Not really - saying "arbitrary" is a little much. The question is not its sphericity, but its mass in comparison to its composition. What you're curious about is whether or not the planet is held together by intermolecular forces, or gravitational forces. It's pretty clear cut, to be honest - either a planet is semispherical or it isn't semispherical. While it's true there will be planets "near" the boundary between the two, there will be brown dwarves close to stellar mass ("occasionally" completing the pp cycle), gas giants close to brown dwarf mass ("occasionally" running a few bits of fusion), etc.
There are ALWAYS "arbitrary" cutoffs when you supply a definition, even if the definition appears clear-cut. However, using "of enough mass to pull itself into a sphere" solves the problem of not having a distinction between planets and asteroids. Right now it's "big" and "little", completely arbitrary as to which one. If you use sphericity, yes, there will be an "arbitrary" cutoff, but there will be a motivation behind it - the point at which self-gravitational forces dominate over intermolecular.
The center-of-mass of the Earth-Moon system is inside the Earth. The only thing that the Earth orbits is itself, and the Sun. The Moon orbits a point inside the Earth, and the Sun.
Your definition has problems with Trojan planets - if you have two planets that orbit each other, then they could pull on each other more than the star does. Clearly they should both be planets, but they wouldn't be, by that definition.
Earth-Moon is definitely not a double planet - you can EASILY define a double-planet system as a system of "larger bodies" where the center-of-mass of the system is in empty space. The Moon orbits the Earth. The Earth does not orbit the Moon - it orbits itself (the center-of-mass of the system is inside the Earth.)
Does the Moon orbit the Sun? No. It orbits the Earth. The Moon's "path" around the Sun is a very perturbed ellipse. The Earth's path, however, is a perfect ellipse - if you consider the little patch of "Earth" that is the center-of-mass of the Earth-Moon system.
The problem that you're describing - that from a Sun-stationary point of view, the Moon doesn't look like it's orbiting the Earth - isn't a good argument for the fact that the Moon doesn't orbit the Earth. This fact is true for any object thats orbital period is a significant fraction of the solar year. There are several satellites that would have this same problem!
The easiest way to ask "what is the Moon orbiting?" is to try to describe its motion as an ellipse about something. That "something" is what it's orbiting - and it would be the center-of-mass of the Earth-Moon system, slightly perturbed by the Sun. The center-of-mass of the Earth-Moon system is inside the Earth. Hence the Moon orbits the Earth.
You cannot describe the Moon's orbit as an ellipse about the Sun.
Actually, there ARE very clear cut in-between stages.
First, you can start converting hydrogen, without fully completing the pp cycle (and blowing up into a star). These are brown dwarves, though they are currently loosely defined via mass. You generate SOME heat this way, but not enough to start a full blown thermonuclear burn.
There's a division between "star" and "planet" - we've got a name for it already, thankfully ("brown dwarf"). There's a clear division between "planet" and "other crap" as well - gravity. Below a certain mass, gravity can't pull an object into a sphere for rocky objects. Thus, asteroids are asteroids because they're aspherical. Note that this makes Ceres a planet, I believe - no big deal.
So:
"star": an object which completes the pp cycle or a later thermonuclear burn. "brown dwarf": an object which can begin, but not complete, the pp cycle. "gas giant planet": an object containing a planet with most of its volume made up of gaseous material. (Gas giant planets have solid cores... we think). "planet": a spherical or semispherical rigid body which orbits a point located inside of a star, and NOT a point located inside another non-stellar object. "trojan planets": any set of spherical or semispherical bodies which orbit a point located inside a star, and a point in empty space. "moon": any sizable body which orbits a point located inside a planet.
Scientists are as human as anyone else, and it would be foolish to believe that the process of science is immune to the flaws of the people who carry it out.
He said real scientists - real in the "ideal" sense, not real as in "real world". The ideal scientist cares only for knowledge, not whether or not he's right. Hell, being wrong is even more interesting than being right.:)
There are no ideal scientists. But there are some who are closer to ideal scientist than ideal-antiscientist. Personally, this guy falls into the "closer to an antiscientist" category.
