey, what's this thing over here?" they were all, "the only way this equation works is if there's something out there."  And the implications of the positron meant there are other anti-particles.  And in order to describe this, they needed to use another dimension (mathematically.  This ain't Dr Who).  That led to the idea of Isospin, and some new kinds of forces acting upon it.  And all of That implied smaller things that made up the proton and neutron.  And so on.

In a way, none of the Standard Model makes any sense until you can answer the question of "What is the Standard Model trying to solve?" 

The Standard Model is a conceptual structure, a set of ideas, in which a small number of fundamental things appears in terms of which all else may be accounted for. But those fundamental things are not related simply to objects we can weigh or deflect in the laboratory. Each "elementary particle" we actually observe is a combination of all the pieces of the Standard Model, just as the observable bits of matter in Maxwell's the-ory are part charged matter and part electromagnetic field.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I dunno how accurate my impression is but, when I listen to people trying to explain these particle/quantum things I tend to see what they're doing as something that doesn't describe what's necessarily happening down there but it's more like they're saying "we don't know what the fuck the mechanics of it are but, if we use these mathematical models, whatever it is that's really going on becomes predictable."

Is that a fair assessment?

[LMNO]

It's more, "we can't explain what's going on in any sort of metaphor that would make sense, because that level of reality doesn't work that way, here's the math that explains it."

Would you feel that saying "a barstool with a 5Kg mass with a density of 20ρ is traveling at a velocity of 50m/s" doesn't explain the mechanics, but is only a predictable model?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Yeah I was just reading about that.  I guess they can have some points back for the Finnegan's Wake reference.  I was surprised to see they were discovered in the 60's and I clearly don't remember learning about them in school 30 years later.  Guess I should have gone to college if I wanted that kind of education.

Scientists are all drug addicts.  It's why they spend so much time reading crappy Irish novelists.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The deeper these lab-coat guys seem to dig them more they're coming across information. Code. Biology just did it with DNA - a bunch of serial code written on a strip of self replicating tape. So we're currently at the - room full of lightbulbs - stage of this technology but another decade or two and we'll have SDK's and IDE's and Lifeform modelling paradigms all up the wazzoo. Kids'll be running around with apps embedded in their smart clothes that can hack the brainwaves of a wasp over bluetooth and make it not want to sting them.

Human behaviour can be coded. Hell, we already have a good handle on how they work. I see neuroscience, at some point, producing the kind of hard data an engineer can code. All human systems from street crossings to individual personalities themselves will be coded for. You don't like being scared of spiders? Fine - we'll code that for you. Want an encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Greek architecture. Sorted. Upgraded arithmetic and logic capability? There you go.

Biologists mapped DNA, and then realized that the complexity of how it actually works is so huge that we maybe, kind of, sort of, understand approximately 2% of it, and it's the simplest 2%.

Neuroscience hasn't even gotten that far.

I know you want to believe, but you are vastly overestimating the current state of the research. What we HAVE done is pretty amazing, but the one thing it's showing us more vividly with each new advance is that the depth of what we don't know is far more immense than we anticipated.

It's just not that simple.

I never said it was simple, however 2% suggests we're about half way done if you extrapolate along similar lines to the genome project - 4 years in they had mapped 1%. The machines that are used to decipher the code will be considerably more powerful four or five years from now. If we were relying on human cognition to work it out then, yeah, it'd take forever but we're not relying on human cognition so I'm a bit more optimistic than you about this.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I don't even really know what the fuck a quark is. I mean, I know that two up quarks and a down quark make up a proton, and that two down quarks and an up quark make up a neutron, and that positrons and electrons are flavors of lepton, and that protons and neutrons can combine/decombine with positrons and electrons in such a way that may change a neutron to a proton and vice versa, but that's pretty much it. Probably all I'll ever really know, in fact, since I'm not planning on taking nuclear chemistry.

If you're really curious, I can try to explain it.  But it looks like you've got a lot of other stuff on your plate, and they all have midterms coming up.

