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The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Fate
Reader Maximum Prophet sends a piece from the NY Times by the usually reliable Dennis Overbye reporting on a "crazy" theory being worked up by a pair of "otherwise distinguished physicists": that the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson. Maximum Prophet adds, "This happened to the Superconducting Super Collider in the science fiction story Einstein's Bridge. Now Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, are theorizing that it's happening in real life." "I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."
Now THAT is a book I'd like to see made into a movie. Put some of the "science" back in Science Fiction.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think casting Keanu Reeves as Neils Bohr was a stroke of unmatched brilliance.
Lady GaGa is, of course, a surprise as "the loathsome particle". She does a good Burlesconi imitation, all thing considered...
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
We created the universe that we are trying to figure out who made it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So I can tell my wife that I cannot cook dinner tonight because the result would be so abhorrent that nature might send an agent back in time to destroy me before I can create it. Ergo, any movement toward making dinner could very well result in my demise...so let that be on her conscience.
...the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one...
if this is true, it's either scary or wonderful!
Smivs on the intertubes!
Maybe this is the reason why i was never able to finished University , the effect on the universe would have been catastrohpic !
but seriously, if it came back through time we should be able to detect it.
I remember when that happened to me, in 2024...
Life hasn't been the same until.
What did you say?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
I'm thinking noodly appendages are involved.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Utter utter bollocks.
He found a practical application for the effect in "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" (named in honor of Frank Tipler's paper). The universe hates time machines... so one side of a war works to convince the other side to try to make one.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Everyone knows the time traveler's objective in going back in time is not to kill his own grandfather, but rather to BECOME his own grandfather.
that the Higgs boson is abhorrent to Nature is ridiculous.
Please don't anthropomorphize particles. They don't like when you do that.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I don't think so. Entanglement. One particle goes through the event horizon. We stay on this side and observe what happens to the other. Some say the energy of the black hole breaks the entanglement. But how will we know till we try it?
This theory actually kind of makes sense to me... almost.
If the universe were indeed so much more complex than we imagined (which I fully believe is possible) that something like this could happen, I still don't think it would happen this way - that the future universe is coming back in time, just to break some magnets. Nature is rarely so subtle.
I do believe in the possibility of multiverse theory being correct, which also allows me to believe in some form of time travel, but a more natural extension of this all is that the particles created in the future tear a hole in time-space and destroy the collision center of the machine, not some magnets around the edge (unless an accidental collision occurred elsewhere, i suppose).
Plus, I've never figured out if time-space would follow the earth in its orbit, or if these things would just happen out in space somewhere, at the spot in orbit the earth was going to be at.
I really hope this is kind of correct, or the universe would be a much less interesting place. I fear that one day we'll figure everything about this stuff out, and that it won't be a magical world of multiverses and time travel.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
I dunno, the more I keep seeing the LHC fail and fail is that we may be experiencing quantum suicide. In each reality that the LHC properly starts up and smashs atoms, the world ends as we know it. We keep experiencing a version of reality where cirmstance is preventing the Hiigs Boson from being created. For those unfamiliar with the concept, here's the thought experiment behind the theory straight from Wikiepdia:
One example of the thought experiment is: a man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. The gun is rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. If the quantum particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If the particle is spinning counterclockwise, the gun won't discharge; there will only be a click.
The man now pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. He pulls the trigger again, with the same result. And again; the gun does not fire. The man will continue to pull the trigger again and again with the same result: The gun won't fire. Although it's functioning properly and loaded with bullets, no matter how many times he pulls the trigger, the gun will never seem to fire.
Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. The man pulls the trigger for the very first time, and the particle is now measured as spinning clockwise. The gun fires. The man is dead.
But the problem arises; the man already pulled the trigger the first time — and an infinite amount of times following that — and we already know the gun didn't fire. How can the man be dead? The man is unaware, but he's both alive and dead. Each time he pulls the trigger, the universe is split in two. It will continue to split, again and again, each time the trigger is pulled. This thought experiment is called 'quantum suicide'. It was first posed by theorist Max Tegmark in 1997. However, science fiction author Larry Niven originally proposed a fictional variant of quantum suicide in his short story All the Myriad Ways in which the protagonist's final action in the story kills/fails to kill him in myriad alternate realities.
With each run of the experiment there is a 50-50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the experimenter will die. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, the gun will (in all likelihood) eventually be triggered and the experimenter will die (assuming the experimenter allows the wavefunction/spinor of the particle to evolve back to its original state after each attempt). If the many-worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment, the experimenter will be split into one world in which he survives and another world in which he dies. After many runs of the experiment, there will be many worlds. In the worlds where the experimenter dies, he will cease to be a conscious entity.
However, from the point of view of the non-dead copies of the experimenter, the experiment will continue running without his ceasing to exist, because at each branch, he will only be able to observe the result in the world in which he survives, and if many-worlds is correct, the surviving copies of the experimenter will notice that he never seems to die, therefore "proving" himself to be invulnerable to the gun mechanism in question, from his own point of view.
If the many-worlds interpretation is true, the measure (given in M.W.I. by the squared norm of the wavefunction) of the surviving copies of the experimenter will decrease by 50% with each run of the experiment, but will remain non-zero. So, if the surviving copies become experimenters, those copies will either die in the first shot, or survive creating duplicates of themselves (copies of copies, that will survive finitely or die).
This signature was left intentionally blank.
This "theory" is horribly bad, inconsistent with modern concept of time and light-cones, but would make a kick-ass book or movie. Hollywood, you know what to do!
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The difference between theory and practice is that nothing in the universe actually conforms to your perceptions and everything you know is not even wrong. You are not even really "you" in any sense beyond the illusory narrative created by the mind, to order its disparate sensations.
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know, nor will it ever really matter - if you cannot even know your "self".
"In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is". I paraphrase this as:
"To the imagination, it is identical with reality, when Reality is so totally comprehensive that all of imagination is an infinitesimal subset."
But the mind is a little thing - with such a limited set of tools and perceptions, on such a tiny scale.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
[citation provided]
I got a particular kick out of the phrase "otherwise distinguished physicists" in the summary.
...but did you notice no one mentioned that it is simply hard to create the conditions necessary to detect the Higgs boson? We too quickly opt for the sci-fi answer and though the idea of time based sabotage is fun, it makes for a better movie than it does an answer. And how was such a conjecture published without data or peer review? Nothing to see here, next particle please...
even the mighty slashdot is speechless!
Apparently, several posts that came after yours traveled back through time to prevent you from being first.
/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler–Feynman_absorber_theory
[quote]the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson[/quote]
Let's apply Occam's Razor. One of two cases must be true, either:
(a) "the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson"
or
(b) building a machine like this is rather complicated and it might take a few goes before they get it right.
Of course, there could be an option (c) they really suck. I'll try that on my boss the next time I fuck something up. "No, see, it's not that I'm not any good at my job, it's that the universe is conspiring against the proper completion of the project. Have I ever mentioned Schroedinger's Cat?"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Kdawson's name is on this, why am I not surprised. I don't mean to troll, but wow does that editor have some interesting stories to his/her name. I mean honestly, a bonified, "time travel is killing the LHC", story?
Actually you kind of are trolling, because that's not what this article is. This is not a "time travel is doing something" article, it's a "two otherwise respectable scientists are saying something pretty crazy" article. And that is notable, because that does not normally happen.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Didn't everybody learn about Higgs by watching the last season of Lexx?
Reading TFA, Nielsen sounds like a reasonable guy, and this sounds like little more than idle speculation from a scientist who does real science. And he welcomes skepticism to his idea. It's still interesting to me that this sounds patently anti-scientific. Science is founded on the idea that our universe is predictable and that we can understand it. Saying "we might not be able to find this out because it's fate" seems closer to "We can never understand our own origins because a mysterious intelligent designer created us" in spirit than I would be comfortable with if I were the scientist who said it.
Don't take this as saying this guy is in the same category as an IDer, that's not at all what I mean. Dr. Nielsen isn't saying we shouldn't try this anyway, wheras IDers do discourage inquiry into evolutionary biology, and more importantly Dr. Nielsen is suggesting an explanation to a phenomena wheras IDers are just trying to convince people to join their church.
OK, who is channeling the Univers(al)?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
by John Gribbin, (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, 105(2):120?125, Feb 1985). In that story a powerful particle accelerator seemingly fails to operate, for no good reason. Then a physicist realizes that if it were to work, it would effectively destroy the entire universe, by initiating a transition from a cosmological false vacuum state to a lower-energy vacuum state. In this story, the explanation of the failures assumes a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. So instead of explicit backward causality, there is effective backward causality: only the branches of reality with equipment failures contain observers; therefore, observers can only experience histories with equipment failures. The effect is the same.
I also discussed this idea in the context of novel models of computation in my MIT Ph.D. thesis, Games, Puzzles, and Computation (section 8.2; also published as a book by A.K. Peters). The idea was a bit similar to Nielsen and Ninomiya's proposed experiment. It turns out that by connecting an accelerator capable of destroying the universe to a computation depending on random numbers, one could in principle solve problems that are otherwise intractable. I termed this "doomsday computation", as a variation on the similar concept of "anthropic computation" proposed earlier by Scott Aaronson.
A book by James P. Hogan. In the novel they built a large collider and produced microscopic black holes accidentally. Their future selves found a way to send a message back in time despite the noise degradation to tell their past selves not to turn the damned thing on.
It was Chrono ... Chrono something.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
My work here is dung.
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know, nor will it ever really matter - if you cannot even know your "self".
Actually, there is some argument there. They fall out of Relativity quite easily, but Relativity doesn't take into account any quantum effects. Black holes are one of the few places where that really matters. Depending on how you reconcile the two, you may not get an actual black hole. (You will get something that behaves quite similarly, but not exactly the same.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Supercollider? I just met her!
What? Where's this damn Publish button.... Ouch! Waitaminute....
All of you guys were tight all along, slashd0t new UI really suxs.. You can't imagine how hard it is to post from a black hole on this crap!.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Information (except its mass, charge, and spin) can't escape a black hole, period. You don't even need to suspect that some difficult concept could plausibly be an exception, because you know there are no exceptions.
These scientists obviously never heard of Ockham's Razor. The fact that these particles have not been found could not be because they don't exist... no, it must be that they're are conspiring with the universe to deny us knowledge of their existence! I think they watched the Wizard of Oz just a few times to many. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
If information theory wants to stop us from observing a higgs boson then we won't be able to observe it in the experiment. What won't happen is that every time we try to test it some mechanical component breaks down. That's ridiculous.
A physicist will be able to explain better than I can why entanglement can't be used for information transfer (such as FTL or what you describe), but my simplistic understanding is that in order to observe the spin on the particle, you have to actually observe it, and by observing, you might alter its spin. You have no way of knowing whether the spin you just observed is a legit signal, or a bunk one induced by your measurement.
Any signal transmitted becomes indistinguishable from a random number generator, and you're back to square one.
On the topic of the linked "paper", this seems like the sort of utterly ridiculous nonsense that Penrose or Novikov would cook up (especially the latter). I'm not going to dignify it with a response other than to predict that Occam's Razor will slice it apart.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Isn't one of the defenses of the safety of colliders such as the Large Hadron that natural collisions at even higher energy levels happen all the time in the universe, just not in front of a sensor that can accurately measure it? Therefore, scientists aren't doing anything that isn't "supposed" to happen. Or maybe it's the _observation_ that isn't supposed to happen. (-;
Did anyone tried to fix LHC by waterboarding main scientist? Today I was trained at my workplace to think outside the box.
839*929
Ewwwwwwww....I think you just described your own grandmother as a GILF.....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
It has a serious, and might I saw, rather obvious flaw
If the activation of the LHC created some kind of cataclysmic event which would some fuck up time to the extent of violating causality, and if the universe does indeed have causality as a boundary condition, then there are far more probable ways of averting the fatal collision than screwing up several tonnes of magnet months before the high energy firings were scheduled to take place.
The universe could simply induce a sufficient e/m force to stop the proton beams colliding. It wouldn't take much, on a cosmic scale, and would be a far more likely outcome than an entire macroscopic object being foobared just to protect the continuity of the universe.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
So the formation of the Higgs comes back from the future to stop its own creation...
If only the destruction of these physicist's careers could have come back from the future and saved themselves from it.
Anyone knows how to get to the enchantment under the sea dance? I was told that a weird, translucent, guy will play the guitar there...
I dunno, it sounds to me like a "two otherwise respectable scientists got drunk one night and now are saying something pretty crazy" story.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I have to point out that this is merely superstitious thought; there is no evidence to indicate that this is the reason why the collider failed, and while the theory *is* possible, it defies rationality. The simplest/most obvious explanation is the the collider simply failed due to technical reasons due to flaws in design or construction. Anyone could tell you that. Saying that it didn't happen because the Universe simply didn't allow it is the same as if you just substituted "God" for the word "Universe." Why didn't X happen? God didn't allow it. Why did Y happen? God made it happen. I'm not saying that it's wrong to believe in God, but these "explanations" are really non-explanations.
Next they'll tell us that we live in an electrified universe!
If they're right, what's the point in further funding?
Fry: [discussing Fry being his own grandfather as a result of going back in time and getting with his grandmother] I did do the nasty in the past-y.
Nibbler: Verily. And that past nastification is what shields you from the brains!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Ah, says Man "But the Higgs boson is a dead giveaway, isn't it? We found it with our new-fangled LHC and It proves you exist, and therefore you don't. QED!" (waits for puff of smoke, quickly attempts to knock up proof that black is white, identifies location of nearest pedestrian crosswalk)
"What Higgs boson? What LHC?" says God, winking.
This is ridiculous and not worthy of any publication, let alone the NYT (and should not be propagated on slashdot, imho).
In short, the Higgs boson (if theories are correct) is a scalar that provides mass to all particles. That means it is present at all times everywhere. So, although it is tongue in cheek, we are swimming in an invisible soup of Higgs particles at each moment. To say that universe doesn't want us to create one is like saying people are born blind because the universe didn't want us to experience light.
By their own theory, every event in history delaying the creation and operation of the LHC would have to be included. Not least of which would be the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria, which probably set back the experiment by a thousand years. Very silly. Who funds these guys?
-- thinkyhead software and media
You are not even really "you" in any sense beyond the illusory narrative created by the mind, to order its disparate sensations.
That depends very much by what you mean by "illusion", and what you mean by "you". If I identify myself as this particular chunk of matter in the state it is at the moment, then yes, I am me.
