February 27, 2007
Just an eggcorn that amused me.
This morning, I was sent a link that brought a smile. Definitely well timed.
An eggcorn is the practice of mistakenly replacing an unusual word (often archaic) with something phonetically similar. "Baited breath" is a fine example, as is "reeking havok".
Staples (UK), sells padded envelopes. On the details page, they helpfully add...
These padded postal bags are the ideal choice for those items that need that added protection, or for that extra piece of mind.
Making things easier for Igors the world over.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 11:46 AM
August 19, 2005
I said the next question would not be about string.
But we all make mistakes. For instance, Utopia believes I can sort this one out.
Dr. Meathe, String theory: Universal Unification or Universal crap?
I should like to take a moment to thank both you and Navarre kindly for the warm up questions before we get to the tricky ones.
There is a problem in physics. There are two important branches which are incompatible. One, Relativity, dealing with large objects and distances, and the other, quantum mechanics and the standard model, seem to provide correct answers for almost every tiny thing under almost all conditions. Together, they represent the sum of our physics knowledge, using completely different mathematics, and in their own domain are spectacular. Einstein spent his last years looking for the elusive theory of everything to marry them and could not find it, as they have irreconcilable differences. At some point before the ceremony one or the other always gets cold feet and stages its own kidnapping. The standard model also has a problems in that it has twenty variables that must be hand added to garner the correct answer to a problem, and for it, gravity does not exist.
For centuries, scientists have been trying to reduce everything to the smallest point that everything else is built from. First the atom. Then protons and neutrons. Then quarks. Eeking ever closer to a zero dimensional dot.
Now suppose that approach is all wrong, and that the simplest, smallest object is a string. It's tiny. So tiny its one dimensional. But it’s a string, and it vibrates, much the same as any string on a musical instrument. And the vibrational pattern of a string determines what basic particle (quark, boson, Higgs-boson, Gluon, etc) is created. If you’re religious, you could imagine these strings are all part of god’s harpsichord. It’s a beautiful picture.
With one small problem: One-dimensional objects are Lucifer’s playthings. They do bad things. Casuality (cause-and-effect) doesn’t seem to apply to them and they contradict Relativity’s dictum that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. But we persist, as we have done for in the past (it has been said for light that “Physicists use the wave theory on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and the particle theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.”)
String theory got its start as a way to explain behaviors in particle smashers. Instead of the good, old fashioned 3+1 (time) dimensions that we're all comfortable with, they proposed dimensions past 4, 26 all told, to cover the erratic behaviour of boson particles from certain collisions in particle colliders. For which it worked fairly well, but only covered very specific things (hadron smashers, boson particles). But the world is not solely bosons, so this one really was a one trick pony, needing rethinking for broader applications. And the physicists spoke, and there was a 10 dimensional model and it was good. This became 5 different theories and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Further refined, it became an 11 dimensional version (10 of space, 1 time), also known as M-theory - combining all 5 previous 10 dimensional theories (this the currently favoured model). The ‘M’ variously stands for Mother, Magic, Mystery, Matrix, Murky and Membrane. When they figure out the theory completely, they’ll probably know what the M means.
One theory to bring them all, and in the darkness tie them
Or such is the intent. String theory is an elegant solution. If the standard model is modified to use one dimensional strings instead of points, the number of hand added variables drops from 20 to 1. And that one is the length of strings. It also explains gravity.
Not that it is without it’s own problems. Sheldon Glashow (Nobel Prize winner, Physics, 1979), though he does admit the elegance of the theory, he points at the glaring hole in the middle. “The string theorists have a theory that appears to be consistent and is very beautiful, very complex, and I don’t understand it. It gives a quantum theory of gravity that appears to be consistent but doesn’t make any other predictions. That is to say, there ain’t no experiment that could be done nor is there any observation that could be made that would say, you guys are wrong. The theory is safe, permanently safe. I ask you, is that a theory of physics or a philosophy?”
As it stands, from a mathematical standpoint, string theory is not a theory, it is conjecture. The difference is not simple word play. A conjecture is an idea, proposed as true which has not been proven or disproven. After it has been proven true it becomes a theorem. There is no way to probe and magnify the infinitely small dimensions in which the strings live. And without that, no way to prove or disprove the conjecture. It’s a house of cards, built on sand. But what an elegant house. But the cards-on-sand approach has been taken before – many Doctoral thesis and postdoctoral research papers were written based on the Reimann Hypothesis before it was proven - and if it were ever disproven all of those would have headed for the circular file.
