tar

imatfaal,

My daughter was at a university for the last 5 years pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry which she now has. She was not in love with the grant process...but private industry grants were as important to acquire as government grants.

We have the same 320 million people in the country now as we had before the election. Same Nobel contenders as before.

Perhaps our president does not wish to tell scientists what they should be investigating, and the decommissioning of the office was part of his deregulation idea.

That is, let people regulate themselves and do what works. If you think about it, you wouldn't want to be forced by the federal government to study a particular thing, would you?

What good is a bunch of people telling you what to think, when you can tell yourself to do the right thing and cut out the middle man.

Regards, TAR

I can have a dream where I taste and smell and see a thing, yet I can still call it a dream because I know I was asleep when I had those experiences and they do not have to align with the waking world.

My thesis is that EVERYTHING we experience is an analog model of reality. Some of it firsthand, some of it from memory, some of it from the experiences of others we trust. That we have more than one sense allows us to match our model to reality in more than one way, thus "making sense" of the place.

In regards, to science, and many of the arguments I get into with scientists, it is more important to me that what I sense matches my model, and I immediately update my model to include changes to reality of which my senses inform me. It is always the match between my model and reality that makes my point of focus consciousness of reality, real.

I don't need to do a transform into Hilbert space, to imagine a photon traveling from a nearby star taking 4 years to get here, and what implications as to the reality of that star, that has.

dimreepr,

I was responding to what I thought Strange thought I was saying. There is plenty of "you shouldn't think you know what the other is thinking" to go around.

Regards, TAR

dimreepr,

I do however admit I often think I know what another is thinking, and I am wrong. However, there are plenty of times in my life when I thought I knew what the other was thinking and I was correct.

I still tend to put myself in the other person's shoes, and figure I can converse with that unseen other, hypothetically, but based on human tendencies I know they must have, because they are human. So sometimes I overthink, but I do not appreciate being accused of "not reading" someone's post. I read the post, I read between the lines, I take into consideration other arguments that the poster has presented to attempt to understand what he or she is thinking. I do not pull my considerations out of thin air.

And of course I confuse and conflate ideas presented by different posters and take the figurative literally, and forget and misremember and such, but I do read. What the subject is, is often misconstrued.

Regards, TAR

and if it is not absolutely false enough for you based on the confirmation of all the member's participation, then there is no thing that the members can absolutely confirm which is not notably helpful to scientific enquiry

The logical conclusion your argument comes to, is that science does not attempt to confirm reality, where I am rather sure that the confirmation of reality is the point of science.

If we are, in Klaynos' opinion, not good absolute judges of the place, so what, point me to someone who is a better judge than another human.

dimreepr,

Strange thinks I was saying people can't have hallucinations. I never thought that.

Regards, TAR

Strange,

I was pointing out that we are sitting here discussing halucinations with other real people that because we are having the discussion, are obvioulsy considered other real people by each of the members.

Any discussion of the non-reality of all the members but one is absolutely proven false by the existence of the discussion.

Regards, TAR

God I believe IS real, in the sense that he/she/it is the anthropomorphic unseen other that we converse with, when we wish to engage the absolute.

Guy hears a commotion in the chicken coup.

"hey, anybody in there"

"nobody here but us chickens"

dimreepr,

Sure there is. I am confirming that solipsism isn't real.

My joke in college philosophy course was that I wanted to start a solipsism club.

Regards, TAR

besides, who are you looking to for confirmation?

if its only you, and you know there are other people to go to, you already have proof enough that you are not a figment of your own imagination to consider yourself wrong to think you are alone

if its only you, and you know there are not other people to go to, you already know there is no hope of confirmation

Absolutely they exist.

And probably In more than one way. That is, while you are experiencing a "good" feeling, there is actually more dopamine in the synapses between the cells in your brain.

I have no doubt that Mohammed conversed with an unseen other in the darkness of the cave, because we actually have a region of our brains that allows us to converse with unseen others.

