thomblake comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Howdy.
I was a sometimes-reader of Overcoming Bias back in the day, and particularly fond of the articles on quantum physics. Philosophically, I'm an Objectivist. I identify a lot of people as Objectivist, however, including a lot of people who would probably find it a misnomer.
I created my account pretty much explicitly because I have some thoughts on theoretical (some might prefer the term "quantum", but for reasons below, this isn't accurate) physics and wanted (at this point, needed might be more accurate) feedback, and haven't had much success yet getting anything, even so much as a "You're too stupid to have this conversation."
So without much further ado...
Light is a waveform distortion in gravity caused by variation in the position of the gravitic source; gravity itself has wavelike properties at the very least (it could be a particle, it could be a wave, both work; in the particle interpretation, light is a wavelike variation in the position of the particles, caused by the wavelike variation in the originating particle's position). Strong atomic forces, weak atomic forces, gravity, and the cosmological constant/Hubble's constant are observable parts of the gravitic wave, which is why the cosmological constant looks a lot more variable than it should (as it varies with distance). A lot of the redshifting we see is not in fact galaxies moving away from us, but a product of that the medium (gravity) that light is traveling in is spreading out (for reasons I'll get into below) as it attenuates. Black holes are not, in fact, infinitely dense, but merely extremely so.
Gravity moves at the speed of light - light is, in effect, a shift in gravity. This is why matter cannot exceed the speed of light - it cannot overcome the infinitely high initial peak of its own gravitic wave. I believe this is also the key to why the wavelength of gravity increases with distance - the gravitic wave is traversing space which has already been warped by gravity. The gravitic wave moves slower where gravity is bending space to increase distance, and faster where gravity is bending space to increase space. This results in light becoming spread out in certain positions in the spectrum, and concentrated in others; a galaxy that appears redshifted to us will appear blueshifted from points both closer and further away on the same line of observation, and redshifted again closer and further away respectively yet still. Most galaxies appear redshifted because this is the most likely/stable configuration. (Blueshifted galaxies would either be too far away to detect with current technology, or close enough that they would be dangerously close. This is made even more complicated by the fact that motion can produce exactly the same effects; a galaxy in the redshift zone could appear blueshifted if it is approaching us with enough velocity, and the converse would also hold true.)
The nomer of quantum mechanics is fundamentally wrong, but accurate nonetheless. Energy does not come in discrete quanta, but appears to because the number of stable configurations of matter is finite; we can only observe energy when it makes changes to the configurations of matter, which results in a new stable configuration, producing an observable stepladder with discrete steps of energy corresponding to each stable state.
I go with a modified version of Everett's model for uncertainty theory. The observer problem is a product of the fact that the -observer's- position is uncertain, not the observed entity. (This posits at least five dimensions.) Our brains are probably quantum computers; we're viewing a slice of the fifth dimension with a nonzero scalar scope, which means particles are not precisely particulate.
Dark matter probably has no special properties; it's just matter such that the substructure prohibits formative bonds with baryonic matter.
Particularly contentiously, there probably are no "real" electrical forces, these are effects produced by the configurations of matter. Antimatter may or may not annihilate matter; I lean towards the explanation that antimatter is simply matter configured such that an interaction with matter renders dark matter. (The resulting massive reorganization is what produces the light which is emitted when the two combine; if they annihilate, that would stop the gravitic wave, which would also be a massive gravitic distortion as far as other matter is concerned. Both explanations work as far as I'm concerned)
(For those curious about the electrical forces comment, I'm reasonably certain electrical forces can be explained as the result of modeling the n-body problem in a gravity-as-a-wave framework, specifically the implications of Xia's work with the five-body configuration. I suspect an approximation of his configuration with a larger number of his particles becomes not merely likely, but guaranteed, given numbers of particles of varying mass - which results in apparent attractive and repulsive forces as the underlying matter is pushed in directions orthogonal to the orbiting masses, an effect which is amplified when the orbits are themselves changing in orthogonal directions. The use of the word "particle" here is arbitrary; the particles are themselves composed of particles. Scale is both isotropic and homogeneous. As above, so below.)
Time is not a special spacial dimension. It's not an illusion, either. Time is just a plain old spacial dimension, no different from any other. The universe is constant, it is our position within it which is changing, a change which is necessitated by our consciousness. The patterns of life are elegant, but no more unusual than the motions of the planets; life, and motion, is just the application of rules about the configuration of contiguous space across large amounts of that space.
This means that the gravitic wave is propagated across time as well as all the other spacial dimensions; we're experiencing gravity from where objects will be in the future, and where they were in the past, but in most cases this behavior cancels out.
I would normally downvote an out-of-context wall of text like the above, but upvoted in accordance with Welcome post norms.
My apologies. I looked for rules, but couldn't find any.
"If you've come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation." seemed to indicate that this is where I should start.
Hey! Welcome to LW. I've upvoted you too, but if you're looking for feedback on your OP, I'm too stupid to be having this conversation. :-)
Edit, since you mentioned you're an objectivist, you might be interested in the general prevailing opinion on Rand around these parts. That being said, LW does have a number of members who were, at one point, or perhaps still are, respectful of Rand.
Howdy!
I'm not sure strict Randian Objectivists would agree that I'm an Objectivist; I use the term pretty broadly to describe anybody who ascribes to the philosophy, not necessarily the ethics. I take Ayn Rand at her word when she says people should think for themselves (the closest she got to a proscription in any of her works), and am not terribly impressed by much of her fan club, which refuses to.
That said, I'm not particularly impressed by that criticism, which, like most criticisms of Ayn Rand, revolves mainly around her personal life.
If you're interested in more recent discussion of that article, you can find some here.
Hm. I don't necessarily agree it revolves around her personal life. The main gist of the post is A. Rand acknowledged no superior, B. If you don't acknowledge some way in which you are flawed you can never improve, so C. This is kind of a stupid thing to say.
I used to call myself a neo-objectivist, mostly because it was a word that had no definition, so I could claim I meant whatever I wanted. And I have a lot of respect for many of the conclusions that Rand came to. But the arrogance of her system is pretty off-putting to me.
Related, "Mozart was a Red", a play Murray Rothbard wrote parodying the time Rand invited him to come meet her.
I've yet to meet somebody better than me at arguing politics; that doesn't mean it's impossible for me to get better, however, which is one of my motivations in continuing to do so. I'm not sure that A logically leads to B.
Are you measuring this in times that you think you lost a political argument, times your opponent thought you won a political argument, or times you learned something interesting by discussing politics?
I measure this in terms of a personal judgement that an objective or hostile third party would declare that my opponent has failed, which is not the same as "winning." It's impossible for me to win an argument, only to lose it. "Winning" would imply that there's no additional argument which could not be constructed to defeat my current argument. I can't prove the nonexistence of such an argument.
(I argue against the ideal, not the opponent; my opponent can lose, but my argument cannot win.)
There's a difference: you (presumably) acknowledge that it's possible for you to get better at arguing politics. Rand did not. Rand believed it was impossible for anyone to be better than her.
No reason to take my preferences as generally normative.
Though I do.