exchemist

That’s curious, so the Earth itself can be old, although the Genesis creation sequence would make the creation of the sun, for instance, come about only 42,000 yrs ago. But OK I admit I’ve never gone into JW beliefs in this much detail before. And it’s probably unfair to keep quizzing you about stuff from years ago.

Sure. But then one wouldn't expect the average mainstream Christian to be particularly scholarly either. The comment was about "scholarly analyses of the scriptures in the original language", referring to the JW organisation, not the individuals you and I may have encountered on the doorstep (who indeed don't seem generally very well educated, at least in my part of London). So it was pretty narrowly defined.

You can do scholarly textual analysis of the bible without getting into whether it should be interpreted literally or not. Interpretation is another matter and on that I'd have to agree with you that the JWs are literalists - and thus creationists (YECs).

Presume you mean definite article, i.e. “the” as opposed to the indefinite article “a”. Classical ancient Greek certainly has a definite article, as I remember from my schooldays. But I suppose there might not have been in the Koine Greek of the period of the gospel writers. In fact I found this which indicates there could be room for ambiguity: https://hellenisticgreek.com/07.html

Yes I know. Unitarianism has a long history, back to the c.16th, i.e. they appeared as part of the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation. But JWs were only set up in the c.19th in the United States, as were the Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons and Christian Scientists, seemingly from the DIY culture of American Protestants of the time.

Your 5 is not justified. There is no "clear" indication that the mechanisms are not completely understood. We have just the one small, poorly characterised object, out of hundreds of comets, for which we have not been able to detect outgassing. It is jumping to conclusions to say there was no outgassing, or that radiation pressure could not have been responsible.

From what I read about Oumuamua we know its shape was far from spherical but it could have been be either be very prolate (cigar-shaped) or very oblate (disc-shaped). Observation was unable to determine which, because the object was only a few hundred metres long in its longest dimension and only about 10% of that along its shortest. Could it not be, then, that Oumuamua was just too small (low volume) for evidence of outgassing to be apparent, or that its mass was low enough, compared to its extension in space, for radiation pressure to be responsible for the observed acceleration?

I knew they are non-Trinitarian, just not how they regard the Holy Spirit, so thanks for the explanation. Evidently They reinterpret "the Holy Spirit" or "the Spirit of God", as mentioned in the gospels, as "holy spirit" [without definite article], meaning a sort of power dispensed from God, but not a distinct entity. Well that could make sense, I suppose, though the definite article does seem to accompany the mention of "holy spirit" each time, I think. Interesting, anyway.

Aha, so that's the agenda. Fine. I take it then that you are looking at 3I/ATLAS hoping to find the same, seemingly anomalous, behaviour from it as we saw with Oumuamua? Very good. But there is no sign of any anomalous behaviour yet, just as there was no sign of it with Borisov. Nor, unless you can correct me, has there been with other comets. So your proposal that relativity is wrong currently relies only on the apparently anomalous behaviour of Oumuamua and no other astronomical object, correct? But that behaviour (i.e. unexplained non-gravitational acceleration) is anomalous with respect to Newtonian orbital mechanics, surely, not relativity. So where does relativity come into it? Or are you saying Newtonian mechanics is also wrong?

Interesting. Does that mean that, to JWs, “holy spirit” is some kind of stuff, rather than the 3rd person of the Trinity as in regular Christianity?

You’ve got some nerve, telling a PhD physicist he doesn’t have the necessary mathematical skills! Especially as getting any supporting maths out of you has been like getting blood out of a stone. Suggest you pull your head in, as they say in Australia. 😁

I presume the inverse square dependence of the non-gravitational component of acceleration is because radiation intensity falls off with the square of distance, hence so will the rate of boil-off of gases likewise. Is that how it works?

As @pinball1970 indicates, It is in fact notoriously hard to come up with an exact definition of what is necessary for something to be considered "alive". So your idea of a passing down of "life" from one generation to the next is a bit simplistic. At the start of life there would probably have been various biochemical systems with some of the properties we now associate with life, including, at some point, a highly imperfect ability to replicate in some way. But we don't know how it took place. That's why people are researching abiogenesis.

Yes these chemical details are presumably how they estimate the rate of colonisation and the types of organism (e.g sulphate reducing bacteria) involved. But my original question remains: why is this significant? They could be suggesting that it could be hydrothermal systems created by meteorite impact, rather than by vulcanism, that provided the conditions for abiogenesis. That was my speculation in the fifth post in the thread. But they don't say. Maybe we just take it for what it is and move on.

