Church Of Thermodynamics

[Raze]

How to be a crank:

(1) Fail to be trained in physics or to educate yourself to the level of someone trained in physics.

(2) Misunderstand some aspect of modern physics as a result of (1).

(3) Read some popular literature on cutting edge physics, misunderstand it as a result of (1).

(4) Formulate a visual representation of the misunderstanding (3) that correlates with a predetermined philosophical or religious idea about the universe.

(5) Believe that modern physics is self-contradictory in some way, or contradictory to the universe in some way.

(6) Use this misunderstood physics to "prove" your ideas on a forum where actual physicists post (as opposed to publishing them in a peer reviewed journal).

(7) Fail to understand the rebuttals from actual physicists, and as a result fail to understand that your "theory" is at best non-applicable to science or at worst simply wrong.

(8) Back peddle, then deny you have back peddled, all the while being a Google Warrior when your idea is challenged, desperately trying to understand why the posters refuted your idea, while sweating profusely whenever a response is very mean and loaded with insults about your intelligence.

(9) Learn enough about the technical aspects of the rebuttal given to you to further misinterpret physics and make more of a fool of yourself in the eyes of trained physicists.

(10) At some point, choose to simply continue believing as you believe, deciding that mainstream physics is too "biased" for your ideas, or that you simply don't believe them anyway, so you ask yourself, "Why learn what they have to teach in the first place?"

(11) Repeat steps 6-10 on a different forum, and repeat steps 1-10 on a different subject.



ETA- JREF staff: the above is 100% original. No copy/pasting here.

 

[Ziggurat]

Then we agree. There is at least 1 dualism, or thermodynamics is only an approximation that can't be used to predict things as long-term as heat death of the universe.

Thermodynamics alone doesn't predict the heat death of the universe. You need to specify your cosmology too, and that's general relativity. In a cosmology with a big crunch, there's no heat death.

But I'm not sure why you think something being an approximation means it can't predict something long-term. Thermodynamics is not an approximation (or at least, no more so than every other theory and less so than most). One must frequently USE approximations in order to apply thermodynamics, but that's not the same thing.

It means, as many eastern philosophies speculate, that the universe is balanced in an infinite number of ways, that anything you can write in math exists somewhere, and when viewed together, all sums to zero, so technically the universe would not exist on average, if its kolmogorov complexity is 0.

Yeah, um, no. That's not what it means at all. First off, the universe not existing "on average" doesn't mean anything. It DOES exist. Whether or not various properties average to zero, the existence of the universe is obvious and self-evident. Whether or not everything that can exist does exist is both unscientific and irrelevant: the part of the universe we can interact with (even in-principle interactions) is finite, and does NOT include everything. And lastly, that's not what a Kolmogorov complexity of zero would mean.

Kolmogorov complexity is the technical phrase for how much total information is in something.

No it's not. It's a technical phrase for how much information is needed to describe something, but that's always with respect to some given language. Saying that it's zero means that once you specify the language, you don't need to describe the object: the language uniquely specifies the object. Which would mean that there's only one possible way the universe could be. While this could be true, it's not scientific, and furthermore, whatever this one way the universe could be doesn't need to be infinite either.

That's my theory of everything which I offer no proof of, but I do plan to test it, in a very indirect way using a software I will build. Its described at this thread, but theres no proof it will work or not until I build it.

I guarantee your "test" won't really test it after you build it either. Nothing you've described in this thread requires that any significant correlations show up in the data you're proposing to take.

If I'm right then the limits of the "Incompleteness Theorem" apply to the laws of physics and inexact words are the best we can do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompleteness_theorem

You've seriously misconstrued the incompleteness theorem. Inexact words have ambiguous meaning. Incompleteness means mathematical statements with definite meaning have uncertain truth. There's a fundamental difference, and that's why theories of physics will continue to be written in the language of math, even though the Incompleteness Theorem applies.

That strategy is good for finding approximations

Unless you're God, that's the best you can ever hope to do, regardless of what strategy you pick for determining the laws of physics.

Energy can be rotated, bent, whatever... to become mass. Is it also defined independently of mass?

That has no relevance to my statement. Entropy is defined independently of mass too, so whatever equivalence you want to set up between energy and mass, entropy still remains defined independently of it.

