[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
Good thread guys.
I’d just like to apologize to y’all though…
As soon as I die, all of you will cease to exist.[/quote]
You don’t have the balls to kill yourself right now! C’mon, I dare you. Hell, I double-dog dare you.
You can’t chicken out of a double-dog dare, now, can you?
[quote]pookie wrote:
If you can show that it’s actually an ESP or telekinetic phenomenon, you can claim a 1 million dollar prize at http://www.randi.org
[/quote]
i wonder about this because back when i was Christian i used to get Kent Hovind Creation Science Evangelism material and he had a quarter million dollar offer to anybody who could prove any aspect of evolution to be true. it’s been a few years since ive heard of him, but im sure he’s still got the offer going.
being that nobody can actually prove evolution nobody will ever get a quarter mil from him. at the same time, his followers think that theories are proveable so they get duped into thinking that every aspect of the evolution theory is wrong because nobody can prove any of it to be right.
as far as i know, the paranormal, the pseudoscientific, and the supernatural cannot be proven.
[quote]pookie wrote:
lothario1132 wrote:
Good thread guys.
I’d just like to apologize to y’all though…
As soon as I die, all of you will cease to exist.
You don’t have the balls to kill yourself right now! C’mon, I dare you. Hell, I double-dog dare you.
You can’t chicken out of a double-dog dare, now, can you?
;)[/quote]
LOL yes I can. You are being awful selfish here, pooks. What about everybody else, man? I don’t want the whole universe to cease to exist just because you’re tired of hanging around in my reality I’ve created in my own mind. Sorry to disappoint you, bud, but I have to think of the children. 
PS You have my permission to off yourself if you want to. I can manage. 
Veg, put the tinfoil thingy in an airtight clear box or something. That way, air currents can’t affect it.
[quote]wufwugy wrote:
pookie wrote:
If you can show that it’s actually an ESP or telekinetic phenomenon, you can claim a 1 million dollar prize at http://www.randi.org
i wonder about this because back when i was Christian i used to get Kent Hovind Creation Science Evangelism material and he had a quarter million dollar offer to anybody who could prove any aspect of evolution to be true. it’s been a few years since ive heard of him, but im sure he’s still got the offer going.[/quote]
I’ve googled a bit and from what I can see, his offer does not appear to be an honest one. It seems to be a gimmick that allows him to claim evolution to be an untested hypothesis.
It would be rather simple to show E.Coli bacteria evolving a resistance to some poison over many generations until the poison kills nearly no bacteria at all.
I’m pretty sure that demonstration won’t convince Hovind nor satisfy the jury (picked by him.)
While some part are contentious, or have many hypothesis still left to test; the basic mecanism of evolution is pretty much accepted as a given by science.
Pretty much all opposition to evolution comes from religious groups or “scientists” that work for them.
The fact that evolution takes place slowly, over extremely long periods of time also makes it difficult to reproduce in a laboratory. How can you simulate a process that takes millions of years when your lifetime is less than 100 years?
His followers probably don’t need much convincing to begin with.
The funny thing is that I find evolution, natural selection, DNA, and all the rest to be a much more marvelous way for life to exist than spontaneous creation from dust or ribs…
Like anything else, you can establish tests for these phenomenons.
Let’s say I claim to be able to predict the future. At the beginning of the year, I make 100 predictions.
Now, those predictions should be precise enough that if one comes true there can’t be any doubt that I predicted it.
“There will be an earthquake in May” does not cut it (since there are about 1500 earthquakes of magnitude 5 or greater every year. Some are bound to be in May.) “There will be a magnitude 6.5 earthquake in Canberra, Australia on the 11th of August at 7:53 AM local time” does.
Once those 100 accurate predictions are in place; you simply wait one year.
If a large percentage of those prove to be accurate, then I’ve proved my claim.
Some mediums do post predictions at the beginning of the year. They tend to be pretty vague and often “sure-bet” type things. Most medium have been predicting the pope’s death for 5 or 6 years now. You can bet they’ll all claim to have “seen it” this year.
Those predictions usually disappear from their websites during the year, never to be seen again. I remember someone, somewhere (can’t find the URL) had used the “wayback machine” http://archive.org to fish out those old web sites and “score” the predictions. All mediums performed abysmally.
