A place for the discussion of all things not closely related to the sport and its competitive side. (Locked down several times a year during the major championships)
Wouldn't you like to hear the kids in the halls after his class?
a. is it not intuitively obvious that I can't possibly KNOW any of that? b. when I see their parents after that, they inevitably say it was the dinner conversation for several days and they (the parents) think it's wonderful that someone is finally challenging them in that sort of way. c. no student ends up believing me, lock-stock-and-barrel, but the inevitable outcome is that that start thinking about these sorts of things, instead of just locksteppingly accepting everything they had been taught heretofore. d. we finally come to the conclusion that my story is as feasible as any other.
Anyone can come up with a similarly constructed 'story', but no, no one can PROVE or DISPROVE the story unless there are impossibilities (as we currently define the physics of OUR universe) that render the story untenable.
I would LOVE to hear your version of the story!! (seriously). What I don't like are students who just give up and say, 'I have no idea'. Where's the adventure in that?!
1. We say the universe began with a "big bang". How do we know there have not been an infinite # of big bangs previously, with another infinity of them to come in the future, before and after the birth and demise of our current deal ?
2. What is currently the farthest object ( star/galaxy ) that we have seen telescopically ?
3. We speak of the "expanding" universe." If this is so, and the other sides, how do we know there are not an infinite # of additional universes ?
My head is spinning now, I'll stop.
This is JRM territory, I am an amateur and working without notes (and no looking at Wiki...) Generally, they call it space-time for a reason: the two are completely intertwined. 'Before' the Big Bang there was no time and no space. A corollary is that time will end if the universe collapses back to a point. However, everything at this point indicates that we ain't ever going back. Rather, the expansion is speeding up as Dark Energy is over-coming the retarding effects of gravity. There are alternative theories that have little bit extra that changes such things but are not views that are widely held, I think. JRM has interactions with some of these guys.
I must go now, will add more later if JRM has not covered the territory.
Pego wrote:Do you really prefer speculation unsupported by evidence to admission of ignorance of the subject matter? A flight of fancy over facts?
One of the explicit goals of my class IS to speculate, especially where the facts are insufficient to 'know'. When they speculate (or I do, which is often), we find ways to support or refute the supposition. They will be presented with MANY unsubstantiated ideas throughout their lives and it's my job to prepare them for that - to question everything. Speculation is the human way of "making meaning" out of the randomness of our existence. Existential exercises such as this are paramount in their 'college-prep' experience, college being where 'speculation' is the coin of the realm, at least in the humanities.
Marlow wrote:Existential exercises such as this are paramount in their 'college-prep' experience, college being where 'speculation' is the coin of the realm, at least in the humanities.
But this is science, not humanities. The norm in science is to gather information so the first 'speculation' can be informed rather than a guess.
Not really. As Pego points out, it's metaphysics. Nothing I posit goes AGAINST science as we understand it (not that it's remotely 'true' in any real sense).
Not really. As Pego points out, it's metaphysics. Nothing I posit goes AGAINST science as we understand it (not that it's remotely 'true' in any real sense).
Hey, let's not misquote Pego. I referred to your monologue on universe as metaphysics. A subject matter in question was universe, i.e. science. Your exercises in mental gymnastics with your students are fine as long as it remains just that, mental exercises, not mistaking fantasy for reality.
Pego wrote:Your exercises in mental gymnastics with your students are fine as long as it remains just that, mental exercises, not mistaking fantasy for reality.
As I said before, this is an ENGLISH class, not an astrophysics seminar.
tandfman wrote:Yes, but you're the one who stressed that this was an ENGLISH class.
It is. I was demonstrating an important facet of rhetoric (of which speculation often plays an important part). The AP English Language course is primarily one of rhetorical analysis. The discussion that my 'lecture' engenders gives valuable insight into how one should handle the vagaries of the information that are thrown at us on a daily basis.
Here's a link to the journal issue (Physics Letters B) in which the official discovery announcement papers from the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations are published (p 1-29 for ATLAS, and p 30-61 for CMS). Also, scroll down and check out paper #11 in the issue's Astrophysics and Cosmology section (p 171-176)!
JRM wrote:Here's a link to the journal issue (Physics Letters B) in which the official discovery announcement papers from the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations are published (p 1-29 for ATLAS, and p 30-61 for CMS). Also, scroll down and check out paper #11 in the issue's Astrophysics and Cosmology section (p 171-176)!
JRM wrote:Here's a link to the journal issue (Physics Letters B) in which the official discovery announcement papers from the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations are published (p 1-29 for ATLAS, and p 30-61 for CMS). Also, scroll down and check out paper #11 in the issue's Astrophysics and Cosmology section (p 171-176)!
JRM wrote:Here's a link to the journal issue (Physics Letters B) in which the official discovery announcement papers from the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations are published (p 1-29 for ATLAS, and p 30-61 for CMS). Also, scroll down and check out paper #11 in the issue's Astrophysics and Cosmology section (p 171-176)!
By the way. look at the length of the authors list; the 19th author has a name starting with Ad and they are all alphabetical.
It's also not uncommon for those international collaborations to have authors who are posthumously listed (and I believe there are several in that list). In fact, the entire author listing goes on for at least 10 pages.
The author list starts at page 25. The paper also has the following dedication:
"This paper is dedicated to the memory of our ATLAS colleagues who did not live to see the full impact and significance of their contributions to the experiment."
JRM wrote:Here's a link to the journal issue (Physics Letters B) in which the official discovery announcement papers from the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations are published (p 1-29 for ATLAS, and p 30-61 for CMS). Also, scroll down and check out paper #11 in the issue's Astrophysics and Cosmology section (p 171-176)!
By the way. look at the length of the authors list; the 19th author has a name starting with Ad and they are all alphabetical.
It's also not uncommon for those international collaborations to have authors who are posthumously listed (and I believe there are several in that list). In fact, the entire author listing goes on for at least 10 pages.
My article in Nature had ten authors, and I thought that that was a lot. Yes, I am aware of the issues in big experimental setups, so I am not surprised by that long list.
Results not kind to Super Symmetry. Commentary from JRM needed here for perspective?
The new observation, reported at the Hadron Collider Physics conference in Kyoto, is not consistent with many of the most likely models of SUSY.
Prof Chris Parke, who is the spokesperson for the UK Participation in the LHCb experiment, told BBC News: "Supersymmetry may not be dead but these latest results have certainly put it into hospital."
26mi235 wrote:Results not kind to Super Symmetry. Commentary from JRM needed here for perspective?
The new observation, reported at the Hadron Collider Physics conference in Kyoto, is not consistent with many of the most likely models of SUSY.
Their results suggest that the decays of B0-mesons (neutral particles made of quark - anti-quark pairs of varying flavor) decay to lighter particles (muon and anti-muon) in a fashion consistent with the Standard Model. The bad thing is the statistics of the decay rates (called branching ratios) is what strongly constraints Supersymmetry. That is, supersymmetry predicts a rate they're decidedly not seeing. So, good for Standard Model, bad for Supersymmetry.
That being said, my contacts at CERN inform me that LHCb is stretching the stats a bit, and not to put too much faith in the "sensationalist" press release.
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