It's like describing a program as an illusion. In the sense that it abstract, perhaps. But it does have real, physical consequences -- at the very least, the color of the pixels on your screen (or which ones are lit by how much, if you want to be pedantic).
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know... Reality is so totally comprehensive that all of imagination is an infinitesimal subset.
Perhaps. What is your evidence for this?
It seems to me that we are refining our understanding of reality, but the subset which we do understand, we understand fairly well. It has been a very long time since we've been truly and profoundly wrong -- and even then, we weren't.
For example: It was once believed that the earth is flat. But even this is not particularly wrong. On the scales most of us deal with in day-to-day life, a flat earth is a good approximation.
It was once believed that the sun revolved around the earth. This is still a good approximation, for most purposes here on the ground. It is only when we begin to consider the motion of other planets that it becomes important which is which.
People often point to Newton being "disproved" by Einstein, as a way to show how "unreliable" modern science is -- usually in an effort to promote some non-science, such as religion or "Intelligent Design". What they miss is that Einstein was, for all practical purposes, a refinement of Newton -- the Newtonian equations are at the core of the relativistic ones, and most of the time, we still use Newtonian physics, because it's still a good approximation and is easier to calculate.
So while I agree that there is always more to understand, we shouldn't pretend we know nothing simply because we don't know everything.
So, going back to what you've said here:
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know,
In the sense that I can "really know" anything beyond the internal consistency of mathematical and logical systems, I can know that black holes exist, until a better explanation comes along. And as I've shown, that "better explanation" probably won't look that different than the one we have now.
For example, it is possible that we are wrong about what the singularity of a black hole looks like. But it seems unlikely that anything would ever make its way back out -- and if it did, it probably would not come back the way it went in. Even if black holes were shown to be an entirely different phenomenon, it seems unlikely we'd show that it isn't somehow swallowing up matter, energy, even light.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
At every point in time multidimensions branch off.
The discovery of the higgs destroys the dimension in which it is discovered.
We are still here to observe the lack of a higgs so in our dimension discovery failed.
Therefore, Observers can only exist in dimensions where the ability/device to discover the higgs fails.
Not a new idea; I read a short story (blanking on the title, sorry) written by the Russian SF authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky sometimes in the seventies. In the story, a physicist teetering on the brink of a major discovery that would change the Universe gets interrupted in his work by weirder and weirder occurences, including a gun-toting dwarf. After reflection he realizes it's a reaction from the Universe, which tends to conserve its state, under some kind of Le Chtelier's principle.
If this particle gives parent child particles mass, then why would nature be against it?
It exists, it seems to exist in anything that isn't a photon. Why on earth would nature complain about its existence if it exists in all matter?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
An artistic rendering, that is all.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
As proof of this, the NY-Times article can only be read by some observers but not others.
Table-ized A.I.
I was expecting the first response to that line to be a Goat-C link......Slashdot has failed me.........again.
It's true, the universe abhors Anonymous Cowards.
<Complete your profile by adding a signature!>
The article sounds like a mashup of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, and quantum immortality, as filtered through pop-science journalism.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I had the same thought while reading TFA. Literal translation of Russian title is "A Billion Years Before the End of the World" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel)
Thanks for the response. This is just a crazy idea I came up with on my own. I was reading The Dancing Wi Lu Masters and got my first brain bending taste of entanglement. At the same time I saw a documentary describing how no information could every travel beyond the event horizon of a black hole. For years the idea has nagged at me and I've asked quite a few physicist why it would not work and have never got an answer that satisfied. But that's probably due more to my stupidity than anything. But even taking spin out of the scenario, can't other things happen to the entangled particle other than a change in spin that we might be able to observe?
He's just defending his intellectual property.
He can't do it through normal legal channels because Satan pwns all the lawyers.
Anyway, that's what I heard from a friend whose cousin knows Glenn Beck's landscaper.
Suggesting new tag for this one - "Great Scott!"
Ha ha!
How chauvinistic! But of course, who but a human would think that a human's mind would be so powerful that the mere observation of a revealing "secret" of the universe would be a threat to it?
Honestly, this is beyond illogical. It may be a fact that the universe thinks and is aware of itself, but to think that it would be protecting itself from humanity learning about it in some way is ludicrous when presented with the infinite number of other ways it could restrict humans from discovering the Higgs boson.
Let's instead consider a more plausible scenario: The LHC is an enormous undertaking that goes beyond any attempt of artifice made before involving particle collision and it is very likely it will have many setbacks.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Observe with...
... (some time between fall '63 and spring '65) I wrote a short story with a similar premise:
The government's physicists had identified a way to create such a "bounce" situation by a nuclear mumbo-jumbo that starts with putting together a dense enough energy packet. This backs the universe up a bit and it takes another alternative timeline. Humans have just enough psi to make different decisions. The more energy you use to start the process, the farther back the "time bounce" to the fork. Or at least that's the theory.
The government has taken advantage of this by creating a secret project: They are collecting and storing a LOT of energy using a solar power satellite. (The downlink is a laser and the ground-based collector and energy storage tech, like the details of the bounce device, are unspecified.) Accumulation of energy is ongoing, so they continue to have enough to bounce back at least to the time when the project was initiated. (Going farther risks taking a fork on which the device is not made.)
This is used by the diplomats as a way to correct mistakes: If things got too bad diplomatically they could go back and try something different. (Unlike a doomsday device you WANT to keep this one secret - and for there to be only one.)
Since the project went online, though there have been many conflicts and near-misses on situations with the potential to degenerate into something that would make WW II or a comet impact look tame, things have always worked out for the government in question. Sometimes by smart diplomacy, sometimes by smart battle strategy in small conflicts heading off large ones, sometimes by seemingly amazing coincidences and blind luck. Starting as one country on Earth (where the device is still sited) the government has (mostly peaceably) unified/absorbed/explored/grown into a multi-solar-system empire.
The kicker is that, from the viewpoint of the operators (from which it is was written) EVERY use is the FIRST use. It ALWAYS appears that things have miraculously gone so well that they haven't needed it - until JUST NOW. Maybe the thing really doesn't work - in which case it will destroy the planet and life on most of the spiral arm. Maybe it does work - but from the viewpoint of the current timeline it's just the end of the universe. Maybe the diplomats and generals, knowing this is a possibility, have gone to heroic efforts and pulled out heroic saves - until JUST NOW. But now it's finally hit the fan and the viewpoint characters have been ordered to set it off ...
One of the others in that class was the guy who was the model for Aahz in Asprin's books. Ran into him a decade or two later. He brought up the story and said it had haunted him ever since. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Depending on how you reconcile the two, you may not get an actual black hole. (You will get something that behaves quite similarly, but not exactly the same.)
A really, really dark brown hole?
Hmmm... Maybe I need to change my sig for this post!
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
Uhm...you forgot "according to current theory" in that statement. We think there are no exceptions, but if we find one then the theory has to be changed.
Theory is only our current working simulation of how we think the universe works; the universe itself plays by its own rules which may or may not match our theories.
Can't escape a black hole, period, according to relativity. However, we still can't figure out if entanglement breaks relativity.
Conjecture on your part, based upon your observations and your personal interpretation of those observations. Whether or not he (or I) ever die is a distant mystery to you and doesn't matter; you should be more concerned with your fate.
See, perspective and philosophy is fun to play with. And my reply to your post is as inane in irrelevant to the subject matter as your reply to the parent was.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
>> "are theorizing that it's happening"
Get the terminology right! Remember the whole Evolution is "just a theory" thing? Theories must be supported by factual evidence, and be subjected to peer review.
As it stands, these guys are "hypothesizing."
--==>>BobT>
Goat C. Worst. Syntax. Ever.
It still won't matter. You were born, and soon you will die. Yet you are concerned with a distant mystery - not the one upon which you are standing and cannot escape.
Are you trying to be deep, "we shouldn't be looking at Schrödinger's cat until we solve the mystery of death" or just combative "don't worry about black holes, you are going to die."?
Get back to work.
in my opinion. Nature requires a self-consistent chain of causality from past to future, with no time travel miracles allowed. It does not require the whole chain to remained nailed to a hypothesized immutable historic 'past'. I don't mean that there are 'many worlds' or existent alternative realities, I mean that the one existent history is free to drift around as long as it does it in a physically consistent manner.
What I'm trying to say here, somewhat ineneptly, has so far been prohibitively difficult to prove through experiment, because the experiments are all conducted from within the causal chain on certain kinds of simple, isolated systems. Very hard to measure in a repeatable lab experiment is not the same as unreal however. And I think that something like this will be shown eventually.
Whether this applies to the situation with the Higgs particle I have no idea, but I think the broader principle is sound.
I am getting some of those. So much for saving money for food, damn science..
The Matrix computer isn't powerful enough to handle the simulation of the LHC correctly. That's why the LHC failed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Perhaps the sum of solution spaces where the machine is never turned on is greater than the sum of the solution spaces where it gets turned on but doesn't find what it's looking for?
"...like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."
-You mean, like the time Fry went back and killed his grandfather, and then "Did the nasty in the past-y"?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I'm hoping the universe protects itself by producing a spelling mutation: the Higgs Bison, which walks out the second they switch it on.
Table-ized A.I.
Correct me if I am wrong, off what I have heard (and probably on Slashdot so take it with a grain of salt)...
Energies of LHC are already found when cosmic rays hit earths upper atmosphere... its just that we have no way of observing them.
So I would believe that whatever is going to happen inside LHC already happens....
Unless this theory is true and the Higgs boson really doesn't let Cosmic rays hit the atmosphere either... Maybe that is why we are all alive instead of Cosmic rays frying all living matter from earth.
What did you say?
White hole spewing time engines dead advice please.
You're way out of my league on this one, but if I had to guess I'd say that any alteration to an observable property will have a similar effect on the particle as observing the spin. Check the Wikipedia article on quantum entanglement.
Also, you can (probably) get information out of a singularity. See here.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Maybe our universe is just an experiment of an extra-universal intelligence that doesn't want us to find out.
We've already been given a warning:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap030630.html
Any further attempts will result in the Mother of All BSOD's, and there's no F8.
Table-ized A.I.
I am truly humbled by your words, StikyPad. We cannot permit your wisdom to be restrained any longer! You must go to that Siren that has ensnared you, and proudely proclaim that you will once again wander the Earth, for the Slashdotters need your words! (And if she likes, she can tag along, but it's Fast Food from here on out.)
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
I made a joke about something like that here the other day. I don't put any stock in the belief, but it is interesting to think about.
Your brain is not a computer.
Temporal reverse engineering.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
A pair of entangled particles has the property that, if someone takes a measurement on each of them, forcing each into one of a pair of eigenstates, knowing which state one of them collapsed into tells you which state the other one collapsed into - even if the separation between the two measurements is spacelike rather than timelike (i.e. even if a signal from one of them "telling" the other which state to pick would have to propagate faster than light.)
But you can't force your particle to pick one of the two options for its own collapse, and thus force the other to pick a state of your choosing and send a bit of information faster than light. The PARTICLE gets to make the pick. You can't distinguish whether the particles communicate FTL, the pick was already made when they initially became entangled and carried by some "hidden variable" until the measurement (though there's reason to believe it's not a hidden variable), they were just predestined to act that way, or whatever. (Physics says WHAT it does but, at least so far, not HOW.)
The most you can do is measure a DIFFERENT thing about the particle when you force the collapse (such as the polarization along a different axis if you're measuring polarization), in which case you lose all knowledge about how the other particle's measurement came out.
So if there is an FTL communications link there, it's useful for the particles but apparently not for us.
This is probably good. If we had a reliable FTL signal link we could pretty trivially (using special relativity and things moving moderately fast) turn it into a future-to-past communication link and blow the hell out of causality. So far the only maybe-future-to-past comm channel that comes out of current paradigms (AFAIK) involves galactic-scale masses and energies.
Does that explanation help?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This seems to be an equally non-intuitive sort of prediction. I suppose they have the maths to back their theory up?
...AND "First Post" posts.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Hey, even you didn't include his wife in the count!
I've read that one. The universe decides that, if side A hadn't tried to convince side B to build a time machine, it wouldn't have been built - so it destroys side A.
Is truly almighty, can even change past to make humanity could only have faith in it, not science to prove that it exist.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
This is where the credibility of the article went south in my book. That kind of sh8t happens all the time. That's why there are big-ass Apollo rockets sitting outside space museums. (Unless Apollo almost found the Moon Obelisks.)
Table-ized A.I.
You know, when someone says something isn't found because it goes back in time to prevent you from being able to see it...
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
When you look at the trends, it seems that disaster is ever more probable, that one begins to wonder how it has not happened yet.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Sure you can. You just repeat it, and if it says:
D.R.I.N.K. M.O.R.E. O.V.A.L.T.I.N.E.
You know it's probably a good signal.
Easy!
A key plot point was that the message sending machine was also the receiver, so the earliest time they could send messages to was when the machine was first turned on.
Which is why we must invent the time machine before turning on the earth destroying LHC! Otherwise, how are our future selves going to warn us not to do it?
...in "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation", in 1977:
http://authors.wizards.pro/books/titles/50243/rotating-cylinders-and-the-possibility-of-global-causality-violation
"Einstein's Bridge" seems to be twenty years later.
As a black hole radiates away, the Hawking radiation contains the information (albeit scrambled) that had been sucked into the black hole. Information is conserved.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
"Information (except its mass, charge, and spin) can't escape a black hole, period.
Information cannot be destroyed, period. One of us is wrong.
When it could simply give a small nudge to any proton in the collider beam that would otherwise have participated in a Higgs-producing collision? Or cause an alpha particle to flip a bit somewhere in the LHC electronics such that the Higgs event goes unnoticed? Or one of any number of other ways to render the Higgs unobserved with minimal effort? After all, there is a small but significant probability of the Higgs existing at the expected energy level and yet being missed by the planned experiment through sheer chance. Why would the universe simply arrange for that to happen rather than making massive interventions?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Kind of a super strong Anthropic principle. "The universe exists because someday, something in the future will require it to."
This is a letter held in trust since 1905 at the firm of Brown, Ellison and Parker. They told Einstein to do this, and now we are delivering this letter to you. We have kept it sealed since then, and were told to deliver it to this address at this date. Please sign here.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's the Mancattan Project.
Table-ized A.I.
Or, to put it more simply . . . entanglement allows two distant observers to witness the same thing at the same time. It can't be used to transmit information between the two observers.
