Fusion, Fission, Quarks and such nonsense.

Just a few clarifications:

False. Carbon dating, for example, uses Carbon-14 - which is naturally occurring.
Re: Fission/Fusion kerfuffle:

Consider a star large enough to supernova
Initially, it fuses hydrogen to form helium, which produces shittons of energy. Eventually it starts running out of hydrogen, so begins to contract (its pressure from produced photons that causes the star to remain spherical despite gravity's effects). This produces energy, which is why you can get sunburnt and why, you know, the temperature is 300ish here and not ~3.
When said star runs out of hydrogen, it begins to fuse products of fusion - you'll note that the products are fused - there is no fission because there is a mass defect involved in moving from helium to hydrogen - i.e. you need to commit energy to split a helium nucleus.
This continues until we get to the fusion of various elements to form an unstable isotope of nickel, which decays to iron. Now, Iron is a bit of a dick. Making iron via fusion gives you energy. But, iron can't be fused with anything else to give you energy either.

So, fusion stops. And the star falls in on itself. As the pressure and heat increase, nuclei are *forced* closer and closer together, until, well, supernova. As a result of this, shit happens and r-process (read about it somewhere else, this is the limit of my knowledge) causes the heavier elements to form - at a loss of energy.

 

On the subject of IQ, when I did have a test, many years ago, when I was young, my IQ was 121. Being as thought that is above average, I'm happy about that.
Mind you, it's been over 15 years, but still.
While IQ may not be an amazing test of how Intelligent someone is, I don't think it's really fair to dismiss it out of hand.

Steven Hawking does have an extremely high IQ, and I think that does tell you it does measure something related to intelligence. I'm just saying, I think he's smart.
I don't think, also, Omni, that anyone would claim Savants don't exist.

Now, Story Time: My neighbor was an 8 year old who suffered from Down Syndrome, while he and I couldn't communicate perfectly, he was still fun to hang around. The time I accidentally sliced a nasty cut down to the bone near my wrist on a pane of glass sitting flat, the other edge came up and stabbed me, proved that despite the communication barriers, he knew I needed to get help.
To be fair, his older sister freaked out more than I did. Adrenaline is very useful for not screaming in pain while bleeding from a serious wound. Only hurt at the hospital when they put the stuff in it to make it not hurt. Wut. No, really, it did.

Er, one cavat, Mining, Iron can fuse, even in a star. However, it's the point at which the energy required to fuse the iron is greater than the energy gained from the fusioning of the iron.
Each element after Hydrogen takes a bit extra energy each time to fusion. Iron is the flash point, if you will, for inevitable star death.
Also, our sun will follow the same path, but because it is not big enough to go supernova, it will just expand until it reaches Earth orbit, and then contract into a "tiny" white dwarf. Which is roughly the size of the Earth, I think.
When a star enters the red giant phase, it doesn't have that much longer to live.
The star also grows larger as fusion starts using heavier elements.
I do know a red giant is already starting to fusion iron. Otherwise it would keep getting larger.

I think the iron fusion is the reason it turns red too, but I could be wrong.

 

Actually, the law of Entropy begs to differ. In nature, things have a tendency to move from a state of higher order to a state of lower order. Intelligence is mainly measured in a person's ability to carry out ordered activities. Pattern recognition, communication, math, reasoning, philosophy, art (even the mostly-incomprehensible modern art follows patterns the artist recognizes, they're often too obscure for most people). We're advancing at a faster rate than previous generations because we have a larger knowledge base to work from (as Newton said, standing on the backs of giants).

That said, intelligence can work against Entropy by restoring the places where patterns break down, communication is unclear, ect. But are we becoming more intelligent or just having more facts at our disposal? I'd argue that the two are not the same, and that the latter is the case.

 

Except that it's perfectly within the rules for entropy to decrease, in limited areas over periods of time smaller than a few billion years. Which is basically what Earth is.

Besides, life exists specifically as a large "screw you" to entropy in general. Granted, it hasn't won yet, but the longer life's around, the less entropic things in its vicinity become.

 

I never said it wasn't. Notice that I mentioned one known mechanism for this to happen. My point was, it's not natural for intelligence to go up, it's a deviation from known laws. We have enough difficulty just objectively measuring intelligence, as has been previously discussed. So I take issue with an increase in intelligence being "natural".

This is actually a statement of first principles, not a scientific one. Areligionists believe that the material is all there was, and so life and intelligence are deviations from natural laws. However, plenty of religious people feel that the world was started by an intelligent force. That makes intelligence and life something that has existed from the beginning and could possibly have decayed over time, with the applied intelligence trying desperately to regain lost ground.

Either one is a non-scientific statement. Short of time travel, observing the beginning of the universe is impossible for modern man. So determining whether intelligence would naturally increase or not is more a question of first principles than science. Determining whether it is increasing or not is a question of objectivity. Both are horrible questions to hash out on the Internet. So I should probably leave this one alone now...

 

Everywhere we look, we find life. There are zero exceptions if we look hard enough.

The carbon control rods in a nuclear reactor have something "Growing" on them after decades of use. They are thousands of degrees hot and have enough radiation to kill anything we know of in common life. But something grows there too if we look.

