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Thought experiment proposed to reconcile psychological versus thermodynamic arrows of time:
A pair of physicists has proposed a thought experiment to help reconcile the seeming disparity between the psychological and thermodynamic arrows of time. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review E, Leonard Mlodinow and Todd Brun claim their thought experiment demonstrates that the two seemingly contradictory views of time, must always align.
When ordinary people think about time, they see the past as something that has come before and the future as a great unknown yet to come. We can remember the past, because it has happened already, but not the future, because it hasn't. Physicists, on the other hand see time as able to move either forward or backwards (towards greater entropy), which implies that we should be able to remember events in the future. So, why can't we?
It's because of the way our memories work the two say, and they've created a thought experiment to demonstrate what they mean. Imagine, they write, two chambers connected by an atomic sized tube with a turnstile in it. If there is gas in one of the chambers, individual atoms of it will move through the tube to the other chamber (towards higher entropy) tripping the turnstile as they go, in effect, counting the atoms as they pass by, until both sides have equal numbers of atoms-creating a state of equilibrium.
http://phys.org/news/2014-05-thought-psychological -thermodynamic-arrows.html
http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/47
http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysR evE.89.052102
(Score: 2, Informative) by kwerle on Tuesday May 06 2014, @03:11PM
What a crapton of bs.
No more like this, please.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday May 06 2014, @03:30PM
As scientific papers go, your refutation needs a little work.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Informative) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday May 06 2014, @05:56PM
The garbage in the article(s) was just as scientific as GP's post.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Tuesday May 06 2014, @07:12PM
Not necessarily. Richard Dawkins has refused to debate certain viewpoints of such an irrational nature (the "flat earthers" as he puts it). Reason being, to put oneself up to debate such a thing may be to inadvertently give more credit (from the perspective of an outside observer) than it deserves. To dismiss something out of hand, however, may be to give it just the right amount of credit.
This depends on the obviousness of how outlandish the opposing position is, however.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday May 06 2014, @08:46PM
I think you'll find the challenging problem for the editors isn't disliking BS, but creating an objective test for it.