Posted by
michael
on from the close-only-counts-in-horseshoes dept.
DrBlake writes "New York Times has an article about a study of Einsteins theory of relativity that I found very interesting. Not only might the speed of light be relative under certain circumstances, the famous equation E=mc2 might not be entirely correct."
That's the paradox...
by
starsong
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...and the beauty of special relativity.
They key thing is that the speed of light is fixed relative to *everything*. This means that if I'm standing by the highway and measure it, I get the same speed as a person in a car going 60 mph away from me. And since the speed of light is fixed, everything ELSE distorts to make up for it. That includes time (time dilation) and space (Lorentz contraction). It leads to some pretty freaky and amazing consequences.
Re:That's the paradox...
by
Trogre
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A good way to observe (well, simulate) some of these effects is to download lightspeed and have a play. Effects such as Lorentz contraction, doppler shift, headlight effects and optical aberrations can be observed. Very cool with the add-on Starship Voyager model.
There's also some very nice mpegs floating around the net of tram cars and flashing lamp posts in a world where the speed of light is slowed to a couple of meters per second. Now if only I could dig up the URL...
-- "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
well, of course...
by
QID
·
· Score: 5, Informative
E=mc^2 is actually a simplified form of the real equation, E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). A convenient graphical depiction can be found in a few seconds with google, or here: http://www.btinternet.com/~j.doyle/SR/Emc2/Derive. htm.
This story's at the top of the page, and look what's at the bottom:
186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
by
rsidd
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Wrong. Newtonian gravity suggests effects should be instantaneous, that's why Einstein knew it was wrong and came up with the general theory of relativity, which is the best theory of gravity we have today (and unlike special relativity which was built on the work of others, GR was Einstein's own, nobody else was even thinking along those lines.)
As for magnetism, that travels at the speed of light -- that has been known since Maxwell's time. Basically, that's what electromagnetic radiation is: a changing magnetic field causes a changing electric field, which causes a changing magnetic field,.... The paradox was that Maxwell's equations give you a constant for the speed of light, without reference to the velocity of the observer, so people assumed that they are valid only in the rest frame of a mythical "ether". Einstein showed that Maxwell's equations are correct for all observers, and it is Newton's/Galileo's ideas which are wrong.
Incidentally, just like electromagnetic radiation, GR implies that gravity waves should exist too.
Re:can someone explain to me
by
rossifer
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
c is relative to the observer, no matter which observer we're talking about. Anything that can measure the speed of a photon will always measure it going at the speed of light through that substance. Through a perfect vacuum, it's c. Through space it's c - epsilon (epsilon is an infintesimally small number). Through water it's about c/1.335.
If you are zooming past me at half the speed of light and both of us measure the speed of a particular photon at the same time, we'll both measure it's speed as c. What will be different about our two measurements is that you'll see a higher energy photon (bluer) than me if the photon is moving opposite to your motion relative to me and a lower energy photon (redder) if the photon is moving in the same direction as your motion relative to me.
No particular point in space is special. Once you identify where the observer is located, you can call that point in space an "origin" or "zero" and make all of your measurements from that point in space. The rest of the universe relative to that origin is called an "inertial reference frame", but it's just the same as any other reference frame. There's another trick. Behavior of things in inertial reference frames is time dependent because gravity pulls your frame around and changes everything around it slightly every moment. Besides that, two inertial reference frames may have a relative velocity but for a moment share the same point in space (the example above).
That's when tensor math starts to come in handy. Don't worry, I won't torture you with that.
Relativity, once you grok it, will bend your mind. From a metaphysical perspective, it emphasizes the reality that most of what we call facts are actually just high probability observations.
Remember, there is no spoon.
Regards, Ross
Re:can someone explain to me
by
GMFTatsujin
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Lordy... You don't ask much, do you?
The speed of light is constant in all possible frames of reference, according to Einstein. Basically what he's saying is that for any two objects at rest relative to each other (regardless of their motion to the rest of the universe, they appear not to be moving to *each other*), time and space behave in the same way. The beauty of his theory is that no one object can be said to be at universal rest to everything else -- there is no universal frame to measure against. Therefore, every frame of reference is valid and will behave the same way. This kills Ether theory dead, since Ether theory depends on a universal frame of reference. If it didn't have a universal frame of reference, then space and time would start behaving oddly within your *own* frame of reference depending on your motion. This is not the case - the light on Pluto behaves the same way as the light on Earth, even though the two are moving in different frames.
