A very amusing thing happened last week. I was in the gym, preparing to do a set of squats, and some old dude asked me, "Are you an athlete?" I told him I wasn't and he seemed surprised. Anyway, he was on some sort of rampage, telling me how so many people don't understand that eating right keeps one healthy and that my appearance is 'how Americans should look' since I'm just 'bone and muscle'. I decided to question the guy and figured out he was a retired plumber and that he had just started becoming healthy. There are other guys like him in my gym - the face talkers. They get right in your face and fire off their opinions. In his case, he was very disgusted by fat people.

And now for the opposite. I went into work later in the day and a huge giant fat man walked in. I was delighted because I was just lectured as to how Americans are supposed to look, so I told my co-workers. They peeked through the window to observe the amorphous mass of blubber.

I could not believe how much of my opposite that guy was. It took him 15-20 minutes of heavy research on the menu, asking me many questions. He first drank a beer and then ordered a cheeseburger, naturally, with mayonnaise. I felt like praising him for his dedication to corpulence. He finished the burger with fries and drank another beer. He next ordered an amaretto on the rocks, and then a grey goose on the rocks. For dessert he got 3 chocolate chip cookies. But he was not happy. He was irate about the burger, accusing me of 'false advertising' and that it should be 'taken off the menu'. Why? He stated, 'That was not 8 ounces'.

So that was fun. Myself and the fat man, we're both disciplined people. It takes a lot of work to not be fat, through caloric restriction and exercise. Similarly, the fat man works very hard at his caloric intake, buys new pants and belts to accommodate the increasing distension, and strives to keep health care costs high.

Your musings add a lot of weight to the STC community.

Haha! You sure should have!

But, aren't the only real opposites particles and antiparticles? Hoho! Or wait, if you thought about opposites of that kind, you wouldn't have termed the fat and the athlete opposites, as they don't try to anihilate each other. Rather, warring states are in opposition to each other, then.

By the way, I once asked my sister what the opposite of a soucepan was. She didn't reply. I asked if it might be an uncooked egg. She then replied that saucepans don't have any opposites. From that day on, I thought that only numbers had opposites (the number you get by multiplying it with -1). Now I think even that couldn't properly be called an opposite, but rather an inverse, and only defined through a specific relation, namely addition. That is, opposites are relative, quite hard to define in most contexts,  and can easily be manipulated. For example, it's easy to persuade someone into dislike of a particular political stance which that particular someone doens't know anything about, only if you say it is the opposite of blah or blah words with happy connotations.

"Can someone please just tell me what happened? I mean, first we paid for fastfood that will make us all fat and tired. So then we pay for elevators, so we won't have to climb the three stairs up to our apartments. Then we buy freakin' StairMaster machines so we can burn away while watching someone make real food on TV. Now, if that doesn't make us winners I don't know what will. I bet we would hang ourselves, if the world would just cut us the slack. And now you think maybe you should see a shrink, help you feel alive again - yeah, that's a plan, just tell us who to pay." - Daniel Gildenlöw

I suppose another example of an opposite would be a mirror image. In particle physics, they call it 'parity' or 'handedness'. It's related to 'spin', which is a concept I don't understand very well. Particle spins are typically left-handed or right-handed. This is not understood very well in the general public, not even the basic notion of a mirror image. A person once told me that twins are mirror images of each other, but if that were true, then one of them would have a heart on the right side. Everything works the same in the mirror world, with the exception of the weak nuclear force. It's called 'parity violation'. Basically, if your mirror image could step out of the mirror, along with his car, all the laws of physics would hold up pretty well. His gas pedal would be on the side opposite of yours, but the cars would still accelerate the same. However, if your mirror image came out with a piece of uranium, then his might not decay at the same rate as yours. (Decay is an example of the weak nuclear force.) So a mirror image is a good example, but not an entirely symmetric one.

  In addition to particles and antiparticles, one could also just consider charged particles. Although the neutron is a counterexample, it does contain fractional charges (the quarks). However, I think that using antimatter is better, since the neutron does have an antiparticle (the quark charges are reversed). 

