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One sign that this skill truly is innate: Children enter the world with a head for numbers. Veronique Izard, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, demonstrated this in a recent study of newborns. She and her colleagues played cooing sounds to babies, with varying numbers of sounds in each trial. The babies were then shown a set of shapes on a computer screen, and the scientists measured how long the babies gazed at it. (The length of time a baby spends looking at an object reflects its interest.) Newborns consistently looked longer at the screen when the number of shapes matched the number of sounds they had just heard. For example, a baby who heard “tuuu, tuuu, tuuu, tuuu” would look the longest at four shapes, less at eight, and still less at twelve. Izard’s study suggests that newborns already have a basic understanding of numbers. Moreover, their concept of numbers is abstract; they can transfer it across the senses from sounds to pictures.
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Other primates, lacking our symbolic brains, take thousands of trials to learn a new rule."
Taken from:
Discover Magazine
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Other primates, lacking our symbolic brains, take thousands of trials to learn a new rule."
Taken from:
Discover Magazine
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7 comments:
An "unreasonbly effective" basic instinct, at that.
Wigner dixi.
Yes, that's right.
I really love math, and I wish that I'd taken a different path, but even when I was in college I thought that my aptitude for physics was just because I was exposed to easy dumb stuff that wasn't hard enough for college.
But there is no way now that I will ever be able to attain the level of math that is necessary to write down this theory properly, but I have chosen to do what I can to say this, because it is relevant when they don't find the higgs or new physics, and they are already sweating it out over the higgs.
While the many theorists that I have spoken with about this physics don't ever even try to shoot down my observation with a simple refutation, they all tell me that I must publish in order to be taken seriously, and they typically can't get involved because they are already very committed to and obligated by the administrative demand of the cutting-edge, which usually straps them down exclusively to string theory.
Some physicists have recommended that I just write up a simple paper that outlines my discovery and what it appears to mean, but I know that this is not as good as the rigorous treatment that others have said is necessary.
Steve Carlip told me that a more rigorous treatment would require that I write down the creation/annihilation operators in this background and whatnot, but that isn't about to happen and I'm not convinced that relativity alone isn't enough to make the point anyway, since the most apparent implication is that his unified field theory will work in this background even though this physics should resolve the problems that quantum theory has as well.
I can't do what is necessary to make this mathematically rigorous, and I only understand the most basic math of general relativity that applies to my discovery, so either we wait for the LHC to turn up nothing and hope that the less formal paper will be enough to capture the attention of desperate theorists, or... ... ... what?
I did take Quantum Field Theory. I can do some math, but I still have to grasp what you are saying.
I can try to be your Maxwell, and you'll be my Faraday.
Math is not all that it is cracked up to be.
Okay, but you have to tell me when you're not getting something, so that I know. There is a great way to illustrate the point and you can understand everything that I say by studying how it applies to this cosmological model.
Using the classical "rubber sheet" space-time analogy, imagine that it represents an idealized zero pressure metric. G=0, P=0, and rho=0.
Now, stick a fork into the zero pressure metric and twist it until this rarfefied mass energy knots around the fork attaining the matter density over this finite region of the vacuum surrounding the fork.
You now have rho>0 in this region of space that surrounds the fork, but what happens to the rubber sheet when you do this? It pulls back!... so negative pressure increases, (which causes the vacuum to expand), as you make matter in this manner.
In Einstein's static model, G=0 when there is no matter. The cosmological constant came about because we do have matter, so in order to get rho>0 out of Einstein's matter-less model, you have to condense the matter density from the existing structure, and in doing so the pressure of the vacuum necessarily becomes less than zero, P<0.
You can even understand my point by using Ned Wright's demonstration:
You can experimentally prove the validity of the asserted physics simply by removing all pressure from a sealed container before you start condensing virtual particles from what’s “not” left in it.
Oh, and I don't care if we never mention the anthropic principle as it is not relevant until we get deeper than we need to go to make this point. In fact, it would probably behoove us not to.
I hope that I was clear enough.
This simple mechanism can be used to explain the problems that modern physics has been stuck on for the past 50 years.
You can see how this model is not unstable, since the increase in negative pressure is counterbalanced by the increase in the matter density, and instability was the ONLY reason that Einstein abandoned it.
That is a crucial key factor in the mystery of where science got off track, because this cosmological model is the most natural extension of General Relativity, is a MUCH stronger theory in this configuration, per Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler:
Is the Universe Closed?
This is huge because this means that Einstein was not wrong about the finite nature of the universe, nor about uncertainty, he simply did not know about the real, massive particle potential that the quantum theory later exposed.
This makes clear that the game would have been over a long time ago had he known of this because the universe is entirely comprehensible in this light.
I hope that this is clear.
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