We are showered by particles with energies far above that which can be produced in the LHC.
I have a theory. It's called the "Bureaucratic Inverse Competence" theory. BIC states that the quality of work done in any organization is quantity whose direct inverse is the number of sycophantic bureaucrats. As the ratio of actual working operators and engineers to parasites increases, so too does the production and quality increase.
tldr; It ain't the universe, it's too many parasites, and too much money. Heck no I don't have a solution. I'd be a very rich man if I did.
^..^
Wow I never knew that Phillip K. Dickhead was so phallusophical
Stoke me a clipper, I'll be back for Christmas
by Connie Willis. (A book I like very much). Time travel to the past is fine, but you can't change the past in ways that would change history.
...or maybe it's because the LHC is a extremely complex machine that is unprecedented in human history with millions of parts that must work together within very narrow parameters.
Just because a few experimental rockets blew up doesn't mean the universe didn't want us to go into space. Just because a few experimental planes crashed doesn't mean the universe didn't want us to break the sound barrier. These physicists should get off the ganga and give each other 14TeV dope slaps for coming up with such a retarded idea.
Plus maybe a slightly smaller dope slap to /. for putting crazy in quotation.
I try to keep an open mind, but not so wide open that the me-jelly leaks out. ;)
Your brain is not a computer.
This is probably good. If we had a reliable FTL signal link we could pretty trivially (using special relativity and things moving moderately fast) turn it into a future-to-past communication link and blow the hell out of causality.
Doesn't this really just mean that FTL is only possible if there's a preferred frame of reference?
So gravity doesn't escape a black hole? Then how does gravity pull you closer to it?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The idea that the universe somehow doesn't want something to happen, and so causes various improbable events to occur on the macro-level to prevent that thing to happen, is a fairly common SF plot. I even recall an SF-detective variant where the universe was arranging to kill scientists who would discover its secrets (eventually stopped when the detective demonstrated that leaving a trail of bodies is a poor way to hide anything).
It's hard to see a real physicist taking it seriously, except out of pure frustration or inebriation.
[...] its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
Well, then I recommend you read Rant by Chuck Palahniuk.
----
Tablet PCs @ Feed Distiller
the only way to know for sure is to run other experiments before trying to create a Higgs boson.
If it runs reliably for lots of other experiments, then blows up when they try for the Higgs boson, this theory might be possible. They would only need to prove it's repeatable then, which could be very expensive.
If they go straight for the Higgs boson and it blows up, it could still be a design flaw in the collider, which would make it an inconclusive test.
My money is on design flaw or faulty parts. lex parsimoniae. It would be wise to try other experiments first so the result would be meaningful if the Higgs boson experiment takes it out again.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
my anti-matter self can escape ... isn't that what Hawking Radiation is all about ? I go in one side and come out on the flip side as opposite me ?
in time, it would create a paradox that would split off into it's own pocket dimension and as such, not be noticed by us.
BTW, nature doesn't 'know' anything.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wire it up to an optical detector and have it start only if it lands on 13.
Then either the detector or the die will refuse to land on 13 if it's true.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Does it explain why, if the Universe is so loath to produce a Higgs boson, it bombards our atmosphere when enormously high energy particles that can create Higgs bosons if they exist? Why hasn't it propagated back in time to stop cosmic rays? It sounds far more like fiction, and inconsistent fiction at that.
The information is available on the surface of the event horizon by the holographic principle.
But can't you measure whether the particle is in a distributed state or is in a single state? For instance, with diffraction, you can get a particle's distribution to interfere with itself, but that interference doesn't happen if you collapse the distribution by observation. If something similar could be done with spin, then you could test whether or not the other entangled particle has been collapsed, thereby passing information. Not that I'm convinced that logic is right, just that I don't understand why it's wrong.
This older writeup describes a similar idea:
http://www.everything2.com/title/CERN+and+the+Anthropic+Principle
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Bit of a non sequitor here, but why all this talk of "waveforms collapsing", rather than assuming the particle had that particular spin the entire time, and you're only now seeing what it's been all along?
Last post!
As has recently been demonstrated we don't actually need to find the Higgs to get a Nobel prize, we just need to show some promise that we might find it....
Holger Bech Nielsen is awesome, really the most geeky of geeks oblivious to his surroundings.
Saw this tv-report once, he was going to meet the queen of Denmark to be knighted or some of the kind. He couldn't put on a tuxedo himself. After his wife had helped him put on the tuxedo and he was all fancy he went out wearing his winter-hood (it was cold outside). After he came out from meeting the queen he reached into his pocket because he felt something strange, and pulled out a pair of gloves (when you meet the queen it's customary to wear gloves when you shake her hand), to which he with a heureka-surprise-kinda-expression on his face announced "OH LOOK GLOVES!".
He has a funny voice to and is enthusiastic about what he does, gotta love him. He attended Mensa-Denmarks 40-year anniversary as a guest-speaker. After 25 minutes we were all simultaneously intrigued and at the same time cracking up because of his character. It was awesome.
I'm conflicted though as to whether I have to hand in my geek-card or not. Got a picture where I'm sitting next to him, and what am I doing? I'm talking with the blonde across the table -.-'
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
That's the observer effect which has nothing to do with anything in QM.
I'm sorry boss. I couldn't complete that project because the universe doesn't want the project to be completed and so a ripple in time undid the labors that I so diligently performed!
Do I get a promotion now for not pissing off the universe?
There are a lot of simpler explanations to go through before we get to "the universe is screwing around with time to prevent a higgs boson to be created." For example, it could just be that it's freaking hard to build a superconducting supercollider and it's particularly hard to get one working correctly the first time you fire it up. As has been pointed out, interactions at the SSC's energy take place daily in our upper atmosphere and you don't see the universe bending over backwards to prevent that. Any sensible universe would just cause a massive explosion or a black hole or something if it really didn't like the particle you were creating. I honestly don't believe the universe particularly cares and is probably too busy keeping other things (Like the space-time continuum) sorted to worry about us smashing some atoms together.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Oh, well - it is fun to grin at the coincidence!
And perhaps even larger is the sum of the solution spaces in which their are no humans to build the thing at all.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Mod parent up!
The author who wrote the NYT article, clearly doesn't know what the Higgs particle really is. Virtual Higgs particles exist everywhere around us. If the universe has a problem with creating real Higgs particles, then that problem should already have presented itself, since cosmic rays in the universe have collided with much greater energy than the LHC would ever produce and therefore such real Higgs should have been produced many times already. There's nothing special about the LHC except for the fact that it has detectors in place to record evidence of the particles that have been produced. Does the universe somehow have a problem with that?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
You can keep 'observing' particles until you get the one you want, then stop.
Th reciever would no what the alst one you did. Of course, you would have to know precisely when to look.
OTOH if we can get to the point where we can separate particles over vast distances, then it won't matter anyways.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...someone seem to want to get it.
But... the future refused to change.
information is ejected back out of a black hole.
"In July 2005, Stephen Hawking published a paper and announced a theory that quantum perturbations of the event horizon could allow information to escape from a black hole, which would resolve the information paradox."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Doesn't this really just mean that FTL is only possible if there's a preferred frame of reference?
Yep. But such a special frame also pulls the rug out from under both special and general relativity.
Given how well relativity has matched extreme physical phenomena so far it seems unlikely that a special frame with FTL will show up.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If you go back in time to before you first met your wife and had a fling with her would that be cheating or would it just be the first time you met your wife.....
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I can't understand a word you're saying.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
Well done. Philosophizing in science is usually a deadend blackhole itself.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Been there, did that, and I'm still (POP!) ...
I love that idea that the future requires a particular past. Helps explain why we feel nostalgic; we needed a particular past, so we treasure it.
So, in a way, the accident at the LHC is confirmation of a physic. Now we just need to understand what it was that we saw. I suppose they'll repeat the experiment and cause another accident. Then they'll have to design another experiment to probe another physic. We're feeling our way into a fifth dimension.
Best regards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_experiment
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This all sounds super deep and meaningful and all quantumy, but does anybody s'pose that it fails so much because it's just a big damn machine built by hundreds of contractors, many of which will be impressed if it works at all?
+1 Disagree
For example: weren't unbounded Higgs bosons last present in large numbers close to the time of rapid cosmic inflation / far greater dominance of dark energy?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Some might say that makes sense without the "Goat", too.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
A few years ago, during the construction, one of the LHC bigwigs gave a speech (which I later read). At the end he said (paraphrased)
"if the Higgs boson does not exist, we will have to invent it".
He was half-joking I suppose, but that is what they are trying now, basically
I have thought for years, partly via observation of their psychology, that the underlying theory must have serious holes. I suspect the truth is:
1 the Higgs boson does not exist.
2 "dark matter" is BS
3 the Big Bang theory is wrong.
[btw, the Big Bang theory has an amazing number of failed predictions]
I just want to point out one thing about this, and how it relates to the article in question.
It's the physics of the situation that makes it impossible to communicate FTL.
Not that the physics says quantum entanglement lets you communicate FTL, so in order to prevent time paradoxes the universe sets it up so every time we try to use our Quantum Phone it mysteriously blows up before we can send anything.
It might be that the Higgs Boson exists but it is impossible to observe it. If so, then the LHC will fail to observe it. That has nothing to do with magnets breaking, coolant leaking, or any other problems getting it working.
The enemies of Democracy are
First we have furries. Now we'll have bosies!
If they're so hard to produce and so "abhorrent to nature", maybe it would be good to stop trying?
QUANTUM ATHEISM!
http://outcampaign.org/
We shouldn't be looking at Schrödinger's death until we solve the mystery of cats.
--
Point the Higgs Bosonator at tomorrow Jeeves, I need a settled bet.
You are not even really "you" in any sense beyond the illusory narrative created by the mind, to order its disparate sensations.
Cogito, ergo sum.
going back? If you went back in time, maybe there wouldn't be any matter or stuff, since it moved forwards in time to now.
They'll never find the higgs boson. Once we couldn't explain light so we invented the ether. We described how light particles interacted with the ether and based all of physics around it. We justified it by saying all other physics has some analogy to the ether. Now we can't explain matter so we invent a higgs field. We describe how matter particles interact with the higgs field and justify it by saying all other physics has some analogy to the higgs boson.
You can keep 'observing' particles until you get the one you want, then stop.
Th reciever would no what the alst one you did. Of course, you would have to know precisely when to look.
The receiver has no idea whether or not you've measured your particle or not.
Entanglement is just a correlation between states after collapse. When you measure yours, you know what the other person would see when they measured theirs. You don't know if they have done so or not, and vice versa. You cannot use it to transmit information. Any information transferred was transferred when you moved the particles apart at sub-light speeds.
On the plus side, you can use entanglement to create a secure sub-light speed communication channel. You can transmit information about the correlations you observe, and if they ever stop holding true, then you know someone tried to read your communication and thus broke the entanglement.
OTOH if we can get to the point where we can separate particles over vast distances, then it won't matter anyways.
I'm not sure how that follows. Seems to me that over truly vast distances, the lack of FTL communication would be a bigger problem.
The enemies of Democracy are
So, in a way, the accident at the LHC is confirmation of a physic.
This is off topic, but I'm curious; I've never heard 'a physic' used in a singular sense. Is that something (to put it bluntly) that's unique to you, or is that terminology in use somewhere? (Or maybe it's archaic?)
Well "according to relativity", quantum mechanics shouldn't exist either...
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Goat C. Worst. Syntax. Ever.
Look at it this way. If the number of (one-syllable-name + one-letter) rappers and hip-hop artists continues to increase, then eventually all possible names will be taken. So, unless that trend fades, someday there will be a fresh new urban act called "Goat C". Fate, twisted master that it is, will make this person famous. Just in time for you to have kids or possibly grandkids. And they will ask you if you've seen Goat C, because he's awesome.
And then you will be horrified.
Then the TV ads will start about how Goat C will be appearing live at your local arena. You won't be able to tune it out like other ads, simply because of the surprise the first time you hear it. Every time you hear the baseline that opens the ad, every time you hear his music, everywhere you turn, you hear people praising Goat C or exhorting you to pay money to see Goat C.
Then he will make a remix of your favorite song. So your favorite song will be forever linked to Goat C.
And that is when the nightmares begin.
Did anyone else immediately think:
"1500 Megawatt Aperture Science Heavy-Duty Supercolliding Super Button"
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
No fair!!! You changed the outcome by measuring it!
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
From Wikipedia: Retrocausality (also called retro-causation, backward causation and similar terms) is any of several hypothetical phenomena or processes that reverse causality, allowing an effect to occur before its cause.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
we are trying to detect it using 3D technology. What if the Higgs Boson is more than three dimensional? Remember M-Theory aka Super String Theory, the Universe is made up of many dimensions. Some of those dimensions are so small we cannot see them, and others are so large that they host parallel universes we cannot see nor detect.
Einstein said that time is the fourth dimension and space is the fifth dimension and warped. What if the Higgs Boson exists out of space/time, we'd never be able to see it even if we caused one to be made. What if like the Hawking Paradox with black holes evaporating the mini-black holes caused by the LHC evaporate the Higgs Boson? Maybe sending it somewhere via space/time or a parallel universe or small dimension? Maybe Black Holes and Higgs Bosons travel so far back in space/time that they send matter and energy into the Big Bang event that created the universe, or creates a parallel universe in another dimension?
The explanation that the universe cannot make a Higgs boson because it travels back in time and stops itself from being formed sounds rather silly. I supposed it would be just as silly to say Time Lords exist and Doctor Who used his sonic screwdriver on the LHC so it wouldn't make a Higgs boson so Human Beings would never learn the secret to time travel?
The idea that the Higgs boson would destroy the universe if made, was the same illogical thinking that nuclear scientists had when developing the atomic bomb that smashing atoms would destroy the universe. Think about it, the universe is large and full of matter and energy, and if a nuclear explosion didn't create a chain-reaction that destroyed the universe, then the Higgs boson most likely won't create a chain-reaction to destroy the universe. Physics doesn't work like that and you have to figure in the law of conservation and entropy that limits the effects of matter and energy so that energy is wasted and lost, and thus you couldn't have an infinite series of chain reactions to destroy the universe. Only the area near the LHC would be destroyed if there was an explosion caused by the Higgs boson, not the whole of Europe, not the Earth, not the Solar System, not the Galaxy, and certainly not the universe. We would have discovered a new way of destroying stuff, and life goes on. But I would rather like to think of the positive in which the Higgs boson is discovered and develops a new form of energy that helps humankind get off of fossil fuels.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
God is not a particle, he's just a guy waiting until we figure it out.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
That is, I agree with your examples of older models retaining their usefulness except for edge cases, but I don't think we've investigated many edge cases lately.
