Greg H.

Electrons occupy a certain amount of volume as well.

In quantum mechanics, the concept of a point particle is complicated by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: Even an elementary particle, with no internal structure, occupies a nonzero volume. For example, a 1s electron in a hydrogen atom occupies a volume of ~10^-30 m³. There is nevertheless a distinction between elementary particles such as electrons or quarks, which have no internal structure, versus composite particles such as protons, which do have internal structure: A proton is made of three quarks. Elementary particles are sometimes called "point particles", but this is in a different sense than discussed above. For more details see elementary particle.

See Point Particle for more details.

I don't have a server, just the web hosting company from who I got the domain name.

You would have to check with them. As Cretin says, it depends on what they're hosting the web site on.

Nobody seems to be considering the feelings or traumatic effect actually ending life might have on the person expected to either provide the means or administer the procedure. The thought of this being part of a doctor's routine range of treatments might not be accepted by many doctor's for a variety of reasons.(Including, dare I say it on a science forum, religious scruples).

That's an interesting viewpoint, but I think it's outside the premise of the OP. (I could be wrong but) I think there's an inherent assumption in the opening post that finding a method of termination isn't the issue so much as why is it deemed wrong to want to exit life at a time and in a manner of my choosing in order to preserve my own dignity and quality of life.

Maybe the discussion of the impact on the provider of such services should be a separate thread?

Why is it that the acceptance of death sounds like mental illness?

It's not the acceptance of death that sounds off, it's the invitation of it to visit that most people can't come to terms with. Wanting to die is so far outside our normal existence that most people can't understand what would drive someone to desire it over continued life. The vast majority of people simply cannot conceive of a time when they would choose death over continued life.

That aside, in terms of assisted suicide, I think it's important that we place as much value on the dignity and quality of a person's life as we do on the simple length of it. Surviving is not the same as living.

[math] \text {Proof that } a^2=b^3 \text { has solutions}, a, b = I > 1 [/math]

 

[math] a^2=b^3 (1) [/math]

 

[math] \sqrt{a^2}=\sqrt{b^3} [/math]

 

[math] a=b^\frac{3}{2} [/math]

 

[math] a=\sqrt{b}^3 (2) [/math]

 

[math] b=4: (2) a=\sqrt{4}^3 [/math]

[math] =2^3 [/math]

[math] =8 [/math]

 

[math] (1) a^2=b^3 [/math]

[math] 8^2=4^3 [/math]

[math] 64=64 [/math]

[math] LS=RS [/math]

 

[math] \text{Therefore proven} [/math]

 

[math] b=9: (2) a=\sqrt{9}^3 [/math]

[math] =3^3 [/math]

[math] =27 [/math]

 

[math] (1) 27^2=9^3 [/math]

[math] 729=729 [/math]

[math] LS=RS [/math]

 

[math] \text{Therefore proven} [/math]

In a broader sense, I think you've basically proven that the solution set includes any a and b where

[math] a=\sqrt{b}^3[/math]

So a = 64 and b = 16 is also a solution, as is a = 125, b = 25, etc.

Your definition of "distance" was essentially "length is how long something is". Rather than being useful, it was entirely circular.

It's not my fault if the dictionary is occasionally redundant, is it?

You spelled "circular" wrong. There's no "s", "f", or "e" in it, and there's only one "u".

Not to be obtuse, but you lost me.

Make your case that "amount of space" is unrelated to measurement.

I see your point, but aren't you assuming that we care about the amount as a concrete quantity? It is possible to acknowledge the presence of some intervening space without quantifying it in terms of fixed units?

To your original point up the thread a bit, though, in scientific terms, the concrete measurement is what is useful, and what will be used and discussed in those contexts.

Its proof of providence (that the world is in the protective care of God).

So the assumption is that if God exists, he's benign and has the world's best interests at heart? That's a fairly large leap, if you ask me.

Just for the heck of it, I went and looked up the definitions of time and distance.

Distance is defined fairly simply and straightforward:

An amount of space between two things or people.

Nice and abstract, but still useful. It explains the concept of what distance is, without going into the measurements or the math of how we determine distance.

Then we look at time

The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.

What the...? So distance as a concept is restrained, finite, with a definite beginning and end. Time, on the other hand, is infinite, and encompasses every when that ever was or ever will be all at once. Is that because we, as humans, have limitations in envisioning time as being limited in the same ways we can limit distance?

Checkout www.Plasmerg.com for the most recent progress in this area. If it's impossible, it looks like a lot of people are wasting money and resources. The US underwater naval research agency tested one of Papp's cylinders in the form of a cannon. The thing blew up! There were no expolosives and was checked and monitored by their researchers. Just a few cc's of noble gas mixture and the ignition chamber. The navy validated it...yet Papp(crazy, paranoid, secretive Papp) never released information on how to recreated the process to them.

People are always wasting time and energy on things that are impossible. That doesn't make them any less impossible. And based on Feyman's account, I'd say the Navy recreated the original pretty spot on, though you'd have to compare the explosions somehow to figure out how accurately.

