When I fire the gun backwards at you from that fast moving car, whilst the bullet is accelerated toward you the reaction is accelerating my car away from you. Me and my car are moving faster and hence we have more energy.
That means that if I ever want to stop the car I will get more energy as heat out of the brakes. That is where the "missing" energy went.
Now, I'm not sure how this simple classical physics view fits with the missing energy of our photon.
When I fire the gun backwards at you from that fast moving car, whilst the bullet is accelerated toward you the reaction is accelerating my car away from you. Me and my car are moving faster and hence we have more energy.
That means that if I ever want to stop the car I will get more energy as heat out of the brakes. That is where the "missing" energy went.
Now, I'm not sure how this simple classical physics view fits with the missing energy of our photon.
If the car was faster than the bullet, would you end up hitting yourself?
Very interesting discussion, indeed. What I tried to express was: if there can be photons of every color, frequency, energy, call it what you like, how can I talk of quantization? The spectra of electromagnetic light obviously is continues.
The point is: photons need not to exist and still there are photons. What you described is: there is a hydrogen atom that emits energy in form of electromagnetic radiation. The point is: such an atom only emits the energy that makes the difference between two exitation levels. But this event, transfer of electromagnetic energy for a piece of matter to the vacuum (which, as we now believe, is filled with radiation) IS the creation of a photon. But you will not be able to detect this photon! Because (as it is red shifted) it can not be absorbed by a hydrogen atom you have in your detector, it just doesn't carry enough of energy!
The whole desaster, according to my degree of understanding, comes from the fact, that some people do not really understand what people wrote. Read carefully the paper of Planck, read Bose's and Einstein's explanation of black body radiation, and try to understand what Einstein said: The laws of physics are not different in different inertial systems. He did not say: we can not determine a coordinate system, that is at stand still!
Let me simplify your bullet example a little. Imagine to have a homogeneous mass. A sphere. And now cut the sphere in the middle and install a spring. The two halfs of the sphere will move apart with a certain velocity. Which one is moving?
...if there can be photons of every color, frequency, energy, call it what you like, how can I talk of quantization?
As far as I can tell notions of quanta have never said that.
The original idea of quanta, as proposed by Einstein, was that an atom can only maintain certain discrete energy levels. That is to say that only discrete lumps of energy can be put in or taken out. Given the relation between frequency and energy we see that only certain discrete frequencies of light can be absorbed or emitted by an atom. Which is what we observe by experiment in school.
The original idea was that these quanta were a property of atoms not a property of light itself. Which was considered to be a regular wave like thing that could adopt any energy. As Maxwell's equations describe.
Somewhere along the line, after much debate, the quanta idea got extended to light itself. Hence the photon. This assumption had to be made otherwise things did not add up. I forget where now.
And now cut the sphere in the middle and install a spring. The two halfs of the sphere will move apart with a certain velocity. Which one is moving?
Where is the observer?
I can make your problem worse. Imagine your two halves of sphere are spinning around each other. The spring will get extended due to ventrifugal force. But what if they are started spinning in deep space, a billion light years from the nearest reference points of any mass, how do they know they are spinning? How does the spring know it is being stretched? Due to the limited speed of light those far away reference points cannot be establishing a rotating frame!
I'm implying it's there, just measured differently. Was a smaller space time at photon create.
I'm not sure that notions of the expanding universe imply that space or time themselves have expanded as such.
But there is my confusion...
In the case of the moving car and bullets we can imagine the energy going into the car. That energy is recoverable if we ever want to halt the car.
But, in the case of photons from far away galaxies we can never recover the energy. There is no way the universe is going to stop expanding. That photon energy lost to red shift is lost forever.
But, perhaps that is OK. By all accounts the sum total of all energy in the universe, due to gravity, mass, etc, is zero.
So, if the universe expands, and all the matter decays to photons, which get red shifted to zero energy. Nothing is lost. It all balances out.
We just borrowed this universe from nothing. We have to pay it back some time!
I try to simplify but stay correct, so no need to complicate the situation. I wanted to show that looking to energy alone is not sufficient. It's like having two unknowns and only one equation. If we do not move fast, but slow, we might reach our target.
