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(A collection of some thoughts brought on by recent posts and posters. Some of these are touched upon in the FAQ and Pseudoscience section, and these sentiments can be found on other science fora) If you think you've toppled relativity, quantum mechanics, evolution or some other theory with your post, think again. Theories that have been around for a while have lots of evidence to back them up. It is far more likely that you have missed something. Here are some things to consider: 1. You have to back your statements up with evidence. 2. Anecdotes are not evidence. 3. Being challenged to present evidence is not a personal attack. 4. Calling the people in who challenge you "brainwashed" or "stupid" does not further your argument. Neither does throwing a tantrum. 5. Published research (peer-reviewed) is more credible than the alternative. But peer-review is not perfect. 6. When you have been shown to be wrong, acknowledge it. 7. Just because some paper or web site agrees with you does not mean that you are right. You need evidence. 8. Just because some paper comes to the same conclusion as you does not mean your hypotheses are the same. 9. Provide references when you refer to the work of others. Make sure the work is relevant, and quotes are in the proper context. 10. Disagreeing with you does not make someone "close-minded." "Thinking outside the box" is not a substitute for verifiable experimental data. 11. Mainstream science is mainstream because it works, not because of some conspiracy. If you think you have an alternative, you have to cover all the bases - not just one experiment (real or gedanken). One set of experimental results that nobody has been able to reproduce is insufficient. 12. Respect is earned. People who are resident experts, mods and administrators have earned those titles. 13. Be familiar with that which you are criticizing. Don't make up your own terminology, and know the language of the science. A theory is not a guess. 14. If nothing will convince you your viewpoint is wrong, you aren't doing science. That's religion. 15. All theories are of limited scope. Just because a theory does not address some point you want it to does not automatically mean it's wrong. 16. Not understanding a concept, or discovering that it's counterintuitive, does not make it wrong. Nature is under no obligation to behave the way you want it to. 17. You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. Science cares very little about your opinion, as it has little relevance to the subject. 18. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to address criticism of your viewpoint.

This is still highly controversial in the science world, so if the mods and/or admins see it as more appropriate for "speculation" then I welcome it removal to that section. My thoughts on this have always been that no known laws of physics were ever broken, rather that some apparent as yet unknown aspect could be at work. The following article and hypothetical seems to support those thoughts........ https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-a-weird-new-idea-about-how-the-impossible-em-drive-could-produce-thrust This Overlooked Theory Could Be The Missing Piece That Explains How The EM Drive Works What if it doesn't break the laws of physics? FIONA MACDONALD 7 OCT 2017 Ever since the EM drive first made headlines, science lovers have puzzled over how the propulsion system seems to produce thrust, despite the fact it's 'impossible' according to one of the most fundamental laws of physics - Newton's third law of motion. Now a team of physicists have put forward an alternative explanation - it turns out the EM drive could actually work without breaking any scientific laws, if we factor in a weird and often overlooked idea in quantum physics - pilot wave theory. more at link.....https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-a-weird-new-idea-about-how-the-impossible-em-drive-could-produce-thrust The new research has been published in The Journal of Applied Physical Science International. http://www.ikpress.org/abstract/6485 Abstracts Scientific literature refers to a strange observed phenomenon, “impossible” according to traditional physics, looking at the experimental feasibility of the so called “EM Drive”. The authors have called it an Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum. Here we present a possible explanation for the observed thrust based on the conceptual framework of Eurhythmic Physics, a kind of pilot-wave theory aiming at bridging the gap between quantum and macroscopic systems. Applied to the present system, a generalized guidance condition could explain the claimed absence of reaction of the material of the drive on the enclosed fields. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Some later news dated Feb this year..... https://www.nowscience.co.uk/single-post/2018/02/24/China-Claims-They-Have-Successfully-Created-an-EM-Drive China Claims They Have Successfully Created an EM Drive ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; So, how viable is this "Pilot wave theory"? Or is this whole exercise a fraudulent joke played out for the scientific community? The last news I heard on this was that there was enough physics and observational data in this claim, to have it tested in LEO and space. What do others here believe is the case?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian Google keyword "Manhattan project accidents"

http://www.theangryufologist.us/dr-steven-greer-fraud-heres-proof/ Positive proof that Dr Stephen Greer, is a Fraud, Liar and Phychopath:

