exchemist

This doesn't bear a moment's serious examination. While it is true that morality in western societies is strongly coloured by the pervasive heritage of Christianity, similar moral principles are found in numerous societies elsewhere that have a radically different idea of God or gods, or no idea of a god at all. (One obvious example of the last would be Buddhist societies.) Respect for life and for property seems to be a natural trait among human beings - and one can immediately see why it would be, for a social animal, simply to avoid conflict. Religions with a god or gods may present these natural principles as instructions from a God who judges humanity's compliance. This certainly provide societies with nice, explicit and easy to grasp reasons for morality, but it is idle to pretend that without belief in a god these moral principles would not be present.

The requirement for (reproducible) observational evidence is only axiomatic for applying the scientific method, the purpose of which is the study of nature. The scientific method is shown to "work", in the sense that we can understand and predict far more about nature than we could before the Renaissance. So I can't see there is anything circular about employing it. Secondly, you are wrong to characterise faith in science as faith in what you call "individuals". The whole nature of science is that it is a collective enterprise that does not rely on individuals. That's why observations need to be reproducible, i.e. capable of being agreed upon by different people, in different places and using different methods. The hypotheses and theories put forward by any one individual to account for observations are also subject to criticism by other people. Active areas of research are full of disputes and argument. You are obviously right that we all take on trust a great deal of what one can call "settled science", by reading books, attending lectures and so forth. The same is true in all other disciplines of study. If nobody did that we would all be constantly reinventing the wheel. But that obviously does not mean, in the case of science, that we have abandoned the requirement for reproducible evidence. We simply trust the observations reported and validated by others and well-tested theories associated with them.

Yes it’s a psychological pathology, if not an actual mental illness. What is it that makes you an authority on it?

It's absurd to call incels a "demographic", when they are just a handful of misfits. Why are you fixing on incels in this thread? Is it really incels that you want to talk about, for some reason? I note, from this article, that incels are prone to suicidal thoughts: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/articles-heterodoxy/202208/inside-the-minds-the-incels. I also note that you speak of it being "merciful" to execute them. But we don't generally help mentally ill people with suicidal thoughts by bumping them off, do we? This is strange talk from one of the Calvinist "Elect".

I expect the mods will move it for you if they think that’s best.

Not sure this belongs in the maths section but I have read there is a view that the entropy increase in irreversible processes determines the direction of time, the issue being, if I have it right, that the equations of mechanics are symmetrical with respect to time, so the only thing distinguishing the past from the present or future is lower entropy.

In theory it does not experience time (time dilation -> ∞ as v -> c). Absent any sense of time, it seems to me that "experience" has no meaning.

The Americans here will just love "dryass"😁.

A couple of points. One is this would not have to be a totalitarian state, just an authoritarian one. Totalitarianism means the control, typically by manipulation, surveillance and coercion, of all facets of society. An extant example is N Korea. What you describe could be any kind of "strongman" rule, like that of Franco or Mussolini - or perhaps even Trump, as the authors of Project 2025 seem to hope. The more important point, though is that what you outline ignores a blindingly obvious fact: that the behaviour of human beings is partly driven by circumstances and can change when those circumstances change. A "murderer" does not automatically go on murdering if released from prison. It all depends on what led to the first murder. An "incel" , who of course is not even a criminal, is someone with an unhealthy psychological condition at a particular stage in their life. That can change. I feel sure a lot of incels simply grow out of it - it all seems very feeble and adolescent. But under your proposal they would all be dead. Your proposal to treat groups of human beings as subhuman, on the basis of applying fixed labels to them, is not only morally repugnant (and deeply unChristian, as I feel sure you must be aware) but also ignorant of actual human behaviour.

Absolutely not. By far the best thing is to expressly avoid talking up nuclear threats. If you make nuclear threats, Putin will feel he has to respond in kind, in order not to show weakness. Before before you know it, he will have backed himself into a rhetorical corner from which he cannot escape without either losing face or actually using these weapons. Russia already knows Nato will retaliate with nukes if Russia uses them to attack NATO states. There is no need to reiterate this in the form of a public threat, which would effectively force him to make public threats as well.

What makes you say we have not been getting closer? This latest piece of work shows the contrary, surely? And your remark about not being able to create life is a complete non-sequitur. -1

Haha I was just thinking about that film. But I haven’t looked into how these connections function in the brain. It’s a long way from my stamping ground.

No one is claiming we do. Mapping the connections is the first step in learning how it works. That's all.

Exactly.

Certainly looks like it.

By “model” you seem to mean a computer simulation. But there are huge numbers of theories in science where the factors involved are too complex to permit computer simulations to be useful. That does not mean there is “no theory”, as you put it. It just means quantitative calculation is either not possible or not worth the effort.

You seem to be ignoring the continual creation of new lithosphere at constructive plate margins and the disappearance of old lithosphere at subduction zones. It's far from a matter of just moving fixed shapes around on the surface of a sphere. As for geologists being supposedly unable to do simulations, what do you think all these search results are about?: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=plate+tectonics+simulation&t=osx&ia=web

There are countless books on it and numerous summaries on the internet. If you couldn’t find one you must be either an idiot or someone trying to redefine “theory” in a way that excludes the available descriptions. I don’t know which it is. It seems to me the onus is on you to show you are not the former of the two. 😄

Most of the bible is the Old Testament, which was already written by the time of Christ. But it is true the term Christian appears in Acts of the Apostles, a part of the New Testament. So yes, there were clearly Christians before the NT was completed. Perhaps our poster does not know his bible quite as well as he thinks!😄

I feel sure you should be able to explain, in words, your assertion that “there is no theory”.

Aha, that's quite a nice explanation.

👍

OK let's see if someone else bites. (Hope not just Mordred, as he tends put up walls of Greek at the drop of a hat.😄)

I'm not great on the physics of this but my likely imperfect understanding is there is a change in phase velocity, when the frequency of the light is close to an absorption band of the medium. This arises due to an increasing degree of coupling of the atoms of the medium with the EM field, as the frequency approaches the absorption frequency more closely. The resulting phase velocity can be either <c or >c depending which side of the absorption frequency you are. But this seems to be talking about the group velocity, not the phase velocity. I hadn't realised this too could be slowed down by passage through the medium. Is that what they mean or am I misinterpreting it? It crossed my mind that this "-ve time" thing could perhaps be associated with reconciling a phase velocity >c with the fact that no actual information is transmitted >c. Can anyone shed light (haha) on this for me?

Surely the problem is you can't get close to the speed of light without incurring a close to infinite energy cost?