Well it's known...
that it's harder to think positive thoughts than negative thoughts, so presumably catcogitates are heavier than ancogitates.
A headline in the venerable New Scientist magazine "Protons are lighter than thought" has prompted El Reg's Standards Bureau to consider the notion of thought as a small unit of mass. It was believed that the proton was about 0.877 femtometres, less than a trillionth of a millimetre. But now scientists have found the subatomic …
So you think that the whole public is pristine and innocent and kind and gentle
There's plenty of crummy people around...
and it's Hopkins articles that make them hate others? Do you not think that she is just saying stuff that many of the public already agree with?
...and confirmation of the legitimacy of their views by seeing similar views in print, in newspapers, will lead to trouble.
If you don't push back against shit opinions, then one day those with such opinions will attract sufficient backing to get elected. Then they stop being opinions; they start becoming policy, with the ability to enact them.
It's all too easy for those with comfortable, easy going liberal views and lifestyles to assume that everyone else shares the same ideals, and that there's no need to proactively maintain an equitable status quo. Biggest mistake ever. The USA got Trump. We nearly ended up with an incompetent Trotsky-ist with as much of an idea of how to be prime minister and run a country as a rotten turnip, because too many Labour MPs thought he'd never win their leadership election and then too many voters took his oh-so dubious promises to heart without any idea what the consequences would be (tanked economy, crippling borrowing rates, rampant strikes, no jobs, no money).
" We nearly ended up with an incompetent Trotsky-ist with as much of an idea of how to be prime minister and run a country as a rotten turnip"
Instead we get a dictatorial incompetent who appoints other incompetents to handle delicate negotiations. Its funny how mildly socialist views are now seen as Trotskyist. Is the Swedish government marxist or trostskyist? Many European governments hold similar views to Corbyn, oddly none of them are labelled quite so aggressively. Crippling borrowing rates? Like our 1.7 TRILLION debt - more than all labour governments in history combined? You buy into the tory dogma that any social spending is bad for the country - well, from the perspective of the very wealthy it certainly is, why waste money on the peasants you could squirrel away overseas for yourself?
"...and don't have a physical weight."
Well, given that neuronal firing is a synonym for the rapid movement of ions across a neuronal membrane, there would be a shift in mass involved. I'm sure someone could work it out if it actually achieved anything by doing so.
Well, given that neuronal firing is a synonym for the rapid movement of ions across a neuronal membrane, there would be a shift in mass involved.
However, a swift kick to the head to dislodge some stuck thoughts doesn't usually achieve the desired results.
But we have to experimentally validate to see if that is actually is the case, and in the process we might indeed find a value for the mass of a thought, by applying standard kicks to the head (calibrated in NorrisLinguini) and averaging the number of unstuck thoughts resulting from that.
Would it have to be an original thought to have mass?
Thus as the sum of human knowledge increases, it becomes less likely to have an original thought.
So perhaps thoughts gain mass as time goes on. To know everything would require more mass than exists in the universe, perhaps?
"I suspect thoughts are entangled"
Would this make the human brain the original quantum computer?
To put it another way: Schrödinger's thought process -> a human is both smart and incredibly stupid simultaneously, and listening to their thoughts changes the outcome?
I know, I know, mine's the one with poison in one pocket and a kitten in the other.
To know everything would require more mass than exists in the universe, perhaps?
At the very least, knowing everything there is to know would make the total mass of all thought a new data point which has to be known, increasing yet again the total mass of all thought, etc.
Wouldn't Katie Hopkins' "thoughts" be anti-thoughts, so we have to look at anti-protons? (and yes, those have the (positive) same mass as protons, but it's the thought that counts)
Alternatively, given the often self-contradictory nature of what passes for thoughts in her case, some particle that is its own antiparticle (a Majorana fermion) would be suitable. As the most probable candidate for such a particle is the neutrino, which has near zero mass, this might be ideal
"It was believed that the proton was about 0.877 femtometres, less than a trillionth of a millimetre. But now scientists have found the subatomic particle is 30 billionths of a per cent lighter than that estimate."