You are becoming a pain in the arse. You have already been told to post these questions in Homework Help but seem to be ignoring that. You post very brief, unclear questions, with insufficient context for a proper detailed response. And you give no acknowledgement to the responses you receive, and thus give no clue to the responder as to whether the response has been useful to you or not. It is all one-way traffic, with us doing the work and nothing coming back from you. This is a discussion forum, not a homework answering service.

Yes but that is "colonisation", i.e. by existing life forms. And who cares if crashed meteorites on other planets may be similarly colonised, by life forms that happen to exist there? It would be amazing if that did not happen and the crash sites remained forever sterile. This seems to have bugger all to do with abiogenesis. So I'm left wondering why any of this is of much interest. Regarding Phys Org itself, what I'm saying is that it seems it does not "comment" at all in its "articles". These articles are simply regurgitated press releases, from the organisation announcing the results of the research. That's why they are quick. There are no authors for these articles and apparently no journalistic input. They don't employ any reporters. They simply republish collections of the days' press releases. The quality of each piece is thus 100% due to whoever at the institution drafted the press release. Sometimes these are good and at other times lousy, drafted by some PR person with no science training. I'm not dismissing its usefulness. Timely reporting of the day's press releases is handy. But we should recognise it for what it is.

I've had a look at this poster's previous contributions and note that a couple of years ago he claimed that a number of phenomena, including the "anomalous" (if you discount the various outgassing hypotheses) acceleration detected with Oumuamua, could be explained by something called "Relativistic Resistance" to movement (RR for short), of which he is an exponent. I'm not sure if this was his idea or comes from somewhere else. I couldn't find anything on the subject in a quick web search. I wonder if this thread is a disguised attempt to resurrect that idea, in the context of 3I/ATLAS, as one of its claims is apparently that an object in free fall will spontaneously decelerate, due to this RR. : https://scienceforums.net/topic/132976-alternative-to-relativity-split-from-a-problem-to-the-theory-of-relativity/#comment-1254887 Looks pretty wacky to me, but seems to fit the general tone of the discussion (and the eventual outburst of crankspeak).

But Borisov didn't show anomalous behaviour and so far there doesn't seem to be, from what you have told us, much evidence of 3I/ATLAS doing so either. I had a quick look at the Wiki article on it and there's nothing there about anything anomalous. It's a comet, unusually big, and outgassing a rather interesting - but far from unexpected - cocktail of substances including cyanide and nickel. And it's on a high eccentricity hyperbolic path through the solar system. That's it, isn't it? So why is it crucial to figure out "quickly" what's going on? Nothing's going on, surely? There is no "public excitement". You have made that up. There is practically nothing in the media about 3I/ATLAS. Barely anybody has even heard of it, much less started worrying about aliens. (Apart from Avi "Frontal" Loeb, apparently. But he's awa wi the faeries, so we can discount him.) Maybe it's just me, but you give me the impression of tap-dancing around some belief that you are reluctant to own up to explicitly. My impression is reinforced by this paranoid stuff about "arrogant, dogmatic scientists" with "downvoting machine guns", which is classic crankspeak. Not having a sound scientific basis for their notions, cranks attack science when it exposes the shortcomings in their thinking, often trying on the Galileo Gambit as a defence. I do hope this is not where you are going. Do you, then, have a hypothesis to propose, for some unusual behaviour you either think you see already, or expect to become manifest, during 3I/ATLAS's passage through the solar system? If so what is it, please? If not, what is this thread about?

I'm getting confused. Is this thread about Oumuamua now? I thought it was about 3I/ATLAS. Why the digression?

Yes the giveaway is the - suddenly - atrocious spelling in the last line. 😆 That’s the only bit our poster wrote in person, apparently.

No thanks.

What do you mean by vertical and horizontal? Do you mean normal and parallel, respectively, to the ecliptic?

Look up CO and tell us how the bonding works.

Hoho I get those too. They have data on us being old and hope dementia has set in, enabling them to scam us out of our saving with worthless and overpriced loft insulation projects. (They often make out there is government "survey", or new regulations to be complied with - all balls of course.) But yes indeed, they do increasingly use computer-generated voices for these cold calls. They are not (yet) very clever though, because if your responses deviate too far from the script they are expecting they cannot react. I do things like comment, conversationally, on their accent to ask what part of the country they are from. That buggers up the computer-generated scripts and makes it obvious if they are not real people. Real people usually like to tell you where they're from, I find. P.S. I recall a fake warning email about surveys, that circulated among the women in the Shell head office when I was working there. It went like this. "If a man comes to your front door and says he is doing a survey and asks to see your bum, DO NOT SHOW HIM YOUR BUM. This is a SCAM. All he wants is to see your bum. I wish I had known this yesterday, I feel so stupid and cheap."

Enough.