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New Theory of Gravity Decouples Space & Time
eldavojohn writes "Petr Horava, a physicist at the University of California in Berkeley, has a new theory about gravity and spacetime. At high energies, it actually snips any ties between space and time, yet at low energies devolves to equivalence with the theory of General Relativity, which binds them together. The theory is gaining popularity with physicists because it fits some observations better than Einstein's or Newton's solutions. It better predicts the movement of the planets (in an idealized case) and has a potential to create the illusion of dark matter. Another physicist calculated that under Horava Gravity, our universe would experience not a Big Bang but a Big Bounce — and the new theory reproduces the ripples from such an event in a way that matches measurements of the cosmic microwave background."
Special relativity, of course, forbids sending information faster than light. A theory supplanting the space-time unification of General Relativity would also supplant special relativity, and hence might not have that limitation. Here's an inteersting tidbit from the article: "Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light."
I'd call that a feature, not a bug!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Behold, science.
The catch is, eventually one will be right, and explain things that are out of the scope of Einstein's theories or more accurately explain in-scope things.
Or do you believe we are at the pinnacle of the field, and can achieve no more?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
We have reached enlightenment. We shall now call ourselves Q.
(huuummmm)
Man this is dull.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Horavec's formulation works for certain (perfectly spherical) cases of the stress-energy tensor, not in other cases. In fact it produces some wildly inaccurate results in more realistic cases. Nor is he the first to try this kind of thing. Still, it sounds interesting and further refinements could produce a fully consistent theory which can match observation. When and if that happens then it will be a really major advance. It certainly seems like we're edging closer to something.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Does this theory suck or is there some pull to it? It just seems so weighty to me.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
... in a presentation from the 30th Workshop on Gravitation and Numerical Relativity at Jungwon University. It's a PDF version of a PowerPoint deck, so it's not exactly easy to read.
So does this compete with string theory or have a chance modifying it to an eventual theory of everything?
I believe they will all be right, but it will only be from the perspective of the observer/believer which is right at the moment. However when it isn't being observed it will be both right and wrong until observed again. Therefore there are multiple pinnacles and it won't matter which are right or highest. Just have your towel ready because on top of the pinnacle is a little man who is only going to apologize for the inconvenience.
Always have a towell ready.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.3775 PS Slashdot has the slowest comment preview of any website I know.
it fits some observations better than Einstein's or Newton's solutions. It better predicts the movement of the planets (in an idealized case)
Oh. In an idealized case. Imaginary physics. Of course, in the actual case, it does not (it requires patching to allow for non-spherical planets).
At any rate, there are at present no known relativistic measurements that are not consistent with General Relativity, so I am not clear where the "better than" comes from.
And, from the standpoint of a General Relativist, the stubborn desire of the particle physicists to have a flat spacetime at high enough energies, no matter what, seems, well, quaint.
Yeah: http://yfrog.com/b9sciencevsfaithbigp
This sentiment is rather old, I'm sure before and when Einstein came about, people were saying the same thing about Newtonian physics. Skepticism about new theories are fine, but I'm sure the science will come to a point where we do discover something better than Einstein's formulas in some areas.
BTW, my physics is really rusty, doesn't one of Einstein's equations devolve into a newtonian equation at slow speed? Which just shows that things are truly built on top of one another.
To differentiate myself from the lot of you bores I shall take a first name: Fah. From this point on I am Fah Q! :)
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Just because communication at FTL speeds doesn't fit the model as we can understand it doesnt mean that it doesn't or cannot occur. We should stop dismissing ideas of science simply because they don't fit with what we believe should happen. It is entirely plausible that there are things that happen in the universe that we cannot yet mathematically explain - but because we cannot fully mathematically explain them they should not be dismissed.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
If you reverse the polarity, inject some chroniton particles, and rub Patrick Stewart's head for good luck, it'll still work.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
1. Gravity is still spooky action at a distance with no causal mechanism defined.
2. I don't think time, as in "time lines" or some kind of unidirectional movement through a medium exists. Now exists, hypostatized out of a past (which stops existing when it stops being now) and which in turn hypostatizes the future (which does not exist.)
3. Electromagnetism is the dominant force in the heavens as it is on Earth.
4. Stars are organisms and they reproduce through fission.
5. Galaxies are powered by vast electric circuits; beads on a string.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Sounds to me like this is just an hypothesis as there doesn't appear to much experimental evidence supporting it. This is an extraordinary claim and so need extraordinary proof.
