iNow

Well mate, you ask a lot of very interesting questions. Unfortunately, it's tough to give quick answers, as trying to explain the answers to the questions requires explanations of the tenets behind them.

Your question is like asking a baker how they make their danish taste so good. Well, they'd first talk to you about the ingredients. They'd then talk to you about the proportion of those ingredients and how to add them together. They'd then talk to you about the mixing process, and how you should not over mix. They'd then talk about the importance of steady heating, and once they'd described each of these things, you'd be much closer to understanding how their danish taste so delightful.

Same with discussion about blackholes and wormholes and time. It takes a little bit of effort to form the foundation of your understanding, and you need good teachers to help with that.

A book that really opened my eyes and my mind, which is written for the non-expert (and not just people with 4 degrees in math and 2 PhDs in Theoretical Physics... in other words, easy to follow if you're willing to spend some time trying)... and I'd HIGHLY recommend it to help address many (if not all) of your questions above:

Kip Thorne: Blackholes & Time Warps - Einstein's Outrageous Legacy.

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763

Kip manages to take the reader from start to finish, explaining fundamentals in clever and understandable ways, and he also allows you to use your imagination like he and his students do. It has several pages, and has a lot of information to digest, but you will come away much more informed if you choose to read it. I've actually read it two or three times just because there were some pieces I couldn't fully digest the first time through.

Another great teacher is Richard Feyman, but I'd suggest Kip's book above to be your first discussion with "the baker" about his "wonderful tasting danish."

You might check out the work of David Buss. He wrote a really cool book which I enjoyed called, "The Dangerous Passion."

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=david+buss

From the first link above:

Evolutionary psychology is a hybrid discipline that draws insights from modern evolutionary theory, biology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, economics, computer science, and paleoarchaeology. The discipline rests on a foundation of core premises:

 

(1) Manifest behavior depends on underlying psychological mechanisms, information processing devices housed in the brain, in conjunction with the external and internal inputs that trigger their activation;

 

(2) Evolution by selection is the only known causal process capable of creating such complex organic mechanisms;

 

(3) Evolved psychological mechanisms are functionally specialized to solve adaptive problems that recurred for humans over deep evolutionary time;

 

(4) Selection designed the information processing of many evolved psychological mechanisms to be adaptively influenced by specific classes of information from the environment;

 

(5) Human psychology consists of a large number of functionally specialized evolved mechanisms, each sensitive to particular forms of contextual input, that get combined, coordinated, and integrated with each other to produce manifest behavior.

Try adding 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after your workout to stretch. Also, eat or drink protien within an hour of working out.

Working out tears down muscles, forces blood and energy through your body, and activates new parts of your brain. As you continue working out, your muscles rebuild stronger, your blood and energy flow more efficiently, and your brain has desensitized to the pain.

Like the first time you smoke a cigarette. You cough and choke and your eyes water... but then, you get used to it, and you become much better at it. The beauty here is that working out is good for your health, where smoking is not.

All in all.. stretch. Hydrate before, during, and after, then eat or drink protien so your muscles have the building blocks to rebuild. Enjoy.

Creationists are creationists because that's what they've been taught to think, the same goes for homophobic attitudes, too. Nobody is born homophobic anymore than they're born a creationist.

 

Also, could homophobia be considered a type of racism?

Ah... thank you for clarifying. Nobody is born hating. I agree. Perhaps we'd do well to suggest that creationism serves as a disappointment to many of us. I mean, why would somebody consciously give up their attempt to accurately understand the wonder which is the universe for some spoon-fed falsehoods? I, personally, do not *hate* creationists, but I disgust what they stand for and what their belief set represents.

As for homosexuality, people are not born hating that either. However, I definitely feel that people are born homosexual... I'm of the school of thought that they did not choose it. Since being born into a certain condition, in my book, is different from making a poor decision, and is very much like hating someone for the color of their skin or country of birth, I find that clear bigotry. I'd suggest that when someone hates people who are homosexual, it is simply a representation of their own insecurities and need to pigeon-hole others... despising people simply for being different from themselves.

While I don't pigeon-hole creationists for being different from me, I do pigeon-hole them for ignoring the mountains of evidence which stand contrary to their belief.

...but I'm not sure I've addressed your question.

Is there any difference between the two in this situation?

Are you suggesting that homosexuality is a choice? If not, can you clarify your question, because implies I must be missing something.

You are asking also, what's worse...

Hating someone for what they are, or

Hating someone for what they think and/or have been taught?

Both are silly, frankly, and I think Pangloss touched on this above rather poignantly.

thank you very much.

Glad it helped.

Here are links to two parts of Cindy's work that I referenced:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/l6t5188g2368377n/

http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~bglab/articles/Meston%20&%20Gorzalka%20(1995).pdf

I'm a layman, so I'll offer some layman's terms. Apologies to those well versed should I misspeak. Please correct my interpretation as needed.

The wave function describes all possible states of an object. This is really the heart of the whole "Schroedinger's Cat" issue. Let's say you put a cat into a box. In that box is a poison in a glass vile, and the box gets dropped (I've changed the real thing a bit, but this is close).

So, cat in box, glass vile of poison in box with cat, box gets dropped. This is where we are.

So, the wave function which describes this discusses all possibilities.

The vile didn't break, and the cat is alive.

The vile did break, but the cat survived.

The vile didn't break, but the cat died (maybe he had really bad vertigo .

The vile did break, and the cat died.

Before you open the box, according to QM, the cat is actually all of these things at the same time. Since you don't know, all you have is a wave function which describes the probabilities of each state.

Here's where it gets weird though.

The cat is also anything else, just at a lower probability. The cat is a dog. The cat is your grandmother. The cat is elvis. The cat is George Washington. The cat is a pterodactyl pulling a meerkat out of a blackhole... According to probability, it's actually all of those things until it's observed, and the wave function is used to calculate the probability of each potential state... Most are just so very unlikely that they can be disregarded, and although still possible, we tend to look at the "cat is alive/cat is dead" only split.

So, once you've opened the box and you look in, you actually learn the state of the cat. You know if it's dead or alive, you know if the vile of poison broke or did not, you know if Ben Franklin wearing a ball gag was in there the whole time... and "the wave function collapses."

All of the possibilities that made up the wave function go away (hence the collapse), because you've observed the system and only one possibility was realized.

Just wait until you read about double slits. Check common sense at the door and prepare to enter the rabbit's hole.

Hi Mag,

Here is a link to the study you reference. It was conducted in 1974 by Dutton and Aron.

http://www.fpce.uc.pt/nucleos/niips/novoplano/ps1/documentos/dutton&aron1974.pdf

You can also google the term "Misattribution of arousal." Also, look up the work of Cindy Meston from the University of Texas at Austin. She did similar work to the bridge study, but expanded it to include general exercise, and also rollercoasters!

I was a research assistant for her while I was still in college, and we got to go to Six Flags all of the time to collect data. Loads of fun.

The same principle holds when taking your date to a scary movie, or driving fast. It gets their heartrate up and adrenaline pumping, so unconsciously they attribute that arousal to you.

Terrorism is not something you control, it's something you prevent.

An ounce of prevention equals...

How come it's impossible to make a perfect vacuum? what's that QM issue you alluded to?

Are you familiar with Hawking Radiation?

If you want more specific answers on QM and the impossibility of a perfect vacuum, consider the impossibility of certainty implied by QM.

Was that Heisenberg over there? I like his hat.