The “James Randi” challenge is set up that way. You make your claim; you must then establish a methodology by which you’ll prove your “power”. There has to be an agreement with the foundation as to the validity of the test. You can’t claim you can live just by breathing (ie, a “breatharian”) and say you’ll show it by staying home for a week without eating. There has to be controls in place. The test seems to be fair. It’s also possible to verifiy the existence of the prize money.
Many “true believers” try to look for a catch and claim the test is “unwinnable” because of some technicality. I simply think Randi’s million is safe simply because you can’t escape the laws of physics.
pookie,
this reminds me of when i was Christian and i first learned of the Bible Code. i went to Borders to get a Bible Code book, and the one that struck my eye was Who Wrote the Bible Code by Randy Ingermanson. so i buy it, take it home, start reading it, then realize that it was different than i expected. i expected something detailing what the Bible Code is and what it means, but the book i bought was only about testing the validity of the Bible Code.
Ingermanson did a great job testing the provability of the Bible Code, and in the end found out that the Bible Code is, in fact, no phenomenon.
i believe that book aided in my journey to the dark side
on another note, nearly all my information about Evolution as a history, not as a practicality (i.e. natural selection, selective adaptation, survival of the fittest) comes from Creation Science Evangelism. Kent Hovind makes Evolution as a history seem really stupid and full of lies. but im curious, is Evolution still a current theory about the history of the Universe?
i think i read in one of Hawking’s books that physicists are leaning less towards Evolution and more towards some unexplained, mathematical approach to the Universe’s history. i could be wrong though.
thoughts?
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
PS You have my permission to off yourself if you want to. I can manage.
[/quote]
I think I’ll wait a bit.
Figment of your imagination that I am, I was rummaging around in your mind and I found the porn stash.
You’re one sick puppy, my man.
[quote]wufwugy wrote:
pookie,
this reminds me of when i was Christian and i first learned of the Bible Code. i went to Borders to get a Bible Code book, and the one that struck my eye was Who Wrote the Bible Code by Randy Ingermanson. so i buy it, take it home, start reading it, then realize that it was different than i expected. i expected something detailing what the Bible Code is and what it means, but the book i bought was only about testing the validity of the Bible Code.
Ingermanson did a great job testing the provability of the Bible Code, and in the end found out that the Bible Code is, in fact, no phenomenon.
i believe that book aided in my journey to the dark side :)[/quote]
I’d put it as coming out of the darkess and into the light…
The “Bible Code” is an amusing gimmick, but pretty ridiculous. Especially since you can apply the technique to any relatively large text and pull out just about anything.
It’s unfortunately a common technique. Science is pretty careful about stating “absolutes”. Theories are always falsifiable; that’s how progress is made. Find a flaw in a theory; propose a new, better theory that explains what the old one did and doesn’t have the flaw.
There are certainly still errors and/or misunderstood phenomena with evolution. That makes it incomplete, not invalid.
Actually, evolution deals with life. Bacteria, viruses, animals, men, plants, etc. and how they change and adapt to their environment.
One good book on the subject is Richard Dawkins “The Blind Watchmaker.”
[quote]i think i read in one of Hawking’s books that physicists are leaning less towards Evolution and more towards some unexplained, mathematical approach to the Universe’s history. i could be wrong though.
thoughts?[/quote]
The origin of the universe is a separate branch of science, refered to as “Cosmology.”
It also has untested (untestable?) hypothesis on how the universe came to be.
It is an evolving (no pun intended) field.
It used to be that the Big Bang was the beginning of space and time. There was no time before the Big Bang, hence, it made no sense to ask what was before. It was like asking what’s north of the North pole…
More recent theory, involving superstring theory (now often called M-Theory) seem to indicate a possible existance before the Big Bang. The theory posits the existence of gigantic plane membranes (called “branes”) that move around… when two branes intersect, a “Big Bang” occurs creating a universe.
I can’t follow the math involved, but apparently it is consistent with observed reality. It could also be that superstring theory is completely wrong and lost in the land of beautiful math.