The same ability that allows us to pick up an extra thing at the market, because we know our significant other would like it, without making a cell phone call. Or to do a thing that would have pleased Grandma, even though she died 25 years ago.

But to Klaynos's "absolute" requirement. I think it is "good enough" to get consensus of your peers.

There is no more absolute judge available.

after all, any unseen other you conceive of, that does not exist in objective reality is by definition imaginary and therefore not absolute...at least another scientist, or a pastor is a real human being, that is not you, and therefore a member of objective reality

isn't it convenient that we can turn to objective reality and ask it what is real

klaynos,

Well yes its frustrating, but you are setting artificial limits as well. For instance you believe it is true that people sometimes hallucinate something that effects multiple senses. If you were to give me an example of this, I would believe it too. We both make a distinction between what is real, and what is going on in our model of reality that is not accurate. That is we can both discern between what is peer reviewed, waking reality, and what is due to mental breakdowns, dreams, drugs, and common beliefs.

I for instance cried when the place that put my dog to sleep sent me a postcard about meeting Shady again, running across the field to greet me as I crossed the rainbow bridge.

I know there is no such bridge, in reality.

Regards, TAR

(yet I have real tears running down my face right now)

and you, Klaynos, know that there is not a rainbow bridge in reality, but you also know that I am real and I once had a real dog named shady, and that there is a vet that sends out cards about the rainbow bridge that can verify my story

you know its true, because it is true in more than one way

peer review is what we go to, to check we have not fooled ourself into believing what we wanted to believe

but we are already pretty sure the thing is real because it satisfied all our tests and senses and we already checked that it was true in more than one way

Peer review would be pointless if we did not believe that other scientists were real and could run the same checks that we ran and get the same results, because the thing we were modeling actually was out there to be tested against our model, for a match.

Except how can the pellet experience less time in one direction than the other?

If you fired a highly polished and reflective spherical pellet through an evacuated track, to a very tiny degree it should look like an oblate spheroid to the rest frame, right?

Could you not aim various lasers from various angles at a point in the track where the pellet will cross, and judge by the landing spots of the reflections, on screens very far from the pellet, for leverage, the oblateness?

So is there any miniscule amount of length contraction/time dilation that the pellet will undergo in the direction of fire that would not occur in the vertical direction, that could be measured and determined shorter and quicker for the pellet that traveled?

String Junky,

I am sorry for interrupting and deflecting the question from its purpose.

Was is more about the simultaneity of decent, where the video ignored your question by dropping the bullet where the fired bullet landed?

​Regards, TAR

As in, does the velocity cause any length contraction/time dilation?

IOW, the problem as typically stated does not suffer to any large degree from the problems you noted.

Right. Not to any large degree. Just for answering the question yes or no as to whether the bullets hit the ground at the same time, you have to say no. Any intuitive shooter elevates above the tangent automatically, after seeing the level shot fall short, anyway. And as soon as you have elevation, you go up before you fall, and the fired bullet does actually spend more time in flight then a dropped bullet, and the firer may well consider a sight elevation "level". So right, the problem does not suffer from the problems I stated to any large degree

Regards, TAR

Well wait, my thinking is a little off, as the M16 muzzle velocity is 2900 ft per sec, and an object falls 16 ft in the first sec, so the round will hit the ground before the pole. So lets shoot the thing from a 30ft platform and have the laser mark at 30ft 8 inches. And at the pole where a tangent line has also been marked at ground level, the mark is 8 inches off the ground, so when the bullet hits the ground at the muzzle it will have fallen 30 ft at the pole, and still be traveling.

I can accept a spherical cow as a general case, but we actually live on a sphere, and if common sense would have a person think it would take an M16 round longer to hit the ground, and that is actually true, why attempt to show they are wrong by dropping out the very element that makes it true?