This is one of those things where I am, actually, really interested. I might have to postpone actually understanding it until after finals (which start today and extend, inexplicably, to the 16th, which is three days after commencement) but since I won't be taking any other chemistry classes beyond organic and nutrition, and the only physics class I'm taking is 201, this might be my only chance to hear it from someone who really gets it

All this is a means by which of saying, yes, please!

[LMNO]

Electricity has two states? 

There are three types of charge:

Electromagnetic
Weak
Strong

[P3nT4gR4m]

It's more, "we can't explain what's going on in any sort of metaphor that would make sense, because that level of reality doesn't work that way, here's the math that explains it."

Would you feel that saying "a barstool with a 5Kg mass with a density of 20ρ is traveling at a velocity of 50m/s" doesn't explain the mechanics, but is only a predictable model?

Yeah but we can see the barstool and weigh it and measure it and stuff. If all we had to go on was this mysterious phenomenon that some people were coming out of bars with stool shaped dents in their heads, we might end up with all manner of spooky maths to explain it?

[P3nT4gR4m]

Electricity has two states? 

There are three types of charge:

Electromagnetic
Weak
Strong

My entire life is powered by electricity and, try as I might, I can't get my head around it 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I've been reading about Quarks and such on and off for years and I still haven't a fucking clue.

If you want to type it, I for one, will read it.

Ok, so, keep in mind that none of this is intuitive.

The equations of the Standard Model make no references to particles.   And yet, we have atoms, and somewhat useful stick and ball models of molecules, and so on.  What's happening is that the nuclei is made up of stuff that reacts with a force law that when excited give it an intrinsic size.  So, they're sizeless quantum energies, but they make things that (mostly) behave like particles when they react to forces.

Ok, so those behaviors can be grouped in to Leptons and Hadrons, based upon their mass.  Hadrons are made up of Quarks, which are described by four-component wave functions obeying Dirac's equation. They come in three "generations" of families with two members each.  The three pairs of quarks in order of increasing mass are called (and the corresponding flavors are labeled) up and down, charm and strange, and top and bottom (or u, d; c, s; t, b; with primes to distinguish anti-quarks: u', d', etc.)

The quarks carry all three kinds of charges – electromagnetic, weak, and strong, and they can clump together to make long-lived objects with definite size and mass, the most stable of which are the nuclei of atoms. The first member of each quark pair, often called the "up"-type partner, carries a positive electric charge two-thirds that of the electron. The other "down"-type partner in each pair has a charge one unit less, or negative one-third.

The strong force, which acts only among quarks – thus distinguishing them from leptons – is generated by a new kind of charge that differs from electricity in having six rather than two states. Three of these are the so-called color charges found on the quarks (call them red, blue, and green), and the other three are the charges found on the anti-quarks (call them anti-red, anti-blue, and anti-green). Since each quark comes in three colors, it would be more accurate to count 3×6 = 18 different kinds of quarks. The colored versions are all so similar it is easier to think of them as just different states of the same underlying object so we usually speak of only six quarks and their anti-quarks.

TL;DR – Quarks are energies that interact with forces and have mass, which clump together to form Hadrons.




I may have over-generalized some bits.

That was mildly elucidating, thank you.

[LMNO]

Electricity has two states? 

There are three types of charge:

Electromagnetic
Weak
Strong

My entire life is powered by electricity and, try as I might, I can't get my head around it 

There are four fields, known as "forces", that are so far irreducible.
Electromagnetic
Gravitation
Weak ("weak isospin" is the historical, if somewhat incorrect, name for it)
Strong ("strong nuclear force")

These are the forces holding the universe together.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I've heard of all of these but that's it - I know the words are something to do with forces. I even recall something about the weak force and the strong one. Might have been your Dad's book, which I tried quite hard to get to grips with, making it about half way though on a couple of attempts. If you imagine a little brain, sprouting arms and putting them over it's frontal lobes so as to shield them from the scary info, that's an exact scientific description of what actually happens inside my skull for a given level of physics.

I honestly turn into a drooling retard. I wish it was different but I generally manage to bumble along okay without it.