And, the interchanging of hypothesis and theory by scientific magazines is a bad thing. If scientists, science fans, and science writers do not use the words correctly how are we to defend the difference when creationists come around misusing the words?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Yet, who is Petr Hoava? He maintains a Web page that offers the following biography.
"Petr Horava received his Ph.D. in 1991 at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He was awarded the Robert McCormick Research Fellowship at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, worked as a Research Associate at Princeton University, and won a Sherman Fairchild Senior Research Fellowship at Caltech, before joining the New High Energy Theory Center at Rutgers University in 2000 as an Associate Professor. In 1997, he was awarded the Junior Prize of the Czech Learned Society, and in 1999 he appeared on the list of top three scientists of the Czech Republic of the 90's. He joined the Physics Department at UC Berkeley in 2001."
The liberation of Eastern Europe in 1989 has unleashed an intellectual force that will advance human knowledge by leaps and bounds. 2009 is the 20th anniversary of that liberation.
Buddha bless the Eastern Europeans.
This is healthy. Science can only progress if we accept that thinking outside the box is admissable. If the idea works ehen it will be testable.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Sounds like this guy's saying "Let us assume the speed of light is not necessarily the fastest anything can travel. If we assume this, then..."
The reason for Einstein's initial assumption is that we have never to date observed anything which has moved faster than light. Then again, would we know such a thing if we observed it, and have we actively looked for such a thing? If so, how have we looked?
It took me long enough to get my head around the intertwining of space and time in relativity. Now you're telling me that they might also be decoupled in special circumstances.
Ow! My brain hurts.
You fixed it by misspelling General Relativity?
Or maybe you actually meant the theory would be better than 'Reletivity'. That could work.
http://www.chaotickingdoms.com
BTW, my physics is really rusty, doesn't one of Einstein's equations devolve into a newtonian equation at slow speed?
Wouldn't be correct if it didn't. Newton wasn't *wrong*, he just didn't specify the parts he couldn't see. Same with Einstein, same with this.
From the linked article, it seems the theory both predicts the heat death of the universe (continued accelerated expansion) and that our universe started from a "Big Crunch" scenario (gravity had pulled everything back again). This seems quite strange (although of course nature can be quite strange at times). Anyone know this theory any better and can provide some enlightenment?
i read that some of the theory used math from helium super-fluids.
As I'm no math nerd, perhaps someone who is can explain why infinity is disallowed? I finally figured out why you can't divide by zero; 10/2=5, 5/2=2.5, but if you use numbers smaller than one it is reversed; 1/.5=2, 1/.05=20, so anything divided by zero would be infinity. Is the universe infinite? If so, how can it be studied mathematically?
I found this intrigueing:
I'm no physicist, but that occurred to me when I first herd of the big band theory. If so, would it bounce an infinite number of times?
Free Martian Whores!
In my home reality, we had machines to jump into parallel dimensions, but baguettes were outlawed when Palin took the U.S. presidency and invaded France.
I hadn't heard of the croaking bird dimension though. I'll have to visit.
There are really 42 quarks.The LHC should probably be able to test this...
(God but I love that guy's cartoons!)
Free Martian Whores!
Yep. It's called the Correspondence Principle when applied to quantum/classical mechanics. Basically, Newton's equations 'fall out' of Einstein's when you assume the speed of light is a big number relative to all other speeds.
Recently, paradigms in physics have been interesting in this respect as the new perfectly subsume the prior in their limits. I am not sure that this is a tautology of science, but it is an elegant means of progression.
The catch is, eventually one will be right,
This is, perhaps, a minor quibble with wording. (Depending on what you meant.) But no, neither is likely to be right. One will be shown to be wrong before the other, however. Or, if you prefer, one will probably be more accurate.
So let's say our universe is expanding (doesn't matter if it's this theory or mainstream Big Bang). We already know there's volume beyond the visible edges of our universe. What if there's another universe expanding towards us, accelerating into heat death, and then its edges hit our own? Wouldn't that Big Smack be a Big Crunch? And thus another universe is born?
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
In one day, and they are both in California. I am stuck here in New Jersey. New Jersey is Hell. When people die, they don't go under the ground, they just pop up somewhere in Newark. See, us citizens of New Jersey are immortal because if we are killed, we just pop up back again in New Jersey. Its just really hard to navigate around Newark, so that's why you don't see us again..................
i am so very tired....