What is interesting is that in order to actually hit a target a mile away you have to adjust your sights so the barrel is elevated above the tangent.

you have to make a parabolic shot...a tangent shot, from eye level will hit the ground prior the mile away target, which is what the general case law is meant to illustrate

Except if you set a tangent line with a laser at 5 ft high and marked a pole a mile away (on the salt flats with no hills or walls) and put an M16 level on this tangent line, and fired it, while dropping a round from muzzle height, the round has to lose 5ft 8 inches of height to hit the ground at the pole where it loses 5 ft of height to hit the ground below the muzzle. It obviously takes longer to fall 5.67 ft than it takes to fall 5 ft.

Nothing to do with relativity yet, but gravity is gravity and curvature is curvature. If your thought experiment was on a very small spherical asteroid, and not the Earth, the tangent shot (oxygen injected to facilitate the explosion) would possibly miss the asteroid and go into elliptical orbit.

 

You really should have provided more information.

So I have offered an amendment to your OP and title, hope you don't mind.

 

 

A bullet fired horizontally from a gun and a bullet dropped from the same height as the muzzle will reach the ground after the same journey time, ignoring the curvature of the Earth and wind resistance.

 

This is because both bullets start with zero vertical velocity and are only subject to the same (vertical) distance to ground and (vertical) acceleration.

Studiot,

I wonder why, in the exercise, the curvature of the Earth is dropped from consideration. In the intuitive consideration of the problem, it seems to make sense, that because of the distance from the launch and the Earth curving away, the bullet will take longer to reach the ground, because in actuality the vertical trip IS longer. In fact, if you start high enough and fire a projectile horizontally to the ground the bullet will take a very long time to hit the ground, as it could continue to miss the ground and be in orbit.

Regards, TAR

Could but not likely it happen that way in every case of a sensed human. That is, we each have our own model of the place, and that model is by definition imaginary or illusory and prone to error and differences, but in all cases of model building, the model is of something, and according to everything I have read, everything I have heard and everything I have seen, smelled, touched, tasted, and everything you and I have conversed about, the reality that science seeks to model is real and is something that we both have in common.

besides a person can not be a creation of his own mind, because he would need a real mind to be the creation of, in which case the mind in question exists

Strange,

Well all the proof that is required is for one person to "sense" another and for the other, at the same time to "sense" the one, and then for the two to compare models. If the "common" model has it that there is the one and there is the other and there is an entire universe common to and outside the both, then the one, the other and the rest, are real.

Regards, TAR

except the solipsist has the problem of determining the "real" population of reality

if it is only her that is real and all else, other than she is deemed by her, to be illusion, then the total number of entities that exist in reality is one

This can only be the case if such a wonderer is reality itself...in other words, it can only be the case if all that we are calling the waking world, or reality, is occurring in the mind of God and she, the solipsist, is God.

I don't think this is the case, nor would it provide any discussion points, since she would already know she was alone and had no one to talk to, or any entity to run into, that was not created in her own imagination.

I think it more reasonable to assume that reality exists and we each build our own model (image) of it, from what of it we sense.

now it is possible that God got lonely and invented the world, and we are each just a piece of her consciousness, and it is our job to be a single point of consciousness, pretending to be separate from her, in order to witness the rest as "something else"...but in that case, I would have to say she is a great illusionist, and we might as well just play along, being that the alternative is to tell her she IS alone

Perhaps something makes "sense" when it is confirmed by more than one sense. Then it is true, in more than one way. Add peer review, and you have confirmation from someone else's senses. It then is confirmed as making sense because it all fits together in the waking world, and has its own, non illusion type reality, without ANY requirement that any particular individual thinks its true.

knock on wood

There are dozens of essay checkers, that I have used, and not all of them are really.....effective. Are there are good, free essay checkers?

Silverghoul1,

As Strange said, you are the best essay checker available. For instance read your above question out loud or to yourself as if someone else was reading it, and see if it makes complete sense.

You will easily find the word you meant was not the word you wrote. An automated checker, not knowing what you meant, would not be able to pick that up, for sure.

Besides, if you know in what manner the checkers you used were insufficient, you must have some good idea of what a good checker would do. So do that.

