joigus

1) Clean up your room 2) Then:

I missed that nuance. Thanks!!

I couldn't agree more. While the GR discussion, as well as alternatives/generalisations/toy-models is very interesting, perhaps @Vashta Nerada is interested in another level of discussion. Markus did say "deduce," but of course we all understand what he meant. I've crossed paths with him at least once in relation to this precise matter. And it hasn't scaped my attention that his signature displays Stokes' theorem in its most general differential-form form.

Whirlwind tour of evolutionary, genetic, behavioural, developmental/environmental bases of behaviour (25 lectures): Enjoy!

You just touched my soft spot. It is an interesting possibility, that I've tackled before in the way of a suggestion: That it's just possible that both time and space are multidimensional, but we (and other physical systems) may just be constrained to perceive it as 1+3-dimensional or, IOW, 1+a bundle of the rest, that we perceive as spatial+internal. It's just a speculation, of course, but a speculation that I think can be argued in favour of within the limits of mainstream, widely-accepted science. I'm not sure if anybody has proposed anything like this. My intuition is that somebody must have, because almost any idea you can conceive of has previously been considered by someone.

Yeah. A nice guy who now and then decides to give some people this nicest of treatments: https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/fatal-familial-insomnia/#:~:text=Fatal familial insomnia (FFI) is,significant physical and mental deterioration. Just because... Ooops, he wanted to play with the order of their nucleotides. This is one of the most horrible deaths you can think of. Nice going, God.

Yeah, there were cyclic-universe models that AFAIK are not very much favoured by cosmologists today. It seems that cosmologies based on inflation (a period previous to the big-bang when extraordinary rates of expansion took place) are the preferred mechanism. That's because they have a considerable explanatory power of the present state of the universe (seeding for galaxy formation, large-scale homogeneity.) This mechanism can be easily accomodated into the dynamics of the vacuum in quantum field theory. You have to have the vacuum "sit" in some kind of scalar background (the inflaton field.) The unfortunate aspect of it is that you must make all kinds of arbitrary assumptions about this scalar (pure-number valued, not changing under rotations) field.

Agreed. If we adopt the basic assumption that the equation for the gravitational potential be the topologically simplest assumption (no field lines start out from the vacuum), then Laplace's equation is the rotationally-invariant version of this assumption. From the initial assumption, gravitation can be deduced now. If we go to GR, as you said, it's a different matter. I do remember that the binding of a small particle coupled to a strong spherically-symmetric gravitational field has higher-order inverse powers of the distance than 1/r2.

I don't know of any cosmological model being considered that started with a "big shrink." I don't know what "absolute zero" in mathematics means. As opposed to "relative zero"? If anything, quantum mechanics suggests that the energy of no physical system can be exactly zero. I don't know what a "virtual number" is. I don't know what the "polar opposite" of a number is. The inverse of a number is what it suggests to me. The inverse of zero is not infinity. Infinity is not a number. Zero has no inverse. I don't know what the "polar opposite" of the real character of a number could mean.

Beautiful flowers frequently sprout from an excrement or a piece of rotting flesh. I suppose that's what's happened here.

Indeed. 1+2 gravity has no local degrees of freedom. Yet people still use it as a topological theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(2%2B1)-dimensional_topological_gravity Just a disclaimer: I wasn't thinking of GR when I asked my questions, even though we know it to be the right framework. I was thinking under the premise "if Newton's gravity were correct..." And I stand by what I said. Namely: we can't deduce any of that. We can't deduce Laplace's equation either. We can guess at it from symmetry properties. Also, I think it would be interesting, like @studiot was trying to do, to find out at what level the OP wishes the question to be answered. Maybe they're not familiar with GR.

OK. We're reaching a stalemate here. I want to be convinced that torture would be effective so much as to grant consideration to use it as a last resort. I intuit that @dimreepr & @Peterkin agree with this particular point. You want to be convinced that torture would fail 100% of the time, as to grant consideration to use it as a last resort. If I understood them correctly, @beecee & @zapatos would abide by the latter. We've narrowed it down, it seems, to some kind of interesting but difficult burden-of-proof argument. This has to be done in such a way that this kind of evidence is obtained without experiments being performed to ascertain the matter. Ethical considerations on which we all agree being the reason. Your turn.

And now for something completely different... Another great: Tommy Emmanuel. His version of Merle Travis: And his version of another classic:

I loved the instrument, and the delivery is amazing. I can't say I like it better than Led Zeppelin's version though. This one is sweet. Led Zeppelin's is more... well, bittersweet. And I love both. Loved it! @beecee, I have a soft spot for working-class songs. One of the greatest American songs is, IMO, Sixteen Tons. So many unforgettable versions... I'm looking for a version by Merle Travis which he ends by singing, "I owe my soul to... Tennessee Ernie Ford". And the audience burst out laughing. It's taking me some time to find it. But in the meantime, here's a version by ZZ Top and Jeff Beck. Vinnie Colaiuta is at the drums. He's been praised as one of the best drummers of all time.

Sorry. I hadn't noticed that the user had already been banned when I wrote my last comment.