Dr Michio Kaku, cofounder of the string-fields theory says “Thus far, M-Theory has withstood every mathematical challenge. In the past, previous attempts at a theory of everything could be shown to be mathematically inconsistent. M-Theory is the only theory which seems to be mathematically consistent. However, there are many solutions to M-Theory, one of which may be our Universe. No-one has found that one solution yet.” (His books, “Beyond Einstein” and “Hyperspace” are exceptionally well written)
So, whilst it may contain the unified answer to life, the universe and everything, we’re not quite sure of what numbers to plug in to get it. 42 could be a good start. Regardless, I like it. I feel the main fault of superstrings is that they are too far ahead of current mathematics.
When Einstein constructed the theory of Relativity, all of the mathematical tools he required had been developed and proven fifty years earlier. Superstring theory requires more mathematical tools than we currently possess which need to be developed. It is an incredibly promising field of study, which has already produced some profound and intriguing results.
As Huxley said, "The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Even if the bottom falls out of it and it is proven bunkum, it's still an elegant work, which, with many worthwhile offshoots in theoretical physics and mathematics.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 01:57 PM
August 18, 2005
Planets 9, 10, 15 and 8 again.
Navarre of the Mooted Point writes:
Dr. Meathe,
This whole situation concerning the tenth planet is becoming convoluted along with talk of declassifying Pluto as a planet. Can you tell us, what WOULD be an acceptable name for a tenth planet (strike Xena right now) AND what exactly makes a celestial body a planet since people are getting all huffy over poor icy Pluto now.
Bastard. I didn't think people were going to ask hard questions. And so we enter the realms of angels and heads of pins.
The basic definition of planet is "A nonluminous celestial body larger than an asteroid or comet, illuminated by light from a star, such as the sun, around which it revolves." Beig roughly spherical, compressed under it's own mass rather than the uneven shape of a 'lump'o'rock' asteroid helps quite a bit too.
So it's a thing that isn't self illuminated (not a star) that revolves around a star but is bigger than an asteroid or comet. Which is one of those loosly worded definitions that just causes problems down the track, with a lot of wiggle room to argue.
Some astronomers think Pluto is just one of many similar objects in the Kupier belt and not really a planet. Other astronomers want as many as 15 objects classified as planets (and more again in the future as they're discovered and they wish to approach immortality by stitching their name to a planet).
Currently, the cut-and-dry approach is to adopt the standards of the International Astronomical Union, which lists the ones you learnt at school from Mercury to Pluto. It classifies objects orbiting the sun as minor planets, major planets, asteroids, comets and trans-Neptunian objects.
Orcus, Ixion, 2002 UX25, Varuna, 2002 TX300, 1996 TO66, 2003 EL61,Quaoar, 2005 FY9, 2002 AW197, 2002 TC302, 2003 UB
Sedna is a bit odd, and further out. It's (usually) considered part of the Oort cloud, which is roughly one light year away - or one quarter the way to the nearest star to the sun.
The IAU is moving toward this definition: "A planet is a body that directly orbits a star, is large enough to be round because of self gravity, and is not so large that it triggers nuclear fusion in its interior." which neatly keeps Jupiter as a planet (it emits more heat than it gets from the sun, but isn't quite large enough to compress under it's own gravity enough to turn into a star - it needs to be about 70x bigger for that).
So, the final answer:
An acceptable name would probably be greek, latin or old-english in origin (eorthe->erthe->Earth, the latin was Terra or Tellus, Gaia in Greek), simply to be in keeping with the rest of them (at least for english speaking astronomers) - though they'll run out of infernals shortly.
It's a planet because the men in white coats who study such things tell us it is so. And we accept without question because they're the ones in white coats, and just perhaps they have access to those straight jackets and we don't like those. Currently Pluto is one. If they adopt the definition above, Pluto will keep it's status. There are others on the table which would definitely deregister Pluto.
Next question will not be "how long is a peice of string?"
Follow up Q/A
I always thought Persephone(G)/Persipina(R) would have been better for Pluto's moon, Charon (though, again, it would be odd to have the spring goddess locked in a frozen embrace). Charon would be better suited for something inside the Kupier belt, floating in the river of forgotten near-planets, like UB2003-313, the one the original question was about. But that's all named now, with no thought of consulting me on it, so we just have to make the best of it.
Thanatos (Death), Pontus (Deep sea) and Nix (Night) would be the front running names for me, in roughly that order.
As for the Norse, they already have the Sun (which is larger than all the other stuff in the solar system combined), and as an additional bonus, days of the week.
Sunna day - English "Sun" is from the norse "Sunna"
Mani's day - The Norse name for the Moon is Mani
Tyr's day - Anglified into Tues.
Oden's day - but Oden was also know as Woden, so it was Wodensday.
Thors's day
Freya's day
Saturn's day is the only greek-inspired day of the week.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:38 PM
Completely and utterly bloody pointless.
In an attempt to fill up space, there has been a new section added, "Ask Dr. Meathe". Any question. Any topic. Answers are guarenteed to have various degrees of humour and accuracy, consistantly within twelve standard deviations of 100% accuracy.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 03:45 PM