CERN claims FTL neutrinos

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junk
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by junk »

Unless I'm mistaken the start itself isn't problematic, but once you get into fairly giant grids the math suddenly starts playing a role.
And various evocodes, pin numbers and stuff work on fairly complex math as well.

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Mjolnir
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Mjolnir »

bunnyboy wrote:Is that so? How we define 'modern civilization'?
Yes. All of modern technology and its impact on human life. Easily accessible and rapid global communication, power transmission, agriculture and manufacturing...even little things like being able to expect to live past 30.

bunnyboy wrote:Can we do it without high mathematics and pfysical understanding?
No, we can't.

bunnyboy wrote:- Industrial growth and cheap prices by spezializaion. It had been done even before Rome.
- Machines to provide cheap labour and fast traffic. Steam engines could do this and they are made before we had any idea of thermodynamics (although resulting many booms).
- Fast communication to provide news and messages even from other side of earth in hours. Telegraph works, but it is slow and easy to prevent. What are science requirements for person operated telephones and wireless telegraph?
- Datastorages to provide information in minutes from great amount of data. Is there any other alternate than savant librarians?
- Personal telecommunication. No idea for this but mirrors and pigeons.
- Cheap mass entertainment on your home. Romans did have industrialized and free entertainment, but you needed to join with over 10.000 other people, if you wanted to watch. Movie theaters were profitable with lesser people in one session, but could hometheater be possible in this setting?
- Cheap energy to provide light in our houses. Gas or gasoline. Electric too, if you own powerplant or have one in your neighbourhood.

Did I miss something? Now I think that Victorian internet forum would be cool. There would be giant blackboard in San Jose, where everything is written and administrating people were taking and sending messages all day. Just like stock market in century ago.
Yes, you missed something...the real world. The Industrial Revolution did not happen in Roman times, and ancient Rome's economic power and feats of engineering in actuality relied heavily on knowledge of mathematics, despite their crude number system. You think they didn't have math back then? A large portion of the surviving cuneiform writings from ancient Sumer are accounting documents, tax records, and so on. From the very beginning of writing itself, scribes were employed as much for their knowledge of mathematics as for their knowledge of writing.

Steam engines prior to Watt's improvements (based on mathematical analysis of the engines) were very inefficient and limited in power, completely inadequate for the purposes which they would later be put to, and even they wouldn't have been possible without some basic engineering skills founded in math and physics. Long distance telegraph lines require the very mathematics TrashMan was ridiculing. And where do you think gas, gasoline, and electricity come from? Do you think houses just grow connections to naturally-occurring power grids and gas distribution systems? And never mind its production, what do you even expect gasoline to be used for, without internal combustion engines? And mirrors, pigeons...are you at all serious?

Absalom
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Absalom »

Mjolnir wrote:The Industrial Revolution did not happen in Roman times,
Not entirely accurate (Rome did actually have watermills, which they used for a variety of things; slave labor seems to have undercut any chance of a true Roman Industrial Revolution, though), but close enough.

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Mjolnir
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Mjolnir »

bunnyboy wrote:- Virtual transfer of money. That would work with enigma, but don't except your credit card to work anywhere else than inside of bank.
What is this supposed to mean? Aside from it being completely unclear what Enigma has to do with money transfers (you know, banks still use these little pieces of paper with writing on them...), how do you think Enigma was designed? Do you seriously think there's no mathematics or physics involved in design of mechanical computers?

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bunnyboy
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by bunnyboy »

I didn't suggest without all mathematics. I'm little bit of mathematician and historian myself, as they are subjects with I'm most comfortable (so you can imagine how much I suck in everything else :roll: ).
I like most of the multiplying system used by arabian merchants and farmers, who couldn't read or write, or even count to 20. Can't tell how it works, but it's simple, fast, accurate and uses small stones. It just make any multiplying or division task as binaric program.

Most of the agriculture and medical achievements outside of genetic readings can do with handworks and experience. Math is just proving the optimal results.
Biggest step to getting longer life on our history was done by english doctor, who just counted how many of births resulted dead baby and terrified of the number, suggested that all personnel present of birth, are required to wash their hands by law.
Mjolnir wrote:The Industrial Revolution did not happen in Roman times
It did happen, and it happened also before Romans. It also happened many times in medieval times, but everytime when demand runned down (war, political changes, etc), it was quickly forgotten.
Mjolnir wrote:Steam engines prior to Watt's improvements (based on mathematical analysis of the engines) were very inefficient and limited in power, completely inadequate for the purposes which they would later be put to, and even they wouldn't have been possible without some basic engineering skills founded in math and physics. Long distance telegraph lines require the very mathematics TrashMan was ridiculing.
Trial and error is slow way, but makes results too. Thanks for the link. I cross out the global communication for the math poor world.
Mjolnir wrote:And where do you think gas, gasoline, and electricity come from? Do you think houses just grow connections to naturally-occurring power grids and gas distribution systems? And never mind its production, what do you even expect gasoline to be used for, without internal combustion engines? And mirrors, pigeons...are you at all serious?
Old way. Gas and gasoline come from earth and you can burn them on lamp.

