"No serious takers for five days... "

I wrote, starting from older messages (time to review them in right reading order:

1 valencequark wrote:

physicists don't postulate a prime mover, you fuckwit.

You change the terminology, but you still think there is an ultimate cause for anything being kept in movement being kept in movement: you call it energy and claim it is impersonal and immanent, other Philosophers call it God and the best of them reject your view precisely because the prime mover must be actual, not potential, therefore not immanent, furthermore identic with prime cause (2nd way) prime necessary existence (3d way, which you used to identify with matter and nowadays identify with energy), the intelligence behind the order of the universe (4th way), the ultimate perfection (5th way) and for these last reasons not impersonal. If I point this out to you, you cling to distinctions that are more terminological than real and insult me.

HGL

have tolerated your ludicrous ideas for far too long. ... you have no grasp of what i refer to as energy.

Why were my physics grades so good then?

your argument that i am placing god like qulities on energy rests on the existence of god, which you have spectacularly failed to do.

I have not so failed, it was not so much an argument as an accusation, the starting point for the argument above.

HGL

nobody has any emprical proof of god, or everyone would be religious.

Everyone was religious, until it was seen too clearly that it involves being a Catholic and was rejected for selfish real reasons with the aid of a rhetoric trying to hide it with, amongst other things, bad philosophy and science.

and as far as you referring to me as an idiot, well i guess it takes one to know one, you smug arrogant flat earthed fool.

• A) I am not flat earthed.


• B) You seem to refer to: "But some idiots who call themselves physicists really want very badly to place the principle of movement and change, of cause, permanence and existence, within the limits of the physical, the manyfold, the continuous (though they tend to deny the reality of continuum by atomism), the moved, the changing, the caused, the things that would obviously for any sane man be seen as also kept in existence and whatever permanence it has by something else. Something outside it. Therefore they pretend that something they call energy is this first mover, cause, necessary existence. But that contention is disproven by the potentiality of energy, especially apparent in potential energy - while the first mover, cause and necessary existance must be actual to move, cause, (put and) keep in existence anything else." I was not saying something about your own precious little person apart from the other ones. If you are so sensitive about the category you place yourself in being referred to as a bunch of idiots, you might do well not so to refer to your betters, like fundies or dogmatic Catholics.

if ignorance is bliss, you must be the happiest mother f@cker this side of equator.



-vq

Ignorance isn't bliss - so you are not and I am not.

HGL

2 valencequark wrote:

ok, firstoff: i apologize for losing my temper, it was uncalled for.

now, you cannot accuse me of changing terminology on you when it is you who is misusing words.

I am not misusing words, nor am I accusing thee personally but rather you-all modern physicists collectively of changing terminology.

energy is nothing more than a measureable quantity posessed by physical systems that happens to be conserved.

How do you measure potential energy? If you suspend a stone from a Newton-metre ten miles above ground (in a balloon) and from a Newton-metre standing on the ground, does the Newton-metre show MORE energy in the first case? No. Saying it is conserved means that measurings of later kinetic energy are accepted as measurings of former "potential energy".

and the reason that it is conserved is because the laws of physics are symmetrical with respect to time. so what? linear momentum and angular momentum are conserved for similar reasons. there is nothing "god like" about conservation laws.

In "potential energy" there is as yet no movement, hence no momentum.

if your phsyics grades were so good, why is it that you misunderstand something galileo postulated over 400 years ago. an object that is moving with constant velocity will continue to do so indefinately unless acted upon by an exteral force.

That is a postulate - not an observed fact. Aristotle observing that sublunar objects flying through the air and eventually losing momentum and falling to the ground said the opposite.

i don't see anything required to keep objects in motion.

Even on your supposition the conservation of momentum is required.

you still misunderstand what potential energy is, and i have explained it to you once before. potential energy is real energy, systems posses it.

In school I was taught OBJECTS possess kinetic energy when moving, potential energy when in a postion where a force could make them move once the obstacle is removed. Now, I was asking in what way the STONE that is ten miles above ground possesses any entity that is greater than the corresponding entity in a stone three feet above ground. SYSTEMS - well, that is another matter: there we are not touching substantial ENTITY, but rather RELATION.

it comes in several varieties. it is called potential energy because it has the potential to be kinetic energy. . it is not called potential energy because it is not energy, that is a misconception.

It is called potential because it is just potentially and not yet really kinetic energy which in turn is called energy because it is not really but just potentially physical work.

you make the unwarranted assupmtion that there is some intelligence behind the order in the universe. that is not a necessary condition of an ordered universe. it may be a sufficient condition, but it is NOT necessary.

Wake up. Welcome to reality. There is such a thing as common sense, you know.

the expansion of the universe totally negates the need for an intelligence to order things.

The what? Are you referring to some farfetched conclusion from the redshift?

why? becase the entropy of a system relates to the number of microstates that a system can be in. as you increase the size of the universe you increase the number of possible microstates that it can have. when you do this, you increase the maximum value of disorder that the universe can have by a whole bunch, when the actual disorder of the universe hasn't increased.