@heater: you certainly will gain better understanding of the space time concept, if you first manifest a foundation. You need a leveled playground, as the great president stated. One is: conservation of energy : you can not +- create energy content of a system that does not interfere with the environment (closed system). But if you create a wall that still allows diffusion inside a system, so you have two lousy coupled systems, you can eliminate energy in one part by creating energy in the other part, what is not witchcraft, but called: a good deal.
The second is: conservation of momentum: Momentum is linked to movement. By definition: I can not imagine a system that has no extention and is located in nothing. But I don't care. If I imagine a system that has no extention and this is located in nothing, it might have any property, like nonzero content of energy, but it can not move! So it only can have a zero momentum. Zero momentum is not nothing, it is the potential to assign an nonzero momentum to a part of the system, in the same moment assigning a negative momentum of same size to the complementary part of the part of the system. (You see, we created from the foundation: there is nonzero energy and there is zero momentum, space and time are derived, because space is what is needed to have a system falling apart and time is needed to identify the moment of establish this falling apart.
There has to be a common understanding. Otherwise you will never proceed in creation of a universe of ideas and not in making anything great. If you are in a closed system, the price you have to pay for a good always is equal to the income you can generate by selling this good. But when there is a borderline it may happen, that a prime minister of a foreign country is very grateful you negotiated the price of a certain good, because now across border he can exchange goods at lower price, increasing the value of the outside.
My understanding of space-time is what it is. It is limited by how much mathematics I get my head around. Special Relativity is OK on a clear day. General Relativity is mathematically way over my head.
Ideas of energy and momentum, at least from a Newtonian perspective, are clear enough. Including conservation. We do the experiments in high school to measure it. The maths is understandable at a high school level.
But if you create a wall that still allows diffusion inside a system, so you have two lousy coupled systems, you can eliminate energy in one part by creating energy in the other part, what is not witchcraft, but called: a good deal.
Well, yeah. You still have a closed system to think about there. Only in two halves.
If you are in a closed system,...
Now there is a thing. Many theories in Physics start by considering a closed system. Be it a couple of colliding masses Newton style. Or a box full of particles bumping around Boltzmann style. Or a box full of photons Planck style.
But we are living in a very open system. The observable universe. It is leaking stuff out all the time. Thanks to the speed of light and the accelerating expansion of the universe that stuff is lost forever.
Conclusion is:
All the far away galaxies we see now will eventually disappear out of the observable universe.
Meanwhile our local galaxies will coalesce under the influence of gravity into one.
That last galaxy will eventually coalesce into a black hole. It's energy having been radiated as gravitation waves.
That black hole will slowly evaporate, it's energy escaping as photons that will disappear out of the observable universe.
The end result is that there is nothing left here.
But wait. If we accept the Cosmological Principle then the universe is the same no matter which direction you look, and no matter where you are.
That implies that if there is nothing left here, there is nothing anywhere else either.
@heater: you bring up a lot of stuff. And so you are lost. Evaporation of black holes is a very complicated matter (mathematical matter), but in terms of physical matter it is simple. Even a dump black holes knows how to do it.
But you didn't get the idea of a closed system. A closed system is, by definition, a system in which at least those two laws of conservation are applied. It is not a matter of size. The whole universe is a closed system. If we could see the amount of energy change, (we didn't up to now) we would immediately know, that the universe is bigger than we knew before. But that wouldn't hurt the principle, it just would reduce the amount of our relative knowledge on details. Some of the questions you put above can be answered, but not based on the idea of us living in a very open system.
Let's look what the holy trilogy (meanwhile grown to six books) has to say to this stuff:
2.HHGTTG 0:
(1) There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
(2) There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
But that gives hope, because it means, when there is reached a certain state of bizarreness, we do not need to discover what it is meant for, but we can focus on understanding what is. This thread exists, because some try to show, why one is not right. Based on science. But it turns out, that those can not succeed because there arguments are based on complex effect that are not understood. If we can not agree about the implication of very simple basics, there is no way, to convince the one, that he is wrong. Chip created the Propeller on the principle of distributed (computation) power, knowing that humans are the most developed beings and that their success is based on: individuals (a lot), goals (a lot), communication (necessary) and no interrupt (disturbing). We could just use what is in existance, connect many propellers around the world to form a large, senseless system and see what will happen. Instead we discuss, there is not enough memory, clock frequency should be raised, interrupts are missed....
And all this in the context of convervation of energy.
By the way: I still couldn't figure out, what yesterday happened in Sweden.