That's not insanity, that's stoic principles, learning to be calm in all situations. If God literally exists then we are not here to make attachments, we're here to do his works.

It's that last part that I have issues with. Just because God exists, why does it necessarily follow that we must do as he commands? Because he says so? What if he's a liar and a cheat? Are we still obligated to do what he says?

THAT TO STUDY PHILOSOPHY IS TO LEARN TO DIE.

 

- Michel de Montaigne

 

CICERO says "that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one's self to die."

 

I prefer Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Physics is not in the business of telling us what things are — that's ontology. In science we like falsifiability, i.e. testing that your thought actually describes how nature behaves, and that involves a measurement of some sort. So he's absolutely right — any science discussion of what time is has to involve how we measure it.

Ok, so the context of the discussion is the gist of the argument. What's he's really getting at is the measurement of this thing we call time, as opposed to the concept of time itself, at least in this context.

It's the same exact way with literally everything. All of our knowledge is derived from measurements. It's just that some people only see this as an issue when time is the subject being studied.

 

So I wonder why that is? What is about time that makes it seemingly so much harder to quantify and understand than length (for example). They both (to borrow my earlier example) describe a separation that can be quantified into measurable units.

I'm posting this here because the material I'm reading deals with cosmology and the origin of the universe. If the topic belongs in a more appropriate location, please advise me, and I'll ask the mods to move it.

I've been reading The Origin of the Universe by John Barrow and I'm starting this thread to discuss an idea he puts forward that I have to disagree with. I'll quote the salient passage here and then put forth my counter-argument.

Our everyday experience of time measures it in terms of sequences of natural events: swings of a pendulum in the gravitational field of the earth; the shadow cast by the sun on a sundial as the Earth rotates; or the vibrations of a cesium atom. We have no way of talking about what time "is" except in terms of how we measure it. [emphasis added]

The last line is the part that I take issue with. From my understanding, what Professor Barrow seems to be saying is that we cannot define time unless we append some concrete units to it - pendulum swings, seconds, vibrations, etc.

It seems to me that we can arrive at a more abstract definition of time by thinking of it as a separation, in much the same way that distance is, in an abstract fashion a separation. Where distance is a separation of two points, can we not think of time as a separation of two events? Or is that simply redefining the more concrete definition of time using different "units"?

However if God had literally appeared in form and had spoke to you then it is very much sane to kill your child.

Really?

I'm with Appolinaria here.

If you have enough emotional detachment that you can murder your own child on the say so of a man claiming to be the Almighty, please do the rest of society a favor and proceed directly to your nearest mental health facility for a mandatory 72 hour hold and eval.

If you'd like a decent introduction to the idea of the formation of the universe and the subsequent expansion thereof, pick up a copy of The Origin of the Universe by John D. Barrow. It covers a lot of the questions you're asking and doesn't require a PhD to understand (thankfully for me).

With a sideways grip, aren't you also defeating the strength of your muscles against the recoil? The straight-up grip is much stronger and more designed with the way the hand and arm muscles work, it seems to me.

 

Also, with a semi-automatic, aren't you running the risk of hot casings coming back at your face instead of off to your right and behind?

Having been trained to shoot by the military, I can't say I have ever fired a gun sideways (drill instructors get really aggravated when you mishandle a weapon), but I suspect you're probably correct on both counts.

Who's broken? Everyone but you?

Sadly, that's just about always the case. The idea of what's normal and abnormal is subjective (at best) and often defined by a society over time. The further away from the subset of "normal" an individual is, the more likely they are to be viewed by that society as in need of some kind of help or intervention.

We are not 'meant' to be anything

We are what we are and that's all that we are?

I have heard also that the smarter (i.e. higher IQ) you are the more likely you are of committing suicide. Is there any truth behind this?

I heard that too. Perhaps smart people are tired of being around so many people who aren't as smart as they are.

I doubt it. If that were the case we'd probably still be living like serfs in the late middle ages as all of history's geniuses offed themselves in a pique of "no one understands me, boo-hoo".

My supposition is that if we looked at a cross-section of IQ to high stress environment (job, family, education, societal duties) you'd find the underlying cause of the seeming correlation.

Perhaps the psychoanalysis and recommended treatments of Appolinaria's apathy / nihilism / depression could be taken to another thread or PM?

I concur with the PM thing. It's really not necessary to discuss it in a public venue (unless, of course, she wants to).

In some countries I'm sure you die before you can attempt suicide anyway. And in many more I'm sure no one notices you're gone.

 

The world is a scary place. I went to bed last night with the image of a baby cub being eaten by a lion and had my morning coffee to pictures of dead children in Syria. If you ask me, people who haven't contemplated suicide are robots and/or psychopaths.

 

I absolutely believe people should be able to commit suicide. I think assisted suicide should be available to everyone.

Have you ever read David Hume's essay "Of Suicide"¹? He considered the right to choose to end your own life to be as unalienable as any of the other civil rights we have come to know and enjoy (at least in the US). One of the footnotes in my copy of the essay mentions this:

The power of committing suicide is regarded by Pliny as an advantage which men possess even above the Deity himself:

God cannot even if he wishes to commit suicide, the supreme boon that he has bestowed among all of the penalties of life.