It's only when you introduce out-of-frame references (I'm standing still, the train is moving at 60mph away from me) that relativity kicks in and the laws start to behave weirdly.
Not inconsistantly, just weirdly. It's all in shifting your viewpoint.
The trick with light is to realize that although it travels at the same speed in every frame of reference, the *wavelength* is what changes between frame. This is what that whole red-shifting/Doppler effect is about. The speed of light is constant; the color, however, changes depnding on your frame of reference. If you shoot a blue light at me while we're both standing still relative to each other, it looks blue to me. If I run away *really fast*, it will still be blue to you, but it will appear red to me because the wavelength alters even though it still travels toward me at a constant rate. Ditto if *you* run away from me - the light is blue to you, but again, it appears red to me, even though it travels at the same speed.
Light does not behave in the Newtonian way - acceleration does not effect its speed, only its wavelength. That's where the question of why light is constant to everything, even moving objects, is answered.
Weird, huh?
For a far, far, better explanation (and a fantastic grounding on String Theory in terms for non-physicists) check out The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. If I could, I'd give this book a Pulitzer every year until the day I died.
Einstein knew he was wrong
by
automatic_jack
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Not more than a few year's after developing his theories of general and special relativity, Einstein realized that they weren't perfect. The simple reason behind his realization was that the theories of relativity didn't make sense when applied on a quantum scale, and the theories of quantum physics didn't make sense when applies of a relative scale. Einstein refused to believe that the universe worked in such a way that there had to be two mutually exclusive theories to explain physics on the very small and the very large scale.
Of course, the rest of the world was busy experimenting with his theories of relativity, but after he published them he quickly lost interest in their progress. He spent the rest of his life searching for what he referred to as the "unified field theory," a single theory that could properly explain quantum physics and relativity at the same time.
I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but theoretical science does interest me. Brian Greene's book, The Elegant Universe does a great job of explaining the background on this. It's worth a look.
--
--
Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
Hektor_Troy
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The job of the scientist is thus to question *everything.*
Why?
-- We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
lars_stefan_axelsson
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I don't mean to be a troll, but I really want to ask this. Why is it so frowned upon to question evolution?
By the nature of science, it is granted that theories and current "knowledge" may be overturned in light of future counter-evidence. However, evolutionists give the impression that they consider their views to be rock-solid, indisputable Truth that is impossible to disprove now and forevermore. Anyone who dares to disagree is dismissed out of hand as a kook. (See, I had to post as AC to even ask.)
Well, I don't know if it's really the case that evolutionists consider their views to be a "truth that is impossible to disprove" etc. (at least not the scientfically minded ones, for any theory there are supporters that one could do without).
Now let me start by saying that I'm not really an expert on evolution, since I'm european I've never had to be. There are no creationists here to speak of, and hence I'm not well versed in their way of thinking. I am a "scientist" however, so I'm somewhat qualified to speak about that.
Now, not to write an essay answering your question, but much of it boils down to what we mean by "wrong." First some preliminaries though. The strength of any scientific theory rests on its predictive powers, how well does it foresay and explain the outcome of experiments or observations (past of future). Any good scientific theory then is very specific (or strong), what we like to call "easily falsifiable", i.e. it is simple to detect when its predictive powers are failing. (Hence many of them in the natural sciences are formulated in some form of logic; "mathematics" since that provides for a stronger statement to be made). So, strong theory equals "easy to prove wrong" given contradictory evidence.
Now, then what does it mean to be "wrong" in the scientific sense? In short it's when there are observations made that cannot fit into the current theory. A prime example would be Newton's law of kinetic energy E=1/2mv^2. For a long time that was thought to be all there is to it, and all the experiments and observations that could be made corroborated that. Today we know that it's not "true". It's OK for lower speeds, but it completely fails to take relativistic effects into account (see previous posts in this thread), and hence has been relegated to the scrap heap of scientific theories, right?
Well, not quite. It's still a very good approximation for most macroscopic real world phenomena. It still explains them very well, and even post Einstein, it hasn't really lost any of it's predictive powers in the domain in which it was thought up. So even though it may now be thought "wrong" in the strictest sense of the word; it may not tell all of the truth to all people, it's still a pretty darn good theory if you're a bit more careful with it's application.
