Home | Join! | Help | Browse | Forums | NuWorld | NWF | PoPo   

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Why do matter and anti-matter hate each other so much?
Thursday. 11.8.07 1:08 am
I dedicate this entry to delightful Thalweg, even though she does not read this blog.

I don't think Thalweg shares to the same degree my penchant for pondering the mystical and unseen mysteries of the human state and the Universe, but she always indulges me anyway, and with good result, too!

For example, I am perpetually maddened by the idea that positive is attracted to negative. But WHY is positive attracted to negative? What about negative makes it attractive? It might have something to do with the spins of quarks, perhaps, but that just bumps the problem to another level. What about the spins of quarks make them attractive to one another? And another thing: electrons are in pairs. Even nuclides with an even number of protons or an even number of neutrons and especially both vastly outnumber nuclides with odd-odd numbers of protons and neutrons. WHY? Why do protons "like" to be in pairs?

Please tell me if you have the answer to these questions.

In this spirit, I was asking Thalweg WHY do things tend towards a low energy state? To say that things "like" to be at the lowest energy possible seems to endow random particles and blocks and elements with rather humanlike emotions. So why is this law of Thermodynamics true? I wasn't really expecting an answer, but Thalweg gave me a good one, and that is this: Objects lie about, not caring at what energy state they are (after all, they are only objects, and not cognizant of what is happening). If the object is a ball, and it is sitting at the top of a hill, any number of random forces can act on it. It is "metastable", meaning that it is not moving at the moment, but there are quite a lot of different things that *could* happen to it which would make it move. So eventually something happens to it. It could take a long time. It could be anything. Since it's metastable, it moves, and it falls down according to the force of gravity to the bottom of the hill (or if it is an iron-rich boulder, maybe it gets picks up by a magnetic tractor beam. Let's say it was gravity acting for now). At the bottom of the hill, just the same number of forces could happen to it, really... but even if they do... the ball won't move anymore. It just hasn't any place to go. So it stays there. So In The Beginning, God put everything at different levels of stability. The ones who were already stable just stayed that way. The ones who were not stable moved. The ones which were metastable have or will eventually move until they are stable, and then they will stop moving. So eventually, if enough forces act in the universe, everything will end up someplace stable, which only really means that they'll be in a place where the forces of the universe can't affect them anymore. You're only most likely to find things there because that is the state that they'll reside in the longest, because once they accidentally get there, there is no way of getting out. The ball will roll down the hill, the electron will go back down from its excited state, some random floating mass will accrete into a sphere in space.

I mean, all of this you learn the first time you encounter potential energy. Everyone knows this stuff. But they always say it the wrong way around! "Matter accretes into a ball because it is the most energetically stable configuration." TRUE! But that doesn't really explain causality! Matter accretes into a ball because there is such thing as gravity, and until the matter coalesces into a sphere, gravity is going to mess around with it. Gravity is going to just mess around with it until it just doesn't have anything to do anymore. So matter isn't arranging itself at ALL, it shouldn't even be the subject of the sentence... it's just sitting around letting something else arrange it until there is no more arranging that can be done.

So that bring us to the next questions: WHY are some configurations more energetically stable? Why do we only have a finite number of forces? WHY DOES GRAVITY EXIST? Why is matter attracted to other matter? What about matter makes it attractive to itself? Did God create gravity as a fundamentally homosexual force, while electromagnetism is fundamentally straight? Does this lead to an orderly array of electric and magnetic dipoles, boringly lined up along magnetic field lines, and then just a big cluster.... of mass?

...perhaps...

I'll have to ask Thalweg.
1 Comments.


You ever look into String Theory? It's gooooood.
» middaymoon on 2007-11-08 06:23:29

Sorry, you do not have permission to comment.

If you are a member, try logging in again or accessing this page here.

Zanzibar's Weblog Site • NuTang.com

NuTang is the first web site to implement PPGY Technology. This page was generated in 0.296seconds.

  Send to a friend on AIM | Set as Homepage | Bookmark Home | NuTang Collage | Terms of Service & Privacy Policy | Link to Us | Monthly Top 10s
All content � Copyright 2003-2047 NuTang.com and respective members. Contact us at NuTang[AT]gmail.com.