The uranium and plutonium used in nukes are alpha emitters. you could use a cardboard box as shielding if you only wanted to fool a Geiger. It would do something towards shielding the spontaneous neutrons too. A tank of water would be better. But why bother. Stick it in a shipping container in N Korea. Maybe change ships somewhere unsophisticated. Send it to a large pot city in the USA + blow it. It doesn't eve need to be labelled for delivery in the US- it could go off in transit. There's no way they would find enough of the harbour (never mind the ship) to work out exactly what happened. It never goes near a radiation detector until it's unloaded- and you don't need to unload it to "deliver" it. There's no sensible way to prove it was the Koreans (even if the terrorist decide to say it was). How would you go about proving that it wasn't a "false flag" attack set up by the US itself? (perhaps as a pretext for war with N Korea)

The carbon we exhale as CO2 is a waste product of our converting the food we ingest into energy the body uses to run its metabolism. It is, in effect, the "ashes" from the "fire" that runs our body. To use this to build tissue would require energy. In order for the organism to use all the food it ingests for tissue building, it would have to have some other source of energy for running its metabolism ( plants do this by using the energy in sunlight) . For an organism to exhale Silicon Tetra-fluoride would require a metabolism in which this is the low-energy waste product, and this metabolism would need to be able to operate in the temperature range in which it is a gas. The challenges of Silicon life is that you need to be able to build complex molecules that are both flexible and reactive enough to run a metabolism yet robust enough to hold together at the energy levels needed to run that metabolism. Carbon seems to be particularly suited to this. Silicon is not quite as suited.

Hello iNow, My thoughts (as worthless as they are) are that life/consciousness is a property of intricate systems that are natural processes within and by the universe. A device is a fabrication made by Man (or other life) that completes a function. A man-made toaster, regardless of how many functions it has, even if it had AI and self replicating nanites to create copies of itself, is still a device of men and not life/consciousness as generated by the propensity of this universe, in my humble opinion. And equating the two is kind of diverting the topic & not what Gees was referring to (although I can be wrong!). I would like to apologise as the post I down voted didn’t actually deserve it as it was 100% true; toasters do react to their environment in all the ways you suggest, as every inanimate object does; passively. It is just that you seem to be overseeing that Life/consciousness reacts and also acts; the compliment to passivity which is activity. Yes, we can ascribe the quality of toasting bread as an activity but this is a design of men, and it would not happen without actual life (us) making it so, whereas the universe just creates it naturally. That is the quality that I think Gees is referring to. I am new here and second apology is coming up; sorry if I have overstepped the mark; I was down voting the direction of the content, not the person. I will check the protocol for using the vote system in future!

Yes, it's the most reactive naturally occurring element and likely does not exist in the free form in useful quantities.

North Korea has an unknown number of nuclear bombs. They are desperate for money. It is likely that North Korea would sell a nuke, that is ready to explode, to a terrorist organization for enough money. The terrorists deliver the bomb to the middle of New York City in the back of a truck. When it explodes it vaporizes all evidence of its' origin. How would we ever know that North Korea provided the bomb? Of course the terrorists could snitch on Kim, but why would they?

