Markus Hanke

That’s of course your prerogative.

My point was about outcomes, not tools. The laws of the universe don’t depend on anyone’s god concept, or lack thereof. Take for example a simple table-top set-up, such as the Cavendish experiment. Anyone can do it, even at home in your own living room; and the outcome of the experiment will always be the exact same, regardless of the experimenter’s religious conviction - you always find the same Newtonian inverse square law, with the same gravitational constant. Concepts of a religious nature are simply irrelevant to the observed laws of nature - which is why you cannot draw conclusions about god (one way or the other) from the natural sciences.

But my point was that whether you are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, something else entirely, or nothing at all, makes no difference - it’s always the same universe, so experiments performed on it have the same outcome, meaning you always find the same laws of nature, irrespective of any god concepts.

Lol +1 Oh how I love being among nerds…

The universe that’s being studied by science is the same now as it was before the 20th century, so I don’t quite understand this comment.

Yes, you answered someone else’s thread with your own personal theory. This needed to be pointed out.

We don’t know the mass of the universe. And what about other sources of gravitation, like radiation? You haven’t accounted for that at all. We don’t know this either. We know only the size of the observable part of it. Right now the evidence is more consistent with the universe being spatially flat on cosmological scales. No. You can’t. Gravity isn’t a force at all, except as an approximation in the Newtonian limit. It says no such thing. Free fall is always along geodesics, irrespective of spacetime geometry, meaning a=0 at all times. No. You can’t. If the topic was locked, then you shouldn’t bring this up again. We’re done here.

Also, this here: is of course incorrect, irrespective of numbers. If you are surrounded by a spherical shell of matter, assuming an approximately uniform distribution, the net Newtonian gravitational force acting on you is exactly zero, irrespective of your state of motion, and irrespective of where within the shell you are located.

No. The most accurate accelerometers we have are around ~10E-7m/s^2. Please show in detail how you arrived at that number. There is no such thing as “inertial acceleration”. An inertial frame is defined to be one where there is zero proper acceleration; if you measure acceleration, no matter how small, then you’re not in an inertial frame. So even if the universe were somehow more gravitationally attractive in one particular direction (which it isn’t), you’d still be locally in free fall in that direction, and your accelerometer reads zero.

It’s an expansion factor. It tells you how the spatial distance between the same two arbitrarily chosen points change over time. Think of it as a placeholder for “we don’t know yet what happens there”. That’s because if you go far enough in time, both gravity and quantum physics become relevant simultaneously, and we don’t yet have a theory of quantum gravity. Hence we don’t know (yet) just how exactly the universe started off, we only know how it evolved after a certain very early point in time. Without DE the rate of expansion would be a constant (but the equations still work). However, the data we have suggests that this rate isn’t constant, but accelerating - so DE is a mechanism that actively pushes the universe apart. The exact physical nature of DE is as of yet unknown. This is not easy to answer in a non-technical way. Think of a tensor (as it is most commonly found in GR) as a function that takes as input vectors, and produces as output a new vector, a real number, or sometimes another tensor. That depends what kind of background knowledge you have…? Perhaps the Wiki article on General Relativity is a good starting point.

If you put an accelerometer in free fall (inertial motion), it reads exactly zero at all times. This is an experimental fact. Thus, due to F=ma with a=0, no force acts on freely falling test particles.

The one that the Christian far-right in the US advocates. Not in their eyes, unfortunately. They are fully convinced that their own interpretation of the faith is the only correct one. What values are those, in your opinion? I’m not a Christian, but I’ve read the Bible, and there’s a very wide range of differing views and values advocated in there. There’s some good things that I can somewhat stand behind, but there’s also some pretty horrific stuff that I wouldn’t want to go near with a barge pole. Some really disgusting stuff. So who gets to decide what “Christian values” actually are? Modern science doesn’t say anything about God (Christian or otherwise), since the concept is not amenable to the scientific method.

I wonder what the US would actually end up looking like if somehow their brand of Christian Nationalism was in fact fully implemented. Seems to me it wouldn’t be too far off a Republic of Gilead type situation. How could anyone actually want to live in that type of society? This is just beyond me. Maybe they simply don’t understand the ramifications of what it is they are advocating for. Even in Atwood’s novels, many of the main architects of the RoG are portrayed as secretly loathing what they had created. As they say, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.