It doesn't mention if this was Pliny the Younger or Pliny the Elder, but we can safely say that the idea behind allowing self-termination in society dates back to at least the beginning of the second century AD, if not sooner (the Younger died sometime around 112 AD, according to our friend, the Wiki.)

Hume goes on to say:

I believe that no man ever threw away life, while it was worth keeping. For such is our natural horror of death, that small motives will never be able to reconcile us to it; and though perhaps the situation of a man's health and fortune did not seem to require this remedy, we may at least be assured, that any one who, without apparent reason, has had recourse to it, was curst[sic] with such an incurable depravity or gloominess of temper as must poison all enjoyment, and render equally miserable as if he had been loaded with the most grievous misfortunes.

The essay itself is a philosophical treatise in an attempt to prove that suicide, in and of itself, is not a "crime", though not strictly in the legal sense of that term. Hume uses the word to denote "a transgression of our duty, either to God, our neighbor, or ourselves." His aim, I believe, is to offer up arguments as to why suicide should not be considered a dereliction of those duties (and in some cases a mortal sin).

------------------

¹- I have no idea if this link references the entire essay or not. I have a printed copy from the following source, and I know the link does not include the footnotes (or at least not that I saw) that are included in my copy.

Popkin, Richard H (Ed.). (1980). David Hume: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the Posthumous Essays. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. ISBN: 0-9105144-45-X

Edited to add a break between the reply and the footnote, as well as to fix some grammar issues. All that money on university level English classes - wasted.

Further to the OP, a lot of religions can be said to have started as a cult, so at what point do they become a religion?

I think this is the central question, and my opinion would be mainstream acceptance which is, in and of itself, a subjective measure (what counts as acceptance or mainstream).

You are right, but not just any law. On what I was calling the book is the date of the US independence. That means, when our constitutional government protecting our liberty was put into law.

I am going to nitpick here just a little bit. Technically, July 4 1776 was simply the date we declared independence. The current government the US has, based on the Constitution of the United States did not go into effect until 1789 after it was ratified by the states. Prior to that we had the Articles of the Confederation, which, as a form of government couldn't even get the states to pay their share of the national taxes, much less insure our continued existence as a country.

See US Constitution - First Government section

The only way we can see what's on the other side of a wormhole is to send a robotic ship down it, and make sure it's giving us a video feed back to Earth. Even if it doesn't open up near a habitable planet it would get us closer to one.

For some definition of the word "closer" sure. But the fact is, given the size of the universe, it's probably more likely to put you further away from any planets at all, than it is to put you closer to a habitable planet than the Earth is.

The reason that FTL travel is such a staple of science fiction/space opera type stories is that no one wants to read about how it took 8000 years to reach where the heroes were going and whatever they were going there for no longer existed.

"Slow boating" at about half-c with some kind of cryogenic storage solution is certainly more plausible in terms of the science we understand, even if we don't have the engineering yet to support it.

would you like to read this paper ( the newest version ) carefully? if you are interested in this theme.

I think only you are Back To Original, you may understand ! Why? Because you have been filled with the pre-existing content, and you are firmly convinced. sometimes, theory is not only science but also belief. In fact, to a wrong theory, there is also many evidences and applications, otherwise they couldn't exist long time, e.g., caloric theory,phlogiston theory,and so on. I hope you can read this paper thoroughly, cast aside preconceived ideas, I think you can distinguish right from wrong.

The present study has demonstrated the non-existence of Clausius entropy, which simultaneously denies the Boltzmann entropy.

In statistical physics, the attempt to directly deduce entropy is untenable. On one hand, it involves a key step to translate infinitesimal into differential, which doesn't hold. On the other hand, the unit (J/K) of entropy (Boltzmann entropy) in statistical physics is transformed from Clausius entropy. So, if Clausius entropy does not exist, there will be no transformation source for the unit (J/K) of Clausius entropy. As a result, the entropy in statistical physics is only a pure digital, with no physical meaning.

In addition, even if we do not consider the issue regarding the unit, from a pure probability point of view, in the equation S = klnΩ, Ω is the so-called thermodynamic probability, and the calculation of Ω involves the phase cell division in surpassing space μ. The phase cell is 2i-dimensional and i the total freedom degree of the molecules within the system. The essence of Ω calculation is the discretization of the continuous μ space and the generation of objective meaning. In fact, this approach does not work, and there will be no objective conclusion regardless of the amount of previous work people have done. This is due to the lack of objective, physically meaningful criteria for phase cell division, that is, Ω has no objective meaning in physics. Together the Liouville theorem and our conclusions indicate that Boltzmann entropy can be taken as a technique for displaying the irreversibility from a purely probabilistic point of view.

While certainly effective at making use of words, simply repeating what you have said before isn't likely to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced. Neither will hand-waving and declaring questions you don't want to answer as off topic.

If I belong to it, it's a religion. If you belong to it, it's a cult.

So if we both belong to the same thing it's a religious cult?