Apparently, one of the interesting thing with string theory, is that the infinitesimal “loops of string” said to compose all particles cannot be reduced to a point. That distinction allows string theory to dispense with infinities.
Infinities, in maths and physics, tend to cause problems. You get paradoxes; infinite mass; division by zero; etc. Phenomenas involving infinities (the Big Bang, black holes, etc) are termed “singularities” and are annoying because the laws of physics break down in singularities.
Of course, most physicist consider singularities to be the sign of defective theory, not defective nature. String theory is interesting for its lack of singularities while apparently explaining pretty well all currently know phenomenas. It does need 10 dimensions to do it, but you can’t have everything right?
Eventually, someone should either make a breakthrough that will confirm a large part of the theory; or something completely new will come out that finally unifies quantum mechanics with gravity and relativity… it is the ultimate puzzle, so there’s no way Man will ever leave it alone. As Einstein put it, physics is about “knowing the Mind of God.”
[quote]pookie wrote:
Figment of your imagination that I am, I was rummaging around in your mind and I found the porn stash.
You’re one sick puppy, my man.
[/quote]
HAHAHAHA!! What’s the matter, pookie? You don’t like handcuffs and nipple piercings? That’s the tame stuff, man! You should keep looking… hint: cross reference farm animals with life-size inflatable Janet Reno dolls…
Mortality sucks, so humans try to figure out how there might be some way out of this for them after all, even though they know they’re all going to die (unless they live until 2030 of course). This is my view on where religion comes from.
Personally, I think the T-man move in the face of this mortality thing is to suck it up, accept the eventuality of non-existence, and use the time available to get down to the serious business of figuring out why this bullshit is happening and what it’s going to take to fix it. In short, T-man should want to be a scientist.
Among scientists it is considered a career negative move to propose a hypothesis that can never be tested. This precludes scientists from taking up most all the big religious questions. Similarly, hypothesizing about stuff that Relativity and QM insist we can never observe or measure is a bozo no-no, unless more refined theories evolve that offer some kind of loophole.
Theories we can’t build the equipment to test anytime soon are considered in bad taste too, but you might not lose your shot at tenure. BTW, String theory is living on borrowed time; you get a while to fully elaborate your hypotheses, but you’re eventually expected to produce scientific progress, i.e. hypotheses that can be experimentally tested.
It’s not that scientists think they know everything, or that whatever they don’t know doesn’t exist, it’s just that there are hard limits on what they can meaningfully say as scientists. Like the drunk looking for his keys near the lamp post, they have to stick close to the experimental data, well-honed theory and certain axioms.
The general formulation handed out by the cosmologists and relativists for over-the-counter use by the laity is that the universe is ‘finite but unbounded’.
When you look far enough away in any direction, eventually you see galaxies moving away at nearly the speed of light. This is called the event horizon, because the light from any event happening beyond this sphere could never reach us. Similarly black holes have a Schwartzchild limit radius, inside which no event can be observed by us: information would have to move faster than the speed of light to get out of that deep into the hole.
Because we can measure the distance to the event horizon, the universe is finite: whatever can be measured is finite. Wherever you go in the universe, however, the event horizon is always this same very great distance away, you can never get any closer to it. This is how the universe manages to stay unbounded even though it is finite.
At the event horizon, and at the Schwarzchild limit, any mass is moving away from the observer at the speed of light. For this mass, time relative to the observer has stopped, according to General Relativity. At the current state of scientific theory, the volumes beyond these limits are considered to be outside our universe - non-existent - and beyond any scientific hypothesization.
On the other hand there is at least one live but dormant line of explanation that says there may be an infinite number of universes, with each tiniest event inducing yet another universe in which the event happened differently, or not at all. An endless combinatoric fountain of universes, an infinity of infinities, infinite enough to satisfy even the most religious.
As to whether abstract concepts exist, they exist as processes of thought and it’s getting to the point you can instrument them, track the activity in the neural net of the brain and go “Look! See that sequence of activations? There goes the concept of romantic love.” What good - or ill - that will do us remains to be seen.
The rewriting of “I think therefore I am” as “I think, therefor thinking is” can be viewed as equivalent to the Buddhist embrace of non-dualistic viewpoint, i.e. the notion that all consciousness everywhere is the consciousness of identically the same entity, a universal Self.
