Re: Getting out of this world?

On Oct 16, 8:57 pm, Tina_H...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Tina Hall) wrote:
N...@xxxxxxx <Alien8...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tina_H...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Tina Hall) wrote:

(Bunches of stuff snipped)

There's nothing that the place itself is. The place itself
isn't really.
That's one thing...

...?
That the place itself, isn't, really.

Ok.

See, when you said that I figured the easiest thing would be to
determine what _is_, then eliminate that so that you'd have somewhere
the Other Place could be.

However you seem to have these ideas of what is, that are simply
wrong.

Ok, what then do you mean by continuous?

It's hard to try to explain things to you because I don't know what
you know, IOW what I can use for imagery. All my favorites seem to
bounce right off you.

Did you take any post-elementary math? Did you learn about something
called "the number line" or similar, with points on a line labeled
with numbers in sequence? Did they teach you that there were, in that
way of arranging numbers, an infinite number of numbers? IOW you could
always pick two numbers next to each other and label the point between
them with a numerical value in between the numerical values of the two
points? For instance between "two" and "three" there was a point
halfway between them that could be labeled "two-and-a-half", and that
between "two" and "two-and-a-half" there was another, and so on and so
on?

The number line is thus said to be "continuous" because it has no
gaps where you can't assign a value between those of the points on
either side.

There's what's called a "subset" of the number line, called "the
integer line" which comprises points sequentially labeled with
integers AKA whole numbers. On the integer line you can't pick a point
between "two" and "three" to label "two-and-a-half" because by the
definition of the integer line, there aren't any points between the
integers; there're only whole numbers, no fractions.

However, since both the number line and the integer line are
abstractions, idealizations that don't actually have to have anything
to do with reality, they don't have to obey reality's rules. Hence the
integer line is still considered "continuous" because according to its
narrow, specialized definition there are no gaps between the integers
on it.

When people think about the structure of space and time, one of the
tools we try to apply is the ruler, which is a sort of concretization
of the abstract number line. It has points marked with sequential
numerals, which we can use to measure distances in space.

However, the ruler brings with it the idealization of continuity
along the number line; even if the smallest division marked on the
ruler is say millimeters, we always assume we can interpolate half-
millimeters between the markings.

That's what I mean by "continuous"; uninterrupted in extent.

That's what spacetime is not.

You are trying to model empty space with your _continuous_
elastic blob of plastic (or what you imagine to be continuous
air). That model is exactly the opposite of right. How can I
possibly say anything so silly? Because serious scientists no
longer try to use anything like it to model reality in actual
theories.

But your strings don't make sense.

Why not? Makes perfect sense to me.

You'd first have to explain what's really there, if not space.

No, I don't. All you have to know is that it isn't what we call
"space".

And where that non-space hides in the space.

"Where" is not relevant. You can't point in that direction, you
can't physically measure how far away it is.

The new picture is that space itself is made of little
discrete, non- continuous bits that interact along specified
pathways. That's what spacetime _is_, not a continuous anything.

I still don't know what you mean by (non-)continuous in this
context.

See above.

I can only guess what small scales you are thinking about.
Around 10 to the minus 43rd or so meters.

I can only guess what small scales you're thinking about. Not
distances, but what matter.

I just told you; 10 to the minus 43rd or so meters. Do you
understand scientific notation? That's a very very very very (insert a
whole lot of "very's" here) small distance. See below.

Your mesh is used for planets or black holes, and how they influence
the light going past it. And that's what doesn't make sense.

No. In Loop Quantum Gravity it's the extremely fine texture of space
and time. The large-scale network can be viewed as an
oversimplification of that which is sort of referenced below, with
dandelions.

I still don't like the strings.

Please tell me you are not one of those people who refuse to accept
things simply because you don't "like" them. I do not like any form of
squash but I accept that it's real and that other people consider it
to be food. It doesn't bother me at all that they eat it but I will
never eat any.

And I doubt that all atoms are lined up straight, all electrons
touching, and that you could draw a straight line along the spaces
between the electrons and their atom cores. So not even they make a
mesh.

I never said anything about atoms or any other particles "lined up
straight". The mesh is much much finer than that.

and not coming on
with planet sized holes in space again.

I never did.

If you want to write a 'travel between worlds' story in which
the 'real world' side is set in a continuum universe, it won't
be science fiction, it'll be straight-out fantasy.

What do you mean by 'continuum universe', and what makes you
think I want to do that? (Really, I have no idea how you got
there.)
Your "continuous blob of plastic" model.

I don't yet see what's wrong with it; you not offered anything to
replace it that makes sense.

What's wrong with your blob is that it does not accurately model
reality. It implies that there is always another bit of space between
two close bits of space, but in doing so it lies; there isn't at the
smallest possible scale. There just isn't.

The fact that it doesn't make sense to _you_ is not the model's
fault, nor mine. You insist on fighting it because you "don't like the
strings".

You'd have to get down to atoms/molecules to find room in
between, and when you're there you might as well say what's
really going on.
This is the last important bit. Quantum Loop Gravity
specifically talks about 'atoms of spacetime' analogous to
matter atoms;

Which has nothing to do with the net&ball that's got lots of
empty space between it. The analogy has larger-than-planet sized
holes in it, and that's what doesn't make sense in the model.
No, it doesn't.

Well, finally. That's what I'm saying all along.

No, I'm saying it doesn't have planet-sized holes in it. It does
make sense.

You may be thinking of the usual presentation that has bowling
-ball-sized spheres rolling around on tennis-net sized mesh.

That's what I'm talking about. That's what you've been talking
about, because you went off from what I said _doesn't work_,
ignoring that it doesn't work and claiming that that's what's really
going on: The bowling ball sized spheres rolling around on tennis
net sized mesh. You took _that_ analogy and went with it.

That's irrelevant. The actual mesh is exquisitely finer than that.

So do we now get to what you're actually talking about? Because so
far we went nowhere.