This is also true of Darwinian evolution. It's a very well tested theory (or "fact" if you will) by now, with wast predictive and explanatory powers. Any later theory that superseeds it must still explain all the observations with the same (or better) accuracy as Darwinistic evolution has to date. So even though evolution as a theory may be proven "wrong" at a later date, it'll still be mostly "right." As Newtons' laws still are.
Now, in order to completely close the sack, we also need Occam's razor. I.e. given two equally predictive theories, we prefer the simpler one. It's really a common sense argument. Why make things harder than they have to be. It's also the only scientific loophole that creationists can exploit. By invoking a "deus ex machina" in the form of an omnipotent God, that stacks the deck so that scientists cannot make correct observations (or make them correctly), you can of course invalidate any and every theory. And that's why science doesn't deal with that. If someone stacks the deck, we won't play! (Then we can continue various philosophical arguments, and in doing so rapidly leaving the natural sciences.)
And that's incidentally why science isn't "just another religion", science specifically is about absolutely minimising the things that have to be taken on faith (such as the existence of the rest of the world etc), while religion(s) are about systematising the things you take on faith. Often that means that science cannot say very much on a subject, and people having a natural tendency towards taking things on faith, often over interprets scientific statements (it takes practice to so thoroughly disiplining your subjectiveness as the scientist must do). This leads to "scientific" statements or belif in the general public, that really aren't. But that's not the fault of science, more a fault of the schooling system.
If you're specifically interested in evolution, I have it on good authority that you could do worse than studying talk origins. I haven't got any good references on the philosophy of science in english for you, but I'm sure that a few minutes of googling will turn up a multitude.
-- Stefan Axelsson
Re:FTL == Time Travel ?
by
Soft
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I have been told that theory forbids any travel faster than light, no matter what the means ("warp drive", "hyperspace", "teleporter", whatever). My understanding is that if you could, some observers would see you traveling back in time, and this is forbidden.
Yes. One of the hypotheses of relativity is causality, that is, one event can possibly cause another only if the latter occurs at a later time than the former, and this must hold true for all possible observers whatever their frame of reference.
Now, as you know, the passing of time for an observer varies with his frame of reference (his speed, to put it simply). Hence, given two events, the interval of time from one to the other will not be the same for all observers. But if one is to cause another, it must always remain in its past; the sign of the time difference "t2-t1" must not change whatever the observer.
Unfortunately, my memories of relativity are too scarce to put this into equations, but if you could travel faster than light, you could, say, watch an asteroid smash into the Earth and warn your friend on the Centauri stock market to sell shares of all Terran businesses before anyone could "see" the flash of the impact.
And in a given frame of reference (maybe that of a traveler aboard a STL ship in-between), it would look as if you knew about it before it happened; stretching it further, it would be possible for the traveler (maybe through another FTL "jump") to warn Earth before the impact. Bye-bye causality.
If these situations are not to happen, information must not travel FTL.
Thanks for a good post. --I offer the following not as a criticism in any way, but just as a thought which has been bouncing around in my mind looking for an excuse to be expressed.
First off, I'm not a creationist. Indeed, I find that whole debate to be entirely infernal, as both sides seem to me quite flawed in their own ways. That being said. ..
Occam's Razor bugs me. As a deductive tool, it is a pretty good one; it works for the most part. What I find unsettling, however, is that it seems to have become, thanks to its presentation and treatment in popular media, understood and accepted by many as a de facto scientific law when it is not.
It is a rule of thumb, and only a rule of thumb. --It is only a rule of thumb, because it is not always right. Every time something unexpectedly complex turns out to be the reality behind a phenomenon which might otherwise have been explained through simple means, Occam's Razor is blunted.
Example:
When Alexandre Graham Bell first announced to the world that he had discovered a way to send a voice signal over a wire, the world erupted with both excitement and disbelief. One major newspaper even ran a story written by experts which attempted to debunk Bell's claim. They used diagrams demonstrating that sound waves sent down thin metal tubes of the diameter Bell was using for wires, could not possibly travel the kinds of distances he claimed. The experts were engineers well versed in the science and dynamics of sound as employed in the kinds of voice communication pipe systems once used large ocean going vessels. To the writers of the article, they were being entirely reasonable.
"Which is more likely?" they must have asked themselves, "That Bell has created some magical new invention to send sound along miles of very thin tubes? Or that he is lying?"
