Higgs' Boson? - We Have A Discovery

[umslopogaas]

#128 Gordon, "The brain will just go through the motions I suppose"

Wouldnt fire up any fly I've ever encountered, they seem very at home among the motions.

Reminds me of the time when, as part of my job, I was sent to a very rugged bit of Eritrea, where toilets were in short supply [actually zero] and to deposit a motion, you had to wander off into the middle distance with a bashed about roll of loo paper and squat down behind a large prickly pear cactus, which was the only plant I could recognise in that environment. Dont squat too close, by the way, there are prickles ...

[Gordon]

..... Eritrea, ...

I get the point! What on earth got you there?? Don't tell me, a ship - you know what I mean! Or was it just a flying visit?!?

[Gordon]

#135:

I guess you might [have been taught, not not understood!], he would have been 60ish then. Which college then? I didn't, but No 2 daughter went to the other place.

He seems to have had a reputation as a lucid lecturer despite his allegedly cool personality. I have his biography "The Strangest Man" which is a facinating read. He started as an Engineer just like all the best people!! I'm sure it would have been a great experience to have been taught by such a person anyway. Strange how some brilliant minds can't teach for toffee even in the best of places!!

[umslopogaas]

#137 Gordon. I've been writing some reminiscences and have several pages in draft about that trip to Eritrea, which was quite an adventure, it involved a trip down the Red Sea in a dhow in August, the temperature was in the upper forties in the shade, but there wasnt any shade. I'll edit a version for this forum, though I might have to consult with french frank about document size, it does run on a bit.

[Quarky]

#117:



Best of Luck!! Let us know how you get on.
===================
.

Finding this process of revisiting QM fascinating, a reliving of my experiences while at University, examining all the pluses and minuses with the benefit of time.

Anyway, before this thread goes cold, one of the wonders of the internet is being able to choose one's university and one's lecturers at will, all from the comfort of one's home and without paying any tuition fees!

Leonard Susskind at Stanford Uni. is unfortunately very long winded -lectures probably aimed at those who actually want to work in QM. David Deutsch at Oxford Uni. gives the info in a more distilled version, and looks likely to give me the answers - assuming I can live with his terrifying intellect!

http://www.quiprocone.org/Protected/DD_lectures.htm

[Gordon]

Excellent stuff OB! I listened to the first Qubit lecture and [I think] I understood it all!!! And me an engineer not a mathematician! I think it helped having done some reading about it all before. It is very good at giving a basic illustration of quantum mechanics and how the maths describes it. Maybe I won't understand it later today though. I'll have a little rest before listening to the next one.

Not sure about this multiverse business though. It seems to say that all possible outcomes happen, as it were, at the same time in these multiple worlds. Only one specific outcome happens in one of these worlds at that time but all of them do happen somewhere. But in only one world, if we conduct our experiment many many times, we experience all those same outcomes at different times if we take long enough. There is a reciprocal relation in there somewhere. Sounds like Fourier in a way and his transform. The same quantum entity is expressing itself in full in each case; in one case in many different worlds and the other at many different times. What is the difference? Two views of the same thing. It seems that time is the key. You enable change through time in one case and through many opportunities in other "places" in the other.

[Gordon]

Just had a few idle minutes between projects this PM so made a cuppa and came around to thinking about that fly issue.

OK, Budapest, here’s the fly thing, I don’t know of this is the sort of thing you had in mind but here goes:

Consider a fly, he [let’s not get into gender] is aloft and, for the moment, hovering stably a few feet above the earth in still dry air at 20C and 1 bar. Let’s not get into his anatomy for the time being, he is just another piece of matter suspended in space.

His main concern is to remain aloft which means dealing with gravity. If he doesn’t he’ll fall down. So his meagre mass is being accelerated towards the ground at 32.2 ft/s/s. In order to counteract this he has to create an equal and opposite upward acceleration of that value. How?

By flapping his wings vigorously [thereby causing that irritating buzzing noise] he is able to use the inertia of the air as a means of generating the necessary uplift. It is not totally different from what a helicopter does when hovering except of course it doesn’t flap. His wings cause the air to be forced downwards with each downward flap and that air presents the resistance that raises the required force. It is so arranged that the upward flap of each cycle does not cancel the downward one so that there is a net useful effect. He must therefore adjust those wings appropriately during one cycle of flap. [Consider fast photography of a humming bird]. To go down he flaps less and vice versa. This flapping business seems so successful that a good few creatures have adopted it.