I hope you didn't think I was trying to tell you that the space
you can see is made up of mesh with oh, ten-centimeter holes!

Actually, that's what you said. (You _used_ the net&ball analogy
that I said doesn't work. And I kept telling you it doesn't work.)

I never said the spacetime mesh predicted by Loop Quantum Gravity
had planet-sized holes in it. That you cannot reach from analogy to
reality is not my fault. I keep telling you that it's very hard to
know how to try to explain things to you because the more I talk with
you the less you seem to know that I can connect with.

No, the actual mesh I'm talking about has holes in the
neighborhood of 10 to the minus 43rd meter or so.

I don't know what is so small. What matter are you talking about?
Atoms? Smaller than atoms?

Not matter. Much much smaller than any matter, much smaller than
quarks (what protons and neutrons are made up of).

...what
the theory you asked for says; that spacetime itself comprises
teeny chunks, not a continuous blob.

What are those chunks?

AFAIK they don't have names. The term "atoms of space" merely refers
to the ancient Greek meaning of the root of the word; it means "no
cut" IOW is the least indivisible unit of something like a carbon atom
is the least individual unit of carbon. Similarly, the idea is that
space itself comes in least indivisible units.

Becaus anything larger than parts of an atom
gets you back to what doesn't make sense. Down there, there might be
truly empty 'space'. (Nothing the electron rubs around on, on its
way/position around the core.)

Much much smaller than electrons etc.

Suppose the Other Place is _in between the lattice lines_ of
our universe?

There are no lattice lines.
But there are.

Nope.

How do you know that?

No, the "empty space inside atoms" is covered by ordinary
physics, until you get to trying to measure forces like
electromagnetism or gravity over really small distances, and
that's where spacetime starts getting "not smooth".

So what are you looking at? How small does it get, in something you
can name (not just distances; I have no idea of the sizes of
things)?

Good grief. What did your teachers do to earn their pay? There's a
website that neatly illustrates everything from the size of the
universe down to the size of quarks and electrons; it's all about
powers of ten:

http://www.wordwizz.com/pwrsof10.htm

Some of the high points- the visible universe is about 10 to the 26
(ten times ten times ten... twenty-six times) meters in diameter, our
Milky Way galaxy is about 10 to the 21 meters across, the solar system
is about 10 to the 13 meters across (at Pluto's orbit), the Earth is
about 10 to the 7 meters in diameter, the state of California is
somewhat less than 10 to the 6 meters long from north to south, you
know how big meters and millimeters are (a millimeter is 10 to the
minus 3 meter of course), a DNA molecule is about 10 to the minus 7
meter long, a single atom of say carbon is about 10 to the minus 10
meter across, the carbon atom's nucleus is about 10 to the minus 14
meter across (that's one ten-thousandth the whole atom's size), at 10
to the minus 16 meters we're looking at single quarks.

The Planck length is about 10 to the minus 35 meters. The mesh would
have holes maybe 10 to the minus 45 meter wide.

So the Planck length will be some 10 to the 10 (ten million) mesh
units long; a quark will be about 10 to the 21 mesh units across.

Yet another analogy; you couldn't paint a life-sized ant on ordinary
artist's canvas because the weave is too coarse; the whole ant would
cover maybe three threads. You'd need expensive silk and even then
you'd lose many details. Painting quarks on 'spacetime canvas' with
10^-45m mesh is dead simple.

I am talking about 'holes' much, much smaller than pretty much
anything (except possibly so-called 'point particles' like
electrons, but that remains to be seen).

And where are they?

Everywhere, between all the strings. Haven't you been paying
attention? :)

For the Nodeworld, that doesn't work. That isn't just 'here on
subatomic level', it's not here.
Exactly; the spaces between the strings

There are no strings.

You say that as if you have proof. What might that be?

_is not accessible_ by any phenomenon that has to do with the
strings (like particles or forces), therefore it's not "here".

That doesn't make sense even ignoring the strings. Not accessible
doesn't mean not here, just not accessible. I'm talking about not
here.

I'm not using "not accessible" in the sense of behind a locked door
or something like that, because if you have a key or a crowbar it's
accessible.

I am using "not accessible" in the physics sense that if you cannot
access it by any physical means, it simply cannot be properly said to
exist- it isn't in your universe, it isn't "here".

Try to remember you came to a science-oriented group; we tend to
think in scientific terms.

Allright. I don't know what he would mean by 'tensor', or what
that 'Ricci' is.
Um, search engines...

Awkward, costy, and for me generally utterly useless.

A little practice removes the awkward. I have no idea what the cost
issue is, and "useless" is relative to how badly you want something.

If you're losing interest, just say so.

You asked what words would be used, I answered you. What else did
you want? Besides, if you aren't going to concentrate on the theory
(and I still say you shouldn't, just mention it in passing to get the
story moving) you don't need to explain anything at all. Just have
your responsible scientist type muttering something about "I could
have sworn the Ricci tensor would go to zero..." or similar.

you can add renormalization, Planck length ( also Planck
scale, mass, time, energy),

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about Planck.
Max Planck. German physicist. 1858-1947. Considered the 'father
of quantum theory' in that he provided the first solid break from
so- called 'classical theory' (which includes among other things
the continuum assumption). He showed the correlation between the
energy states of an oscillator (say an electron in an atom) and
the wavelengths it can emit is quantized, proportional to an
irreducible minimum unit of angular momentum (AKA spin).

Sounds interesting. (No idea what angular momentum is, though.)

"AKA" means "also known as". Macroscopic (means "big enough to see"
more or less) things have what's called "rotation", subatomic stuff
has angular momentum.

He himself at first just thought of it as a 'mathematical
formality' but eventually came to grasp its deeper significance.
Nonetheless he proceeded to take the idea to its (to him) logical
conclusion and proposed a set of units based on the measured
values of many physical constants, the Planck length, the Planck
time, and so on.

Ah. Thanks. (Now, if I knew what they refered to... Which is what I
originally meant, though this is interesting.)

