joigus

(My emphasis). I think the importance of this comment cannot be overstated. How can there be a discrepancy between an energy density and an energy? It's like stating that there is a discrepancy between the speed of light and the radius of the proton.

Your title confounds me. What delusion? You seem to be of the opinion that Dawkins is deluded. Could you elaborate?

I tend to forget biologists are sooo carbon-centered...

Of course. Watch out for things like, \use_package amsmath 1 \use_package amssymb 1 \use_package cancel 1 \use_package esint 1 \use_package mathdots 0 \use_package mathtools 1 \use_package mhchem 1 \use_package stackrel 1 \use_package stmaryrd 1 \use_package undertilde 1 etc on your headers, that some of these editors automatically generate but doesn't 'tell' you about. Good point.

An interesting option is to get hold of a good WYSIWYG editor --there are many--, and generate the LateX code to copy and paste. You only have to worry about the code-wrapping symbols.

Thanks. You're right. I also said "produce" when I meant to say "consume".

Plants do cellular respiration too. It's only that they are nowhere nearly as energy-demanding as animals are. Plants have mitochondria, not just plastids. They do 'produce'. Google for: "animals have many more mitochondria than plants"...

This is a point I've been meaning to bring up too. If you insist on saving the aether, you can, by introducing cumbersome hypotheses that clocks in motion slow down somehow and certain 'tensions' shorten the moving lengths somehow. Hendrik Lorentz did try something like that for a while from what I know. Old quantum theory was derived with the idea that particle positions were well defined. Later developments showed they aren't. Early relativistic ideas (Lorentz, Poincaré, etc) were developed with the idea of aether/absolute space. Later developments showed you can drop it and nobody would be any the wiser. You should read what other members are telling you: It's invariant, not constant. It produces the same reading in all inertial frames. You should also do the exercise that @Eise suggests. Just a pure mathematical exercise, with no appeal to any ether. It produces what's observed. You missed the point, I'm afraid. I didn't say that. Unless you're willing to admit that moving is a matter of perspective. Then I did say that. But then, staying where you are (not moving at all) is but a particular way of moving. And moving in general, is tilting an angle along a hyperbola.

The 'change' in simultaneity is 'real'? Simultaneity is a frame-dependent concept, rather. The Earth 'suddenly ages' for real? The accelerating twin finds a path in ST for which proper time is less, rather. Time dilation/length contraction are real. As much as anything else that you see. They're very much like foreshortening. Is foreshortening just a matter of 'perspective', and therefore 'not real'? If you think that's the case, try to get a 4m-long pole inside a garage through a 3m-wide door with the pole's length parallel to the door. A clever person --who knows the laws of foreshortening-- manages to get the pole inside the garage by rotating it, and then rotating it back once inside (the close equivalent of the twin's U-turn). Don't get me wrong. You seem to be trying to make sense in an honest way, but you're trapped in an early-20th-century illusion. That's why you express yourself in such an obscure --and incorrect-- way. Some of the things you've said, though, sound like you're groping towards Mach's principle. But with the wrong toolkit taken from the junkyard of discarded ideas. And with the wrong outlook. Your 'ether' or 'absolute space' is (if anything) the distribution of energy in the universe.* That's why most of us look at you in disbelief, like the proverbial Earth-bound twin, wondering, "where have you been all these years? Your ideas haven't changed at all since the early 20th Century!" ----------------------------------- * Unfortunately (or not) Mach's principle is not a very useful constructive starting point in order to reach the right theory of gravitation. Although GR is definitely Machian in spirit: The distribution of stuff tells you how much you must deviate from locally inertiall in order to be aware that you're moving.

This is only true on a field that is of characteristic > 2. In discrete arithmetics it's not true that 1+1=2. In binary arithmetics 1+1=0 or 2=0 (mod2). The moral of my silly little story: Don't take anything for granted. Not even aether theory. Yes, I know what acceleration is. I wonder whether you do. As to your last statement, it went badly wrong the moment you wrote 'so if'. Because nothing you said after that follows from the antecedent. But don't mind me. Carry on with your enthralling conversation.

Will you just read what's answered to you??? Otherwise it's a monumental waste of time for everyone involved. (my emphasis.) The returning twin is subject to accelerations. Is it not? This is the major bone of contention with people who don't understand the twin's paradox. (Or should I say it just goes over their heads?) It is practically a socio-physical theorem that there will always be people who don't understand it. You are living proof of it.

That should be fun. I'm wondering what the n-1 level of stupidity would look like.

What do you mean non-relativistic photons? Photons are always relativistic. Am I missing something? Everybody else seems to understand what you mean, but I don't. Because they're always relativistic, the equation of state (pressure as a function of density) is what it is in the matter term of the Friedmann equation.

The alleged title, Doesn't even make syntactical sense. It's perhaps significant that this OP seems to be in answer to one of the main objections to previous bogus thread on "fluorine-based biology". In particular the part that says,

This is basically the picture in my mind, but of course it would be interesting what @CharonY, @exchemist and the rest of the (active) experts have to say.