Well, indeed. And I wasn't even that nasty to you.



Starts well!



...but goes downhill from there. Get a little more creative. That was so boring I think you gave me cancer.

Now, as you seem to be convinced I'm a fag, let's put a scenario on the following remark - imagine I am boring hard into your arsehole with my enormous Maddox-sized penis. On every word, I want you to imagine a long finessed stroke smoking you open and bouncing off your little boy-prostate and a gravelly voice grunting the following at the back of your head.

Don't.
Express.
Opinions.
If.
You.
Don't.
Know.
What.
You're.
Talking.
About.

*more lube*

Ask.
Questions.
Instead.

All wah and no science...

...makes this thread fucking dull.

Right then. This one will do your head in - it concerns the first (that I'm aware of) testable hypothesis to start chiselling pieces off string theory. I read this a while ago (was published last year) but thought it could use a write-up as I vaguely remember we used to have a string theory thread with you nerdier types being rather interested.

If you can deal, you can read the abstract here and a killer explanation of hierarchy theory here.

"Of course, string theory hasn't been tested yet — experimental evidence is necessary. Additionally, Hewett, Lillie and Rizzo’s analysis can only disprove critical string theory; it cannot prove it."

Why not? Does this have something to do with the "theory" part?

Long story short: it's possible for them to get an experimental result which falsifies the predictions of string theory (which is the discovery of many more dimensions than string theory predicts) but not possible for them to confirm it with a congruent result. That is, they can get a consistent result (evidence of 10 dimensions, for example) but not confirmatory result.

FBS, Your posts make me giggle like a little school girl :rofl:

Looks like it's just me in this thread.

Cockpunching Einstein, Dark Matter and re-writing the parameters of gravity.

MIND. FUCK.

Lots of physics stuff seems to be happening lately!

With all this new shit, I'll be in the same boat as an old cenile man in 20 years. Too bad I won't be in school all my life.

Can the theory of gravity be proven, as opposed to the string theory?

Proved, no. This isn't mathematics, where we prove theorems. Physics, as the name implies, is a physical science. Of course, we use what we could corasely call mathematical techniques to get theories about different phenomena. What's different is then we have to make them fit environmental and experimental evidence... and sometimes 'good' theories fuck up spectacularly when it comes to mating them with the available evidence.

So! Dark Matter is something that gives physicists the shits, and is highly confusing. If this solution to the gravitational theory is congruent with the cosmological data we get from galaxies, it will be an excellent indication that it describes reality. But not proof.

The 'Dark Matter' theory reminds me this belief in 'aether', which was popular before the Michelson-Morley experiment in the 19th century. Both are pathetic attempts to connect raw theories with experimental data.

^ most brutal burn ever.

This has often been said. But there is a great counterexample - the neutrino. Fermi said "this wacky little particle must exist". Many people said "Fuck off, wop". It took another twenty five years to find them, using a wacky nuclear reactor.

Two further problems - dark matter theories explain some results a lot better than competing theories of non-Newtonian gravity, and some physicists think exactly the same kind of 'fudging' criticism applies to arbitrarily farting around with the laws of gravity to explain cosmological anomalies.

I don't like the dark matter explanations very much myself. But then again, I don't understand them, either.

Yeah, but that was Fermi, whom we all, gifted with hindsight, know to have been awesome, even if he was a wop. These BM guys may or may not be Fermis. On the other hand, that gravity should be a continuous function that changes over distance feels like it should be right to non-scientist me. Doesn't mean it is, but it seems logical. Anyway, let's see some falsifying.

Very true. The mathematics behind physics is based on a "modelling" concept - it models what we observe, sometimes good enough to derive very accurate predictions. But whether nature itself is embodied and somehow, for want of a better word, "aware" of the special relationships within these mathematical models is very much a subject for philosophers.

Unfortuantely, even the most rigourous of theories will be chock full of assumptions that are highly unlikley to occur in reality, i.e. planets are assumed to be perfect spheres, many fields are assumed to act uniformly, etc, etc. Basically, there's only so much detail that can be contained within a mathematical model, or else it becomes impractical to solve. I'd actually venture to say that a perfect model of the universe would take an infinite amount of time to solve.

There's a Borges satire on the exactitude of science which addresses this problem.

A bunch of cartographers determine to make the most accurate map of the land ever built. It becomes larger and larger in scale until the bastard covers the entire country - scale 1:1. Then it becomes impossible to maintain and gets run down and tore up, and goats ended up chewing bits off the side.

Moral of the story: anything that has to account for every variable in its entirety becomes as complicated as the system it's describing.

In conclusion, use the phrase "Borges' map" in conversation and watch the women flock to your feet in wonder.

Knowing Latin American fabulism is always the best route, to understanding as well as to getting laid.

Even the simplest dynamical systems described by differential equations sets are pain in the neck to solve. In practice to find a solution they use one of the iteration methods which implies the solution is never exact.

Another problem is that the universe is too imperfect for the perfect mathematical models we could build. Because of this, physicists will always have their jobs, even after all mathematical problems are solved :)

Hopefully we'll all be dead before Mansley's math major is made useless by the solving of all possible mathematical problems. I don't want to live in a world where Mansley means nothing!

And then, we have things like brains with their 2^100 possible synaptic pathways.

Brains make us cry, and pretend we know things.

This week, I have been mostly learning about Multinuclear NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy.

In solids, shielding anisotropy, dipolar interactions and quadrupolar interactions broaden the peaks in the spectrum - fucking it up.

However, all these interactions are dependent on cos^2(theta) - 1, so spinning your sample at 54.74 degrees (the magic angle) to the applied magnetic field reduces this term to zero, giving a readable spectrum with sharp peaks.

There you have it - Magic angle spectroscopy - I think it's pretty nifty.