Language Subjects

[D. Sanchez]

En Espanol - able to speak and write but limited

Duestche (German) - understand a little

Mandarin - VERY DIFFICULT!

[rafi]

i took 12 units of french cause it was required for my ab degree. thought it would be easy but heck no! i can still understand and speak a little

[theobserver]

I dont know whether this is the right thread...but hey, why did the government scrap the teaching of the Spanish language...just look around you...the world is getting smaller...it is now an advantage to be multi-lingual...kung tinuloy ang Spanish and, not to mention, na strengthen pa then we Filipinos would be more competitive now...we would have been a nation of Filipino, English and Spanish speakers!

 

In the European countries, it is a must for them to learn another language...tayo...English na lang daw...tapos ginawa pang bilingual ang instructions...lalong nasira ang english learning in the country...

[chabacano]

I dont know whether this is the right thread...but hey, why did the government scrap the teaching of the Spanish language...just look around you...the world is getting smaller...it is now an advantage to be multi-lingual...kung tinuloy ang Spanish and, not to mention, na strengthen pa then we Filipinos would be more competitive now...we would have been a nation of Filipino, English and Spanish speakers!

 

one educator had told me years ago that one important reason for scrapping it is the

fact that very few students really learned much in 4 sems of it to be able to converse

any reasonably fluent spansish speaker; that even less get to use it at all post-college.

sana di o.t. 'tong reply..

[chabacano]

"one educator had told me years ago that one important reason for scrapping it is the

fact that very few students really learned much in 4 sems of it to be able to converse

any reasonably fluent spansish speaker; that even less get to use it at all post-college.

sana di o.t. 'tong reply.."

 

please excuse the typo's..

[foxy_fujiko]

"one educator had told me years ago that one important reason for scrapping it is the

fact that very few students really learned much in 4 sems of it to be able to converse

any reasonably fluent spansish speaker; that even less get to use it at all post-college.

sana di o.t. 'tong reply.."

 

please excuse the typo's..

 

I agree... besides... we don't even do much trade with spain or any spanish-speaking nations.... what is the use? i just dont see it advantageous.... mandarin pa siguro...

[iamthebest747]

Spanish yung inaral ko sa college.

 

I guess medyo fascinated kasi ako sa kanyang influences sa sarili nating language e. Saka it's really fun to converse in Spanish. Plus, half of the New World speaks Spanish, Portuguese or a variant of the Latin language, so may edge pa rin kung may balak kang magtrabaho abroad.

 

Just my thoughts.

[jonp]

anyone out there interested in this sstuff? its actually a great read and the daily applications is phenomenal...

What I find most profound is the destruction of the principle of determinism. That there are events for which there is no traceable cause.

 

Our (present) human mind's tendency is to consider cause and effect as the overriding principle of reality. For early humans the cause they assigned to particular effects was very crude. The universe around them was NOT subject to scientific laws but rather to the whims of gods or whatever. Still, right here we see that for some reason Man's mind is wired for searching for the proper cause to assign an effect.

 

Slowly we taught ourselves that every supposed phenomena (effect) has a traceable non-supernatural origin (cause). With that view comes the paradox of what then gets assigned as the First Cause, an uncaused cause. It is a paradox because an "uncaused cause" completely violates of the principle of cause and effect.

 

Now, with science, we are actually observing phenomena (at the quantum scale) for which the cause and effect clearly does not apply, with events just happening for no reason at all. However, the central feature of these events is that while they have no assignable cause they have the very remarkable property of being statistically/probabilistically consistent.

 

Einstein could not believe that 'God would play dice', but apparently 'GOD' seems to be nothing but a bunch of dice!

 

This means that probability, something that seems to be so intangible, seems to be intimately involved with the core of our current universe-view. A rigorous philosophical analysis of the notion of probability might be one way to point to put our understanding of physics on a more solid footing.

[jonp]

anyone out there interested in this sstuff? its actually a great read and the daily applications is phenomenal...

What I find most profound is the destruction of the principle of determinism. That there are events for which there is no traceable cause.

