Orodruin and Peter: I recognize that, of course, technically a determination of perfect flatness can never be established by mortal man, so let me rephrase it. If there's an unbroken string of ever tighter constraints that are aymptotically approaching perfect flatness, I think every...
Thank you Peter for your response-- I suspected that perhaps Natalie should not have chosen the word 'pristine', given its implication of perfection. Now could you try your hand at my closing question: "And if perfect flatness is not a theoretical consequence, and if the universe turns out to...
I just read an article by Natalie Wolchover (a smart and knowledgeable writer as far as I can tell) in Quanta about the new analysis supporting a closed universe. In the article she makes this comment, "The leading theory of the universe’s birth, known as cosmic inflation, yields pristine...
Hi! Obviously my understanding is at a pretty elementary level, but nevertheless I'm puzzled by the reaction of astronomers and astrophysicists to the discrepancy in the measurements of the expansion of the early universe based on the Cosmic Microwave Background, and the measurements of its...
Sometimes, the full truth is right there in front of you, but as many children will be discovering on the morning of the 25th, some assembly is required! Is that the case here? Or is a crucial part of the truth missing from the box, so to speak, and we have to put in a call to relevant parties...
I have to be very brief for now-- sleep beckons!-- but I know that the experiment doesn’t actually violate thermodynamics laws! Give me a wee bit of credit, Peter!
But you still are disregarding the experimenters’ own partial explanation-- that the energy of the decohering correlations is used...
But Peter, you didn’t respond to the point of mine that dealt a coup de grace to your assertion that the hotter Hydrogen had higher entropy than the colder Carbon: The experimenters themselves wrote in their paper that “This reversal is accompanied by a decrease of mutual information and...
Of course, my initial words to you PeterDonis must be a pure and sincere expression of appreciation for your efforts to explain this experiment to me-- my only regret is that I already put a thanks to you in bold face and italics in an earlier post, so what do I do now, when so much more...
Yes, PeterDonis, entropy increased overall, we agree-- but why was this cold to hot (I understand the special way we’re using ‘cold to hot’, as you pointed out) entropy decrease a part of what happened? Why didn’t the correlation-loss heat, equally distributed between the Carbon and Hydrogen...
First of all, thank you very much PeterDonis for taking the time and expending the energy to reply to someone like me, as obviously unschooled in the nuances of the quantum world as I am intrigued by those nuances-- those strange, deeply counter-intuitive little details that fascinate everyone...
Very simply put, I have an intense desire to understand an experimental result which, on the surface, violates entropy and the arrow of time-- although, since the experimenters predicted exactly that outcome, a deeper analysis must show that it does not actually violate entropy and the arrow of...
Hi, I'm trying to understand in a simple, non-mathematical way the basic concept underlying why a particular, very recent experiment turned out the way it did.
The experiment, by Serra and Lutz entitled 'Reversing the thermodynamic arrow of time using quantum correlations', demonstrated an...
To Mentz114:
Talk about “unwarranted assumptions”! The idea that I want, to quote you, “to stir up doubt and dissent” about GR is an imputation of motive that would make my 'little round belly shake like a bowl full of jelly' from guffawing, if I didn't have high-carbon steel washboard abs...
Showing unusual maturity for one of my tender years, I'm going to ignore the fact that another commenter attempted to insert me bodily into his Cuisinart set on puree, for no apparent reason. I'll just follow the splendid example of my Granddad, who hailed from Laredo, Texas. In situations...
As an interested amateur, I felt compelled to register just to pose some questions about issues raised by this thread, questions which I hope will be answered by the experts in as explicit and jargon-free a manner as possible.
Consider the prototypical gravitational event: a rock is released...