It seems like there's plenty of active research going on...
It seems to me that it's like the God of the Gaps. That is, as we understand progressively more, and as we refine our process for understanding, there are fewer edge cases, or at least, fewer edge cases that we haven't thought of, and restricted the domain of our laws to account for.
For example, it seems likely that really weird things happen at the instant of the Big Bang, but we can't actually get that far back. We can get really, really close, but there's a limit, and we know what that limit is.
Contrast this to Newtonian physics, which was assumed to apply universally.
Then again...
It's worth mentioning, Relativity was 1905. It's barely been 100 years since that. Origin of Species was 1859, Newton's Principia was 1687, and Copernicus' Commentariolus was 1514 -- going by the first publication of the most obvious work I could find (Origin of Species,
I've pretty much arbitrarily chosen these as revolutionary ideas, but it certainly doesn't show any signs of slowing -- only that, perhaps, we're about due for another.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
But you can't force your particle to pick one of the two options for its own collapse, and thus force the other to pick a state of your choosing and send a bit of information faster than light. The PARTICLE gets to make the pick. You can't distinguish whether the particles communicate FTL, the pick was already made when they initially became entangled and carried by some "hidden variable" until the measurement (though there's reason to believe it's not a hidden variable), they were just predestined to act that way, or whatever.
...and therefore, free will is an illusion.
there aren't a lot of links. and I should say I am no expert. But from what I remember these were all failed predictions ==>
--background temperature -in pre-BB world this was correctly predicted (with slightly inaccurate math) to be 3K. BBers predicted values much higher. then when it was measured as 2.8k the BBers claimed they had said this all along
--distribution of galaxies - now observed, clustered not as predicted at all
--gravity waves : not found
--age of Universe: BBers keep waffling massively, see spinning on Hubble deep field, and what they would find
--neutrinos: I'm pretty sure they switched up on what they find, involving these particles, too
up next, the phantom Higgs Boson? I say yes.
No, it's true! For example, it's impossible for this post to refer to itself in such a way that it completes its
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
If creating a Higgs Boson would destroy the universe, then to exist, this universe would have to be one of those few universes where random occurrences just happen to have, by chance, have sabotaged all attempts to create one so far. Otherwise it would not be here.
The universe is not deterministic. If you got stuck in a loop like that, eventually you'd break out due to some crazy quantum coincidence.
Yep.
In fact I'd expect that the quantum randomness would all come out uncorrelated with the "previous fork" and macroscopic things would quickly diverge as a result. And if I were (re)writing it these days that's what I'd use to avoid infinite loops.
But back then I was a high school kid with very little understanding of quantum mechanics. So I used "psy" instead. (Campbell was still running Analog and was a big fan of Rhine - at least when it came to story premises.)
(Well, actually I had a LITTLE bit of quantum mechanics: I knew that things were lumpy at about the atomic level, important parameters of matter had discrete integer and half-integer values instead of continuous values, and you couldn't measure some stuff below this uncertainty-principle level, with some scientific philosophers speculating that this was because there WASN'T anything below that value. From this much I'd coined the phrase "The universe is a computer simulation and quantum numbers are as far as the computer takes the arithmetic.". I had another story outline based on the premise that the computer gets replaced with a new model that carries the arithmetic out farther, breaking semiconductors, bugs in the simulation were what {had} made ritual magic work before the previous upgrade, and while trying to figure out what happened to tunnel diodes the physicists find some NEW bugs...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If this crazy idea did, in fact, turn out to be true. . . It could be used to create an improbability engine.
A device to create a higgs bosun must fail. The most robust the design of the machine, the less likely it is to fail. Therefore, by creating ever more soundly engineered and constructed devices, one could summon forth ever more unlikely events to prevent them from working.
It's a dangerous exercise, though. You can't be sure whether the unlikely event is going to be a simple failure of a (very solidly constructed) superconducting magnet, or something more like a fleet of alien constructor ships arriving to demolish the planet and make way for a hyperspace bypass.
It was completely over the top for humour value. No one is taking this seriously. No one in their right mind anyway. So there's no secret agenda to oppress women here.
The same women that complain about these jokes as being sexist usually have no problem with jokes about men. Get a grip. I'm a fat guy but I still laugh at some fat jokes. It's called having a sense of humour.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Wow: So the future success of the LHC in producing the Higgs Boson is so abhorrent to nature that it causes a bad solder connection it it's own past!? Huh?
This seems to assume that:
and all t just to cause a LHC version of the grandfather paradox!?
Well... Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... Until then: move along, nothing (sensible) to see here...
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know, nor will it ever really matter - if you cannot even know your "self".
Like arguing with a train from the tracks.
It's all theoretical until it isn't.
Oblig. - And if the universe doesn't care that our degenerate friend Fry is his own grandfather, then who are we to judge?
Which, in turn, may be smaller than the sum of solution spaces where the collider never gets built in the first place...
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
And furthermore, slashdot can post a story explaining why what is happening is happening, if that's what's happening, without the post (or poster) magically disappearing from existence so that also proves it lol.
Although, I like this theory better simply because it makes sense. I read through lots of particle physics articles on wikipedia and I don't think I learned one single thing lol. I don't get any of that crap and I'm supposed to be smart or something lol. Now particles screwing with fate, that I get!
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
...for these guys to switch over and become Religion professors.
But the mind is a little thing - with such a limited set of tools and perceptions, on such a tiny scale.
Borg queen, is that you?
int main(void) {while(1) fork(); return 0;}
Someone reversing the odd circuit? Planning to start taking things out?
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
yes but relativistic quantum mechanics is fine :-P, as a particle physicist personally I take the view that gravity is being down right unreasonable by not being a nicely renormalisable quantum field theory on flat space.
Discovery of the Higgs Boson is the catalyst which precipitates the End Times. A small team of heroic timetravellers have been sent back to sabotage the experiment, but have to be very careful not to end up deleting themselves from the timeline, because if they do there will be no one to save the universe.
I think this is a sort of in-joke; or at least I hope it is. I prefer to believe that no scientist would seriously consider this valid.
However, it does raise a couple of interesting points - one is the question of the nature of time; it has never been satisfyingly explained why time is the way it is (if it is). Why is it 1-dimensional and directed? To me, at least, it seems reasonable that the apparent direction of time is connected with the idea that cause comes before effect; so the idea of "effects from the future" would simply be absurd.
The other point is that science is not so much about seeking out the trust, but rather about eliminating un-truths, which is a slightly different enterprise.
"Now we just need to understand what it was that we saw." Brittney Spears videos! The future is pissed at us for allowing her.
Shouldn't this be tagged "funny"?
My web domain.
You forget that, because of time dilation, you cannot observe a particle passing through an event horizon. In essence, once the time has passed when the probe particle is supposed to have 'actually' gone through, they become effectively decoupled because there can be no paradox between the image of the probe (which never crosses) and the 'actual' probe (which cannot be accessed). One cannot even tell what the attributes of the probe are any more (particles may spontaneously transform as their spacial and time coordinates mix inside the horizon), much less if the state in question agrees with its mate.
"Producing" a Higgs in this sense only means detecting its presence (in)directly. Higgs, if it exists, is ubiquitous in the universe already, saying that its presence is abhorrent to nature is like saying an electron is. Nature is quite comfortable with the presence of all of its particles, and doesn't give a rat's ass if we ever see any of them.
I am also finding that there is a very high correlation between the multiverses where the LHC doesn't work and those in which I do not win the Lotto and become a billionaire.
While correlation is not causation, I have to wonder... Do I only win the Lotto in the multiverses where the LHC works correctly?
It seems to me that we are refining our understanding of reality, but the subset which we do understand, we understand fairly well. It has been a very long time since we've been truly and profoundly wrong -- and even then, we weren't.
Indeed. There are many things that we know to the true. There are some things that which we know we don't know. And there are a few things that we don't know that we don't know them.
It was once believed that the sun revolved around the earth. This is still a good approximation, for most purposes here on the ground. It is only when we begin to consider the motion of other planets that it becomes important which is which.
Actually, saying that the Sun orbits Earth is not really wrong even today. The universe doesn't have a fixed reference frame so no body has an absolute position, all 'positions' are just relative to other bodies (including time positions). We still tend to put the Sun in the "center", in coordinate (0,0,0) of the solar system, because that's very useful for local purposes, but it's just as arbitrary as having Earth in the center centuries ago. So, we could very well define as a convention that Earth is permanently fixed in the center of the entire Universe as a convention, and adjust all our calculations for that, and everything would be just fine... some equations could become more complex (a microscopic perturbation in Earth's orbit would translate, due to angular distance, in galaxies billions of years away being "shaked" in faster-than-light speed - still not violating any physics laws) but that would be just complex and ugly, not wrong.
Also, whats to say that the rules that the universe plays by don't change? Rules are thought to be known facts and we assume that those facts don't change but how can we know for sure?
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
You could send information by using a large array of entangled pairs to distinguish information. (collapsed=1 , non-collapsed=0) Who-the-hell cares which direction they break.
"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." -- Nathaniel Borenstein
How very self-centered some people can be; they think of themselves, instead of me! - L. Baird
If this is true, its a shame that the Higgs Boson couldn't have found some way of rippling back through time to a slightly earlier point, and stopping the construction of the LHC in the first place, thereby saving us many billions of euros :(
ant.
Maybe time travel isn't necessary. Maybe the production of a Higg's Boson causes the universe to end. If all choices causes the universe to brnach into universes with each of the possible outcomes, then maybe the only universe we can exist in is one where the collider doesn't work. So although >99.9% of all branchings lead to a successful trial (and the end of the universe), the only ones around afterwards are the ones where it didn't work.
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
Self-referential observation.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Actually, saying that the Sun orbits Earth is not really wrong even today. The universe doesn't have a fixed reference frame so no body has an absolute position...
Not everything is relative -- for example, rotation. To say that the Sun orbits the Earth, you would have to say Earth is not rotating -- but we can measure exactly how much Earth is deformed by its rotation. It's not perfectly spherical -- centrifugal force makes it slightly squashed.
We still tend to put the Sun in the "center", in coordinate (0,0,0) of the solar system, because that's very useful for local purposes, but it's just as arbitrary as having Earth in the center centuries ago.
It's not arbitrary, as the solar system doesn't make sense if we put anything else at the center. The sun is the most massive, so most things can be said to orbit the sun. If you put Earth at the center, you'd have to have the other bodies orbiting the Sun still for it to make sense.
It's "arbitrary" in the sense that there is no actual "center", but if we were to choose a center, it makes much more sense.
(a microscopic perturbation in Earth's orbit would translate, due to angular distance, in galaxies billions of years away being "shaked" in faster-than-light speed - still not violating any physics laws)
Actually, things moving faster than light does violate some very fundamental laws of physics.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Rips this argument to pieces.
-- Back to the shadows again...
Well sure, but what's the fun in that?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Interesting that you bring up FTL travel and entangled particles. It actually just sparked a question I never thought of before. What effect would time dilation have on a pair of entangled particles that were separated? (Say, one on a spaceship going near c, and the other on earth or a stationary spaceship) Would the particle on the moving ship relay information at an increased rate or the particle on earth at a slower rate or neither or both or would they become disentangled?
Is no one aware of the previous work of I. Asimov on Thiotimoline in the late 1940s?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Touche... "Business as usual" makes for terrible TV (and slashdot articles).
+1 Disagree
I say this is just the universe's version of Quantum Immortality. Every universe where the LHC is successfully run immediately undergoes a new Big Bang, so the only surviving universes are those where the experiment keeps having problems.
This has all been fascinating reading, but I really need to get back to the Heart of Gold so I can fix that #*($%^#*! Infinite Improbability Drive . . .
How very self-centered some people can be; they think of themselves, instead of me! - L. Baird
Sure. But maybe there is a probability associated with such a selection.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Putting the "c" back into "analcyst".
Bullish Machine Tzar
All technological societies ( those that would expand across the galaxy being a subset ) would get to the point of building a device to generate a Higgs boson which would initiate destruction of sun/planet/solar system. Thus no technological civilizations would never have a chance to expand and the Fermi paradox is solved.
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
So, the Universe abhors the creation of the Higg's boson so much that if we ever create it, it will time travel back to destory the machine that created it. Either that, or someone screwed up while assembling what might possibly be the most complicated machine ever built.
Whats that thing about simpler solutions?
Could this be the research that spawns the Infinite Improbability Drive?
If attempts to create the Higgs Boson result in something going wrong with the LHC, there is certainly energy involved in causing the breakdown. If that energy could somehow be harnessed and directed, say to a single failpoint - say a motor that consistently explodes when it fails - then the energy from that explosion could be used to drive the ship forward. Just keep attempting to create that abhorrent boson, and harness the explosions that result. Voila!
Or, in the spirit of the original, remove all reasonable failpoints and let it create all kinds of weird effects.
cracks, black cats, and higgs bosons? Got it. Honestly, I'd say it's being suggested CERN integrate a project like Princeton's. Sorting large amounts of random numbers looking for periods of non-randomness. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
Enough! Switch on the LHC and end the fscking universe already!
Table-ized A.I.
I hear it has nasty security holes.
Table-ized A.I.
If it is the case that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck, and we notice this, than haven't we then sort of observed the Higgs? If so, then maybe WE ( meaning the inhabitants of Earth ) are going to have bad luck.... 2012 is right around the corner....
(I'm kidding of course - or am I?)
...
If we can trigger the suicide of the universe at will with the LHC, all we need is to give everyone a button to remotely start it up whenever they feel unhappy. The future universes would be filled only with happy people (or none).
So gravity doesn't escape a black hole? Then how does gravity pull you closer to it?
The gravity is just holding on to you, taking you to the mouth of hell along with it.
Bow-ties are cool.
Please, species ending disasters have occurred repeatedly throughout geologic history and none of them had anything to do with the hand wringing concerns that are conventionally invoked (after all we have the alibi that we were not present to take the blame). The quantitative fact is that the interval between these events is much longer than the current period during which our species has been terra forming the planet. No need to invoke any intellectually thin gruel of time travel.
Archaic meaning medicine, especially a cathartic.
....I can know that black holes exist....
except that nobody has ever observed one anywhere. Science, especially cosmology has lost its way. Originally, modern science got started, when somebody we now call a scientist observed something about nature. As part of trying to explain and make sense of the observations, mathematics is used as a tool that has been extremely helpful.