 

[DSo]

That's my theory of everything which I offer no proof of, but I do plan to test it, in a very indirect way using a software I will build.

Best sentence of all time!

BTW - what are you going to do after lunch?

 

[casebro]

Church Of Thermodynamics ?

I want to join, just to watch the Sacraments. Must be AWESOME funeral pyres !

Hmmm, I wonder what they do for weddings? Other sacrifices?

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Dualism?

 

[ben m]

The only closed system I know of is the whole universe, because universe means everything that exists. Therefore I hereby invalidate all physics theories that apply to closed systems and are based on experimental data. The experiments were not done in closed systems or approximations of closed systems. Garbage in. Garbage out.

You can't absolutely prove that energy is conserved, because you didn't do an energy-conservation experiment in my teakettle this morning. If you did, you did it only on the left side of the kettle and not on the right, and you did it this morning and not the morning before.

You can't absolutely prove that tritium is unstable, because you only ever looked at a statistical sub-sample of tritium atoms.

You can't call it "Kepler's Law" because for all you know the planets all popped into existence yesterday, along with false memories of them and a complete fictional history of astronomy, all generated by The Matrix.

That's all exactly as stupid as "you can't claim to know thermodynamics because you haven't done a Universe-spanning experiment." That's not how science or knowledge work.

Here's how science works. Do you have an alternate theory of statistical thermodynamics? Apply that theory to a (small, lab-scale) experiment of my choosing. Does your theory correctly predict what I should see? Does the current mainstream theory correctly predict what I should see? According to the your theory's predictions: will the mainstream theory/experiment disagreement, if any, get better or worse if the system gets bigger, or better-isolated?

 

[sol invictus]

You can't absolutely prove that energy is conserved, because you didn't do an energy-conservation experiment in my teakettle this morning. If you did, you did it only on the left side of the kettle and not on the right, and you did it this morning and not the morning before.

You can't absolutely prove that tritium is unstable, because you only ever looked at a statistical sub-sample of tritium atoms.

The funny thing is, if you could prove any of those things, they'd be trivial and useless. What makes science powerful and useful is precisely that it might be wrong.

 

[BenRayfield]

Link to what I copy/pasted

Rule 4 says you're allowed to copy/paste your own stuff but nobody else's. I did not violate rule 4. But since its still edited in the first post, here is a link to what should be there.

http://spacecollective.org/BenRayfield/6401/Church-Of-Thermodynamics

 

[SeanDamnit]

How to be a crank:

(1) Fail to be trained in physics or to educate yourself to the level of someone trained in physics.

(2) Misunderstand some aspect of modern physics as a result of (1).

(3) Read some popular literature on cutting edge physics, misunderstand it as a result of (1).

(4) Formulate a visual representation of the misunderstanding (3) that correlates with a predetermined philosophical or religious idea about the universe.

(5) Believe that modern physics is self-contradictory in some way, or contradictory to the universe in some way.

(6) Use this misunderstood physics to "prove" your ideas on a forum where actual physicists post (as opposed to publishing them in a peer reviewed journal).

(7) Fail to understand the rebuttals from actual physicists, and as a result fail to understand that your "theory" is at best non-applicable to science or at worst simply wrong.

(8) Back peddle, then deny you have back peddled, all the while being a Google Warrior when your idea is challenged, desperately trying to understand why the posters refuted your idea, while sweating profusely whenever a response is very mean and loaded with insults about your intelligence.

(9) Learn enough about the technical aspects of the rebuttal given to you to further misinterpret physics and make more of a fool of yourself in the eyes of trained physicists.

(10) At some point, choose to simply continue believing as you believe, deciding that mainstream physics is too "biased" for your ideas, or that you simply don't believe them anyway, so you ask yourself, "Why learn what they have to teach in the first place?"

(11) Repeat steps 6-10 on a different forum, and repeat steps 1-10 on a different subject.



ETA- JREF staff: the above is 100% original. No copy/pasting here.

There needs to be something in there about Big Science trying to squelch your theory because it's too radical and the public would revolt or something.