 

For some reason, the human mind is wired for searching the proper cause to assign to an effect, e.g. we seem to be wired to need to consider cause and effect as the overriding principle of reality. For early humans, no matter how primitive the culture, no matter how limited the science, the need to assign causes to particular effects was still there.

 

Slowly we taught ourselves that every supposed phenomena (effect) has a traceable non-supernatural origin (cause). But realize that, with this view comes the paradox of what then gets assigned as the First Cause, an uncaused cause. It is a paradox because an "uncaused cause" completely violates of the principle of cause and effect.

 

Now, with science, we are actually observing phenomena (at the quantum scale) for which the principle cause and effect clearly does not apply, with events just happening for no reason at all. However, the central feature of these events is that while they have no assignable cause they have the very remarkable property of being statistically/probabilistically consistent.

 

Einstein could not believe that 'God would play dice', but apparently 'GOD' seems to be nothing but a bunch of dice!

 

This means that probability, something that seems to be so intangible, seems to be intimately involved with the core of our current universe-view. A rigorous philosophical analysis of the notion of probability might be one way to point to put our understanding of physics on a more solid footing.

[jonp]

Suffice it to say that the new science of Chaos and Complexity Theory looks at everything in a holistic viewpoint rather than fragmented parts of the whole.

A clue to why probability plays such a big role may lie in that statement.

 

Probability/statistical measurements do not manifest themselves unless a large enough sampling is made. Believeing that the principle of cause and effect can explain everything discounts the notion that there are some kind of 'holistic' aspects that are impossible to analyze or make sense out of in isolation (because cause and effect is all about 'isolated' causes being responsible for isolated effects).

 

The notion of probability is absent when an event is looked at in isolation.

[jonp]

One URL describing the John Cramer experiment is described here:

 

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/292378_timeguy15.html

 

The way I understand it, "adjusting the position of the detector that captures the second photon (the one sent through the cables) [to determine] whether it is detected as a particle or a wave" is the act of 'free will' that will only get consummated 50 microseconds into the future.

 

In principle, this act will already have been _decided_ beforehand (e.g. the experimenter's decision to set up the detector to detect the second photon as particle or wave). However, the actual detection will not occur until 50 microseconds in the future.

 

But before the 2nd photon's detection has occurred, the first photon's measurement will already corroborate the experimenter's (ostensibly free-will) decision.

 

 

Now, assuming the above is a correct understanding of what's going on, and if the so-called retrocausality is demonstrated successfully then that's pretty remarkable. Now here's a little thought experiment:

 

Lengthen the fiber optic cable to a length such that the second photon will take many seconds before it will hit the movable detector. Enough seconds such that the experimenter can see first whether photon #1 gets detected as a particle or a wave

and THEN adjust the movable detector.

 

What the heck would then happen in such a case?? Remember, the entanglement dictates that if photon #1 gets detected as either particle or wave, it should constrain photon #2 to be detected as likewise (or opposite, not sure which, but the relationship is concrete and pre-determined). But the adjustment of the second movable detector is supposed to be able to control detection as the experimenter wills it! If photon #1 is already detected as wave and if in such a case entangled photon #2 has GOT to be detected as a wave also, what happens if the experimenter tries to move the detector in such a way as to 'force' photon #2 to be detected as a particle??!?

 

 

 

Of course, there is the possibility that I really have no idea what the heck i'm talking about here and have missed some very fundamental point...

[Grimace]

i have no Idea! just kidding!

[lorenavelez]

hello guys! can i join in the discussion? im very much interested to learn what this quantum mechanics concept is all about. what turns me off and what confuses me are what i read in pop books or watch in docu movies (like the 'What d bleep do they know'?) which to my mind r full of s@%t coz they co-mingle the physics principles with pseudo-zen buddhist concepts, fuzzy new age logic and jz knight/ramtha channeling (tagalog: "sinasaniban") philosophy!

[Alien1]

If photon #1 is already detected as wave and if in such a case entangled photon #2 has GOT to be detected as a wave also, what happens if the experimenter tries to move the detector in such a way as to 'force' photon #2 to be detected as a particle??!?