0.877 femtometres is a length. You can't be 30 billionths of a percent lighter than a length.
Indeed: a person crueller than I might consider the whole piece innumerate tosh. Thoughts do of course have "physical weight" (what other sort is there? Spiritual, literary I guess). The firing of a neuron occurs through passage of many neurotransmitter molecules across a synaptic gap, and they have a finite molecular weight.
The Register wonders how many Katie Hopkins columns it would take to amass a single unit?
The units are indeed confused. Katie Hopkins columns are so insubstantial they actually have no mass at all. The appropriate unit to use therefore is the 'nat' from Shannon information theory, as her columns convey precisely zero information.[1]
[1] Although they may leak information about herself.
"[...] Katie Hopkins columns are so insubstantial they actually have no mass at all. [...] as her columns convey precisely zero information.[1]
[1] Although they may leak information about herself.
I'm not a physicist, but this kinda sounds a bit like a reverse black hole.
Maybe we could call this phenomenom "Hopkins radiation"?
"It was believed that the proton was about 0.877 femtometres, less than a trillionth of a millimetre. But now scientists have found the subatomic particle is 30 billionths of a per cent lighter than that estimate."
I thought I was 1.8m tall but it turns out I'm much heavier.
Perhaps Vulture Central's IT specialists could implement El Reg goggles (similar to gmail goggles) which prevent drunken article writing.
It might reduce the number of articles where masses are specified in units of length and inequalities get reversed. It might even result in a coherent article (if you manage to implement laser goggles).
Don't TAKE HE mocky AST YOU BRATS would say OUT OC KATIE HOPKINS SHES A frond Of TRUMO SO IS A fiend of the AMORICAN PEEPLE. SHE JUST says WHA WIL. BE AMERICAN FOREIGH POLICY NEXT week. SHE IS. A genius LIKE TRUMPP and LIKE the GINGER one FROM THE SPICE GURLS - /sporty SPICE. TEASER may should APPOING hopClit To be Your DIPLOMAT TO THE USA! With Marlinia tramp On top. Politically I MEAN NOT LIKE TOO NAKID WOMANS. I AM not A pivot. So Katie's thoughts are Like a BAG. OF AGAR. SUHAR. SUGAR.
As I read down and saw this "Hat-tip to Douglas from Cambridge for spotting this article" I immediately thought of the late great Douglas Adams.
Adams was born in Cambridge in March 1952 and he is quoted as saying that DNA (his middle name was Noël) was in the city nine months before Francis Crick and James Watson discovered its double-helix structure.
I'd like to think that this story would make him smile, firstly for the terrible grammar of ""Protons are lighter than thought" headline and secondly at the idea that a thought has some kind of mass.
Not knowing who or what KH is.
Sadly, the type is not unique or restricted to the UK. We've some collection of idiots over here who have spent far too much time in the right wing echo chamber and are *firmly* convinced that all Syrian Refugees (substitute any non-white skinned, non christian faithed body) that Canada has accepted will be simultaneously trying to convert Canada to Sharia law and wearing explosive belts to all our major public events. And that the only solution is to allow Canadians unlimited access to assault rifles and large clip handguns.
The awkward bit in the article is 'meters' vs some measure of mass. I'm assuming that there is some calculation somewhere that converts diameter/length of a proton to some value of mass and that this is universal, said assumption solely to let the NS writer off the hook. It might be advantageous to hunt that formula up.
As for thoughts having weight, having periodic depression will educate one on that front. They weigh a fucking ton. (Short ton, sorry, leftpondian). If protons were *heavier* than that I think we'd all be just a wee bit shorter, what with mass having an influence on gravitational pull.
(actually had a great long weekend, just it is first day back at the mess and I'm looking at 125 lines of python that were committed on Thursday night and wondering what idiot thought this would have *any* value....)