The idea is that physical systems cannot have those quantities
in smaller amounts than those units; if you had a ruler marked in
Planck lengths there would be no physical object or phenomenon
that could fit between the marks.

Cool.

Same with the Planck time; no physical event can take less than that
amount of time.

diffeomorphism, quantum field theory, spinfoam, gauge groups
and quantum groups, torsion (of spacetime, meaning empty space
with a built-in twist), and so on.

Sounds interseting (no idea what diffeomorphism is, though, and
can only guess at the rest).
It's extremely interesting to a certain kind of mind, and even
those of us who can't manage the complex math can be fascinated
by the concepts it exposes.

I wouldn't mind the maths if I understood what it's going on about
(and had learned complex math). It just doesn't help at all to
understand. I first need to know that, in simple, what Tom is and
what Jerry is, to then get interested in how much bigger Tom is.
Similar for (continuing the analogy) knowing what a cat is (to
understand what the funny picture is trying to depict), and for
'higher physics'; internal proportions of cats, the organs, and
stuff.

If you said T=10*J, I haven't got the slightest clue what either
letter is, and what it's supposed to mean. No cats in sight, no
mice, and certainly no cartoon. That's why formulas don't work to
explain something. I'd need the (in this case cartoon) image first,
to then place the numbers. And before the cartoon, I need the real
thing, or we're going to fall flat very soon somewhere (because a
cartoon doesn't depict the real thing accurately).

To grab that analogy, you keep pointing at the cartoon image, and I
have no idea what animal it is supposed to show me, because I have
never encountered one like it. I first need to know the animal
before you can work with cartoon analogies.

That's what I meant when I said it's hard to explain things to you
when I don't know what you know.

I mean, we both know Tom 'n' Jerry, but do you know Fritz The Cat?
Schroedinger's cat? I bet not.

Here, try this imagery; there's a branch of math called "topology"
which is about how things are shaped, and whether they have holes in
them, and what sorts of connections can be made between various
points, and so on; it does not however have the same sorts of rigidly
defined shapes as does ordinary geometry. Where's the image? Visualize
a ceramic coffee cup. Ignore the interior of it and just consider the
very skin of it. Now imagine that it isn't ceramic, but infinitely
deformable rubber. Now, stick your finger through the handle and
imagine shrinking the rubber cup-shaped skin, without allowing the
internal volume to go away; imagine it filled with say beans like a
beanbag. Eventually you'll reach a point where the bowl of the cup has
disappeared, the handle has expanded, and the cup now looks just like
a donut wrapped around your finger. There's a kind of mathematical
formalism that exactly describes that transformation, and it's called
a diffeomorphism. Now look at a sphere; do you see that it simply
cannot be deformed into a donut without poking a hole in it? In order
to transform one shape into another smoothly, they must have the same
number of holes, and other properties like say twists. That reminds
me; know what a Mobius band is?

(That's the really important bit of this post; the following is
another digression into details that may or may not influence
your understanding of what I've written)

I might have understood it if you had left out the solar system
sized nets.
SMALLER, DAMMIT!
Sorry.

Now you now how I felt with you insisting that it's correct. IT
DOESN'T MAKE SENSE, DAMMIT!

Nurrrr. "Make sense" can mean "translate to something I know". What
is your main area(s) of interest, since you don't know much of
science? What sorts of books do you have on your shelves? I have all
sorts of stuff; the (harder) sciences, science fiction, technical and
other reference books, art books, four or five bibles, a koran,
Rushdie's _The Satanic Verses_, two different Escher books (!),
poetry, classical Greek philosophers, gun repair manuals, H. G. Wells,
Sun Tzu... and that's just in this room.

The Xtian example of Jesus multiplying fishes and loaves of
bread for instance violates the conservation of mass and
energy; where'd the extra mass of the fish and bread come from?

For me, the thing that violates physics would be (with an
example of turning a pebble into a strawberry) that someone does
that with just their thoughts. He picks apart the atoms and puts
them back together in an order that is eatable, with vitamins
and everything, turning excess matter into air (oxygen,
nitrogen, carbondioxide, whatever else in the correct
percentages), or taking missing matter from the air or something
else in the surroundings. It's manipulating matter in a way that
you can't really manipulate it. Starting with thoughts
influencing a pebble a foot away from the brain having said
thoughts.

The character could have it look like multiplying strawberries,
too, and you wouldn't know where the mass came from, that it's
actually taken out of nearby ground. (At one point in the ME, a
character moves a small rock into his trouser pocket and changes
it into a precious ring - [...]
Well, that's just "plain vanilla" telekinesis

No, for me that's magic, because it ignores physics. (Telekinesis
doesn't enter anywhere, either. That's explainable by physics.
Besides, telekinesis is concerned with pushing objects about, 'move'
here means that its location changes instantly, due to moving it
with magic.)

Well, I could bring up the wave nature of matter, and so-called
"atom lasers" and diffracting whole molecules through gratings just
the same way light diffracts through them, which means the molecules
stopped being "here" and started being "there" without crossing the
intervening distance, but that would likely only confuse you. See,
solid matter isn't. Solid, that is, and I'm not talking theory here,
but experimental proof even the diehards had to accept.

This sort of "teleportation" is done with mundane physics, not magic
or even telekinesis.

(which as was mentioned elsethread, hasn't been demonstrated).

?

That telekinesis hasn't been demonstrated to actually happen.

It doesn't violate physics,

I believe that if you can do it for real. No devices, mind, just you
using magic, through the sub-atomic link.

I'm talking about the real world. We don't know that there is such a
link, nor do we know there isn't; the problem is that magic is very
hard to study because for some strange reason nobody has come forward
and claimed to be able to do magic, and offered to do so for
observation by scientists. Same goes for telekineses.

and could be shown not to do so if the telekinetic were limited to
the mass available in a locked room (though imagining locks that a
telekinetic couldn't bypass is a bit tricky).

A locked room _is_ mass.

What you need is a bubble-like containment done with magic.