Lately though, especially with the advent of modern computers, mathematical modeling computations have taken precedence and a life of their own over simple observation. Yes, the mathematics says that black holes should exist, but the sad FACT is, that nobody has ever observed one. The same goes for dark matter and energy as well as gravitational waves. Just because a computer model or theory says something should exist or be so, doesn't mean it actually is. A singularity, such as theorized as being at the center of a black hole, is a mathematical fiction, but no such thing exists physically. Mathematics must be the servant of science, not its master.
If the earth had an opaque atmosphere, such as Venus, how would we ever know about the existence of the sun? Could we ever know anything about planets and stars? Mathematical models and theory tell us there must be a black hole at the center of our galaxy, but nobody has ever directly observed or measured it. Current theories and mathematical models concerning the motion of galaxies and the stars within them, combined with our limited understanding of the force of gravity, makes it necessary to invent constructs such as dark matter and energy. Maybe the mathematical Emperor really doesn't have any clothes.
Despite spending millions of dollars on incredibly sophisticated detectors, no one has ever really detected gravity waves. We experience time and gravity everyday of our lives, yet both of them are in essence is still very mysterious.
All theory is gray
Another way of looking at it is as an analogy to potential and kinetic energy.
A black hole contains "potential" information that changes to "kinetic", or normal, information (in the form of Hawking radiation) as the black hole dissolves.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
....The universe doesn't have a fixed reference frame....
If you had said the universe doesn't APPEAR to have a fixed reference frame, you would have been more correct. Since we have never seen or found the end of the universe, we cannot say for sure whether the earth is or isn't a the center of the universe or any particular place in it.
All theory is gray
....because maths is not observation....
It used to be that science was about observation and then scientists use mathematics as a way of quantifying and explaining the observations. Now, with computer modeling we have turned that on its head. Scientists make a computer model, where they usually make certain assumptions, and then try to observe what the computer puts out. That is why millions of dollars are being spent on searching for black holes, dark matter and energy, gravity waves and other mathematical fictions. We are told that the universe started with a singularity, which of course is a mathematical fiction, out of which came the so-called Big Bang. Mathematics has become the master of science rather than its servant.
All theory is gray
except that nobody has ever observed one anywhere.
Before we proceed, define observation.
Unless you're going to dispute optics, at the very least, we never actually observe anything directly, but rather, the light coming from that place. Nor do we actually observe a place being dark, only the reduced amount of light.
So what, exactly, is your criteria for "direct" observation?
Originally, modern science got started, when somebody we now call a scientist observed something about nature. As part of trying to explain and make sense of the observations, mathematics is used as a tool that has been extremely helpful.
I'll agree with that.
Lately though, especially with the advent of modern computers, mathematical modeling computations have taken precedence and a life of their own over simple observation.
How is this different than, say, Newton?
He made some observations. He came up with a mathematical model to explain them. He used it to predict some things, and his observations matched his predictions.
The same thing happens in cosmology. The use of computers to crunch the mathematics doesn't change the basic process.
Yes, the mathematics says that black holes should exist, but the sad FACT is, that nobody has ever observed one.
Nobody has observed a quark, as far as I know. Nor, technically, have we observed atoms. We've observed a readout on a display which indicates that some electrons bounced off something in exactly the way we expect an atom to be there, but certainly, no one's directly observed an atom.
Do you dispute the existence of atoms? Would you have, if electron microscopes did not exist?
A singularity, such as theorized as being at the center of a black hole, is a mathematical fiction,
There is a difference between a theory, or even a hypothesis, and a fiction.
no such thing exists physically.
And now you've crossed from denying that we have evidence of something to positively asserting that it does not exist.
I must ask, are you actually a scientist?
If the earth had an opaque atmosphere, such as Venus, how would we ever know about the existence of the sun? Could we ever know anything about planets and stars?
Sure we could, it would just take longer. For one, is Venus' atmosphere opaque to everything?
limited understanding of the force of gravity,
Our "limited understanding" which allows us to make predictions about tiny objects moving thousands of miles per hour, and aim a rocket at a target hundreds of thousands of miles away, and hit it with a high degree of accuracy...
Maybe the mathematical Emperor really doesn't have any clothes.
It sounds very much like you're someone who wants to do science, but doesn't like doing math. Disgruntled at a physics course, you've rebelled against your teachers...
But that's idle speculation.
If you have evidence to present, or a real lack of evidence, please, go right ahead.
Despite spending millions of dollars on incredibly sophisticated detectors, no one has ever really detected gravity waves.
Once again, not directly, but their effects have been detected -- and, moreover, relativity has been shown to be a highly accurate model in the situations where we've applied it (the orbit of mercury, for instance).
Aside from your credentials, your sources, and your criteria for something having been "observed", I'd also like to hear your suggestions for the "way" that you feel science has lost. What tool would you use in place of mathematics?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
So after doing some digging it turns out that even the authors of the papers admit it is a somewhat shaky proposal. Basically they assumed that something called the action, a quantity in physics usually taken to be real, maybe had an imaginary part and then played around with it a bit and assumed it would have a strong effect on a scalar field (such as the Higgs). They found the imaginary part of the action had a strong dampening effect on actions even if they were minima (which are the usual ones we work with). Basically from what I have read/gathered this imaginary part appears in the form of non-local effects in space-time by forcing a consideration upon an entire trajectory through time not just what is local. So basically it would imply the universe as a whole could be on a trajectory where the Higgs just couldn't be created due to the dampening effects of the imaginary part of the action. No backwards propagating signals or anything...just the way the universe is. Of course the whole thing is pretty shaky (invoking at least two 'tooth faries') but it is fun nonetheless.
Again, answered by my GP post.. if you never see the Higgs boson then you don't know if it's "the curse" or just its nonexistence
But if you attempt to do something that would produce a higgs if it had worked, and you repeatedly find problems then you can look at the statistical liklihood of an accident vs the observed number of malfunctions and come to a degree of certainty about sabotage. That degree of certainty might also be the odds that milennia ago the orbit of an asteroid was perturbed in such a way that destined it to collide with earth on (*grins*) December 21 2012 just prior to the time when the dude who had been collecting data would have sat down to add up the figures. Then no more humans to publicise the fact to anyone who might be watching.
...
...Before we proceed, define observation...
By this I mean to perceive with our senses or scientific extensions thereof. With field emission microscopy scientists have actually photographed atoms for example. So no, I do not dispute the existence of atoms. The word "atom" comes from the Greek which means indivisible, because the Greeks gave that name to what they thought could no longer be divided into smaller pieces. Of course, in modern times, we found out they were wrong about this.
(...So what, exactly, is your criteria for "direct" observation?...)
We can observe and measure, for example all sorts of electromagnetic radiation coming from the sun, as well as solar neutrinos. We can use radar or lasers to accurately measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon. He can observe the motion of stars and galaxies directly. Real science is all about measurement, experimentation and accurate observations.
Newton supposedly did get hit by an Apple or whatever, but at any rate he observed and THEN he used mathematics to try and make sense out of what he observed. Much of cosmology today does it the other way around, in that they come up with theories and models and then try to explain the observations in terms of those. When they come up with anomalous observations, that don't fit the models, they invent fictitious things like black holes, dark matter and energy, rather than scrapping their obviously wrong models. That is what I mean when I say cosmology has lost its way.
(...Nobody has observed a quark, as far as I know...)
The Standard Model, in high-energy physics is based on what has been observed and I measured in thousands of experiments around the world. The idea of quarks is based on observation and measurement, not mere mathematical theory. First comes the observation and measurement and then comes the math. In particle physics it is still done mostly this way.
(...I must ask, are you actually a scientist?...)
No, I am an electronics engineer that worked in the physics department of a world-class university.
(...Our "limited understanding" which allows us to make predictions...)
There is a big difference between knowing how to make use of something and actually knowing what it is that we are making use of. Another example is the one of time. We can measure time, divide it into smaller increments more accurately than any other physical quantity that we have learned how to measure, yet no scientists anywhere knows what time actually consists of. It is rather ironic I think.
(...moreover, relativity has been shown...)
to be correct by a multitude of experiments at particle accelerators and with accurate cesium beam clocks. It is not based merely on mathematical models, but on actual observed physical reality.
(....What tool would you use in place of mathematics?...)
I object to the order in which science, especially cosmology, is done these days. It used to be, that scientists would do an observation or experiment and then apply mathematics to gain a fuller and quantitative understanding of nature. Today, some scientists do nothing but sit at computers all day running their models, based quite often not only on solid observed data, but unproven assumptions (faith). Mathematics has become the master of science, rather than its servant.
All theory is gray
Perhaps. Still, you do not give full weight of danger from our technology which was not present in Earth's long history: Nuclear weaponry, intentional spread and lethalization of infectious disease, etc. Moreover, there are two trends to technology: Increased ability to destroy. Increased ability to protect. The first has, and will outpace the second. As these two trends diverge, risk of catastrophe increases. I dont foresee a safe future because of these two principal trajectories. I have wondered if we have past the point of low probability of disaster to high probability of disaster. If large catastrophe does not happen, then I'd start wondering why it has not. Science? No. Guiding principles of my life? No. What is interesting about these two scientists is that they see a possible mechanism within physics for such a scenario as they describe.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
According to current theory they do not...In other words we gotta start somewhere bub.
Newton supposedly did get hit by an Apple or whatever, but at any rate he observed and THEN he used mathematics to try and make sense out of what he observed.
And then -- and this is the important step -- his mathematics were used to make predictions, which were verified by further observation.
Much of cosmology today does it the other way around, in that they come up with theories and models and then try to explain the observations in terms of those. When they come up with anomalous observations, that don't fit the models, they invent fictitious things like black holes, dark matter and energy, rather than scrapping their obviously wrong models.
Except that this is essentially how both Kepler and Einstein worked. Kepler didn't scrap the "obviously wrong" model of planets orbiting the sun, but he adjusted the mathematics to match the observations. Einstein didn't scrap the "obviously wrong" model of Newtonian physics, but he did invent the "fictitious thing" of a warping of space-time -- which was then used to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, the movements of Mercury.
And, unlike atoms, none of these things are directly observed. No one has observed the bending of space-time. We have observed its effects (Mercury again).
to be correct by a multitude of experiments at particle accelerators and with accurate cesium beam clocks. It is not based merely on mathematical models, but on actual observed physical reality.
Again, all of which are merely observing the effects of relativity, not relativity itself.
That is why black holes don't seem wholly "fictitious" to me -- we can see effects which are very well explained by black holes.
Moreover, consider the period before relativity -- people did not throw out Newton's models until there was a better explanation.
You do make some good points, though, and I'm probably reaching the edge of my own understanding.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
So information CAN escape a black hole. I knew one of us was wrong. Glad it wasn't me.
...his mathematics were used to make predictions...
Exactly, and that is the way it should be done, first observe and then do the math, which could predict what further observations corroborate. The same scientist that does the math, isn't always the one who makes the observations. Einstein did the math, but countless other scientists verified by observation, that the equations corresponded with actual reality.
(...We have observed its effects...)
All we really have observed directly, are some anomalies in the orbit of Mercury. We interpret that to be due to the operation of gravity alone, but that is an interpretation, not a measured fact. There are other forces operating in the universe, such as the electric force, being 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity. Only a tiny charge imbalance between the sun and Mercury could also cause anomalies in the latters orbit. It is an assumption (belief) and not a measured fact that the Sun and Mercury are electrically neutral with respect to each other.
(...the effects of relativity, not relativity itself....)
That's like saying when we measure an electric current, we do not count the electrons, but it's magnetic effect in a Galvanometer. Besides that, it isn't even true. When the electrons reach the end of Stanford's two-mile linear accelerator, they have an effective mass, directly measured by magnets, of about 40,000 times their rest mass, before they started their two-mile journey. Also, the accelerating tube has to take into account the increasing speed of the electrons only in the first 10 feet. After that the velocity is essentially constant for all practical purposes. All the electrical energy is nicely converted into mass, just as predicted by Einstein's famous equation. All this is measured by instruments, not theorized by a model in a computer.
(...why black holes don't seem wholly "fictitious" to me...)
Black holes as well as the universe as a whole, before the so-called Big Bang, are theorized to contain a SINGULARITY which has no existence in the physical world, but is ONLY a mathematical construct. The concept of zero, infinity and a point also are purely mathematical, but do not exist in the physical world.
(...people did not throw out Newton's models...)
First of all, Newton and even Einstein only describe how gravity WORKS, not what actually constitutes or is behind gravity. We know that somehow mass generates gravity. Gravity itself is still a deep mystery. However, we experience it every day and steer our spaceships by the equations that Newton came up with, showing that in this model of how gravity works, is still valid to a high degree of accuracy.
Science is first about observation and experiment but mathematics has been very valuable in quantifying and trying to make sense of what we observe in the world around us. I am not against mathematics, believe me.
All theory is gray
What? No, it's just left on the surface where it fell in..
All we really have observed directly, are some anomalies in the orbit of Mercury. We interpret that to be due to the operation of gravity alone, but that is an interpretation, not a measured fact.
It does, however, line up with Relativity's predictions. That's the point.
It could be absolutely anything. But it matches the mathematical model.
Similarly, we have not "measured" Newtonian gravity. We interpret certain phenomena we see, such as the movements of the planets and the way in which things fall, to be expressions of Newtonian gravitation. We can use the mathematical model to predict how things will behave, and then measure that they behave that way. But we haven't observed them.
So I have to ask: Do you dispute Newton?
No, a scale does not count. A scale can only show that something is accelerating toward the Earth. That is only measuring the effects of gravitation, not gravitation itself.
Black holes as well as the universe as a whole, before the so-called Big Bang, are theorized to contain a SINGULARITY which has no existence in the physical world, but is ONLY a mathematical construct.
What is your evidence for this? Or, what is your reasoning for this?
The concept of zero, infinity and a point also are purely mathematical, but do not exist in the physical world.
Zero certainly exists -- it is possible to have zero of some measurable thing. Simple example: There are currently zero apples in this room.
Also, unless I'm missing something, black holes don't require the singularity to be a point, only that it have sufficient mass to create an event horizon. If you like, we can say that we don't know what they are, or what happens inside one, but I don't think we can say that they don't exist.
First of all, Newton and even Einstein only describe how gravity WORKS, not what actually constitutes or is behind gravity.
