[HN Gopher] We Are Made of Waves
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We Are Made of Waves
Author : dnetesn
Score : 76 points
Date : 2024-06-07 10:47 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| illuminant wrote:
| We are made of potential, potential acts and distributes as waves
| (when not acting like and distributing as a state particulate.)
| Something tells me we already know this and are continually
| amazed by new narratives re-explaining these counter intuitive
| topics.
|
| This announcement is like saying "buildings (large architectural
| structures) are actually moments of force, the cement or stone or
| wood or steel only exists to keep everything from collapsing in
| on itself.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Buildings are fundamental components of the universe?
| x86x87 wrote:
| i believe the intent is to highlight the banality of the
| claim through an analogy.
| Psillisp wrote:
| Waves. You're soaking in it.
| breezeTrowel wrote:
| Yes. That's why fundamental particles are called the
| "building blocks of the universe". It's buildings all the way
| down!
| koolala wrote:
| developers! of course!
| azulster wrote:
| if your frame of reference is centered on teh building then
| it could be claimed that the entire universe fundamentally
| depends on the exact properties of that building on some
| level
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "Real estate baby!"
| szvsw wrote:
| > buildings are actually moments of force, the cement or stone
| or wood or steel only exists to keep everything from collapsing
| in on itself.
|
| This is actually kind of a beautiful sentence, especially the
| first half. I'm sharing it with some of my colleagues who
| research computational structural design/architecture/analysis
| as well as historical structural/civil engineering. I think
| some of them might agree with it, in a weird way. I will also
| be trying to get the main structures prof to squeeze this line
| in as a debate opener to one of his lectures for a class that
| is mixed between architecture and engineering students. FWIW
| the textbook used for that class is called "form and forces" so
| you can see how a sentence like that would fit well into the
| dialogue.
| illuminant wrote:
| I've been self studying architectural engineering. I hope to
| some day build my own home. It may well be a tribute to
| brutalism, we'll see.
|
| This observation is genuine enough, the moment of force is
| kind of like the quantum super-amplitude of forces, playing
| out very slowly on the classical scale. The experienced
| architect (or engineer) can "see" how a structure may future
| collapse by the intuition of reading moments of force and how
| they influence forms.
| szvsw wrote:
| > I've been self studying architectural engineering.
|
| Get the form and forces textbook. It's fantastic.
|
| > I hope to some day build my own home. It may well be a
| tribute to brutalism, we'll see.
|
| Don't tell any architecture students this, they will rip
| you apart (just re-visiting their trauma upon you from when
| they were inevitably criticized for thinking "brutalism is
| cool" when they first got to arch school).
|
| > The experienced architect (or engineer) can "see" how a
| structure may future collapse by the intuition of reading
| moments of force and how they influence forms.
|
| Absolutely, any structures professor/lecturer worth their
| salt IMO should always be encouraging students to develop
| this ability. One excellent way to develop it is through
| the method of graphic statics (covered extensively in the
| aforementioned textbook) which was out of vogue for quite a
| while but has since started to gain some traction again as
| a pedagogical and design tool. The catenary is the oft-
| cited (and boring) example of a form-found structure.
|
| Membrane and tension structures/the force density method
| would be another thing to check out in this realm.
| layer8 wrote:
| What the heck is potential?
|
| I mean, I'm roughly familiar with the physical notion, but it
| doesn't seem very suitable as an ontological bedrock.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| _Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and
| pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless
| choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Iluvatar
| to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging
| melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the
| depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of
| Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo
| of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void._
|
| i've always been struck by the aptness of that framing of the
| state of things.
| koolala wrote:
| im vibin atleast 70%, heart beat does whatever it wants
| ysofunny wrote:
| the tricky thing is distinguishing that which is being moved by
| the wave from the wave itself
|
| if the wave is the energy moving, the energy is being moved by
| the wave, but then what's the wave? clearly not energy
|
| if the wave is moving the energy around, the channel (or medium)
| is the wave!
| neom wrote:
| I always thought about it more like water waves, where the wave
| is both the medium and the channel? I guess I've been thinking
| about it wrong!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Believe it or not, also a wave.
| layer8 wrote:
| Everything is necessarily (?) just stuff changing in relation
| to other stuff. The wave is the change.
