h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm involved with a discussing with a serial idiot on Facebook, who is I predict heading towards challenging me to explain how energy becomes matter.

He's also linked to a video of the double slit experiment which is as far as I can tell faithful, right up until the close when it name-checks new-age-ism and notes how measurement changes the outcome but then veers off into a different territory of saying "consciousness" is the ultimate universal reality, and that reality is consciously constructed.

Now pause to note, I am familiar with the notions coming out of neuroscience that our perceptions are constructed by the brain not (necessarily) accurate records of experience.

So I think where's he's heading is a sort of solipsism, we can't accurately measure somethign and we can;t even think clearly, you don't know anything (and therefore god exists)

Any guidance on how I can keep the conversation sensible, becuase it's like the fundamental discoveries of brain and physics do seem to say reality is well weird, but he's using that to argue it's unknowable.

A penny for your thoughts....

My thoughts?

Don't waste your time and energy. Talk to non-idiots.

Aren't you suffering from the SIWOTI syndrome?

http://xkcd.com/386/

He haunts my facbook page. I put up a video sciency-related, invariably he comments on it.

I started my reply to him today with "I'm not having this argument with you again Alan."

But I figured forewarned is forearmed....

"Talk to non-idiots."

That's why I always come back to h2g2 and merely flirt with Facebook, brazen hussy that she is...

The problem with the two slit experiment is that the "standard" interpretation of it, the Copenhagen interpretation, is that the outcome is not determined until some conscious being observes it. Reality doesn't exist until someone observes it. This is so ludicrous that the physicists didn't fancy it at all, but it gives all the right answers. They then developed an alternative, equally ludicrous interpretation - that each time two outcomes are possible, both occur and the universe splits into two, with each outcome happening in a different universe.

If you can think of an explanation of Quantum Mechanics that makes sense and is easily understandable, I'd say there'd be a Nobel Prize for it.

I actually quite like the many universes hypothesis... means that somewhere out there is a Mr. D who's life isn't a constant barrage of Complicated because it either worked out in his favour or he didn't want it in the first place...

<>

serial idiots answer

it doesn't!!!!! they are both the same thing, its just one is moving faster than the other

E=mc2

slow energy becomes hard,

just like water

fast high energy water is steam, slow it and it becomes liquid, slow it some more and it becomes solid, its the same with energy and matter, they are just 2 different names for the same thing in 2 tifferent physical states



B.B.B.

http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=111519688922998&id=671304675

If you want to follow along at home....

not at home!!!

Matter/Antimatter/Dark matter. Energy/Dark energy.
All components of the same entity - the Multiverse - all mixed up together, showing us (at our primitive stage) bewildering 'facts'.

The slit experiment is the only window we have (so far).



Hehehe.
Can I have that prize now, please?

""Matter/Antimatter/Dark matter. Energy/Dark energy. ""

anti matter is just matter with an oposite charge, when they produce particles of anti matter, they cool it so it 'condenses' into anti-hydrogen

Tell him this:

The Multiverse is engaged in a continuing battle to retain a balance between Law and Chaos. If it wasn't for Elric, John Daker, Jerry Cornelius et al, we'd be stuffed.

there is no "" Law and Chaos."" they are mearly different aspects of Kaos!!!!

There is no Kaos. Only the Great Old Ones and the monotonous fluting of a blind idiot god.

now you have opened a can of cthulhu