I am never lost. I am at the center of space-time, (0, 0, 0, 0). All else is some other place/time.
I think, therefore I am. Everything else is up for contemplation.
Evaporation of black holes is a very complicated matter (mathematical matter), but in terms of physical matter it is simple. Even a dump black holes knows how to do it.
I agree. Rocks fall to the ground. Electrons run around circuits. Black holes do whatever they do. None of that stuff out there knows or cares about our mathematics. It does whatever it does.
But you didn't get the idea of a closed system.
Yeah I did. You consider a system in a finite space with no inputs or outputs. Spent years fighting with the maths of such models.
The whole universe is a closed system.
I think that is where I have a problem.
Thanks to the speed of light and the accelerating expansion of the universe there is a limit to what we can observe. Ever. We cannot speak of "the whole universe". If you cannot measure it, it does not exist. Who knows if the "whole universe" is closed or not?
If matter and energy passes out of that horizon of our observable universe it may as well not exist anymore.
Does not sound like our observable universe is closed at all!
...complex effect that are not understood.
There is no "understanding" in Physics.
Newton came up with his famous mathematical description of gravity. He also said "I have no frikken idea why this Smile works" or in a modern translation:
"I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction."
We can see the same playing out in the wonderful world of quantum mechanics. The maths works very well. Why does it work? No one Knows.
Wouldn't you say before man was able to mess things up, we had a beautiful planet. Your maths work because of a devine creator.
That what yeti posted:
2.HHGTTG 0:
(1) There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
(2) There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Could make sense, that when we know how and why we are here, that we know as much as the creator, then things will change. The earth's magnetic field could reverse again, and that can disastrous for everything we do. Are planet could become tidal locked with the moon, who knows how different what we know now could be. We have a delicate balance in the whole scheme of things, and that it couldn't happen by chance, but there was incredible design involved.
Who knows if the "whole universe" is closed or not?
Me. Period.
If you come up with alternative facts, your universe is open. But as mine is closed, it just includes all the regions of secret escapes where what escapes your universe escapes to.
Such simple.
Wouldn't you say before man was able to mess things up, we had a beautiful planet.
No idea, I was not there. As far as I can tell the Earth was pretty horrible a while back. Too hot, no oxygen, etc. The planet still looks beautiful to me. Although I will admit the mass of humans on it have a habit to build very ugly houses and cities and motorways etc. Whilst turning forests into deserts and exterminating all the interesting animals. After we have made this place uninhabitable and become extinct ourselves there will be nobody to say if it is "beautiful" or not. Perhaps it still will be.
Your maths work because of a devine creator.
Oops...now we are straying from the world of things we can measure and reason about to philosophy and, God forbid, religion.
Why maths works is a deep problem that many wonder at. Especially mathematicians as far as I can tell. Is mathematics invented or discovered?
My take on it is as follows:
Humans need to think to survive. They have no sharp teeth or dangerous claws. They have no armor plate to protect them. Or horrible venom to kill anything that tries to eat them. What they do have is a brain. They work in groups, they communicate, they cooperate, they learn and predict and plan. Without all that humans would have been easy prey a long time ago. Many would agree that all this involves thinking.
I make the claim that mathematics is no different. It is just more thinking. It is an extension of what all humans do all the time.
So, of course mathematics works. It's just thinking. If thinking did not work we would not be here.
I really don't care if there is a creator or not. Divine or otherwise. The whole creator concept does not help us reason about anything [See note 1]. Saying "creator dunnit", whatever it is, does not really explain anything and is a lot less interesting than looking a the problem further.
By the way. What does "divine" mean? How does a "divine creator" differ from your ordinary, everyday, common or garden, universe creator?
Could make sense, that when we know how and why we are here, that we know as much as the creator,...
I suspect you know nothing of Douglas Adams. When he wrote such things he was having a satirical poke at such ideas. Highly recommended reading.
Or watch the man himself shortly before he died:
Note 1: About the only thing the "creator" concept helps us understand is the bizarre behavior of our fellow humans who believe such a thing in many and varied ways.