"You'll have to excuse me if I don't buy into your overly romanticised perspective without some proof."
You don't need proof for a perspective - it's an outlook, not a hypothesis. Scientifically, if you start from an outlook, and use it to begin a hypothesis, etc., that's fine. It introduces a bias into your investigations, yes, but you need to start somewhere, and if you're willing to fairly test the hypothesis, it doesn't cause a problem. Ah, the importance of blind investigations...
As per your outlook, "in my world, i.e., the real one" - the one question I always have to ask is that you're assuming that the world is different than his statements, right? Did you ever think that the reason your world is so cynical is because you make it out to be? In your world, you assume the worst of people, which means you'll never see the really good ones. Yes, there are downsides to the alternative, which you pointed out, but there are downsides to yours as well.
People often say that it's nice to have ideals, but the real world muddles things - "there is no black and white, only shades of grey." In my opinion, people are wrong about that - the world IS black and white - it's only people believing that there are shades of grey that makes them exist.
There are some real scientists. Few. But some. And more importantly, one's individual motives aren't nearly as important as one's overall actions. "Don't try to be a great man, just be a man, and let history make its own decision." Or something like that.
Dear God no. There are contrived and difficult theories that say the speed of light changed, but no real good ones.
Moreover, the data doesn't say that the speed of light changed, either. Within ~ 2.5 sigma or so, the speed of light hasn't changed. For those attempting to reply to this with the Webb data re: alpha changing due to quasar absorption line shifts, look at the data. The worst point is about 2.5 sigma off, and the farthest data point is consistent with no change.
Right now, the safest thing to say is that the data (tentatively) supports the fact that the speed of light is constant over a good range of the Universe's age.
No - because the "we" in this case are on Earth, and it takes light-travel time to get to the Moon. The "shadow" is moving from one sensor to another faster than light, but the "shadow" doesn't have any real meaning to it.
Basically, your computer would receive 4 chunks of data in quick succession, and the time difference between the 4 chunks of data would be than the light-travel time between the sensors, but not the light travel time to Earth.. This is completely useless.
You already did. What more can I say other than "FTL travel isn't possible", and you already said that. On the other hand, no one had pointed out to you that FTL communication isn't possible, either, regardless of what some guys with a NIAC proposal think.:)
Before sending people we will send bots. And to download information from bots TCP/IP may be good choice.
... have sent bots, actually.
The whole idea of this isn't some science fiction idea of humans on Mars. The real reason is that the DSN (Deep Space Network) is overloaded. It's going to have to be replaced soon, and NASA's thinking, well, why not do it with something that's extendable?
You can't "make" the 1s one way and the "0s" the other way. If you did, then they wouldn't be entangled, would they? You'd be forcing the message upon them.
If you're talking about forcing the "1s" in one state before you even send them out, then you're encoding the message before you send it out, in which case, the message takes, well, the travel time of the package to the destination.
You can't do it. It's really too bad that the EPR experiment and Bell's Theorem get so much air time. So many people get so excited about nothing.
Careful. FTL communications are not "probably possible." Definitely not! About the best you could say is "well... um... since we haven't stretched the bounds of the theory, we should try all possibilities before discounting them."
Did you read the paper that you quoted? It basically said "well... theory says that FTL communication isn't possible using quantum correlations... but the theory could be wrong!" Yes, it's true, the theory could be wrong - and the same could be said for any number of things, but it's not where I'm going to place my money.
No one - read, no one has managed to send information faster than light. They've managed to collapse EPR states, they've managed to distort a photon's wavepacket such that a significant portion of it arrived faster than light would, but no one has managed to send information yet, because all of these experiments have the side caveat: no, we can't send information this way - but it's still interesting to see what we can do!
Unfortunately, your interpretation of Bell's Theorem is quite wrong.
