lemur

The young elephants were orphaned and moved to the reserve. The people at the reserve were unaware of elephants ever killing rhinos, so they weren't even the suspected killers. It was a surprise when they began witnessing the elephants killing the rhinos. They suspected the problem was caused by the fact they had been orphaned and moved to the reserve. They brought in older elephants to see if this would make a difference and did. They concluded the problem was caused by removing the young from their herd, and that bringing in older elephants resolved the problem. That is just what happened and I do not want to argue with you.

All I was pointing out is that these are very broad-stroke observations that have underlying causation.

Now, as far as I am concerned, if an adult is willing to take on the risks of an activity (for whatever reason), they are entitled to. So many people talk about freedoms, but this is actually what freedom means. You have to accept that people are willing to take risks that you might not take yourself. They should have that freedom if you want the freedom NOT to have to undertake an activity that you feel is too risky.

 

It is a two way street. If you want the freedom, you have to give that freedom to others, even if it makes you feel uncomfortable.

I think people misunderstand the historical context in which freedom and democracy were embraced as an alternative to authoritarian rule. The basic logic was that intelligent free people can govern themselves on the basis of reasonable judgment. This is an ideal. The question is what to do when free people do not base their self-governance on reasonable judgment. Now, you can argue that what constitutes "reasonable judgment" is totally subjective and arbitrary, but you can also allow people to defend their reasons against others that are concerned with abuses of freedom causing detriment, whether it's people harming others or themselves. Again, you can claim that people have the right to harm themselves, but you can also ask what could be influencing a person that would lead them to choose to harm themselves. An obvious example would be someone who is subjecting themselves to violent physical abuse to gain respect of peers. Obviously such a person should be stopped from damaging themselves for this purpose if possible. So if you can recognize that there are some instances when people abuse their freedom to harm themselves and others, then it just becomes a question of determining which situations merit what level of intervention. Freedom is the ultimate ideal goal but in order to achieve it, obstacles to freedom must be removed. Addictions, authoritarianism, irrational fears, etc. are all examples of things that impede the human ability to freely self-govern according to reasonable judgment. A person who chooses to engage in prostitution to garner sufficient cash to buy a drug fix, for example, is not engaged in free self-governance on the basis of reasonable judgment. A person who chooses to experiment with prostitution in a controlled way might be, but the question becomes whether isolated experiments can be so easily contained or if they always end up being a "gateway" to further experimentation and ultimately addiction. Really, more research should be done into these kinds of activities because it would be truly interesting to discover that there are individuals who practice prostitution, drug-use, etc. without any detriment to their free will. In my observation, though, however there are so many people whose free will is lacking just because of legal addictions like consumerism and peer-approval-seeking/submission. It would be nice, though, if there was more cultural knowledge about how to achieve free reasonable self-governance for more people because I think life would be better for everyone if there weren't so many people desperately submitting to all sorts of freedom-sacrifices in service of authoritarian culture(s) of social validation.

Can anything really be fully accomplished and can anything be done without some force? I could replace national with lawn or human, etc. and come up with a similar question.

Maybe I should be more specific and note that nationalists always seem to have enemies. I.e. it never seems like everyone in the world is just content to be nationalistic and support other nationalists' efforts to police regions of 'foreigners' and structurally produce strong national economies. So the question is why nationalism never attempts to understand what other views might be possible instead of treating everyone who doesn't commit themselves to a nation and do everything possible to support it as a problem. Another way to put it is to ask how popular global freedom and migration would be if it weren't for all the nationalist force being applied to maintain strong solidarity and containment within national regions.

If someone is making $50 an hour, or $400 a day, the the difference in cost of a $600 plane ticket and a $200 ocean ticket is 1 day of work. If the ocean liner can't get you there in 2 days, then the person had better be able to do work while traveling; otherwise you are paying them to sit around. If it's a vacation, then you're talking about ~2 weeks of travel on top of the time at the destination. If it's last-minute for any reason, there is no other option, which is why those tickets are more expensive.

 

What you are arguing is a fundamentally different culture, but that's not how your first post framed the question.

That might be because I don't view radical cultural differences as fundamentally different. Rather, I should say that I don't share the view that cultures of norms and economic structuring are as fixed and defined as they seem to appear to many people. Look at the current economy, for example. On the one hand the news is always full of recession, budget cuts, calls for stimulus and job-creation, etc. yet on the other hand the media and everyday life is full of examples of unprecedented wealth and energy/resource-consumption. So it seems that both cultural pressures are present, but it is unclear what will cause people to start radically expanding their horizons as to what kind of culture and technologies to create to allow more people to live well within the parameters of what Earth can provide.

