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Slowly Pulling Facts from Black Holes
lee1 writes "Astronomers have proven the existence of the event horizon, the 'point of no return' that surrounds black holes. An MIT and Harvard team said they showed its existence by looking for X-ray bursts from neutron stars and more compact objects thought to be black holes." Relatedly beuges writes "IOL is reporting that by tracking the death spiral of cosmic gas at the center of a galaxy called NGC1097, scientists figured that material moving at 177 000km an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole. 'It would take 200 000 years for gas to travel the last leg of its one-way journey,' Kambiz Fathi of Rochester Institute of Technology told reporters at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society."
I wouldn't be too sure about that. For centuries man thought it impossible to prove the existence of atoms, things so small one could never discern them not even with the best of microscopes. Right now we know about the existance of even smaller things in our universe...
So what makes you think that we'll never be able to prove the existence of places we could never visit in physical form, not even in the strongest and most powerful of spaceships? ;)
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
Hmmm - So friction in the revolving gas could will cause it to heat up and possibly glow, while slowing down its rotation, causing it to cross the event horizon and fall in?
Oh well, what the hell...
What makes you so certain Atoms really do exist?
Oh sure, we have mathematical formulas that prove that "something" does exist and we can even do some manipulation, but what if it turns out that all this stuff thats so tiny that we can't see it isnt at all what we think it is even though it does respond in predictable ways that we can understand and measure.
Its like an old programming analogy I once read, picture a man in a box who only understands english, but has a big book on Chinese. Now programmers feed the box instructions written in chinese and the man inside is able to look up words in his book, and then he is also able to write chinese replys using the book, but he doesnt actually understand the chinese language itself. The people on the outside would think he understands chinese because they send in chinese messages and get chinese replys in return.
Maybe atoms are like that as well. We poke atoms, and they respond in a predictable fasion, but since we cant actually see them how do we really know what we're poking?
That's a classic defense of dualism you're quoting, and the fatal flaw is only considering the programmer as an individual. If the book contains enough information to trick outsiders into thinking a chinese speaking person is inside, the book itself can be considered an individual, living of course only in the environment created by the actions of the programmer, but an individual none the less.
So, essentially, even if the atoms are only emulating on something more complex or different, we are still working with what we conceive of as atoms, simply at a lower level. The intermediate stage may be interesting or it may not, especially if it remains undetectable. For instance, assume a perfect simulation of the universe on a computer, the inhabitants of the universe are, philosophically, no less real than we are, they see the same phenomena as we do and think they live in a universe of atoms despite the fact that they're just data structures and algorithms emulating what our atoms would do.
Not true. The speed of light is a constant, even near a black hole.
But spacetime is bent quite badly near the event horizon. Light emitted in the appropriate direction would orbit the black hole several times before entering/leaving the black hole, so while the speed of light may be chugging along at 299,792,458 m/s, the distance it travels might not be what you expected...
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Hint: what is the *definition* of "speed of ligth" ?
Your comment is purely based on the theories of Stephen Hawkings. I've read a lot of his work and I think he is mostly full of shit. For some reason he has been put on an intellectual pedestal by his peers in the field of theoretical physics. I don't believe that this is for the right reasons though, but I won't speculate what the reasons actually were. I think his theories are having a harmful effect on physics as a whole, because (1) like i said above, he's full of shit, and (2) any new breakthroughs that contradict his work are usually ignored, because they contradict him. Science advances generation by generation because its often very hard to refute a great scientists work until after he has died. I sincerely hope that he has written his last book. I sick of hearing dumbasses quoting from A Brief History of Time to support some bullshit they are trying to make me believe in.
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It does too! How many pregnant pr0n starz have you seen?
I think you do get it! Turing's test is just a better way of stating the problem than the Chinese Room.
The often overlooked and very insightful aspect of Turing's test is that it doesn't just apply to "artificial" intelligence. In his formulation, by communicating with an unknown entity, you can determine by conversation whether or not it is at least as intelligent as you.
While that's an interesting test for an AI (though many AI researchers have problems with it today) it also makes a very different point: given two people, both smarter than you, you can't tell which of the two is the smartest through direct interaction! Much of the scientific method and the culture of science can be understood from this simple observation.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes, they're pictures of atoms, taken with electrons instead of photons. What we see with our eyes, after all, is nothing but the oscillations produced by the scattering of photons off atoms.