He can stay in this situation indefinitely provided nothing changes much eg a breeze or puff of wind. The movement of those wings is cyclic and has a fixed form and does not need calculating anew for each cycle, only a bit of adjustment from time to time. Not much to calculate really. In fact it probably doesn’t need any calculation at all. If a breeze should occur some sensing of that will adjust the wings or the fly simply goes with the flow.

If some of the downforce from his wings is diverted from the vertical so that it results in an additional horizontal [forward] force the fly will be accelerated horizontally, ie he will be seen not only to hold himself up in the air against gravity he will also “fly”. Not unlike Harrier VTOL jump jet. That horizontal force will be met by an equal and opposite force resisting the movement [oddly enough this is called “air resistance” and will depend on the fly’s anatomy]. The two forces will remain in balance as the fly moves at a constant speed forward there being no net force to cause any acceleration unless he decides to move faster in which case a net force is needed. So saith Prof Newton. The fly’s mass is sufficiently large that Brownian motion is not significant.

The various other manoeuvres this fly can accomplish are variants of the above including accelerating himself in an angular fashion to cause rotation [barrel rolls, loop the loop etc] instead of linear motion. This by causing an imbalance between left and right wing flaps. A combination of those manoeuvres will see him land on a ceiling. These rotations or linear motions can be in any of the three dimensions of space in which he is placed. All accomplished by adjusting the way his wings beat the air. Piece of cake for a fly. Just like you being sick for example, the nervous system doesn’t require your brain to get intimately involved. The appropriate sequence of events is more or less known beforehand.

How he decides when and where to make those adjustments is another thing of course. That is more interesting than mere mechanics, however complex it may appear. Creatures are stimulated by the smell of food [or light eg Moth] for example so that, together with a search algorithm that may be simple and repetitive, may be used to direct that creature towards it. Again, that may not need a complicated “brain” to be intimately involved. All that RAM and MIPS stuff is for digital computers anyway. Analogue ones are very good at doing the sort of things that are needed for control systems. They don’t compute as a digital machine may do, they just construct an analogue system, a model of that being mimiced. Such a thing could be set up inside the fly after many millenia of evolution.

Does that help?

[Quarky]

Not sure about this multiverse business though. It seems to say that all possible outcomes happen, as it were, at the same time in these multiple worlds. .

Nor me. Wikipedia entries keeping my head above water. Multiverse appears an interpretation of QM, rather than a new theory, so I am hopeful I can slide back to the traditional representations of QM if the going gets too tough.

The example is given of the double slit experiment where, if you don't look to see which slit the electron goes through, there will be electron diffraction. If you do look, you change the system, and the wave function description of the system collapses. According to Multiverse as I currently understand it, by "taking a look", a new universe has been created, alongside an existing universe where a "look" has not been taken???

[Vile Consort]

#135:

I guess you might [have been taught, not not understood!], he would have been 60ish then. Which college then? I didn't, but No 2 daughter went to the other place.

He seems to have had a reputation as a lucid lecturer despite his allegedly cool personality. I have his biography "The Strangest Man" which is a facinating read. He started as an Engineer just like all the best people!! I'm sure it would have been a great experience to have been taught by such a person anyway. Strange how some brilliant minds can't teach for toffee even in the best of places!!

Yes, he did, although apparently numbers at his lectures tended to dwindle until only students from his own college were left. Presumably in those days, lecture courses were delivered by two lecturers concurrently (in different rooms!), as they were when I was an undergraduate. He apparently wasn't a lot of help if anybody asked him to explain a point again - he just repeated word for word what he had already said.

"The Strangest Man" is indeed absolutely fascinating. Also fascinating is "Quantum" by Manjit Kumar, which not only describes how quantum ideas developed gradually but also gives a good feel for the personalities involved and their particular points of view on the topic. I hadn't, for example, realised until I read this book that Schroedinger thought his equation did away with "all that quantum jumping" and was disappointed when Dirac proved his approach to be equivalent to Heisenberg's matrix formulation.

[umslopogaas]

I've posted this story before, but am delighted to be given the excuse to repeat it. Dirac was both extremely taciturn and maddeningly precise. He was once persuaded to give a lecture at Harvard, or somewhere very prestigious, and for an hour America's finest watched with furrowed brows as he covered the board in massively complex equations. At the end, the chair announced that Prof. Dirac would take questions and a young chap put up his hand and said (something like), "Professor Dirac I dont quite see why you have inverted the cube root of the kappa function in the third equation from the right at the top of the board." There was, even for Dirac, a very long silence and eventually the chair said "Prof. Dirac, can you answer the question?" Dirac replied "It wasnt a question."