Entropy exists as a theory. It cannot be disproved, nor proven.

 

I thought this was Entropy.

When I think of Entropy, I think of Heat Death, Maximum Entropy.
How does Human Intelligence fall victim to Entropy, when it has to do with Thermodynamics.

 

New term: Thread Entropy.

What were we talking about?

As I said, entropy cannot be either proven nor disproven. It may exist, or not. It may apply to everything too. But that is counter entropic, is it not?

For the purposes used here, this link is correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

For an easier to understand and condensed version, check this link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_entropy

But for a more generalized look at the theories, this link is more appropriate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(disambiguation)
(Note that this is a big topic. It covers potentially everything possible to discuss, so be warned.)

Good reading too.

I am rather surprised no-one has reacted to my post indicating life was found on the carbon control rods of a nuclear reactor. Is this common knowledge now? Understand that I do not even own a television. So I am very much out of the loop.

 

Yeah, I use the term to refer to disorder, which I see is now a strongly disliked use of the concept. Basically what I'm referring to is this:

A highly chaotic system cannot store information in any way we know of. The disordered system must be put in a shape recognizable to intelligence. The problem is, intelligence itself seems to be a structured phenomenon. Thus, it would have a tendency to move towards disorder itself. (Also, does intelligence involve heat? No one knows.) But, as I said above, that's all first principle stuff.

I had read this somewhere, though I can't remember where now. I'll see if I can find a link or some such...

 

Intelligence involves heat in that electrons moving *Are* heat. And without electrons moving you cannot think at all. But that is a vastly different argument from what I am certain you are referring to.

I am unaware of anything that demonstrates intellect that does not involve heat in one way or another.

Entropy is too ambiguous for me to understand. That is why I call it a theory. The words in the English language are half adopted from other languages. And there are many subjects where our usage is limited. We need new words to express certain ideas.

Sadly, I forget where I was going with this, and I too must be going. I am accompanying my brother to visit an Alpaca farm today. (He wants to raise them for some reason.)

 

Oh, okay, Lorrelian, I was wondering if I was just forgetting how Entropy worked or not.
My knowledge of many things is fairly limited.

 

I don't know if I can find the article now (was probably in Scientific American or Scientific American Mind, and I'm not sure even if I still have that issue), but I remember reading something about intelligence and thermodynamics, about how there's a thermodynamic limit on intelligence with the general design of the human brain. If someone else knows about the article, you can refresh my memory of it.

/edit I found it online here.

 

And yes, you are of course right about Carbon 14. I just turned 52 on the 5th, so you'll have to forgive my pre-alzheimer brain malfunction. I definitely screwed that up.

 

My grandfather died of Alzheimer's 17 years ago, but I have a feeling he would find your post funny.
He would have loved the vast knowledge you can find on the Internet too.
I'm not offended or anything, believe me.

But time to go back to Fission/Fusion/etc. I hope my knowledge on star death is correct above.

 

My dad also had Alzheimers when he died (he also had cancer and emphysema, and it was the latter that actually killed him). I joke about it, but I can't help but have my own fear of Alzheimers, more even than cancer, since I saw what it did to him. Humor is an awesome defense-mechanism.

 

Indeed it is.
My dad died of Heart failure from Diabetes, and he was renown for having a good sense of humor until he died.
I got his sense of humor, to be honest. Which is why sometimes I am a bit weird.

 

I got my sense of humour from my maternal grandfather, meaning that it's more common for people to laugh at the weirdness of what I say instead of laughing at my jokes (and that made me stop using any jokes other than weird puns; oh, well).
And in my family there's a lot of hereditary diseases, so I'll be pretty surprised if I live for more than 50 years; no Alzheimers, luckily.

Anyway, I came here to tell you that I really like your discussion about various physics-related things. I don't feel capable enough to discuss it in English without making any stupid mistakes, so I relegated myself to merely watching, but I find the fact that someone discusses the quirks of physics on an internet forum to be really nice.

 

While iron can fuse rarely in any star, it can only fuse in *large* quantities under the extremely high energy situation in a supernova type situation.

Regarding thermodynamics: All processes we undergo as humans increase entropy, bar none. It's why we can't have perpetual motion machines, and why there is always waste in anything we do.
When we think, move, breathe, our heart beats - anything - there is production of irreclaimable heat. Energy which was once potential gravitational, potential chemical, potential difference over an electric circuit - anything - is now, ideally, 100% kinetic which can then be changed back into potential energy - but - some of that is wasted in the form of heat energy. Even the sun, which some people call a "net exporter of negative entropy" because it creates situations where energy can be stored as chemical potential (i.e. photosynthesis), but overall, more energy is converted into heat from nuclear potential than back into potential of other kinds.

 

Ah. Okay then.
Thermodynamics is a big part of everything.
I actually didn't know that.

Regarding Iron, I can understand that.
Beats my knowledge on Thermodynamics.

Now I have to go and make a Perpetual motion machine just to see the entire universe explode like it probably would if I made one.
I bet Batman can make one. He's Batman.
I kid, I kid. I know you can't.

 

MacGuyver could do it.


With the help of a legion of script writers.