The Republic of Heaven

krebbe wrote:neutrinos (tiny particles with negligible or no mass that hardly interact with anything and travel at the speed of light - lots are passing straight through us and the earth all the time).

As more of a literary lass, may I put a literary slant on this?

John Updike wrote:Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
and painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
and pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed-you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.

Enitharmon wrote:As more of a literary lass, may I put a literary slant on this?

John Updike wrote:Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
and painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
and pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed-you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.

A great poem. It was in my A-level physics textbook too!

It doesn't mention that they come in 3 different flavours though!

Max wrote:You go in for that dark matter codswallop then do you? It's not as bad as 'dark energy', but the whole thing makes me snigger. '~*pineapples*~, our theories don't match our observations... I know, let's invent a load of completely undetectable stuff to account for the discrepancy! It's the perfect cri-.. Explanation!' In short, I'm not convinced.

It does sound uncannily like a 'fudge factor'. It's all we've got until someone comes up with a better idea or finds the stuff.

Edit: it appears max didn't write that anymore
Edit 2: what's going on I'm confused?!
Edit 3: Is Max schizophrenic?- why is he rebuking and referring to himself in the 3rd person?!

Umm.. I wrote:It's perfectly respectable scientific method. It's also how discoveries have been made. Consider the discoveries of the planets Neptune and Pluto, and the other one the name of which escapes me for the moment. You have a discrepancy in your measurements? Construct a theoretical hypothesis to account for the discrepancy, and then go out and look for evidence that the hypothesis is true.

And look how Pluto's ended up. My point wasn't about the making of hypotheses to account for discrepancies, but the way in which this particular one isn't one for which confirmatory evidence can, by virtue of the theory itself, be found - and that in this instance what was required was a theoretical review as opposed to the hypothesis of a new variable. And so it turns out - it now appears that the discrepancy is explicable by flaws in theory as opposed to all this dark nonsense.

Above all it's about that this hypothesis is generally portrayed as verified theory.

I also wrote:And Max, dear, please mind your language and be less aggressive in your disagreements. You've been told before...

Eh? I can see how that might apply to previous posts, but not that one.

krebbe wrote:Edit: it appears max didn't write that anymore
Edit 2: what's going on I'm confused?!
Edit 3: Is Max schizophrenic?- why is he rebuking and referring to himself in the 3rd person?!

Some call it 'Rosie doing a whoopsie'.

My apologies

krebbe wrote:It does sound uncannily like a 'fudge factor'. It's all we've got until someone comes up with a better idea or finds the stuff.

What we used to call 'Martin's Constant' in my early days in computing (COBOL-bashing on a battered old NCR Century 100). After a colleague who often made use of them. An arbitrary constant introduced into a calculation, not because anybody knows why it works but because it produces the result the management want to see.

Max wrote:My point wasn't about the making of hypotheses to account for discrepancies, but the way in which this particular one isn't one for which confirmatory evidence can, by virtue of the theory itself, be found - and that in this instance what was required was a theoretical review as opposed to the hypothesis of a new variable. And so it turns out - it now appears that the discrepancy is explicable by flaws in theory as opposed to all this dark nonsense.

Above all it's about that this hypothesis is generally portrayed as verified theory.

I wasn't aware the discrepancy had an alternative explanation that nullified dark matter? Of course every time there's a difference between observation and prediction, the current theories have to either be wrong or incomplete.

I was still under the impression that dark matter was widely accepted as a working hypothesis. I'll ask the physicists later.

As for its wide acceptance as fact, I think the media is to blame: they like to draw pretty diagrams and sensationalise it all. That Pullman bloke is the worst for doing it - sentient fundamental particles indeed!

Enitharmon wrote:What we used to call 'Martin's Constant' in my early days in computing (COBOL-bashing on a battered old NCR Century 100). After a colleague who often made use of them. An arbitrary constant introduced into a calculation, not because anybody knows why it works but because it produces the result the management want to see.

There's plenty of them in theories derived from classical assumptions. Quantum mechanics really tidies things up

And if we used Planck units, we could get rid of those unnecessary conversion factors due to our imperfect system of units.

They're not particularly practical for everyday use

Numbers too big to comprehend properly.

This is why we have prefixes like giga- and tera- and so on.

The national (duel-carriageway) speed limit would be 1.03x10^-7 Planck length units/Planck time unit - would be a fun sign post

Edit 3: Is Max schizophrenic?- why is he rebuking and referring to himself in the 3rd person?

I've called Max a lot of things, but that ain't schizophrenia!

krebbe wrote:The national (duel-carriageway) speed limit would be 1.03x10^-7 Planck length units/Planck time unit - would be a fun sign post

Is this a subtle filmic reference?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067023/

Bah, my writing brain is thinking phonetically again

I had a mental picture of cars jousting...

krebbe wrote:Edit 3: Is Max schizophrenic?- why is he rebuking and referring to himself in the 3rd person?!

*Grumbles*
Seems to be a craze around here...