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Radical Edward

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Everything posted by Radical Edward

  1. well a better way to put it is to say that space and time are dimensions. separation in space and time are described by spacetime vectors.
  2. precisely. the most extreme form of a faraday cage is a hollow metal sphere. obviously in there you're safe. now make lots of really tiny holes, you'll still be safe because it's easier for the electrons to flow around the cage, since the resistance is lower. there would be no effect on the potential difference between two point of the cage.
  3. it doesn't. That's a load of bullshit.
  4. good question. We know space has properties like electrical permittivity, permeability and curvature, but as to what it is, well it could just be an artefact of how things work. The problem is that at the moment we don't have a background independent description of the universe.
  5. hai! I'm Radical Edward, I was one of the earliest members here and was even a moderator for a good while, but I vanished for a long time but now I have returned. I introduced lucaspa to the place. he's a dude.
  6. good to see you I always knew you wouldn't blow yourself up, you're too good for that.
  7. well if we're going to propose intelligent design, then what is intelligence?
  8. well in principle it could have done, just like we use evolution to make things from aircraft wings to circuits and antenna. However the whole exercise makes an intelligent designer a bit redundant when we're talking about the creation and evolution of life, since the algorithm variables would never generate anything with any function other than to carry on reproducing (unlike say an antenna, where the selection criteria are tweaked to produce better antenna)
  9. the point is, that intelligent designs do not show the patterns that evolutionary designs do. For example in my car I have a radio and a CD player. the CD player has a laser in it, but that laser was not designed by car manufacturers or co-opted from a part of a horse and carriage. It was co-opted from a completely different area of development in semiconductors. evolution cannot do this, and thus the patterns of inheritance in terms of where structures come from is totally different.
  10. erm, no. the time dilation goes so far it turns inside out. think about scaling an object by -1 in the x direction, you end up with a mirror image.
  11. not bacteria, but pubic lice and head live have certainly speciated. Looking at their genes, we even know roughly when.
  12. actually no. The earliest mentions of the idea of dark matter are related to galactic rotation curves. when one looks at the distribution of matter in a galaxy, the orbital valocity should drop off towards the edge of the galaxy, but it doesn't, the orbital velocity in the outer regions remains roughly constant. This means there must be some additional mass further out towards the edge of the galaxy that we can't see. Given that we can even see dust and so on from its effect on the spectra of the galaxies, it follows that some of this mass shouldn't interact electromagnetically, rendering it "dark" and so the idea of dark matter was born. nope, as lucaspa says, the universe has no (observable) edge. the 13.7 billion years is calculated principally from the CMB. we can quite clearly see that the CMB is a black body spectrum, and these are only formed by things in thermal equilibrium. Since the universe is quite obviously not in equilibrium, it follows that in the past it must have been. The only way for it to be in thermal equilibrium between matter and energy was at a point where the temperature of hydrogen was above the ionization point, and once this point was crossed, hydrogen became transparent and equilibrium was broken. By looking at the temperature of the CMB now (4.7K) and the opacity-transition temp of hydrogen, we can work out how old the universe is. It has nothing to do with how far we can see.
  13. you're looking at a diffraction pattern around little bits of cells and things floating around in your vitreous humor. it should be fine. The latter I am not sure about as it depends if you're staring or not. if you stare, then the opsins in the yellow spot of your eye will be used up faster than they recharge and you can get some odd effects if you move your eye just a little then you "see" an inverted impression of what you saw before. A particularly intense version of this is if you stare at a dark object on a light background for 30 seconds, then look away (even close your eyes) you'll see a light version of the dark object.
  14. electrons obey the Pauli Exclusion principle, which states that no two identical fermions can occupy the same atomic levels. Electrons obey this, and fall into the fermi distribution, so they are identical.
  15. look at it this way. At high velocity, you get length contraction, so what looks like 10 light years here on earth would not look like 10 light years if you were flying from earth to a distant star at 0.999999x the speed of light.
  16. the thing to look at here is the Lorentz Transforms, which are deduced from simple geometrical considerations, where the speed of light in vacuum © for all observers is a constant. (It is a constant because the permittivity and permeability of free space are invariant with velocity, leading to Einstein's extending Galilean relativity to include electromagnetics) for a more detailed look, the Lorentz Transforms but here they are anyway: looking at the top one, we can get the time dilation: on the right hand side, the delta_t is the time between two events for one observer, and on the left hand side, delta_t' is the measured time between those same two events for another observer travelling at velocity v with respect to the first. now if we make delta_t=1 for simplicity, and make v=sqrt(2)*c, then on the right hand side you get delta_t' = 1/sqrt(-1) which is 1/(+/-)i seconds. and that doesn't make alot of sense. the real core of all this lies in the fact that we're all travelling at c, but through spacetime. in a rest frame, we see all of our velocity in the t direction, but as two objects move relative to one another, some of the velocity gets transferred out of the t direction into one of the spatial directions. light however has all of its velocity in the spatial directions, and none in t.
  17. the core reason that Evolution produces "not really ideal" results is because it is an inheriting process - all modifications are made on the template of previous generations, which leads to the inevitable Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg contraptions. Intelligent design can eliminate this, because the design is created conceptually before it is implemented in the real world, and so there is no need to replace the horse with an engine, and leave the straps tethered to the fuel line, which is the sort of thing you end up with in evolution. the fact is that we see these patterns of modification when we look at the phylogenetic trees. We see whales and dolphins with digits in their flippers and genes for smell even though these things are totally unnecessary. we see the recurrent laryngeal nerve looping under the aorta and so on. These things have simple explanations so far as evolution goes and can be tracked right through the various species, however ID is at a loss to explain them, unless they admit that their designer is incompetent.
  18. the usual thing "no new information" "microevolutinary changes only - no goo to you via the zoo" "pre-programmed adaptivity" and so on. As a rule, creationsts don't explain things, they come up with crappy handwavy palm-offs and demand something stupid, like bacteria with legs.
  19. radiation resistant crops? Guess I'd better invest in post-apocalyptic breweries then.
  20. mostly in the evolution and creation bits of other fora. I currently spend most of my time over here heh, thanks again I had alot of good times here. Is YT2095 still building mad stuff?
  21. oh thanks nice to see people recall me. No idea why I thought of this forum after such a long time. I guess I am just sick of stupid creationists
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