What do those Nobel people know anyway?

[Jedidiah]

ok. What's a quantum field then?

A pregnant void.

[rogue06]

While the Nobel Peace prize has become thoroughly politicized not even it can be fairly labeled a "participation trophy".

And now since this was the second year in a row that no women were awarded the prize the head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the committees that choose Nobel Prize winners will be meeting this winter to discuss "gender and ethnic diversity issues." IOW, this will likely lead to quotas (openly or otherwise) in upcoming years.

[One Bad Pig]

And now since this was the second year in a row that no women were awarded the prize the head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the committees that choose Nobel Prize winners will be meeting this winter to discuss "gender and ethnic diversity issues." IOW, this will likely lead to diminishment in the prestige of the awards in upcoming years.

Fixed that for you. N/c.

[TheLurch]

we did discuss quantum fields in this thread ( http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...anity&p=451638 ) but nobody ever said what they WERE. If they create space, and they are not made up of particles or energy, then what are they?

They don't create space; they permeate it. And if you excite one of the fields, you do produce a particle - a photon is just a particle that represents an excitation of the electromagnetic field.

[Jedidiah]

And now since this was the second year in a row that no women were awarded the prize the head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the committees that choose Nobel Prize winners will be meeting this winter to discuss "gender and ethnic diversity issues." IOW, this will likely lead to further diminishment in the prestige of the awards in upcoming years.

Fixed that for you. N/c.

Fixed your incomplete correction.

[TheLurch]

And now since this was the second year in a row that no women were awarded the prize the head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the committees that choose Nobel Prize winners will be meeting this winter to discuss "gender and ethnic diversity issues." IOW, this will likely lead to quotas (openly or otherwise) in upcoming years.

All depends on how it's implemented. Let me give you two examples that are symptomatic of the problem. We all know Einstein, right? He got the Nobel, became possibly the most famous scientist ever, etc.

If you follow physics at all, you know of the Bose-Einstein condensate. But how many of you know anything about the Bose in that name? It's for Satyendra Bose. He made critical contributions to quantum mechanics in general, and Einstein's work in particular, but never got the Nobel Prize. (FWIW, Einstein only got one Nobel Prize, even though he deserved several, probably because he was Jewish, which is also on topic here.)

What about Emmy Noether? She got called in when Einstein was stuck on a math issue, helped him out, then took the ideas she worked out for him and extended them to create Noether's Theorem, which describes a fundamental property of physics that relates every symmetry to a conservation law. Not only did she not get a Nobel Prize, but she couldn't even get a faculty job in Germany, because she was female.

We'd like to think we're better now, that talent gets recognized no matter what its source, and that the Nobels clearly wouldn't overlook people like this today. And personally, i think we are better about this than we were. But "better" doesn't necessarily mean "good" yet. There's a lot of indications of systemic problems still - uneven grant and paper reviews, uneven allocation of lab resources, horrific cases of sexual harassment, etc. - that i'm not entirely confident that we're appropriately recognizing talent regardless of its source. If this effort prevents people like the above from being ignored, i can't see that as being a bad thing.

[shunyadragon]

ok. What's a quantum field then?

First, Quantum field theory is theoretical framework at the Quantum level of the behavior and the nature of the basic particles, and the underlying Quantum Field. The Quantum Field is the ro point energy field that the basic particles of matter exist.

[Sparko]

They don't create space; they permeate it. And if you excite one of the fields, you do produce a particle - a photon is just a particle that represents an excitation of the electromagnetic field.

so you are saying the electromagnetic field exists even in the absence of any particles? In space where there is nothing else?

That sounds an awful lot like the "aether"

[TheLurch]

so you are saying the electromagnetic field exists even in the absence of any particles? In space where there is nothing else?

That sounds an awful lot like the "aether"

Think of it this way: the field is simply like a set of rules to follow. The rules exist even if there's nothing around to obey them.

Another way to look at it: a hill exists even if nothing's rolling down it at any particular moment.

[Sparko]

Think of it this way: the field is simply like a set of rules to follow. The rules exist even if there's nothing around to obey them.

Another way to look at it: a hill exists even if nothing's rolling down it at any particular moment.

A hill is a physical object though. And rules are just abstract ideas. Apparently fields are something actual though. Or I thought they were. I also seem to be confusing "field" with "force"

[TheLurch]

A hill is a physical object though. And rules are just abstract ideas. Apparently fields are something actual though. Or I thought they were. I also seem to be confusing "field" with "force"

Right - i'm trying to use analogies, and they will not be perfect.

