joigus

33 minutes ago, MSC said:

Oh so then maybe I'm not flogging a dead horse but putting a bullet into the brain of a would be zombie horse. 

I don't think so. AAMOF, ideas like "we live in a simulation" or panspermia sound to me dangerously close to trying to revive the idea of an intelligent creator, but with an aura of scientism about it.

All of them (and the ones to come) equally vulnerable to the infinite-regression argument: Who simulated the simulators?, and Who seeded the seeders? etc.

36 minutes ago, MSC said:

Definitely not the Messiah, just a very boring prophet. 

That's from Life of Brian, if I'm not mistaken.

I testify to the fact that the teleological argument has been receiving some attention lately. More of a cardiac massage, IMO.

24 minutes ago, geordief said:

Better not ask any more questions here  and get even further out of my depth..

On my part, it's OK. Those aren't bad questions necessarily. Any imprecision is understandable on account of the difficulty of the subject. IMO Mordred's answer was spot on and succinct. I have little to add to what he said.

You seem to be bothered by the presence of fields in the geometry though, and that's fair enough. In pure geometry we don't have this arrowy structure we call fields. On top of that they have an algebra of creation and annihilation, and they are complex (have an imaginary part). Those are quantum fields and they seem to go beyond the scope of geometry. Does space-time emanate from the field, or is it the other way? Nobody knows. Maybe there was an eternal inflation scenario, as some models say, and scalar fields gave shape to everything else. It's, as Mordred said, speculation. Highly educated, yes, but speculation after all.

10 hours ago, geordief said:

Do you mean there could be no quantifiable relationships between  distinct  objects ?

I suppose what @MigL means is that differential geometry is no longer applicable.

There is no point closer, and closer, and closer still to a given point.

There might be "quantifiable relationships between distinct objects" but not of a geometric nature. Or there might be no distinction of objects. Or...

I suppose when you say "objects" you mean points?

Maybe the quantifiable relationships are something like entanglement, but that's not really geometry.

1 hour ago, JohnDBarrow said:

Can't we say that black people and white people are as anatomically different as Dromedary camels and Bactrian camels? Might African and Asian elephant differences be a better analogy?

No, we can't. Modern humans diverged into their different phenotypical varieties, if you will, about 70,000 ya. while,

Quote

~4.4 million years ago

 

The divergence time between the Bactrian camel and dromedary was ~4.4 million years ago (1.9 to 7.2 million years ago) (Wu et al., 2014), and genetic studies confirmed (Ji et al., 2009; Silbermayr et al., 2010; Jirimutu et al., 2012; Mohandesan et al., 2017) that the wild two-humped camel was different from the ...Aug 12, 2022

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9374477/#:~:text=The divergence time between the,camel was different from the

Modern humans are in fact genetically closer together than most other species. One of the few species that are much tighter together than us is the cheetah. Have you heard of the 70,000 year old bottleneck due to the Toba eruption? Cheetahs are eve much closer together than us because their bottleneck happened only 10,000 ya. All this info you can find on the internet. You only have to bother doing so.

5 hours ago, JohnDBarrow said:

Calico, black and white/gray cats tend to be alley cats or mongrels. 

No. They tend to be female.

Can you be constantly wrong in a little less inflammatory way?

20 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Fued is to strong a word to use for someone I'd love to share a beer with, while we shoot the, metaphorical, shit... 😇

I was joking. I'd share a beer with you two too.  

3 minutes ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

I haven't read the book but I do know that is makes an argument that Muhammad suffered from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as well as Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Certainly possible. I prefer to think in terms of how the character of Muhammad has been construed through  time. Like what influential people that came after him did with his figure, as well as the early offshoots of Christianity at the time he is supposed to have lived. Don't forget it was Waraqa ibn Nawfal, a Nestorian priest (Christian), who authorised him as a prophet.

7 hours ago, JohnDBarrow said:

If reincarnation is true, I don't want to be reincarnated back into some nasty primitive society and suffer a future miserable existance.

7 hours ago, JohnDBarrow said:

Leonard Nimoy had a song called Highly Illogical in the 1960's. He sang Man made a mess out of planet Earth and might someday do the same to other parts of the universe with emerging space travel technology. I hope we don't mess some future planet up too like we did poor green Mother Earth. 

That I find highly illogical.

