They've got to be kidding now, right?

Damn, that's pretty clueless, all right. Unless you take Jimbo's statement at face value because we didn't literally have email-rumors 40 years ago, because we had no email. But what point does he have in that? Rumors that take on a life of their own, are as old as history. Like Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" remark.

God, to hear Jimbo, you'd think at first that he things episemological problems and the need for skepticism about conventional wisdom, is only as old as the internet. Or worse still, Wikipedia. Who said conventional wisdom of crowds is reliable??

I can take a crowd of even science-literate people (like high school science teachers) and they'll believe that Einstein's equation E=mc^2 means that mass can be converted to energy, thus disappearing as mass. Wrong. And as for the opinion of the public on this issue, it's "whaaaaa....?"

Jimbo really buys into the sui generis belief of the Internet and of Wikipedia; he is absolutely convinced that Wikipedia is categorically distinct from everything that came before, and this conviction colors his beliefs in other areas.

This is a common problem with new media advocates; it often causes them to blindly march into grave errors that they could have avoided if they looked at prior human experience in related areas that they simply refuse to see as being related to whatever it is they're doing.

I don't think I've heard that interpretation. In fact I thought the usual source of confusion is the notion that linear speed can be squared, so that (299,792,458 m/s)² becomes something like 8.9875 × 10¹⁶ m²/s²—thus that many sq. meters per second per second—thus representing some kind of acceleration in the rate at which the surface area of [something, the universe perhaps] increases.

But yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not it either.

I did take physics in high school (it was either that or "Biology 2") and passed the exams from rote memory, but that should not imply that I understood any of it. For the most part I still don't, so even today if I were to (for some reason) sit through it all again, I doubt I'd be able to discern whether the teacher bellygroks the brain-fuck chapter about Einsteinian relativity or is merely a more gifted actor.

Presented without comment

Ahhhhghhh!!!! It buuuuurnnssss.

Compared with this kind of thing, Wikipedia is pretty damned good.

Isn't that how the sun shines? Four atoms of hydrogen fuse together to form one of helium that weighs slightly less than they do. The difference appears as energy at the rate of E=mc^2.

Correct, but the light retains the missing mass (in the Sun's center of mass frame), and the Sun only loses mass because it loses the light. Basically, this is just mass going from HERE to (out) THERE. Along with the energy. All types of energy are associated with a quantity of mass, and both mass AND energy are separately conserved. One is not converted to the other. If you put a giant globular mirror around the sun, to isolate it as a system, it wouldn't lose mass. It would get hotter and hotter, but the mass would stay the same as particle rest masses were converted to the masses associated with heat and light in systems. The same is true in any chemical or nuclear reaction if you don't let out the heat/light-- no mass goes with it.

What does happen in some systems, rather than mass converted to energy, is that what some people call "matter" (fermions) can be converted to stuff some people call non-matter (like light). But through it all, the mass of the system (taken as a whole-- drawing a boundary around a larger and larger volume to contain the light) remains the same.

However, in the Sun, even the matter-to-energy conversion doesn't happen to any great extent. No particles are destroyed in fusion. The binding energy which carries away the mass, simply shows up as a missing mass in the bound helium-4. But no baryons disappear, even if one kind is changed to another (protons to neutrons). Instead, the collection of baryons gets lighter.

Essentially the sun destroys not 4 million tons of matter per second, but rather a net 4 million tons of static force fields (8 million tons of nuclear field are destroyed and 4 million tons of electric field is created). This all is converted to 4 million tons of light (and some particles like neutrinos, which are an insignificant fraction), and off it goes. Along with some solar wind (which carries away mass about half as fast as the light emission, but as actual protons and electrons).

the comments were a hoot.

He really oughta see a wiki-proctologist about that …

Jon

This seems to be a matter of definition. What was matter (which of course has mass) is converted to energy which (by E=mc^2) still has mass. The total mass of the universe remains constant but matter is converted into energy. Sometimes energy is converted to matter too.

Wow.

Then again, in a world where people buy bottles of water from France which are chemically identical to the water coming out of the tap, maybe homeopathy is the logical consequence. (I briefly tried to help the homeopathy editors work through a dispute some months ago, made my head hurt in a similar wa that it hurt watching that kwazy lady.)

