joigus

Yeah, it rings a bell: https://www.scienceforums.net/search/?q="MHV"&quick=1

And it's spilt over from there. Now it's about Netflix and the Bible.

Reptilien? Is life German? You left out the most interesting bit of evolution, which is the transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. Once you have eukaryote life going, the combinatorics from reptilian to avian, or from reptilian to mammalian is rather trivial in comparison. I think. IOW, eukaryotic life only occured once for all we know. One swallow doesn't make a Summer.

The quantum phenomenon responsible for quantum entanglement is quantum entanglement. Radiation, vacuum energy, and matter have very different equations of state with respect to the expansion parameter. I think I'm going with Mordred on this one.

@Knowledge Enthusiast, for someone with the nickname of "knowledge enthusiast" you display very little enthusiasm in accepting hard-won knowledge from others. Ironic. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Complexity http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_information_theory Oh, I almost forgot. Mass is not conserved. Energy is not conserved in cosmology either for the universe as a whole. It is true though that for a "small" object (eg, Mercury) falling in a static gravitational field, an analogue of Newtonian energy can be derived that is conserved. That is because a static gravitational field has a time-like Killing field and you can do that for that particular case. Actually, energy is quite a schizophrenic concept in general relativity, because the most you can do is to define 3 different energies. One of them is the matter-radiation energy on the right hand side of Einstein's equations. The other is some kind of "geometric energy" that people normally place on the LHS. Those two almost perfectly balance each other out, were it not for a 3rd --and weirdest of all-- kind of "energy" that we call vacuum energy. You need to learn some physics if you're going to talk about it. Put this in your pipe and smoke it: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/ As a university professor once said, "if you want to learn to write Chinese poetry, it seems like a good idea to start learning Chinese."

You know what? I don't think anybody can answer that... The multiverse came from string theory, and nobody has ever been able to sensibly look into any of those patches of the landscape. My guess is that all that people do hardly goes beyond writing something called the partition function and trying to guess how many non-equivalent geometries there are (the famous Calabi-Yau manifolds). But I've read that the counting itself is incredibly challenging, let alone case studies of different geometries. @Mordred would probably tell you more and better. Provided he maintains his expert status.

Not at all, "plauseable" is not a word. What is plausible, you think, the multiverse? I think the problem with the multiverse is how to make it a predictive idea. How to take it to the testing grounds of... well, the testing grounds.

That was my original phrasing, There's your full stop. But It was ignored, so I dumbed it down.

Exactly, because complexity has been defined, redefined, and refined in its definition, and studied for many decades now, so it's quite inane to try to define it all over again on one's own while ignoring decades and decades of study. And I mean the contemporary notion of it. I'm sure the Greeks thought about it too. Say what? Oh, yes, I must have forgotten to say: Mass is not conserved. Conserved in chemical reactions, not conserved in nuclear reactions. So not conserved. (nuclear or non-nuclear; any reactions involving number of particle change)

Mass is not conserved.

Sorry. I thought you'd lost interest. The point is that one can quite freely draw analogies, but that's all it is.

Another interesting topological concept is that of closure.

Lol. You reminded me of this true story: I once met a psychoanalyst with some background in physics that wanted to learn quantum mechanics. The money was good, so we arranged some tutoring hours every week and after we had the basics covered (limitations of classical electrodynamics, classical experiments and the like) I proceeded to teach him Fourier analysis, as he had studied multi-variable calculus and such, so it seemed appropriate, rather than the more abstract operator approach. Everything had gone quite smoothly thus far. But as soon as I said "every periodic function of a real variable can be expanded as a linear combination of sines and cosines of a fundamental frequency and successive harmonics blah blah" a glint of recognition appeared in his eyes. Now I must tell you the classes were in Spanish, and "sine" in Spanish translates as seno, which also means "bosom". Cosine (coseno) would be "co-bosom", I suppose. Anyway, he blurted something to the effect of "Oh, yes, I remember from psychoanalysis, the sine represents the female, while the cosine is the male". It was then and there that I knew the word Schrödinger would never be pronounced in those sessions.

Why indeed? And why not indeed? As long as we're just drawing analogies, I think it's a valid one. And that's what you're doing. Is it not?

What about the principle of least action, of which the speculations section offers so many examples? I think that should play a role in the standard model of the mind.