That's all phrased very global and philosophical, but in terms of your fiscal analysis, the issue is that increasingly less people will be making the high wages you speak of, and as a result more people will not be able to afford expensive plane tickets. So as economic restructuring redistributes jobs in a way that allows more people to work less, because it is not worth the resource drain to have more people working more, they end up having to save more for lower-priced means of transit. It makes economic sense that if less labor is needed, then people can organize the labor they do into shorter blocks of weeks/months leaving more time available for surface travel. Sailing just makes sense as fuel grows increasingly expensive and elite. Obviously elite culture will continue for a very long time, but that doesn't interest me as much as how mass-culture will evolve to accommodate more people with scarcer resources and fuel/energy.

If only science could be left to improve the world, without interference from politics and religion.

It would be free from such interference if it could figure out the causes of social-political strife and provide potential solutions. Personally, I think that science has already done this by providing the means to calculate what level of energy-use is feasible at the broadest global level. Since it doesn't seem feasible to extend western levels of energy/resource consumption to everyone in developing economies, it is logical that stratification can only decrease by bringing developed world energy-consumption closer to that of the developing world. I think that this would also remove much of the impetus for terrorism, since there would no longer be cause for jealousy and migration-conflict. Large nuclear-powered ships might actually be the best use of nuclear fuel in a world where people live very light and everyone wishes to travel/migrate around the world freely. If everyone was allowed to go wherever they wanted and practice their religion and other culture freely, why would there be terrorism?

There are any number of round vegetables that could be sliced to make any width wheel.

The main thrust of this article is on airships (blimps, dirigibles), but they have an analysis of power vs speed, and power(energy) is a proxy for cost. Moving people around has similar arguments.

 

http://www.scientifi...neve-2011-05-27

I would like to past the chart from this article into the thread but I'm not sure how to do it. I was able to select it and click "copy image" but uploading an image requires a url it seems.

Anyway, freight trains, cargo ships, and semi trucks are all clustered into the bottom left corner to show airships and jet aircraft as outlyers. I would like to see such a chart that includes passenger vehicles, sailing vessels, and maybe motorcycles.

Time is money. I can fly just about anywhere in a day. If the goal is to be at my destination, flying is worth it. The mere existence of airlines show that other people think it is, too.

Yes, time is money because an economic culture has evolved in which it seems as if the more we do, i.e. the more labor and energy we expend, the more economic value there is to be created - limitlessly. In reality this is not the case though, since inefficiency and waste actually produce more deprivation for more people. If there was unlimited energy and resources, then it would always make economic sense to work harder and faster to produce more because doing so would logically lead to sufficient means of consumption being produced for the maximum number of people. As it is, however, I would say that most energy/resources/labor gets wasted on maintaining non-essential cultural prerogatives of privileged developed economies.

What I'm thinking is that if everyone in the world wanted to become rich enough to fly around in passenger jets all the time, there wouldn't be enough resources for that. However, if fleets of sailing vessels were once again free to roam the continents, and they didn't destroy each other and sink in storms, etc., this could be a means for everyone globally to travel the world using only wind energy. It would indeed take a lot more time, but is time really money when people are using it to waste energy and resources?

Once upon a time, sailing ships dominated intercontinental transit. Today, passenger jets have replaced the function sailing ships once had. Do you think it would be possible for sailing ships to bear all intercontinental traffic once again? If they did, do you think intercontinental travel would decrease due to the inconvenience or do you think sailing ships could provide sufficient convenience to satisfy modern consumers despite the long travel duration?

Lemur, sometimes you're plainly wrong. I understand that you're searching for answers, but you seem to insist on being so defensive about your own point of view, it tends to make the argument completely moot.

 

Either you want to know what mainstream (workable, testable, empirically proven) physics say on the matter, or you wish to stick to your guns and play allknowing. There's nothing wrong with being wrong. There's a lot wrong with insisting you're right when the evidence is against you.

 

This wordplay games and defensive redefinitions are really unhelpful here. Getting things wrong is how we learn.

