telekinesis

[Stone Daemon]

This joke thread has turned out to be quite the interesting discussion.

I'm sure some of you have seen this already, but since we're on the topic of moving things without touching them... https://www.thalmic.com/myo/

[Segev]

I imagine any particle could go any speed given some magical force (provided IT won't fall apart for similar reasons). Will a proton disintegrate into its constituent quarks if it exceeds a certain speed? Maybe. I don't know. But I certainly never suggested that it wouldn't, since, not knowing one way or the other, that would be foolish.

All well and good, but you're still missing something, as illustrated here:

In the context of one atom, the force that draws in the electrons has some measurable magnitude, meaning that there is a finite upper bound to how fast the nucleus can move before the electron can no longer orbit it.

With no wind resistance, speed is irrelevant. The nucleus could be moving at 10 billion light years per second, and, if the electrons are also moving with an equal net velocity in the same direction, to the nucleus and the electrons, the nucleus seems stationary and the electrons are just orbiting it (and that's still using the less-than-accurate model that treats electrons like planets orbiting a nucleus-star).

For there to be force exerted that might rip the nucleus away from the electrons, there must be acceleration. Force equals mass times acceleration. Nowhere in that equation is velocity nor speed mentioned, merely the first temporal derivative thereof.

Provided the acceleration is low enough, the electrons will experience force from the nucleus such that they are pulled into accelerating along with it, but never so much that the force pulling them along with the nucleus is less than the force of their own inertia. Let's assume that we go with an acceleration of 1 mm per year per year. This is ludicrously slow acceleration, but after enough millenia (assuming no relativistic effects creating a light-speed barrier), the atom accelerating at that rate will be going many times the speed of light. At what point, in your hypothetical model, would the electrons be ripped away?

Note that just typing on my keyboard subjects the atoms in my hands and the keys I depress to far greater accelerations than 1 mm/year/year.

Will the nucleus itself fall apart before it reaches that speed? Who knows. But no matter how you slice it, if the atom gets moving fast enough, it will cease to hold itself together.

The force required to rip apart a nucleus is, in fact, far greater than the force required to strip electrons from their "orbits."

And time travel won't have occurred.

Uh, okay. I'm not quite sure how this follows, as you seem not to have addressed any of the points regarding time travel that I raised. ^^;

[GuyPerfect]

The nucleus could be moving at 10 billion light years per second, and, if the electrons are also moving with an equal net velocity in the same direction, to the nucleus and the electrons, the nucleus seems stationary and the electrons are just orbiting it (and that's still using the less-than-accurate model that treats electrons like planets orbiting a nucleus-star).

You can't make that argument. As I stated in a previous post (and have no intention of stating in a later post), the electrons won't be orbiting unless they're changing direction. Since electrons only move so fast while they orbit (we're talking a couple thousand kilometers per second; look it up), they won't be able to maintain an orbit at 10 billion light years per second.

Now, this isn't the first time I've explained this, which gives me an idea of how the conversation will proceed. I won't resort to calling names; I'll just nip it in the bud.

In other news, electrons are like miniaturized satellites. Unlike planets and moons, though, they'll tend to stay away from each other and aren't easily subject to collisions.

[Segev]

You can't make that argument. As I stated in a previous post (and have no intention of stating in a later post), the electrons won't be orbiting unless they're changing direction. Since electrons only move so fast while they orbit (we're talking a couple thousand kilometers per second; look it up), they won't be able to maintain an orbit at 10 billion light years per second.

Now, this isn't the first time I've explained this, which gives me an idea of how the conversation will proceed. I won't resort to calling names; I'll just nip it in the bud.

Except that you're continuing to utterly miss the point.

That speed of their "orbit" is an instantaneous linear speed.

Let's take the moon. It orbits the earth at a speed sufficient to complete roughly one orbit per month. The moon is orbiting "backwards" relative to the motion of the earth around the sun for roughly half the time, agreed?

By your logic, the moon should already have been left behind, since it's constant linear speed would have it move further back relative to the earth with each "backwards" motion, and not catch up as it moves "forwards."


Now, in actuality, the moon's orbit has a constant instantenous linear speed only if you treat the Earth as being stationary. If the Earth is treated as orbiting the Sun, then the moon actually has a net velocity equal to the Earth's instantaneous linear velocity around the Sun. I say "net" velocity because it actually moves faster as it "catches up" with and "passes" the Earth going one direction, and moves slower as it "turns around to go the other way."