Bell's Theorem says that quantum mechanics is fundamentally right. Wave functions collapse instantaneously (barring a nonlocal hidden variable theory). That would seem to imply that we can send information faster than the speed of light, but that's not true - there's no information contained within the wavefunction itself. You can't send information. No. No chance. No way. No how. Go ahead. Try. You'll never be able to.
"Things" travelling faster than the speed of light is not surprising. It is normal. Imagine two planets, say, 1 light year apart from each other. Now imagine you're thousands of light years away from them, perpendicular to the line joining the two planets. Now you shine a biiig flashlight on them, and wave it back and forth between the two planets. Now think about the shadow (or "lack of flashlight") - passing back and forth. Do the math - it's going to be going back and forth at several times the speed of light.
Is this a problem? Hell no. There's no information in that "shadow". There's no way for planet A to use that shadow to transmit information to planet B (without sending it to you first, which would... well... defeat the point).
Bell's Theorem basically says that the wavefunction is the quantum analogue of the magnetic vector potential - a quantum "shadow". Yes, it propagates faster than the speed of light. No, this isn't a problem. The EPR experiment, and others similar to it that Bell's Theorem addresses, cannot be used to send FTL messages. If they could, you'd be damned sure we'd already be doing it!
Actually, last time I checked, they had divided up DNS because they realized the problems that Earth-based DNS was having - namely, companies using things like "france.ibm.com" instead of "ibm.com.fr" - people want the TLD to stay the same.
So they split it up into a domain name, and a location identifier - that is, "mars.ibm.com, mars.sol". This is easily extendable to other galaxies, although there's no real need - parent stars will always be uniquely identified, I imagine. But "mars.ibm.com, mars.sol.milkyway" still sounds fine.
Notice how he deliberately leaves out the creation of the Sun at the same time. Kinda throws a nice big kink in the whole thing.
Not really. First, Genesis never said "God created the Sun." It said "God said, "Let there be light" ". From a scientific standpoint, this could be talking about the solar ignition, rather than the solar formation, and the Earth was (at least) starting to form before solar ignition.
There was reference to "water" before solar ignition, which I'd buy more as a translation/interpretation/vocabulary problem. It seemed to refer more to "space" than "water", which I'd buy.
"Plants," as we normally think of them, probably hit the evolutionary scene before animals. They evolved together, yet the story seems to make the two separate, distinct, and most importantly unsynchronized events
The two did not evolve together. The first life to show up on the planet was cyanobacteria, followed by slews of other bacteria. Do you know the Hebrew word for bacteria - oh wait, there isn't one.:) "Plants" seems a good substitute. Multicellular life appeared in an explosion of new life later - those are your animals forming.
(Note that I'm not suggesting that the explosion was divine created - it's obvious, once you get to multicellular life, that things are going to differentiate, respeciate, and respread fairly quickly).
The one thing that I keep reminding people is that Genesis said something ridiculous at the time - it said to people, "The Earth was created. It took time to create. There was a time when the Earth was not here." Who would believe this? This is crazy! The Earth had always been here, as far as they knew. This was the point that was trying to be gotten across, not the specific order using pathetically bad vocabulary.
Bingo! You're exactly right. The problem is that far too many people look at two things, say "They look contradictory" and ignore them. So here I am, I go and say "you know, it might behoove you to actually try to figure out if they're contradictory, or whether or not you can understand them in a different light," and about seven or eight replies show up and say "No, they're contradictory, because my evidence cannot be interpreted any way except the way that I interpret it."
If you have two explanations of an event, both with equal evidence to support it, and you can either a) interpret both in ways which make them contradictory, or b) interpret them both in ways which make them complementary, which do you think is going to be true? This is kinda like an Occam's Razor type philosophy: if a dualist interpretation can incorporate multiple other explanations, it will tend to be the correct one rather than an interpretation which excludes one or the other.
