Week 9: Physics

Newton's Three Laws and Me

This is a response reposted from reddit from the query "How do Newton's Laws and Einstein's Theories Contradict?", I just really like how this was stated:

level 1

Weed_O_Whirler

Aerospace | Quantum Field Theory

10 points

·

4 years ago

Newton's Laws are known as the "slow speed" approximation of physical laws (they are also the "large scale" approximation- we talk about this when we are discussing how they contradict Quantum Mechanics). What is important to remember, it isn't that Newton's Laws are "wrong" and Einstein's Laws are "right." Both sets of laws are mathematical models of what actually happens, and Einstein's Laws cover a wider variety of cases than Newton's Laws, but they are still a model, which does not perfectly predict all situations.

Now, as for the differences, Newton's Laws explain what happens when large things move slowly (large being relative, even a tiny ball bearing follow Newton's Laws almost perfectly- here large means "more than a few million atoms"). What Einstein predicted, and has been backed up by many experiments, is that light moves the same speed in any reference frame, and that nothing can go faster than light. Turns out, this has all sorts of odd implications, including time dilation (time appears to travel slower for someone going faster), length contraction (an object going faster measures distance to objects as shorter than an object going slower), and velocities are no longer additive. But you can only ever see these effects when you are going really, really fast.

So it isn't so much that Newton and Einstein "contradict" as much as it is you can only use Newton's Laws when you are a big object going slow. You can say that Einstein's Laws (which are very difficult to work with, and require a lot of calculation) simplify to Newton's Laws in the big object going slow limit. So, if you have an object going really fast, Newton's Laws will no longer work to accurately predict what those objects will do- not so much because they are "wrong" but because we are outside of their realm of validity.

Sort of comforting to know that our models of reality are ultimately just that, models.  There's been an ongoing conversation about Qi and Energy at school, and definitely two basic "camps" - one says Qi and Energy are the same, that is, Qi is in essence some way akin to or a sort of subset of the overall Western concept of Energy, and the other camp says they are inherently different, and that any Western concept of Energy is not an overall accurate definition of Qi.  I'm of the latter camp.  Of course, there's folks that just stay out of it, or don't have a grasp of one or both concepts enough to weigh in on the conversation.

The reason I stick with the latter camp is that Qi comes from a completely different model of reality that the Ancient Chinese were working with, that was somewhat preserved in Classical Chinese Medicine.  You could say that a particular way of thinking about Qi was preserved in Classical Chinese Medicine, a way that keeps the medical system intact and self-referential, but perhaps doesn't encompass the totality of Qi.  In any case, you throw out Qi and the medicine becomes a ghost of itself, a shell of something, like a museum curating articles from the past but no one really understands the working context anymore.  We guess at it, theorize possible connections/meanings, log interpretations, but all along we're holding onto a modern concept of Qi=Energy and ultimately missing the point.

Speaking about ghosts...here's a great article about them, and how the LHC at CERN has put the idea to rest.  

What about Qi?  If Qi exists then the Standard Model that CERN works within would be able to account for it, or be able to recognize it, at least predict for it.  If that isn't happening - then Qi doesn't exist or the Standard Model is inadequate.  As in the case of gravity, I reckon the latter.

           

Chinese Seal script for Po (left) and Hun (right) "soul" [Wikipedia]

Hun and Po pertain to Liver and Lung respectively, and are aspects of Shen, which, along with Jing (on the other end of the spectrum) are apparently different states of condensation of Qi.  So, by the theory that is handed down to us in TCM, our concept of Qi has to account for them.  The Chinese Characters for both Hun 魂 and Po 魄 contain the ghost radical "gui" which translates as "ghost/demon".  

Fancy that.

Our "Energy-Efficient" Culture

What about different cultural perspectives of "Energy-Efficiency"?  When I read the term, I couldn't help but imagine a Hitleresque take on the idea. I'm sure that wasn't the intent, but unless we clarify whose perspective of "energy-efficiency" we're regarding, this concept could (already does) go down some pretty dark paths. 

Descartes has a lot to answer for

I think it's covered here.