A few questions for physicists

[dutchfire]

Matter is energy, so it can't come before energy.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, at the initial conditions, the Universe was 'stuff' that we'd never really call matter OR energy. It was something else until it cooled.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am not keen on having as a goal to define a moment before all parameters are anything even in the outer limits of what they are defined as currently (the parameters may be lacking, but having a pre-parameter too won't solve that, surely). Besides, how is a human supposed to actually identify some state before the state that uses all the definitions for existence we have for the universe? Isn't it a bit like trying to define not living from the point of view of yourself in the hypothetical that you weren't alive?

(ps: i tend intuitively to favor more the assumption that possibly the universe always existed, and we are looking for the wrong term here).

 

[El_Machinae]

Many, many theories have a pre-existing universe (not in a form we'd recognise though). The hard part is coming up with testable predictions for those theories.

 

[warpus]

It's an easy trap to assume that the universe will play by your rules and/or care about being logical or not making sense in some ways. It is what it is, even if it "doesn't sound right". The only thing you can do is study it, by listening to your gut you are likely going to go down the wrong path.

 

[Kyriakos]

It's an easy trap to assume that the universe will play by your rules and/or care about being logical or not making sense in some ways. It is what it is, even if it "doesn't sound right". The only thing you can do is study it, by listening to your gut you are likely going to go down the wrong path.

Oh i see you brought the mirror there. Please move it to the next room

 

[El_Machinae]

String Theory is used to explain exotic materials.

What's more, string theory has finally produced a set of physical predictions that experimentalists can go check.

My personal vow is that when they discover and believe the theory that 'unites' General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, I'm going to go learn it. Like, probably attend university courses and get my A.

 

[Kyriakos]

^Is it move valuable to try to account for all movements in the outer rings of a vortex, for all movements just at the point it generates and produces all other rings which by themselves have different attributes, or to study just why the vortex is there in the first place?

I am not sure if it matters much if we come up with a super-elegant equation which (with some parameters cancelled in most cases) would work for both the outer (large) and inner (minute) parts of a phenomenon. I doubt this is what will help. On my part i would tend to be interested in defining the phenomenon in relation to a hypothetical non-existence of it, and thus (hopefully) getting to study why we are in this mess in the first place.

PS: If one is more poetic, then: Maybe the difficulty in seeing the answer is that most humans would use it to ruin the viewpoint that allows it to be seen, once again.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, it would be like trying to explain a moving shadow when you cannot see the person making the shadow. It becomes incredibly simpler to explain if you can just understand that there's a person casting a shadow. Of course, you can run into problems, and under-describe reality

 

[Kyriakos]

Which is more relevant than not, given that it would be less difficult to examine the shadows of what we don't see, if so many did not choose to see in them everything that their own mind projects as ludicrous and ugly :\

 

[uppi]

String Theory is used to explain exotic materials.

My personal vow is that when they discover and believe the theory that 'unites' General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, I'm going to go learn it. Like, probably attend university courses and get my A.

That article you link is not about String theory as Grand Unified Theory, but string theory as a mathematical tool to make a simplified description of a condensed matter system. The latter can result in experimental predictions, but when people think of String theory they usually think of the former. And String theorists sometimes try to blur the line between those cases, maybe to hide the fact that String theory as a GUT has been a failure so far.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Space is real. Space is what adds time to the transit of photons from A to B.

Cool. What mechanism does space interact with the photons by?

 

[El_Machinae]

I don't know.

 

[uppi]

Cool. What mechanism does space interact with the photons by?

The vacuum field of space.

However, you have to be careful when using the classical particle picture for a photon. A photon can be at A and B at once, so there are cases where the time it takes to travel from A to B is not a meaningful quantity.

In principle, this applies to all other particles as well, but particles with rest mass are much harder to delocalize.