And the imperfection here is in part that there is never really any area of space that's empty of things to be governed. Virtual particles pop in and out of existence all the time, so the fields constantly have something to govern.

[rogue06]

All depends on how it's implemented. Let me give you two examples that are symptomatic of the problem. We all know Einstein, right? He got the Nobel, became possibly the most famous scientist ever, etc.

If you follow physics at all, you know of the Bose-Einstein condensate. But how many of you know anything about the Bose in that name? It's for Satyendra Bose. He made critical contributions to quantum mechanics in general, and Einstein's work in particular, but never got the Nobel Prize. (FWIW, Einstein only got one Nobel Prize, even though he deserved several, probably because he was Jewish, which is also on topic here.)

What about Emmy Noether? She got called in when Einstein was stuck on a math issue, helped him out, then took the ideas she worked out for him and extended them to create Noether's Theorem, which describes a fundamental property of physics that relates every symmetry to a conservation law. Not only did she not get a Nobel Prize, but she couldn't even get a faculty job in Germany, because she was female.

We'd like to think we're better now, that talent gets recognized no matter what its source, and that the Nobels clearly wouldn't overlook people like this today. And personally, i think we are better about this than we were. But "better" doesn't necessarily mean "good" yet. There's a lot of indications of systemic problems still - uneven grant and paper reviews, uneven allocation of lab resources, horrific cases of sexual harassment, etc. - that i'm not entirely confident that we're appropriately recognizing talent regardless of its source. If this effort prevents people like the above from being ignored, i can't see that as being a bad thing.

A lot of deserving folks have been snubbed and non-deserving folks have won. Gandhi never got a peace prize but Al Gore and Obama^[1] did. Dmitri Mendeleev, who came up with the periodic table lost out because it was too well known (only obscure achievements get awarded?). Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics primarily because he was a critic of George W. Bush not for anything he did.





1. Obama was nominated for all his accomplishments as president -- when he was in office less than two weeks.

[shunyadragon]

Think of it this way: the field is simply like a set of rules to follow. The rules exist even if there's nothing around to obey them.

Another way to look at it: a hill exists even if nothing's rolling down it at any particular moment.

I would not describe what cosmologists and physicists support as there is 'nothing around' concerning the 'Quantum nothing.' Krauss describes this as:

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/science/space/cosmologists-try-to-explain-a-universe-springing-from-nothing.html

Dr. Krauss delineates three different kinds of nothingness. First is what may have passed muster as nothing with the ancient Greeks: empty space. But we now know that even empty space is filled with energy, vibrating with electromagnetic fields and so-called virtual particles dancing in and out of existence on borrowed energy courtesy of the randomness that characterizes reality on the smallest scales, according to the rules of quantum theory.

Second is nothing, without even space and time. Following a similar quantum logic, theorists have proposed that whole universes, little bubbles of space-time, could pop into existence, like bubbles in boiling water, out of this nothing.

© Copyright Original Source

[seer]

I would not describe what cosmologists and physicists support as there is 'nothing around' concerning the 'Quantum nothing.' Krauss describes this as:

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/science/space/cosmologists-try-to-explain-a-universe-springing-from-nothing.html

Dr. Krauss delineates three different kinds of nothingness. First is what may have passed muster as nothing with the ancient Greeks: empty space. But we now know that even empty space is filled with energy, vibrating with electromagnetic fields and so-called virtual particles dancing in and out of existence on borrowed energy courtesy of the randomness that characterizes reality on the smallest scales, according to the rules of quantum theory.

Second is nothing, without even space and time. Following a similar quantum logic, theorists have proposed that whole universes, little bubbles of space-time, could pop into existence, like bubbles in boiling water, out of this nothing.

© Copyright Original Source

There three nothings in your link:

Dr. Krauss delineates three different kinds of nothingness. First is what may have passed muster as nothing with the ancient Greeks: empty space. But we now know that even empty space is filled with energy, vibrating with electromagnetic fields and so-called virtual particles dancing in and out of existence on borrowed energy courtesy of the randomness that characterizes reality on the smallest scales, according to the rules of quantum theory.

Second is nothing, without even space and time. Following a similar quantum logic, theorists have proposed that whole universes, little bubbles of space-time, could pop into existence, like bubbles in boiling water, out of this nothing.


There is a deeper nothing in which even the laws of physics are absent. Where do the laws come from?

[One Bad Pig]

There three nothings in your link:

...and none of them are in any way relevant to TheLurch's post.