granpa

how does that address the original question? what if the swan is 99.9999% white? how are you defining 100% white (or white in general)? white is a category. it includes a range of colors. 99.9999% white is white. (not to mention that inclusion in a category is itself not all or nothing) further it is obvious to me that all this talk about swans is a straw man argument. we probably couldnt agree on whether all swans really are white or what the definition of white even is. a much more pertinent question would be how we know the sun will rise tomorrow. we all know it will but how do we know? it obviously isnt a simple matter of observing it happen 1000 times then concluding that it must happen tomorrow.

the set of everything that we know about everyting may not be infinite but it is very very large. certainly if every bit in the message has a chance of being wrong then its possible, howevery unlikely, that every bit in the message is wrong. no error correction can repair that. but what if the total number of errors is known to be less than some maximum? and what if R<<C?

well then you can get into the whole question of categories and whether inclusion in a category is all or nothing. (it isnt). but I think that might be getting off topic. I think a better question than 'are all swans white' is 'will the sun rise tomorrow'.

if a swan can only be white if it is %100 white then I would suggest that no swans are white.

what will man become? what does man want to become?

it gets lifted a little bit by the cold polar air then the heat released as water vapour condenses into rain causes it to rise much more. the energy released is no doubt what drives the ferrel cell in reverse. I dont disbelieve you but I'm not sure what you mean about temp. all I know is that air rises until it reaches the stratisphere. yet the base of the stratisphere is for some strange reason at different heights at different latitudes. the diagram below shows it varying continuously from pole to equator but other diagrams I've seen show it changing suddenly as one goes from one cell to another. it probably does both. now certainly on a large enough planet the atmospheric circulation must indeed break up into smaller cells. but just because the earth today has 3 cells doesnt seem to me to prove that it cant have 2 ar even 1 cell. however you raise a lot of good points so its far from obvious what the case really is. edit:ok. that makes sense now. air at the equator is warmer so it carries more water vapour so it rises to a greater height so the base of the stratisphere is higher.

error correction isnt off topic at all. its exactly what the op asked about. the op asked how we can say what we know about a system when we start off knowing absolutely nothing about it? are we doomed to forever just saying that we dont know for certain? that is exactly what error correction is about. if you knew more about how multidimensional parity works maybe you would understand what it is I am saying. did you read post #55? not true. thats the opposite of what it says The Shannon theorem states that given a noisy channel with channel capacity C and information transmitted at a rate R, then if R < C there exist codes that allow the probability of error at the receiver to be made arbitrarily small.

whoops. major typo.

meaningless. cause of what? time dilation causes many things. gravitational redshift for instance.

the polar front probably has something to do with it too. also different cells have different depths. not sure how that factors in.

seems more likely to me that the air would simply descend over a larger area. and I'm pretty sure the upper air already spends enough time in the upper atmosphere to reach an equilibrium temp. spending longer shouldnt make any difference.

that doesnt make any sense. why would gravitational time dilation for light be any different than for a clock? I'm now (typo for 'not') explaining warping as being due to time dilation but if it is objects that shrink,not space that stretches, then light cant shrink so it can only be affected by time dilation.

if one clock is deeper in a gravity well than another then they will tick at different rates. 'excess path' cant account for that.

there is no trouble. its your understanding that is wrong. it doest have to wait for the density to become low before it can take place. only you know what 'low enough for stable matter' means. as far as I can tell its a meaningless statement.

I didnt say that you would know that all swans were white. didnt you read what I wrote? I said that you would know that there is a tendency for swans to be white. to be totally accurate what you know is your expectation (as someone else correctly pointed out below). I use the regular nonmathematical definition of the word. can your expectation, by means of error correction, ever become %100? that is the question. can you transmit a message over a noisy channel without any loss whatsovere?

you seem to see some great trouble with the idea that large amounts of matter and antimatter might have annihilated each other very shortly after the big bang. I dont see any trouble with it at all as long as it occured before the universe became transparent. the only effect would have been to raise the temp of the universe so it would have taken slightly longer to cool (due to expansion) my assumption has always been that all this occurred very very soon after the big bang while the density of matter and energy was still very very high. now really. this is becoming tiresome. I see no trouble here at all. if you do then its on you to show it.

I cant really comment on that since it seems to be beyond me but I would like to hear more about how you arrive at these conclusions. do you have any links I could follow?

if there is its far beyond me.

does spacetime curve or do objects in a gravitational field simply shrink and become time dilated like they do when moving near the speed of light? since light cant shrink then it would only be affected by time dilation. hence post 6.