I'm really going to destroy my karma here, but I think that diagram isn't correct. I would argue that personal faith is almost identical to the path of the science in the diagram. There are those of us out there who hold beliefs but aren't afraid that our beliefs might be changed by what evidence we are presented with. Faith will always be there for the things we do not have the tools to understand. Whether or not you apply a god to it doesn't matter, because in the end, past what our science is able to tell us, everything comes down to a belief.
The problem with faith is when it becomes blind faith. Some people think what they've found is the be all end all and refuse to search anymore. It's not specific to the religious either. If you notice, there are "science" folk in here mocking this new theory because it contradicts the old one. Think about this next time you want to take a swing at someone who holds faith.
My hypothesis about gravity:
Everything is growing. We can't see anything growing, because our rulers and tapemesures and everything is growing. That's gravity: Just the growing earth pushing against your growing feet. Gravity at a distance is just objects growing towards each others (the void doesn't grow). Come to think of it. It's probably a bad hypothesis. It couldn't explain a slingshot effect, could it? Nevermind.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
BTW, my physics is really rusty, doesn't one of Einstein's equations devolve into a newtonian equation at slow speed? Which just shows that things are truly built on top of one another.
It's easy to get Newtonian physics from Relativity. The hard part was to get Relativity knowing just Newtonian physics. Ergo, things are not just built on top of one another, but it's more like building beneath of what you don't know.
But does it also predict that time is an illusion, lunch-time doubly so? If not then there is still room for a more refined theory.
Then I shall be Fah Q 2!
.evom ton seod gis eht
Same thing in Quantum Mechanics. They devolve into classical equations, if you set Planck's Constant to 0.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light.
How do we know for sure that it's impossible? How can we test against it to conclude it's definitely an impossibility? We surely haven't found any way to achieve that, but given that all theories are still in the balance, how do we know for sure there's no way we possibly could?
This being said, nice to see a theory that's more intuitive than usual, that attempts to explain dark matter and dark energy by revising how things work rather than claiming there's a bunch of invisible mysterious things at work, and that does so without adding a bucketload of new unperceptible dimensions and weird vibrating strings that no one can prove. Ah, and give an alternative to the ailing theory of Big Bang.
And nice to see that it took SciAm's commenters less time than Slashdot users to make the discussion drift into some crap about religion. Maybe we're not that bad after all.
You just got troll'd!
Actually, it's quite simple: The old theory correctly describes the old experiments. If the new theory is to be right, it must also correctly describe the old experiments, therefore under those conditions it must not differ from the old theory any more than the measurement errors.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The problem isn't so much with the infinities, those are perfectly allowable in math and in physics.
The gravitational pull as you approach a black hole approaches infinity
The limit of the graph 1/x as x->0 is infinite.
The problem is that other theories of quantum gravity result in infinities where we do NOT observe these infinities to exist. As a simple example (quantum mechanics is beyond me, but this gives the flavor), one of the classic theories of electrostatics states that the electric field of a point charge is inversely proportionate to the square of the distance from that charge.
However, from a quantum-mechanical standpoint, and electron has no size...it is a point particle.
This causes an issue if we take both of these results together...as you approach an electron, the electric field should approach infinity.
We know that this doesn't happen, so one of the two theories must be incomplete.
I prefer to say one will prove to be a better model. I suppose "more accurate" works too, although it begs the question of what "accurate" means in the context. Scientists of course understand that means it produces correct predictions more often, but laymen are likely to interpret it to mean something more vis a vie it's status as a "description" of reality. Which may indeed be true, but ultimately that's a philosophical question, not a scientific one. In science, the "better description of reality" is "better" only in the sense that it produces better predictions. "Closer to the truth" is a question outside the scientific realm. "Right" is right out...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Well Fah Q both then
Science and faith are intrinsically linked. You must have faith to be a scientist in the first place, because faith is what allows you to believe there is order in the universe, and that causality exists. The people who use a personification metaphor to describe the order of the universe are no different from those who use more abstracted and precise language. They still have faith that, even though we might not have a perfect understanding of (the universe/the will of god), it does indeed exist, waiting to be noticed. To not have faith is to genuinely believe that the universe is without order, and there is no point in putting food away for tomorrow, because it might turn into a carnivorous butterfly and eat you before morning anyways for all you know.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The difference between science and faith is whether the statement could possibly be disproved. If it can, it's science. If it can't, it's faith.