To contain a telekinetic for scientific testing...

What an odd mixture of flavors.

What physics can't explain is the channel by which information is
allegedly transferred from his/her mind to the matter that gets
rearranged,

Transfering information only applies if you see it like my hand
touching the keyboard as transfering information.

Yep. Or using a mouse, or whatever. Have you seen those infrared
gizmos that scan the eye movements of paralyzed persons to move the
cursor on a computer monitor? The same has been used to operate
motorized wheelchairs etc. If you didn't know about the infrared
technology you might think it was magic, or at least telekinesis.

That's what the Clarke quote means; notice it doesn't say "is the
same as" but rather "is indistinguishable from" as in those not in the
know can't tell the difference. And we all are ignorant at some
level...

but if a telekinetic ever presents themselves for testing I'll bet
it could be figured out.

Ah, but our world doesn't have magic. Certainly not the ME magic. :)

Being able to figure out how doesn't invalidate it being magic. Not
being conform with physics makes it magic. Like being able to
construct real 3D things of the Escher paintings.

Oh, that's just a matter of rearranging the geometry. Seriously;
such things could theoretically be built near say black holes, where
space is so severely curved that what is locally flat and straight,
curves back on itself.

...in the ME, doing things with magic is easier than doing them
the mundane way.

Well, you probably won't be surprised to find that it grates on
me as 'unrealistic'. Odd thing to say about magic, I know, but
still.

What grates on me is claiming that magic has to have costs, or
adhere to any physical laws.

Again, I say "physics" and you automatically read "not magic".

Of course. That's the definition. They do exclude one another.

We say that, but we have no magic to examine to see if they really
do.

Your magic has stuff (and "stuff" doesn't necessarily mean atoms
etc.) interacting according to consistent rules. That's
practically the very definition (except for the word "magic") of
"physics".

Physics is what we have here.

We have stuff interacting according to consistent rules, they have
other stuff interacting according to other consistent rules. I see no
fundamental difference.

Allow me to quote Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Which I think is nonsense. It talks about viewpoint, while I
talk about absolutes.
You can _talk_ about them, but there aren't any.

That's misunderstanding what I said.

A hypothetical all-understanding being would be able to tell the
difference, and that's all that matters, not the potentially
primitive viewpoint who looks at it.
Now we've wandered into philosophy. What does "all-understanding"
mean,

Not relevant, as it's hypothetical. All it matters is that it
understands the tech, no mysteries. Not whether there can be any
such being.

I should mention that I take "technology" to mean any
instrumentality that takes advantage of physical forces to impress our
will on physical reality. That includes everything from stone fist-
axes through computers to hypothetical brainwave-controlled graviton-
generator implants that permit _real_ telekinesis.

In a universe that supports magic, as far as I'm concerned it's just
another physical (it affects physical objects) force, so using it is
technology.

and in what context does it do its understanding in? If you're
going to say that it would understand in a way we couldn't, that's
cheating.

No, claiming we should be able to understand it is trying to warp
things. We're not the angle all revolves around. We're just one
possible viewpoint (one who might be too daft to understand),
irrelevant when looking at absolutes.

You already did that though when you said "it understands the tech,
no mysteries". That's practically the definition of a god. No, excuse
me, that'd be a capital "g" God.

In waveguides and such it's any deviation from perfect
smoothness and consistency in the dimensions of the waveguide;
think of it along the lines of 'speedbumps' for the guided
waves.

This is a good example for why it's better to talk about the
real thing than analogies: I'm much better imagining that than
first drawing up the image of the analogy, then trying to find
out what that's supposed to be analogous to, while never getting
an actual picture of the real thing, and thus never getting any
idea of what's meant. I'd never have thought about an opening in
the waveguide if you didn't mention it, and would have been
stuck on the 'speedbump' just as I do on 'lattices'. (There are
no literal street speedbumps on the metal of the construction,
just space isn't a fishernet.)
Well, actually there can be literal speedbumps.

Like they are on the street, for cars, made of mortart and bricks,
same size? Because that's what I mean.

They do the same things to microwaves that speedbumps do to cars.
That's what I mean.

The metal had better be very smooth at certain places (where the
electric field is large, also known as "anti-nodes" along the
guide). If it isn't, if there are lumps, the electric field will
concentrate at those places (exactly the way Saint Elmo's fire
concentrates on sharp-pointed objects during thunderstorms) and
the microwave energy will reflect back the way it came (just as a
slow-moving car will bounce back from a real speedbump) or, if the
field strength rises far enough, be dissipated as an electric arc
within the waveguide.

The analogy makes sense (again) because I know what you mean.
Without that, just 'speedbump', would, as said, not work.

OK, so I took a wild risk and assumed you knew about speedbumps and
got lucky- you do. ;>)

I wish you'd fire up your browser and look at:

For that I'd have to quit the software I'm using now, wind down
the computer, turn it off, plug in the windoze drive, turn it
on, tell it to boot that drive, wait endlessly for windoze to
boot, start the dialler and browser and stuff, choose a provider
(internet-by-call), establish a connection, and then go there.
What software do you use to read usenet groups?

XP.

I'm sure there's a good browser for it that wouldn't require you
to go through all that.

Not one with a dialler that has a list for all the frequently
changing rates of the Internet-by-Call providers. (Frequently, as in
every few hours, like provider A costs 0.43 cent per minute from
09:00 to 12:00 and 2.99 cent per minute the rest of the time, and
Provider B costs 0.42 cent per minute from 11:00 to 13:00,... As
random examples, not exact numbers - I don't have to remember them.
On top of that they change the hours and costs, too, whenever it
suits them. The dialler I've got - for windoze only - updates that
automatically.)

We have Internet via the same coaxial cable that delivers TV and
phone service. 100 megabits/second pretty much all day every day.

Personally I could live without the TV, but my wife...

I use the WIndoze version of Firefox, but there's also Unix
versions.

