Well it's known...
that it's harder to think positive thoughts than negative thoughts, so presumably catcogitates are heavier than ancogitates.
One thought equivalent to less than a single proton in mass
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 …
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Tuesday 4th July 2017 22:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
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).
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Thursday 6th July 2017 08:47 GMT Mooseman
" 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?
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Tuesday 4th July 2017 12:45 GMT TRT
"Of course, we know that thoughts are generated by the firing of neurons in the brain"
"...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.
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Wednesday 5th July 2017 07:54 GMT Stoneshop
Re: "Of course, we know that thoughts are generated by the firing of neurons in the brain"
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.
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Tuesday 4th July 2017 12:46 GMT Red Ted
Original thought
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?
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Tuesday 4th July 2017 22:32 GMT Meph
Re: Original thought
"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.
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Wednesday 5th July 2017 08:00 GMT Stoneshop
Zeno's thoughts measurement
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.
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Tuesday 4th July 2017 12:47 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
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
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Tuesday 4th July 2017 12:49 GMT Richard Tobin
Confused units
"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.
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Tuesday 4th July 2017 21:19 GMT Dick Pountain
Re: Confused units
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.
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Tuesday 4th July 2017 13:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Confused units
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.
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Wednesday 5th July 2017 04:25 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
Re: Confused units
"[...] 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"?
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
