To think that Noel Edmonds might just..

[juststoppit]

..have something there. Not all of his twaddle, but the bit about dying.

I'm not a scientist or a weirdo, but it seems to be an indisputable fact that energy can't cease to exist. And we are made from energy. Our eyes, hearts, livers, the house we live in, the toilet roll we use, the cat litter (which needs cleaning, oops) - their fundamental forms all are energy. Electrons, protons neutrons.

So..

"Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it transforms from one form to another"

So whilst we may stop living in the traditional sense, our energy doesn't.

(I might add I'm not a hippie/druggie/troller/religious fanatic, or particularly sentimental)

Can anyone give me a point of view?

I feel daft talking about it in real life. And I think I might feel a bit dafter after posting this

I have a Astro physics friend. I both find him amazing and terrifying. I love talking about magnetospheres etc but everything just sounds stupid when I say it.

I am scientist but everything I know about physics is from the TV. God knows how I passed GCSE

I don't know about his immortality, but when I was a teenager he couldn't even hang around long enough in the department store he was supposed to be doing a meet and greet at.

My very disappointed friend and I happened to then be behind him on the escalator as he was leaving. He gave us a really smug smile. I hope his atoms don't get mixed up with mine any time soon.

Ohhh it was Schrodinger! Him of the cats, making horribly incorrect statements about life and entropy. I sort of understand why the myth took so long to over turn if it was heavy weights like that screwing it all up....

Schrodinger thought of life as 'pools of order amongst chaos'.

Unlucky...liked his earlier work but maybe biophysics was a step too far.....

nice too late if you shared a lift I'm afraid....

I am imagining a Shrodinger's miniature Noel Edmonds in a box.

The banker is offering a quarter of a million on him being dead.

IceBeing - it was an escalator, and we were down the next step, please tell me that will make a difference ?!

If I start growing a beard tomorrow and buy a ridiculous jumper I shall turn myself in. Please let me have Shakespeare's atoms instead.

hmm...it occurs to me that of course the business with the cats also doesn't reflect that well on Prof. S. what with it being a totally irrelevant argument in quantum these days...but I am far too harsh. He was a trail blazer and they are going to get more wrong than they get right and that is just how is SHOULD be!

We could indeed run the cat experiment on Noel...I would vote for a relatively small completely sealed box and a radioactive isotope with a rather long half life. We won't learn much about the nature of the universe...but we should escape any victim blaming twaddle about cancer for a time.

ego argh!

nice it will have helped but it won't have been enough....but don't worry to get the beard etc. you would probably have to have exchanged DNA, maybe even stem cells or something....and they just don't let you get THAT close on an escalator....

My colleagues never believe me when I say there is physics banter on MN....they are so wrong!

Can someone tell me if I can turn myself into jewellery after I die, pls?

ego I think phosphates on a biochemical level are fascinating (if that isn't too boring a thing to say!) They are so important to the cell - as part of signalling cascades and short term energy stores etc ...
Just deleted a long explanation as I got carried away - but in my Phd I looked at inositol polyphosphates (inositol with 7 and even 8 phosphate groups - so one or two double phosphates) And dinucleoside polyphosphates (two nucleotides joined together with a chain of up to 6 phosphates). We still don't know why either exist (or last time I looked we didn't - and the dinucleoside polyphosphates were first discovered in the early 1960s) but they must take a hell of a lot of energy to make - so presumably they must have a purpose...

