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Joined: Mar 2006
Posts: 7
K
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K
Joined: Mar 2006
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JOnny - no you can't extrapolate in that way; and don't trust Penrose too much on this one. I'm sure he only trusts General Relativity and Twister Theory ;-) ;-)


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Kasper Olsen, Ph.D.
web: kasperolsen.wordpress.com
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Joined: Mar 2006
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K
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K
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DA Morgan, you say: "I doubt anything smaller is measurable. So it should be reasonable to consider it the unit of granularity."

Maybe reasonable. But you can't conclude from this that time IS discrete. For example, as I've said before, just because strings are extended objects does not imply that space and time should be discrete...


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Kasper Olsen, Ph.D.
web: kasperolsen.wordpress.com
Joined: Oct 2004
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D
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D
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Johnny Boy asks:
"Is it then reasonable to extrapolate and postulate that "everything else" is quantised?"

I think it is reasonable to consider that if one part of a calculation is ... all must be. The fact that we consider, in our daily lives, temperature to be continuous, has no bearing on the fact that we know, for a fact, it is quantized.

Dr. Olsen wrote:
"as I've said before"

My understanding of the degree you have is that to earn it one must understand the value of supporting statements with evidence. What do you have to support your statement "just because strings are extended objects does not imply that space and time should be discrete."


DA Morgan
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What interests me is the following: In order to model cavity (blackbody) radiation, one FIRST has to calculate, from the boundary conditions, what the allowed frequencies can be. This requires standing waves stretching over the whole cavity. Then you have two choices: (i) you can use Boltzmann-statistics on the standing waves, or (ii) you can use Bose-statisics to determine how the photons fill the energy levels. Now in the first case the waves outomatically "know" which frequencies are allowed, while in the second case, the photons are assumed to have a limited size; so how do they know which frequencies are allowed? Does this not imply that the radiation in the cavity does exist of standing waves, while the radiation, measured through the hole in the side, exits and then morph to form localised photons. If this is correct it means that quantization does not necessarily implies granularity of "light size", but only that a wave with a certain frequency, whatever it's size, cannot have less energy than given by the Planck's relationship between energy and frequency.

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