Physicists have dealt with this for years (wave-particle dualism, renormalization, etc.) which is why I started looking into this.:)
You have just made one person quite amazingly happy. I actually had never heard of Joseph Campbell - I'll have to look it up, definitely! I had been terrified all of this time that I'm the only one who had thought that the questions that religion/mythology raised were worth studying in a scientific, rigorous manner.
As per the new religion project, I don't know. Some times I feel so strongly about how bad many of these religions are messing it up that I really want to, but I just don't think that my brain is wired right for it. I'd be a contributor, though!:)
Thank you very much for writing this - you've really relieved a lot of my fears about humanity.:)
The trouble is that the elephant argument isn't a scientific explanation. It's a faith-based explanation. If you have to use the elephant argument to explain a seeming contradiction, you are following the path of faith, not the path of science.
It's a principle, not an explanation. To use it as an explanation would be a cop out. But it's a principle - the idea is that seeming contradictions can be worked out by people, if they try hard enough. If you can't work it out - if you come back to a self-contradiction, then maybe you've got a real problem. But a lot of those seeming contradictions can be wiped out by just a tiny bit of work.
Redarding the Many-Worlds Interpretation of the universe, you have re-explained it, but have failed to demonstrate why it is a more scientifically compelling explanation of free will than, say "There is no free will", or "We are brains in a vat with God telling us what to do."
It's scientifically compelling to me because I have empirical evidence. Me. I know that I choose. I know that whatever someone says, I can choose to do something, and not choose to do something else. Yes, this is a slightly biased observation, but it's just not unprovable to me. You will never convince me that you can predict everything I will do. Free will is my own ability to choose what I say, choose, think, do. It's kindof a tautology if you think about it that way. Your suggestion that we're just brains being controlled by God is interesting - you're proposing it assuming that it does contradict MWI, but I don't think it does. First, I'm not talking about my brain - my brain doesn't choose. I do. If you're talking about God controlling me - point made. But that would make me "God with a limited viewpoint" which, in some sense, would be a new distinct being, wouldn't it? So whether or not I am distinct from God or part of God is an interesting question - definitely interesting! I raised this myself, or something similar - but it doesn't preclude free will. It merely brings up an interesting variant.
I'll pass on the "in His image" thing, because first you have to define what "we" are. I know what I am - I am my Observer. Not a human, not a brain, but my Observer. So "in His image" to me, means that God (the ultimate Observer) made me an Observer. Works with me.
"For with God nothing is ever impossible, and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment."
"impossible" is a poor word in the human language. There are two kinds of "impossibilities": things which are possible but unlikely, and things which are utterly impossible. It is utterly impossible for 2+2=5, for instance, without a redefinition of what 5,2, or + means, because it's basically a definition. Same way with things in reality - can't arbitrarily change the speed of light, permittivity of free space, and permeability of free space, because they're all the same thing. That's what I was trying to explain - what humans see as "possible" is just due to a limitation in scope, in the same way that what humans see as "impossible" can easily be possible. Bread falling from the sky, out of nowhere - that's impossible, right? Except it happened - because it is possible. Manna is the edible excrement of a plant louse in the Sinai peninsula. Poor human scope.
Note that I've already addressed the fact that Christian doctrine stating that nothing is impossible for God is poorly worded - God is outside of time - all of the Universe is already there. All the possibilities, everything - God can't change it because, well, change implies time, doesn't it? In that sense God is impotent, and everything is impossible for God. But God created the Universe, so in that sense he's omnipotent, and nothing is impossible for God, because he's already done everything.
It's kinda like Deep Thought in Hitchhiker's Guide - 42's a perfectly valid answer, and Deep Thought wasn't responsible for the fact that the people who asked the question didn't understand it. Same way here.
Nope. Because there's more to the Universe than the first cause.
Take you, for example. What are you? Precisely - not the "meat" you, the "you" you. What are you? You're an Observer - a quantum observer. You collapse wavefunctions, make choices, and move forward through time due to time's opposite metric signature. But what makes you make those choices? Some say your history, your upbringing, your genes determine all of that. I say bull, because I know that whatever choice I make, I could make another one. You can argue that with me, but that, along with "I exist" is something that I know - I make decisions.