Right,
thought= neurons firing (allegedly- not a neuroscientist, just a bored Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Boffin)
Neurons fire electrical pulses, which are electrons, one at a time down along the axon. (according to google "how does a neuron work")
radius of electron= 2.818 x10e-15m
but we want weight/mass which is 9.1 x10e-31 kg
So, one thought, which is one pulse is 9.1x 10e-31kg.
Which, if we think Katie Hopkins is thoughtless means that one of her columns is less than that- taking a 95% as a maximum statistical less than , her columns are at a maximum 8.64x10e-31 kg.
which is, not very much.
which are electrons, one at a time down along the axon. (according to google "how does a neuron work")
Which isn't right. A charge moves, but it's not electrons. And even if it's a piece of copper wire, the electron barely moves. They shuffle along at a really, really slow pace.
Here is my work, bear in mind I'm frequently wrong but NEVER in doubt:
Rest mass of proton: 1.672621898E-027 kilogram
Speed of light: 299792458 m/sec
Therefore the energy equivalent of one proton is:
E = mc^2 = 1.50327759289611E-10 Joule
I don't know Katie so we will use one of my thoughts. I have on average 2/day.
Apropos of nothing the average time for a mammal to defecate is 12 sec.
Basic energy consumption of an adult male is about 8700 kJ; over 24 hours this averages to a power level of just over 100W. The brain consumes about 19% of this, so the brain is 19W.
Given 12sec/thought, then the energy value of a thought is 12sec * 19W = 228Joule
How many proton rest masses is this? 228Joule / 1.50327759289611E-10 Joule / proton ~ 14820948642677 protons.
An error of 30 billionths of a percent is 3.333E-10
3.333E-10 * 14820948642677 ~ 506.
So because of this error I need another 506 protons per thought. Or less fiber.
I may have mis-understood the premise of the article (but hey, I think we all did)
So, if thoughts have mass, then every time an original thought is had (or even an unoriginal thought) a very, very ickle tiny amount of matter is tied up in that thought. Now, as matter can be neither created nor destroyed, that means that over time a growing percentage of the mass of the Universe will be converted into thoughts. Eventually the universe will comprise one single 'body' of interlocking, coruscating thought, and humanity will have reached its ultimate evolutionary stage.
Hmm, I feel the urge to found a new religion coming on....
A Guardian article about Ligo possibly being used to uncover evidence for string theory's extra dimensions had me wondering, this morning, about testability, and I realised that we *still* haven't observed proton decay - which would be really big deal in confirming some facts about a universe which, I am constrained to point out, has, despite immense scientific effort, not been getting any *less* weird since Einstein muttered about "spooky action at a distance". Personally I still have to deploy the mental "long spoon" when supping with dark matter ...
But, to topic, do thoughts have mass? Insofar as they embody electric charge, then they must do, just as a capacitor must become infinitesimally massier when charged. Does this mean that thinking new thoughts increases one's brain mass? Or, since our mass can, in any given reference frame, change only via our receiving or transmitting something, do mass-increasing thoughts work only when stimulated upon receipt of information from outside ourselves? Does a certain kind of thinking - e.g. complex analysis, creativity, learning - have more mass than other, less challenging 'thought' processes, like watching 'Love Island' or listening to politicians tell lies?
Is it possible that I am getting heavier when reading an electronics textbook, because I am processing and (I hope) storing complex new information? Whereas perhaps the audience at a Donald Trump speech gradually gets lighter, as the listeners know less and less?
"Wow, Doc, this is heavy ..."
The brain uses about 0.15 calories per minute. By relativistic mass-energy equivalence, the mass of 0.15 calories is 6.98e-15 grams. The mass of a proton is 1.67e-24 grams.
That means the brain uses approximately 4 billion protons worth of energy every minute. If a thinking brain uses 10% more energy, and you have ten thoughts per minute, a thought weighs in at 40 million protons.
So yes, protons are quite a bit lighter than thought, I would say.