Show of hands: did anyone actually watch that whole thing? I lasted about 45 seconds.

I watched the whole thing, and I'd encourage you to give it another shot. You really get into her rhythm eventually, and start to get a feel for her non-sequiturs. After hearing her say enough things like "So if energy can be neither created nor destroyed, then what is disease?" I start doing it myself. This morning, for example: "If the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right triangle, then where are my pants?"

(It's also fun to count how many scientific disciplines she individually mangles. So far I've got math, chemistry, and physics. I assume that something she says about cellular structure is also nonsense, but I don't know the first damned thing about biology.)

I got yer animated shorts right here …



Jon

That's the core of the misconception. The mass of the system is only actually reduced when the heat and light energy leave the system (whether "the system" is defined in this case as "everything within 700,000 KM of the center of the sun" or the entire galaxy or whatever), If you put the whole thing on the scale, the mass you measure will in fact include all energy in the system, regardless of whether that energy is in the form of rest mass of particles, atomic binding energy, potential due to charged particles being close together, kinetic energy*, or heat and light.

*This is where we get "relativistic mass"

To repeat myself:

The real problems come in trying to define "matter." Why should "electrons" be counted as "matter" but "photons" not? This seems to be to be mainly fermion-o-centrism. Or, if you like virtualgaugeboson-ophobia. Due to the exclusion principle, fermions have a bit more "matter-like" quality than do bosons, but at the end of the day, particularly for virtual fields, there's not much difference. All "particles" have wave-like natures and waves have particle-natures, and which way you wish to see the world is up to you. If the math predictions are the same, it's just your prejudice. Physicists as great as Weinberg have chosen to see everything in nature in terms of fields, with "particles" as simply field excitations. Feynman chose to see it nature in terms of particles. The math is the same.

What you can't get away from is the fact that 98% of the mass of ordinary "matter" is not fermions, but just fermionic kinetic energy and perhaps the mass of some gluon "field".

The message of E=mc^2 is simpler: mass and energy are the same thing, and so neither one appears without the other. Energy always has mass, and mass always represents energy. The two are not interconvertable because they are separately conserved over time, and the amount of both of them in any isolated system never changes (and when you open the system, they both leave or enter together). And there you're done--- unless you make the mistake of trying to differentiate "matter" from energy. Mass is easily defined-- matter is not.

The only other wrinkle is defining the KINDS of mass and energy. Both remain the same value over time for the single observer. However, different observers may disagree (according to your definition) on what the value IS (even though all observers agree that it does not and cannot change). There's a type of E and M that varies with observer, and a type that doesn't.

The energy that changes with inertial frame and observer is called relativistic energy, and the mass that does this is called relativistic mass. The relationship between the two is E=mc^2.

The energy that does NOT change with inertial frame and observer is called invariant or rest energy, and the mass that does this is called invariant or rest mass. The relationship between these two is also E=mc^2.

However, it is NOT generally true that E=mc^2 where the E is of one sort, and the m is of the other. There is a momentum term which must be added in to get from one sort of energy and mass, to the other sort. Thus, the only time the two kinds of energy and the two kinds of mass are all four of them equal to each other (forget the factor c^2) is in the inertial frame where momentum of the system is zero. This is called the "center of momentum" or COM frame. Such a frame (call it a velocity point of view) always exists for any system of 2 particles or more, so long as they're doing different directions. When you get into this frame (travel at its constant velocity), everything is simplified, because all the different types of energy and mass are now equal. Also, interestingly, their value is minimized in this frame. So even though their value never changes over time in any frame and for any observer, you are free to choose a frame (or observer) where this value is minimized, and the COM frame is it.

Milton

God, nobody knows how to derail a thread about Internet trust issues with know-it-all physics like Milton.

Thank you. It's a gift.

However, I used it as an example of a bit of "knowledge" commonly misunderstood, and I was obliged by somebody who seemed to be misunderstanding it. Voila! The thread derailment occured at the point I was asked "But isn't that [bit of misinformation] actually correct?"

Answer: no, it's not. The equation itself is only correct under some circumstances, and even then doesn't mean what most people think it means.

Hell, there's a whole book in the bookstores on this (the meaning of E=mc^2). I haven't dared buy it, for fear they've screwed it up.