I vote that the next time someone posts Crank stuff on this forum that instead of arguing with this person, we immediately all agree with and praise that poster for his/her significant contribution to science. We encourage him/her to put his/her thoughts together and try to get published in a peer reviewed journal.
Then we see what happens...

 

[Dancing David]

Rule 4 says you're allowed to copy/paste your own stuff but nobody else's. I did not violate rule 4. But since its still edited in the first post, here is a link to what should be there.

http://spacecollective.org/BenRayfield/6401/Church-Of-Thermodynamics

Rule 4 ..."do not post large amounts of material available from other sites."...

 

[BenRayfield]

Dancing David,

Quoted from the details of Rule 4 at http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=5669795#post5669795 which you can get to by clicking the "E2" at the end of Rule 4 when you click "Forum Rules" in the menu.

Authors of copyrighted material may post their own work, provided they hold publishing rights to the material.

SeanDamnit,

if you have something specific to say against my theory that thermodynamics applies to the laws-of-physics the same way it applies to mass/energy, then say it. All you've done so far is name calling etc.

 

[BenRayfield]

AIUI, the Kolmogorov Complexity defines the minimum amount of information required to specify or fully describe something - for a random string it will be the information in the string, for the Mandelbrot Set it will be the smallest algorithm that can produce it. For the universe it will be the minimal amount of information required to specify it - regardless of what attributes in the universe sum to zero. It seems to that all you've said by asserting that the Kolmogorov Complexity of the universe is zero is that in your theory the universe doesn't exist.

My theory "The kolmogorov-complexity of the universe is 0." is separate from the theory about thermodynamics. I only told that theory here to give 1 possible case which allows my variation of thermodynamics to be true.

You're correct that if that theory is true then the universe does not exist, but you left out that any part of the universe individually does exist because its kolmogorov-complexity is more than 0.

(4) Formulate a visual representation of the misunderstanding (3) that correlates with a predetermined philosophical or religious idea about the universe.

I have my reasons for thinking certain philosophy ideas are true, and unlike most religous people, I do not have different definitions for "believe x" and "think x is true". For reasons that are too long to get into in this thread, I think the kolmogorov-complexity of the universe is 0, therefore I combine that with other things I know about physics.

(5) Believe that modern physics is self-contradictory in some way, or contradictory to the universe in some way.

I didn't go that far. I said that thermodynamics is a local approximation and should not be used to predict what the universe will become an infinite time in the future or however long time lasts.

as opposed to publishing them in a peer reviewed journal

All theories should be written informally before doing experiments and publishing results in such journals.

Thermodynamics alone doesn't predict the heat death of the universe. You need to specify your cosmology too, and that's general relativity. In a cosmology with a big crunch, there's no heat death.

I do not expect the entire universe to be crunched into a point, and I do not expect heat death.

But I'm not sure why you think something being an approximation means it can't predict something long-term. Thermodynamics is not an approximation (or at least, no more so than every other theory and less so than most). One must frequently USE approximations in order to apply thermodynamics, but that's not the same thing.

Approximations can predict things after a long time, but not an infinite time. What I've read of thermodynamics exactly says what the universe will be after an infinite time.

Yeah, um, no. That's not what it means at all. First off, the universe not existing "on average" doesn't mean anything. It DOES exist. Whether or not various properties average to zero, the existence of the universe is obvious and self-evident. Whether or not everything that can exist does exist is both unscientific and irrelevant: the part of the universe we can interact with (even in-principle interactions) is finite, and does NOT include everything. And lastly, that's not what a Kolmogorov complexity of zero would mean.

Any subset of the universe other than the whole universe has a kolmogorov complexity more than 0, so it exists, but together the kolmogorov complexity of 0 does not exist.

It has never been proven that we interact with only a finite part of the universe, and there is no way you can prove it, therefore it is not a scientific theory.

Kolmogorov complexity 0 means nonexistance. What do you think it means?

Unless you're God, that's the best you can ever hope to do, regardless of what strategy you pick for determining the laws of physics.

I'm not a dualist, therefore if I thought God existed, then I would also have to think there is some way I could learn to do the same things God does. "God" is a word people made up to explain a lot of things they didn't understand.

Church Of Thermodynamics ?