Likewise, electrons, in the "orbit" model, don't really care how fast the nucleus is moving relative to some outside reference frame. As long as there is no acceleration, the nucleus is effectively stationary as far as the electrons are concerned. They move at the instantaneous linear speed you listed about a "stationary" nucleus.

The nucleus, if it is not CHANGING velocity, will have electrons whose net velocity is equal to the nucleus's. Even when the electrons "turn around and go the other way," they make up for it by going equally faster when they come around to "catch up" and "pass" the nucleus on the other side.

The only way your model has electrons unable to "catch up" is if the nucleus is accelerating at a rate such that the force the nucleus exerts on the electrons is less than that needed to accelerate the electrons at the same rate. This is Newtonian physics, not relativistic.

Think about yourself in an airplane. When it's moving at a constant speed, you don't feel like you're moving, despite it going hundreds of miles per hour over the Earth's surface. Strip away the air resistance and still let it fly, and it will be able to move arbitrarily fast (in Newtonian mechanics, anyway), and you won't feel like you're moving as long as you are inside it. Only if it accelerates (or decelerates) so fast that you get squashed by the intertial forces slamming you against the rear (or front) wall will you suffer.

You, and the electrons around a nucleus, only feel force when there is acceleration involved. Constant speed - no matter what that speed is - has no effect on force at all.

Thus, if you accelerate a rocket at 9.8 m/s/s, it will go faster and faster and faster and you'll just feel like you're standing on the rear wall. In Newtonian physics, there is no upper limit to that speed. You'll never be "crushed through" the floor because you'll never experience more force than your earth-weight. It's only if the rocket starts increasing its velocity at a faster rate - that is, exerts more acceleration than g by a significant amount - that you'll feel first heavier, then get crushed by the accelerating floor beneath your feet. Or fall through said floor as your "weight" becomes too great for it to support. But this is only a problem when acceleration is involved, not speed.

In other news, electrons are like miniaturized satellites. Unlike planets and moons, though, they'll tend to stay away from each other and aren't easily subject to collisions.

You can assert this all you like, but experimental evidence disagrees with you.

[Mister Bison]

Derailing from telekinesis, but just to point one thing before going back to business.

In other news, electrons are like miniaturized satellites. Unlike planets and moons, though, they'll tend to stay away from each other and aren't easily subject to collisions.

That was like that in physics textbooks of 1960, and nowadays. In other more recent news, when orbiting a nucleus, electrons are actually more akin to a "field" with mass than a real particle. They can actually jump trough the nucleus or any other sufficiently small particles (the quantum jump). I think that for an electron to be a particle and stay afloat orbiting the nucleus instead of collapsing on it, it must be going to more than relativistic speed. Which is impossible.

Actually, that makes me remember dithering (or what's its name). If we are on a quantized grid, one way to simulate continuousness is vibrating between two states, passing more of the time at the position you want to "appear" nearer to than the other you are vibrating on (if vibrating between too). Like how you drive a motor with a PWM.

Back on the subject.

It's a question of how accurate your model of the force is, and how well you can detect that it works according to that model, and how complete that model is.

We have a fairly complete model of EM in the modern era. We fully understand how radio waves are controlling that R/C car. The only evidence the ancient Romans have that some force is in operation is that the car moves according to commands given by the remote.

You have a very wrong definition of "detect". It is "to discover the existence of". Now, I'm a scientist (I mean, I am, IRL. Though only going through my Ph. D.). To discover that you can repeatedly and conciously move something (whatever), with no application of the interactions I know of, that is what I'd call "detect a mysterious force". How do you think that we detected "dark matter" ? We didn't harness is, or modelise it. First, we notice the expansion of the universe, using known variables, didn't account for the actual, observed expansion of the universe. There was a new thing in there, we called it "Dark Matter" because it was accountable for new, unobserved until now, mass, in the previous equation. The previous thing was modelised and explain, but not it. And afterward ? The expansion speed was accelerating again! This time, you should remove mass to explain it. So we called it "Dark Energy". This is a new force. It was "detected" by hubble and scientists around the globe.

Did Newton "detect" gravity ? No, he merely gave it a name. Any baby eventually detects it, after he detected his own body, inertia, and muscles. Did Thomas Edison (was that him?) first detect electricity ? Neither, we discovered a battery in Egypt far more ancient than his time.

The very definition of Force, is transfer of energy (or "work"). Gravity transforms potential gravity energy into kinetic energy. Potential gravity is expressed via a property of particles called "mass", and distance. Electrical Force transforms electrical potential into kinetic energy. Electrical potential is expressed via a property of particles called "charge", and distance too. Magnetic force works with magnetic moments I don't want to explain. Electrical and Magnetic, well, you know it already I think.