OK one last time. What E=mc^2 is saying is that all energy has mass. Electromagnetic energy, which is why light is bent in a gravity field. Kinetic energy, which is why a moving body is more massive than a stationary one. It also means that a lump of metal can have part of its mass disappear to reappear as energy, as in an atomic bomb.

Now what the fuck were we talking about?

Ok, the bottled water thing. When people slag off others for buying bottled water (especially the small bottles) they are not taking into account the almost complete lack (in Britain at least) of public access to water, something which was accessible for many years in the form of drinking fountains in parks etc. Water taps.

Now the only way a thirsty person can get access to drinkable water tends to be bottled. And they get criticised on a regular basis, for taking the only choice presented to them, as others have been proscribed. Very Foucauldian. I even saw a blogging GP accuse bottled water drinkers of being 'neurotic' this year.

Meanwhile, a thirsty little girl in our local park on a (ok rare) hot summer's day this year got heat exhaustion because there was no water around. The family were begging others for water as the little girl got more and more distressed. Luckily she was helped a little by a kwazy carrying - wait for it- a bottle of water!

Should we wait for a lecture about how we should be prepared for thirst by -wait for it- carrying bottles of water around now? Were the parents evil for trusting there might be a water fountain, even while those of us with older children know those things no longer exist in most British Parks?

Or should the water we carry around be in a gourd, the good old-fashioned way? Do you KNOW how quickly stored water in containers get stagnant? Or is that part of the character building experience?

But, of course, that energy has mass, so that mass really hasn't disappeared, until the energy leaves the system.

The real problem is the fact that until we get to the point where we're talking about atomic energy, the mass/energy ratio is really vanishingly small, so we get the idea that this 'loss' of mass (i.e. conversion from forms of energy which are more or less "stuck to" the actual matter to forms of energy which tend to quickly leave the immediate vicinity) is something special that only happens in nuclear reactions.

c[sup]2[/sup] is about 90 billion MJ/kg. The hydrogen fusion reaction in the sun yields 645 million, almost 1% of this. Most chemical reactions are single digits or less of MJ/kg.



There is a difference between buying bottled water and carrying water in a bottle.

≠

The image was working when I got it. Anyway, it's obvious enough from context what it was.

Yes- In fact I recycle bottled water bottles to carry water around me if I know I'm going out for a long time etc.

But - there's problems. This bottle that you show doesn't address the issue of stagnation, for example. Stagnant water is horrible- and expecting children in particular to drink such water might just be a little bit mean (and maybe us adults). It's still a plastic bottle. If everyone who drinks any bottled water bought one of these, they'd still wear out after a while, no matter how hard you clean them they become rank in their own right eventually etc. This may seem like a poor comparison to the amount of say Evian bottles disposed, but nevertheless it's still potentially a formidable amount of plastic. AND, if you run out of water from your little bottle- where are you going to get more, unless you run off home? Or ask nicely from a kindly shopkeeper (one who wants to sell you Evian to boost his profits, by the way?)

Of course, if public mains water access had not been curtailed so badly by the state, the 'need' for bottled water would not have been imposed. If those who slag off bottled water users actually campaigned for the return of such, they might be more successful in reducing the use of bottled water. But then- that would go against the interests of the bottled water producers. Sometimes its easier to build straw men out of the populace then go up against those bad boys.

Lastly, a person I know suffers with excessive thirst as part of their illness. I was so grateful for the evil imperialist Evian/Vittel/Buxton manufacturers of the big bottles in particular when our water supply was last unavailable, a frequent occurrence in my part of the world (yes- England). The problems in Britain's water supply infrastructure is another issue that contributes to increased use of bottled water, both because of problems of supply, and of water quality.

How long does it take? Enough that it'd be bad by evening if you filled it in the morning before going out?

As for cleaning - my understanding is that they are durable enough thermally to be boiled.

But anyway - if it were solely a matter of needing to be able to get water in public, then water taken from a specific source and shipped from France (let alone Fiji) wouldn't be able to compete commercially at all.

The mass doesn't disappear. It's still riding with the energy (here heat and radiation). The mass of the bomb doesn't decrease UNTIL YOU LET THE PRODUCTS COOL AND LET EM RADIATION OUT. And when you do, the excess mass goes off with the heat & "light", and is deposited on whatever is heated. So mass never disappears.

