Premises for Call of Cthulhu Adventures from Real Life

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
If we are not, as you say, "made"of particles, then what are we composed of
Sorry last I'll say on this, but I woke up this morning and remembered I forgot to mention this! I meant to include a simple practical consequence.

If you do a comparison with the classical idea of atoms as real objective objects from which things are made and the quantum notion where they're only an aspect of subjective observations you get the following differences:
  1. Ice becomes hard enough to melt that snow would never thaw over most of the Northern Hemisphere
  2. Lungs couldn't extract oxygen from the air
  3. Gold would be silver coloured (most things would shift colour, but I like this one)
Anyway that's it, I just thought memorable examples would be nice.
 
Sorry last I'll say on this, but I woke up this morning and remembered I forgot to mention this! I meant to include a simple practical consequence.

If you do a comparison with the classical idea of atoms as real objective objects from which things are made and the quantum notion where they're only an aspect of subjective observations you get the following differences:
  1. Ice becomes hard enough to melt that snow would never thaw over most of the Northern Hemisphere
  2. Lungs couldn't extract oxygen from the air
  3. Gold would be silver coloured (most things would shift colour, but I like this one)
Anyway that's it, I just thought memorable examples would be nice.

I find this stuff fascinating. Are they are articles or books for the layman that you would recommend about newer trends in physics?
 


More on this here:


'In fact, the main production on Dau didn’t start until 2009, when the director and his team decamped to The Institute, a huge, functioning experimental research facility in Kharkov, Ukraine. This was specially built for the film and recreated in the minutest detail the facility in which the real Lev Landau worked. “The Institute existed within a parallel spatial and temporal universe: a meticulous historical reconstitution spanning the years 1938 to 1968,” explains the new Dau brochure, produced for the show in Paris.

The filmmakers spent over two years here, shooting 700 hours of 35mm material from which they eventually edited 13 features. Twelve of these features will be in the Paris exhibition. It was at this point that Khrzhanovsky went off the grid and that reports began leaking out from the set suggesting that he was turning into European cinema’s answer to the morally unhinged Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.'
 
I find this stuff fascinating. Are they are articles or books for the layman that you would recommend about newer trends in physics?
The terrible thing is that this stuff is from the 1920s but never makes it into accessible books! In studies Tanya Bub and Jeffrey Bub's graphic novel "Totally Random" tends to come out on top, but what "clicks" with an individual is very personal so it might not suit yourself.

What a book about this stuff should do is:
(a) Explain the failure of what is know as "realism", i.e. the view that atoms etc exist objectively outside of observation
(b) Spend little time on fringe theories attempting to escape (a) since after nearly 100 years they've never gone anywhere or managed to match experiment, e.g. Many-Worlds, atoms being in "many places at once" and so on.

For example many books explain entanglement with the particles communicating faster than light, which is actually how it is explained in some of the fringe theories from (b) not by Quantum Theory itself. The graphic novel above is very good in this regard.
 
I don't know how much you want to know, so just ask if there is anything you want clarification on.

Heat Death was a sort of cosmological application of thermodynamics done in the 19th century. Since thermodynamics really only dealt with nearly isolated perfectly controlled systems, like a gas in a sealed rigid box at a fixed temperature, even at the time they had doubts that it made sense to apply it to the whole universe. Later in the early 20th century the French mathematician Henri Poincaré showed that even gas in a box doesn't exactly undergo heat death, so there was even less of a reason to think it made any sense for the universe as a whole.
The whole set up makes little sense today as we now know that entropy is a subjective* property measuring how much you know about a system, not a real physical quantity like energy.

As for the actual fate of the universe, in current physical theories it's unknown since it depends on a quantum theory of gravity which we don't have.

*I think this is probably the thing most commonly left out of popular expositions, how subjective and "non-mechanical" a science physics now is. Notions like "The Laws of Physics" even are outdated. Modern theories are quantum theories and quantum theories operate in terms of an observer's bets/beliefs/probabilities about what they might see in the future. Not absolute 3rd person "objective" laws governing the world like it was a giant clock.
Sounds like Quantum Physics cribbed the magic system from Mage: The Ascension.
 
TIL that bananas produce antimatter, releasing one positron—the antimatter equivalent of an electron—about every 75 minutes. This occurs because bananas contain a small amount of potassium-40, a naturally occurring isotope of potassium that rapidly decays.

I have no idea what to do with this information, but I can't help feeling that it's the inspiration for a supervillain waiting to happen...

ErnieBertBananaEarPart1.jpg
 
Untitled.jpg

The Predatory tunicate, is a very unique and unusual animal living in the deep-sea at depths of 600-3,300 feet that resembles a cross between a Venus flytrap and a jellyfish. Unlike most tunicates, the Predatory tunicate is not a filter feeder, but is carnivorous in nature as it lets food enter its open mouth before snapping it closed.
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top