Honey, I doomed the universe!

i think we've all had one of those days where you do one thing wrong and it just seems to f*** up everything

Duh, wha'id they say?

Somehow I just didn't follow that.....um....logic?
I guess I will just have to sit back and watch the end of the universe.
If the end is nigh....LETS PARTY!!!!

Hyack had to go all the way to India for that tid-bit of info. It was on page two of the Globe and Mail Thursday....

Dark energy, sounds Darth Vader-ish

It's all quite easy actually. The universe is built on the golden number, Phi . (The Greek letter Phi, symbol for 1.618 0339 887...) It explains it all! Once you understand that it's all symbol......uh.......simple.

For a great site 'bout it click here

BluesBud



Yeah! What he said....

If we can stop global warming with carbon credits we can stop the expanding universe.

It is critical as the expansion is pulling the sun further away from planet earth. We will all freeze our nuts off before you can say Kyoto.

Get on the bandwagon early. That is where all the money is to be made.

Mmm . . .ok, I'll try to give the 'Quantum Physics for Dummies' version. But, don't look for 'logic' when it comes to Quantum Mechanics. It's usually the opposite of what you expect.

There was this guy, Schrodinger, and he devised a 'thought experiment' to show the inherent flaw in an interpretation of Quantum Physics called the 'Copenhagen interpretation'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodingers_cat

Put a cat in a box, along with a poison that is released by the radioactive decay of an element, so that sometime in the next hour, the poison is released. His thought experement said that until you look in the box, the cat is nether dead nor alive, but both (and nether). By opening the box, you 'collapse' the wave function into one probablilty or the other.

I think this article and others like it are misinterpreted. (eg: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.j ... tviewedbox)

In Quantum Physics, you cannot measure any particle without changing it. If you measure the speed of a photon, you have to use another particle to do it, and thereby change the thing you are measuring. You can only describe particle paths, velocities etc. as 'probabilities' because of this. If you measure them, you can say what it 'was', not what it 'is'.

'Waveform collapse' therefore applies to quantum probabilities, not long-distance observations. You cannot change what already happened billions of light years ago, and light years away.

These articles are saying that because we observed 'Dark matter' billions of light years away . . .

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5272226.stm

. . .and because we believe without the missing gravity that Dark Matter provides to our understanding of the universe, that we may have destroyed the dark matter simply by observing it. (that is, it was in a state of near collapse already, but our observation of it sealed it's fate) And thus, we doomed the universe to a 'heat death' and eternal expansion simply by finding the dark matter.

I don't buy it, of course. Even though the 'observer' can change experimental results in ways we are just finding out, having those photons reach earth and not being observed, they still would have been changed by interaction with the Earth (and still are being changed). We made no difference to the universe by observing it.

I got it Doc. I was just kiddin' 'round. Like Yogi said "I'm smarter than the average bear!"

I must be a dumb ass, you lost me around the stuff about quantum physics

I concur with Dr. Caleb.

Duh was my way of smelling a rat here. the notion of affecting a change merely by observing something of such infinite dimensions/properties at near infinite distances and time is just plain dumb.

I agree that merely observing a thing does not change the nature of that thing. That is what I am referring to as questionable logic. That's that tree falling in the forest thing.
(OMG I am agreeing with sasquishy)

DrCaleb's quick enlightening course did shed some light on dark matter but that still remains unproven and speculative. However it is still fun stuff to ponder. It just seems silly to have a bunch or gas bags get together and try to explain these things to laymen, when they barely have a grasp on things themselves.

I still say it all is based on the universal constant of Phi. (unless perhaps you are orbiting a black hole or dark matter )

A forget the whole darn thing! I am going back to my first post. Let's have a drink. Salute the end of the universe and party our asses off.

I'm with you. Quantum physics makes me thirsty.

American beer needs some of that dark matter stuff.

Quantum physicists are largest group of voyeurs on the planet.