If you catch it as EM radiation headed out into space, it still has mass (the invariant mass concept doesn't apply to single photons, but you never have just one photon-- it's always a system where a photon is emitted from some other particle, and you have to consider the "mass" of both of them, as a system.)


It's always amusing to see people whinge about plastic bottle and newspaper lifetime in landfills, at the same time they're trying to figure out tricky ways for carbon capture and sequestration to keep it out of the atmosphere.

Just bury the frigging bottle and lose the guilt.

I have no idea if Evian (naive spelled backward) is just some French guy filling containers with a hose, while dropping cigarette ash in, ala SNL. But some bottled waters are purer than most tapwater.

Shame about tapwater. They spend a lot of money to make the water you put on your lawn and flush your toilet with, drinkable. If we had an intelligently designed dual drinking water graywater plumbing system, we could have our water and drink it too.

I thought my English was well enough to be understood. I said that mass doesn't disappear. I said that electromagnetic radiation has mass. The issue is that solid matter, a lump of metal, can be transformed to energy so that it ceases to be solid matter. In theory, that process can even be reversed. E=mc^2 gives the conversion rate between the two.

Yes- water stagnates quite quickly in airless containers. I have no idea how Buxton/Vittel who have you manage to prevent this. But they manage to.

So one boils one's plastic container every day? How much environmental externalities would that cause? This is a bit like a woman I know who won't use screen de-icer because it's environmentally unfriendly, but ends up using more petrol running her car while stationary to warm the car screen up in order to be able to scrape the ice off more efficiently. Or the fact that to 'recycle' food jars and tins in certain boroughs here, one has to scrupulously clean them (how much water will that need?).

As regards commercial interests, bottled water does manage to taste better, partly because the British supply tastes actually bitter, with various things in it, for some of us at least, so it's not difficult. Various ad campaigns work also. But the gross reduction of public supply certainly has allowed a 'need' to develop for access to water. In a free market economy, water has become commodified. My beef here is with the idea that people who buy bottled water are irrational. There are lots of good reasons why people find themselves needing to access bottled water, that are to do with the way water supply and access to it is organised. It has obviously become commercially viable.



Yes. There are ways we could make things less wasteful etc. at the level of design of infrastructure. My concern at the moment is that 'environmental' concern itself has become so ideological in nature, that the wrong people are being scapegoated as evil environment destroyers, for not being 'green' enough, while those in positions to effect various systemic changes that might actually work don't. in the meantime we are being encouraged to 'rearrange deckchairs on the Titanic' in many ways.

Water only "stagnates" if it's contaminated to begin with (with something bacteria and/or algae like to eat), or chemically reacts with the container (which is why it's not sold in iron cans). Nothing happens at all to water that sits still... it's still just dihydrogen monoxide.

They "fix that" by making the containers as non-reactive as possible, and putting good seals on them.

There are good reasons to buy bottled water, just not good reasons to ship water across the ocean (or even the Channel) to non-arid countries (I'm under the impression that the British Isles are not particularly arid). The residents a few towns up are subsidized to get bottled water by the company that polluted their wells (apparently safe enough for bathing and such, but ppms too high for drinking and cooking).

Right - "Bottled Water" doesn't have to mean Evian - in the US two of the biggest individual brands of bottled water are Dasani and Aquafina - which come from tap water at Coke and Pepsi (respectively) bottling companies. (There was something of a scandal with Dasani in the UK since the normally harmless purification processes they used interacted badly with normally harmless substances contained in the local water, and it never recovered because once the story came out people felt "cheated" due to the - irrational - belief that water shipped in from France is somehow superior)

Close. Actually, the Dasani "scandal" was that they overdosed the water with one of the additives and consequently made the tap water, which the British are lead to believe is some of the best in the world and we have been drinking for decades safely, breach safe levels. Dasani was just in the start up phase - they'd only been going a few months, so they gave up.

It killed the brand dead but more because it not only was a health issue introduced from processing something that did not need processing, but the revelations of the process made it feel to be a con of selling tap water as equivalent to spring water - where the British irrationally believe that something left lying around in rocks for a while must be better than something out of a tap. There isn't a particular interest in the water being French (and several mains water companies over here are French owned anyway) - Perrier damaged their brand quite easily with a contamination problem.