In Germany, giving the Hitler salute is a criminal offence - mostly you’d get fined, but technically it could earn you up to three years in prison. Either way you’re left with a criminal record upon conviction. But yeah, he probably thinks he’s making America great again.

It wouldn’t be a war with Denmark, it would be a war with the European Union. People here wouldn’t look kindly on an act of military aggression against any of our member states, and I dare say neither would the rest of the international community. Given the level of national debt of the US, and the degree to which its economy relies on foreign trade, such a move would be…ahem…unwise.

If an extraterrestrial spacefaring civilisation actually exists, and decides to visit earth over the next four years, I hope they won’t choose to land on US territory, because Trump is going to deport them as illegal aliens… I’ll see myself out.

It’s the other way around - the fundamental assumption in standard cosmology is the cosmological principle, and homogenous expansion follows from this. What do you mean “modifies the FLRW metric”? Do you mean you have worked out a different solution to the Einstein equations? Perhaps you could just post here your new metric in mathematical form (the forum supports LaTeX), which would make it easier to discuss things. Note also that none of this is exactly new - inhomogenous cosmologies in various forms have been studied for a long time, see here for an overview of the most important models.

I doubt it. We’ve already had two world wars, countless regional wars, and a couple of genocides - just in the past 120 or so years. Society doesn’t seem to have learned any lessons from these, much less taken those lessons to heart.

Yes, absolutely. You’ve got a point there. Also, if you’re stuck in less than ideal circumstances, it’s only natural to want to go someplace that’s perceived to provide better opportunities and a better life. Who can blame them? I can guarantee you that those who rant the loudest against immigration would probably be the first ones to try and flee, had they happened to be born in Somalia, just to pick a random example.

If Trump was the actual winner in 2020 as you claim, then you must also acknowledge that his current position is illegitimate, since under your constitution you cannot be elected president more than twice. If you recognise him as your legitimate president now, than you cannot claim he won in 2020. Take your pick.

It exists here too, but hasn’t gained much prominence within the local politics (yet). Which is a pity, because these are rich and beautiful, and so far as Indo-European languages go, among the least complex ones, at least so far as grammar and morphology go (Finnish of course being the exception, but that’s not Indo-European). I went from zero to C1/C2 in Norwegian in about 18 months, it isn’t too hard for those who already speak at least English. I can also read Swedish and Danish, and can have simple conversations in those languages, though I never formally studied them; these three are just pretty similar. At a stretch I can also figure out a litte Faroese and Icelandic, but only with lots of concentration and guesswork. Finnish though eludes me, since that is a Uralic language; it’s very different and much more complicated.

Yes, that’s a very good point too +1

That’s because the human psyche is still the same; we are still subject to and affected by the scourges of greed, hatred and delusion to varying degrees. Our technology and culture has evolved, but not our minds, so no matter what political system we put in place, the same human tendencies will continue to crop up, and thus things like fundamentalism, extreme nationalism etc etc will continue to manifest themselves when the conditions are conducive.

Yes, China indeed has its own serious systemic issues too, I didn’t mean to imply anything different. But still I see it becoming a much more influential global player in the near future. Btw, the surveillance state has always been there in China, it’s just that this has become a lot easier now in the digital age. I love Canada, especially the Western states, have been there several times. But for now I’m quite happy in the Nordic countries

Indeed. As someone who grew up in the former Eastern Bloc, and whose family fled to the West as political refugees in the early 80’s, the US used to be something we looked up to and admired, a beacon of hope somewhere beyond the bleak grey concrete of communist suburban plattenbau (literally and figuratively). Needless to say these illusions have been thoroughly destroyed over the past 30+ years, and what I see now in the US just fills me with sadness and a sense of despair. Are we soon going to see people fleeing the US, like we once fled from the East? Oh how the tables have turned. I anticipate the rest of the world turning more towards the Asian powers in the near future, particularly China, mark my words. Time to dust off my rather rusty Mandarin (it’s been 25 years since I lived in China), me thinks.