Why ask questions, that can not be answered, if there were answers long ago: don't ask such questions. The age of enlightenment started in coincidence with one man: Descartes. He lived in a dangerous world, full of war and he saw, what happened to people like Giordano Bruno (golden fire) or Galileo Galilei (golden cage). So he wrote: I destroyed the book I wrote my last findings in, not because I fear something, but I'd like to prevent, that others use it as a witness for their own misapprehensions (this reminds me to "the apprentice"). But this is no forfeiture, as those, able to understand what I wrote, will be able to find it by themselves!
So he said: Only one fact can not be doubted: God exists. As he exists and as he is good, he created man such a way, that man can understand the creation God did. For this reason as a method of reaching gnosis is to ask questions, that is to doubt in everything. So the first finding is: I doubt, so I think, so I am! And he used present, because he realizes: I thought, so I am is not the same, because thinking and existence now are not located in the same moment and things could have changed between thinking and realizing existance!
In the meantime we saw: thinking implies existance, but existance doesn't imply thinking. No matter who you are!
Why ask questions, that can not be answered, if there were answers long ago: don't ask such questions.
What? The questions are there. Many times it is not clear if they can be answered or not. Perhaps I don't know there were answers long ago. I have the question anew. Besides, who is to say what can be answered or not?
Wait a minute. Descartes started is deduction from "Cogito ergo sum". After a lifetime of thinking about that I still think his use of that to prove the existence of God etc does not follow.
Anyway, Descartes is a hero of mine. Wonderful coordinate system and all that. And he refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers. I can do likewise, even if it is Descartes I am refusing.
Did I tell you....One of the best presents I was ever given, age 8 or 9, was a kit of parts to build an electric motor out of. It was totally fascinating.
On odd occasions I have had day dreams of building a reciprocating electric motor. You know, a coil as "cylinder", a magnet as the "piston". Pushing a crankshaft to get rotary motion and drive the commutator. Just for show.
I really don't care if there is a creator or not. Divine or otherwise. The whole creator concept does not help us reason about anything [See note 1]. Saying "creator dunnit", whatever it is, does not really explain anything and is a lot less interesting than looking a the problem further.
By the way. What does "divine" mean? How does a "divine creator" differ from your ordinary, everyday, common or garden, universe creator?
Could make sense, that when we know how and why we are here, that we know as much as the creator,...
I suspect you know nothing of Douglas Adams. When he wrote such things he was having a satirical poke at such ideas. Highly recommended reading.
Note 1: About the only thing the "creator" concept helps us understand is the bizarre behavior of our fellow humans who believe such a thing in many and varied ways.
I do admit devine was a poor choice of words, how about single creator. But have you considered we may be somebody's ant farm.
Did I tell you....One of the best presents I was ever given, age 8 or 9, was a kit of parts to build an electric motor out of. It was totally fascinating.
On odd occasions I have had day dreams of building a reciprocating electric motor. You know, a coil as "cylinder", a magnet as the "piston". Pushing a crankshaft to get rotary motion and drive the commutator. Just for show.
Such a motor could make a nice little desktop decoration. Perhaps a nicely machined brass flywheel and connecting rod with a small round magnet as the piston and a solenoid coil as the cylinder. Something like the model steam engines you see occasionally.
Add a small stepper motor as an alternator to produce current that is fed back to the coil and you have your own "Free Energy" prototype......as long as you can hide some batteries in the base of course.
"Single Creator" won't do. That admits the possibility, or speculation, that there may be two or more creators. Which flies in the face of modern mainstream theologies.
Hmm....Design by committee. That might account for many things...
It certainly feels like I'm living in somebody's ant farm sometimes.
Let us come back to the basics: Do you believe, energy and momentum are conserved, yes or no? If no, no need to discuss further, because if I do not believe in energy conservation, I believe in perpetua mobile. There is no more choice than TRUE or FALSE
Such a motor could make a nice little desktop decoration. Perhaps a nicely machined brass flywheel and connecting rod with a small round magnet as the piston and a solenoid coil as the cylinder. Something like the model steam engines you see occasionally.
Exactly. That is exactly what I had in mind.
We can get some nice powerful, round, neodymium magnet with holes in the middle now a days to mount on a piston rod.
Problem is I don't have the means to make the nicely machined parts any more.
Add a small stepper motor as an alternator to produce current that is fed back to the coil and you have your own "Free Energy" prototype......as long as you can hide some batteries in the base of course.
Do you believe, energy and momentum are conserved, yes or no? ... TRUE or FALSE
Ouch! So demanding.
