Blogger & Beyond

I'm just taking a chance to sit down and reflect upon the quality blogs from this semester. It was good. As we go forward, I think it would be good to continue the best of what we've learned on this forum with the best of PLS. Hence the Juan Pablo Garcia initiative, brought into fruition through the tireless efforts of Mr. Lucci will be made available @ "verbum veritatis." Joe, Professor Goudling, and any house wives from Tennessee/interested individuals are welcome to view the contents of the junior blog & perhaps with the special permission of Mr. Juan Pablo Garcia and/or Mr. Matt Lucci participate in the conversation. That is all I have to say tonight, my work is done here. In the meantime, Happy Blogging~

C.J. Mehlos I

They are made out of meat

Just a fun little video while you're getting ready for exams. Question: doesn't it seem peculiar that meat can do geometry?

Plato may just have been right...

The universe is a dodecahedron, just as he says in the Timaeus. See this story and, for a more technical explanation, this one.

Investigating the Aleph

I found the Aleph reading to be quite interesting unlike other's we've read this semester. It is somewhat of a riddle as the mere concept of something unbounded such that "a million horrible acts . . . that all occuccupied ehe same point, without superposition and without transparency is tantalyzingly supernatural though hyper-realistic. The question remains: is an Aleph truly possible within the laws of this universe, and if so can we perceive it other than through an illusory manner? The author clearly suggests that the Aleph in the story is false, however he does not deny the possibility of a real Aleph existing . . .

Finally, if given the chance to view the actual Aleph, presuming it exists, would the opportunity for knowledge outweigh the horrific reality?

Where do we go after relativity?

As I was working on my paper, I was looking back through all of the things we read and thinking about Einstein. Even though the theory of relativity is the standing "best explanation" that we have of the way the universe works, the ideas of the people who wrote before him probably seemed equally as right at the time. Then someone else came along and showed a better or more complete way of thinking about things. Can we ever get to a correct and full description of the universe? What technological or mathematical innovations would we need to do so, if this is in fact possible?

What Would Happen Then?

Ok, so I was thinking about this scenario ever since class Friday and brought it up to a very unreceptive audience Saturday morning and was delicately drowned out by the ever-increasing twangs of lively Bluegrass. As we discussed in class on Friday, if we were holding the light clock vertically and Corey runs past us with his own light clock we would see the zig-zag then according to Relativity time is slower for him than us. Also, because he would see our clock zig-zagging, our time would be going slower for us than him. What if, however, we were stationary with our vertical light clock and Corey was running in a perfect circle around us. In this case we would see Corey's light clock going in the zig zag pattern around us and Corey would see our clock still going straight up and down. So, in this particular scenario wouldn't Corey's time be going slower from our perspective and ours going normally, if not faster, from Corey's perspective because our particle is only going up and down instead of taking the zig zag. I just wanted to see what other people thought about this and if I'm going wrong somewhere maybe someone could point it out. Also, if I did the pythagorean theorum right then the path that the light particle takes is 263,043 miles. That's 76,761 miles added to the path of particle and add about four tenths of a second to what "time" was for the person who is standing still. That's less time than I thought that it would be, of course my math could be wrong cause I tend to not be good at math and science.

Einstein & the Big Bang

I realize I'm probally the only one posting this weekend because I'm a nerd & have no friends and the like, however I was intrigued by Einstein's theory of expanding space in the Davis reading and how it set the groundwork for Hawking's big bang theory. I think I understand that Einstein's non-Euclidean conception of space as "finite but unbounded" sets the stage for idea of an ever-expanding universe, however I am one of those who 'prefers words to equations' so I was wondering if someone could further explain the nuiances of Einstein's general theory in relation to the big bang theory (175). Ironically, once again Einstein's theory lead to the 'big bang' of sorts so if nothing else I thought I'd offer a few words as I naturally prefer it to equations. Yours in PLS,

Corey

P.S> If I was Einstein and I was offered the Presidency of Israel in '52, I probally would have rejected it, too . . . and held out to be the P.M. of Ireland, instead!

Gaussian Space-Time Continuum

In chapter 27, Einstein talks about how the general theory of relativity operates under a four-dimensional coordinates system, suggesting that the space-time continuum renders it non-Euclidean (111). NOTE: if you want the exact reasoning, check Lucci's post.

Given that every point - - x1, x2, x3, & x4 - - is assigned arbitrarily, then it seems to follow that every statement of space and time can be described in such a four-dimensional co-ordinate framework. Hence "every such statement is expressed by the agreement of their four coordinates" (112). In such a way the Gaussian model effectively replaces the old, rigid body of reference mode as such statements cannot be limited to the Euclidean-coordinate mode.

By the way, Matt & Peter: I'm 5 seats to your left- GO IRISH,

Corey

A comment to Cathy, and a little something of my own

• First, since comments are a few extra clicks to get to, I'll just comment on Cathy's post here: The point of the expanding rods, I think, is to show that if one set of rods is expanded, a few squares for example, the cartesian plane will become warped. This doesn't change the marble slab itself, of course, but it does change the way that we can measure it. Accordingly, our measurements will be warped, and a strictly "straight," rigid cartesian system simply won't fit onto our marble slab.
• Einstein asserts that because the universe's density differs from zero, it cannot be quasi-Euclidean. From this, he concludes that the universe must be spherical (to be more precise, quasi-spherical), and necessarily finite. I'm not sure how to make sense of the Einstein's assertion that the universe's density differs unequivocally from zero. It would seem to me that in order to conclude this, one must assume a finite universe in the first place. Theoretically, however, it seems quite possible that the universe could actually be infinite but mirror itself. When we see the universe "expanding," then, what we would actually be seeing is things moving even farther out. To sum up, I basically don't see how, if we live in a poincare sphere, we could actually understand definitively.