I guess that’s not so far from where we came in, with this cosmic intelligence thing.
frank
PS Anyone who doesn’t think evolution is observable in our own lifetimes, please explain how species of bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
Veg, put the tinfoil thingy in an airtight clear box or something. That way, air currents can’t affect it.[/quote]
I have actually done this, while it was very very hard, I did get some movement. I used a thick drinking glass and I think that it may have interfered with my enegy to some degree, I will have to try it with a thinner glass. Perhaps I was just mentally blocking myself with the notion of the glass there. Well I will try and practice this a bit more and see if I can master it, then 1 million bucks here I come.
And pookie if I do get it, I’ll give you a finders fee bud. Seriously I will.
V
I believe with a little ingenuity and some imagination, we could overcome this event horizon to a large degree. Bear with me.
Ok in say 100 years we have some serious ion drive engines that after a pretty good distance can get things moving pretty fast, and for experimental sakes lets just say we can get an object moving near the speed of light. So we send out 10 or 12 scientific probes, or telescopes which are 100 times more powerful than the hubble. (an array would probably be best) and we send them out in all different directions. Ass soon as these observatories started moving away at any speed our univers would instantly get bigger. And as they approached light speed, even galaxies moving away at the speed of light would be sending light back at us basically at the speed of light (at least thats how the telescopes would view it).
The problem is obtaining the data these telescopes would be collecting, because you reach the same problem as the telescopes move away from us at the speed of light any optic communications attempted would basically stand still. This is where we would need to set a predetermined timeframe and then stop the telescopes from moving further away (which we would not be able to do with the entire universe) and then send the info back to us.
Now this would realisticly not enlarge the universe very much for us, as if we sent something away from us for 10 years at the speed of light, the universe would get 10 light years bigger in that direction, which in the scope of things in almost nothing. What we really need to do, is to find a way to move either an object or information faster than the speed of light, which I believe is entirely possible. Anyways just some thoughts on the topic at hand.
V
thump… ouch!
[quote]Vegita wrote:
I believe with a little ingenuity and some imagination, we could overcome this event horizon to a large degree. Bear with me.
Ok in say 100 years we have some serious ion drive engines that after a pretty good distance can get things moving pretty fast, and for experimental sakes lets just say we can get an object moving near the speed of light. So we send out 10 or 12 scientific probes, or telescopes which are 100 times more powerful than the hubble. (an array would probably be best) and we send them out in all different directions. Ass soon as these observatories started moving away at any speed our univers would instantly get bigger.
[/quote]
Reigning theory dictates not that the universe will get any bigger in that fashion, but rather that all the travelers will get closer to where they started even while they are getting farther from the same point.
The situation is somewhat like what an ant crawling straight down the center line of a moebius strip experiences, in one dimension at any rate. Eventually he comes back to where he started. The moebius strip doesn’t get any longer.
In our universe, you can only ever travel in arcs, it seems, never actually in straight lines.
BTW, what Vegita is doing here in this discussion is setting up what theoreticians call “gedanken” experiments, or thought experiments. They are a very well respected method of refining theory or the understanding of it by testing for consistency and closure in boundary or limit cases no observer or experimentalist can get near.
Oh yeah, I should also mention that, thought experiments aside, from what we can see the universe is getting larger all the time, all on its own. It’s already happening at nearly the speed of light. All those galaxies short of the event horizon are moving very near the speed of light, but we can still see them. We’ll always still be able to see them. Thus the distance to the event horizon is increasing at nearly the speed of light.
Most perplexingly, although it makes no real difference to their speed relative to us - they can’t actually go away from us faster than light and thus disappear - far from slowing down they all seem to be speeding up.
wouldn’t the practicality of vegita’s thought experiment be lost in the fact that an object traveling at the speed of light would collide with something in space (no matter how small) and get busted?
ive said it probably a dozen times on this site, but i’ll say it again. i believe true understanding is only through analogy. that being said, i’ll analogize the human body with the universe. perhaps if we can determine if the human body is finite or infinite we would be closer to understanding which one the universe is.
what do you think of this? if a man stepped out his front door and travelled a straight line as far as he could he’d end up at his back door. likewise, if a man could travel through outerspace in a straight line and he travelled the farthest distance he would end up back on our very own terra firma.
