Bright lights & wind farm damage in Lincolnshire?

[The_Doctor]

Ah Damn, I was hoping the missing blade was a new structural member in a farmer's barn some where, never to be found. Thus making another 40 year old local myth.

That would have been the best way, I agree. I was always impressed by a helicopter blade that found its way to a local squat where people I knew were living, but that turbine blade would have been in a different league.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7791989.stm

So now we have documented proof that the "Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog " could have existed.

Steve

I saw that one too, very curious. Almost as outlandish as a pangolin. I used to think that Australia had a sort of monopoly on weird wildlife but not so. Scotland is no slouch, having the Shetland Pony...

[The_Doctor]

Roberts' second law, NO UFO video will ever be in FOCUS

Steve

Second??

You knew someone would have to ask what the first was, didn't you?

[mixedgas]

Roberts' first law,

As computers get faster and faster, programmers will so bloat the OS with garbage at a rate exceeding the growth in capacity such that eventually the OS will never complete a boot, let alone reach a user prompt.


Steve

[The_Doctor]

There's truth in that. It amazes me that there have been people who when I say I stay with W98 SE have said what amounts to "get with the program" or even "get a life", but every time I hear about another ghastly incompatibility or slowness with WXP or Vista I learn new things about the meaning of the word Schadenfreude. Also, I remember that the first thing many WXP users had to go through was a baptism of fire, just learning where to switch all the crap off. At least with 98 Lite you can strip out that stuff at install time. Nice fast stable OS, done the right way, by minimal core then adding stuff carefully at need. And easier to adapt than to learn something completely new.

The best joke of all is that people sometimes seem to need a machine that gamers would have killed their grannies for if it had existed a year earlier, yet this apparent need is to run a word processor or browse a few web sites! With a machine that can heat a couple of rooms. Never mind incandescent light bulbs, it's computers that will really escalate wasteful consumption of energy.

[tocket]

Here's an interesting video that shows what happens if a windmill gets out of control,and it's certainly not what happened to the one in Lincolnshire:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cdd_1203701257

well steve, Schrödinger's cat says that it was both struck by something and suffered from mechanical failure.. and both will be true until there is proof of one or the other.

BUT the transcendental thinking reveals to us that something can not be itself and NOT itself at the same time..

Is that really what Schrödinger's cat says? I thought cats couldn't talk. Perhaps more importantly is that you shouldn't apply quantum mechanics to macroscopic systems.

Besides, Schrödinger's cat is dead.

[mixedgas]

Here's an interesting video that shows what happens if a windmill gets out of control,and it's certainly not what happened to the one in Lincolnshire:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cdd_1203701257



Is that really what Schrödinger's cat says? I thought cats couldn't talk. Perhaps more importantly is that you shouldn't apply quantum mechanics to macroscopic systems.

Besides, Schrödinger's cat is dead.

"Mrs Shrodinger killed Dr Schrodinger, she was a member of PETA and got tired of having half dead cats." American Physicist Joke.

Steve

[The_Doctor]

Perhaps more importantly is that you shouldn't apply quantum mechanics to macroscopic systems.

I'm not so sure about that. First, many exalted physicists have found this controversial so there's no reason why we shouldn't have a go with this, we all have the right to risk a possibly foolish view...

Second, there are macroscopic quantum phenomena like Bose-Einstein condensates. And I read that some chunks of some kind of matter the size of the part of the average adult thumb covered by the thumbnail had been made. Can't remember the details but the point was they were definitely a single quantum state, AND definitely macroscopic too.

Then there's the matter of probablility, which quantum mechanics insists we accept in place of certainty. It's a frequent view that quantum uncertainty is like a digital switch, e.g. it's often assumed that you either know the position OR the momentum of a particle, but I think this isn't the right way to express it. As far as I know, the correct way is a kind of proportion, i.e. the more you know about the position, the less you can know about the momentum. Once you see it so, it is easily possible to extend this to the macroscopic world. This is important, because it's all made of the same stuff, and it's impossible to draw the line at what scale the erroneous (digital switch) view of the uncertainty begins to hold. While it's easy to apply it directly to a single particle, but not to groups of them, this is flawed because it forces a singularity for each particle, a total isolation. We KNOW that the quanta don't behave that way because light can behave as waves as well. Thus, the only practical way is to see it as proportional exclusion of certainty of one measure at the expense of another. I don't know how well that works for a single particle but I know that atoms have been manipulated as if they were larger macroscopic things (with optical tweezers, and scanning tunnelling microscopes), and it can resolve the scale conflict in the theory, as well as the need to model a behaviour that is both wave and particle.

To show what I mean in macroscopic stuff, consider photographing someone leaping across your view. The more accurately you want to capture exact position and subject detail, the shorter the strobe flash has to be, and the less info you have about their speed and momentum. If you lengthen the exposure you can see by a blur of motion some detail of the movement with loss of certainty in position. Good action photographers balance these uncertainties to get the best portrayal of both states of information in their images. This is familiar, but that's the point. If a physical theory cannot account for the familiar while it models the new, what use is it? If it only works in the maths, it's especially useless.

[The_Doctor]

"Mrs Shrodinger killed Dr Schrodinger, she was a member of PETA and got tired of having half dead cats." American Physicist Joke.

Steve

I take it we will not know the state of Mrs Schroedinger until someone opens Death Row?

[tocket]

The larger a system is, the more it behaves according to classical mechanics. There is no well defined border between the two, but a certain point the cost of using QM outweighs the benefit, as QM calculations are far more complicated. As always, there are exceptions. In theory you could describe any system with QM, but in practice it's unrealistic to model more than a few hundred atoms. For dynamic systems (time-dependent) it is barely possible to make the calculations for a single atom.

Regarding uncertainty the principle is usually referred to as the Heisenberg uncertainty relation. It simply states that:

Giving a lower boundary to which the position and momentum of a particle can be determined.

Similar uncertainty relations can be formulated for any two non-commutable operators. I would say that they are in essence the same uncertainty. Perhaps the most interesting one (at least in my opinion) is the Energy-time uncertainty relation:

Which is very useful in spectroscopy. It is for example possible to determine the lifetime of excited states based on the linewidth of an emission peak. Here, measurements on what might be seen to be macroscopic system gives rise to something that can only be explained by QM.

My view on QM is that it should only be applied where it is necessary and practical to do so. I even do some quantum chemical calculations myself every once in a while.

[The_Doctor]

I'd go with that too. It's an interesting inverse of the argument that Newtonian physics will do well till you need Einstein's relativity theory for extreme speeds. I like that there is no clearly defined boundary, it wouldn't ring true if there was. The maths is where I stop being able to follow, it's like Chinese to me, a pattern I can't interpret, but I also agree that the time/energy uncertainty is interesting (and that they are the same uncertainty, as to say otherwise would be like looking at copper and tin and saying only one was a metal). If I'd remembered it earlier I'd have wanted to base an example on it..


On maths, it always seems weird to me, either a way to say what can just as easily said with words, where actual application is inherent, or it becomes self-sufficient but intangible to me and I cease to know if it's telling me of a real truth of which manifestation is the abstraction, OR whether the maths itself has disappeared up its own proverbial. I think Einstein was rightly cautious of it too, preferring to use it to encapsulate the description he first deduced from observation and thought. Anyway, I have real trouble with it, and it probably stopped me from getting into real academics. Not that my school teaching was anything to trust either, that didn't help.