You're right. That's what Newton did. If Kepler's laws are satisfied, what kind of distance-dependent power law do I need to reproduce them? And the answer is indeed an inverse-square law. But how do we know Kepler's laws would be satisfied in a 2D world? I don't think the gravitational law can be deduced. Your argument here is more akin to a deduction. But it still rests on a guess. If it's true that the overarching principle of gravity is that it reproduces the way field lines escape from a point in the same way that the lines representing a substance that once starts flowing away from a point, is conserved; then that would be what gravity would do in 2D. I agree. But that's a guess. Agreed. Nevertheless, one can still manage to find examples in which thinking in 2D is useful. Graphene being one example.

It has all the hallmarks of a scribal writing (very ornate, very sophisticated) that later derived in more sketchy pictographs. I would go with @Ericchiriboga's guess that it's very ancient. My rough idea is that it's one of those scribal symbols that have been found carved in bone, and going back to the birth of agriculture in China. Han civilisation? It does look like it's been carved in bone. It's perhaps interesting that the "radiating motif" on the top is strongly reminiscent of very common radicals in modern Chinese that very much look like a crown on top of the symbol. I've been trying to install Tagaini Jisho, which is an excellent Japanese dictionary, with no success, due to a problem of paths in the binary. As kanji Japanese is a simplified version of written Chinese, and this dictionary allows you to do a search by radical, it could be interesting to try to figure out what modern pictograph more closely corresponds to it. Too bad @Strange is no longer around. Maybe someone else is familiar with Chinese pictographs.

I've kind of addressed some of these questions before; to what degree of success, I don't know. We shouldn't wait for the chips to be down. A protocol should be developed when our minds are cool and can think straight. If something separates us from other primates very distinctly, it's our ability to plan for the future. I perfectly understand that most of us would act differently if we were under extreme pressure, myself including. It doesn't bear thinking. That's precisely why discussions taking place in this vein could be useful. I don't assume any of us is thinking under extreme pressure now. I also agree that for the most part, this discussion is constructive and interesting. It's a challenging problem, isn't it? Experimenting with torture is out of the question. What do we objectively know about it? Can we infer anything about it without reproducing the experiments? Somehow I can't picture the inquisitors back in the Sixteenth Century crunching numbers about the efficacy of their methods.

Google: "websites providing statistical data" Output: https://www.makeuseof.com/websites-find-statistics/ and many more. I hope that's helpful. Tell me if it works for you. I haven't checked them out.

What's the argument? How can you deduce the gravitational law?

Give us a quote from your famous avatar, that great philosopher-scientist.

I meant the child abuser or the terrorist that @beecee was talking about. Aren't those sociopaths? Maybe our wires got crossed there.

The important differential fact with respect to our case at hand is that most of us here are not sociopaths. Now, I don't know about papers corroborating this, but at least according to neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky, sociopaths have a significantly higher pain threshold than socially typical individuals. I picked this from his Stanford lectures on Human Behavioural Biology. I'm searching for the references to papers that ascertain this point. Your suggestion of playing with the terrorists' mind I find much more acceptable, for many reasons. Truth serum, flooding his pituitary with oxytocin, or whatever other chemical that facilitates collaboration. Combination of use of chemicals with psychological manipulation. Have these possibilities been tried to the point that we know there is no other possibility but torture? Both Zapatos and you seem to be anchoring the bulk of your reasoning to this 'last resort' argument. I'm not sure it is to be applied here, and I would need a lot more convincing. These are not matters to be improvised in the face of a compelling case --however hypothetical it may be. A protocol should be established on the basis of maximum likelihood of producing results in a reasonable time to deploy an efficient rescue operation in the case you propose. If there were hard scientific proof that torture would lead to the desired results for the profile that we're talking about (sociopaths), that would be another matter. But I don't think that's the case. This is the most difficult aspect, I think. As to right or wrong, I don't think any of us can provide a philosophical reasoning establishing beyond any doubt whether a course of action is or isn't wrong --either irrespective of circumstances or otherwise. At some point we must adopt some kind of axiom, so to speak. I remember a conversation with a German person many years ago on reasons why bullfighting* should be banned --we both agreed that it should. Silly me, I said that torturing an animal is simply wrong. She said that she didn't think that was a reason. That the reason is that the animal doesn't have a choice in the matter. Well, I can think of thousands of ways to twist that philosophically, but I won't dwell into that. Sometimes we need principles, something that's to be considered as completely off the table. There's a reason why we call those "principles." * I'm not comparing the example with the matter at hand. The fact that both my example, and our topic here, have to do with torture is just coincidental. One is for the sake of a lesser evil; the other is for the sake of entertainment. I, of course, understand that.

No, I meant it more in relation to "how the Earth was created" or "made", "the Himalayas were created by such and such process," etc. You know what I mean. But now that you mention it, I remember there was a pseudo-religious-whatever people that played with the idea of creation and annihiliation operators as the two versions of the Hindu gods. Brahma was the creator (a+) Shiva was the destroyer (a) I assume the number operator aa++a+a was supposed to be Vishnu, "the keeper." 🤣

I agree with this. Fine-tuned seems to re-invent a concept that was already there, with much less anthropomorphic/deistic implications: ad hoc. I myself would like to see more and more people resisting the temptation to use these anthropomorphic/deistic words: created, tuned, etc.