Out of Pod Experience

Thanks for answering this question! I forgot I had posted this :) very interesting.

I happen to know that there guns that can fire out of water or sand because their weapons fire using gas and won't overheat if it's dumped in sand or water.

Edit: Balls can't find the video, it should be up on future weapons somewhere, it's a Heckler and Koch assault rifle.

An esoteric quantum mechanics question for you:

Let's say a resting particle decays in say electron and a positron and they fly along the x axis. As i understand it they share the same wave function.

Because the particle was at rest and the momentum has to be conserved the moment I measure the momentum on the positron, the momentum of the electron has to be same just in the opposite direction. Like those entangled spins i guess.

If you measure the momentum on the positron would this still effect measurement of the position on the electron because of the uncertainty principle? Would it even be possible for the observer of the electron to tell that his measurements are no longer accurate?

tricky question. one of the more precise physical theories is Quantum Field Theory (QFT or Quite ******* True!) which states that fundamental particles can be thought of as the quantization of a specific "field". the photon and electron are quantizations of the elctromagnetic field, for example. a field in this context is, mathematically, an object with infinite degrees of freedom (it can vary in any way it likes). a good way to think of quantum fields is to envision an infinite sheet (or more realistically, a fluid) that can flutter and wave. certain types of waves that travel along the sheet are the "particle quantizations" of that field. the interactions of the waves also describes the interactions of the particles (photons and electrons are like ripples on the field).

from this context, the universe itself (space-time) could be thought of as a field, and all the other fields that we have identified may simply be different perspectives on this one. in physics, a field which unifies the four fundamental forces of the universe is called a grand unified field. the description of such a field that is mathematically consistent with our observations is called a Grand Unified Theory or a Theory Of Everything (GUTs and TOEs for short). this is the holy grail of ALL physics. many attempts have been made in the past but they are either untestable with our current level of technology, or have been disproven. it could be that space-time is just another part of this field that needs to be unified. honestly, i don't know.

so, to finally answer your question, the universe could very well be both! it could be both matter AND the thing that contains matter. the universe could be this unified field, and matter would then be ripples on the field. we are and interact with the ripples which exist within the field itself.

so there is a slight caveat here. if you KNOW that the primary particle was at rest and its decay resulted in a positron and an electron then you have already measured BOTH of their momenta. why is this? it is because momentum is not a frame invariant quantity. the momentum of a particle depends on your velocity relative to that particle. spin, on the other hand, IS frame invariant. the spin of the electron is always +- 1/2 no matter how fast you move. so in order to claim that the original particle was at rest, you must be moving in such a way that it is at rest in YOUR FRAME, which already requires you to know its velocity, and therefore momentum.

by claiming this, we have already affected the uncertainty in the position of all the particles in question. because we cannot measure a particles momentum and position simultaneously, if we followed our initial measurement of momentum, with one of position, we now have an uncertainty in momentum! you may think that this violates conservation of momentum, but the key here is that one measurement follows the other. there is a space in time in which the particle is unobserved and this affects the following measurement (there is, in fact, an energy-time uncertainty principle as well. furthermore, you can create an "uncertainty principle" for any two observable quantities that share a certain property).

hope this helps!

both men have excellent points of views on the nature of science, but i consider myself to be a sophisticated falsifiacationist, so i would lean towards Kuhn. the ability for a theory to be proven false is CENTRAL to the very definition of what a scientific theory is.

and yes, people who use the word paradigm without understanding what it means makes me cringe too

How did you manage to keep the trolling so low in this thread :P

Can you sub-entangle particles from a batch of material entangeled to itself?

Can you entangle a batch of materials instead of just a pair of atoms?

Would those sub entagled batch still be able to influence the entire batch?

Is there a way to prevent what the sub entangled batch influence from effecting another sub entangled particle.

there are a lot of thoughts here so i will do my best to address them, please let me know if i miss anything.

the expansion of the universe appears to be driven by energies that are independent of the matter it contains. light and matter don't "push" the edges of the universe. our current measurements on the expansion of the universe shows that, not only was it at one time expanding faster than the speed of light, but in 1998 it was discovered to be accelerating.

there are a couple key points that concern the expansion of the universe that i would like to touch on. hopefully this will give a better idea of what is going on! imagine a square grid (like a chess board) and that on three adjacent intersections of the grid there are galaxies A, B and C. now, suppose you had a device that could give you the precise distance between any two grid points as a digital readout and you place two of these devices on the grid; one between galaxies A and B and the second between galaxies B and C. here, the grid represents-space time, so let's pretend that it behaves (and expands) the exact same way!

the two devices will always read the same value for the distance between the grid points because the grid points are defined relative to each other, but that value will increase with time. space time is literally scaling up (similar to what you would see as you zoom into a photograph). the galaxies remain on the grid points, but the unit of measure for the distance between the points is increasing!

