10000000000000th Post !!!

[Swimmin' Salmon]

Perfection can only be seen through a very limiting lens.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

I am told that "uncertainty principle" is a misleading translation (because it implies an imperfection in measurement rather than an inherent relationship between two properties), and that Heisenberg preferred "indeterminacy principle". Confirm/deny?

That's accurate, both as a more exact translation of the original German term "Unschärferelation," and for the actual meaning in quantum mechanics.

[waterplant]

Unschärf is most closely translated as 'blurred'. Schärf has a broad definition incorporating sharpness and hotness of food.

[Triumph]

I wonder if Mr. Vogel ever imagined when he first started writing games that he would one day provide a place for discussions of quantum mechanics...or any of the other things on these forums, for that matter. LOL.

[Student of Trinity]

Schärfe is the noun, and scharf the adjective. I post this because it is hard-won knowledge for me. My first guess was still Unscharfheit, which is not a word.

[Kelandon]

It has been suggested that most of the major physics terms named throughout the 20th century have been badly named. The theory of "relativity" might better have been called the theory of "invariance." And don't get me started on quark names.

 

Then again, I think I said that (about relativity) once before, and SoT pointed out how I was wrong. I don't remember why, though.

[Swimmin' Salmon]

The same could be said for pretty much anything that is observed, and named by, scientists. There are, of course, exceptions, but ... geez, you'd think that folks could think up better names than Pseudotsuga menziesii. Obviously named in honor of Archibald Menzies, naturalist and doctor aboard HMS Discovery, the common name is Douglas-fir, in honor of David Douglas, the botanist who brought specimens back to Great Britain and cultivated it at Drumlanrig Castle in the early 1800's.

 

The actual catalogist was the French botanist, Carriere.

 

So yeah, not a lot of sense anywhere in the scientific community.

[Alorael at Large]

Species get named whatever the discoverer feels like naming them. Asteroids are apparently similar. Theories tend to get either a name, a description, or both. If you're going to describe, you should probably describe well.

 

—Alorael, who has heard the same about Heisenberg's principle, even to the point of a textbook using indeterminacy in place of the more common uncertainty. He has also heard it better explained that it has nothing to do with measurement. Rather, it has to do with the momentum and position not being defined to arbitrary precision at the same time. They are indeed relatively indeterminate.

[Monroe]

Originally Posted By: Kelandon

And don't get me started on quark names.

I'd like to know more about quark names, actually.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Originally Posted By: Running Hot

Um, no you can't. You can't decide not to play. Everyone is always playing, whether they know it or not. You can't win or quit, you can just continue to not lose. You can stop caring about it, but you still have to play. . .

I don't know about the others here, but I don't like people trying to tell me what I'm thinking. And I have never played and will never play the Game.

Also:

[Randomizer]

Particle physicists are whimsical.

 

Quarks came from the James Joyce quote:

 

"Three quarks for Muster Marks."

 

where quarks was mispronouncing of quart.

 

The quarks are currently given names of up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. Although truth and beauty have been used.

[Rowen]

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel

I don't like people trying to tell me what I'm thinking.

*Waves his hand* These are not the droids you are looking for.

[Student of Trinity]

Murray Gell-Mann claims he wanted to name quarks after the 'kwork' sound of a quacking duck, and only later settled on the 'quark' spelling after seeing it in Joyce. He does have vanity New Mexico license plates that read 'QUARKS'.

 

I'm not sure what I said about relativity versus invariance, but it's true that relativity was an established concept long before Einstein. If you've thought about how a car driving at 60 passing another car going 50 is overtaking at a relative speed of 10, then you've applied relativity — as it was first explicitly explained by Galileo, and believed until Einstein's 1905 paper. Einstein introduced a new version of the familiar concept of relativity. Some things that were previously considered absolute, like time, became relative in Einstein's version; some things that were considered relative, like the speed of light, became absolute.

 

The funniest thing to me about quarks is that there are six of them, when we really only need two. The up and down quarks are the main components of protons and neutrons and pions, and the other four quark flavors really only show up in big accelerators.

 

All matter particles come in three versions: tall, grande, and venti sizes, as it were. The light versions — up and down quarks, and electrons — make up all matter as we know it. The middle versions — charm and strange quarks, and muons — show up fairly often as short-lived products of high energy reactions. The heaviest versions — top and bottom quarks, and tauons — are only glimpsed very briefly, in very high energy collisions, before they decay into clusters of lighter particles.

 

When the muon was first discovered, I.I. Rabi exclaimed, "Who ordered that?" It was really like having the pizza arrive with some unexpected extra topping. To this day nobody knows why we have to have two extra, heavier copies of every kind of matter particle, which don't really appear to be 'used' in nature much at all. There is pretty convincing albeit indirect evidence, at least, that there are only three 'generations' of matter — that there are not fourth and more still heavier variants of everything out there yet. Though one does wonder. Maybe the yet heavier variants are just really a lot heavier.

[Kelandon]

Presumably string theorists have presented plausible but unverifiable explanations for the quark issue (why we have the bonuses). They're good for that sort of thing.

 

I feel as though a lot of particles are more or less useless, but I suppose they exist to make some conservation/symmetry work out. Neutrinos seemed pretty lame when I first learned about them (uh, they don't interact electromagnetically, so they pass through pretty much everything all the time), but I guess they're important in nuclear reactions to conserve I-forget-what.

[waterplant]

Maybe scientific teams should have a philosopher on board as philosophy is much about accuracy. Philosophers split finer things than atomic particles on a regular basis.

[Alorael at Large]

No. They split hairs. Atoms are substantially finer.

 

—Alorael, who would support the addition of a philosopher specializing in ethics to many science teams. Not all, though. Someone has to be out there doing the mad science.

[Monroe]

To their credit, philosophers were talking about atoms for centuries before scientists were.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

tall, grande, and venti

...ergh. Starbucks and its illogical sizes.

Originally Posted By: Alorael

No. They split hairs. Atoms are substantially finer.

Not finer than metaphorical hairs, which are the finest thing possible.

Originally Posted By: Monroe

To their credit, philosophers were talking about atoms for centuries before scientists were.

Only because that was when the philosophers were also the scientists, before science emerged as a field distinct from philosophy.