Occam's Razor is deeply rooted in how one perceives, how much information there is available to work with, and what has been previously accepted by culture as normal and/or outlandish.
-Now Bell was, of course, proven to be right. When words crackled out from crude speakers for all to hear, the enthusiastic debunkers, (and there is never any shortage of enthusiastic debunkers or respected, conservative media outlets to give them a voice and print their diagrams), had to quietly go mum and withdraw their objections. But that was in part due to large forces which wanted and allowed Bell to be proven right. If you don't advertise a fact or discovery, facts and discoveries can easily vanish. People have short memories. People have short lives. Without active perseverance, knowledge is a self-burying commodity until it becomes large enough to self-sustain, and even then, it is not so very difficult to forget important turns of history after only a few fickle generations have passed.
Science as a concept, is a pure, wonderful thing, but it does not know everything. Indeed, many institutions are not so pure as the science which they employ; it is well known that individuals with weak morals, and corrupt institution will suppress data, twist data and even make up data on a basis regular enough that the public pool of knowledge has been polluted to the point that the employment of Occam's Razor is by no means reliable in today's arena of public thought.
Just something to consider next time you feel the need to slam a new idea. Remember that Occam gave us a deductive tool, not an irrefutable law.
-Fantastic Lad
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
jaoswald
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Did you actually read the link you included from talkorigins.org? It contains a plausible sequence of evolutionary changes that would lead to the bombardier beetle; exactly what you claim is impossible.
In any case, argument from design doesn't provide any "explanation," much less a better one. How did the designer make the beetle, and all its close genetic relatives, where none had existed before? Why the variety of mechanisms in the close relatives, instead of a single design?
Re:You misunderstand completely
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, nobody has ever seen "evolution" happen in a way congruent with the theories proposed by Darwinian evolutionists. Their theories include rates of change that are so slow as to be unobservable.
Wrong. We also can't see electrons, or stars/galaxies at the edge of the universe. We don't need to see them to observe them though. Evolution has been observed in the fossil record, and even to some extent in the laboratory. Still, the lab observations are fairly new (the last 30-40 years) and science is busy debating whether or not it is indeed evolution... after all, as you pointed out, it is a slow effect.
Furthermore, no evolutionist has ever explained creatures like the Bombardier Beetle and its built-in flame thrower.
Huh? Of course evolutionists don't know everything at once... they don't claim to be omniscient. However, that doesn't mean they are doofuses without a clue. There have already been several possible explanations suggested in the scientific community, and no one disputes that something unknown is going on. You must not be researching this issue very thoroughly, if you believe there are no explanations at all, and that biologists are all sitting around dumbfounded.
Some of the more radical ideas center around the possibility that DNA acts more like a computer than a raw blueprint. That it might "store" a bunch of "mutations", saving them for a rainy day when some threshhold is reached. This "computer" might even span many individuals in the population. So instead of a gradual change into a "bombadier beetle" where there are many transitionary variants doomed to blowing themselves up, evolution simply "skipped over" those and went straight to the version capable of blowing up its enemies, and not itself.
Was it Greg Bear that said "Even evolution is evolving, becoming better at what it does." ?
Besides, lay off Darwinian evolution. Most people today see it as only the crudest approximation of the reality of evolution. Would figure that a bible thumper would be reacting to the scientific community of 100 years ago... you guys are always more than a few steps behind.
Slashdot Mirror
NYT article
...and the beauty of special relativity.
They key thing is that the speed of light is fixed relative to *everything*. This means that if I'm standing by the highway and measure it, I get the same speed as a person in a car going 60 mph away from me. And since the speed of light is fixed, everything ELSE distorts to make up for it. That includes time (time dilation) and space (Lorentz contraction). It leads to some pretty freaky and amazing consequences.
E=mc^2 is actually a simplified form of the real equation, E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). A convenient graphical depiction can be found in a few seconds with google, or here: http://www.btinternet.com/~j.doyle/SR/Emc2/Derive. htm.
186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW.
As for magnetism, that travels at the speed of light -- that has been known since Maxwell's time. Basically, that's what electromagnetic radiation is: a changing magnetic field causes a changing electric field, which causes a changing magnetic field, .... The paradox was that Maxwell's equations give you a constant for the speed of light, without reference to the velocity of the observer, so people assumed that they are valid only in the rest frame of a mythical "ether". Einstein showed that Maxwell's equations are correct for all observers, and it is Newton's/Galileo's ideas which are wrong.