That's a tiny difference in length of description. But the difference between what can be disproved and what can't is a very big difference. While faith statements could be the most important if true, like a diety, afterlife, consequences of pure morals, without proof or disproof those statements are the most unreliable to be true.
--
make install -not war
Cousin to Sofa King Awesome, I suppose. You people are so immature.
To differentiate myself from the lot of you bores I shall take a first name: Fah. From this point on I am Fah Q! :)
Just curious, do you own a horse?...
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
I don't understand this, I don't need faith to believe there is order in the universe. It's been proven that there is a certain amount of order and I can reproduce those measurements if I wanted to see for myself. Causality is equally provable. We don't know how everything works yet but the stuff we are sure about I don't need faith to believe. The other stuff we make our best guess while reserving the right to change our mind pending further data.
As I'm no math nerd, perhaps someone who is can explain why infinity is disallowed? I finally figured out why you can't divide by zero; 10/2=5, 5/2=2.5, but if you use numbers smaller than one it is reversed; 1/.5=2, 1/.05=20, so anything divided by zero would be infinity. Is the universe infinite? If so, how can it be studied mathematically?
I'm no math nerd either, but what I remember is that since it has no end (infinite), you can't add or subtract from it because it still has no end after that. That's all fine, but irrational numbers don't exist, yet we use them in arithmetic. I don't know why we just can't use infinity the same way and do magic tricks like:
oo - oo = 0
oo / oo = 1
etc.
(Note: oo = infinity. ∞ and ∞ not supported on Slashdot.)
Any math lord reading this thread?
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
http://mndl.hu/works/fractalcow
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Religions, which is what you're talking about when you say faith, are software that runs in a cluster of human beings. They mutate all the time... you turn your head, there's another one popping up, the bastard stepchild of a few predecessors. Some religions will destroy the hardware they run on before they ever propagate. The Davidians, for example. Others will propagate through a population quickly, but lead that population to extinction in a few generations. A few will endure, supporting their populations growth and infecting or destroying the populations running another religion.
This is not made up airy-fairy bullshit that some simpleton believes for no reason. This is evolution at work. These old religions have demonstrated their reliability, because the people who believe in them are not dead.
The evidence indicates that the vast majority of ideas that are "modern" and "novel" and "progressive" will lead the population that embraces them to extinction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Yes, with science there is a certain amount of established expectation based on observation. Do something, see what happens, expect it to behave the same way in an identical situation. If it doesn't behave the same way, figure out what's not identical about the situation. I don't think it's right to call this faith, or if you want to, it's important to suggest the only REAL faith is "expecting what you've already observed will continue to be true". There are still tests that can be tried and repeated, there are generally equations that can be applied to the results.
Religious faith, on the other hand, deals with having insight into the unknowable. As such there aren't any tests, any results, no expectation of repetition, no equations.
Religious faith may be rewarding for many people in many ways (hey, it seems pretty popular), but it doesn't pay to confuse it with the scientific process. Those two different uses of the word faith are so divergent, it's probably better just not to use them.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Spooky action at a distance doesn't need any finagling to get around lightspeed, because spooky action at a distance doesn't involve any communication. It's already compatible with general relativity (at least, insofar as any quantum theory is compatible with relativity).
A flawed, but illustrative example that should explain why this is so: imagine you have a friend who is flipping a coin... if it comes up heads, he writes an X on two sheets of paper, if it comes up tails, he writes a checkmark on both instead. Both are immediately sealed inside envelopes and mailed to opposites sides of the planet. If you open one letter and see an X, you instantly know the other has an X also. That doesn't require any communication.
A slightly less flawed, and still illustrative extension: Now instead of a coin flip, you have a machine do it based on the decay of a mass of cesium, and you have a perfect envelope which protects against quantum decoherence. The same situation applies, as soon as you open one envelope you know what is contained in the other. The only difference this time is that the letters were entangled and in a superposition of states. However, it's the same mechanism, and no communication is required.
All faith is blind.
'Faith - Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.'
And just because some may swing one way or the other within either group doesn't show anything. At its root religions are unchanging, or at least the Judeo-Christian ones are meant to be. At sciences base we strive for changing, evolving viewpoints.
No, that is a stupid terrible meme. First off the axioms of science are things like 'a + b = b + a', compared to there is a God and history as described in a multiple 1000page book. Not the % of which is axiom, In fact the whole christian belief system IS a huge axiom, individuals get to add theories on top that's all.