I don't like to say I "believe" anything. That implies accepting something as true without actually knowing it for oneself.
Having done a lot of experiments with colliding masses, falling bodies, pendulums, calorimeters, capacitors, etc, etc, and having understood some of the mathematics of it all, at least in a Newtonian way, it looks to me as if energy and momentum are conserved.
It's a very convincing argument that with time takes root in the mind as "true".
So much so that the assumption of conservation of energy and momentum becomes a starting point for subsequent investigations. And what do you find? It all works out. Great!
In a closed system of course.
We have to say "closed" because we cannot account for what happens outside the system under observation or consideration.
By the way. I have recently become aware of the idea that if you start from the assumption that the laws of physics are the same everywhere, then that implies conservation of energy and momentum. There is a mathematical proof of this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem
So, if I assume the laws of physics are the same all over the place, then I don't need to assume a closed system, conservation follows. But then again, can I be sure the laws of physics are the same in places I cannot observe?!
All of which is a bit removed from my statements about energy disappearing from our observable universe. Stuff can leave but nothing can ever get in. So for any reality we can ever experience in all of time, energy escapes. Eventually nothing is left.
Comments
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
When I fire the gun backwards at you from that fast moving car, whilst the bullet is accelerated toward you the reaction is accelerating my car away from you. Me and my car are moving faster and hence we have more energy.
That means that if I ever want to stop the car I will get more energy as heat out of the brakes. That is where the "missing" energy went.
Now, I'm not sure how this simple classical physics view fits with the missing energy of our photon.
If the car was faster than the bullet, would you end up hitting yourself?
The point is: photons need not to exist and still there are photons. What you described is: there is a hydrogen atom that emits energy in form of electromagnetic radiation. The point is: such an atom only emits the energy that makes the difference between two exitation levels. But this event, transfer of electromagnetic energy for a piece of matter to the vacuum (which, as we now believe, is filled with radiation) IS the creation of a photon. But you will not be able to detect this photon! Because (as it is red shifted) it can not be absorbed by a hydrogen atom you have in your detector, it just doesn't carry enough of energy!
The whole desaster, according to my degree of understanding, comes from the fact, that some people do not really understand what people wrote. Read carefully the paper of Planck, read Bose's and Einstein's explanation of black body radiation, and try to understand what Einstein said: The laws of physics are not different in different inertial systems. He did not say: we can not determine a coordinate system, that is at stand still!
Let me simplify your bullet example a little. Imagine to have a homogeneous mass. A sphere. And now cut the sphere in the middle and install a spring. The two halfs of the sphere will move apart with a certain velocity. Which one is moving?
The original idea of quanta, as proposed by Einstein, was that an atom can only maintain certain discrete energy levels. That is to say that only discrete lumps of energy can be put in or taken out. Given the relation between frequency and energy we see that only certain discrete frequencies of light can be absorbed or emitted by an atom. Which is what we observe by experiment in school.
The original idea was that these quanta were a property of atoms not a property of light itself. Which was considered to be a regular wave like thing that could adopt any energy. As Maxwell's equations describe.
Somewhere along the line, after much debate, the quanta idea got extended to light itself. Hence the photon. This assumption had to be made otherwise things did not add up. I forget where now. Where is the observer?
I can make your problem worse. Imagine your two halves of sphere are spinning around each other. The spring will get extended due to ventrifugal force. But what if they are started spinning in deep space, a billion light years from the nearest reference points of any mass, how do they know they are spinning? How does the spring know it is being stretched? Due to the limited speed of light those far away reference points cannot be establishing a rotating frame!
But there is my confusion...
In the case of the moving car and bullets we can imagine the energy going into the car. That energy is recoverable if we ever want to halt the car.
But, in the case of photons from far away galaxies we can never recover the energy. There is no way the universe is going to stop expanding. That photon energy lost to red shift is lost forever.
But, perhaps that is OK. By all accounts the sum total of all energy in the universe, due to gravity, mass, etc, is zero.
So, if the universe expands, and all the matter decays to photons, which get red shifted to zero energy. Nothing is lost. It all balances out.
We just borrowed this universe from nothing. We have to pay it back some time!