I think you got the song wrong. This would have made a lot more sense,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFDcoX7s6rE

Quote

Adventure seeker on an empty street
Just an alley creeper, light on his feet
A young fighter screaming, with no time for doubt
With the pain and anger can't see a way out
It ain't much I'm asking, I heard him say
Gotta find me a future move out of my way
I want it all, I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now
I want it all, I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now

Listen all you people, come gather round
I gotta get me a game plan, gotta shake you to the ground
But just give me, huh, what I know is mine
People do you hear me, just gimme the sign
It ain't much I'm asking, if you want the truth
Here's to the future for the dreams of youth

I want it all (give it all I want it all)
I want it all (yeah)
I want it all and I want it now

I want it all (yes I want it all)
I want it all hey
I want it all and I want it now

I'm a man with a one track mind
So much to do in one lifetime (people do you hear me)
Not a man for compromise and where's and why's and living lies
So I'm living it all, yes I'm living it all
And I'm giving it all, and I'm giving it all
Oh oh yeah yeah ha ha ha ha ha
Yeah yeah yeah yeah
I want it all

It ain't much I'm asking, if you want the truth
Here's to the future
Hear the cry of youth (hear the cry of youth) (hear the cry of youth)
I want it all, I want it all, I want it all and I want it now

I want it all yeah yeah yeah
I want it all, I want it all and I want it now
Oh oh oh oh oh

And I want it (now)
I want it, I want it
Oh ha

On 5/28/2024 at 9:31 AM, Otto Kretschmer said:

By any chance, has any of you read Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography of Allah's Prophet by Ali Sina?

I haven't, but I'm very interested in anything you might have to say about it.

Not to say I'm not enjoying the discussion on local realism and the concept of reality.

(As well as the ongoing intellectual feud between Moontanman and Dim.)  

Yeah, hunter-gatherers are the problem.

Sigh

I shy away from worldviews (try to), even though sometimes I can't help getting tangled in them. There are too many obstacles, some of them really thick, to acquire any kind of a vantage point. And the individual perspective is only too limited. I see a piece of landscape from where I stand. That's all.

Besides, there are already too many Manichaeans out there, preaching with too loud a voice. I don't want to be that person.

I must side with Genady here, but as a dream perhaps. That some day mathematics, logic, and similar tools of analysis can tell us what this or that pattern does in the great scheme of things. As for the rest, such tools will hopefully tell us why and what in the world cannot be understood on account of logical/semantic incompleteness.

Mathematics is so...

dispassionate.

Atheism is not a worldview, btw, as far as I can discern. It's more of a 'what do you mean by that' attitude the way I understand it.

Also, \( \nu \) in \( E = h\nu \) is the Greek letter nu, while  \( v \) in DeBroglie's relation \( \lambda=h/mv \) is the Latin letter v. Could that be related to your problem?

IOW, one is the frequency in Hertzs, while the other is the speed.

I'm no expert here, but feedback mechanisms in biology are so frequent that I think pointing to the presence/absence of a certain chemical as the cause of an illness (or of any other process for that matter) is probably not the way to go.

It's Sagan, of course. And after that, Sagan. The poetry, the music, the absolutely unfettered passion for understanding it all that cannot be muffled in any way. 

The Cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever will be...

And I was immediately and unconditionally engaged for the rest of my life.

As to the rest of them, I can't help but feel they've been built as marketing products in a way, probably through no fault of their own. I agree with exchemist that Hossenfelder means business more than any of the others.

Sorry for the mixed metaphor.  

On 5/20/2024 at 4:40 AM, MigL said:

Not much chance of an assassination.
A mountainous area where fog can spring up very quickly, and flying in a Bell 212 helicopter, which is, at best, 1970s vintage, is a recipe for disaster.

How it gets spun by the religious leaders to their people, is a different story.

Agreed. A couple of disgruntled shepherds throwings stones could have startled the pilot just enough to do it. And discontent there is in Iran, as pointed out. But no need for a plot here, and most likely an accident. That doesn't mean the Israelies haven't uncorked a bottle or two.

12 hours ago, StringJunky said:

I don't think any sensible strategist would take out any leaders in this stage of potential hostilities. Killing a leader would create too many new geopolitical outcomes. We need hose-pipes, not flamethrowers.

Agreed. I'm sure the next in line is not going to make much of a difference, turban-wearing or not. I'm pessimistic about your last wish though, however much I agree. Any hose-pipes I envision are political. And most problems in the Middle East are cultural and deeply rooted in people's minds, not political. 

What @MigL is referring to is Planck's scale. If you want to probe space-time at scales roughly 10^-43 seconds (10^-35 m is another way to characterise it), you make black holes. So it doesn't quite make sense to discriminate between points, mesure distances, angles, speeds. There would be no geometry proper.

And I agree also with @Genady that the big bang is not a point, of course. A picture that I find particularly attractive is that of conformal symmetry, which is a universe in which there is scale invariance. In a conformally-invariant universe, there's no difference between big and small in a way. AAMOF, we know when temperatures are very high, conformal symmetry is more and more accurate. The universe would look very much like Maxwell's equations with no sources. Perhaps scale invariance is a spontaneously broken symmetry?

@TheVat, @CharonY. Aaah. My friend has just answered. It was Peter Godfrey-Smith. A philosopher of science rather. And he is Australian. Sorry I must have thrown you off.

It could have been E. O. Wilson... I know his topic of expertise was ants. I don't remember him as making a big deal out of cephalopods.