No, if I can put you on a very precise scale, see you lose weight faster when you make that telekinesiable thing move with your mysterious power, when it is actually inside a faraday cage, I can say you are expanding your energy and giving it somehow to the telekinesied thing. Though there is still a possibility that you are using one of the other interactions, I don't know how to proof the telekinesiable thing from them, but I think there is a way to verify it violates all known theory about them, therefore, prooving it's not one of them either.

Since I'm not the most brilliant scientist, I just prooved that "we can not detect the mysterious force" and "somebody can move something with the mysterious force" are incompatible. Even a child is going to admit it (even if it calls it "magic !" like what powers phones, houses, and television. He will differentiate it from that because you do it, not the phone.)

[Codewalker]

You can't make that argument. As I stated in a previous post (and have no intention of stating in a later post), the electrons won't be orbiting unless they're changing direction. Since electrons only move so fast while they orbit (we're talking a couple thousand kilometers per second; look it up), they won't be able to maintain an orbit at 10 billion light years per second.

The fact that they're changing direction relative to the nucleus has no relevance to how fast the nucleus is moving. Really, the whole reference frame is moving, but within it, things appear stationary and only relative motion matters. Strong and weak nuclear forces are what keep an atom together, similar but not exactly like how gravity keeps a planetary system together. In the simpler Newtonian model (which applies reasonably well to large bodies like planets), if the Earth were to accelerate, its gravity would impart some of that acceleration on anything nearby like the Moon, damping the effects of its own acceleration slightly. Action and reaction.

This is basic stuff, and is what keeps the planets and moons from flying away from each other, even though the moon is rotating around the earth which is rotating around the sun which is rotating around the galactic core which is moving through space in some yet-to-be-fully-quantified fashion. And that's rotational motion, which can cause tidal effects, unlike linear motion which truly wouldn't affect orbits in any way at all.

In other news, electrons are like miniaturized satellites. Unlike planets and moons, though, they'll tend to stay away from each other and aren't easily subject to collisions.

You can assert this all you like, but experimental evidence disagrees with you.

This. And if you want to disagree with it, you can start by providing an alternate explanation of how a single electron, when given a 50/50 split of paths to take, can generate patterns in its ending distribution that clearly show that its wavelike properties is making it somehow interfere with itself -- as if it had taken both paths simultaneously.

This is a simple experiment that has been repeated many, many times.

[FatherXmas]

Lookie, an electron shell.  Well sort of ...

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/may/23/quantum-microscope-peers-into-the-hydrogen-atom

[Segev]

You have a very wrong definition of "detect". It is "to discover the existence of". Now, I'm a scientist (I mean, I am, IRL. Though only going through my Ph. D.).

I'm not trying to get into a degree-waving competition, but since we're establishing bona fides... I am also a scientist in real life. I have an M.S. in physics and a Ph.D. in computer engineering. ^^;

To discover that you can repeatedly and conciously move something (whatever), with no application of the interactions I know of, that is what I'd call "detect a mysterious force". How do you think that we detected "dark matter" ? We didn't harness is, or modelise it. First, we notice the expansion of the universe, using known variables, didn't account for the actual, observed expansion of the universe. There was a new thing in there, we called it "Dark Matter" because it was accountable for new, unobserved until now, mass, in the previous equation. The previous thing was modelised and explain, but not it. And afterward ? The expansion speed was accelerating again! This time, you should remove mass to explain it. So we called it "Dark Energy". This is a new force. It was "detected" by hubble and scientists around the globe.

Did Newton "detect" gravity ? No, he merely gave it a name. Any baby eventually detects it, after he detected his own body, inertia, and muscles. Did Thomas Edison (was that him?) first detect electricity ? Neither, we discovered a battery in Egypt far more ancient than his time.

The very definition of Force, is transfer of energy (or "work"). Gravity transforms potential gravity energy into kinetic energy. Potential gravity is expressed via a property of particles called "mass", and distance. Electrical Force transforms electrical potential into kinetic energy. Electrical potential is expressed via a property of particles called "charge", and distance too. Magnetic force works with magnetic moments I don't want to explain. Electrical and Magnetic, well, you know it already I think.