[quote]wufwugy wrote:
wouldn’t the practicality of vegita’s thought experiment be lost in the fact that an object traveling at the speed of light would collide with something in space (no matter how small) and get busted?
ive said it probably a dozen times on this site, but i’ll say it again. i believe true understanding is only through analogy. that being said, i’ll analogize the human body with the universe. perhaps if we can determine if the human body is finite or infinite we would be closer to understanding which one the universe is.
what do you think of this? if a man stepped out his front door and travelled a straight line as far as he could he’d end up at his back door. likewise, if a man could travel through outerspace in a straight line and he travelled the farthest distance he would end up back on our very own terra firma.[/quote]
No–we know the boundaries of the Earth, we know of no such boundries outside of that.
[quote]sasquatch wrote:
wufwugy wrote:
wouldn’t the practicality of vegita’s thought experiment be lost in the fact that an object traveling at the speed of light would collide with something in space (no matter how small) and get busted?
ive said it probably a dozen times on this site, but i’ll say it again. i believe true understanding is only through analogy. that being said, i’ll analogize the human body with the universe. perhaps if we can determine if the human body is finite or infinite we would be closer to understanding which one the universe is.
what do you think of this? if a man stepped out his front door and travelled a straight line as far as he could he’d end up at his back door. likewise, if a man could travel through outerspace in a straight line and he travelled the farthest distance he would end up back on our very own terra firma.
No–we know the boundaries of the Earth, we know of no such boundries outside of that.[/quote]
even if we didn’t know the boundaries of the earth it would still work out as i described. try again please.
[quote]wufwugy wrote:
wouldn’t the practicality of vegita’s thought experiment be lost in the fact that an object traveling at the speed of light would collide with something in space (no matter how small) and get busted?
ive said it probably a dozen times on this site, but i’ll say it again. i believe true understanding is only through analogy. that being said, i’ll analogize the human body with the universe. perhaps if we can determine if the human body is finite or infinite we would be closer to understanding which one the universe is.
what do you think of this? if a man stepped out his front door and travelled a straight line as far as he could he’d end up at his back door. likewise, if a man could travel through outerspace in a straight line and he travelled the farthest distance he would end up back on our very own terra firma.[/quote]
The beauty of thought experiments is that they don’t have to be practical. Besides not having to worry about running into anything wherever you go, you can have frictionless pulleys, masses that are infinitely tiny, objects that have no mass, faster than light travel, time travel. But the game has to be played according to the math.
For a long time people thought as you do about the role of analogy in uncovering the truth. After a lot of mistakes this got replaced with mathematics, and science was born. Analogy does play an important role in learning, however, and in explaining things. But it’s like a piece of climbing rope, you can only trust it if you have a good guide on the other end, pulling you along to where you need to go.
In our universe, all straight line paths close back on themselves. But these paths are also all the time growing longer, by a rate faster than we can travel them. If you could somehow completely travel one of these paths, (e.g. in the faster than light spaceship I just gave you) you’d come back to where you started.
[quote]wufwugy wrote:
sasquatch wrote:
wufwugy wrote:
wouldn’t the practicality of vegita’s thought experiment be lost in the fact that an object traveling at the speed of light would collide with something in space (no matter how small) and get busted?
ive said it probably a dozen times on this site, but i’ll say it again. i believe true understanding is only through analogy. that being said, i’ll analogize the human body with the universe. perhaps if we can determine if the human body is finite or infinite we would be closer to understanding which one the universe is.
what do you think of this? if a man stepped out his front door and travelled a straight line as far as he could he’d end up at his back door. likewise, if a man could travel through outerspace in a straight line and he travelled the farthest distance he would end up back on our very own terra firma.
No–we know the boundaries of the Earth, we know of no such boundries outside of that.
even if we didn’t know the boundaries of the earth it would still work out as i described. try again please.[/quote]
Without thought–yes you would always end up where you started. Geez, how outside the box.
Within the context of this thread, lets stretch our minds and possibilities just a bit.