I only boot windoze when I have to, which is for internet. I use
Firefox as browser, but that's got nothing to do with usenet
newsgroups.

Right now I'm running XP in a DOS window in OS/2. (I use OS/2
because it lets me do different DOS things simultaneously.) Have
used that since I first came into contact with Fidonet (back then in
DOS), early nineties.

No browser, no internet. Only a direct call to the node (Fidonet;
I'm getting Usenet through a gateway) to send stuff off and download
new stuff.

Yeesh. Well, whatever floats your boat.

This is, technically, an 'antenna' though it's pretty crappy as
such things go because it reflects much of the energy back into
the can; the waves don't like to make the velocity transition
so abruptly. Flaring the cutoff end to the proper degree makes
it easier for the waves to 'slide out' so to speak.

Thus sattelite antennas looking like a chunk cut out of a ball,
I guess.
The big dish is just a reflector to focus the microwaves; the
actual antenna is in the center of the dish.

So what you described has a different angle of 'flared out'?

Yeah, they're usually called "horns" because they look sorta like
the noisy ends of wind musical instruments seen from the side (ASCII
'art' warning):

| |
| |
|___|
/ \
/______\

The vertical lines represent the walls of the guide, and the wedge
thingy represents a sort of hollow square pyramid, open at the top
which is where the microwaves transition in and out of the guide, and
open at the bottom which is where the microwaves enter and exit the
horn.

In the usual application there's a microwave source or detector at
the top end of the guide, and the horn "looks" at the dish reflector
below (I can't draw curves in ASCII) which serves to take the
spreading beam of microwaves from the horn and focus it into a
straight(ish) beam pointed straight up.

What we call 'matter' is, in the Loop Quantum Gravity view,
merely coherent patterns of vibration of the strings in the 3D
mesh.
What do they really talk about? (The analogy is only used to
describe something, after all, build an image for people.
That spacetime (space in all four directions; left-right,
up-down, back-front, and past-future) has texture like a knotwork
fabric with extremely small mesh. It is not smoothly continuous.

You keep saying that, but not what you actually mean. So it still
makes no sense.

Exactly what I mean. Yes, it makes sense. Get over it.

As example, there's the old model of 'atoms like a solar
system', which isn't correct either. And for me it's much better
to imagine a shell where the dot of the electron is everywhere
at once (thus shell, even while it's a dot). Improving that
closer to what's really going on would be even better; my
imagination isn't limited, the analogies are (in leaving out
what's really going on).
If you could see atoms directly (I'm sure you've heard this bit
before) you'd see the nucleus as say a soccerball-sized sphere
surrounded by intersecting, layered cathedral-sized clouds of
electron orbitals.

That's fine.

But at that scale you _still_ couldn't see the spacetime "mesh-
ness".

Could you stop mentioning any meshes?

Hey, you asked for theory to get "out of this world" and that's what
you got.


I'm not going to start talking to some non-person part of my
thinking.

Gravitational radiation is also coherent patterns of vibration,

I've got a problem with 'gravitaiontal radiation'. For me
radiation means something going out, rather than attracting
something. But gravity 'keeps' things, it doesn't spout bits
around like a fountain.
You are now trying to make physics fit your "rules of magic".

Nope. Nothing magical about that.

It is false imagery; gravity does not "keep things".

That isn't what gravity does at all; gravity bends spacetime
around masses so that masses move together.

It has to do that somehow.

Yep.

You haven't yet offered a better image.

I offered what I have, that I know works. That you "don't like it"
is not my fault. Your likes and dislikes do not dictate reality.

If two masses move near each other, but don't touch, then move
apart, and do so at the right speeds, then the bent spacetime
between them can indeed spout out a coherent ripple that
propagates (radiates) away.

No problem with that. But it isn't little bits springing around that
hold the actual masses together.

How do you know that?

Eh, the bits in the mesh are holes in space where there is no
space,
EXACTLY!

You already agreed that it's nonsense.

No, I did not. I agreed that you refuse to see the sense in it.

Except you're using the same word (space) to describe two very
different things; the domain of the strings, and the domain in
between all of them.

Space, alone, is what planets and stuff move around in.

Yes.

Space between things, you have to define or at least name the
_things_ it's between. Else it's suns and planets and stuff.

What?

as I see the analogy. It's what you try to depict 'empty space'
_with_.
The mesh domain is what _we_ call "space", the domain in
between is what The Others call "home".

No, they're not here, they're somewhere else.

I just said that.

Ordinarily they can't see us

They might be able to from their 'higher' (not spacial higher)
position. I'll see when I write more.

(or more likely have decided not to pay any attention to since
we're no fun due to the fact we can't see them at all).

I don't know why that should be a reason for them.

Whatever.

Where they are, there is neither space with planets, nor the space
between anything. Probably not time either. All there is is what the
locals made. That's added to, within the nothing-at-all.

That's what I said.

Here's another option- alternatively we can talk about the
vibrations obtaining some sort of existence separate from the
supporting mesh (they sort of 'slide off' the spacetime mesh
when the scientist vibrates it out from under the travelers)
but that'll be harder to justify. Well, maybe not; sound is
vibration, and vibrations can 'slide off' say violin strings
and travel through 'stringless' empty space (as long as there's
air to support the vibrations, which is the catch to this;
there's no equivalent of 'air' in the Other Place).

It doesn't work because with the analogy of the mesh, you've got
one line every some kilometers for the sound to move along, with
absolutely nothing in between (the holes in the net), no cities,
no air, nothing at all. Which simply isn't true.
Replace "kilometer" with "10 to the minus 43rd or so meter" and
try again.

You were using the net&ball analogy that I said doesn't work. Don't
complain now that it's not the size you like.

Please quote me saying that Loop Quantum Gravity talks about
kilometer gaps.

You keep saying it's not continuous, but as I see continuous, a net
is lots of continous strings.

Sigh.

Your idea of gravity is your problem, especially if it doesn't
match the real thing, and it does not.

You haven't yet offered an alternative image.

Sigh.