If I was somehow strawmanning the frame-relative definitions of potential energy given, than I apologize. There is a difference between the existence of potential energy in physical systems and the framing of it for analysis and measurement. My concern was that potential energy was being explained as something more abstract than kinetic energy, i.e. because it is latent instead of manifest. I agree that potential energy can't be directly observed except in terms of how much kinetic energy is released or how much force it exerts, but I still think it is correct to acknowledge that it exists regardless of how it is framed. Swansont resolved that conflict in a recent post. I don't think you should be pushing me to abandon my point of view and adopt some other "mainstream" point of view instead. There are different ways to express things and by allowing differences to interact, critical rigor subjects knowledge to scrutiny and stimulates it to check and defend itself. That is not a bad thing. You claiming that it's unhelpful ignores the fact that the OP in the PE thread may well have understood the insistence on frame-relativity the same way I was, i.e. as an absolute relativism of energy, which Swansont clarified it is not. Whether or not you recognize it, that ambiguity was present in the thread that this all emerged from. Denying that just buries the problem in order to assert that orthodoxy is always right and never misunderstood; and that's overzealous, imo.

There is nothing to disagree with. Nobody has made this claim. DrRocket told you that this was utterly wrong at the outset of the thread.

 

You are misusing "frame" here. A frame of reference is a coordinate system. Other frames of reference move at some speed with respect to it. The amount of potential energy is defined in terms of location; you have X amount of potential energy with respect to some position. If you choose another position, you have a different amount of potential energy. It is not an absolute. The existence of potential energy does not depend on the choice of the reference point.

 

It can vary between frames because, as I explained before, invariant and conserved do not mean the same thing.

Maybe "utterly wrong" was just insufficiently specific and I ended up interpreting it to mean that things were wrong that weren't actually wrong. Suffice to say there was miscommunication, though it was not entirely my fault because the things I was saying were not wrong.

Nationalists have two primary goals: 1) policing of regional populations against 'foreigners.' 2) increasing the prosperity of the national economy for the benefit of citizens. Can these two goals ever be totally achieved in practice and, if not, will people ever stop using force to try?

A much shorter summary:

 

Since potential energy can be arbitrarily defined, what matters is the potential energy difference between two states. If I start with 0 potential and proceed to -10, that's 10 units of energy freed up to do something else. The fact that I had 0 at the beginning is irrelevant, since negative potential isn't a problem.

 

So if something has a potential energy of 0 in some chosen system, that doesn't mean it cannot move. Perhaps other states have negative potential energies.

If you believe that a dead battery has no potential energy, just take it out of your car and drop it on your foot.

 

Thermodynamics texts are filled with engines that operate by taking gas in one state of thermodynamic equilibrium and extracting work, resulting in another state of thermodynamic equilibrium.

 

Go read the book.

Ok, you're both giving reasons why framing is useful and how potential energy is empirically demonstrable beyond whatever framing is applied. I never disagreed with anything except the implication that potential energy ONLY exists insofar as it is frame-defined. I never said that it COULDN'T be defined according to different framings in ways that would render a particular system as having a specific amount of energy between specified points of reference.

No thanks dropping the dead battery on my foot. I'll try it with the physics books you keep recommending though.

Go read a physics book. There is nothing to debate.

I might not have enough potential energy to read the book if it's beyond my chosen frame of analysis.

Your challenge in the thread on potential energy is invalid because you understand neither, and have made a number of factually incorrect assertions in your "challenge".

You state this in a general way, but the only person who has made any specific claims in that thread was Mooeypoo, who claimed that any object has a potentially unlimited number of frames in which it can be measured as having more potential energy.

If you don't like a definition then what you do is define an alternate term and DEMONSTRATE the benefits of your alternate concept.

The benefit of recognizing potential energy as an empirical fact instead of an artifact of framing is that the law of energy conservation is practically respected as no energy is treated as "final" except insofar as it is framed within a finite context. In practice, an object's/system's energy is not suddenly dissipated because the limits of the frame have been reached, correct? So why wouldn't it be beneficial to recognize energy-potential as a form that kinetic energy takes as it converts from one form to another? Even an object 'at rest' on the ground is pushing against the ground with a certain amount of force, which represents a potential to do work. Why wouldn't it be beneficial to recognize this as frame-independent? Yes, measuring a finite amount of potential energy requires a frame, but so does measuring a finite amount of kinetic energy, no?

What you don't do is pervert the meaning of a well-defined concept and claim that it is something that it is not.

I'm not trying to pervert anything. I'm trying to acknowledge why it is beneficial to frame and measure energy as finite quantities in some applications but it can also be useful to recognize that energy is continuously transforming and dissipating through any series of frames you apply to define it according to specific instances. Plus I think it is misleading to claim that potential energy only exists as a frame-relative concept, because the frame-relativity is an analytical convenience, not a law of nature.

incorrect

I hate to be rude, but making assertions like this with no grounds or explanation is only helpful to someone willing to take you at your word. Do you want to discuss/debate these things or just make absolute claims and expect to have them taken as indisputable fact?