I agree. Standardize testing as a way to rate school and determine important things like funding is flawed. I also think it overly focuses kids and a single type of problem solving (best answer on multiple choice). That encourages a focus on short term memorization without any sense of nuance or context over actually incorporating information into long term knowledge. If is far easier to run through a couple hundred flashcards to temporarily retain keys details of something than it is to think thoroughly about things, understand them, and commit them to a functional collective of long term memory. Knowing addition, subtraction, and multiplication is enough to be capable of balancing a checkbook but it isn't enough to understand why one should bother. We are giving kids generic list of power tools and raw materials in advance of real estate to build on, blue prints, or building code. The tools shouldn't determine the project but rather the project should determine the tools. We are teaching kids backwards and society reflects that. People often start with how much money they have or can borrow and use that to decide what car to buy, what home to live in, what city to live in, where to go to school, and etc. Rather than realizing what mode of transportation they use, where they reside, what city they live in, and etc has as directly a proportional relationship to how much money they have as vice versa. The world isn't flat.

The other 99 ideas are wrong.

We are discussing consciousness, not life. Equating consciousness to life is redundant, because we already have a word for that: "life". You could say the same about God. In absence of evidence, I see no reason to assume consciousness is in any way special; nor unachievable by nonliving computers. Besides, the ancient Greek philosophers had all kind of funny ideas, and Einstein rejected the big bang and quantum uncertainty because of his philosophical ideas. Are you also going to refer to Freud in a discussion about the Higgs boson? The God idea: yes (although I'm not convinced of the unconscious part). A toaster also comes from the human mind. That doesn't mean a toaster is consciousness. (I'm really starting to like toasters, the towel of philosophical discussions) I can do analogies too. Think of the temperature sensor and timer as magnets and the electrical current in the wiring as the force. Or another analogy : think of consciousness as the operating system organising low-level processes and emotions as user profile settings

So what do you think is so special about consciousness that calls for endless debates on it? I’m by no means a great mind but the way I see it, is that our brain capacity advantage in comparison with other species makes us so full of ourselves that we decided that we’re special because consciousness... to a point that some of us decided that other species are conscious too and that consciousness is somehow relevant to nature. Its not, not in any remote way other than like any other advantage a species has which is ofcourse completely insignificant on the cosmic scale. The fact that I can learn relativity or use sarcasm or ask philosophical questions about the meaning of life or do any other things that other species can’t, makes me feel lucky not special. Consciousness is a set of mental traits that we humans have which some of us insist on being glorified. I don’t think that our minds should be glorified in this way...we humans should be proud of our achievements and abilities but glorifying consciousness is just being a dick. Besides of what has already been stated in this thread about what a god is - god is also a product of people needlessly glorifying their place in nature.

- electric neutral particle called photon with energy [math]E=hv=hf=\hbar \omega = p c = \frac{h c}{\lambda}[/math] momentum [math]p=\frac{E}{c}[/math] frequency [math]f=\frac{E}{h}[/math] wavelength [math]\lambda = \frac{h c }{E}[/math], transferring energy between source and destination particles. (h - Planck constant, [math]\hbar[/math] - reduced Planck constant, f or v - frequency, [math]\lambda[/math] (lambda) - wavelength) - classified by human by energy/frequency/wavelength into categories: gamma photon, x-ray photon, ultraviolet (couple subcategories), visible spectrum (this is what typical layman is calling light), infrared (IR), microwave, radio wave. - photon has polarization, linear, circular - photon can be absorbed, emitted, reflected, refracted, scattered - photon can be redshifted and blueshifted. - high energy gamma photon (energy > 1.022 MeV) can create pair of matter-antimatter. - high energy gamma photon (energy > 2.2 MeV) can "destroy" matter (split e.g. atom to constituent particles e.g. protons and neutrons). This effect is called photodisintegration. - classical description of light electromagnetic radiation Summary of photon-matter-antimatter interaction is on this video:

Reincarnation ? Really ???? But a toaster, with AI, as a life form, is too far fetched ?

For the brazillionth time, NO! we are not starting a Supervillainry section just so you can advertise your Tesla coil hoola hoops!

Here is the finished product used a light oak stain with an outdoor gloss protective coat

Which bits of this would be beyond the ability of a well funded terrorist or criminal gang? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon I can see how it's hard to get hold of the uranium (that's why enriched uranium is usually carefully guarded), but the rest seems simple.

Sorry, Koti, I don't want to offend, but who the fuck gave this a +1? BTW I've given you plenty.