So could God influence the Universe? Not what happens, no - because God is outside of time. Everything that can happen, could happen, will happen, He already knows. But what He can do is point us down the right path. Ever wonder why some things just "feel" right? In my mind, that's God. Instinct. That's God.
So what about all the stories? Eh. All of them can be explained. Paul was a temporal lobe epileptic - but what exactly generates the visions that a TLE seizure causes? Ah. And that's the kicker.
"God did it" is not anthropomorphizing if we try to elucidate exactly what God is. Then it's a statement - especially if we don't necessarily attribute human qualities to God. Saying you can't do that is not trying. I think you can do it. I think that's what religion has been trying to do for years.
You might not know. That's fine. But you wonder, don't you? And so you must have ideas. Thoughts. Questions. If you don't, I'm sorry for you, as that would be a very sad life.
Even if you end up not believing in God, it's worth thinking and questioning about it to see if there's any basis for your disbelief other than personal feelings. I know for me that there is no basis for disbelief, as my beliefs are self-consistent with the Universe as a whole. I don't have another option that works for me. If someone wants to try to argue a different method for the Universe being created, go right ahead. (Quote Stephen Hawking if you want - it's the beauty of being a physicist - I can even argue against that.:) )
I apologize for being overly emotional here. A few things are hitting point which I am incredibly angry that most people ignore.
Well two issues here... One is that many times these dieties exhibit traits and personalities that conflict with each other.
You mean like being human and being not human? That seems to be pretty conflicting, yet Christianity resolved it pretty well. Don't limit God by pathetic human understanding.
Hmm, well Islam says that in its marketing materials but there is an awful lot of conquest, killing of the infidels, etc. in the Quaran. So it is a god of Love or War?
Christians killed a ton in the Crusades, and justified it. If we had written a book on Christian actions, it'd look a lot like the Koran. There's a ton of killing in the Old Testament - Sodom, for instance. This is poor logic - you're using examples of people misusing religion to disprove it. Poor implementation doesn't disprove the idea.
Geez I don't know where to start. Get a book on world religions and then try to tell me they all say the same thing. They don't. Not even close.
YES, they do! They all say "Be nice to each other!" How is that hard to understand? You're seeing differences where none should exist.
Also a child isn't a good example, what does a child know? They know they are sitting in church being bored and would like to go get an icecream cone.
Children know everything. They don't have the prejudices, the biases, the hatreds and the fears that adults have. Children are far smarter than any adult. Look how fast they learn.
And what do children know? How to get into Heaven, by Christianity's own admission.
"He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven."
Matthew 18. Christ knew - and I listened. You, and many other people who disparage children, apparently did not.
Matthew 19.
"Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."
Do you think they are listening to or understanding the sermon or anything else? If they are then they must be smart because I certainly wasn't when I was young.
Yes. They are extremely smart - and you were too. You're not smart now, because a) your brain is no longer expanding as fast as it was then, and b) you've forgotten what it was like to be a child. I only wish I could be as smart as I was when I was a kid!
Kids don't understand prejudice, religious differences, hatred, or any of that stuff. Not because they're stupid. They're not - they pick up thousands of years of human learning in extremely short timespans! No - they don't understand these things because there's nothing to understand. Those things are stupid.
I don't understand this. What rules says salvation and damnation cannot be part of religion? If a religion says "God created you. He'll decide how you spend eternity". That seems to fit religion very well.
You're correct - it does. But it's also not what religions say. For instance, they might say "Say you believe in Christ, or you'll be damned." That's not God deciding - that's humans deciding that God cares what you say!
Christians claiming that only Christians will be saved are usurping God's right to judge, and that's damned wrong.
Christianity does exclude other religions. Check the Bible. Jesus says that he is the light and the truth and the only way to the father is through him. That's kindof specific don't you think?