Maybe creating Satan, hell, and the freedom to choose evil over good IS God's marketing plan for heaven. If you believe in reincarnation as a means of experiencing eternal hell on Earth through the reaping of bad karma, everyone no matter how deep they've mired themselves in evil continues to have to option of choosing to confess sin and accept salvation. Admittedly, most Christians I know reject the idea of reincarnation and karma but I find that they are quite compatible with the Christian theology.

There are many tricks and illusions that seem to make sense and are still bunk. How would you propose we sift through what SEEMS true (but isn't) to what SEEMS unreal (but is) without some empirical data? Calculations, mathematics and physical theories with evidence, observations and repeatability are meant to supply exactly that - a consistent method to know what is real *despite* what might *seem* real to us.

 

I can give you a dozen examples of things people think are entirely reasonable but are, in fact, false. The most notable one is "the world is flat". The only reason you might consider this no longer reasonable is because of CURRENT knowledge and satellites and spaceflight, etc. But 2000 years ago, the laymen would undoubtedly argue the scientists who said the world is spherical, since the laymen, walking out and looking at the horizon, saw flat surface.

If we were to accept "logic" without empirical evidence, we'd be still afraid to fall off the edge of the Earth.

I agree with you. I really do. I would just point out that there's a difference between simply accepting the world is round instead of flat without reason or evidence, as many people do, simply because they're told that experts 'know' the world is round not flat. Further, I think it is or at least should be part of the mission of scientists to apply critical reasoning to any claim, not just those that come gift-wrapped as articles for peer-review. Part of such critical reasoning is to recognize and state when a particular question can only be answered with empirical evidence and what kind of evidence would be needed and why. All this makes up a process of scientific reasoning; i.e. thinking logically about questions and claims and reasoning about what evidence demonstrates what and how. I think the issue of whether textbook knowledge is right or wrong is secondary to knowing how and why.

It's relative and chosen arbitrarily because it's not really usable energy until you actually drop it. It's energy that is only usable when it's converted, really. If an object remains at rest somewhere, it can have all sorts of "potential energies" that are meaningless until you find one you want to use when it actually moves somewhere lower or higher.

 

Therefore this statement:

 

-- is meaningless. Potential energy exists out of definition of it. On one hand everything has potential energy relative to some arbitrary point that is not their own position, and on the other everything that doesn't move is at zero potential energy relative to their own position.

My argument is that if you take your phone example or any other empirical example of an object framed with some amount of potential energy, there may be a method of further releasing more kinetic energy, in which case that energy must have been potential in the object/system prior to it being released.

Certain things/systems don't have any more potential energy to give. A dead battery or any thermodynamic system in equilibrium has exhausted its potential, correct? Matter at the center of the Earth lacks gravitational potential, correct, except for relative to other gravity-wells, such as the sun? I contend that even if you define the center of the Earth as an absolute ground position for that frame, you could still cite an empirical method of further releasing any potential energy present. Actually, I don't think there is any further potential energy present for the Earth to fall into the sun since it is already free-falling at a stable-altitude. Could this be empirically contradicted if I was wrong? I think it could, and that's my point.

That is what is believed to be the case. They concluded elephants learn elephant etiquette from their elders, and that it was a mistake to separate the youngsters from the adults.

 

I am excited by the research. I think we learn a lot about ourselves through zoology, and this is one the main reasons I am opposed to religions. I think it is a serious mistake to think a God created humans differently from all the other animals. It is a mistake to ignore the social problems created by poverty and divorce, especially in inner city ghettos where the children do not have the socialization of middle income neighborhoods. Add this ignorance of how we become as we are, to education focused on technology, instead of socialization, and the cost of incarcerating people becomes greater than the cost of education. Elephants are doing a better job of correcting their misbehaving young.

Making conclusions like this involves a lot of assumptions. Before you could really apply the knowledge about the elephant socialization to humans, you would have to know what it was the older elephants were teaching the younger ones that causes them not to attack other animals. At that point, you could compare the socialization processes of the elephants with humans and identify variations in conditions and outcomes. You are also assuming that aggression doesn't get expressed among middle-income children and that it does among people living in "inner city ghettos." Hopefully you realize that you're generalizing based on media stereotypes and that many children in both settings behave like the stereotype of the other setting, for example. The question is what causes one individual to repress/express aggression in one way and another in another. It is not as simple as correlating behavior with categorical identities.

what basis do you claim in order to declare the textbook's shortcomings? is there an internal inconsistency or do you have empirical data? there is no basis for a truculent refusal to accept established learning on the basis of personal incredulity or lack of understanding.