Incidentally, just like electromagnetic radiation, GR implies that gravity waves should exist too.
c is relative to the observer, no matter which observer we're talking about. Anything that can measure the speed of a photon will always measure it going at the speed of light through that substance. Through a perfect vacuum, it's c. Through space it's c - epsilon (epsilon is an infintesimally small number). Through water it's about c/1.335.
If you are zooming past me at half the speed of light and both of us measure the speed of a particular photon at the same time, we'll both measure it's speed as c. What will be different about our two measurements is that you'll see a higher energy photon (bluer) than me if the photon is moving opposite to your motion relative to me and a lower energy photon (redder) if the photon is moving in the same direction as your motion relative to me.
No particular point in space is special. Once you identify where the observer is located, you can call that point in space an "origin" or "zero" and make all of your measurements from that point in space. The rest of the universe relative to that origin is called an "inertial reference frame", but it's just the same as any other reference frame. There's another trick. Behavior of things in inertial reference frames is time dependent because gravity pulls your frame around and changes everything around it slightly every moment. Besides that, two inertial reference frames may have a relative velocity but for a moment share the same point in space (the example above).
That's when tensor math starts to come in handy. Don't worry, I won't torture you with that.
Relativity, once you grok it, will bend your mind. From a metaphysical perspective, it emphasizes the reality that most of what we call facts are actually just high probability observations.
Remember, there is no spoon.
Regards,
Ross
Lordy... You don't ask much, do you?
The speed of light is constant in all possible frames of reference, according to Einstein. Basically what he's saying is that for any two objects at rest relative to each other (regardless of their motion to the rest of the universe, they appear not to be moving to *each other*), time and space behave in the same way. The beauty of his theory is that no one object can be said to be at universal rest to everything else -- there is no universal frame to measure against. Therefore, every frame of reference is valid and will behave the same way. This kills Ether theory dead, since Ether theory depends on a universal frame of reference. If it didn't have a universal frame of reference, then space and time would start behaving oddly within your *own* frame of reference depending on your motion. This is not the case - the light on Pluto behaves the same way as the light on Earth, even though the two are moving in different frames.
It's only when you introduce out-of-frame references (I'm standing still, the train is moving at 60mph away from me) that relativity kicks in and the laws start to behave weirdly.
Not inconsistantly, just weirdly. It's all in shifting your viewpoint.
The trick with light is to realize that although it travels at the same speed in every frame of reference, the *wavelength* is what changes between frame. This is what that whole red-shifting/Doppler effect is about. The speed of light is constant; the color, however, changes depnding on your frame of reference. If you shoot a blue light at me while we're both standing still relative to each other, it looks blue to me. If I run away *really fast*, it will still be blue to you, but it will appear red to me because the wavelength alters even though it still travels toward me at a constant rate. Ditto if *you* run away from me - the light is blue to you, but again, it appears red to me, even though it travels at the same speed.
Light does not behave in the Newtonian way - acceleration does not effect its speed, only its wavelength. That's where the question of why light is constant to everything, even moving objects, is answered.
Weird, huh?
For a far, far, better explanation (and a fantastic grounding on String Theory in terms for non-physicists) check out The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. If I could, I'd give this book a Pulitzer every year until the day I died.
Not more than a few year's after developing his theories of general and special relativity, Einstein realized that they weren't perfect. The simple reason behind his realization was that the theories of relativity didn't make sense when applied on a quantum scale, and the theories of quantum physics didn't make sense when applies of a relative scale. Einstein refused to believe that the universe worked in such a way that there had to be two mutually exclusive theories to explain physics on the very small and the very large scale.
Of course, the rest of the world was busy experimenting with his theories of relativity, but after he published them he quickly lost interest in their progress. He spent the rest of his life searching for what he referred to as the "unified field theory," a single theory that could properly explain quantum physics and relativity at the same time.
I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but theoretical science does interest me. Brian Greene's book, The Elegant Universe does a great job of explaining the background on this. It's worth a look.
-- Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Well, I don't know if it's really the case that evolutionists consider their views to be a "truth that is impossible to disprove" etc. (at least not the scientfically minded ones, for any theory there are supporters that one could do without).
Now let me start by saying that I'm not really an expert on evolution, since I'm european I've never had to be. There are no creationists here to speak of, and hence I'm not well versed in their way of thinking. I am a "scientist" however, so I'm somewhat qualified to speak about that.