No, if I can put you on a very precise scale, see you lose weight faster when you make that telekinesiable thing move with your mysterious power, when it is actually inside a faraday cage, I can say you are expanding your energy and giving it somehow to the telekinesied thing. Though there is still a possibility that you are using one of the other interactions, I don't know how to proof the telekinesiable thing from them, but I think there is a way to verify it violates all known theory about them, therefore, prooving it's not one of them either.

Since I'm not the most brilliant scientist, I just prooved that "we can not detect the mysterious force" and "somebody can move something with the mysterious force" are incompatible. Even a child is going to admit it (even if it calls it "magic !" like what powers phones, houses, and television. He will differentiate it from that because you do it, not the phone.)

All of what you say is "true," using the definitions you're applying, but are beside the point.

The point of the two-force suggestion is to refute a proof-by-contradiction that says that it is impossible for TK to exist because the human body cannot produce any forces in sufficient quantity for it to happen. That proof explains that any force that the human body could generate that we have not the tools to detect would be too short range or too weak to do it.

Obviously, if we had a proven telekinetic, we could "detect" that there is something that causes the telekinesis.

Like the R/C car, we would be mistaken if we said, "There is a mysterious force that causes the car to move when you manipulate the magic box that controls it." That is, we would be if my silly hypothesis were actually correct.

The ancient Romans, of course, would be mistaken to say, "We have detected a mysterious force," as well. They've detected that there is some influence of the "magic box" on the "magic chariot." There are, in fact, multiple forces involved. It's not just radio waves, but batteries, voltage drops, and motors.

So my point is, they lack the means of figuring out what is going on, because the forces they can identify and study through more than this one mechanism cannot explain the behavior. They cannot detect the multiple separate forces; they can only detect the result.

You bring up dark matter; initially, we only detected deviation from our predicted models. Our models were good enough that our immediate prediction - there must be some mass out there we weren't "seeing" - is probably right. We think we've detected further evidence that it's there. But - and I could be behind the times, here, but I think - we have yet to actually confirm "dark matter" is real. For all we know, our model is off and there's some other cause.

Galileo and others didn't "detect" that the Earth orbited the Sun; they noticed that planets didn't act right if they just orbited the Earth. They then started revising models.

Now, you could argue that I have, if I present a person with Telekinesis, used knowledge of our other detection limitations and my hypothetical two-forces model to "detect" those forces. You'd be wrong; I've hypothesized them. I'd need some means of isolating behaviors that would be further explained by these forces, and preferably would not require the two forces to be working together for this detection, as I would need to isolate them for detection.

"Detecting" in the sense that you know "sometihng" has to be happening is pedantic. The point is, the ancient Romans cannot detect radio waves. They can only say, "something causes this car to move."

[TimtheEnchanter]

Ukaserex, a few years from now, you'll look back on this and remember it as the time when a simple joke led to the Titan Network developing a viable theory for wormhole technology, enabling NASA to conduct manned exploration of Alpha Centuari. 

[Segev]

Ukaserex, a few years from now, you'll look back on this and remember it as the time when a simple joke led to the Titan Network developing a viable theory for wormhole technology, enabling NASA to conduct manned exploration of Alpha Centuari. 

You're not cleared for that knowledge, citizen. 

[johnrobey]

I am probably not cleared to read this forum thread either, but i had fun doing so!   

[Taceus Jiwede]

Guys I don't think Cthulhu will want us talking about this kind of stuff.........

[Segev]

Just wait until you find out that the mediating particle of the communication-force used in the 2-force TK model naturally assumes a probability field in the shape of the sigil that marks the King in Yellow.

[TimtheEnchanter]

Guys I don't think Cthulhu will want us talking about this kind of stuff.........

Gozer just called on my Ouija board. He/She/It/Whatever said it's Cthulhu is fine with it, as long as we don't try anything with marshmallows or spaghetti monsters.

[Segev]

Well, that's going to disappoint the pastafarians.

[TimtheEnchanter]

Well, that's going to disappoint the pastafarians.

Cthulhu has reasons. Something to do with tentacle trademark infringement?

[Mister Bison]

I think I did read a morcel of this thread while at work. So, technically, this reflexion is now the property of the French National Scientific Research Center.


(Joking. Not technically CNRS... Not yet. Just doing my Ph.D. at one of their labs)

So, i'd like to say, if you can proove the telekinesis force, I'm all for it. It's just that I wouldn't like it to be due to an externally powered gimmicky that's peeking at signals in my brain or body. Actually, you can now detect movements with wifi signals.

Problem is, you're going to prohibit "harlem shake" in your house, in case it would turn the microwave on involuntarily.