Similar things could, again, be said about anything else. Chemistry only describes how things work -- atomic theory can tell us that atoms are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons, but what are these, really? If you said "Quarks and electrons", fine, but what are those, really?
If you accept string theory -- and I'm not sure I do -- they are actually strings, or perhaps vibrations of a string, which still doesn't answer the question. What is that string?
I know of no scientific explanation that is not in terms of something else, or relating to something else, eventually tying it back to the world we observe. So if we are talking about any fundamental property of the universe, there's always some mystery behind it.
I agree that a scientist spending all day playing with a mathematical model is not quite doing science, just a very elaborate hypothesis, and perhaps not even that. But I don't agree that either black holes or the Big Bang are just that -- the test of a mathematical model is not that it was inspired by observation, but that it fits observation, and that it is the simplest known model to do so.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If it's left on the surface, then it has escaped the black hole.
...So I have to ask: Do you dispute Newton?...
No, of course not! He did it right in that first he observed and then came up with a mathematical explanation of what he had observed.
(...What is your evidence for this? Or, what is your reasoning for this?...)
Black holes and the singularity of the Big Bang are all based on the assumption (belief) that gravity is the only force that controls the large scale movement we observe in this universe. We know by observations that stars, planets, and galaxies all have magnetic fields associated with them. We know of no way to generate a magnetic field without the movement of charges, that is electrical or ionic currents. To drive these currents requires electrical potentials which could be in the trillions of volts or more in the case of galaxies. We also observe incredibly high energy cosmic radiation. We know of no mechanism on earth that can produce such radiation except by the application to a charged object the electric force which is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity. An unmeasurable tiny electric field of only a few microvolts per kilometer applied to a charged particle over galactic distances can easily accelerate such a particle to the energies we observe.
(...Zero certainly exists...There are currently zero apples...)
That is true if you are dealing with integer objects, but not with particles and time and space. There is no such thing in nature as absolutely nothing. Google "zero point energy" sometime if you're interested to find out why.
(...black holes don't require the singularity to be a point...)
I'm not completely up on the latest theories of black holes, but I do know that if they have a singularity, it doesn't matter if that is at a point or not, but the fact is that both a singularity and a point are valid mathematical constructs even though they have no reality in the physical world.
(...Quarks and electrons...)
But don't you understand that we can measure quarks and electrons? The ultimate measure of what is real and what isn't, is more philosophical or even religious than science. Jesus Christ gave us a few glimpses into a reality that cannot be measured by our senses or their extensions. He talks of demons, angels, places called heaven and hell and does things which we call miracles. I'm sure you've heard the saying about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic or the miraculous. The bottom line to all this is that all of reality cannot be grasped by the scientific method.
(...If you accept string theory...)
It is a good and fun mathematical exercise, but like black holes, dark matter, dark energy and gravitational waves has no bearing or connection to the physical world we currently inhabit. It also makes a lot of assumptions which cannot be verified philosophically or scientifically. There are other conjectures, such as multiple universes.
In my view, science and religion are two sides of the same coin in man's search for truth. Jesus Christ once made a very audacious statement in John 14:6 which is either crazy or true. It cannot be proven or disproven, but only believed or disbelieved. I happen to believe that he spoke the truth and answers the most important questions that any human being can ask.
All theory is gray
He did it right in that first he observed and then came up with a mathematical explanation of what he had observed.
That is exactly backwards from the way we know the things we know.
Observation can provide inspiration for a mathematical model, but the test for a model is not only whether it fits current observations, but whether it predicts new observations, which are then confirmed.
For instance, the Big Bang theory predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation, which was then observed. Einstein's theory of relativity was not invented to explain the movements of Mercury, but it does. As for black holes, I wonder if these mean anything to you?
Furthermore, it should be obvious that a thing is true or not -- the order in which humans discover it does not change the truth of a thing, only (perhaps) its likelihood to be true. Even if a logical falsehood is employed in discovering a hypothesis, that hypothesis may be true.
There is no such thing in nature as absolutely nothing.
Fair enough. At least, it's not worth arguing, as humans can certainly come up with concepts which don't apply to the real world, or concepts which, while useful in mathematics -- even in mathematics which have real applications -- are wholly imaginary.
For example:
The ultimate measure of what is real and what isn't, is more philosophical or even religious than science. Jesus Christ gave us a few glimpses into a reality that cannot be measured by our senses or their extensions.
This presupposes that Jesus Christ existed, that the report of his sayings is accurate, and that he was not deluded. There is significant doubt of the first two points, but if they were true, I suspect he was delusional.
I'm sure you've heard the saying about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic or the miraculous.
The point I take from that is that everything that exists can have a natural explanation. Anything that is "supernatural" and actually exists is actually a natural phenomenon that we don't yet understand.
I can say that largely because I am defining it to be that way -- for instance, if miracles and magic do actually exist, I assume they follow some sort of laws of their own, and quite probably interact with existing physical laws we know and understand. But I also believe that the universe does make sense, and that we have the ability to make sense of it.
I could pretty much sum that up like this.
It is a good and fun mathematical exercise, but...
I agree with you up to this point. I'll justify it with another webcomic.
like black holes, dark matter, dark energy and gravitational waves
But again, we have a fair number of observations which tell us black holes exist, and line up with certain predictions black holes would imply. We have nothing like that for string theory, that I'm aware of. Hawking Radiation is similar. People are working on it.
In my view, science and religion are two sides of the same coin in man's search for truth.
I would argue that the motivation can be the same -- note, can be. Religion is much easier to corrupt than science, since we don't really know what we're doing, whereas in science, anyone can come up with a counterexample.
But despite the similar motivation, they represent wholly different methods.
In particular, science demands that you turn on your brain and think rationally and critically. Religion demands that you turn off your brain and believe on faith. Science can throw out many hypotheses, and admit which of them we don't know, whereas relig
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
...Einstein's theory of relativity was not invented to explain the movements of Mercury...
The tiny anomalous aberrations in the orbit of Mercury are interpreted to be due to Einstein's relativity, but this particular aspect of relativity measurement is based on the assumption (belief) that gravity is the ONLY force that affects Mercury's orbit. A number with 36 zeros behind it is unimaginably big, and that is how much more powerful the electric force is than gravity. If there is only a tiny charge imbalance, that is, if the sun and Mercury are not EXACTLY electrically neutral towards each other, such an electrical force could lead us to misinterpret the orbital aberrations.
(...This presupposes that Jesus Christ existed...)
Yes it does and he did. We know the same way he existed, that we know Julius Caesar, Alexander the great, Aristotle or Confucius or any other historical figure existed. There is an excellent book, which you may get, which was written by a former atheist journalist by the name of Lee Strobel called "The Case for Christ". After his wife became a Christian, her personality changed for much the better. Lee, her husband, who was also a lawyer, put his journalistic and legal skills to work to prove that Jesus Christ and the record we have of him are fictitious. At first, he was very angry with his wife for having put her faith into what he considered a silly myth. After painstaking and exhausting research, because he was an HONEST skeptic, he too came into a personal relationship with the living Christ. Being a Christian is not about a religion, but a relationship with the real living Jesus Christ. Hitler may have been a Roman Catholic, but he obviously did not have a personal relationship with God.
(...Anything that is "supernatural"...)
is only labeled that, because we have insufficient knowledge. There is really nothing supernatural about turning water into wine. Grapes, with the help of humans do it all the time. Because Jesus, who claimed he is God the Creator has perfect knowledge of his creation, he is able to arrange atoms and subatomic particles any way he wishes. How that works we know nothing about, at least not yet. To him who created life in the first place, it is no big deal to bring the dead back to life. Jesus said that the time will come when we will have no more questions. Someday, in the world beyond this one, we will be given the intellect to fully understand God and whatever he might want to tell us. For now, though he asks us to BELIEVE him. Everyone, without exception can believe, but only if they WANT to.
(...But despite the similar motivation, they represent wholly different methods...)
Exactly right! Science and its methods are limited by our senses and understanding. A four-year-old could not understand differential calculus, but he or she can BELIEVE what their daddy tells them. Later, when kids mature, they can understand things which they could not before. There are two paths to knowledge. One is experience and the other is faith. A little kid can believe that an adult telling them that jumping off the cliff will kill him or he can jump and experience what he has been told will happen.
(...Religion demands that you turn off your brain and believe on faith...)
Some religions do that, but the Bible encourages us to have faith based on reason. It is not a blind faith, a jump in the dark, but a reasonable faith. If you have the faith that your God is all-powerful and can do anything at all, then it is not unreasonable to believe that he can bring back the dead. I believe in a God that is big enough and powerful enough to have flung the galaxies throughout the unfathomable depths of space and yet that he also loves me personally. Jesus Christ became one of us humans, although he is God. His knowledge of us is not theoretical, but he experienced being human even to the point of a horrible death as a criminal.
(....plenty of evidence against a personal god who answers prayers....)
I used to believe that, but since my mother was twice miraculously h
All theory is gray
The tiny anomalous aberrations in the orbit of Mercury are interpreted to be due to Einstein's relativity, but this particular aspect of relativity measurement is based on the assumption (belief) that gravity is the ONLY force that affects Mercury's orbit.
Yes, yes, it could be anything. It matches the predictions of relativity.
A number with 36 zeros behind it is unimaginably big, and that is how much more powerful the electric force is than gravity. If there is only a tiny charge imbalance, that is, if the sun and Mercury are not EXACTLY electrically neutral towards each other, such an electrical force could lead us to misinterpret the orbital aberrations.
Except that I have yet to see such an electrical force actually worked out to explain and predict the movements of Mercury, as relativity has. All you've said is it "could".
If you like, go ahead and produce a system of mathematics that uses electromagnetism, and predict where Mercury will be. See how you do compared to relativity.
Yes it does and he did. We know the same way he existed, that we know Julius Caesar, Alexander the great, Aristotle or Confucius or any other historical figure existed.
The difference is, we have independent accounts of each of the other historical figures you mentioned. The only accounts we have of Jesus are the Bible and Josephus, and Josephus looks suspiciously like a forgery -- the parts mentioning Jesus are shoved into a place where they're pretty much irrelevant, they don't match the writing style, etc.
There is an excellent book, which you may get, which was written by a former atheist journalist by the name of Lee Strobel called "The Case for Christ".
Disclaimer: I have not actually read this book.
The problem is, his claim that he was a former atheist, and that he was investigating Christ as he would any other phenomenon... I doubt that. His motivations were not purely curiosity, but a Christian wife who was sad that he was going to Hell.
And from what I have heard, his presentation of the atheist viewpoint is truly pathetic. He sounds much more like a Christian who was angry with God than someone who's actually read the arguments that actual atheists use.
If he really wanted to present this as a "fair and balanced" journalistic endeavor, he'd have interviewed some actual atheists, and asked them if they could refute these "slam-dunk" arguments he got from the apologists. I suspect Dawkins would've been happy to talk to him.
After his wife became a Christian, her personality changed for much the better.
Whether religion can change a person for the better has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it is true.
After painstaking and exhausting research, because he was an HONEST skeptic,
Again, if he was an honest skeptic, he'd have interviewed the other side, rather than pretending he alone could speak for all atheists.
Go back and read those riveting passages where he starts out angry, and within about three seconds, he's come to accept the apologist's argument. This is not someone who was honestly skeptical -- this is someone who, if he was honest, was simply angry and hadn't thought much about it.
It seems far more likely that he was not honest, and that he was playing the atheist strawman.
That's pretty blatant right here:
Lee, her husband, who was also a lawyer, put his journalistic and legal skills to work to prove that Jesus Christ and the record we have of him are fictitious.
No atheist I know of takes the position that we have proved Jesus Christ to be fictitious. The burden of proof is not on us. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.
The fact that I can think of that in about three seconds, and Lee never thought of it at all, tells me he wasn't particularly familiar with the common
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
....Except that I have yet to see such an electrical force actually worked out..
I know that mainstream cosmologists largely ignore electricity in the large-scale function of the universe. I believe that is a grave mistake. That doesn't mean that the theories of those who advocate for an electric universe are all correct and the others are all wrong. I'm just saying that the electrical force should be paid more attention to than it currently is. There is not a single mathematical equation, the changes in the slightest, whether one acknowledges God or not.
(...Whether religion can change a person....)
It is never any religion I'm talking about, but a living relationship with the person of Jesus Christ that will always change a person for the better.
(...Again, if he was an honest skeptic..)
he is not pretending to speak for atheists, but merely chronicles his journey from atheism to faith in Christ. There is also a DVD out, based on this book and having the same title.
(...The burden of proof is on the person making the claim....)
that is true, and there are plenty of atheists who are trying to prove their claim.
(...He cannot forgive one who does not believe in him...)
That is right! The Bible says our relationship with God has to be based on faith. It is the only criterion that is universal. There's not one person on this earth that CANNOT believe. It is a matter of WANTING to or not.
(...yet he will only save his friends...)
That is not true, but Jesus will save anyone who wants to be saved.
(...A judge sits in a courtroom...)
when his aged mother is brought before him, having been caught red-handed in a crime, which in that society was punishable by 40 lashes minus one with a whip. The judge knows that his old momma would never survive such a punishment. He steps down from the bench, takes off his judicial robe, has the executioner with the whip to deliver those lashes on to his back instead. The crime we have all committed against God is eternal death, that is, eternal banishment from his presence. So God stepped out of eternity into time, became a man and took the punishment in our place.
(... This is your divine justice?...)
yes, God took your punishment you so richly deserve and I too, along with every other human and now gives you the opportunity to go free. Justice has been met, in that the decreed punishment of death was carried out, but not on us sinners. Jesus took your guilt and bore it so you don't have to.
(...The claim is that he simply said a prayer...)
Jesus claimed to be God and as God the Creator has perfect knowledge of the structure of matter. It is easy for him to restructure a collection of atoms of water into wine or to multiply a few loaves of bread and some fish to feed 5000 people. Just because we don't have the foggiest notion how such a thing could be done doesn't mean it can't be done and hasn't been done.
(...once you accept the premise...)
there are many things we accept on faith, that is, they are axioms upon which further reasoning is based. The Bible puts it like this:
Hebrews 11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
There is a promise in this verse, in the last phrase.
