The Marines, Sailors, and Soldiers Who Died in Afghanistan
Unless otherwise mentioned, these people are Marines.
All died in Afghanistan, serving us, their lives expended stupidly by His Fraudulency.
That does not take away from the debt we owe them, in fact it increases it. We owe it to them to remove His Fraudulency and his cohorts from power.
Justin Allen, 23
Brett Linley, 29
Matthew Weikert, 29
Justus Bartett, 27
Dave Santos, 21
Jesse Reed, 26
Matthew Johnson, 21
Zachary Fisher, 24
Brandon King, 23
Christopher Goeke, 23
Sheldon Tate, 27
Max Soviak (USN)
Rylee McCollum, Wyoming
David Lee Espinoza, 20, Texas
Sgt. Nicole Gee
SSGT Ryan Knauss (USA)
Normal Introduction
Another week, another deluge of BS from the White House and from the Controlled Opposition.
The Audit continues.
The collapse of the Covidschina continues.
No doubt much will be said about those today. (And I have missed a lot this past week.)
To my mind the audits are the last hope for a within-the-system fix to what happened last November. “Within the system” meaning the audits find fraud, the various states decertify the results, and some dang judge rules that Biden must step down and Trump must be installed.
That last step is crucial. The way our system works, “fraud” isn’t a fact until some “competent authority” (i.e., meaning “one that has jurisdiction,” not “one that won’t end up with an ice cream cone on its forehead”) rules it is so. That must happen before the system will accept that the election is vitiated by fraud. No finding of fraud means, as far as they are concerned no fraud, no fraud means nothing vitiated. We sit and fume, because the system has failed.
I’ll leave it to you to decide how likely you think it is that a judge will rule against the Left given the riots that would likely endanger his/her family.
As for the military stepping forward and doing the job instead? Well, that’s technically “outside of the system” and besides…this military, that’s being made woke as we speak?
What do we do in the likely event that fraud is found, but no judge will find it to be “fact” as far as the Federal Government is concerned? I keep hoping someone will come up with a suggestion, and so far “general strike” (H/T Scott) is the only one I’ve seen.
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
Last week:
Gold 1781.50
Silver 23.13
Platinum 1000
Palladium 2354
Rhodium 17,100
This week, 3 PM MT on Friday, markets closed for the weekend
Gold $1817.80
Silver $24.08
Platinum $1016.00
Palladium $2498.00
Rhodium $18,400.00
Everything was much lower this week (except for rhodium and palladium which had been creeping upward), but suddenly on Friday, gold jumped 24 bucks, silver 44 cents, platinum $33, palladium $22, and rhodium $100 (that’s a very small move for rhodium, by the way; it usually moves a lot more in whatever direction it is going). So now it’s a net improvement for the week.
Part XVI – De Broglie, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg
Very flaky connection. Who knows whether I’ll be able to finish this.
I can’t figure out a coherent history of the 1920s; apparently a lot of stuff was happening simultaneously. So I will treat three different threads as though they were independent. They weren’t.
De Broglie
(Which is pronounced “Deh Broil-ee” or at least was by my physics professor–the four alternatives given for pronunciation in Wikipoo are different from this), put 2 and 2 together.
We had already established that light, even though a wave of energy, has particle behavior (that was largely Einstein in 1905). And we also knew, thanks to Max Planck (1905), that the particles (“photons”) had energy proportional to their frequency.
But we also knew that matter is basically equivalent to energy, that thanks to Einstein as well in 1905.
Since light was energy and could behave as both a particle and a wave, could matter, which was equivalent to energy, also behave as both a particle (which you’d expect from matter) and a wave (which you would not expect)?
De Broglie said, in essence, “yes,” in his doctoral thesis in 1924.
Here is the Planck-Einstein relation:
E = h ν
…which relates the energy of the photon to its frequency ν (Greek letter nu) and Planck’s constant, h.
And light turned out to have momentum (p), too, based on the energy E or wavelength λ:
p = E / c = h / λ
You can simply rearrange this last to get:
λ =h / p
And of course p is mass times velocity, mv.
The implication is that any chunk of matter is a wave, at least while it is in motion. However, if you consider the very tiny size of Planck’s constant, 6.6 x 10-34, and realize it is being divided by, say 100 (a 100 kg object moving at one meter per second, for instance) for any sort of object you will deal with in your daily life, the wavelength (6.6 x 10-36 meters) is very, very small, much, much smaller than an atomic nucleus (roughly 10-15 m). Immeasurably small. The wavelength is about the same size, in relation to that nucleus, as the nucleus is in relation to the Earth.