As well, science is made of 'best guesses so far'. That 'so far' stipulation means you don't actually have faith in anything merely knowledge of a best guess. Scientists/Philosophers haven't proven with any great certainty that we can know anything so all we CAN do is make guesses. The only absolute proofs we make do use givens, so we can prove things withing certain constructs. Like, we can PROVE things in math, but it is an artificial device. That isn't the same as universal truths. All we get there are good guesses.
Do we act on those guesses? Certainly, much like you'd call a friend's cell before his house. You don't KNOW he is there, simply that is the best educated guess you can make at the moment. The idea that people EVER need to make a leap of faith is total BS.
Same as with the Highlander. But I digress.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
I'm not familiar with this Jesus theory. Because I am open to outside-the-box thinking, I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and evaluate your theory based on it's merits, rather than dismissing it out of hand. Can you send me an example where Jesus accurately predicts known experimental results? Also, what experiments would you posit to prove or disprove Jesus? I eagerly await your reply.
Not so. You cannot prove that repeatedly making a measurement in the past is any indication that it will hold in the future. Pointing out that it's worked before is just begging the question, and therefore reproducing the results doesn't help, for it does not mean you'll reproduce the results *again*.
You *must* presuppose that the future is relevantly like the past for empiricism to have any meaning in any context; it's pretty much an irreducible problem.
With that said, such "faith" is, I would argue, essentially to daily living and doesn't really deserve to be categorized as "faith" except in the most pedantic of senses. Without acting under this presupposition, you cannot learn. Anything. I suspect that biologically this presupposition cannot be unlearned since it appears to be intrinsic to learning even in some of the stupider members of the animal kingdom.
Uh, because that would be incorrect? One infinity is not necessarily equal to another, not to mention infinity isn't a number, nor is it a constant or variable. It's a concept, and you can't add, subtract, multiple or divide concepts, so you can't do anything like that to infinity.
There's a calculus theory whose name escapes me that allows you to solve for what X/Y equals when X and Y are both infinite functions using their derivatives. I remember taking tests where we basically had lim (x->oo, y->oo) of (x+10)/(y^2) and we had to determine what it equaled. Sure you could simplify that to oo/oo and then say it equals 1, but you'd get that question wrong.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
No, but I did get a Bachelor's degree in math what seems like an infinity ago....here's what I remember.
You can add infinity to the number system just fine. In doing so you would want to preserve rules of the standard number system (e.g. a+b = b+a, (ab)c = a(bc)).
This has already been done. Hyperreal numbers make up a branch of mathematics called nonstandard analysis.
Nonstandard analysis has been used occasionally in studies of quantum physics, but it doesn't help with the infinities.
The infinities in quantum gravity are not a math problem they are a physics problem...i.e. the infinities turn up where we know they don't exist (e.g. infinite mass, infinite energy, etc). Nonstandard analysis can be useful in working with these infinities, but not in explaining them.
It makes one wonder what he smokes...
1960s Dr. Who by the looks of things. Man, I'd forgotten about those...
The problem with faith is when it becomes blind faith.
No, the problem with faith is that it is always blind. Faith is a strong belief in the absence of evidence, but without evidence, you are utterly and completely blind.
Faith will always be there for the things we do not have the tools to understand.
There are better words for the things we do not have the tools to understand. "Ignorance" is a pretty good one, for instance.
If you notice, there are "science" folk in here mocking this new theory because it contradicts the old one. Think about this next time you want to take a swing at someone who holds faith.
Criticizing new theories is part of what "science folk" do, you know.
+1 Directly to the fucking point!
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
Thanks for making the point more clear. We can't predict the future so we can't know if in ten feet the road will vanish beneath me or that my electrons won't go flying off into space. Fair enough.
Haven't we proven enough of our theories about this world that we know for certain things are stable to a known degree? Or is it like the "law" of gravity, not proven but correct according to a large body of evidence? Do you mean to say that we know no absolutes?
Faith is belief in something for which there is no proof or even strong evidence. Faith is generally applied only to spirituality, and it should be so according to the definition. For example, I don't need faith to believe that the Yankees won the World Series this year - there IS evidence for that. I do believe that they won BECAUSE of the evidence.
You do NOT need faith to believe that the universe is anything. Ordered, structured, causal, etc. A good scientist believes these things because there is evidence of order, causality, etc.
To not have faith is to not believe in something for which there is no evidence.
One does not need faith to look forward to the future doing something chaotic because of the belief (through prior observation) that those kind of things (earth turning into a carnivore butterfly) just does not happen.
