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Unfolding Nature Shop: Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

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OfflineKhaunshar
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Registered: 04/04/05
Posts: 136
Loc: BE
Last seen: 12 years, 8 months
minimal movement
    #8033831 - 02/17/08 07:04 AM (15 years, 11 months ago)

I guess this is actually a question about physics.
But I just want to hear about your thoughts, I havn't searched for the answer yet. Just wondering

Is there something as minimum movement? What would it be, how would it be related to the force working on it? Or something completely different? How do you see it on micro- and macro-scopic scales and how are they related.

Anything


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fashs and cops, both go down, as the aggro spreads across town, bricks n bottles fall like rain, evil coppers double up in pain


Edited by Khaunshar (02/17/08 07:07 AM)


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InvisibleDiploidM
Cuban


Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 01/09/03
Posts: 19,274
Loc: Rabbit Hole
Re: minimal movement [Re: Khaunshar]
    #8033871 - 02/17/08 07:31 AM (15 years, 11 months ago)

Yes, there exists in nature a minimum action. This property of the fabric of reality is at the foundation of quantum mechanics and it has some very deep philosophical implications.

The smallest distance that makes any sense is called the Planck Length, named after Max Planck, the physicist who formulated the set of natural units used in all of elementary physics. It is the distance that light travels in one Planck Time.

The Planck Length is V-E-R-Y tiny. To get some idea of how small, consider that quarks are about 1,000 times smaller than protons. The Planck Length is 100 quadrillion times smaller than a quark. Lengths smaller than this do not make sense according to our current understanding of physics.

The reasons why it is meaningless to consider anything smaller are pretty complicated and the explanation is steeped in math, but one way to look at it is to consider something called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle which, simplified, states that it is not possible to know both the position and the momentum of an object exactly. The more precisely you measure one parameter, the less you can know about the other. It's kinda like a seesaw. The farther down you push one end, the farther up the other end goes. You can never get both on the ground at the same time. As it relates to the Uncertainty Principle, this means that as you zero in on an object's exact position down to the Planck Length, the uncertainty in your knowledge of its momentum approaches infinity.

Trying to consider something smaller than the Planck Length leads to nonsense results like square root of -1 units of time, which is a complex number. But units of time only make sense as real numbers. If you remember from high school algebra, the square root of a negative number is an imaginary number, but time is measured in units of real numbers.

There's a good primmer on Planck's natural units in the Wiki. You can get a good understanding of these ideas here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units


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Republican Values:

1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you.
2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child.
3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer.

4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.


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OfflineKhaunshar
Stranger

Registered: 04/04/05
Posts: 136
Loc: BE
Last seen: 12 years, 8 months
Re: minimal movement [Re: Diploid]
    #8034083 - 02/17/08 09:41 AM (15 years, 11 months ago)

Very intresting article.
Was aware of some things, but how they all fit I had no idea about.

I'm still in high school :crazy: lol


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fashs and cops, both go down, as the aggro spreads across town, bricks n bottles fall like rain, evil coppers double up in pain


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OfflineTheCow
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Registered: 10/28/02
Posts: 4,790
Last seen: 15 years, 6 months
Re: minimal movement [Re: Khaunshar]
    #8034165 - 02/17/08 10:21 AM (15 years, 11 months ago)

Not really sure what you are asking per se. Movement takes the path of least energy. When you work out the equations of motion, forces, momentum, blah blah. You could theoretically get an infinite number of functions describing your situation. In physics you have something called a Lagrangian, or a Hamiltonian which describes your system. Typically this involves a function, various derivatives of that function, and some f(x). You can choose your function to be a lot of things, but what physics is interested in is a so called stationary point. So there are methods to get this function that correspond to the minimum of the Lagrangian integral


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Unfolding Nature Shop: Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order


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