Rotation speed of galaxies stars plotted against distance to galactic centre. It's explained in link provided by exchemist. Left-hand means "on the left side".

Don't use Star Wars as your source for science, please. You might end up thinking you can hear explosions in outer space, or travel at superluminal speed. There's no reason I can think of that we cannot have Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes some day. But don't hold your breath.

A good place to start is trying to understand the virial theorem. Also, having a good understanding of physics beyond the standard model. The standard model is a pre-requisite for the latter. For starters, are you familiar with the fact that for gravitational systems the average kinetic energy is minus a half the average potential energy? If this thread goes well you could be on track to a Nobel Prize, who knows.

That would imply power losses are somehow being retreived after they've been lost to the thermal degrees of freedom, which I'm going to venture cannot be solved by cleverly arranging field lines. This is not how field lines work in EM. The source of the E (electric) field is electric charge. It is polar, which means that the electric field lines come from the charge and diverge towards infinity, becoming more and more "rare". The source of the B (magnetic) field, on the other hand, is axial and circulates around the axis defining the current. It also becomes more and more "rare" the farther away we go, but with a different power law. Something like this: This, plus how a changing E produces a B, and how a changing B produces an E, is the essence of Maxwell's equations.

Context is essential, yes, as everyone has said. As a further example, 1+1=0 is false in standard arithmetic, but it is true in mod-2 modular arithmetic. And @studiot's example of Russell's paradox is an example in which one seems to be led to the conclusion that some statements can both be true and not true. Of course, what happens is that the context, or the axioms/premises must be re-examined.

I don't think the distinction between generalist and specialist can be unambiguously drawn in a scenario of just 2 or 3 species. The lines get blurred, I think, precisely because the distinction is only precisely defined if/when there are plenty of resources. After all, the specialist's motto is something like "from all these so and so many resources I can only exploit this particular one". With only resources A and B, the specialist and the generalist cannot be told apart. That's what my common sense dictates anyway. I hope it makes sense. So you're right to say, I think, It's kind of like trying to define the pressure of a collectivity of two molecules!

Let's assume the tiger escaped from a zoo in Johannesburg...

I see your point. My take is that specialist vs generalist occurs in a direction with respect to the evolutionary tree, while a taxon vs another taxon occurs along a different direction. What I mean is any specialist in a given taxon has a cousin that is a generalist. It stands to reason that the more species there are, the more likely it is that a genetically-close generalist is there to fill the gap. There is no doubt that diversity is bound to take a blow any time a catastrophic event happens. Swarms of specialists will fall, and along with them relatively closely interdependent sub-niches. Conceivably, it's the generalist cousins that remain there to plant the seeds of the future biodiversity.

Yes, but see how dangerously close to a tautology we get? The default condition is whatever can sustain biota that will keep that condition. It's like the puddle suggested by @studiot. That was a brilliant analogy btw. Yes, I think this has to do with biodiversity being very low back during those eons --see last point by @StringJunky. Higher biodiversity will conceivable smooth out these patterns of variations. That's probably why we see those sharp banded-iron formations corresponding to the GOE. It's been speculated (but very plausibly so) that they must correspond to pulses of massive death of aerobic/anaerobic organisms and their re-births. It's like the oscillating pattern of daisy world, but with generations of aerobic/anaerobic prokaryotes playing the role of the black/white daisies, and oxygen abundance in the interstices of their bacterial mats (rather than the atmosphere) playing the role of the albedo. Well, perhaps the oversimplified way I've come to look at it. I agree with this. In fact, I've thought for some time that we usually focus too much on particular episodes just because of the particularly dramatic footprint they left behind, but the reason why we divide at all Earth time into these periods is because towards the end of each one of them, something had to give (biologically speaking) under one kind of stress or another, be it biological, cosmic, or geologically driven, or all of them together.

This is more or less what I meant when I said, Photosynthesis by cyanobacteria leading to the GOE no doubt came from mutations in prokaryotes, which is a genetic event, but catastrophic nonetheless. As @StringJunky said, all bets are off then. It's like the Earth setting the course to a whole new "Gaia deal" so to speak. What I fail to see is the presence of an immutable condition defining the stasis. In the case of thermodynamics, it's the equation(s) of state. In the case of living organisms, it's parameters such as pH, osmotic pressure, temperature... What on Earth (pun intended) is the go-back-to condition that defines Gaia? Agreed.