Science and faith are NOT intrinsically linked. Science and belief ARE. Science and faith are two completely separate things.
No one is questioning the intelligence of the soviets or eastern europeans. The problem was that when they did science, they did it in an inverted way. For example, in Soviet Russia, the particles accelerated you.
Actually for electrodynamics the problem is completely solved. Basically the idea is that around the electron the vacuum polarization causes the field to me modified, so what you see as electron isn't actually the "naked" electron, but the electron plus vacuum polarization. So if you get closer to the electron (or equivalently, are scattering at higher energies), you have to modify the coupling constant (that is, basically the charge). The procedure is called renormalization and can remove the infinities from the theory.
The problem with General Relativity is that if you quantize it, you cannot get rid of the infinities through renormalization.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The Jatravartid People of Viltvodle Six firmly believe that the entire universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called The Great Green Arkleseizure. They live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming Of The Great White Handkerchief.
Fah Q and the horse you rode in on?
Remember the saying that science proceeds by successive approximation to the truth.
"You cannot prove that repeatedly making a measurement in the past is any indication that it will hold in the future."
Flip side, you can't prove that it won't hold true in the future either. In essence, your argument is a case of argumentum ad ignorantiam.
The bottom line is that you're engaging in fancy footwork trying to get to him to use the word "faith", in which case you then have a basis for moving on to a discussion of "true faith", a belief in God or some such. Faith is belief without proof.
But... if you have proof then you don't need faith. Past personal observation, history, science, math, and orbital mechanics all say that the sun will come up tomorrow. Faith is not needed.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Yes, and our current problem in physics is that we have two forks of Newtonian Physics. In one branch, we fixed the description of gravitation, in the other branch we fixed the description of subatomic particles. Both branches are very successful in their respective area. Now we try to merge those branches, however it turns out that the patches are not compatible, and we don't know what is the right way to combine them.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
There are actually only to possibilities. Either the things continue to work the same way they did before, or they don't. If they do, then acting on the assumption that they do is clearly the right choice. If they don't, then we have no idea what to do; whatever we do could be right or wrong. Therefore the rational behaviour is to assume that the rules continue to work.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Einstein was an Eastern European. As were most of the other scientists coming up with what Einstein brought together in Relativity. Soviet physicists were mostly Eastern European, and came up with quite a lot of advances in physics.
No he wasn't - Western Germany/Italy/Switzerland are hardly 'Eastern Europe'. Nor were the others: Poincaré (France), Planck (Germany), Bohr (Denmark), Lorenz (Netherlands), Schwarzschild (Germany), Lemaitre (Belgium)... (Not that Eastern Europeans weren't well represented in sciences, they just have very little to do with the early history of relativity.)
There are two stated assumptions in the principa, one of them is that "time is constant", 20/20 hindsight says this assumption was wrong. However, the fact that he had the insight to recognise that statement was an assumption is testement to his genius.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The universe is a giant plutonium atom. Archimedes told me so.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
You *must* presuppose that the future is relevantly like the past for empiricism to have any meaning in any context; it's pretty much an irreducible problem.
Who must what?
That is, you--who who exist and are persistent in time with a unique personal identity and live in a causal world that is persistent in time and full of a diversity of phenomena that are identifiable by you and persistent in time--must, to engage in the act of disagreeing with the self-consistency and sturdiness of the logical foundations of empiricism, must presuppose--as a condition of entering into the discourse--the very conditions that you for some reason want to say must be uniquely presupposed by empiricists.
That is, you are saying, "I completely accept these conditions without dispute and can raise no argument or question against them, but I demand that empiricists justify them, even though I don't demand the same thing of anyone else, including myself."
What you are claiming is a problem with empiricism is actually nothing more than a universal and rather uninteresting form of scepticism, and anyone who raises it seriously immediately rules themselves out of bounds by the simple fact of not having applied their own argument to their own utterance first.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"Faith is belief without proof."
Belief without evidence is called blind faith, science rests on the faith that the universe is ultimately predictable and will continue to exist even if we don't (in other words it believes that the proverbial tree in a forest does indeed make a noise).
There is no way to "prove" that the universe behaves like this but rational people take it as an indisputable fact because the evidence of ones own perceptions is very difficult to ignore particularly when they match the perceptions of other humans. So yes, science is based on faith as is all knowledge that goes further than "I think therfore I am".