| canjobear wrote:
| Check out Sean Carroll's recent books if you want an introduction
| to these ideas that conveys the actual mathematical content and
| not just a word jumble.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| Sean Carroll's content really hits the spot. Technical and
| mathematical enough to avoid metaphors that don't hold up to
| careful thought, but straightforward enough to be enjoyable
| even after work when my brain is fried. He's incredibly
| prolific too, hours of content per week that's accessible to
| people like me go up on his Mindscape podcast and Youtube
| posted lectures.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Waves are just a description of the behavior that's been
| observed, right? It is a mathematical model.
|
| Physicists cleverly foist the question of what is and why on
| philosophers (who are happy to ponder endlessly), it turns out
| "can we model how it works" is much more profitable to follow.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Any physical theory is "just a description of the behavior
| that's been observed, right? It is a mathematical model."
|
| (Saying that 'cat' is just a word describing what's been
| observed completely misses the point of what science actually
| is. Philosophy of thought and science has gone much farther
| than that.)
| Aloisius wrote:
| It does seem that many physicists confuse mathematical models
| with reality or at least do so when communicating to laymen.
|
| At the very least, it sells more books.
| whatshisface wrote:
| In the sense that,
|
| - You don't know your partner, you know what you remember of
| what you've understood from what you've seen them say and do.
|
| - You don't know the text, you know what was printed.
|
| - You don't know which grains of rice you will scoop out from
| a bag.
|
| "Reality" as held above theories (models) and the evidence
| for and against them is an unreachable standard of truth.
| mistermann wrote:
| Non-truth, and the unknown (both realized as such, or not)
| _are also_ fundamentally important components of aggregate
| reality.
|
| Reality is very complex, but it typically seems very
| simple.
| samatman wrote:
| Physicists are not in the book-selling business to at least
| three significant figures.
| Aloisius wrote:
| I'm unsure what you mean by three significant figures.
| 99.8%? 1.57% 1,240?
|
| Physicists aren't generally in the book selling business,
| but authors generally want their books to be popular and
| presenting mathematical abstractions as physical reality
| certainly seems like it would make it more appealing to the
| general public (and of course, publishers).
| criddell wrote:
| Some, like Max Tegmark in his Mathematical Universe
| Hypothesis, suggest that mathematics may be all there is.
| mistermann wrote:
| Physicists, like all humans, often confuse their theories and
| models of reality for reality itself.
|
| And when they are called on it, they are far less likely to
| simply admit the mistake/shortcoming than their stellar
| reputation would exist.
|
| Also, like most (but not all) humans, they tend to not enjoy
| criticism.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Mathematical models answer all sorts of 'why' questions: why is
| the sky blue? why do the planets move the way they do? Why does
| biological altruism exist in a Darwinian world?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They are answering 'how is the sky blue' not 'why' the
| universe has a mind (in the form of human) to experience the
| blueness :)
| mannykannot wrote:
| Any toddler can ask "why" ad nauseam (at least it seems
| that way to adults in the vicinity) - and that is a good
| thing - but answering is the clever part.
|
| Strangely, some philosophers seem to shy away from
| answering. Philip Goff, for example, whose forays into
| popularizing include "Galileo's Error", merely declares
| that consciousness is fundamental, without explaining the
| second thing about what that means, and he is not,
| apparently, at all interested in following through; in
| fact, he seems to think that is a job for scientists - the
| same scientists who have made the error of adopting
| mathematical models, apparently - who should gratefully
| accept his insights and do something (what?) with them.
|
| https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/599229/galileos-
| err...
| amelius wrote:
| Even Feynman didn't like to answer
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA
| mannykannot wrote:
| There are some apposite comments here:
|
| @matthewsawczyn6592:If this man ever talks to toddlers,
| the conversation will be infinite.
|
| @thisismonitor4099: He actually did. He talked to me when
| I was a toddler at a physics conference in Greece and i
| remember it well. However, at the time I thought my
| father (another physicist) was smarter than him:)... Well
| he asked me if I knew my numbers (I did) and then talked
| a bit about them, and I told him my father taught me and
| that he was the smartest man in the world - lol he
| agreed:)
|
| He was a very kind man to children indeed and he
| certainly had no airs about him given that this guy was a
| 1 on the Landau scale and that probably no one else at
| the conference was better than a 3 so he would have been
| 100 times more influential than anyone else ...
