The Altered Thoughts Thread Options

[Sir Psycho Sexy]

I knew something like that would happen.

[Usurper MrTeapot]

I can't for the life of me work out how he did it, but my old crazy maths teacher once proved that 1+1=3. It took him a whole lesson and many coverings of the whiteboard, but he did it.

[Yannick]

Was his work flawed, or did he actually like, prove it?

Different base or something?

[Usurper MrTeapot]

Was it flawed? Hmm, difficult question. We were still trying to get our head around algebra and that Pythagoras bloke so I guess he could have told us anything. The simple bits made sense but at the end of the lesson most of us still declared that 1+1 equaled 2 and anything else was lunacy.

[Moosh]

Yes, it was flawed. Most likely he divided by zero at some point, that's the usual way to produce "proofs" that 1=2 or 1+1=3 or whatever you may want.

[Usurper MrTeapot]

Ah. Well. There you have it.

1 + 1 most certainly does not equal 3.

[Yannick]

In a discussion about whether or not negative speed is possible (no definite answer yet, but I said yes, in the sense of deceleration, but you can't really have a negative speed, so no), we got a bit off topic and started talking about whether negative things are conceivable at all. So this guy started saying stuff about negative charges, and I replied with:

Oh, forgot about those. We've not done much on magnetism in school, but when charges are said to be negative and positive, are they actually, or is it just like "This one has this type of charge, and this one has the opposite of that, so they must be positive and negative!"

Oh man, I think my brain just like, exploded. Do you know how difficult it is to comprehend that we can have negative charges? I mean, how is that measurable? It totally just stopped making sense to me. (This isn't to say I've stopped believing in it, but woah, brain ache.) Here's my attempt (mostly for myself) to make it make sense again...

Neutron = no charge (this is very easy to accept)
Proton = positive charge (taking this to mean a measurable, countable, charge. As in, "I have a positive amount of money" or "I have money that exists and can be measured)
Electron = .... Hey, probably not, but what if like, there's a 0, and there's really no such thing as negative and positive, just directions from 0? Not necessarily only two (like on a number line), but an infinite amount of directions? Negative and positive are just opposite directions, and it really has nothing to do with a number being below zero, just the absolute value from it? It makes it make sense! Sort of. To me anyway.

Someone should interject before I actually start believing what I just wrote. My head hurts.

[Moosh]

Okay, from the top. Deceleration is not negative speed, it is a negative change in speed. I believe I read an article in some journal recently where someone had managed to make light move with what was technically a negative speed, but I didn't read it in detail, so don't quote me on that. Other than that negative speed doesn't exist in the real world as we know it, but of course that doesn't stop us using it in calculations.

Charged particles. The words "positive" and "negative" are of course just arbitrary labels, but I think you can be fairly sure there are two types of charge, and they are opposite. I'm sure you know that opposite charges attract, and like charges repel. It's called charge because there are two types, not the other way round.

Charge is a physical property of particles, like mass or spin. It is therefore measurable, and if you accept that it is measured relative to a scale that we made up, then it's perfectly reasonable that a down, strange or bottom quark has a charge of -1/3. It's not really an absence of charge, you're simply measuring its relative effect on things and applying a label that's convenient.

Of course someone who knows more about physics than me (not that hard really) is welcome to come along and say that that's all bollocks.

[Yannick]

Wait. Then do neutrons actually have charges, but they're just measured as zero on our scale?

[Moosh]

A neutron is made up of a top quark and two bottom quarks. These have a charge of 2/3 -1/3 -1/3 = 0. It doesn't attract or repel other charged particles, so it doesn't have charge.

[Yannick]

Well yeah, but from how I understood what you said, whatever top quarks and bottom quarks (and charm, strange, etc.) charges' are, they have to be relevant to something, and that something has to be 0. And the neutron is right at that zero mark, because it has no charge. Which makes my absolute value thing make sense, 'cos it's not making the particles have a negative charge per se, just a charge less than the neutron's charge, or less than 0. God that must sound terrible. "Less than 0, but still not negative" That's not really how I mean it. Imagine that 0 = 100. You can have a number less than 100, but it's not really a negative number, even though that on our scale it is.

Actually no. Think of it like this. The neutron has no charge, therefore it is at the center of our scale, and is considered to be 0. There's no such thing as positive and negative charges, just charges that attract and repel each other. Depending on the characteristics of a particle, it is either measured to the left of the neutron and dubbed negative or to the right and considered positive. So it's not like we actually have negative anything, we just have stuff conceivably different than what we would regard as their positive. ...Does that make sense?

Man I do not like negatives. I'm kind of expecting to go to bed and wake up with the above ripped to shreds. Don't forget to explain why when you do so.

[Moosh]

The second paragraph is better. The charge on an electron is not less than the charge on a proton, it's the same, but in the opposite direction. It's just convenient (and makes the adding up work out) to label those directions as positive and negative.

[CrazyFooIAintGet...]

Ok I can add to this, but I just woke up so I may have to come back and edit this later.

In a discussion about whether or not negative speed is possible (no definite answer yet, but I said yes, in the sense of deceleration, but you can't really have a negative speed, so no), we got a bit off topic and started talking about whether negative things are conceivable at all. So this guy started saying stuff about negative charges, and I replied with:

Ok, firstly: you can distinguish between two types of quantities: scalar and vector. The difference is that vectors have a direction associated with them and scalars don't.