"The bottom line is that you're engaging in fancy footwork trying to get to him to use the word "faith"
No he is not, the "bottom line" is that basic scientific philosophy confuses the hell out of people who subscribe to the popular but incorrect notion that science is in the bussiness of "proof". We wouldn't even be having this discussion if epistemology was taught in modern high schools.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Haven't we proven enough of our theories about this world that we know for certain things are stable to a known degree?
Not to be contrarian, but we haven't proven any of our theories at all.
First, you do not know what is occurring in every place in the universe. No number of experiments will ever prove a theory to be true because you cannot perform the test at every conceivable place in the universe. This is why Francis Bacon stated that the proper scientific method should be falsification. You only have to find one place where a theory comes up short to prove it wrong, but time constraints say that you can never prove that it is right. This is what modern science is based upon.
More importantly to his post, however, is the fact that we have no deductive reason to assume that the future will replicate the past. The GP says
Pointing out that it's worked before is just begging the question
He is referring to the problem of induction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
This is not "fancy footwork," it is a many centuries old philosophical problem brought up by David Hume. You cannot state "X happened in the past, therefor it will happen in the future" without using "X happened in the past" as your reason for believing "X will continue to happen."
Essentially, you cannot prove induction correct without being inductive. "The ice I've touched has been cold, therefor all ice is cold" is not deductive reasoning.
This is, for all intents and purposes, a genuine criticism of the scientific method. "All ice I've ever touched is cold" may be true, but "All ice is cold" is completely false. http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/03/turing-water-into-very-hot-ice-very-very-quickly.ars http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKN1621607620070516
This is the sort of thinking that science employs, however. Now, his point is not that science is not useful, nor is it that science is wrong. He is simply stating that inductive thinking is programmed into us, and that there is no good deductive logic which led us to it. You see neither causality nor time, these concepts exist inside of you -- i.e. Science is a byproduct of being an ape, not a byproduct of logic itself.
It's always interesting how quick some people without deeper knowledge of the matter are with labeling something as nonsense.
I have 3 dark PhD's, and I say it's bunk!
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
Your use of argumentum ad ignorantiam is... interesting. Would you, perhaps, claim that agnostics use argumentum ad ignorantiam when they say that we cannot prove or disprove the existence of God?
- Francis Ocoma
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Good Lord! I haven't even got relativity down pat yet! How can I get my head around this new stuff and does it explain the warp speeds of Starship Enterprise?
Or do you believe we are at the pinnacle of the field, and can achieve no more?
Depends on the funding.
I don't think anyone was arguing that logic and philosophy (faith being in the realm of philosophy) are separate.
That's not what the OP was arguing either. He was saying that you must have some form of faith to even accept your reality as stable such that you can observe with the scientific method to make your conclusions in the first place.
It's simply difficult to have a motivation to find a formula representing a natural system if you have no faith that there is even order in the first place.
That doesn't mean that it cannot be derived without faith, but simply that human nature, for the most part, would not allow it. After all, we are animals, not computers, and are preconditioned to seek for some goal with that goal in mind, not stumble blindly through logical conclusions until we find useful knowledge.
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Can you send me an example where Jesus accurately predicts known experimental results?
(I'm not sure if your stay on rejection was genuine or troll-bait, but it's caught momentum and I thought I'd provide an honest response rather than leave the question hanging.)
There's the golden rule, for starters. He didn't invent it, but he was instrumental in the widespread use of its positive statement ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" as opposed to "Do not to your neighbor what you would take ill from him"). And the result of following that rule, the rule of initiating kindness, you are statistically more likely to be treated kindly in return. Common sense and anecdotal evidence bear this out as well.
Then there's a bunch of other stuff he said, including things about the Kingdom of Heaven being here and now, forgiveness, faith, and love, that has unfortunately been so steadily downplayed and cloaked in tradition and dogma that it gets lost in the "war" to "win souls" for God. I think the historical Jesus would get along just fine with good-hearted atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Krishnas, Christians, Buddhists, and followers of most any other creed that you can imagine--and he probably had more in common with the Buddhists than we tend to think. He might not agree with all of the beliefs in those various systems, but he was more interested in disciples, people who would emulate his way of living, than converts to his religion, which didn't even exist during his lifetime. In other words, I think he'd be an excellent person to discuss philosophy and religion with, and he'd probably be the first to quell any budding flame wars.