I can't really describe it much more clearly. As Uncle Al of
sci.physics says, I can _explain_ it for you but I can't
_understand_ it for you.

An explanation is fine. To understand I just need the right
images. And 'flying gravitons' look like dots whizzing around.
Which doesn't match the image of 'gravity', thus there it stops
making sense.
Not 'dots', ripples in spacetime.

Ripples make sense. Gravitons don't. (Just using the word without
explaining what you mean, don't be surprised if it sparks an image
of dots. You're free to explain what it is instead.)

I can't help what images are sparked in your mind by certain words
and I definitely will not be held responsible for them. Those are the
result of your experiences and are your problem, not mine. Try
actually reading what I'm writing and understanding me, rather than
expecting me to know how you think.

Do you have trouble seeing waves traveling on water?

I have trouble seeing the water when you draw just a few wavy lines
on a piece of paper, with no actual connection to real water; that
there's currents and stuff beneath the surface that move things.
Water isn't just lines, either. It has volume.

I said nothing about lines. Read what I wrote and try to understand
it as it is.

Do you have trouble understanding that there are waves traveling
_in_ the water, under the surface, that you cannot see?

Analogous, I keep asking about them, but you just claim there's a
few scraggly lines on paper, which doesn't match what's really
there, and doesn't explain it either.

Not lines on paper. Have you ever seen an ocean or lake?

Gravitational waves are waves traveling as ripples in spacetime
that you cannot see.

Only they don't have a water-like surface. A water surface is just
2D again, not 3D.

And waves travel in the volume of the water too.

What would make sense would be going down to atoms, or
somewhere, explaining why one bit of matter attracts another. I
already know about the electronic side, but that's not it, after
all. So I imagine some very weak but very large field around
something (atom, or subatomic particles, I have no idea), that
does the attracting part. And the more you get together, the
more fields (all 3D, mind) overlap, strengthening the effect. Up
to the point of holding a person on the globe, or cancelling
each other at the Earth's core (or perhaps addinig up to
squeezing point, that's stuff I don't know, but I can imagine
either).
All matter attracts other matter; the bit about bending space
was Einstein's brilliant interpretation, and experiments like the
observation of the precession of the orbit of the planet Mercury
proved him right. Gravity bends spacetime, period, (okay, comma)

Don't know how that connects to what I wrote. What in the above
image is wrong or right?

Because as you keep complaining, images can mislead. I'm trying to
avoid them wherever possible.

If it doesn't bend it the way I imagine, I still need an image.

Use whatever image you can for bent space. I have none to offer
because there's no visible difference between bent and unbent space.

and that knowledge led directly to the balls-on-the-rubber-sheet
imagery.

Which makes no sense.

Exactly what part of it do you have trouble with?

You mentioned some knowledge of electronics; I'll mention two
scientists whose names are forever linked so: "Kaluza-Klein".
They tried to link gravitation and electromagnetism by adding two
more dimensions to spacetime. The general idea was to show that
gravitation and electromagnetism are simply two slightly
different ways to bend spacetime, one of which only acts on
matter that carries an electric charge while the other acts on
all matter whether it has a charge or not. This goes back to
1921.
Since then, other scientists trying to figure out if they were
right generated whole other theories including loop quantum
gravity.

Sounds interesting, but don't really know what it says, with you
throwing terms around without explaining them and using them in
apparently some other meaning than the image they spark.

Which terms? Again I am not responsible for your 'sparked' images,
you are.

Now I wonder whether that would also explain why making things
move faster requires such energy; I could imagine that the
fields like things being static, or at least moving steadily
against it ('with it' does speed you up to a point; all things
fall to the ground, at the same rate, within the gravity
strength), and the more you try to go against that, the more it
tries to hold you back (a bit like being stuck in rubber). But
that's just a fancy idea that came to me just now. No idea
whether gravity has anything to do with trying to speed up
spaceships in theoretically empty space.
It does, yes. There's this effect called Unruh Radiation;

So my image is right?

Sort of. You could look it up in books. I assume you have a library
available that doesn't cost money.

Um, yeah. No, they're not considered to be 'particles' any
more.

But something that's called 'flying gravitons', or just
gravitons, sounds (and looks) to me like particles. It's small
dots, not an effect.
The "-on" ending does not necessarily indicate a dot-like
matter particle, any more than you ought to expect "photon" to be
a dot-like particle.

I do. It just moves around in 'waves' (not water waves, but more
like two sine wave signals going forwards, alternating, at right
angles, with the dot at the center 'producing' the 'waves', a bit
like expanding and shrinking).

Nope, no dot.

That's my image anyway.

Where did you get that image?

Gravity I imagine to be an effect across a large volume, not tiny
bits, even if they're waving.

But as mentioned, if you want to use a term and don't like me
attaching a random image to it, you need to provide an image to
attach to it.

I provide what I have. If you decide you "don't like it" I fail to
see why I am obliged to look for others you will like without knowing
what you know, which you still haven't said anything about. I'm not a
mind-reader.

Electrons have something called spin, meaning they sort of act
as if they are tiny current-carrying loops, creating a circular
component to their static field.

Like rings? Or like a shell? (Don't know where to place the
loops, or the spin.)
See, this is where it gets awkward; as far as experiment can
tell, electrons are _point_ particles. They have no physical
extension within which their charge might be carried in a circle
by their spin,

As mentioned, I don't know where to place the spin, so that doesn't
tell me anything. (Using words that I asked to explain isn't doing
any good in explaining said words.)

The words "loop", "ring" and "shell" involve at least two
dimensions. A point particle has none, therefore explaining how a
point electron's spin involves loops, rings or shells is just about
impossible. Some things you have to grasp on their own terms and leave
naive imagery behind.

yet they sure seem to act as if they do just that.

Do what?

Carry their charge around on a little internal circle, which because
they're point particles, there's no place 'inside' them to put said
circle.

