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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: 1) by Groonch on Tuesday May 06 2014, @08:11PM
Empirical proof is great for the stuff it can reach, but it really only works well on a certain limited kind of repeatable problem. It doesn't even reach all scientific matters (like much of current astrophysics), and much less stuff that's of daily concern to everyone as human beings. For instance, there is no way of empirically proving human beings are sentient. You know they are sentient, because you have privileged reference to your own empirically unverifiable sentience. Then there's the million things we do and have to take on trust in all of our human relationships.
I get it when a scientific materialist is pissed off about people asserting statements of faith that fly in the face of what we know empirically. However, they misstep when they don't distinguish what we know empirically is not true from stuff that is merely empirically unverifiable. It is an empirical fact the world is older than 6000 years. But it is not an empirically verifiable fact that God or a mind (in the dualistic sense), etc. don't exist. Yes, the burden should be on the proponent, but then, exactly what experiment could prove or disprove these things? If there isn't one, you can't state with scientific authority that they are false.
You can take an ethical or political stance that unverifiable ideas are suspect, lead to bad things, and should thus be rejected. And I respect that as a personal choice, even if it's to some degree futile. But don't speak with scientific authority on things where there is no scientific authority.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:36PM
"If there isn't one, you can't state with scientific authority that they are false."
You can state with absolute certainty and (scientific) authority that given existing evidence, theories, and experimental results, it is an unscientific statement or unscientific claim.
Staying away from the inflammatory "God" discussion, it should be trivial to come up with utterly unscientific statements. This years womens fashion trends are inferior to last years. My favorite sport is superior to your favorite sport. My favorite color is blue. I strongly feel the earth is flat and the globe is a conspiracy theory (note: you can prove its round, but you can't prove much about my feelings). My favorite breed of dog is superior to all others. My source code editor is superior to yours. Clojure is better than Scala.
Given sufficient data and criteria you could express a scientific claim about Clojure being better than Scala, but I didn't provide that, so its just noise.
(Score: 1) by Groonch on Tuesday May 06 2014, @11:29PM
Stating with absolute scientific authority that a claim is unverifiable or unscientific, however one might understand that, is very different from saying it's false or even meaningless. Having the first one doesn't get you to the second one.
If I posited a the existence alternate universe that did not interact in any way with our universe, such a belief would be unverifiable. It is not necessarily untrue, however. Now, this opens an epistemological Pandora's box of how one might distinguish the unverifiable ideas one accepts from the unverifiable ideas one rejects, but that's a value decision based on an intellectual ethos, not scientific disproof.