Cornwall had problems with its spring water this year where excessive rainfall washed lots of microbes into the water supply.

You can buy bottled water for around 10p for 2 litres on the value brands in supermarkets or pay £1.50 for a 150ml bottle if you so care.

I think it was a classic case of a global corporation not understanding the subtleties of a local market - and also just how the press know a good story and are happy to play games.

Also, the media played up the "it's just tap water, why are you paying for tap water, they're ripping you off charging for tap water" angle a lot - if not for that (and for - as I was saying, irrational - consumer attitudes that made being tap water somehow a problem), they could have just fixed the problem



Right. The survival of 1.50 150ml bottles on the market is a monument to the irrationality that she persists in claiming does not exist.

Who's "she" Random?

And, irrationally buying expensive water (presuming you actually do have a choice- and aren't stranded somewhere by circumstances with no access to water otherwise? in which case 'irrationality' would be an inaccurate description) by SOME, does not support the charge of 'irrationality' per se in all decisions to buy bottled water, which was your original assumption.



Ok- well thanks for that SB Johnny. I didn't know that.

Now I do, I'd say that rather supports my charge that the return of water supply in public places would reduce people's need to find alternative supplies.

Yes. Only caveat being that you must be looking at the transformation process in the inertial frame where the "solid matter" is at rest. And stay there. The mass here of the "solid matter" includes any other internal energy it may contain, like heat.

In other frames, if you force the definitions of E and m so the equation is correct, then m isn't the "solid matter" which turns to energy, but rather the relativistic mass, which is partly kinetic energy anyway, on top of the matter's "rest energy."

No access to cheaper bottled water from the same store where one has access to the top-shelf imported 'mineral' water?



Who said that? You haven't actually linked to any of the blogs you're talking about, so I'm proceeding from the assumption that they are actually [at least implicitly] talking about people who buy Evian or whatever.



It is, of course, possible in theory to convert the actual solid matter itself to energy, but this requires something more exotic than a nuclear reaction (i.e. antimatter)

With ya there. Or at least allow the shopkeeper to charge you a few cents (or pence) to fill your bottle from the tap or a cooler.

Access to potable water is one of the more basic and profound human rights if you ask me.

Ok, Random. You said:



Because you were putting people buying bottled water from 'France' allegedly identical to local (say UK) tap water within the same frame of reference as 'kwazy lady', I presumed you meant people buying bottled water from anywhere (even say, British people buying UK bottled water) were irrational. There is a current political background issue where people buying bottled water have frequently been accused of being environmentally unfriendly, of which I'm presuming you are aware.

You've subsequently used the idea of a (purely hypothetical, by the way) 'choice' between grossly expensive bottled water and cheap bottled water to imply bottled water drinkers per se, are irrational: a "monument to irrationality' that she persists in claiming does not exist" I think is what you said? In fact, my argument is about the problem of lack of public access to water, which means that buying bottled water is sometimes, maybe often, the only 'rational' choice available for people.

You certainly haven't clarified that you might think bottled water buying is at least sometimes a rational choice.

So, are you now confirming to me that you think sometimes buying bottled water is a rational choice in certain circumstances? If you are, then we have no argument.

The charges of 'neuroticism' by the way are in this blog:

http://afortunateman.blogspot.com/search?u...max-results=50)




You are right there.

Hello, mods? Please, I beg ya, this thread is hosied all up. Messy messy.

Please, please, could y'all put the talk about mass/energy and bottled water elsewhere?

It really would be nice to talk about how Internet leaders discuss the notion of "trust" these days, as well as media counterpoints to that discussion.

First of all, that wasn't me. That was SB_Johnny. And as you can see, he was talking specifically about "water from France". As in Evian.



So, how exactly did you get from his specific mentioning of bottled water from "'France'" (Why the scare quotes? Do you not in fact accept that Evian is shipped across the channel?), that he meant anywhere? He meant the OPPOSITE of "even say, British people buying UK bottled water".

Yes, I've already pointed out that kinetic energy has mass and a moving body is more massive than one at rest. Since of course this is the theory of relativity, motion hence the increase in mass is relative to the observer.