The second is: conservation of momentum: Momentum is linked to movement. By definition: I can not imagine a system that has no extention and is located in nothing. But I don't care. If I imagine a system that has no extention and this is located in nothing, it might have any property, like nonzero content of energy, but it can not move! So it only can have a zero momentum. Zero momentum is not nothing, it is the potential to assign an nonzero momentum to a part of the system, in the same moment assigning a negative momentum of same size to the complementary part of the part of the system. (You see, we created from the foundation: there is nonzero energy and there is zero momentum, space and time are derived, because space is what is needed to have a system falling apart and time is needed to identify the moment of establish this falling apart.
There has to be a common understanding. Otherwise you will never proceed in creation of a universe of ideas and not in making anything great. If you are in a closed system, the price you have to pay for a good always is equal to the income you can generate by selling this good. But when there is a borderline it may happen, that a prime minister of a foreign country is very grateful you negotiated the price of a certain good, because now across border he can exchange goods at lower price, increasing the value of the outside.
Ideas of energy and momentum, at least from a Newtonian perspective, are clear enough. Including conservation. We do the experiments in high school to measure it. The maths is understandable at a high school level. Well, yeah. You still have a closed system to think about there. Only in two halves. Now there is a thing. Many theories in Physics start by considering a closed system. Be it a couple of colliding masses Newton style. Or a box full of particles bumping around Boltzmann style. Or a box full of photons Planck style.
But we are living in a very open system. The observable universe. It is leaking stuff out all the time. Thanks to the speed of light and the accelerating expansion of the universe that stuff is lost forever.
Conclusion is:
All the far away galaxies we see now will eventually disappear out of the observable universe.
Meanwhile our local galaxies will coalesce under the influence of gravity into one.
That last galaxy will eventually coalesce into a black hole. It's energy having been radiated as gravitation waves.
That black hole will slowly evaporate, it's energy escaping as photons that will disappear out of the observable universe.
The end result is that there is nothing left here.
But wait. If we accept the Cosmological Principle then the universe is the same no matter which direction you look, and no matter where you are.
That implies that if there is nothing left here, there is nothing anywhere else either.
The Universe is gone!
But you didn't get the idea of a closed system. A closed system is, by definition, a system in which at least those two laws of conservation are applied. It is not a matter of size. The whole universe is a closed system. If we could see the amount of energy change, (we didn't up to now) we would immediately know, that the universe is bigger than we knew before. But that wouldn't hurt the principle, it just would reduce the amount of our relative knowledge on details. Some of the questions you put above can be answered, but not based on the idea of us living in a very open system.
Let's look what the holy trilogy (meanwhile grown to six books) has to say to this stuff:
(-: SCNR ;-)
And all this in the context of convervation of energy.
By the way: I still couldn't figure out, what yesterday happened in Sweden.
I think, therefore I am. Everything else is up for contemplation. I agree. Rocks fall to the ground. Electrons run around circuits. Black holes do whatever they do. None of that stuff out there knows or cares about our mathematics. It does whatever it does. Yeah I did. You consider a system in a finite space with no inputs or outputs. Spent years fighting with the maths of such models. I think that is where I have a problem.
Thanks to the speed of light and the accelerating expansion of the universe there is a limit to what we can observe. Ever. We cannot speak of "the whole universe". If you cannot measure it, it does not exist. Who knows if the "whole universe" is closed or not?
If matter and energy passes out of that horizon of our observable universe it may as well not exist anymore.
Does not sound like our observable universe is closed at all! There is no "understanding" in Physics.
Newton came up with his famous mathematical description of gravity. He also said "I have no frikken idea why this Smile works" or in a modern translation:
"I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction."
We can see the same playing out in the wonderful world of quantum mechanics. The maths works very well. Why does it work? No one Knows.
God bless Douglas Adams.
(Figuratively speaking I guess as he and I are atheists)
Wouldn't you say before man was able to mess things up, we had a beautiful planet. Your maths work because of a devine creator.
That what yeti posted:
Could make sense, that when we know how and why we are here, that we know as much as the creator, then things will change. The earth's magnetic field could reverse again, and that can disastrous for everything we do. Are planet could become tidal locked with the moon, who knows how different what we know now could be. We have a delicate balance in the whole scheme of things, and that it couldn't happen by chance, but there was incredible design involved.
Me. Period.
If you come up with alternative facts, your universe is open. But as mine is closed, it just includes all the regions of secret escapes where what escapes your universe escapes to.
Such simple.