(...Problem of Evil...)
that is a problem and stumbling stone that has caused many thinking, honest people like you, (yes there are honest atheists) to question faith in God, especially a God who supposedly is love. Theologians and philosophers have wrestled with this throughout the ages. The Bible tells us that this problem of evil started for man, when he disbelieved God and in effect declared himself independent from God, becoming as it were godless. The first of the 10 Commandments tells us to love God. In order to love someone, we must also have the choice not to love. If you want to know what love looks like, from God's perspective, read 1Corinthians 13 in your Bible. The bottom line is simply this: God gave man a love
All theory is gray
I know that mainstream cosmologists largely ignore electricity in the large-scale function of the universe. I believe that is a grave mistake.
I think it largely can be ignored, due to the distances used.
But that isn't the issue question. The question is, since you mention those who advocate for an electrical universe...
That is: If you're suggesting that Mercury could've been moved more by electricity than by gravity, you should be able to find some evidence for that, and a mathematical model to support it, and which can make predictions based on that. It'd help if it was more accurate than relativity currently is.
If not, you're talking about what "could be", rather than what is known to be, to the extent that we can know these things.
It is never any religion I'm talking about, but a living relationship with the person of Jesus Christ that will always change a person for the better.
Missing the point.
Whether or not any religion, including the one you're talking about, can change a person for the better is a completely separate issue from whether it is true or not.
A religion could be true, and not change anyone, or change them for the worse. A religion could be false, and change people for the better all the time.
he is not pretending to speak for atheists, but merely chronicles his journey from atheism to faith in Christ.
I suppose I'd have to track down where I seem to recall him making that claim. But again, in his journey, he picks really bad arguments for atheism, and seems to be actively seeking out theists, not atheists.
There is also a DVD out, based on this book and having the same title.
I might look at it, but from what I've seen of the guy on YouTube, he's fairly underwhelming.
See, one of the side effects of him not interviewing atheists on his journey is that he doesn't seem to have heard many of the responses to those arguments -- many of which seem quite obvious -- and that he hasn't heard many of the good arguments for the atheist position (or more accurately, against the theist position).
that is true, and there are plenty of atheists who are trying to prove their claim.
I don't have to prove my claim. My claim is that I have seen no evidence for a god.
Now, I can respond to claims that a god exists by investigating the evidence presented, but understand, all I have to do is show that this evidence is inconclusive -- the default position is lack of belief.
That is right! The Bible says our relationship with God has to be based on faith.
In other words, God is asking far more of me than any human relationship does. Humans do not often require a leap of faith -- it's a slow, steady process of building a relationship.
There's not one person on this earth that CANNOT believe. It is a matter of WANTING to or not.
See, I care about whether or not my beliefs are true. I want to believe as many true things as possible, and as few false things as possible. (I've stolen that line from Matt Dillahunty.)
Because of this, I do not want to believe something for which I have insufficient evidence to believe is true, and sufficient evidence to suspect is false.
Nor, realistically, could I choose such a belief, any more than I can choose to believe that the wall next to me doesn't exist. I suppose I could delude myself into believing this, and I could run full speed at the wall... only to crack my nose on it, because it does exist.
That's the problem here -- I have no desire to put effort into believing something that isn't true. If you can convince me that your story is true, that Jesus died, rose, loves me, will save me, etc, then I'll have no problem believing. If, on the other hand, you cannot really convince me, but ask me to set aside my critical thinking skills an
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
.....due to the distances used....
It's obvious that the electric force operates over cosmic distances, otherwise we would not receive any electromagnetic radiation from distant objects. The electric force includes electromagnetic radiation, as well as electric and magnetic fields. The electromagnetic force and gravity both operate over cosmic distances. I am not a cosmologist, but an electrical engineer and as such I think the electric force should not be ignored large-scale operation of the universe. Most of the universe does not consist of nicely neutral atoms, such as we are familiar with here on earth, but of ionized matter and free electrons, which are free to move cosmic distances even in an immeasurably small electric field. I think a better, more complete explanation of the operation of the cosmos can be had if both gravity and electric fields and currents are taken into account.
(...he picks really bad arguments for atheism,...)
actually, atheists have some pretty good arguments, if you accept the assumption (belief) that all of reality, all there is, can be grasped by our senses or the extensions thereof we have developed.
(...My claim is that I have seen no evidence for a god...)
But then you haven't seen any evidence to the contrary either. At best, you could call yourself an agnostic.
(...God is asking far more of me than any human relationship does...)
Your life is far more faith-based than you realize. You go to bed at night in the belief that you will wake up in the morning. However you have no guarantee that you will.
(...whether or not my beliefs are true...)
Jesus made some rather arrogant statements concerning himself and truth.
John 6:35, John 8:12, John 9:12, John 10:9, John 10:14, John 11:25, John 14:6.
Unless all these statements are true, Christians have been following a deceiving and deceived egomaniac. Yet, even our calendar marks the time when he appeared, even if not down to the exact year. I believe that the statements that Jesus made about himself are indeed true.
(...insufficient evidence...)
What would be sufficient evidence for you that what Jesus Christ said is true? What would be sufficient evidence for you, personally, that the airliner that you are about to board has been properly maintained? For me, the fact that the apostles and early Christians managed to change the world, is evidence enough. They were willing to die to proclaim the truth, the world changing truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. They were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt. So am I.
(...If you can convince me that your story is true, that Jesus died, rose, loves me, will save me, etc,...)
You are asking me to do something only God, by his Holy Spirit can do.
John 15:26 "But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.
Just say something like: "Dear Jesus, I have trouble believing your gospel story as written in the Bible. I don't even know for sure if you exist. Will you please give me enough evidence so I too can believe and become your child?"
(....In other words, we, as a society, are more ethical than your god....)
It is debatable whether we really are more ethical or not in locking somebody up for the rest of their life. However there are and have been societies who did not employ prisons the way we do.
(...I'm sorry, what crime have I committed?...)
Revelation 21:8 But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death."
Have you ever committed any one of these even once in your life? How many murders as a person have to commit before they are a murderer? How many lies for a liar?
(...In other words, as long as I can believe, I can do whatever I want?....)
A person who truly believes and loves God does not ever WANT to do anything that displeases him. Just b
All theory is gray
It's obvious that the electric force operates over cosmic distances, otherwise we would not receive any electromagnetic radiation from distant objects.
Distance and magnitude, then?
That is, we see plenty of light in the night sky, but its effect on our planet and its movement is minimal.
That we ignore these seems similar, to me, to the fact that we still use Newton's laws when we aren't dealing with relativistic speeds or masses.
actually, atheists have some pretty good arguments, if you accept the assumption (belief) that all of reality, all there is, can be grasped by our senses or the extensions thereof we have developed.
I don't know any atheist who asserts this. Indeed, it'd be foolish, as those extensions can be further developed.
But the point was, rather, that whether or not there are good arguments, Strobel didn't seek them out and doesn't address them.
But then you haven't seen any evidence to the contrary either. At best, you could call yourself an agnostic.
That is a matter of semantics, and I will do my best to explain the conclusion that seems universal among those who call themselves atheists:
Theism or atheism is a statement of belief. Agnosticism or gnosticism is a statement of knowledge.
All "agnosticism" means is that you don't know -- it says nothing about what you believe. You could be an agnostic theist -- you don't know, but you believe anyway.
But if you look at the word atheist, a simply means not. I am not a theist -- I do not believe. That does not automatically imply that I disbelieve.
It is similar to a statement we might make about Santa Clause. You can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he doesn't exist, but you don't believe him. Indeed, if asked, you might find yourself saying "Santa isn't real. He's just pretend, make-believe."
Thus, by this definition, I believe atheism is the sane default.
There is also the concept of "strong" and "weak" atheism, where a weak atheist is one who simply does not believe, while a strong atheist absolutely believes there is no god. There are not many strong atheists.
Now, I happen to be of the opinion that the various god-claims I have heard of do not exist. I could thus be classified a strong atheist. I do not know absolutely for certain, so I could still be classified an agnostic.
That is: I could be wrong. But I really don't think so.
Your life is far more faith-based than you realize. You go to bed at night in the belief that you will wake up in the morning. However you have no guarantee that you will.
You seem to be intelligent. Can you honestly not see the gaping hole in this argument?
I have gone to bed at night every night for several decades, and every morning, I have woken up. I therefore do not have faith, but trust, and evidence to back up that trust.
I have never had evidence presented for the existence of god. It would therefore require faith without evidence, as opposed to trust with evidence.
I understand (and really do enjoy) Hume's attack on inductive reasoning -- that past experience does not prove the future. It is, however, the best we have. Considering that you have woken up every day for the past several decades since you were born, if you were asked to choose, coldly, rationally, and logically, based on the evidence you have, do you think it is more likely that you would wake up tomorrow, or not?
Granted, this kind of thing is usually repeated so often as to become unconscious, but the fact remains -- I do not currently have trust in things that I don't have a good reason to trust. I therefore do not have faith.
Jesus made some rather arrogant statements concerning himself and truth.
John 6:35, John 8:12, John 9:12, John 10:9, John 10:14, John 11:25, John 14:6.
Unless all these statements are true, Christians have been following a deceiving and decei
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Hi David,
At this point, I think it is no longer helpful to respond to your post point by point. Besides the book or movie, "The Case for Christ", there are two other DVDs, I would like to recommend to you. In neither one of them is God ever mentioned. The first is called "The Privileged Planet", the other one is "Unlocking the Mystery of Life". I believe they are available from Amazon. You might be interested in seeing them, because both of them deal with evidence that there is a mind behind the universe.
The problem of evil in this world, as well as a book by that title, seems to be a big if not the biggest factor in your conclusion that there is no God. The Bible hints at the origin of evil, but labels it a mystery to which we have not been given the full answer. It has something to do with how Lucifer an Archangel became proud and rebelled against God. However we are given no detail into why and how this happened. We read that he became God's adversary, that is Satan. The Bible tells us only about the MYSTERY of iniquity.
It seems that the question "why" is the one most often asked by believers and atheists alike. Science and scientists can often answer questions for "how", but only faith can answer some "why" questions. Some questions will remain unanswered until we are in eternity.
I have never yet communicated as with anyone as extensively as with you, on Slashdot or any other forum. I wish I could meet you in person, or at least chat with you for a while on the phone. I too will tell you a little bit about myself.
I am an electronics engineer, now retired. I was born in Germany, under Hitler, but immigrated with my parents to the United States after World War II. I was 11 years old at that time. Before I go on, I would like to say that I am truly sorry what my people did to your people.
I was brought up in a Christian home, with all that entails, you know church and Sunday school and all that. I too had, and still have an inquisitive mind. I was always interested to find out how things worked. Even still in Germany, with the country in ruins after the war, I took mechanical things apart in order to figure out how they worked. Sometimes I even managed to put them back together again. Some kids were blown to bits, when they tinkered with unexploded bombs.
In my teenage years, being exposed to the theory of evolution in science classes, I began to doubt everything about my Christian upbringing. I especially saw the hypocrisy of many Christians around me. I was told by the pastor that I would go to hell for working part-time in a movie theater.
However, I continued going to church, mostly in order to please my mother and it was just the "thing" to do on Sundays. My body sat in church, but my mind was far away, elsewhere. All of our church services were in German.
One day, when I was in my late teens, a young man, an evangelists from Germany was invited to our church. Though usually, by this time in my life, preaching went mostly in one ear and out the other, for some reason, I listened to him. One evening, although he was preaching to the congregation, it seemed as if he were talking directly to me.
He talked of things that I have done, attitudes I had, in short, as if he knew all about me. However, they were all things that were also known by my mother. After that evening, I was quite angry with my mother and accused her of telling him all about her boy. She said quite succinctly that she had not talked with a man about me, but I did not believe her. The man was staying with us as a houseguest
The next evening, was essentially a repeat performance, except this time he talked of deeds and attitudes that I have never shared with anyone on earth, even my mother, whom I was otherwise very close to. All this was in the scriptural context of John 4:4 to John 4:43, the story of the encounter of Jesus and the woman at the well. Just like the story of that woman, the evangelist, as a representative of Jesus, was given information about me that no one on earth
All theory is gray
I just hope that possibility is so abhorrent to the Universe that any multiverse it occurs in would be destroyed.
Goat C. Worst. Syntax. Ever.
You obviously haven't tried Tub Perl
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
It's still easier for me to respond point-by-point, just as it's easier for me to respond with a longer message than a shorter one...
The problem of evil in this world, as well as a book by that title, seems to be a big if not the biggest factor in your conclusion that there is no God.
It is the single reason that led me to that conclusion -- because, as I've described, I had an intense intellectual and emotional reluctance to seriously consider or accept that position.
Now that I have, I see many other arguments -- Occam's Razor is a powerful one, though perhaps not as good as the Problem of Evil.
The Bible hints at the origin of evil, but labels it a mystery to which we have not been given the full answer. It has something to do with how Lucifer an Archangel became proud and rebelled against God.
Here, I'd suggest Milton's Paradise Lost. While it was written by a believer, it makes an interesting case for Lucifer. Until his fall from grace, he's painted not as someone proud, but as someone who dared to question a tyrant's absolute authority.
I am not saying I agree -- given that I don't believe either actually exist.
But I can also define evil in purely secular means, and I can describe very specific instances for which I have not heard a good response. An obvious one is: Why does God allow babies to die in fires?
It seems that the question "why" is the one most often asked by believers and atheists alike.
You'll most often see atheists asking this question rhetorically. When I ask why God won't heal amputees, it is a rhetorical question -- my answer is, god is imaginary, and imaginary beings can't heal anyone. But I ask the question because it's one to which I don't see a good theistic answer, so it is likely to make theists think -- and the fact that there are a few really bad theistic answers, and one very good, simple atheistic one, makes a convincing argument.
I wish I could meet you in person, or at least chat with you for a while on the phone.
That might be interesting, at some point... Feel free to email me when the thread is eventually archived.
At the moment, the main reason I don't want to do that is the amount of other things I have going on in my life. It is easier to fit in time to work on a post than to make a phone call, even if one takes longer.
I was born in Germany, under Hitler, but immigrated with my parents to the United States after World War II. I was 11 years old at that time. Before I go on, I would like to say that I am truly sorry what my people did to your people.
I appreciate it, but I must also say that you are not your people any more than I am my people. I don't think it is a lack of respect for those who dies when I say I do not hold you accountable for what your ancestors did to mine.
I also am going to respond briefly to your story. I will say that I do not doubt your sincerity.
Just like the story of that woman, the evangelist, as a representative of Jesus, was given information about me that no one on earth could have guessed or known.
Without knowing what that was, it's hard for me to say. Even if you told me, it's also difficult to say without a record of everything he talked about...