Mind you the current best observational evidence only puts their
lower size limit at around 10 to the minus 22 meters which in
quantum mechanical terms is enormous. In a universe described by
LQG there's plenty of room in that 10^-22 m for the charge of a
single electron to form a loop with a radius measured in Planck
lengths.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

The claim that electrons are point particles is based on an old idea
of particles that will likely be overthrown before long. If they are
not points there is indeed someplace 'inside' them for their charge to
be carried around in a teeny-weeny loop.

Don't know what you mean by loops, or spin.

What the words "loops" and "spin" mean to you?

If that didn't penetrate, read the stuff I gave you links to
above.

The word 'loop' still interferes with the image, but that's it.
Spin, I think (due to an earlier attempt from someone to explain
something), might be the sideways and up-down direction the
photon waves about in while going straight ahead.
Something like that. Photons have alternating electric and
magnetic fields; those can take the form of strainght lines or
loops, depending on how they were generated.

Don't know where to place the lines or loops. (I really have no idea
what you mean by the terms in this context.)

Check the website. Read some dead tree books on electromagnetism.
There are illustrations. Text just doesn't cut it for some things.

Gravity waves aren't directly involved in ordinary
gravitational attraction

Then I have no idea what they are.
Traveling self-contained deformations of spacetime.

That produces a nice image.

Now, just to get this right; they're at best hypothetical,
right?
Yes, they are considered 'very solidly' hypothetical, so much
so that most scientists assume they are real.

Ok. Thanks.

(Or the tiny-mini-things that one scientist you mentioned
managed to produce - have to keep track of what's tied to what
in this conversation.)
That's a real head-scratcher. Einsteinian gravitons, if real,
will, according to the math that describes them, be so feeble
that we may never detect them directly. Yet somehow Forward
managed to get his devices to work.

Ah. Ok. Thanks.

That produces a particular kind of deformation in the spacetime
between them that manifests as an attractive force; they tend
to 'fall' together.

A completely different image than I used to have, but it's
interesting.
Electrons 'want' to fall into the nuclei of atoms just like
apples 'want' to fall to Earth. Apples are too large to form
quantized orbitals though.

Which has me think of solar systems again, so I don't thing it's a
good idea to compare that. Electrons don't want to fall to the
nuclei because of gravity, or do they? I thought it was charges (now
I wonder what keeps them on their shell).

That's why we have quantum mechanics; everybody wondered about that
and still nobody knows, we just know that electrons simply cannot form
orbitals smaller than a certain minimum size which keeps them out of
the nucleus. Quantum mechanics is basically the math that tells us
exactly how large those are, and how larger orbitals will form at
certain multiples of the minimum, and exactly how much energy the
electron has to have (or emit) to jump from one to another.

A scientist named Millikan used a static electric field to
suspend drops of oil that contained extra electrons against the
pull of Earth's gravity; that experiment proved that electric
charge was quantized.

They needed that experiment to prove that?

Yep. Nobody knew for sure whether charge came in discrete bits or
was "continuous".

they are generated when _any_matter is waved around just as
photons are created when electric charges are waved around.

Ok, I can follow that. I just don't like the 'waves' bit (as
they're just depicted as lines, again). I like coherent fields,
of any form (or de-form).

I meant waving like waving a flag. Wave a flag and you generate
sound waves in the air, wave an electron and you create
electromagnetic waves.

And as for the coherent fields, again, too bad. Quantum mechanics
rules.

I'm not visualizing the depiction you're objecting to here.

Then offer an alternative.

Um, think that through please. How can I offer an alternative to
something I can't visualize?

Like, take a tank with water, and a container that can leak blue
liquid. In a perfect, theoretical environment (I guess a real
water tank would have side-effects and interferences just like
real space would have), you swing the container back and forth,
and whenever it's at either of the furthest points, it blobs out
a bubble of blue that travels on. It doesn't leak circular
strings of blue.

Alternately they come out all the time, but at the furthest
points currently makes most sens to my ignorant self.

That's a bit like what I imagine happens by what you describe.
(Please confirm or correct.)
Hrm. And you were objecting to some of my analogies,

They have to work, else talking about them is not going anywhere.

and wanted to know about 'the thing in itself'.

Still do.

Familiar with the old 'lines of force' imagery?

Not really. (Never understood what the teachers were going on about
with their funny formulas not saying anything comprehensible.)

Not formulas, the pictures.

Those are nothing to do with the previous 'mesh' imagery, lines of
force merely indicate the direction of the force a test charge
(remember that concept?)

You mentioned it somewhere.

would feel at a particular place within the volume the lines
occupy. The lines are not intended to mean that the force only
occurs where the lines are drawn; you are supposed to understand
that you can interpolate between them to get the force where no
line is drawn.

Ok.

There are _always_ electric 'lines of force' connecting any
positive and any negative electrically charged object, like say
an electron and a proton. For that matter, if you take an
electron out of its nice comfy orbital and carry it far, far away
from any atom, it is fair to say that it will still be surrounded
by lines of force all pointing away from it with spherical
symmetry like the head of a dandelion

Except the dandelion is just a circle again, and thus 2D.

What planet do you live on? On my planet they form little ethereal-
looking spheres.

(the force gets weaker with distance but extends literally to
infinity, of course it's undetectably weak by then).

That's fine.

Those lines indicate the direction it would 'fall' toward a proton
placed anywhere near it; IOW straight toward the proton.

Right.

Those lines of force are specifically lines of electrostatic
force, and they form a 'field' around the electron. Protons have
the same kind of field around them (except it points the opposite
way). The space between any electron and any proton therefore is
the same kind of 'electric field',

'Same kind of electric field' has me think of two fields, that
overlap when they come together. Which I guess is not what happens.

Shouldn't have said "kind of", just "same".

(Unless the overlapping is what makes gravity. ;) )

Sorry, no, it's never that simple. :>(

and that's all an electric field is; a volume of space labeled
with a bunch of indicated directions of the force a charge will
feel when placed in that volume.

So well so far. I wonder why you bring force and lines into it,
though.