Apparently he was married, his wife must have been a very patient woman.

And I think it was Dirac who was once in conversation with a fellow physicist who got so exasperated at the complexity of Dirac's equations that he burst out, "Paul, there are possibly three people in the world who understand what you're talking about!" Once again there was a very long silence. "Paul, are you OK?" "Yes thank you, I was just wondering who the third person might be."

[umslopogaas]

#137 Gordon, I've been writing some reminiscences and have about five A4 pages on Eritrea. I cant figure out how to copy them over from MS Word to this forum (I'm not very computer literate and this new machine has up to date versions of my familiar software, I cant make anything work - what the h**l have they done with the Copy/Edit functions?), but I could send them to you by email and then probably you could -or maybe you know someone who could?

To do this we need each other's email addresses. To keep them private, send yours to french frank, who will then send it on to me. ff already has mine and will send it to you (I've checked and ff is willing to do this).

Its quite a fun story and I think others would be interested in it. Its certainly a bit different from the usual discussion material we find here!

[amateur51]

Yes, he did, although apparently numbers at his lectures tended to dwindle until only students from his own college were left. Presumably in those days, lecture courses were delivered by two lecturers concurrently (in different rooms!), as they were when I was an undergraduate. He apparently wasn't a lot of help if anybody asked him to explain a point again - he just repeated word for word what he had already said.

"The Strangest Man" is indeed absolutely fascinating. Also fascinating is "Quantum" by Manjit Kumar, which not only describes how quantum ideas developed gradually but also gives a good feel for the personalities involved and their particular points of view on the topic. I hadn't, for example, realised until I read this book that Schroedinger thought his equation did away with "all that quantum jumping" and was disappointed when Dirac proved his approach to be equivalent to Heisenberg's matrix formulation.

You've prompted me to get both of these, umslopogaas

Does either require a substantial understanding of theoretical maths?

[umslopogaas]

am51, no, no big maths required. I THINK I got these stories from Gribbin's 'In Search of Schrodinger's Cat' (Corgi pb 1984), but I'm not absolutely sure, I might have found them on these fora a few months ago. Anyway, there is some maths in Gribbins' book, but you can skip it and enjoy the story without losing much (well, what the hell would I know, I dont have the maths to know how much you are losing by not having the maths, if you follow me).

But the other two books need comment from those who have read them, I havent.

[amateur51]

am51, no, no big maths required. I THINK I got these stories from Gribbin's 'In Search of Schrodinger's Cat' (Corgi pb 1984), but I'm not absolutely sure, I might have found them on these fora a few months ago. Anyway, there is some maths in Gribbins' book, but you can skip it and enjoy the story without losing much (well, what the hell would I know, I dont have the maths to know how much you are losing by not having the maths, if you follow me).

But the other two books need comment from those who have read them, I havent.

Many thanks, umps!

You must think I'm deranged because the obvious person to whom I should have post my query is, of course, Vile Consort :duh:

[umslopogaas]

#146, oh well, as punishment for my computer incompetence, I have typed the whole lot back in again. Here we go.

In 1988 my boss called me into his office, puffed on his pipe and gave me a London telephone number. I rang it and got through to an anonymous aid office somewhere in the smoke (these days smokeless) traffic and arranged an interview with a a very friendly chap in a comfy jumper. He'd been to a rather obscure part of the obscure part of a country where no-one ever goes anyway, and met some arresting people. They needed help. His agency had money, would I be interested? Er yes, cough up the necessary and I'll go to the moon. In fact I was to go to Khartoum (pronounced with a ferocious gob at the end of the first syllable in order to spit out the second, "Khar T ...HOICK!! ... dong toum") and spend a month behind guerilla lines in Eritrea, giving crop protection advice to the Eritrean People's Liberation Force.

The Eritreans at that time were fighting a guerilla war of independence against the Ethiopians, and had done the classic Maoist manoeuvre of retreating into the mountains while they gathered their forces (I'm not an expert in political positioning, by the way, but the situation was explained to me by a savvy consultant in economics, or whatever, those professions that pay real dosh, who I met in the EPLF guesthouse). You couldnt access Eritrea via Ethiopia, so yo so you had to