I want to join, just to watch the Sacraments. Must be AWESOME funeral pyres !

Hmmm, I wonder what they do for weddings? Other sacrifices?

Most people at this forum are already members of the Church Of Thermodynamics. If you think there should be sacrifices, its your religion. Do whatever you think Thermodynamics wants you to. And don't forget to drop some entropy in the collection plate.

You can't absolutely prove that energy is conserved, because you didn't do an energy-conservation experiment in my teakettle this morning. If you did, you did it only on the left side of the kettle and not on the right, and you did it this morning and not the morning before.

You can't absolutely prove that tritium is unstable, because you only ever looked at a statistical sub-sample of tritium atoms.

You can't call it "Kepler's Law" because for all you know the planets all popped into existence yesterday, along with false memories of them and a complete fictional history of astronomy, all generated by The Matrix.

That's all exactly as stupid as "you can't claim to know thermodynamics because you haven't done a Universe-spanning experiment." That's not how science or knowledge work.

Here's how science works. Do you have an alternate theory of statistical thermodynamics? Apply that theory to a (small, lab-scale) experiment of my choosing. Does your theory correctly predict what I should see? Does the current mainstream theory correctly predict what I should see? According to the your theory's predictions: will the mainstream theory/experiment disagreement, if any, get better or worse if the system gets bigger, or better-isolated?

Approximations can be used to test most parts of physics, but how do you know there aren't parts of physics that can only be tested on much bigger sizes, maybe as big as the whole universe? If the universe is a fractal (and I think it is), then whole universe size experiments aren't as hard as most people think.

The funny thing is, if you could prove any of those things, they'd be trivial and useless. What makes science powerful and useful is precisely that it might be wrong.

Almost. What makes science powerful is that it might be wrong BEFORE its proven right or wrong, but if its never proven right or wrong, it's a religion unless you say "I don't know". Welcome to the Church Of Thermodynamics.

 

[Reality Check]

Dancing David,

Quoted from the details of Rule 4 at http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=5669795#post5669795 which you can get to by clicking the "E2" at the end of Rule 4 when you click "Forum Rules" in the menu.

BenRayfield,
You missed Dancing David's point and what the rule states.
The rule is that you cannot post large anounts of text from other sites. This is nothing to do with copyright. Even if you are the author, the site rules do not allow you to post your entire web site in a single post!

SeanDamnit,

if you have something specific to say against my theory that thermodynamics applies to the laws-of-physics the same way it applies to mass/energy, then say it.

Well that is easy
Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics is the science of energy conversion involving heat and other forms of energy, most notably mechanical work. It studies and interrelates the macroscopic variables, such as temperature, volume and pressure, which describe physical, thermodynamic systems.

Laws of physics

A physical law or scientific law is a scientific generalization based on empirical observations of physical behaviour (i.e. the law of nature [1]). Laws of nature are observable. Scientific laws are empirical, describing observable patterns. Empirical laws are typically conclusions based on repeated scientific experiments and simple observations, over many years, and which have become accepted universally within the scientific community. The production of a summary description of our environment in the form of such laws is a fundamental aim of science. These terms are not used the same way by all authors. Some philosophers e.g. Norman Swartz use "physical law" to mean what others mean by "natural law"/"law of nature".[2]

Laws of physics are not described by thermodynamics. Thus your theory is wrong.

 

[BenRayfield]

Those are not the exact definitions I was using. I'll give an example to make the difference clear:

My theory says that the 4 forces will decay into some other patterns of forces the same way mass/energy decays as described by thermodynamics.

 

[MRC_Hans]

How to be a crank:

(1) Fail to be trained in physics or to educate yourself to the level of someone trained in physics.

(2) Misunderstand some aspect of modern physics as a result of (1).

(3) Read some popular literature on cutting edge physics, misunderstand it as a result of (1).

(4) Formulate a visual representation of the misunderstanding (3) that correlates with a predetermined philosophical or religious idea about the universe.

(5) Believe that modern physics is self-contradictory in some way, or contradictory to the universe in some way.

(6) Use this misunderstood physics to "prove" your ideas on a forum where actual physicists post (as opposed to publishing them in a peer reviewed journal).