Whoever has the most, politically, to gain. After all, they did launch, the phuqr (posh spelling), it.

Isn't that what I just said? And where are your emoji's?

It seems that 9/11 has made people forget that many, perhaps most, terrorists are "home grown" and don't need to ship internationally.

Science is a method of exploring the universe in a manner that minimizes the influence of our own biases.

Like most other Americans, I support progress with N Korea and applaud what’s happening. What worries me, however, is the likelihood that this is all happening primarily bc KJU has already achieved his nuclear ambitions. Basically, maybe it has little to do w DJTs rocket man tweets and bellicosity and more to do w the fact that N Korea already has in hand what it has wanted these last several decades. Either way, I support progress. The status quo was untenable, but will KJU and China support/believe our promises given what just happened w the Iran deal... Will Europe? And let’s not mention the complexities introduced by the fact that Israel and Iran are tossing missiles at each other tonight

I cannot agree, a bacterium at the very least can react to its environment, can a toaster react its environment without lots of tweeking? I know my toaster does not do this...

john lennon said god is a concept

Depends, most likely not terribly long as the once the blood stops flowing cells will undergo hypoxia and depleted of nutrients, which limits their ability to proliferate. In mice mitosis was observed from biopsied dead mice about 60 hours or so postmortem (less if you keep temperatures high, which facilitates bacterial decomposition). Cells do remain viable for quite longer than that, if we ignore or reduce bacterial activities. Note that you argued the opposite, that death occurs because of cessation of cell division. If cell division stops, the organism will die, however I cannot think of many scenarios where that could theoretically occur. There is basically cell division happening not only until the point of death, but also for a little bit after that (after which bacteria take over and basically have large snack). Quite some philosopher have approached conciousness from a materialistic and include neurophysiological aspects. But I doubt that there are a lot of metaphysical approaches that would attribute consciousness on the cellular level (perhaps Eise can comment on that).

progress report on Well just need to finish the handle then prep for staining and outdoor protection.

John, Phi and Overtone: the observations you have made are accurate. They also have the appearance of emotional, knee jerk reactions. You disappoint me. It seems clear to me - and Endy has provided a good example - that there will be some benefits of global warming. Noting those benefits does not mean any of the following: We don't believe in global warming We don't believe there are any significant negative effects We don't care that some people will lose out It simply means that we have noted the benefits and set them down alongside the problems. I always thought that kind of objective observation, rather than one sided emotional attacks, was what science was about.

Of course. The metal expands and contracts with temperature changes. The plastics go brittle in low humidity spaces. The wires change their electron flow when around magnetism. The springs lose pliability and bounce through the seasons. The heating elements oxidize and rust. The static buildup collects dust particles, etc. In some ways, one could say the toaster interacts w it’s environment EVEN MORE than bacteria.

I don’t use emoji’s when spending a saturday at mother in law’s.

It would take ages to dig up a hundred different ideas on what light actually is. So help if you can! Lets keep it to a very short paragraph of 2-4 sentences, assuming everyone knows everything about particle physics. Two word introductions! (I believe, Light is, We think, etc) I will start with my more recent conjecture. I believe light may be a string of sub-quark matter, created by high-energy quantum interactions and amplified by converging and colliding wavelengths. If a confinement medium is in place, they may become any number of known and unknown sub-particles, and interact henceforth. The center of the wavelength would be something similar to the higgs bosun.

I believe the link I posted will answer some of your questions. If not....a mere twenty minutes googling reviews on the doc certainly will. As will viewing a couple YouTube clips. I disagree with your last point vehemently. Sometimes there is SO much compelling material in a given presentation that a full viewing IS required. Other than that.....I must stand by my aforementioned policy of not defending Bor discussing Unacknowledged until the person I'm discussing with had viewed it. It's a waste of my time rehashing for somebody not interested enough to devote a mere ninety minutes for info that will likely change the way you view the universe and your place in it. Cheers

You got that right!