  Things get tricky if you consider numbers. One could argue that -2 is the opposite of 2 (reversed sign), or that 23 is the opposite of 32 (reversed order). I'm sure there are many more examples.

Your wit is admirable; may your existence continue past the decay of every proton. But there is some truth in your wit, as the internet actually does have weight. The data itself can be weighed. An average day of traffic on the internet weighs approximately 0.2 millionths of an ounce (source: June 2007 issue of Discover, p.43)

I never got into particle physics, because I don't understand the most basic probability theory. What does P=1/6 really mean? Perhaps this summer, I will read a book or two about it. But I fear it won't be easy to find out, as some philosophers seem to have discovered crazy solutions to the problem. (See modal realism).

If you consider opposites to be the same as annihilation, you would think of -2 and 2 to be opposites under the relation of addition, as they, added together, would become 0. But what if you consider the relation of multiplication? Would you cosider the numbers annihilated if their product were 1? I don't know. (1/4 x 4/1). If you considered 0 to be the result of two opposites meeting each other, 0 would be the opposite of any number under the relation of multiplication. And what of colors? Black is commonly regarded as the opposite of white, but why is that? Does green have an opposite color?

I guess you can say the same things about reversals. What's the reverse of blue really?

But there has to be some real Idea of the Opposite, one might think, there's some kind of "essence of opposite" somewhere. A formula you can use on any case to judge if two objects "really" are opposites. But that seems that doesn't exist. Then, it's hard to trust one's thoughts, as one doesn't understand even the most basic of concepts when one really attempts to. That's why it's a good idea for one to buy all of Plato's dialogues. So one can discover the true meaning of Justice, Opposites and Truth, if one decides to trust him. Which one should, as he's the greatest philosopher of all time, one could argue.

There! We've found the opposite of blue! It's antiblue!

It's very difficult to define an Absolute Opposite, something completely objective that everyone would accept because there would be no alternative. While thinking about what might be an Absolute Opposite, I remembered there are two types of situations for any event: realistic and ideal. As an example, it would always be ideal to take the shortest path when driving home from work, which is a straight line. However, we must follow the roads. So we are forced into a realistic path. In order to take the idealized path, one would have to exert a tremendous amount of energy clearing all of the structures and natural obstacles. So ideal situations can become realistic through the expenditure of energy (I apologize for the wordplay; the alternate use of meaning).

Another significant example of an Absolute Opposite is that of subjective and objective situations. A classic example is the tree falling in the woods. Objectively, regardless of whether humans even exist or not - the tree always makes a sound, provided it does not fall in a vacuum. If you are not there when the tree falls, then the experience is objective; it is outside of your experience. However, if you are there, then it becomes a subjective experience. This is drastically different from the difference between ideal and realistic situations, since, in that case, an expenditure of energy could bridge the gap from realistic to ideal. No amount of energy can bridge the gap between subjective and objective. If you weren't there, then you can't be there. It's that simple. It doesn't matter how much energy you use; you will never 'go back' and make an objective event subjective.

Maybe not in our lifetimes, but all of particle physics is going to have to be revised. I recently finished the biography of Paul Dirac and now I'm reading Ettore Majorana's. Both were exceedingly strange people (they make me look as normal as paperclips).

Majorana essentially said that antiparticles don't exist. There is only one particle and all the 'others' are decays of it. The problem with Majorana's theory is that physicists don't think it's wrong. It's just a more profound version of what we currently know.

  I'm beginning to think that thinking of matter and antimatter as opposites might be wrong. When matter meets antimatter, two extremely energetic photons are emitted, so why are photons not the opposite? Once you get into this stuff, one tends to think less and less of them as 'point-like' particles - distinct entities. It becomes hard to define what is distinct. As an example, humans are clearly distinct entities, but so are our organs. What if some intelligent creature could only see our organs? That might be the problem with our observations. We're just seeing the insides of something (whatever that is).