Because the volume of space is filled with "something" that induces
a force on charged objects in that volume, and it aligns itself into
"lines" that pont from one of the generating charges to another. What
is that "something"? The electric field, of course.

Spin a charge and you add a sort of 'twist' to the electric field,
a twist that slews the force sorta sideways. That's what we call a
'magnetic field'.

How do you spin a charge?

The same way you spin anything' grab hold of it (actually, the thing
with a charge on it, in this case an electron or a proton) and make it
rotate like a top, or grab it and drag it around and around in a
circle.

Actually, "spin a charge" is physics shorthand for "consider a
charged object which also has intrinsic angular momentum" which
roughly translates to "think about a charged thing like say an
electron, and imagine it spinning like a top".

The image I had of electric/magnetic field just ran off when I was
trying to follow that, so now I'm a bit more clueless than before.
(I wondered how that matches what I know, but right now can't
remember what I know.)

Then we're both in trouble.

Look at the isolated electron again with its dandelion-field.

Sphere, right? (I doubt it's 2D.)

Correct, sphere.

Imagine it moving a bit to the left. The extended field has to
change to reflect the different directions it's going to be
pointing in afterward

What extended field?

The individual bits of fluff on a dandelion are all the same length
and aren't all that long. I was using that image to represent the
lines of force extending from an electron, but they 'extend' out to
infinity, forming the 'extended' field.

and that change can't be instantaneous; it propagates outward away
from the charge as a sort of ripple at the speed of light.

That bit I understand.

That expanding spherical ripple is composed of photons even though
overall they don't look like the typical sinewave illustration- if
you zoom in real close to the ripple

Not just the typical sinewave, because they're more than one, at
least in my image.

Right.

while it's moving you get the familiar sinewave image.

In 3D.

Yes.

By the way that should have been "while it's accelerating". Simple
constant motion produces no photons.

So there you are; moving a charge simply produces expanding
ripples in its inherent, infinite electric field.. Two charges
have a mutual field, and moving them in concert also produces
expanding ripples, but because they don't have the spherical
dandelion symmetry an isolated charge does, the ripples will have
a different symmetry to them.

Right. Why didn't you say my image was ok, only that it's not
bubbles but expanding spheres?

Because your image says nothing about the geometry of the situation;
how the charges and the 'lines of force' are arranged, and how their
motion gives rise to the photons. The geometry is the really important
thing.

(I still don't know what to do with the spin.)

Gravitational fields similarly surround masses; move a mass and
its field ripples, and the ripples (gravitons) expand away also
at the speed of light.

(Again, replace "move" with "accelerate".)

I wonder about strength of the ripples and direction. If I have a
ball on a chain, and swing it left, how's the proportion of the (I
know, tiny) strength in the ripples in all six directions?

Think about how to go about measuring them. A pretty good way would
be to hang pendulums all around and use them to directly map the
changing gravitational field of the moving ball by watching how the
pendulums move. Yeah, gravity is terribly feeble but in principle it
will work IF you have a massive enough ball.

Ideally you'd hang the pendulums first and note how they hang
without the ball present; that gives you a map of the local G field.
Then you introduce the ball and notice all the pendulums lean just a
_little_ bit toward the ball. Then, as you said, move the pendulum a
bit to the left and watch the pendulums some more. What would you
expect to see?

If you swing the ball back and forth, and have lots of pendulums, at
different distances, eventually the way the near ones' swing will get
out of step with the farther away ones, and that's how you'll know you
have "gravitational radiation".

(Shouldn't there be a time direction, too, what with you talking
about spacetime.)

That comes in when you start wondering how quickly the ripples
expand over a given distance.

Not dots at all, more like complicated self-contained directional
induced motion fields that travel at the speed of light.

Now that's finally something I can imagine. :) (And that makes
sense.)

They're very feeble though, because as I said the gravitational
coupling constant is so much smaller than the electromagnetic
equivalent.

'Coupling constant' doesn't really mean anything to me. At best
I can guess that it's a number that's slapped onto the field I
mentioned further above, where gravity is most happy at
(attracting and overlapping), keeping stuff where it is (and why
things don't speed up further, when falling to the ground). But
that's a wild guess.
Think of charges as digging their fingers into the warp and
weft of spacetime

?

Never mind that charges don't have fingers.

and _pulling_, deforming it to produce that electric field of
force.

Nope, no image.

Their mass also digs different fingers into other threads in the
weave of spacetime and _pulls_ to produce the gravitational field,
but much, much less strongly.

No image.

It would help if you said what's wrong with my images.

It's like gravity can't get anywhere near the 'traction' that
electrical charge can. Nobody knows why. Yet.

I don't see why it should.

it's just what they are, like traveling self-sustaining
deformations of the arrangement of water molecules are called
'water waves'. It's pointless to ask how water waves rearrange
water molecules, it's what they are.

Quite the opposite.

I might be able to use plain water waves, but as soon as I need
them to hit something, I need to know how that works. And with
physics, I have no way to just try and observe. Imagine I had
never heard of cliffs, and never taken a bath, and never seen a
duck on the river,... _all_ I know is just 'water waves',
unconnected to anything else. There's really nothing at all I
could do with that. But if someone told me how they work, I can
then use that do do all sorts of interesting things.
Then you're out of luck because at this time nobody knows 'how'
gravitational waves work.

An image of the effect will help, like the one above that you
apparrently don't like but don't want to correct.

You mean the blue blobs in water? It ignores the geometry.

Yep, whatever it takes. I suggest you don't quote specific
numbers other than to mention that the technique is all about a
way to exceed previous maximum power _density_, not just power
levels. The power density is what ovrwhelms the local spacetime
texture so to speak.

Makes sense.

Thanks again!
You're welcome; I hope some of this sticks so that you can use
it.

Well, I've got an image of the scientist and his construction, and
my own suggested images. :)

M'kay. I guess as long as you can make the transition believable...


Mark L. Fergerson
.

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