I have no idea what you are talking about. what if you observe every swan on the planet?

could some of the interstellar dust grains (is that the right word) be living self reproducing molecules perhaps similar to (very primitive) ribosomes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAH_world_hypothesis http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s603155.htm if it was just a single self-replicating ribozyme-like molecule then there would be no need for water. Water is the 'medium' in which life processes occur on earth. In space, space itself would be the 'medium'. If these molecules seeded earth with life (or at least with organic molecules) by means of comets then maybe they have seeded all habitable planets in this galaxy. If so then life must be everywhere. This does just move the "how did it start" question somewhere else, but it moves it to the vast molecular clouds of interstellar space where there are far more oportunities for just the right molecules to come together in just the right way. vertebrates, arthropods, & molluscs correspond to the 3 modes of moving used by worms:wriggling, walking, & sliding. This is suficiently basic that I would assume that it would evolve on any planet. trilobites http://www.palaeos.com/Invertebrates/Arthropods/Trilobita/Trilobita.htm lobsters http://www.palaeos.com/Invertebrates/Crustacea/Crustacea.html Arthropod bodies are naturally waterproof so they would tend to be the first to leave the ocean and colonize land on any planet. first land animal (millipede) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumodesmus_newmani http://www.palaeos.com/Invertebrates/Arthropods/Myriapoda/Myriapoda.html scorpions and spiders http://www.palaeos.com/Invertebrates/Arthropods/Chelicerata/Chelicerata.html insects http://www.palaeos.com/Invertebrates/Arthropods/Mandibulata.html I think social insects (termites, wasps, ants) are most likely to develop higher intelligence first. The idea that their bodies would be too heavy to grow large is bunk. (edit:Yes there is a limit to how big they can get but I see no reason to suppose they cant get nearly as big as a human) After all , if a vertebrate can get as large as this: then is it really so surprising to suppose that an insect might be able to get nearly as large as a human? (and that dinosaur had one hell of a big ribcage and its leg bones were probably nearly as large as its legs) And these guys here were not plodding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinosaurus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus So why did insects never get so big. I'm thinking that they didnt get big for the same reason that mammals didnt get big during the time of the dinosaurs. There was already a very big predator. (centipedes and maybe millipedes) It stands to reason that centipedes can always get much larger than a 6 legged insect. Intelligent life: It took 5 billion years for intelligent life to evolve on earth but the milky way galaxy is over twice that age. Furthermore, once one species on a planet becomes advanced enough to genetically engineer animals and they figure out how brains function then it may only be a short time before nearly all large animals on that planet are intelligent. Superintelligent life: I suspect that ecosystems derived from extremely high tech terraforming nanobots are not rare. They may even be the rule rather than the exception. Over time they would eventually evolve into some very impressive highly intelligent half-robot half-animal creatures. Origin of the universe: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/34196-origin-of-the-universe-matterantimatter/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation#Latitudinal_circulation_features The wind belts and the girdling the planet are steered by three cells: the Hadley cell, the Ferrel cell, and the Polar cell (the interpretation of the latter two is complex). it is my understanding that during most of earths history that air rose at the equator and sank at the pole in one continuous cell and that it was very much warmer. there was no ice at the poles.. further I can see no reason why one couldnt have just 2 cells. so it seems to me that the earth could have 3 different climates. one with 3 cells like today. one with 2 cells. and one with only one cell. now the one with 1 cell is certainly very warm. could it be that ice ages occur when the earths climate goes into a phase with only 2 cells? would there be any way to test this?

uh. hello? it was a joke. I was being facetious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper#Problem_of_Induction Problem of Induction Among his contributions to philosophy is his attempt to answer the philosophical problem of induction. The problem, in basic terms, can be understood by example: given that the sun has risen every day for as long as anyone can remember, what is the rational proof that it will rise tomorrow? How can one rationally prove that past events will continue to repeat in the future, just because they have repeated in the past? Popper's reply is characteristic, and ties in with his criterion of falsifiability. He states that while there is no way to prove that the sun will rise, we can formulate a theory that every day the sun will rise—if it does not rise on some particular day, our theory will be disproved, but at present it is confirmed. Since it is a very well-tested theory, we have every right to believe that it accurately represents reality, so far as we know. he doesnt take error correction into account.

who's Popper and what objection to induction? observing all white swans doesnt prove that all swans are white but it does establish a rule that swans tend to be white. further observations lead to other rules. each rule supports some other rules and argues against some other rules. these rules form a vast interconnected web. the process of error correction then takes place. a weight/confidence value is placed on each rule depending on how many other rules support it. after this is done the values are interpreted (I wont go into this step but its important) then the process is repeated with the new values depending not only on how many other rules support it but also on the confidence value of each of those rules. this is error correction. can it ever establish that 'ALL swans are white'? I dont know. but it can probably establish that 'whiteness' is characteristic of 'swanness'.