Regards, TAR

Human judgement is the best judge. Why use someone else's judgment when you have a human judge available for free, that is always willing to check your work. Read it like it was written by someone else, who you knew had made some errors and might have some weak construction or have failed to supply some element you would have wanted present. Then you find the weakness, correct it, and it is even more your work than it was before. You are your own best critic. That is also the bedrock of scientific checking of one's own hypothesis. Look hard for the reasons why it won't work. Turn it over and over and look at it from every direction...and when you find a flaw, correct it...and look again.

Pay attention to agreement, that one part of your sentence agrees with the other in tense and mood and such, and make sure you are using idioms correctly and completing ideas that might be spread out over several clauses. If it "sounds" wrong it is wrong. Fix it. It has to make sense. It has to work. It has to express the thought you wished to share.

or lets say a phase transition normally happens to universes of our type when they are 100 billion years old and something quite different starts happening everywhere

local stars would look the same as always for 3 years at least, and then one by one close stars would exhibit the new behavior,

Stars everywhere else in the galaxy would look the old way for up to 100,000 years, and still after they changed appearance the rest of the galaxies local to us, would look like nothing new happened.

I think it is safe to say, philosophically, that the universe has not yet done what it is going to do.

while everything we see the universe do is something that it already did a long time ago

we are basing the idea of an accelerating expanding universe on what of it we see at the moment

That is looks like it is expanding now, could mean it was expanding before, and now it is not, or it could be contracting now, and we would not know about that until evidence arrived, which given the size of the place, could take a while to get here.

BeeCee,

On topic because we are talking about the reality of the universe...in 600billion years. Hardly realistic. And exactly as accessible to philosophy as it is to science. Even the scientific claims of possible reality in 600billion years admit that the Solar system and maybe even the Galaxy will not be the same by then...so it is very far from being empirically testable today, and whether my take is reasonable or logical to the same or lesser extent than a scientist's take, we are both getting about 600billion years ahead of our selves and we are talking about a universe that is quite huge, as if it is all happening at once, which it obviously is not.

So a scientific model would have the whole universe behaving according to a simple gas law and some principles of Newton's and Einstein's. A philosophical model would have the whole universe behaving as the universe behaves, and the important bits would be what we experience of it, not what it is doing right now a ly from here, but what light and energy from everywhere is hitting the planet now.

In someway the second take is more empirically based than the first.

So is reality what we know must be the case, or what we experience. That is, when we see the Mars Rover about to run into a hidden ditch, the Rover has actually already been in the ditch for some amount of minutes. Which take is real?

Regards, TAR

I was watching the Yankees live yesterday and at the same time watching live stats on my Yahoo Fantasy league. I watched a homerun and looked down to see my hr total increment, and it was already incremented. I guess there is a several second delay in the broadcast to give the station time to bleep out an inappropriate comment, whereas the stat feed beat the TV broadcast to my family room.

my daughter, unknown to me, was actually at the game several rows back from where the homerun landed which I did not know until after I had texted her a comment about the game

She actually had experienced the hr firsthand before even the stat feed was informed.

last football season my now PhD daughter at VT would watch a game off the internet while I was watching it on ESPN. I learned to not text her congratulations on a VT score, because she had not seen it happen yet, since the internet feed was behind the ESPN feed

while when she was at a game, she could text me a happening before I saw it on ESPN

"While we will continue to receive signals from this location in space, even if we wait an infinite amount of time, a signal that left from that location today will never reach us. Additionally, the signals coming from that location will have less and less energy and be less and less frequent until the location, for all practical purposes, becomes unobservable."

​Which is what I understood. It does not mean the image ever stops coming. It just gets slower and weaker. What is practical in 600 billion years may be impractical at the moment.

so if there are areas of space beyond the CMB, I could imagine that there may be some that we would never see the first light from, but everything between us and the CMB we have already seen the first light from, so there is only the second, third, fourth and 13.8billionth light that we will see from those areas of space. There is not a reason for their light to all of a sudden not be able to reach us, it is already on its way and it can only get longer in wavelength it can not decide not to get to us