But for something very, very light, like, say, an electron…you might get a reasonable wavelength. If de Broglie isn’t just talking out his ass.
An electron’s mass is about 9.1 x 10-31 kg. So assume (for the sake of example) one is travelling roughly at one hundredth the speed of light ( 3 x 106 m/s, and plug that into λ =h / p and you get:
λ = 6.6×10-34 / ( 3 x 106 * 9.1 x 10-31 ) = 242 x 10-12 meters
Now the diameter of a hydrogen atom is about 62 x 10-12 meters. Its circumference is therefore roughly 195 x 10-12 meters…which is pretty doggone close to this wavelength actually, considering I just made a guess as to how fast an electron might be moving.
Standing Waves (Not Really a Digression)
If you have ever plucked a guitar (or violin) string, you’ll have noticed it moves in a certain fashion, the top left in the diagram below:
It turns out that the other modes shown in the diagram also exist to a certain extent. You can also have standing waves (of sound) in an organ pipe or any other wind instrument.
Now back to the electron. If it is a wave, and it’s orbiting around a nucleus, the wave has to mesh cleanly with itself after one orbit around the nucleus. Look at the top right string, which is a full wavelength. So if that string was actually arranged around a circle, instead of a straight line, at any given point it would look like a smooth wave; because the end of the wave would be consistent with the beginning of the wave where it joins, it’d be a smooth wave travelling in a circle. But if the electron were to have a different wavelength, it couldn’t be in that orbit, because the wave wouldn’t be smooth–there’d be a “break” in it somewhere along the circumference.
That’s only the beginning of the argument, but it will eventually turn out that de Broglie’s hypothesis, that an electron is a wave as well as a particle, ends up explaining why electrons can only assume certain orbits in an atom. We knew, thanks to Bohr and the spectroscopists, that it did do so, but didn’t know why it followed the rule. Remember that the quantum theory was just an arbitrary-seeming restriction on various processes that seemed to work out. Now we had some hint as to why the restriction exists. It was the only way for electrons to form standing waves.
Of course it’s all very well for him to propose a hypothesis that seems whacky but seems to match the facts. But it’d be nice to do an experiment that proves that electrons can behave as waves, and Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer did so at Western Electric (later Bell Labs) in 1927, sending a beam of electrons through a sample of nickel and seeing a diffraction pattern form.
A diffraction pattern is a property of waves.
De Broglie won the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Erwin Schrödinger
But this tidy little solution was way oversimplified.
An electron is not a one-dimensional string, tied down at two points, but left free to vibrate. It instead is a wave free to move in three dimensions, but caught in a potential well, attracted to a nucleus, the more strongly the closer it got.
It’s possible to write the equations of those strings’ waves, and doing so gets you a nasty mess full of trigonometry. (Nasty, that is, to the mathematically dis-inclined.)
It’s also possible to write a three dimensional equation, using complex variables, to describe the waves an electron can make when bound to a nucleus by the electrical force.
It’s even possible to write yet a different equation, which the first equation must satisfy in order to work. That may have made your head spin just a bit, so let me back off and explain something about higher mathematics.
Arithmetic and algebra deal with functions, you plug a number in and out comes another number, that is termed “a function of” the first number. f(x) = x2 is one example; plug 3 in and out comes 9.
Calculus, and even higher forms of math, actually works on functions, not on numbers; giving you another function (which you can then plug a number into).
For example, if you want to know how fast f(x) = x2 changes as you change x, you can do something called “taking the derivative” to the first function, and you get another function, f'(x) = 2x. You can then plug your number into that equation, and know that not only is x2 = 9 when x is 3, but you know how fast x2 is increasing at that point: it’s increasing at a rate of 6 for every 1 increase in x.
In 1925 Schrödinger postulated, then in 1926 published an equation, which involves a lot of calculus, into which you plug your proposed equation for an electron wave. If it balances out, you have the equation for a wave an electron might assume. There are many possibilities for what the electron is actually doing (depending on its energy, for instance), and yours might just be the one it’s following.