Ok, I'm very very sorry. I did get my SBJohnny's mixed up with my Randoms. For that I apologise, although, as it turns out, I'm guessing SB Johnny might accept that buying bottled water (from wherever) might not be an irrational act per se, in light of our conversation? And it would seem we both agree that public access to water in public spaces (like it used to be) would be a good thing, reducing demand for bottled water?

As I've already delineated to you in the earlier posts: The context of buying bottled water, whether from France or the UK, is often presented as people being irrational, environmental villains who drink trendy water needlessly etc. This appeared to be the argument of SB Johnny (who I mistook for you). I was explaining why that wasn't a safe assumption. I don't think your own interpretation, that he somehow meant 'the OPPOSITE' of British people buying British bottled water is correct though. I guess we'll have to leave it to Johnny to explain if he feels like it.

Eric. I'd like to say sorry for the detour in subject. But hell- this goes on all the time in Wikipedia Review. I'll stop when everyone else does! Which'll be never. Anyway, I suspect the bottled water debate may have come to its natural end.

Greg, internet 'leaders' is itself a strange concept, sociologically. Certain people may have more power than others (economic, access, etc.). In what concepts are people judged to be 'leaders'? There's no leader of 'my' internet, just a bunch of ******** trying to wield power over me, via the internet as well as other places (I'm being sociological here- not claiming the computer is putting voices in my head or anything!) I think that in itself is interesting as a subject. Let alone the issue of 'trust', another one.

Actually, the miscommunications and misinterpretations of this thread and the way they've propagated do present some interesting things about how information becomes untrustworthy in a crowd-sourced environment.

Well, in my defence, it is quite easy to get anonymous usernames/avatars mixed up, and I don't think it is necessarily a strange thing to assume French bottled water equalled bottled water per se in a discussion, especially in the current context of global warning concerns and my own related concerns re scapegoating and rearranging deck-chairs.

Another lame Kohs "OMG, Jimbo" thread gets justly derailed by bottled water and the energy equivalence of mass.

1.5 pounds for a 150ml bottle of water? Is that a typo?

The disappearance of drinking fountains is making me fat: since I'm too lazy/incompetent to plan ahead by bringing my own water, when I get thirsty I have to buy something, and I'm viscerally incapable of paying that kind of money for water. So I pay that kind of money for something high fructose corn syrup-based, even though the company's margin on that isn't much lower than for water.

One nice thing about going from the University of Alberta, which has plenty of new infrastructure on account of oil wealth, to the University of New Brunswick, which doesn't, is that UNB still has drinking fountains. Now if I could just learn to get caffeine in a form that doesn't include HFCS, I'd be laughing.

Aspartame? Or, for that matter, coffee?

Or maybe a brand of soda that uses real sugar - I think there are still a few out there.

Oh yeah - I didn't mean to suggest that there weren't any such options open to me, just that I dislike aspartame and coffee (except when sweetened a bunch, which sort of defeats the point) enough that I don't bother with them. There's a fairly widespread brand of energy drink up here called Beaver Buzz that uses cane sugar, but it doesn't taste as good and I figure as long as I'm going to poor what's basically caffeine-infused sugar down my throat I might as well go all the way. Once upon a time pot after pot of black tea would do the trick, but no more, I fear. I'm sometimes tempted to go the caffeine pill route, but I'm afraid that that would increase my caffeine intake enough to do more damage to my health than the HFCS I'd be cutting out. Plus, HFCS is delicious; pills, not so much.

(I acknowledge that none of my beverage-related beliefs and practices are rational, so save yourself the time of pointing that out.)

I can't believe you said HFCS is delicious.

Don't get me wrong. I hate health food trends, and I savor snacks that get the balance of artificial flavors just right. MSG, as it should be, is in my cupboard.

But the first time I tried a Dublin Dr Pepper, I wanted to nuke Iowa, or failing that, repeal farm subsidies.

I'm a simple man, One. Actually, I think HFCS is probably less delicious than other forms of sugar, but more delicious than caffeine pills. Not that I've ever tried caffeine pills.

As for a "Dublin Dr. Pepper", does Dr. Pepper in the States not have HFCS? Or am I misinterpreting you.

On farm subsidies...I'm all for getting rid of them (except when I'm in the EU buying cheese). But I'm afraid that that'll be a non-starter in your neck of the woods as long as Iowa caucuses fall when they do. Probably would be anyway, really.