It's very true that you can't keep all of us living in mathematically inept world, but can small croup of humans keep our standard of living? (And I don't mean the living standards of developing countries)
Mjolnir wrote:
bunnyboy wrote:- Virtual transfer of money. That would work with enigma, but don't except your credit card to work anywhere else than inside of bank.
What is this supposed to mean? Aside from it being completely unclear what Enigma has to do with money transfers (you know, banks still use these little pieces of paper with writing on them...), how do you think Enigma was designed? Do you seriously think there's no mathematics or physics involved in design of mechanical computers?
With virtual transfer i mean that data of your account is moved without any cash or paper. You can't do that without secure dataline or cryptograph. Enigma was only typewriter, which was writing different letter than was hitted. So, with them bank could secure their bank account messages, even if they are sended in semaphore, without need for army of human calculators.

By the way, there was a institution of calculators in france. They teached lot of poor womans to add and subtract, nothing more. And used them to make graphs for artillery, navy, astronomy etc.
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Arioch
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Arioch »

Getting past c.1900 technology into electronics, telecommunication, molecular biology, nuclear power etc. all require understanding how the innards of the atom works, and that requires some pretty hellacious math.

Nemo
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Nemo »

The biggest step for the revolution was using power on demand, not subject to the whims of weather and fortune. You cannot support industry on whatever energy you scrounge up. You must understand what it is, why it is, where it is, how best to utilize it, and how to get more on demand. All of this falls on the advanced mathematics of Leibniz and Newton. None of the vaunted Roman achievements were possible without Euclidean geometry. Math is the common language of thought. It allows one to describe grasped principles to others in definite, reproducible ways.

Image
Freefall


Einstein was able to intuitively grasp the nature of nature. Namely, gravity and acceleration are the same thing. He came up with math to show others how this was the case, and that forms the very cornerstone of Relativity. They then used the math to make predictions about nature and attempt to falsify Relativity. You make a prediction against Relativity and several other forms of science expressed as discrete mathematics every time you turn on a computer, and they haven't lost a bet yet. Well... maybe one... at CERN...

Now then, you don't have to accept gravity for it to suck. Similarly, you don't have to accept Relativity for it to work. We know it works because of those predictions it has made time and time again. We have driven incredible amounts of energy into matter to accelerate it. We measure its behavior, and in each... err... all but maybe one time... matter behaves in accordance to its predictions. Namely, as you accelerate ever increasing amounts of energy are required to accelerate. We can even measure time dilation with 'simple' clocks.
The measurements that we make affect people's lives every day - and for example, very accurate timing.

I mean, do you need to be able to measure the time change on your watch that's going to be caused by you walking? Well, no, your watch isn't going to measure that, and it's not going to make any practical difference in your life.

But very accurate timing and synchronization is a part of our modern technological infrastructure, and people are using it every day. When you make a telephone call, when you use a computer network, you're relying on networks that have to be synchronized to better than a millionth of a second per day.

Electric power distribution has to be synchronized to better than a millionth of a second per day, and the global positioning system, GPS, which allows you to get your position anywhere on Earth, whether you're driving or walking around with a handheld receiver or while an airline pilot is flying, that relies on atomic clocks that are better than a billionth of a second per day.

...


... it was in fact based on precision experiments, which were looking at things called the ether, which was some mythical substance through which light was supposed to propagate.

And when it was discovered by measurements in the late 1800s that, in fact, this ether did not in fact exist, people had to come up with other theories to explain what's really going on. And that led, directly and indirectly, to Einstein developing his theory.

And things like the discovery of quantum mechanics, which governs everything from electronics to even the way we're looking at biophysics nowadays again came about through very precise measurements showing things that were behaving just a little bit differently than expected and then pursuing those measurements.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =130104039

Nemo
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Nemo »

Oh and,
It's very true that you can't keep all of us living in mathematically inept world, but can small croup of humans keep our standard of living? (And I don't mean the living standards of developing countries)
Not unless they utilize a number of perpetual motion machines that they need not ever maintain.

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Trantor
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Trantor »

bunnyboy wrote:...
Is that so? How we define 'modern civilization'? Can we do it without high mathematics and pfysical understanding?

- Industrial growth and cheap prices by spezializaion. It had been done even before Rome.
- Machines to provide cheap labour and fast traffic. Steam engines could do this and they are made before we had any idea of thermodynamics (although resulting many booms).
- Fast communication to provide news and messages even from other side of earth in hours. Telegraph works, only with limited distances and great differences in quality. How much of Marconi work (wireless telegraph) was calculating and how much experimenting?
- Datastorages to provide information in minutes from great amount of data. Is there any other alternate than savant librarians?
- Personal telecommunication. Mostly in person. No cellphones or equivalent.
- Cheap entertainment for masses on your home. Gramophone and magazines. Any idea for hometheater?
- Cheap energy to provide light in our houses for staying awake after sundown. Gas or gasoline. Electric too, if you own powerplant or have one in your neighbourhood.
- Virtual transfer of wealth. That would work with enigma, but don't except your credit card to work anywhere else than inside of bank.
- Aviation. Slow and expensive.
- Weather prediction. Mostly your eyes and calendar.
- Space advancement. Ballistical.
...
Steampunks´ wet dreams. SCNR. :mrgreen:
sapere aude.