No. It's not. It's only specific if you think that Christ isn't present in many other religions as well. It's only specific if you read the letter of the text and not the meaning. "I am the light and the truth" - OK. So if the light and the truth is elsewhere as well, isn't Christ there as well? Transitive property of equality - if a=b, then b=a.
Christianity specifically teaches that there is an afterlife and a judgement and you get one chance at this life. It's scattered throughout the whole Bible, especially the new testament. Revelation has some good parts about people sleeping (dead) being raised and the like. Never anything about reincarnation, etc.
Christ also said forgive your neighbor seven times seventy times. Do you really think he meant 490 times? After 490 times, damn, you're screwed, and then you can pelt him with stones. Come on. Stop treating certain parts of the Bible as literal and others as figurative. It's all figurative, because we, as humans, don't have the capability to see otherwise.
I'll dissect this for you. "You get one chance at this life" - We're not talking about retrying your current life. That statement is there to stress that you cannot change what you choose - that your choices are permanent, they define this life for you. What reincarnation COULD mean is taking different choices along a totally different path. In a sense, a totally different "you".
"there is an afterlife" - What afterlife? What happens there? What do you do? What can you do? What can't you do? What's the daily schedule?
Yes, but what if the elephant says it has a trunk and two big ears, then it doesn't matter what the blind men say.
God's never been that specific - he can't be. We wouldn't understand. If you've read the Belgariad/Malloreon by David Eddings, you'll know kindof what I'm talking about - there, the two "Godlike" entities needed to talk through madmen, and the corresponding prophecies were garbled. Whisper down the line and all.
To God, all of mankind must be like madmen - and so even when things appear to be completely obvious, it's amazing how twisted humans can distort them. Even Christ - we know that the Gospels were written down long after Christ's time (because the religion was in hiding before then) so whisper-down-the-line had a long time to take effect. You have to look at the Bible and try to figure out exactly what was meant.
The worst thing that's happened to Christianity was the Catholic Church saying the Bible was immutable, when they themselves changed it over time, retranslated it, reinterpreted it. The Bible was written by men, and one cannot blindly read through it without working to try to see the hand of God behind it.
That's completely not true. The power consumption of the CPU is everything - the fans themselves draw the same amount of power between an AMD setup and a P4 setup (they better - in many cases they are the same fan - look around. Many HSFs are usable in socket 478 and socket A). While it's true that it's more difficult to cool an Athlon core (the thermal dissipation - W/mm^2 - is higher since the core is smaller) that just translates into a slightly higher ambient temperature or a slightly higher core temperature, neither of which consumes power. Athlons might take a bit more effort to cool, but that effort is physical (larger heatsink) rather than electrical.
The only other way an AMD setup should draw more power is due to a) lack of adequate standby circuitry (see other posts on system disconnects with Athlons: it is possible, and is probably what's drawing all the power) or b) overly high motherboard chipset power consumption. I don't know about B - I'd have to go look up the Northbridge specs - but I highly highly doubt it.
AMD and P4 systems draw the same amount of power under heavy load. "Cooling difficulty" doesn't translate into more power consumption.
The AMD XP/2000+ you're quoting is a Palomino part (0.18 micron process) and the P4 is a 0.13 micron part. Of course there's going to be a ton of difference.
You should be comparing the 2.53 GHz part with the XP/2200+-2600+, which are also on a 0.13 micron core, or at least looking up the data for a 0.13 micron part. The XP/2000+ on a 0.13 micron core draws 54.7W, the XP/2200+ draws 61.7W. I'm not sure what the 2400+ or 2600+ draw, as I don't have that document. You can check me using the datasheet for the Athlon XP model 8 core off of AMD's website. I'm using typical draws here, rather than maximum.
Check your sources next time - they draw basically the same amount of power.