 

Then the interaction of particle pairs will cease and the universe

will have to cease to exist to maintain parity.

 

KIDS, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!

 

:cool:

[jonp]

Then the interaction of particle pairs will cease and the universe

will have to cease to exist to maintain parity.

 

KIDS, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!

 

:cool:

Hmmm... the universe's 'laws' do not really change only our conception of what we assume to be the universe's laws.

 

Now, since I'm too lazy to try to figure out the diagrams here -> http://www.flickr.com/photos/kathryncramer...57594379836957/ , assuming the news article is accurate in the sense that it all boils down to the photon "being detected as wave or particle" (A lot of the people in physicsforum.com do not buy Cramer's experiment, but what lends him legitimacy is that he was able to secure funding. Also, remember that in the double slit experiment, the so-called wave nature of light is not manifest until a lot of photons get shot at the plate behind the slit, so obviously some very complicated explanation is involved when the experiment claims to be able to detect a single photon as a 'wave' or a 'particle' using only a single photon), I would expect some totally mystifying/surprising results along the lines of the double slit experiment where the photon seems to 'know' if an attempt is being made to detect it as a particle or not and manifest as the former if so, and as a wave if not.

 

I'm almost sure that english or any other traditional human language is failing to capture the essence of the experiment correctly, (it already fails somewhat in the case of the double-slit experiment). In english understanding this is the best I can explain as to what is going on, and a paradox definitely arises:

 

a) it is possible to create 'entangled' photon pairs for which certain properties of each one totally determine the other. If, for example photon #1 is detected as 'black', photon #2 will always be detected as 'black' as well. If photon #1 is detected as 'white', photon #2 will always be detected as 'white' also. ('black' and 'white' being totally fictitoius properties).

 

it does not matter how far away the 2 photons are. The theory goes that you could send photon #2 to the other end of the galaxy and if the detector at the other end registers it as black, photon #1 will also be detected as black. Experimentally however, they have been able to confirm this phenomenon over hundreds of miles, iirc.

 

c) now, the above by itself would not be remarkable at all since photon #1 could already be 'black' from the beginning, and the act of detection merely confirms it. But this is NOT what is going on. Because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (I hope I'm not making this up), the experimenter can CHOOSE to make a particular property appear depending on the way he measures the particle. In other words, in some very very technical way (which I have only the foggiest notion of), he is able to choose to detect one of the photons as 'black' or 'white'.

 

d) the moment he does that, for some reason the other photon will then have to follow suit. If experimenter chose to detect photon #1 as 'black', then photon #2 cannot help but also be detected as 'black', and vice versa.

 

e) what is remarkable is that supposedly it does not matter how far away the photons are. The property of the 2nd photon is determined instantaneously by how the first one was chosen to be measured. This is supposed to be impossible because nothing travels faster than the speed of light, and yet there is instantaneous information transfer between the 2 photons.

 

f) Cramer's experiment ultimately seeks to confirm this absurdity even further, making the entanglement relation hold not only across great distances but across time. The experiment sets up photon #2 to be forcibly (according to my understanding) detected as 'black' or 'white' at (t+50) microseconds. At time t however, photon #1 is already being measured for whether it is 'black' or 'white' and the expectation is that entangled photon #1 will already exhibit the properties that the detector for photon #2 is set to discover only 50 microseconds later.

 

Now assuming the above understanding does not miss any vital points, you could push the envelope even further, by delaying detecting of photon #2 at time t plus, say, 10 seconds. I am wondering if it would be correct to speculate that the experiment could allow us to see whether photon #1 gets detected as 'black' or 'white' and THEN adjust the detection of photon #2 to be detected as the contrary.

 

That would violate the entanglement which I doubt is possible, so what the heck would actually happen?? Would nature show that it already knows what you're going to do before you do it (similarly to how the photon in the double-slit experiment knows if it was being detected as a particle)??? But how does that affect the free will of the experimenter since he can know in advance what nature is supposed to know about *his* future action *and* can then go ahead to do something contrary???