[ Long ] A Philosophy of Science v. Pseudo-Science

Post Reply New Topic

Not in the strict sense of ownership; but the mods do tend to respect the wishes of OPs to lock 'their' threads when the topic has strayed too far or when individuals have hijacked the thread for their own purposes.That suits me just fine.

However, I'll wait a few more days and see if things cool down a bit.

Please people, let's return to the topic of the thread, otherwise this thread will be locked indeed.

That's great, and hopefully, from my sentence above, as my language can get a 'little' convoluted, you know that I do mean there are not any 'sane' problems at this time.

Funny that you can describe you extraordinarily convoluted and verbose diction in such a concise manner.

You will, no doubt, define the parameters as to what is acceptable.

If one may not effectively disagree with the OP then I think that such should be clearly stated.

Absolutely. Well OP thinks that this thread has strayed off the course....so it would be very much appreciated to be as pertinent as possible to the subject of the thread.

What variables?



Depends on what exactly you mean by mass. If you mean rest mass, it doesn’t depend on the speed of the proton relative to anything. If you mean relativistic mass (though I think this concept is currently being abandoned to reduce confusion, as it’s enough to talk about the total energy of the particle), it’s given by

m′ = E / c² = m / √(1 - v² / c²),

where m′ is the relativistic mass of the particle, E is its energy (sum of rest energy and kinetic energy), v is its speed, all three with respect to a certain reference frame, and m is its rest mass.

If a particle has no energy (or no relativistic mass), there simply is no particle. So, for the quotient

m / √(1 - v² / c²)

not to vanish as m approaches zero (the case of a photon), v needs to approach c. Any speed other than the speed of light causes a particle with zero rest mass to have zero energy, so photons can only exist travelling at the speed of light relative to any reference frame.

Did you miss the part where Fnord and DentArthurDent sorta, um, did, before the quoted was posted?

There was one certain twit on the Internet who claimed to be the world's foremost neuroscientist, mathematician, and physicist.

He showed himself to be bogus pretty soon after I first saw something from him when he referred to the neurofibrillary tangles of those who suffer from Alzheimer's to be tangles of neurons. Any world's foremost neuroscientist would know that neurofibrillary tangles are tangles of very fine structures within neurons, not of neurons themselves.

The more he posted, the crazier he got. He couldn't understand why nobody paid any attention to him.

Choose your units carefully so that c=1 and then you have E=m for a mass at rest. For a mass in motion, it becomes E^2=m^2+p^2 where p is its momentum.

One of the crazies that I've encountered insists that the ratio of the circumference of any given circle to its diameter has been slowly increasing since the world was created in 4004 BCE, and that it will eventually equal 4.004; thus proving that the "Heavans and the Earth" we're created by God, and also signifying that the Final Days have come.

I love it. We should send him a "4004 aniversary card each year".

Years ago I went to work for an engineering company in Houston. The guy I replaced was a member of some church where the preacher predicted the end of the world to be some specific day back then, I think in September or October of 1979.

When the end of the world came and went without any notable changes, the preacher recalculated and found that he was a year off and it was the same day but a year later.

One Monday morning a few months before the revised end of the world, his boss called him in and asked about the date of the end of the world which the guy confirmed. His boss then said that he had just bought a sailboat and scheduled the payments to start after that date so that he would never have to make any payments on the sailboat. He told the guy that if he did have to make any payments because the world didn't end on that date, he was going to blame him for it.

The guy got mad and quit and so I was hired to replace him.

That isn't true, unless mass is equal to 0 (in which case it just becomes E = 0 due to all of the units cancelling out due to the zero*), because m would have the unit only for mass, and E would still have the unit for mass times the unit for speed squared.

So let's make up a speed unit, so that c = 1. I don't know of any speed units that cause c = 1, so we need to make it up. Let's call it q. Then that would cause c = 1 q. Let's use the good old kg for mass. Let us say that m = 100 kg. So plugging into the equation:

E = (100 kg)(1 q)^2

E = (100 kg)(1 q^2)

E = 100 kg x q^2

Notice how E is equal to 100 kg times q squared, but m is just equal to 100 kg, so E and m are NOT equal.

*The only exception for this is a unit in degrees, in which case 0 degrees does not cancel out. Notice how Fahrenheit and Celsius are in degrees, because there are valid temperatures in those units that drop into the negative, but Kelvin is not in degrees, because 0 K (or just 0) constitutes the very lowest temperature anything in the universe may theoretically have (i.e. no negatives are valid).

<* Heavy Sigh *>

Mass–energy equivalence means only that the mass of an object or system is a measure of its energy content.

Thus,


E / m = c^2 = (299,792,458 m/s)^2 = 89,875,517,873,681,764 J/kg (≈ 9.0 × 10^16 joules per kilogram).

So the energy equivalent 'E' of one gram (1/1000 of a kilogram) of mass 'm' is equivalent to:

89.9 terajoules
25.0 million kilowatt-hours (≈ 25 GW·h)
21.5 billion kilocalories (≈ 21 Tcal)
85.2 billion BTUs

or to the energy released by combustion of the following:

21.5 kilotons of TNT-equivalent energy (≈ 21 kt)
568,000 US gallons of automotive gasoline

For instance, the atomic bomb used on Nagasaki had an explosive yield equivalent to 21 kt of TNT. About 1 kg of the approximately 6.15 kg of plutonium in each of these bombs fissioned into lighter elements totaling almost exactly one gram less, after cooling. The electromagnetic radiation and kinetic energy (thermal and blast energy) released in this explosion carried the missing one gram of mass. This occurs because nuclear binding energy is released whenever elements with more than 62 nucleons fission.

Class dismissed.

I assume that you are objecting to the use of geometrized units. In General Relativity, it is quite common to see papers and books that use geometrized units. To say that it is wrong is to say that General Relativity is wrong.