Speed is a scalar, and as far as I know negative speed doesn't have any physical meaning... however it has a vector equivalent called velocity. You may hear speed and velocity interchangeably but there is a difference. You can't just say something is moving at a velocity of 10m/s, because then you don't know which direction its moving. You need to know the speed and the direction to get its velocity. You could give the direction as an angle from an established direction, or if you have defined a coordinate system (lets say that the y direction is north of where I am and x direction is east) then through the magic of trigonometry its possible to break it down into 2 numbers: the x component of the velocity and the y component. i.e. if you have a velocity of [2,1] this is telling you that for each unit of time, you are moving 2 units in the x direction and 1 in the y direction. If you imagine a flat 2D world you can describe any direction in this way. So if you know somethings position and velocity you have everything you need to know to track how it moves with time, but if you just knew that the speed was 5 you'd have no clue because it could be moving in any old direction. Anyways what I'm getting at is that with velocity you can have a negative number, because it just means you're moving in the opposite direction.

Oh, forgot about those. We've not done much on magnetism in school, but when charges are said to be negative and positive, are they actually, or is it just like "This one has this type of charge, and this one has the opposite of that, so they must be positive and negative!"

Oh man, I think my brain just like, exploded. Do you know how difficult it is to comprehend that we can have negative charges? I mean, how is that measurable? It totally just stopped making sense to me. (This isn't to say I've stopped believing in it, but woah, brain ache.) Here's my attempt (mostly for myself) to make it make sense again...

It's completely arbitrary which one is positive and which one is negative, the important thing is that they have opposite charges, so if you force an equal amount of positive and negative charges together, like in an atom, from far away it looks like a big neutral charge.

but what if like, there's a 0, and there's really no such thing as negative and positive, just directions from 0? Not necessarily only two (like on a number line), but an infinite amount of directions? Negative and positive are just opposite directions, and it really has nothing to do with a number being below zero, just the absolute value from it? It makes it make sense! Sort of. To me anyway.

Ok, you're mixing math-land with reality again. What does "direction" mean in your hypothetical number-plane? With a line of numbers theres a simple way of getting to the next and previous number, you either add or subtract 1. How would you get from 0 to the next number in one of the other directions?

The second paragraph is better. The charge on an electron is not less than the charge on a proton, it's the same, but in the opposite direction. It's just convenient (and makes the adding up work out) to label those directions as positive and negative.

Actually charges don't have a direction - it's the electric field of the charge which is the opposite direction.
The value of the electric field at some point in space tells you the force a positive charge at that point would feel from the electron or whatever. (Again we could switch everything positive to negative and vice versa and it wouldn't make a difference, as long as you're consistent)

The equation for the electric field for itty-bitty things like electrons is called Coulombs law, which is:
Electric field at some point = (a bunch of constants) * the charge / the square of the distance from that point to the charge * a unit vector pointing from the charge to that point.
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_field#Coulomb.27s_law)

A unit vector = vector with magnitude of 1. This gives the electric field it's direction. Now, if the charge is positive, the direction of the electric field is the same as the unit vector: away from the charge, so it will repel a positive charge. But if it's negative, the electric field is in the opposite direction, so it attracts. Eek gotta go sorry if this isconfusingbye

[Yannick]

but what if like, there's a 0, and there's really no such thing as negative and positive, just directions from 0? Not necessarily only two (like on a number line), but an infinite amount of directions? Negative and positive are just opposite directions, and it really has nothing to do with a number being below zero, just the absolute value from it? It makes it make sense! Sort of. To me anyway.

Ok, your mixing math-land with reality again. What does "direction" mean in your hypothetical number-plane? With a line of numbers theres a simple way of getting to the next and previous number, you either add or subtract 1. How would you get from 0 to the next number in one of the other directions?

Well, a number line will do fine. Things with the properties of whatever we decide go to the right, while things with the opposite properties go to the left. The scale is identical for both types of charge, so it's the distance from zero that matters. I guess positive and negative is just a convenient way to label them. But from what I'm getting from this, I'm right. 0.o

[Eli]

Wow..I was gone for maybe not even a little over an hour and Izzy managed to make a whole other page to one question. You really are gifted.

[Yannick]

We're still on the page. Just with lots more scrolling now.

[Yannick]

Okay, I have another one. While discussing super powers at the playground, I realized that in a parallel universe, I've enslaved the Earth. Here's the thought process.
1. If I think of something, a parallel universe opens up where I've also thought this.
2. If I choose not to act on my thoughts, a parallel universe opens up where I have acted on my thoughts.
3. The thoughts in question being world domination, in at least one universe, I have to have been successful.

Makes me wonder how many times I've died..

[LoLo]

How do people come up with things like, "Oh if I take this bean, roast it, then grind it up and add water to it, then take the grounds out, I'll have a tasty drink that will keep me awake when I'm sleepy?"

[Yannick]

Since when was coffee tasty? Way too much time on their hands. Freaky no-interent civilizations.

[LoLo]

Personally I find if it's a good quality bean and fresh coffee is quite tasty.

[Yannick]

Eugh. You adults and your strange alcohol/coffee liking taste buds.

Now caramel frappacinos are a different story..

[Moosh]

Eugh. You adults and your strange alcohol/coffee liking taste buds.

Now caramel frappacinos are a different story..

Eugh. Far too sweet. I've never understood why people want their coffee to taste of things other than coffee. Especially not sweet things.

[Yannick]

Because coffee is grooosss.

[Rubium]

Tonight, for some reason, im wondering whether the secret service have ever considered using short repeating loops as means for conditioning the human mind, The reason im thinking this is because I was watching "Camberwick green" tonight and realised how catchy "windy millers" mill sound effect sounded I was actually watching episode after episode just waiting to hear it again and thus the thought entered my mind.

Any ideas whether they have or not?

[LoLo]

I think they have otherwise why would people actually think they like reality tv shows? Reality TV is just a test to see if they can condition us and who all they can affect.