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

Hi, JD, I hope you remember me. You an me and Virus 1 were having a nice conversation about science, religion, metaphysics and so on before being so rudely interrupted. I guess it's all gone now, and I don't know if it will ever come back. As for me, I've been evicted from my old home, having forgotten a password, so I have a new home and identity where you can find me should you wish to talk about that kind of stuff again! Anyways, wellcome back from my side, and I hope things will get back on track with the new site and all!

Best Wishes,
The Case M2

Heh! Hello again yourself. Indeed I do remember our conversations. Miss them, I do. Okay, before I sound TOO much like Yoda, welcome back. Sorry to hear about the forgotten password - mine came to me in a sudden flash of memory like a long-lost data bit that turns up months after the computer has deleted the file it was missing from and eventually crashes the entire western half of the USA's phone networking computers. Well, maybe it wasn't that dramatic - but it certainly was exciting to be back.

Hiya! I'll get my old password back eventually, but right now I'm having huge fun building my new site. We can resume our discussion soon - I still have to get my wits together, the mess over here is rather confusing! Anyways, cheers!

Well hi guys (?). Nice to be back with you. Not sure about the benefits of being corporate BBC now but I managed to get back in so that's a start.

Nothing to say except glad to know you're still around. Back soon for more explorations of the limits of our abilities to communicate by email.

Happy Easter

Hello Virus and welcome back! I have also had a bit of a problem getting back into the swing of things. Not very happy about BBC either. Talk more later!

Well, fellers, looks like we're all back ... more or less. Heh. I've been hanging around the good ol' Ask H2G2 forum, specifically the one going on about "Americans, Bush, and Global Warming." Some decent discussions going on there, some not so decent. Seems we arrived at a consensus in our earlier debates on science versus religion ... now I'm going on about the philosophy of human nature and it's tendency to waste abundant natural resources, though I think I've talked myself out of that one too. Heh. I debate a lot, it seems. At least H2G2 is a comfortable forum to do it in. Must be something about the writing things out as opposed to face-to-face ... advantages are being able to think things through for a while, then develop the thoughts into logical sentences and concepts that can be communicated ... hopefully, anyway. The drawbacks are of course that it's hard to communicate thoughts without the benefit of body language, and non-verbal expression/inflections we take for granted in our daily communication efforts. One of you had mentioned this earlier, and it struck a chord with me. The "dynamics of email" I think you put it. Interesting dilemma there.

We must just think thoroughly about what we want to write and consider the way the words look on the screen and the impression they convey. If all fails, use smileys!

JD there is something I would like to know that you might be able to answer. Or you could perhaps ask some of those scientist buddies of yours:

1) Is there any CONCEIVABLE way in which a neutron can be turned into an antiproton plus an electron?
2) Is there any conceivable way in which a proton can be turned into a neutron plus a positron?

I know that protons can be turned into neutrons by absorbing an electron, but what about the above reactions? Are they possible at all?

Some hefty questions there, UMP. I'm sure I'm not the difinitive one to answer those questions, so I'll try to ask someone who might know. I don't know enough about atomic particles to say whether or not they are interchangeable as you ask. To be pedantic, anything is possible / conceivable. However, it might involve thinking of things more broadly than they had been before. In other words, it might mean re-thinking what is meant by "antiproton" or even "electron," from a physical sense.

JD - Good point. ("To be pedantic, anything is possible / conceivable. However, it might involve thinking of things more broadly than they had been before. In other words, it might mean re-thinking what is meant by "antiproton" or even "electron," from a physical sense.").

This may be the deepest comment I have read yet in all these conversations. Of course it is true. Unfortunately people do not, for reasons I cannot understand unless it is simply laziness (which I do understand!) take the trouble to think through the implications of our having and holding this belief, irrespective of its truth.

In fact, although it doesn't alter the significant truth, I would argue that not everything is possible. Only possible things are possible, and these are defined by our logic, our belief system, which is realised, outwardly expressed, in the logical laws of the Universe. It is what our world is built out of.