OK, more later, because I want to go home now.:) but if you're wondering really about whether or not there's a consistent belief structure here, no, there isn't. There's an inconsistent belief structure (like all the others) that I'm working to make consistent. Go to my home page and check out "views". That's a good place to start.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really - saying "arbitrary" is a little much. The question is not its sphericity, but its mass in comparison to its composition. What you're curious about is whether or not the planet is held together by intermolecular forces, or gravitational forces. It's pretty clear cut, to be honest - either a planet is semispherical or it isn't semispherical. While it's true there will be planets "near" the boundary between the two, there will be brown dwarves close to stellar mass ("occasionally" completing the pp cycle), gas giants close to brown dwarf mass ("occasionally" running a few bits of fusion), etc.
There are ALWAYS "arbitrary" cutoffs when you supply a definition, even if the definition appears clear-cut. However, using "of enough mass to pull itself into a sphere" solves the problem of not having a distinction between planets and asteroids. Right now it's "big" and "little", completely arbitrary as to which one. If you use sphericity, yes, there will be an "arbitrary" cutoff, but there will be a motivation behind it - the point at which self-gravitational forces dominate over intermolecular.
The center-of-mass of the Earth-Moon system is inside the Earth. The only thing that the Earth orbits is itself, and the Sun. The Moon orbits a point inside the Earth, and the Sun.
Your definition has problems with Trojan planets - if you have two planets that orbit each other, then they could pull on each other more than the star does. Clearly they should both be planets, but they wouldn't be, by that definition.
Earth-Moon is definitely not a double planet - you can EASILY define a double-planet system as a system of "larger bodies" where the center-of-mass of the system is in empty space. The Moon orbits the Earth. The Earth does not orbit the Moon - it orbits itself (the center-of-mass of the system is inside the Earth.)
Does the Moon orbit the Sun? No. It orbits the Earth. The Moon's "path" around the Sun is a very perturbed ellipse. The Earth's path, however, is a perfect ellipse - if you consider the little patch of "Earth" that is the center-of-mass of the Earth-Moon system.
The problem that you're describing - that from a Sun-stationary point of view, the Moon doesn't look like it's orbiting the Earth - isn't a good argument for the fact that the Moon doesn't orbit the Earth. This fact is true for any object thats orbital period is a significant fraction of the solar year. There are several satellites that would have this same problem!
The easiest way to ask "what is the Moon orbiting?" is to try to describe its motion as an ellipse about something. That "something" is what it's orbiting - and it would be the center-of-mass of the Earth-Moon system, slightly perturbed by the Sun. The center-of-mass of the Earth-Moon system is inside the Earth. Hence the Moon orbits the Earth.
You cannot describe the Moon's orbit as an ellipse about the Sun.
Actually, there ARE very clear cut in-between stages.
First, you can start converting hydrogen, without fully completing the pp cycle (and blowing up into a star). These are brown dwarves, though they are currently loosely defined via mass. You generate SOME heat this way, but not enough to start a full blown thermonuclear burn.
There's a division between "star" and "planet" - we've got a name for it already, thankfully ("brown dwarf"). There's a clear division between "planet" and "other crap" as well - gravity. Below a certain mass, gravity can't pull an object into a sphere for rocky objects. Thus, asteroids are asteroids because they're aspherical. Note that this makes Ceres a planet, I believe - no big deal.
So:
"star": an object which completes the pp cycle or a later thermonuclear burn.
"brown dwarf": an object which can begin, but not complete, the pp cycle.
"gas giant planet": an object containing a planet with most of its volume made up of gaseous material. (Gas giant planets have solid cores... we think).
"planet": a spherical or semispherical rigid body which orbits a point located inside of a star, and NOT a point located inside another non-stellar object.
"trojan planets": any set of spherical or semispherical bodies which orbit a point located inside a star, and a point in empty space.
"moon": any sizable body which orbits a point located inside a planet.
That's a good set of working definitions.
Scientists are as human as anyone else, and it would be foolish to believe that the process of science is immune to the flaws of the people who carry it out.
