swansont

Not sure how this would be applicable to physical objects I don’t see this as having a lot of traction; you can certainly investigate what happens if the constants have different values and see how (or that) things fail to work — changing the characteristics of fusion, for example. What we might not know is whether you can change only some of the constants without affecting others, but I’m not sure how that gets tested. There’s a limit to any irregularities for similar reasons. If the nature of interactions were inconsistent, how do we end up where we are? How do we get data of various vintages that’s all consistent with the interactions being the same?

You posted about science and technology, and it’s up to the presenter of these things to show that their work is valid and correct. That’s a hurdle everyone has to overcome; it’s not bias. The work is compared against how nature behaves, so if the idea doesn’t measure up to that, it’s not biased to reject it. Einstein was talking about inspiration and intuition, which are important, especially in coming up with something new. He wasn’t talking about just making stuff up, untethered from reality, and he was in no way implying that knowledge is unimportant. Why can’t you test it and show the results? Without specifics it’s impossible to say for sure, but lots of ideas run afoul of experiments that have already been done, which means they get rejected out of had.

Yes, tariffs are killing us. You handed it to me so it’s nacho problem, but the news is not grate. Not gouda at all.

The thing about the US situation is that Trump is alienating almost everybody to some degree. The ones not directly affected by the fascism are or will be affected by the repercussions of it (farming labor shortfalls, and possibly construction) which will drive up costs. His tariffs and gutting food-based aid programs are angering the farmers who supported him but now can’t sell their crops. The tax cuts for the rich are at the expense of healthcare, which are poised to skyrocket. The attorney general even managed to piss off the gun rights people. And the Epstein files loom large. Plus, everybody can see that Portland and Chicago aren’t war zones. The frogs and chickens, et. al, are making sure of that.

It’s a matter of how many photons it emits. With a dark-adapted eye, you can discern 5-7 photons hitting the retina, but because there are losses in getting there, around 50 or so photons need to hit the eye. How many have to be emitted is an issue of the geometry of the situation. https://research.physics.illinois.edu/QI/Photonics/pdf/PWDec16Holmes.pdf A 1 mW source pulsing for 1 microsecond is emitting something like 10 billion photons Color sensitivity is a factor; you are much more sensitive to green than red or blue, but within the so-called visible range (400nm - 700nm) this is around a factor of 10.

Why they work is the underlying science, which you have to understand to decipher all this. Isn’t it faster to just learn science to understand how the universe behaves? To what biases are you referring?

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WTF does that even mean? I don’t agree because it’s demonstrably wrong. There aren’t two sides here. There is a standard we expect in science discussions; either you meet it or you don’t. Much like I said about televangelists earlier: they might have started out as true believers, but at some point they get corrupted by the money to be made.

The fact that you’re calling it anecdotal evidence points to one issue. Also, you’re hardly the first person to be challenged to provide a better accounting than “I heard/saw it in a show” One reason people get called out for this is that it’s really easy to misremember the details or the context. There’s a decent chance the show was talking about people in the middle ages, because there’s a misconception that flat earth persisted as the prevailing thought persisted far longer than it did. I made a statement and your response was that there was no evidence of it being true. I don’t see how that’s supposed to count as “basically agreeing” Asking for better/proper support for your claim is supposed to be a message for you to improve the quality of your response. But you apparently decided that the real problem is that I pointed out the deficiency.

linking to bio pages with no information on the topic is not actually helpful. One might count it as just more trolling. IOW, who TF cares what you claim they think? OTOH, the wikipedia page disagrees, with examples and lots of actual citations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth Looking for actual evidence is better than guessing.

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I was talking about how followers might believe even if the leader doesn’t, regardless of the leader’s motivation. (Though it’s possible some religious leaders start as believers and only get corrupted later)

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And while some might not truly believe and are in it for the lulz or the grift, they can convince others, who do. (see e.g. televangelists)

Trump was apparently threatening tariffs and other actions against Norway if he didn’t win. Copying the strategy of Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama seemed like such a good idea, too!

Ancient civilizations did. Lady Elizabeth Blount led an organization that did, ca 1900. Some of it might be simply contrarianism. People who have arrived at a position emotionally tend to dig in and double down when confronted with facts that challenge them.

True for hardcore bigots as well. The whole worldview is built on certain things being true, and they will fight with all their being against accepting objective facts that contradict it, because if they did their whole world comes tumbling down. Facts and reason won’t sway them because that’s not how they got to where they are. It was indoctrination and emotion.

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It has to start there, anyway. If you can’t do it in physics, you can’t do it with physics plus anything else.

In TNG there was a crystalline life form that called the humans/humanoids “ugly bags of mostly water” (Home Soil)

You need to have your answers be outside of the quote box https://scienceforums.net/topic/135919-using-the-quote-function-2025-edition/ “To break up the quoted material, to respond to a specific section, put the cursor in the text box and hit return/enter a few times, and it will split the quote box in two, with a place for you to respond in between them.”

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One thread per topic, please

I’m not even sure about organic chemistry, and I don’t think that it’s a fundamental biological requirement that life be based on the building blocks we observe on earth. Organisms have to have some way to utilize energy, with an intake and expulsion of waste. Those trace back to thermodynamics anyway. I also think that some aspects of biology would get rewritten if it’s realized that they are, in fact, earth-centric. The earth case would be a subset. Nothing new there, really, since refinement has already happened in other disciplines when we learned new things (e.g. phlogiston, atomic models) But I also think that there’s a chunk of biology that’s “applied biology” and it’s already understood that it’s specific to earth. I think physics and chemistry have an advantage in that there are no big holes in them stemming from us only being on earth. We can observe physics and chemistry happening elsewhere, to some extent, because photons get to us. There aren’t any gaps in the periodic table, and the standard model’s deficiencies don’t seem to include missing particles that readily interact. What we learn that’s new in them happens as we dive deeper into them and push boundaries But biology can only look at what’s happening in a certain slice of conditions, so it might very well be far less complete. There might be low-hanging fruit out there on some alien tree that’s just not available to us (yet)

On the contrary, the rules of biology should be the same everywhere, it’s the results that can differ. It would be like arguing that two rivers aren’t the same because the rules of fluid flow vary. And we don’t assert that - we realize that it’s the variables and boundary conditions that differ. Biology has lots of variables and boundary conditions.