Whatever your basis, you simply explain your reasoning. If your reasoning makes sense, there should be no tension for true scientists to immediately recognize validity. My point is that there is social-political tension coming from the fact that oftentimes people don't really recognize empiricism as a more ultimate foundation for authority than institutional authority. So if potential energy is defined a certain way in one or more textbooks, people will resist questioning the authority of the textbooks regardless of the reasoning of the critique. They will turn it into an ego-issue ("who do YOU think YOU are to disagree with a textbook?") or they will simply ignore the challenge because they don't want to take sides against established authority. If no one had any particular investment in protecting the legitimacy of any orthodox knowledge, it would not be such a big deal to question and discuss definitions, axiomatic assumptions, etc.

Lemur, we're dealing with definitions here. Potential energy is defined by arbitrarily chosen (but *consistent*) relative points.

 

 

That is, if I stand on a 1 meter chair on top of a 10 story building and jump off the chair, it is my choice how to define my "potential energy" comparison point, but this point MUST be consistent later. I can choose that my "zero" is the ground (at the bottom of the building), in which case I started with potential energy of mg(10stories+1meter) and ended with potential energy of mg(10 stories), and the difference is just mg(1 meter).

 

Or I can decide that my "zero" is on the floor relative to me, that is on the floor of the 10th floor -- in which case I started with potential energy mg(1 meter) and ended with mg(0), which makes the difference again mg(1 meter).

 

The only time a potential energy is not really arbitrary is in the case of potential elastic energy, where the "zero" point is considered the equilibrium resting point of the spring.

 

That's the way we define potential energy. It is, therefore, dependent on a location in the same frame it's being measured. By definition.

 

I am stating a bit of simplistic stuff here, but you should really pick up a physics book for the more elaborate concept; this "pick up a book" deal isn't to condescend you. It's to help you understand.

 

Before you try to revolutionize physics I think you probably would do best to learn what it actually says on the matter...

 

~mooey

I'm well aware of this frame-relative approach to quantifying potential energy, which mooeypoo describes so thoroughly. My point is that while I see how this emphasis on the framing allows the analysis to be defined according to the problem at hand, it doesn't eliminate the fact that empirically more potential energy may be available that is excluded from analysis arbitrarily because it is outside the selected frame. E.g. so in terms of the example of going from 10 stories + 1 meter to the ground +1 meter, the object treated as being at an arbitrary frame-relative ground state at +1 meter may be empirically observed to have more potential energy by triggering the release of that energy. So while it makes sense to use frame-relative parameters for measurement, you can't claim that all potential energy has been exhausted simply because an object has reached the limits of its potential in terms of the applied frame.

Can anyone acknowledge that potential energy is an empirically observable form of energy and that it may exist regardless of how it is framed by physicists?

Crackpots, essentially by definition, do not present either valid reasoning or valid evidence.

 

Scientific theories are regularly challenged by real scientists using real data and formulating logical and potentially valid theories. It is not a matter of "taking sides". It is a matter of logical consistency of a theory, and, more importantly, consistency of the consequences of that theory with experimental data.

I guess the issue here is how do you deal with challenges to established authority, such as knowledge and definitions from textbooks, etc. If a textbook defines something like potential energy in a way that has shortcomings, what basis would you have for questioning the textbook's authority?

What causes people to cling to established authority, even when presented with valid reason to question it? When do people choose to accept challenges to authority as legitimate and when do they resist it? Is there social-political pressure among scientists to defend each other's authority against challenges or do all scientists place reason and empiricism above all other bases for authority? Would you take sides with a crackpot against a veteran researcher if the crackpot presented valid reasoning or evidence against claims of a reputable person?

What basis is there for claiming that potential energy exists only relative to the arbitrarily chosen frame in which it is measured? Doesn't potential energy, just like kinetic energy, persist until it is converted into another form or dissipated? It may be possible to measure it differently according to what frame of motion/time you're interested in, but ultimately it exists as empirically observable potential insofar as it can be released and measured as such, correct? Just because something runs out of potential in a given frame doesn't make it absolutely devoid of potential energy in any possible frame.

I don't think genetic engineering in itself is moral or immoral. Each specific application can be morally evaluated in its purpose and consequences. Is it moral, for example, to genetically engineer crops purely for the purpose of preventing subsequent seeds from being collected and used without buying new seeds from the distributor? What about engineering a crop variety that grows better in a wider range of temperatures and is more pest-resistant reducing the need for pesticide? Simply saying that genetic engineering is immoral would be like saying that all engineering is immoral, I think.