TrashMan
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by TrashMan »

Mjolnir wrote:
TrashMan wrote:I'm a not a beliver in travel back in time. The "cannot move faster then light or it will break casuality" is not a rule I belive in.
It's a product of a mathematical equation with immaginary numbers and theorethical constructs.
It's a result of time dilation, an effect not only predicted using those equations but directly observed.

TrashMan wrote:Mathematical formulas can sometimes be a hinderance as much as they can be usefull.

Why should I be concerned with deviding by zero? Half the math uses immaginary numbers - which don't exist in nature - to get their results. :geek:
Without the math you so deride (and which you clearly know absolutely nothing about, wonderfully illustrated by your comment about imaginary numbers not existing in nature), you wouldn't have power grids, radio, or in fact anything close to modern civilization. Please learn at least the barest minimum about things like this before so blindly criticizing them.
I don't deride math. And FYI, I do have a high technical education. Not a major in physics like you, but above average knowledge.
And if you can show me an imaginary number in nature..like -i apples on a tree....


For lack of a better explanation, the whole time-travel thing feels wrong to me, and not convincing enough.

But let's just drop it, k?

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Cy83r
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Cy83r »

TrashMan wrote:Mathematical formulas can sometimes be a hinderance as much as they can be usefull.

Why should I be concerned with deviding by zero? Half the math uses immaginary numbers - which don't exist in nature - to get their results. :geek:
Dividing anything by zero equals a subset of infinity from what I can tell.

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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

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Cy83r wrote:Dividing anything by zero equals a subset of infinity from what I can tell.
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Mjolnir
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Mjolnir »

Cy83r wrote:Dividing anything by zero equals a subset of infinity from what I can tell.
Division by zero for the reals is simply undefined. You can often take a limit as the divisor approaches zero, however, and the limit of 1/x as x->0 is +infinity from the right and -infinity from the left. Other variations can be given a definition...lim sin(x)/x as x->0 is 1, from both the left and the right. And in complex arithmetic, divisors with a real component of zero are no problem as long as the imaginary component is not also zero. The imaginary component carries extra information and provides another degree of freedom that allows singularities to be sidestepped.

Karst45
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Karst45 »

If you use windows calculator and try to divide by zero it said: Cannot divide by zero.

So it must be true, Microsoft is never wrong.

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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Darth Cloaked Guy »

Wait, seriously Mjolnir? You need non-real (imaginary, complex, take your pick on terminology) numbers to design a radio? I admit I am only in college, but still... that can't be right. :|

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Mjolnir
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Mjolnir »

Darth Cloaked Guy wrote:Wait, seriously Mjolnir? You need non-real (imaginary, complex, take your pick on terminology) numbers to design a radio? I admit I am only in college, but still... that can't be right. :|
Technically, there's nothing you need complex numbers for...you can transform any calculation using complex numbers into one using vectors or just scalar reals. There's a reason they are used, though...it's a vastly more convenient framework to work in for many things. In particular, practically anything dealing with waves or other time-variant systems...filters, signal analysis, compression, controls, etc. In radio transmitter and receiver design, just matching the impedance of the antenna involves complex numbers. Complex numbers are so pervasive in electronics engineering that the field has its own symbol for the imaginary unit...it's called j instead of i to prevent confusion with electrical current.

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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by starstriker1 »

TrashMan wrote: Half the math uses immaginary numbers - which don't exist in nature - to get their results. :geek:
NUMBERS don't exist in nature. You can't pull a 3 out of anywhere, you can't mine for 7s, and there is no elementary particle for a 2. Numbers are abstract concepts used by the human mind to understand and describe the environment around it. Imaginary numbers are a convenience for denoting a specific kinds of concepts, which the others have clearly demonstrated has utility for describing many natural processes. It's worth noting that nature also does not correspond to "common sense"... it's significantly stranger. If a feature of the natural world is best described with an imaginary number, so be it... crazier things have happened and will continue to happen.

Also, you don't get to pick and choose what math you accept. Mathematical theorums and concepts are the only things in the entire universe that are either true or untrue, and they are always PROVABLY so. They arise from the basic axioms, so you can only reject them if you're willing to reject the principles of logic as well.

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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by discord »

there was a nice little movie with that funny hawking guy...i think, math is all around us in nature, and it comes back again and again...shapes of leaves, shells formation of sand dunes in wind, waves, and so on ad nauseam.

have fun.

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Cy83r
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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by Cy83r »

IIRC, those're called patterns and math is used to describe and understand them as how nature works. Basically, math is the translation of the language in which the universe operates, but they are not the same, one is just a crude simulacrum of the other.

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Re: CERN claims FTL neutrinos

Post by fredgiblet »

I think there are many mathematicians who would argue that nature is just a crude simulacrum of math.

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