I will say that we can all be fooled. The easiest way to prove this to yourself is to go to a performance by a good mentalist -- they will tell you things about yourself that no one could know, but with an entirely natural, explainable process.
From your perspective, I expect you are still convinced it was true. It is possible you have enough evidence to discount my possible explanations, though I doubt it.
But understand that from mine, it is simpler to accept that you are dishonest, or that you were knowingly or unknowingly misled by this man, or perhaps your mother was dishonest, or any number of other explanat
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
... Why does God allow babies to die in fires?...
Why does God allow anybody to die? The Bible tells us that death came into the world when the first man sinned. Death is a natural fruit of sin in the same way apples are the natural fruit of apple trees. Besides that, God doesn't look at death the same way you do. Death is not the cessation of being, but a mere separation. The Bible speaks of two deaths. The first happens when your spirit and soul are separated from your body. Your body dies. The second death is when your spirit and soul, which were meant to be united with God forever, are separated from God for all eternity. Since babies have not had the opportunity to specifically reject God and his salvation, the way you have, the second death does not apply to them.
God doesn't want to torture you, but it would be torture for you if he forced you to be in his presence forever. The only way you are anybody can go to hell, literally, is over Jesus dead body. He hung there on the cross for you.
(...It is only when things are going well, and God is no longer directly manifesting, that they start to wander...)
When I was still in Germany, immediately after the war, the churches were packed. Now they are empty museums mostly. Troubled times send people to search for God, but when there is prosperity, people including Christians get fat and lazy and God becomes unimportant. Therefore, God allows or even sends trouble, in order for people to search again for him. Christians in America have come to rely on their own strength and resources rather than God. That is why God does few miracles among us. This ties right into:
(....When I ask why God won't heal amputees, it is a rhetorical question ...)
In our church we often hear the testimony of visiting missionaries from Third World countries, especially Africa. They testify of experiencing miracles, were lame people walk again, blind people see again and even dead people come to life again, in response to fervent prayer. You will probably tell me that their testimony is false. You are of course entitled to do that. Jesus enemies attributed his miracles to the devil rather than God. Satan has far more power and knowledge than any human. He can and will also do miracles, if that's what people are looking for. Therefore, what we call a miracle in itself, is not necessarily from God.
There is however one thing that only God can do. That is to accurately foretell the future, especially thousands of years in advance.
Isa 46:9 remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me,
Isa 46:10 declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,'
God is scientifically accurate in his word. Here he tells us modern knowledge, such as the Earth suspended in space and the fact that exactly north of earth space is strangely empty. The boundary between light and dark, inscribed upon the earth, called the terminator, is also circular.
Job 26:7 He stretches out the north over the empty place, and He hung the earth on nothing.
Job 26:10 He has described a circle on the surface of the waters to the boundary of light with darkness.
Read Isaiah 40, paying special attention two verse 22. Here, God tells us contrary to then current scientific opinion, which was that the earth is flat, that God is enthroned above the circle of the earth.
(....God abandons them and punishes them...)
You've got it wrong. The natural result when people get fat and lazy and stray away from God, are the troubles you describe and more. It's just as natural as an apple falling off the tree.
(...Muslims and Christians have done similar things...)
I am talking about losing one's cultural and religious identity. Except for the fact that governments have sometimes put natives into reservations, which are little better than concentration camps, most of them have integrated into
All theory is gray
Look through a box with a pinhole and you will see only part of which you are able to see; for as big that box really is. Remove the box and you will perceive for which your eyes will be able to see and process. You have been limited by the box and maybe even your mind, because you shouldn't be looking trough a box in the first place. :) Same with thinking; try not to think in a vacuum which is created by/for you. Try to think outside the box, because that box is only just a protective vacuum of your limits.
The frequency of light will bounce against your eyeballs which gets translated in the brain to the physical object memorized by you. Mostly, you don't remember the full details of an event which has happened years ago. Try for yourself and remember which color shirt your best friend had on your birthday ten years ago; in most cases these small details get discolored in the brain by other details. It could be even you'd remember green while the shirt was red. Try this with five years ago and the result could still be tainted.
Sound is another frequency, recognized by the brain, through a process of vibration with the ears. We try to remember as much as we can in that grey goo but still, details will get lost in time. This is because we make new neural paths in our head by the minute. So, go call me crazy in advance, but what if ... our brain is a cache connected to a much bigger database and we are just being nodes of such system? I'm not talking about SciFi stories ala Matrix; but rather thinking further than that box is!
I'm not talking about the beginning of all times here, but I'm talking about the past, the present and the future. Look around you, everything you see are the decisions of you and all others around you; everything exists out of a particle of an atom in our universe. Your body is like any physical matter, it's part of space, where reality is created by you; starting at your house. Your reality is your mind, your thoughts and the connections to any other atom on this universe.
That we are connected only with six degrees of separation should be of no surprise, since we all are connected on this world through another. Like said before "All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves..."
Matter is part of a frequency. Objects are built out of atoms. Structure of matter will change when you amplify it's frequency. Our planet, sun and solar system works on a frequency. Light is part of the visible spectrum where the frequency variates. Maybe you have felt before, time is a growing constant; look to the world, technology, our environment like melting icecaps, environmental impacts and evolution; you will see time is running faster than ever.
Our planet, sun and solar system all work on a frequency. Light and sound are frequencies recognizable in different ways and anything which reflects such frequency gets read by all of us on this planet through our perceptions. Not only electronic devices are having oscillators, but we, humans, are natural oscillators defined to search those which frequency matches us most.
Doesn't that let you think about "what" we are in this universe? We are part of this universe, this planet, this little dot in the galaxy. We create reality as we live. Could it be possible, that all options possible with a decision do exist in an alternative universe as an atom? The universe could be a gigantic library of options possible where we merely selected those which we can really understand about. Our mind could be part of a gigantic library, where choices interact with eachother, just like a computer computes through algorithms.
What if some of us are possible to view such alternate realities or even possible to change the field where the atom is in it's quantum reality; then you are in the field of time travel. What if what we really fe
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Why does God allow anybody to die? The Bible tells us that death came into the world when the first man sinned.
In other words, God likes to punish people for things they didn't do, because an ancestor did?
Besides that, God doesn't look at death the same way you do. Death is not the cessation of being, but a mere separation.
And fire is not merely death, but an incredibly painful death.
So, your god burns babies to death -- or merely burns them until they're a pile of ash, and then resurrects them to eternal life -- because of something Adam did.
And you're ok with that.
Is that something you would ever, ever do, even if you had the power to resurrect them to eternal life? Wouldn't you at least knock them out first, if you had to kill them, to be merciful about it?
God doesn't want to torture you, but it would be torture for you if he forced you to be in his presence forever.
Firstly, you cannot possibly know that. Certainly, there was a time when I didn't believe, but wanted to. At that time, if he turned out to be real, I'd certainly want to be in his presence.
Secondly, that's a false dichotomy. You're implying that the only option is to separate me from him forever for my disbelief without evidence, or force me to be near him.
He could, y'know, provide evidence, so I could make an informed decision. If he doesn't want to do that in this world, perhaps a good opportunity would be after death -- yet according to you (correct me if I'm wrong), after death I'll be cast into a lake of fire, without the opportunity to actually see a few angels and demons and change my mind.
Therefore, God allows or even sends trouble, in order for people to search again for him.
Is that the best possible way he could think of helping people search for him?
Especially considering that for some people, this has the opposite effect? Many Jews who survived the Holocaust became atheists, as they could not believe that any loving god would allow that to happen.
In our church we often hear the testimony of visiting missionaries from Third World countries, especially Africa. They testify of experiencing miracles, were lame people walk again, blind people see again and even dead people come to life again, in response to fervent prayer. You will probably tell me that their testimony is false.
Something like that. Here's a quote from David Hume:
no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.
Can you tell me honestly that these missionaries are so reliable that for them to be wrong would be more miraculous than for a dead man to rise again?
Also worth mentioning, none of those things you mentioned are limbs regenerating. There have been examples of similar things with entirely secular explanations, where lame people began to walk, where blindness was only temporary, and where someone was mistaken for dead.
Amputees are chosen as an example, because it's usually quite easy to prove that someone is missing a limb, and later, to prove that the limb is there.
Jesus enemies attributed his miracles to the devil rather than God.
And what is your reason for believing him, rather than his enemies?
That is to accurately foretell the future, especially thousands of years in advance.
It seems like what you've quoted here is a declaration of the end, not evidence of anything...
Job 26:7 He stretches out the north over the empty place, and He hung the earth on nothing.
Job 26:10 He has described a circle on the surface of the waters to the boundary of light with darkness.
These are vague enough that they might be de
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
....In other words, God likes to punish people for things they didn't do, because an ancestor did?...
God doesn't punish anybody anymore than an apple tree punishes an apple that falls to the ground. As I have said before, God is perfect, and unless you are too, you cannot and will not stand in his presence. We are so used to sin, because we live in a sinful world. God abhors sin and apparently considers it much worse than death, even the death of a baby in the fire.
(...Firstly, you cannot possibly know that...)
Yes I can. When Adam and Eve sinned, they ran away from God, but he went looking for them. Because you are sinful, you are running away from God. God may call you, but people never drank you kicking and screaming into heaven. Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden because they didn't believe God. You will be kept out of heaven because you didn't believe God. You keep talking about evidence in the same way that the Pharisees asked Jesus for evidence. He said they would be given the evidence of his resurrection, but they rejected that.
(...Is that the best possible way he could think of helping people search for him?...)
Yes it is, because it is human nature to search for God when things get really bad. But there are many who have become true Christians when they were at the bottom of a foxhole under enemy fire. I will pray, that God will put you in a "foxhole", and you cry out to God to save you.
(..no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle...)
The religious leaders of Israel did not believe in Jesus resurrection because they did not want to believe. A person who has made up their mind not to believe, will reject any and all evidence, just as they did.
Of all religious leaders and groups that have ever come and gone on this earth, only Jesus has made the claims to deity, but he was also the only one who proved his claims by conquering our worst enemy, death.
(..and where someone was mistaken for dead....)
Jesus was very definitely dead and he came back to life again. That is the core of the Christian faith.
(...And what is your reason for believing him, rather than his enemies...)
Because I have personally seen him in action in my life over and over again.
(...Note that he describes a circle...)
in the Hebrew language that word is KHUG which can also be translated spherical, as a ball.
(..The Earth doesn't have foundations, or a corner stone...)
The sun doesn't rise either were set, but we still speak of sunrise and sunset. We also speak metaphorically of the ends of the earth.
(...Why does God have to prove anything to Satan?...)
the book of Job clearly shows that God is in control and that Satan has to obey God whether he likes it or not. God allows Satan to test Job, but God also sets limits to the test which Satan cannot exceed.
(...part of God telling Job, more or less, "I'm awesome. What have you got to say for yourself?"...)
That's because God IS the awesome eternal Creator, where Satan is merely a created finite angelic being who rose up against God.
(...It's also interesting to suggest that God would destroy his creation so...)
It is prophesied, then God will indeed destroy the entire physical universe which has been corrupted by sin, and make a new incorruptible one.
(... foundations of the earth?...)
The verse talks about time, the beginning thereof, not the structure of the earth.
(... It's a circle...)
the Hebrew word for circle can also be sphere or ball.
(...In other words, god isn't responsible for something that's "natural"?..)
To God everything is natural, but to us limited humans, some things are supernatural. God could prevent something from happening, such as a natural disaster, but he can also allow it to happen. When a tidal wave or earthquake kills thousands we blame God. God says this world is corrupt because of sin. As a result of that corruption we get natural disasters and also actions of men such as war.
(...The Nazis were, as an organizatio
All theory is gray
God doesn't punish anybody anymore than an apple tree punishes an apple that falls to the ground.
An apple tree is not omniscient or omnipotent. If god is, he again either punishes or allows suffering to happen as a kind of punishment.
I think the difference between punishment and an omnipotent being allowing punishment to happen is largely subjective.
God abhors sin and apparently considers it much worse than death, even the death of a baby in the fire.
This is another case where I think I can show that you or I are better than God.
Which is worse: Saying "You look great in that dress!" or calmly watching a baby slowly burn to death, while doing nothing about it?
Oh, and false dichotomy -- why does your god allow babies to die in fires? How is that stopping (or preventing) sin from happening? It's not like we either have sin or babies dying in fires -- obviously, we have both, and if God was real, we could have neither.
Because you are sinful, you are running away from God.
Running away would be closing this thread and never returning.
Or, more significantly, running away would have been to stop thinking about these questions when I started getting answers I didn't like -- to continue to believe, and ignore all the reasons I had not to.
there are many who have become true Christians when they were at the bottom of a foxhole under enemy fire. I will pray, that God will put you in a "foxhole", and you cry out to God to save you.
Ah, the "no atheists in foxholes" argument... But read that article:
The Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers, an atheist organisation, opposes the use of this phrase. They have adopted the catchphrase of "Atheists in Foxholes" to emphasize that the original statement is just an aphorism and not a statistical fact.
I hope I am never in a foxhole, but I doubt it would make me find faith -- though it might increase my use of a few habits that I've been slow to break, like the phrase "Goddammit."
But your core point here, that this is the best way he could help people to search for him, shows a lack of imagination. At least in my case, I would be far less likely to believe in a foxhole than I would if, for instance, I actually met Jesus, or if I prayed for something physically impossible or incredibly improbable, and it happened -- especially if I could make it happen reliably, simply through prayer.
The religious leaders of Israel did not believe in Jesus resurrection because they did not want to believe. A person who has made up their mind not to believe, will reject any and all evidence, just as they did.
That has something to do with the above, but also does little to explain why bad things happen to good people, to the truly faithful. The idea of "testing someone's faith" seems bizarre -- again, wouldn't an omniscient god know whether they were truly faithful without forcing them to undergo that test? I'm fairly confident that I would survive castration, but I'm not eager to test that -- why would a loving god test us that way?
What's funny is, you posted this in reply to "no testimony is sufficient..." without actually providing sufficient testimony. Instead, you've said something that's demonstrably wrong:
Of all religious leaders and groups that have ever come and gone on this earth, only Jesus has made the claims to deity,
I'd like to use this opportunity to stress, again, why it's important to back up your beliefs with evidence -- if nothing else, it's a means to help you to believe things are true. And I'd like to stress, again, that it's important to believe as many true things as possible and as few false things as possible.
Here's a short list of religious leaders, real and po
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!