Why maths works is a deep problem that many wonder at. Especially mathematicians as far as I can tell. Is mathematics invented or discovered?
My take on it is as follows:
Humans need to think to survive. They have no sharp teeth or dangerous claws. They have no armor plate to protect them. Or horrible venom to kill anything that tries to eat them. What they do have is a brain. They work in groups, they communicate, they cooperate, they learn and predict and plan. Without all that humans would have been easy prey a long time ago. Many would agree that all this involves thinking.
I make the claim that mathematics is no different. It is just more thinking. It is an extension of what all humans do all the time.
So, of course mathematics works. It's just thinking. If thinking did not work we would not be here.
I really don't care if there is a creator or not. Divine or otherwise. The whole creator concept does not help us reason about anything [See note 1]. Saying "creator dunnit", whatever it is, does not really explain anything and is a lot less interesting than looking a the problem further.
By the way. What does "divine" mean? How does a "divine creator" differ from your ordinary, everyday, common or garden, universe creator?
I suspect you know nothing of Douglas Adams. When he wrote such things he was having a satirical poke at such ideas. Highly recommended reading.
Or watch the man himself shortly before he died:
Note 1: About the only thing the "creator" concept helps us understand is the bizarre behavior of our fellow humans who believe such a thing in many and varied ways.
So he said: Only one fact can not be doubted: God exists. As he exists and as he is good, he created man such a way, that man can understand the creation God did. For this reason as a method of reaching gnosis is to ask questions, that is to doubt in everything. So the first finding is: I doubt, so I think, so I am! And he used present, because he realizes: I thought, so I am is not the same, because thinking and existence now are not located in the same moment and things could have changed between thinking and realizing existance!
In the meantime we saw: thinking implies existance, but existance doesn't imply thinking. No matter who you are!
Wait a minute. Descartes started is deduction from "Cogito ergo sum". After a lifetime of thinking about that I still think his use of that to prove the existence of God etc does not follow.
Anyway, Descartes is a hero of mine. Wonderful coordinate system and all that. And he refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers. I can do likewise, even if it is Descartes I am refusing.
Did I tell you....One of the best presents I was ever given, age 8 or 9, was a kit of parts to build an electric motor out of. It was totally fascinating.
On odd occasions I have had day dreams of building a reciprocating electric motor. You know, a coil as "cylinder", a magnet as the "piston". Pushing a crankshaft to get rotary motion and drive the commutator. Just for show.
I do admit devine was a poor choice of words, how about single creator. But have you considered we may be somebody's ant farm.
Such a motor could make a nice little desktop decoration. Perhaps a nicely machined brass flywheel and connecting rod with a small round magnet as the piston and a solenoid coil as the cylinder. Something like the model steam engines you see occasionally.
Add a small stepper motor as an alternator to produce current that is fed back to the coil and you have your own "Free Energy" prototype......as long as you can hide some batteries in the base of course.
Hmm....Design by committee. That might account for many things...
It certainly feels like I'm living in somebody's ant farm sometimes.
We can get some nice powerful, round, neodymium magnet with holes in the middle now a days to mount on a piston rod.
Problem is I don't have the means to make the nicely machined parts any more. Ha! Let's not go there
I don't like to say I "believe" anything. That implies accepting something as true without actually knowing it for oneself.
Having done a lot of experiments with colliding masses, falling bodies, pendulums, calorimeters, capacitors, etc, etc, and having understood some of the mathematics of it all, at least in a Newtonian way, it looks to me as if energy and momentum are conserved.
It's a very convincing argument that with time takes root in the mind as "true".
So much so that the assumption of conservation of energy and momentum becomes a starting point for subsequent investigations. And what do you find? It all works out. Great!
In a closed system of course.
We have to say "closed" because we cannot account for what happens outside the system under observation or consideration.
By the way. I have recently become aware of the idea that if you start from the assumption that the laws of physics are the same everywhere, then that implies conservation of energy and momentum. There is a mathematical proof of this idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem
So, if I assume the laws of physics are the same all over the place, then I don't need to assume a closed system, conservation follows. But then again, can I be sure the laws of physics are the same in places I cannot observe?!
All of which is a bit removed from my statements about energy disappearing from our observable universe. Stuff can leave but nothing can ever get in. So for any reality we can ever experience in all of time, energy escapes. Eventually nothing is left.
What good conservation laws then?