(7) Fail to understand the rebuttals from actual physicists, and as a result fail to understand that your "theory" is at best non-applicable to science or at worst simply wrong.

(8) Back peddle, then deny you have back peddled, all the while being a Google Warrior when your idea is challenged, desperately trying to understand why the posters refuted your idea, while sweating profusely whenever a response is very mean and loaded with insults about your intelligence.

(9) Learn enough about the technical aspects of the rebuttal given to you to further misinterpret physics and make more of a fool of yourself in the eyes of trained physicists.

(10) At some point, choose to simply continue believing as you believe, deciding that mainstream physics is too "biased" for your ideas, or that you simply don't believe them anyway, so you ask yourself, "Why learn what they have to teach in the first place?"

(11) Repeat steps 6-10 on a different forum, and repeat steps 1-10 on a different subject.



ETA- JREF staff: the above is 100% original. No copy/pasting here.

Excellent! Fits several people here perfectly (will not mention names, since this is, apparantly, disallowed). Also, replace 'physics' with some other science discipline, and it works for that, too.

Very good work.

Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

Those are not the exact definitions I was using. I'll give an example to make the difference clear:

My theory says that the 4 forces will decay into some other patterns of forces the same way mass/energy decays as described by thermodynamics.

Unless you can show how this predicts something observable, I'm afraid you cannot call it a 'theory', but at best a thesis. However, a more realistic term is 'speculation'.

Hans

 

[Reality Check]

Those are not the exact definitions I was using.

Those are definitions of Thermodynamics and Laws of physics.
If your theory is about neither then you have to start by defining them.

My theory says that the 4 forces will decay into some other patterns of forces the same way mass/energy decays as described by thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics does not say the mass or energy or "mass/energy" decays. Thus your theory is still wrong.

 

[Eligbak]

Thermodynamics says disorder increases over time

No it doesn't. It says entropy does. I know how to define and calculate entropy rigorously. I do not know how to define "disorder" rigorously.
... a uniform temperature IS a maximum for entropy.
... Energy doesn't enter into thermodynamics until you talk about temperature. Entropy is defined independently of energy..

Most definitions of entropy for non-physicists (like me) are a bit, er, misleading. Or simply incomprehensible. Including the one on Wikipedia.

Entropy is a thermodynamic property that is a measure of the energy not available for work in a thermodynamic process. ... In the microscopic interpretation of statistical mechanics, entropy expresses the disorder or randomness of the constituents of a thermodynamic system or, analogously, the availability of accessible quantum mechanical states. A closed system always tends towards achieving a state with a maximum of entropy.

From a thermodynamic point of view, machines are energy conversion devices. Thus, such devices can only be driven by convertible energy.​

"Disorder" is a frequently used synonym for entropy, but as I (not? mis?)understand the concept, it seems rather like too much order, similarity, to me - an equilibrium, a melange, like coffee and cream totally mixed into one indistinguishable light brown brew. Order is reliable, unchanging, frequently boring. Disorder means action, violent clashes, shaking up things in everyday language.

Perhaps I should turn my liberal attitutes around for the sake of the cause and take the 1950's view:

picture disorder as little bleeding demonstrators who've beaten each other up so thorougly that they've all had enough, and everyone has drawn back into his little comfort zone where he will not disturb or influence anyone else. Or rather, they don't even dare to bleed.

While order is represented by a stack of wood (energy), the flow of oil, the sun (hot) vis-a-vis cold space... possibilities for exchange.

I've tried to explain order and disorder, so maybe Ziggurat can explain entropy to me.

Thanks for making the Kolmogorov Complexity seem a bit less esoteric, dlorde. On a related subject - randomness - can "real randomness" as it applies to information theory even be achieved by a computer, by itself, without someone to wriggle the mouse for "extra randomness"?

 

[MattusMaximus]

Just a point about thermodynamics, BenRayfield: you do realize that the "laws" of thermodynamics are not necessarily fundamental, right? What are commonly referred to as the "laws" of thermodynamics are actually the result of the most probable outcome of large numbers of interacting particles within a system, also known as statistical mechanics.

 

[MattusMaximus]

I don't want to dig through all the posts right now, so can anyone here tell me whether or not BenRayfield has any math to back up his/her claims?