Radical Edward

Space is the separation between objects. Time is the separation between states of a system. Time and space are very related. You can see from what is said that they are similar, but not identical ideas. The magnitude of the separations are relative and dependent on the energy of the system in a reference frame.

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.

I find mitochondria fascinating due to their close match to bacteria in terms of protein modifications and loose DNA structure (not packed in chromosomes like human DNA) and plasmids etc... Plants also have chloroplasts which seem bacterial-like in several respects. However, I don't know if I would classify that as an evolutionary event - I would rather treat it as a case of symbiosis with subsequent accommodation.

well they have evolved to live in the cell.

Anyway there doesn't seem to be any requirement for a Faraday cage to be isolated from earth or completely enclosing (hence "cage" rather than "box")

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.

 

In atoms? How does this work, it's news to me...

 

it doesn't. That's a load of bullshit.

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.

aah my legacy lives on.

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.

good to see you I always knew you wouldn't blow yourself up, you're too good for that.

Radical and iNow, I am speaking of the possibility of a form ofintelligent design, wherein the intelligence lies within the ground rules. And, to repeat the point, the intelligence need not be omnipotent, and it may be contingent and ad hoc in its application. There is nothing in evolution, as presently understood, that excludes intelligent design.

The counter statement is, of course, "but there is no need for it, and no evidence". I would question that, citing for example, the suggestive precision of the fundamental constants, without which life would be impossible. Now this is moving us off topic, I'm simply pointing out that while ID is a no-no, id is worth a further look.

well if we're going to propose intelligent design, then what is intelligence?

you know this is annoying, why couldn't a "greater entity" have worked through evolution?

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)

Not exactly true. It is, after all, called intelligent design, not omnipotent design.

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.

that's just grim.

so, in essence, what would be time travel in my frame of reference would only be time dilation in yours? doesn't that mean that true time travel (transporting yourself into the past) is impossible?

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.

If I understand you correctly, are you saying that the level of mutations are causing new species to arise on human bodies? Is there any evidence for this process?

not bacteria, but pubic lice and head live have certainly speciated. Looking at their genes, we even know roughly when.

aah those pesky CDesign Proponentsists.

Dark matter exist between the earlobes of people who believe in the Big Bang. Because without dark matter and dark energy you can't have your Big Bang. And that would be sacrilegious. Much easier believing in matter you can't detect (wimps and/or machos; give me a break) and energy coming out of nowhere making the galaxies go faster. All in the name of science??? I need to start snortin' some of that bb dust. It's a better drug then the ones I've been taking.

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.

Is 13.7 b ly years the edge of the universe or not? Obviouly it it not.

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.

Only three years later, but I too am and have been experiencing this same vision peculiarity and only as of today decided to implore the internet for an explanation. When either outside or looking outside (much like your experience) I see tiny flashes of lights flow and zip about without pattern (sometimes long curved movements, sometimes zig-zagging spastically. You can actually see the depth in their flight as, at times, one will cross behind another. While inside (not looking out the window), on a day-to-day bases, I see (what only can be described as) an odd blanket of pulsating light over (essentially) everything I look at. It’s difficult to discern if it is on top of the object itself or a wall just before it, but none-the-less, it’s there. If – by chance – you still frequent this site or if anyone you there may have heard/knows of this occurrence, I am all ears. Being a hypochondriac, my hope is that it is not a tumor (a doctor’s visit is on the radar screen ).

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.

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.

if i were to travel to a star...say 5 light years away (10 LR round trip) at 99.99999999 percent the speed of light and then come back to earth...which of the following would occur:

 

1) 10 years would pass for me (the traveler) where thousands of years would pass for those back on earth or,

 

2) a few hours would pass for me due to time and space dilation, and 10 years would pass for those back on earth

 

thanks

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.

what i'm getting from that is that faster-than-light will be seen as moving back in time. how so? if it is viewed as going back in time, does that mean you would pop up (let's say) yesterday? why is that? just because you're going ridiculously fast doesn't mean that you should be able to return to before you started. unless light defines/governs time...

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.

Evolution is imperfect by its very nature - too many random variables.

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.

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.

radiation resistant crops? Guess I'd better invest in post-apocalyptic breweries then.

Where ya been hiding all this time?

mostly in the evolution and creation bits of other fora. I currently spend most of my time over here

Radical Edward, great to have you back! A legend steps out of the pages of history.

 

I hope you'll stay to recharge your intellectual batteries.

heh, thanks again I had alot of good times here. Is YT2095 still building mad stuff?

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