Back to the OP -
The cancer thing as a pp said - bollocks. On a basic level - cancer is caused by a gene mutation. This could be inherited or acquired. As our cells keep dividing as we age we are more likely to get a mutation which could cause cancer. All cancer starts as a cell going out of control - it replicates when it shouldn't and doesn't commit suicide (programmed cell death) when it should. A genetics lecturer said that by the time we reach 80 we will all have cancer somewhere - when you are old, your cells aren't dividing as rapidly anyway so it tends to be very slow growing.
As to life energy - not really good at physics but we are surrounded by a vacuum in space. So atoms can't go anywhere (except when we launch things into space!) so they will always exist as long as earth exists. And even after then. I guess the atoms might change in certain circumstances to become different elements ...but then the subatomic particles will always exist (not just protons, neutrons, electrons but quarks and hadrons and baryons (?) - not very up on sub sub-atomic particles).
I thought it had something to do with Einstein and his theory of relativity - energy = matter too...but like I said rubbish at physics and also I have a feeling that E=MC2 has been (partially?) disproved????
I sure some (Ancient Greek?) philosopher or philosophical theory also had a similar concept that live never truly ends - which then was later developed in an atomic concept. I am racking my brain to remember better...and if I do I'll post it - or maybe someone else knows what I am on about ...

Slippy I was going to post that...

"You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every BTU of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen."

I'm not sure how comforting I'd find that. But I love this song

unlucky83 Are you thinking of Aristotle and the continuum? He predicted the atom, pretty much, in the 4th century BC.

Clever fucker.

Unlucky83

You touched on what I was clumsily trying to get at. I might have focused on atoms et al, but what about the gravity each one of us produce (tiny tiny tiny, yes), our own electromagnetic properties and the gaps between our synapses.. which transfer signals.

It's all energy, so surely our conscientiousness is energy. Hence it can't be destroyed. Re-distributed, yes. Never destroyed?

Thanks for all the replies to my first ever thread. Been an MNer for a while, just a quiet one.

(Just found out on my quest for knowledge the the World Wide Web actually has an estimated weight. It weighs the same as a strawberry!! Shall tend to more pertinent matters now. Bloody litter tray STILL needs doing)

Some interesting stuff on this thread.
Noel however is just a massive bellend.

MrsTP.

Shit the bed!!! That nails it completely.

Knew I wasn't too bonkers. Thanks

You touched on what I was clumsily trying to get at. I might have focused on atoms et al, but what about the gravity each one of us produce (tiny tiny tiny, yes), our own electromagnetic properties and the gaps between our synapses.. which transfer signals.

We don't "produce" gravity-it's the force of attraction between anything that has mass. The atoms were are made of have mass so we experience the force of gravity. Synapses are just gaps between nerves that chemicals travel across in exactly the same way as perfume spreads all through a room if you spray it in one corner. I'm not sure which electromagnetic properties you're talking about.

You have a really romantic view of the human body. I can understand that. They way it works is incredible. Absolutely beautifully elegant but I think you're better looking at faith or philosophy for what happens to our "consciousness" after we die. I don't think there's a scientific explanation for the afterlife.

Some interesting stuff on this thread.
Noel however is just a massive
bellend

This with bells on. Really enjoying this thread.

expat

Noel Edmonds made me laugh when he tried to claim he had RSI from lifting the phone on Deal Or No Deal. Bless

My friends dad was pretty sure that his cancer was due to the daft experiments he did as a student engineer.

I personally believe that consciousness is tied up in the transfer of energy (chemical in the main part) between neurones and the chemical composition that arises in these neurones due to the signals...

So when you die the chemicals continue, the energy exists but the information content decays exponentially back to the background level.

It is like having a book that stays a book while you are turning the pages, but when you put it down all the ink begins to disperse randomly around until each page is basically a uniform grey. All the ink, all the paper is still there but the information is lost.

So our atoms and our energy continue, but the unique information content that comprises our consciousness is lost....meanwhile the unique information we passed on in our lives via our interactions with the world and with other people continues to ripple out influencing essentially everything in our light cone...so the memory of our existence lives on indeed forever.

liney damn it - you made me look into it - I think I was more thinking of Democritus/Leucippus and Atomism - around at the same time as Aristotle but they didn't quite agree -but I can't find the exact thing I read/ was thinking of so might still be wrong (And I think I would have remembered atomism as a concept name ...)
But agree Aristotle - in fact lots of the Ancient Greeks and some of the ideas they had are pretty amazing...