Recent content by blazh femur

I'm neither a robot nor an appliance, but I am very interested in science.

Okay, so even though it would take a supercomputer millions of years to calculate, the future trajectories of each chunk of material in the rings of Saturn is theoretically possible, unlike decaying carbon 14 atoms which are subject to the random behavior dictated by quantum mechanics. Correct...

And yet, if we have a million carbon 14 atoms we know in 5,730 years half of them will decay very predictably, though it's impossible to know which ones will decay. So, using my own term here, the "system" of a million carbon 14 atoms does NOT behave randomly, but each atom individually behaves...

I'm thinking about something like Brownian motion, or the trajectories of every chunk of material in Saturn's rings. There are so many interactions in the rings of Saturn it's impossible to follow them all, so we call the motion "random" - or some people do - even though, from a distance, the...

How did you find PF?: random Brownian motion Is randomness real or is it simply defined as such due to our inability to perceive hyper complex order? Randomness is a troublesome word. I'd feel better if I knew it was an objective phenomenon and not merely a placeholder description of...