I am a Scientist., page 3

Originally posted by mb2591
Regarding the double slit experiment how do you say nothing special is going on when the results of the experiment change simply by observing it?

As I explained, measurement is an abstraction used to make things easier to calculate. The actual "process" that happens is an interaction with the environment and has nothing to do a living "observer" doing anything, it's just an interaction, which is with the physical experimental setup, not the actual experimenter!

In fact, the right way to think of "wave function collapse" is by the evaluation of a conditional probability. It's no shock the probability changes--that's the whole point! (en.wikipedia.org...)

Originally posted by kurifuri
Nah, in a seriousness, I too find this site highly amusing. The religion section is particularly outrageous.

It's got some amazing stuff! Though a few days ago one of the threads there did lead me to some hilarious youtube videos...

BUT... with you description i was thrown off. I was under the impression that string theory allowed for different universes? Not that i understand the concept of other universes very well, nor do i believe it.

It does! But that's not a problem! Normal physics does this too! The neat thing about string theory is that it does this in a "controllable" manner. The way normal physics does it is through adjusting "adjustable"parameters (e.g., "imagine a universe where electromagnetism is twice as strong"). String theory does this in a more complicated way, because it relates "everything to everything else" in some sense.

And being able to describe other universes doesn't require that they exist. It's not clear if string theory (or other theories) require other universes with different physical laws to exist (although for various reasons it's generally expected that they do). But it may well be that lots of different universes *can* exist ("could have"), but for whatever reason, only ours *does*.

On a side note: Now that i have physicist here i would like to ask about the God Particle and the effect its discovery could have on technology and the way we view the world in general?

The "god particle" is the Higgs, no physicist calls it that

. And in terms of technology? I don't really know, it's not clear to me how that specific thing could have direct applications. It's hard to make, so any applications of it would have to exist in that hard to make regime. There are applications of particle physics at "high" energy (e.g., scanning things with particle beams) but the Higgs is produced at energies much higher than this so I don't see any obvious direct applications.

Indirect applications exist, though, because understanding the details of how the Higgs works specifically tells us how our theories can work in general, which do have applications to every day things (e.g., the math behind the Higgs mechanism is roughly the same as the math used to understand phase transitions in condensed matter systems).