If the Universe were blindly expanding, the actual disorder would increase. Stability is a known prerequisite for order.

it si therefore possible to order some regions, disorder other regions by a greater amount as required by thermodynamics, and still eb under the maximum value of entropy that the universe can have. no intelligence required, only the laws of physics.

Correct me if I am wrong, but these laws of thermodynamics have been determined not only or purely by sublunar observations, but rather by taking into account the supposed heliocentrism of the supposed solar system.

Furthermore not increasing disorder is something other than ordering what had no order to start with.

Furthermore you are giving me a naked statement rather than technical proof - a statement which to any man possessed of common sense seems to accuse you of exactly what I did accuse you of: giving matter and energy the attributes of God as discovered by metaphysics: in this case intelligence designing the well-ordered reality we see around us. That makes it the 4th way of proving the existence of God that modern physics parodies.

now, before you go to "well, where do the laws of physics come from" let me assure you that god will never be an answer. why? because that would be a supernatural explanation, which means you are no longer doing physics.

If you are:

• A) claiming to seek an answer
  
  and


• B) excluding the obvious answer because it belongs to a higher science
  
  you are also


• C) courting wrong answers, like postulating this or that divine attribute for the things that your science claims to study objectively.

further, as we make progresses with the quantum theory of fields we may come closer and closer to explaining the universe with a few numbers, rather than with a few physical values that have to be measured in a lab.

But is it the real universe as actually observed that you are explaining - or a construction that has no proven identity with it?

as for your physics grades: well, those are your business, not mine. but i'm willing to bet that mine are at least as good as yours.

-vq

I never denied yours were good. Only I would have got really bad ones if I had misunderstood the basic concepts, you know. So, your guess on why we differ seems to be quite wrong.

Hans Georg Lundahl

3 valencequark wrote:

your first point is totally cluttered. are you measuring kinetic or potential energy?

I was asking the question whether potential energy had ever been actually directly measured.

HGL

well...if you use a "newton meter", which i assume is something that reads a value in newtons, to measure an object obove earth, you are directly measuring the gravitational force on the object.

Go on.

this is related to the potential energy, which can be calculated given the force reading.

Related to means like not identical with, correct me if I am wrong. So measuring the force is not measuring the potential energy.

HGL

there should be no mention of kinetic energy becuase the object is assumed stationary, so it has zero kinetic energy.

Exactly, so whenever one measures kinetic energy later, there is no potential energy left to be measured, by hypothesis. Measuring the later kinetic energy is therefore not measuring the potential energy it had.

HGL

and yes, your scale reads smaller forces as you increase your altitude, in fact the gravitational acceleration field generated by earth drops off as the inverse square of the distance from the center of the earth, and since f=ma (newton's second law) you can relate the force to the gravitational acceleration.

Which further underlines that "potential energy" is not directly measured by using the newton-metre, also that potential energy is not identical with the force acting on the object.

HGL

physicists define terms so that they may communicate, this is a part of life. if you want to talk physics, you had better use teh terminology in the sense of physics.

Even if your terminology can be seen as muddled when measured by the facts?

HGL

as far as potential energy and momentum, i was merely pointing out that conservation of energy is one of several conservation laws on physics, i was not trying to incorporate linear or angular momentum into a definition of potential energy.

I was not accusing you of that. I was merely ruling out the identification of "potential energy" with momentum. Kinetic energy can be so identified and seen to be a real and actual quality in the object itself as falling - but in what category of being would you place "potential energy"?

HGL

inertia is a postulate and an experimentally verified fact.

Like most physicists you assume inertia to mean quite as much continuing in a linear motion at constant speed as standing still until moved. When was it verified that objects in linear motion at constant speed continue until acted on? When was it verified that an arrow loses momentum by air resistance rather than by inertia in the old aristotelic sense, being loth to move?

HGL

aristotle was wrong in his analysis because he failed to take into account that air is composed of tiny molecules that cumulatively exert noticable forces on moving objects.

How do you prove air resistance is the cause an arrow loses momentum?

HGL

an object moving through air under no forces besides those due to air will lose momentum (and kinetic energy) and fall to the ground (losing potential energy).

How do you know the air resistance to be so great that it causes the arrow to lose momentum - rather than the arrow losing momentum by being material and therefore inert in the good old aristotelic sense?

HGL

potential energy is related to the concpet of work because to increase an object's potential energy one must do physical work on the object.

The concept of potential energy is also related [to physical work]as follows: "potential energy" is supposed to be converted into same quantity of kinetic energy which can be converted into "same quantity" physical work. Which is why I take it that one of the methods of measuring "potential energy" indirectly is measuring the work "its" ensuing kinetic energy=momentum actually does(=impact) and assuming the quantity is the same minus air friction.

Physical work is easy to identify, so is kinetic energy=momentum, but potential energy cannot be identified with force, since the force acting is supposed to be smaller in a situation where the potential energy is supposed to be greater.

HGL

me wake up? sorry, but you flailing your ignorance of physics and crying about terminology does not make you any more in tune with reality than i.

-vq

Valence Quark is certainly awake enough to be dishonest in argument by giving non causa pro causa: I told him to wake up when claiming there is no need for a designer of the Universe.

HGL