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Well, I can clarify a bit Isaac Send a noteboard - 05/07/2013 09:30:16 PM

View original postOkay, so I was reading a couple of articles from io9.com recently about the Standard Model of particle physics, and they kept talking about Symmetry and Supersymmetry, and how certain particles are actually essentially the same particle but really aren't (specifically it was saying this about electrons and neutrinos).

Neutrinos and Electrons are part of the particle group known as leptons. Now essentially leptons are composed of two types, the charged type and the uncharged ones. Charged are the electorn, muon, and tau, each of which has an antiparticle with reverse charge, the electrons is called the positron but the other two are just anti-muon and anti-tau. Flip side is the nuetrino, which is three types, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino along with their 'anti' forms which are essentially indistinguishable, same spin and lack of charge, but opposite chirality (twist) IIRC. Now muon and tau are basically the electron's rare big brother, muons do form naturally, but they live for 2 millionths of a second, tau I don't know if it forms naturally or not, presumably somewhere they do, but we made ours rather than found them. Much like the quarks, up/down is the base with 4 other bigger forms, electron/positron is the base with 2 other forms.

Now Supersymettry, more commonly SUSY, is/was a fairly popular theory but while still probably the most popular it is a little degraded from lack of evidence from LHC and I'm going to do everyone here a favor and not even try to explain it especially while the theory is in limbo, beyond it having to do with particles that parallel existing known particles but have different spin and/or charge.


View original postThen later in the evening I was watching something about genetics ("Decoding Neanderthal DNA" or something like that), and a crazy thought occured to me and I had to share this idea, to see if it makes sense to anyone else. Oh, and to clear up any misunderstandings I might have if someone can correct me.

DNA's not my zone, I did do theoretical biophysics but even then my interest was in a cell powerplant, so to speak, not its harddrive. I'm not sure if we have any resident microbiologist to defer to so I'll speak up if I know but 'grain of salt' applies to all remarks.


View original postNOTE: I am not a scientist, do not have a degree in any science, I just love reading about science and watching science documentaries. And coming up with crazy science-fictiony ideas when possible.

That describes a lot of scientists too


View original postSo, most of us know that genetics runs off of an "alphabet" of 4 letters: A, C, T, and G. Each letter only bonds to one other letter, forming pairs that make up the "rung" of the double-helix ladder. A binds to T, and G and C bind together.

Well better maybe to think of it as A, C, T/U, G and there are other possible base pairs too, but yeah.


View original postGeneticists, when they read out our genetic code, basically only read one side of the ladder's rung, and know that when they see a T that the other side of that particular rung is A, and vice versa. Same goes for when they see a C or G.

Again, yeah, its not really about symmetry there so much as knowing eahc 'rung' is an A-T/U or G-C


View original postAdd in what I had just been reading about symmetry, and my mind (admittedly a bit effected at the time by some good old green herbs) came up with the idea that these base pairs could almost be thought of as particles like in the Standard Model.

Mary Jane usually isn't a very good nootropic.


View original postThink of it this way: reading out our genetic code is like going through a crazy tarot deck that only has two different cards, but with countless copies of each card. Each card in the deck is a base pair, and like tarot cards can be dealt "upright" or "inverted" (or whatever the terminology they use in tarot readings, but I figure you know what I mean).

Yes, that just means a base pair is 2 bits of data, not 1 bit. I wouldn't think over the 'reverse' angle of this much, this is pretty safe and well known math, akin to four separately colored balls or a switch that isn't up/down but up/down and left/right, so you get UL, UR, DL, DR.


View original postSo the two cards in our genetic tarot deck are AT and CG, but they can also be revealed as TA and GC (inverted version of the card, like when you draw the tarot card The Tower but it is upside down).


View original postAnd as I thought about this more, it occurred to me that in essence our DNA code is a "double binary" system in a way. Say AT is 0 and CG is 1. TA would be 0' and GC is 1' (I'm using " ' " to denote the difference, the fact it is reversed).

Well we have a name for double binary, its called Quaternary and much like hexidecimal its one of the easiest to work with if you're already used to binary, as opposed to migraine-generators like ternary (Switch up, down, middle) or some of the really screwy ones like Oksapmin base-27 or non-matched suberbases, mixed-radix, or quater-imaginary - binary and composites, base 4, 8, 16, 32, etc are easiest.


View original postYes, I know that there are no computers that can currently work in this way, we are stuck for now with 1 and 0, and maybe in the next 20 years we'll have some sort of quantum computer that can deal with "on," "off," and "both" and hopefully someday even "neither."

Well to the contrary we have never been 'stuck' with binary, its just works well in multiple ways, extensive non-binary computing has been done, IIRC one of the first computers was ternary, pre-civil war, which is what you're referring to.


View original postI realize that none of this really means anything significant for science, but does it make sense to anyone else, or is it just something that only makes sense when one is stoned outta their mind?

Well it all made sense, its just not really new, and quantum computing is really just an entirely different ballpark, different sport really, from biocomputing. The -1,0,+1 'balanced ternary' aspect of that isn't really a hurdle

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
- Albert Einstein

King of Cairhien 20-7-2
Chancellor of the Landsraad, Archduke of Is'Mod
This message last edited by Isaac on 05/07/2013 at 09:35:03 PM
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