Now, not to write an essay answering your question, but much of it boils down to what we mean by "wrong." First some preliminaries though. The strength of any scientific theory rests on its predictive powers, how well does it foresay and explain the outcome of experiments or observations (past of future). Any good scientific theory then is very specific (or strong), what we like to call "easily falsifiable", i.e. it is simple to detect when its predictive powers are failing. (Hence many of them in the natural sciences are formulated in some form of logic; "mathematics" since that provides for a stronger statement to be made). So, strong theory equals "easy to prove wrong" given contradictory evidence.
Now, then what does it mean to be "wrong" in the scientific sense? In short it's when there are observations made that cannot fit into the current theory. A prime example would be Newton's law of kinetic energy E=1/2mv^2. For a long time that was thought to be all there is to it, and all the experiments and observations that could be made corroborated that. Today we know that it's not "true". It's OK for lower speeds, but it completely fails to take relativistic effects into account (see previous posts in this thread), and hence has been relegated to the scrap heap of scientific theories, right?
Well, not quite. It's still a very good approximation for most macroscopic real world phenomena. It still explains them very well, and even post Einstein, it hasn't really lost any of it's predictive powers in the domain in which it was thought up. So even though it may now be thought "wrong" in the strictest sense of the word; it may not tell all of the truth to all people, it's still a pretty darn good theory if you're a bit more careful with it's application.
This is also true of Darwinian evolution. It's a very well tested theory (or "fact" if you will) by now, with wast predictive and explanatory powers. Any later theory that superseeds it must still explain all the observations with the same (or better) accuracy as Darwinistic evolution has to date. So even though evolution as a theory may be proven "wrong" at a later date, it'll still be mostly "right." As Newtons' laws still are.
Now, in order to completely close the sack, we also need Occam's razor. I.e. given two equally predictive theories, we prefer the simpler one. It's really a common sense argument. Why make things harder than they have to be. It's also the only scientific loophole that creationists can exploit. By invoking a "deus ex machina" in the form of an omnipotent God, that stacks the deck so that scientists cannot make correct observations (or make them correctly), you can of course invalidate any and every theory. And that's why science doesn't deal with that. If someone stacks the deck, we won't play! (Then we can continue various philosophical arguments, and in doing so rapidly leaving the natural sciences.)
And that's incidentally why science isn't "just another religion", science specifically is about absolutely minimising the things that have to be taken on faith (such as the existence of the rest of the world etc), while religion(s) are about systematising the things you take on faith. Often that means that science cannot say very much on a subject, and people having a natural tendency towards taking things on faith, often over interprets scientific statements (it takes practice to so thoroughly disiplining your subjectiveness as the scientist must do). This leads to "scientific" statements or belif in the general public, that really aren't. But that's not the fault of science, more a fault of the schooling system.
If you're specifically interested in evolution, I have it on good authority that you could do worse than studying talk origins. I haven't got any good references on the philosophy of science in english for you, but I'm sure that a few minutes of googling will turn up a multitude.
Stefan Axelsson
Yes. One of the hypotheses of relativity is causality, that is, one event can possibly cause another only if the latter occurs at a later time than the former, and this must hold true for all possible observers whatever their frame of reference.
Now, as you know, the passing of time for an observer varies with his frame of reference (his speed, to put it simply). Hence, given two events, the interval of time from one to the other will not be the same for all observers. But if one is to cause another, it must always remain in its past; the sign of the time difference "t2-t1" must not change whatever the observer.
Unfortunately, my memories of relativity are too scarce to put this into equations, but if you could travel faster than light, you could, say, watch an asteroid smash into the Earth and warn your friend on the Centauri stock market to sell shares of all Terran businesses before anyone could "see" the flash of the impact.
And in a given frame of reference (maybe that of a traveler aboard a STL ship in-between), it would look as if you knew about it before it happened; stretching it further, it would be possible for the traveler (maybe through another FTL "jump") to warn Earth before the impact. Bye-bye causality.
If these situations are not to happen, information must not travel FTL.
First off, I'm not a creationist. Indeed, I find that whole debate to be entirely infernal, as both sides seem to me quite flawed in their own ways. That being said. .