[Linguistic aside: Schrödinger is sometimes spelled Schroedinger, where oe is an acceptable substitute for ö. Sometimes it’s rendered “Schrodinger” which is technically incorrect. To form the sound the Germans mean when they write ö, prepare to say “eh” as in bet but round the lips (like you do when saying “oooh”) when you say it. To some people it sounds a bit like “er” and I’ve even see “teach yourself” books that said that was how to do it. Cuppa Covfefe will no doubt amplify or correct me. Meanwhile, the same physics prof who taught me how to butcher de Broglie pronounced it “shraydinger” which would make sense…if his name was Schrädinger/Schraedinger.]
So here it is. I had to work with a simplified version of this back in college, and I do not remember how to do it; in fact certain aspects of the notation don’t make sense to me at all, so I’ve forgotten much.
Note that i, the square root of minus one, (the unit “imaginary” number) appears at the left hand side of the thing. Ψ is the actual electron wave equation, if it meets the condition shown, it’s a possible equation for an electron.
Remember that this is being done in three dimensions, and that the value of the wave function Ψ is itself a complex number, i.e., the sum of a real number and an imaginary number, a+bi. (Yes, we did a lot with complex numbers…in fact electrical engineering would be damned near impossible without them.)
In college, I had to work with a problem called “particle in a box” where the particle had free reign of a small region of space (in one dimension); at the edges of the region the potential went up to infinity, meaning the particle couldn’t go past those points. The answer was a standing wave, just like the ones in the diagram above.
When solved in three dimensions, for electrons orbiting a nucleus, you get these possibilities:
Because of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, only two electrons can occupy each orbital, but that means an S orbital can hold 2 electrons, the p orbitals (at a specific energy) can hold 6 electrons, the d orbitals 10, and then f orbitals 14. These correspond to (and explain) the lengths of the blocks on the periodic table.
Schrödinger is most famous for his cat. Well, actually, it wasn’t his actual cat (I don’t know if he even owned any, or served as staff for any), but it was a facetious thought experiment he proposed to ridicule a certain interpretation of quantum mechanics. But that was in 1935, far in the future, but it does touch on quantum uncertainty, which brings us to…
Werner Heisenberg
In 1927, Werner Heisenberg put forward the uncertainty principle. It states that even in principle it is impossible to know a particle’s position and momentum perfectly. You could know one of them very accurately, but then you’d know the other one quite imperfectly. You can multiply the two uncertainties together, and the product will be greater than h/4π, or ℏ/2. Even if your measuring apparatus is very accurate the uncertainty cannot be less than ℏ/2.
This introduced some spookiness into quantum mechanics.
Up until now, everything physics had produced was fundamentally deterministic. If you knew the state of a system at a certain time, you could, in principle (though it would take a YUGE computer a YUGE amount of time) figure out what state it would be in at some time in the future…or what state it had been at some time in the past. it would be like playing a movie forward and backward.
Along comes Heisenberg, and says you cannot know the state of a system at a certain time. If you know where the constituents are, you don’t know how fast they are moving. If you know how fast they are moving, you don’t know where they are.
And it turns out, even the particles themselves don’t “know.”
The electron wave, it turns out, actually describes the probability of the electron particle being at various places. According to one interpretation (the one that is dominant today) called the “Copenhagen Interpretation”, the electron can be anywhere that wave function says, but at some point it will interact with something, and then it will assume a definite position. (Please note, not the same as “assum[ing] the position.”)
This is seriously weird stuff. And I’m going to leave it to a competent physicist to talk about some of the ramifications. Richard Feynman was once voted (by currently practicing physicists) as the 7th greatest physicist of all time. And his lectures are famous…they used to be for sale at dead tree bookstores (e.g., Borders), and I’m sure they’re available in printed form on the web. (I’d look but it’s already nine minutes before 10 PM my time.) This video is almost an hour long, but good.
It was this sort of thing that brought about Einstein’s quote that God does not play dice with the universe, and also led Schrödinger to propose the cat experiment, which purported to show that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics led to a situation where a cat was neither dead nor alive but both but neither until you opened the box and looked.
But we do not need to open the box to know that Saturday is bacon day around here.
And that Joe Biden didn’t win.
[I must apologize for this article; I doubt it made anything clear at all. However, there’s an old saw about how anyone who thinks they understand quantum mechanics just shows his ignorance. I don’t know that there is actually any way at all to make this stuff clear; it’s utterly counter to anyone’s intuition to the point where intelligent/geeky people just flatly refuse to accept it, despite the fact that it has been experimentally verified again, and again, and again….]
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!