They're all Greeks to me now LOL. I'm getting old.

I've just whatsapped my friend. See if he can remind me and it rings a bell to any of you.

1 hour ago, Max70 said:

This is based on the standard Big Bang theory. There have always been scientists who didn't believe in the Big Bang.

We know observationally, actually. The surface of last scattering has still not disappeared behind the kinematic horizon. The fact that there are features not totally explained by the standard cosmological model doesn't mean that we must throw everything away.

1 hour ago, Max70 said:

There are also microwave, radio, X ray and gamma ray telescopes.  In the future we could have types of telescopes that we cannot imagine now.

All of them photons. All of them subject to extreme redshift when close to c as receding velocity. So your point is moot.

21 hours ago, TheVat said:

I've wondered about octopus intelligence because of their intelligent behavior (they test smarter than human toddlers, in some respects) and also things like having the highest encephalization quotient of any invertebrate, a degree of synaptic plasticity more associated with learning and memory centers of vertebrates, sophisticated control of 5 different types of chromatophores, and the whole "embodied" brain thing which is so unlike vertebrates.  My guess is that they do have a unique form of intelligence that we are only starting to be able to measure.  I have wondered if someday we  discover that they are able to use chromatophores as a sophisticated language system, and not just for camouflage or basic emotions.  Half a billion neurons is a lot, when you are invertebrate and weigh 6-20 lb.

Another factor is that they are both predators and prey.  This dual role usually makes more higher overall intelligence in the animal kingdom.

Very interesting points.

I don't seem to remember (or successfully google up) the name of a very influencial biologist (American/Australian/British...?) who called for more attention to cephalopods, and proposed to study them as models of radically different body plans that could be the basis of intelligent multicellular life other than mammalian. I'm sure you know who I'm talking about... 

Very interesting topic btw.

On 5/14/2024 at 10:30 AM, Max70 said:

I would like to distinguish the observable universe from the part of the universe that we can observe with our most powerful telescopes.

I think that the observable universe is much larger than most people think.

If there is an object distant 10¹⁰⁰  light years, we could see it if we had a telescope enough powerful.

There are at least two reasons why this isn't true. One of them is that long enough ago (which is automatically implied by "far enough away" as you should understand if you want to do cosmology and astrophysics) the universe was opaque to radiation. A little farther beyond it was opaque to neutrinos even. And also there's a kinematic horizon, as Swansont explained. Photons from so long ago and so far away get redshifted into total invisibility.

23 hours ago, swansont said:

No it doesn’t

🤣

There are gauge bosons (particles mediating the interactions) that acquire mass via the Higgs mechanism though. The W and Z bosons of the weak interaction are the famous example, because they were the first particles for which the Higgs-Kibble-Anderson-etc mechanism was proposed.

Back in the '60s it was known they shouldn't be fundamentally massive on account of a very important symmetry --called the gauge symmetry-- being broken if they were. They must be acquiring mass from something that's dragging them. Another field. Thereby the Higgs. People knew they must be massive in practice, as the weak interaction is short-ranged.

So it's kind of peculiar that some of these mediating particles (gluons and photons) don't acquire mass via the Higgs mechanism, while others (Ws and Zs) do.

At least I find it so.

I think that's a very good question, btw.

2 hours ago, Max70 said:

But this is a spiral motion, therefore the calculation of the acceleration is more complicated.

Not really. A gravitational orbit plus a dissipative environment will be a possible model to account for closing spiral orbits, as @exchemist has pointed out.

It just doesn't seem to do what you claim it does.

I would relax about getting credit for this idea for the time being.

20 minutes ago, Max70 said:

The objects near the black hole have a spiral motion. I think that the accelerations are more or less like the ones shown in the following figure:

The acceleration of a rotating body is towards the centre of attraction. It's called centripetal acceleration. Tangential acceleration would require a completely different force field.

Have you seen @Ghideon's picture? Do you know why he drew the acceleration the way he did?

3 minutes ago, Max70 said:

My idea is that there is a colossal black hole that is very far

Very far from what? There are galaxies in every direction. It cannot be very far from everything. However far is "very far".

4 minutes ago, Max70 said:

also dividing its mass by r² (where r is the distance)

Yeah. r is the distance, and m is the mass, and q is the charge, and I is yours truly.

Distance between what and what? Again, there are galaxies in every direction. And galactic halos in every direction.

6 minutes ago, Max70 said:

they have a spiral motion towards the colossal black hole.

How does that reproduce the velocity curves?

You are mixing and mis-matching the expansion of the universe with the v(r) law for galaxies from the centre outwards. Very different things. One goes by the name of dark energy. The other, dark matter. Different names for very good reasons.

The galaxy rotation curves are rotations of stars around the respective galactic centres.

Expansion of the universe is about galaxies getting away from each other.

You're not making any sense. At least about the universe we observe.