This is of course only my understanding of Jesus. I've put a lot of thought and a decent amount of study into it, so I have a nuanced view not shared by most Christians, but I prefer to simply act in a manner I think he would approve of than to talk about it. It's more challenging and more effective to act, and I lack the agenda to convert people so dislike being perceived as having it. It is still disheartening to see his teachings rejected out-of-hand because of the centuries of stupid, un-Christlike actions of his followers, not to mention the (in my opinion) corruption of his words within the Bible. I hope to change that by trying to live up to the way I think he did. Even if most people who learn from me never find out my source, it is a good way to live.
Your brain is not a computer.
Assuming, of course, that Einstein's theories are actually incorrect. This particular theory, for example, sets of my bullshit detector because it claims that the nature of reality suddenly changes totally in large enough energies - not just some field, but space and time itself.
Frankly, yes: I don't think that Einstein's theories will ever be proven wrong. They fit too many phenomenom perfectly, predict too much, and when you really come down to it, are too fundamentally simple: General Relativity is really just taking the notion that all observers are equal and examining the logical consequences.
The only reason these "Einstein was wrong" -theories keep on popping up is because it's difficult to get the math of quantum mechanics and General Relativity to work together. I suspect that's mainly because of our insufficiently advanced mathemathics, rather than physics, and possibly also inappropriate use of Heisenberg uncertainty principle (which is why you get infinite energies input into GR in the first place). It could also be that the universe simply is chaotic in the fundamental level, and only looks stable at large scale because uncertainty becomes averaged out.
In any case, since the article doesn't bother to actually describe the theory, it's impossible to say for sure. But I'm not holding my breath.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"Science complements the gambler's fallacy with the same flaw but the opposite conclusion--that the 4 is more probable because of the sequence."
And you're arguing by analogy, another fallacy.
Speaking in those terms, and to use my example: the sun may rise tomorrow, or it may not. But thousands of years of observation, coupled with the scientific inference and deduction of natural laws, all tell us the mechanics of just what it means for the sun to "rise" tomorrow, and that it's not a simple 50/50 proposition.
Or to use your example, four straight 4's may be a statistical fluke... or one might begin to use that statistical anomaly to make some deduction as to the nature of the dice themselves (loaded). Accumulate enough observations, and you might decide that it's in your best interests to do go play dice with someone else, "probabilities" be damned.
"Even if you could assert something definitive from the repetition of events..."
If you truly believe that, then I invite you to step off the top of the nearest ten-story roof. Under your assertion, repetition and past experience will not necessarily hold true, and you'll float there and win your argument. From my perspective, however, if you do so then I'll need to make a call to 911 so they can scrape the pieces off the sidewalk.
So... unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, I suggest you go back to counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
You seem to have failed entirely to answer the question that you quoted. The "known experimental results" was in the context of a debate about physics, and yet you've just inserted a huge bunch of unrelated waffle about how nice Jesus was, and how much he worked hard to make everyone happy. I certainly would have let that pass if you had the decency to be correct, but sadly where you have wandered from theology through the social sciences to the far extremes of testable science you have erred.
When you say that the golden rule is "statistically more likely", based on "common sense" and "anecdotal evidence" you really are reaching. A simpler (and more scientific) way of analysing it would be in terms of game theory. Let's consider a world where everyone follows this advice: if I decide to act like a complete tool then nobody is going to change their behaviour towards me, so I can get all of the advantages without suffering any of the consequences. By symmetry this argument applies to anyone else. So everybody derives an advantage by switching away from the golden rule. Hence it is a weak equilibrium strongly dominated by (almost) any other strategy.
More complete work has been published on the game theoretic analysis of truth-telling/lying and altruism. So your imaginary friend not only lacks accurate predictions of known experimental results, but when you try and twist his alleged words into such proofs you run up into the problem that he was wrong. Perhaps more critical thought is required?
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A flawed, but illustrative example that should explain why this is so: imagine you have a friend who is flipping a coin... if it comes up heads, he writes an X on two sheets of paper, if it comes up tails, he writes a checkmark on both instead. Both are immediately sealed inside envelopes and mailed to opposites sides of the planet. If you open one letter and see an X, you instantly know the other has an X also. That doesn't require any communication.
Isn't that just the 'hidden variables' interpretation of quantum physics, which from my limited knowledge I think was eperimentally proven false?
From my understanding, there really is nothing in the envelope until you look inside it - that's what makes the in-sync states of the atoms, even when seperated by distances greater than c*t, 'spooky'. Communication may not be possible, but it is still very weird from our classical perspective.
BTW, if you get a correct answer about the nature of the universe, let me know.
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