now, consider the velocity of B relative to A. this would be the rate at which the readout of your digital ruler between A and B changes per second. lets say its 1m/s. because the two readouts always give the same value, the relative velocity between B and C is also 1m/s. they key point here is that the relative velocity between A and C will be the sum of the two, or 2m/s! from a person living in galaxy A, it would appear that galaxy C is moving away twice as fast as the closer galaxy B!

in this case, we would then say the the universe is expanding at 1m/s/grid-space (read as one meter per second per grid space). by plotting the velocity of distant objects relative to the distance of that object, we get a line, and the slope of this line tells us the rate of expansion of the universe. this slope is called Hubbles Constant, and our current measurements place it at around 70 km/s/Mpc or seventy kilometers per second per megaparsec. a parsec is about three light years and a megaparsec is a million parsecs (so this is around 70 km/s per three million light years!).

as for the next three paragraphs...
i am not entirely sure about what you are saying here :( what do you mean by "save"? as for the second bit, i have never heard of this... the force acting on an object is determined by that objects acceleration and visaversa. if a ship is moving at a constant velocity of .99c, a person riding in that ship would feel no force and could walk around as if they were on the ground at "rest" (assuming there's gravity and such).

as for the third bit, again, i don't follow what you are trying to say, sorry! are you asking why does fusion exist? or the nature of fusion in general? sorry again, but can you clarify what you are trying to say?

for those who may not be familiar, quantum entanglement is one of the more weirder consequences of our quantum mechanical universe. when two particles are entangled, it means that the observation of one particle affects the observation of the other instantly, regardless of the distance between them! a common analogy that describes the effect goes something like this...

once upon a time, a brilliant physicist created a device that could entangle coins. the physicist used the device to entangle two coins and, without observing either of them, places each in their own box and passes one to each of his graduate students. the physicist then instructed his students to go to opposite sides of the planet, open their boxes, record whether the coin is on heads or tails, and report back. the graduate students did so, without what would be considered legal pay or any real compensation. their travels were both arduous and turbulent, and the boxes which hold the coins bounce around a considerable amount. both students heard their coin rattling around inside its box and lamented at what was now probably a ruined experiment. they reached their respective positions on opposite sides of the planet, opened their boxes at a pre-agreed upon time, and recorded the result of the coin in their notebooks.

they then returned to the physicists who, delighted with the accomplishment of his students, rewarded them by giving each of them another coin and instructed them to do it again. and again. and again..... after many MANY repetition, the physicist finally had them compare the results of their notebooks and they found that every single time, without fail, when one coin was heads, the other was tails.

spooky yes?

so, when i first read your question i thought to myself, surely not! most entanglement experiments are highly sensitive to things like temperature and so are usually done using single atoms. but then i did some searching just to be sure and i found this. apparently, a group of scientists in the UK have successfully entangled two diamonds, and observed the effects of this entanglement over several centimeters! this is a HUGE DEAL. so now, at this point, i would have to say that the answer to your questions is a resounding "possibly"! assuming i understood them correctly...

1) for a partial answer to this refer to my previous response. the FTL page is trying to describe a communication system based on quantum entanglement (and it does a very VERY poor and inaccurate job of it. i am in the process of fixing it). based on our current understanding of quantum mechanics, such a system is not possible. this is primarily because we cannot yet control what state a single particle will occupy without breaking its entanglement. because of this, the observed stated appear in a random order, and from this alone, we cannot know if the result is our first observing the particle, or one created from the observation of its entangled partner.

2) that depends on how this rotation is defined. if we assume that the matter of the universe is in the same rotating frame as space-time, and if we assume that classical mechanics still hold at this level (which we really can't) then we should observe an unexplainable force accelerating matter in the universe away from the "center of rotation", if we can even define such a thing for the universe (the universe has no center as far as our measurements go). the rate of rotation would be proportional to the acceleration we observe. if space-time were in a different rotating frame than matter then, well, i'm not sure if we could measure the rotation rate. i'm not even sure what a rotating space time would imply or what other consequences it would raise... sorry!

3) wormholes cannot form rings because gravitational fields are central and conservative. such a ring black hole would collapse back into a spherical singularity.

4) it would look similar to what the universe looks like locally! remember, even though what we see when we look in the sky is an image of the past, the matter there is just as old as the matter here =D

5) i can actually calculate this and i will do so monday when i get back to the lab and have time to kill between my simulations. there is a limit to the number of g's (multiples of earth gravity) the average human can withstand. i can derive a function for the gravitational acceleration as a function of distance from a planet and simply solve for the the distance that corresponds to the human limit. should be fun! also, there is a very good XKCD infographic that shows the relative depth of gravitational wells in our solar system. be sure to check it out!