| mistermann wrote:
| > but answering is the clever part.
|
| Regurgitating memorized ideological theories as if they
| are facts is not particularly clever in my books, but
| opinions vary.
|
| > who should gratefully accept his insights and do
| something (what?) with them.
|
| Well...they could practice their epistemic humility and
| control over their conscious processes, wonder whether
| their ideology and models are missing anything important
| (to the future well-being of the existence of humans on
| this planet), etc.
|
| Or they could carry on as is.
| mistermann wrote:
| Whether the answers are comprehensive and correct is not
| necessarily knowable though.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency
|
| Luckily, most people cannot care.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Imagine I said "rain is made of matrices". There is a problem
| with that statement. Your rain model might function using
| matrices, but that's not what rain is.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| First, the dominant philosophy of physics/science is that of
| falsification. Which roughly says that it is impossible to know
| the "true" laws. All of physics is just models, nothing else,
| and you can't do better than that.
|
| Second, physicists also do not foist this question onto
| philosophers. There is plenty of work done on this by
| physicists.
|
| Particularly, on the question of whether the wavefunction is
| simply a calculational tool or more, there are many many papers
| written by physicists. Two samples [1, 2].
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3233
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.1570
| croes wrote:
| Terrence Howard enters the chat:
|
| Told you so!
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "I remember being born"
| emporas wrote:
| Walter Russel's periodic table, is very intriguing.
|
| Observing the fact that many elements decay to other elements,
| with time being the only variable changing, is a very strong
| indication that the classic periodic table might not show the
| whole picture.
|
| I don't know in particular if matter is frozen light, but i
| think that matter has some properties we overlook.
| calebm wrote:
| I'm a wave fanatic. Shameless plug for my wave-oriented art:
| https://gods.art
| malux85 wrote:
| These are awesome, I love "Give and Take",
|
| I'm a computational chemist, you should have a look at Kohn
| Sham orbitals and google images "the hydrogen wave function"
|
| I will reach out to you for a commission
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| I mean lots of the comments in this thread exemplify the need for
| this book assuming it is well written enough to achieve its
| purpose [0]
|
| Take for example the dismissal that "waves are just a
| concept/model/way of describing the universe that is useful and
| pretty accurate for many purposes".
|
| Yes, this is true, but the wonder is to be found _in the
| universe_ , not in the model, and the model provides a path to
| that wonder to be found approaching true understanding.
| Understanding with one may practically profit, and idk
| motivational salience to see connections where they are present.
|
| Like, if you stop and think about it, isn't it like totally nuts
| that light, "heat", "electricity", etc. just smear out into one
| another at the right frequency, and that you can predict it? That
| you can ring all the nuclei in a human's body just like ringing a
| bell, listen to the tone, and turn that into a like a 3d image of
| tumors and crap? [1] And, this beauty / intricacy / whatever
| collides into the need to eat and clean up poop and so forth [2]
| -- And we end up with microwave ovens used thrice daily until
| broken and trashed, and relegate the concepts themselves into
| "just"s, because they are ordinary.
|
| And if this sense of holistic appreciation for the universe is
| more cultivated in more people we'd see more cool stuff or live
| in a better world or something.
|
| [0] idk, helping the reader develop a sense of ... awe, _better_
| intuitive understanding (because people have it no matter how
| wrong), connection, higher order consequences, all embedded in a
| practical context or something.
|
| [1] NMR/MRI more or less
|
| [2] which are _also_ emergent consequences of all these heady
| abstract concepts btw, like what _is_ is that we need to eat, why
| do we need to eat to begin with, etc.
| standardly wrote:
| not ashamed to admit I will never fully comprehend this.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| That's good, but I still have to pay my taxes
| layer8 wrote:
| Unless they are waived. ;)
| jumploops wrote:
| What are waves? Just loops over time :D
| MrPatan wrote:
| Waves on what?
| criddell wrote:
| Probability.
| largbae wrote:
| Is this theory going to give us a warp drive?
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