Occam's Razor bugs me. As a deductive tool, it is a pretty good one; it works for the most part. What I find unsettling, however, is that it seems to have become, thanks to its presentation and treatment in popular media, understood and accepted by many as a de facto scientific law when it is not.
It is a rule of thumb, and only a rule of thumb. --It is only a rule of thumb, because it is not always right. Every time something unexpectedly complex turns out to be the reality behind a phenomenon which might otherwise have been explained through simple means, Occam's Razor is blunted.
Example:
When Alexandre Graham Bell first announced to the world that he had discovered a way to send a voice signal over a wire, the world erupted with both excitement and disbelief. One major newspaper even ran a story written by experts which attempted to debunk Bell's claim. They used diagrams demonstrating that sound waves sent down thin metal tubes of the diameter Bell was using for wires, could not possibly travel the kinds of distances he claimed. The experts were engineers well versed in the science and dynamics of sound as employed in the kinds of voice communication pipe systems once used large ocean going vessels. To the writers of the article, they were being entirely reasonable.
"Which is more likely?" they must have asked themselves, "That Bell has created some magical new invention to send sound along miles of very thin tubes? Or that he is lying?"
Occam's Razor is deeply rooted in how one perceives, how much information there is available to work with, and what has been previously accepted by culture as normal and/or outlandish.
-Now Bell was, of course, proven to be right. When words crackled out from crude speakers for all to hear, the enthusiastic debunkers, (and there is never any shortage of enthusiastic debunkers or respected, conservative media outlets to give them a voice and print their diagrams), had to quietly go mum and withdraw their objections. But that was in part due to large forces which wanted and allowed Bell to be proven right. If you don't advertise a fact or discovery, facts and discoveries can easily vanish. People have short memories. People have short lives. Without active perseverance, knowledge is a self-burying commodity until it becomes large enough to self-sustain, and even then, it is not so very difficult to forget important turns of history after only a few fickle generations have passed.
Science as a concept, is a pure, wonderful thing, but it does not know everything. Indeed, many institutions are not so pure as the science which they employ; it is well known that individuals with weak morals, and corrupt institution will suppress data, twist data and even make up data on a basis regular enough that the public pool of knowledge has been polluted to the point that the employment of Occam's Razor is by no means reliable in today's arena of public thought.
Just something to consider next time you feel the need to slam a new idea. Remember that Occam gave us a deductive tool, not an irrefutable law.
-Fantastic Lad
Did you actually read the link you included from talkorigins.org? It contains a plausible sequence of evolutionary changes that would lead to the bombardier beetle; exactly what you claim is impossible.
In any case, argument from design doesn't provide any "explanation," much less a better one. How did the designer make the beetle, and all its close genetic relatives, where none had existed before? Why the variety of mechanisms in the close relatives, instead of a single design?
Actually, nobody has ever seen "evolution" happen in a way congruent with the theories proposed by Darwinian evolutionists. Their theories include rates of change that are so slow as to be unobservable.
Wrong. We also can't see electrons, or stars/galaxies at the edge of the universe. We don't need to see them to observe them though. Evolution has been observed in the fossil record, and even to some extent in the laboratory. Still, the lab observations are fairly new (the last 30-40 years) and science is busy debating whether or not it is indeed evolution... after all, as you pointed out, it is a slow effect.
Furthermore, no evolutionist has ever explained creatures like the Bombardier Beetle and its built-in flame thrower.
Huh? Of course evolutionists don't know everything at once... they don't claim to be omniscient. However, that doesn't mean they are doofuses without a clue. There have already been several possible explanations suggested in the scientific community, and no one disputes that something unknown is going on. You must not be researching this issue very thoroughly, if you believe there are no explanations at all, and that biologists are all sitting around dumbfounded.
Some of the more radical ideas center around the possibility that DNA acts more like a computer than a raw blueprint. That it might "store" a bunch of "mutations", saving them for a rainy day when some threshhold is reached. This "computer" might even span many individuals in the population. So instead of a gradual change into a "bombadier beetle" where there are many transitionary variants doomed to blowing themselves up, evolution simply "skipped over" those and went straight to the version capable of blowing up its enemies, and not itself.
Was it Greg Bear that said "Even evolution is evolving, becoming better at what it does." ?
Besides, lay off Darwinian evolution. Most people today see it as only the crudest approximation of the reality of evolution. Would figure that a bible thumper would be reacting to the scientific community of 100 years ago... you guys are always more than a few steps behind.