Another way of saying this may be that anything may in fact be possible/conceivable, but not in this Universe. Our beliefs, our definition of this Universe, precludes certain things from being possible. Try and think of just one thing that exists that is not possible. And how you could possibly observe such a thing. Of course one can't.

We might see surprising things, but we never see something that we believe to be impossible, however impossible we considered it to be before we saw it. If anything that really is impossible in our belief system really does exist we will never observe it. By definition we don't have the conceptual tools. It would mean reconceptualising the world while still holding on to our old conception, an impossibility. We meet impossibility by changing our belief system so as to include it or by demoting the observation to hallucination. Our beliefs detirmine what is possible, or rather what it is possible for us to detect or conceive of, (which are the same thing).

What follows inexorably from this is, (can't quite prove 'inexorably' yet), that what is possible is what we can conceive of, that in a sense everything we can conceive of exists. If the possibility of a thing exists, if it is logically possible, then we must believe that we live in in a world that is logically constructed in such a way as to allow the inclusion of that thing. The logic of the world would not be destroyed by the existence of that thing. If you spend long enough considering this then I think you'll find that logically everything possible has to exist. For now I'll just suggest that everything logically possible may as well exist.

As it is our beliefs that govern our behaviour things that we often think don't exist have a remarkable effect on the world. God is a good example. He may not exist but he's had a more profound effect on this Universe than doughnuts, which clearly do exist, ever will.

To say that God only exists in our heads is not a counter argument. There are many philosophers who would argue that doughnuts only exist in our heads. It is better to define existence as the extent to which a thing interacts with the world than by its ability to hurt your foot if you kick it. If existence were to be redefined and understood in this way then we would have a much better understanding of the dangers and the power of human imagination and our ability to conceptualise.

I would like to say here, having become pi....d off with academic philosophical writing that constantly covers its back and just flies kites without commitment, intellectual doodling, that I actually believe all this, although I may well have put it badly.

Akay Virus, thanks for getting so deep and all, I agree with you to a large extent! But necessarily my own views are somewhat different from yours, because my own experiences have been different. I believe every person will have a slightly different view from every other person, or else they wouldn't need to be separate people! We can talk a long time about perceptions and realities and how they interrelate. I don't want to get entangled in my own ideas though; I'd like to keep them loose and open.

What I really wanted to know from JD was, whether by 'generally accepted' scientific quantum/nuclear physical theory, it was possible for neutrons to disintegrate into anti-protons plus positrons, though! Or any other way in which matter might turn into anti-matter. For instance suppose we accept the existence of quarks. Which quarks form a proton, which a neutron, which an anti-proton and which an anti-neutron?

First word should of course be "Okay"!

Akoy UMP Mark II - In hindsight my last message was heavy handed, whether correct or not. Pardon for this.

No idea about matter and anti-matter except an interest in the fact that they share the same manner of existing as God and the Devil, and probably everything else. They can both exist, or neither, but you can't have on without the other - they sum to zero.

No problem Virus, your insights are always interesting! I would like sometime to tell you a bit about matter and anti-matter and the theories about them.

When's JD gonna show up again?

Oh I'm here, from time to time. I just don't have the time to say much when I do have the time to stop by, if that makes any sense. Besides, I'm not very knowledgeable about matter and anti-matter anyway. From what I know, their existence has largely been deduced by Einstein's theory of Special Relativity and its consequences on how matter and energy work. How this relates to quantum mechanics / theory (loosely the theory of how/why subatomic particles behave they way they do) I'm not sure is well-theorized as yet. I think that's part of, or perhaps one of the goals of the Grand Unification Theory (GUT). It's been a while since I had time to read Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" (my personal favorite book for discussing all things very very large and very very small), but he talks about this a lot. It's yet another subject I'm interested in, but don't have the time for.