:)
He said real scientists - real in the "ideal" sense, not real as in "real world". The ideal scientist cares only for knowledge, not whether or not he's right. Hell, being wrong is even more interesting than being right.
There are no ideal scientists. But there are some who are closer to ideal scientist than ideal-antiscientist. Personally, this guy falls into the "closer to an antiscientist" category.
"You'll have to excuse me if I don't buy into your overly romanticised perspective without some proof."
You don't need proof for a perspective - it's an outlook, not a hypothesis. Scientifically, if you start from an outlook, and use it to begin a hypothesis, etc., that's fine. It introduces a bias into your investigations, yes, but you need to start somewhere, and if you're willing to fairly test the hypothesis, it doesn't cause a problem. Ah, the importance of blind investigations...
As per your outlook, "in my world, i.e., the real one" - the one question I always have to ask is that you're assuming that the world is different than his statements, right? Did you ever think that the reason your world is so cynical is because you make it out to be? In your world, you assume the worst of people, which means you'll never see the really good ones. Yes, there are downsides to the alternative, which you pointed out, but there are downsides to yours as well.
People often say that it's nice to have ideals, but the real world muddles things - "there is no black and white, only shades of grey." In my opinion, people are wrong about that - the world IS black and white - it's only people believing that there are shades of grey that makes them exist.
There are some real scientists. Few. But some. And more importantly, one's individual motives aren't nearly as important as one's overall actions. "Don't try to be a great man, just be a man, and let history make its own decision." Or something like that.
Dear God no. There are contrived and difficult theories that say the speed of light changed, but no real good ones.
Moreover, the data doesn't say that the speed of light changed, either. Within ~ 2.5 sigma or so, the speed of light hasn't changed. For those attempting to reply to this with the Webb data re: alpha changing due to quasar absorption line shifts, look at the data. The worst point is about 2.5 sigma off, and the farthest data point is consistent with no change.
Right now, the safest thing to say is that the data (tentatively) supports the fact that the speed of light is constant over a good range of the Universe's age.
No - because the "we" in this case are on Earth, and it takes light-travel time to get to the Moon. The "shadow" is moving from one sensor to another faster than light, but the "shadow" doesn't have any real meaning to it.
Basically, your computer would receive 4 chunks of data in quick succession, and the time difference between the 4 chunks of data would be than the light-travel time between the sensors, but not the light travel time to Earth.. This is completely useless.
You already did. What more can I say other than "FTL travel isn't possible", and you already said that. On the other hand, no one had pointed out to you that FTL communication isn't possible, either, regardless of what some guys with a NIAC proposal think. :)
The whole idea of this isn't some science fiction idea of humans on Mars. The real reason is that the DSN (Deep Space Network) is overloaded. It's going to have to be replaced soon, and NASA's thinking, well, why not do it with something that's extendable?
You can't "make" the 1s one way and the "0s" the other way. If you did, then they wouldn't be entangled, would they? You'd be forcing the message upon them.
If you're talking about forcing the "1s" in one state before you even send them out, then you're encoding the message before you send it out, in which case, the message takes, well, the travel time of the package to the destination.
You can't do it. It's really too bad that the EPR experiment and Bell's Theorem get so much air time. So many people get so excited about nothing.
Careful. FTL communications are not "probably possible." Definitely not! About the best you could say is "well... um... since we haven't stretched the bounds of the theory, we should try all possibilities before discounting them."
Did you read the paper that you quoted? It basically said "well... theory says that FTL communication isn't possible using quantum correlations... but the theory could be wrong!" Yes, it's true, the theory could be wrong - and the same could be said for any number of things, but it's not where I'm going to place my money.
No one - read, no one has managed to send information faster than light. They've managed to collapse EPR states, they've managed to distort a photon's wavepacket such that a significant portion of it arrived faster than light would, but no one has managed to send information yet, because all of these experiments have the side caveat: no, we can't send information this way - but it's still interesting to see what we can do!
Unfortunately, your interpretation of Bell's Theorem is quite wrong.
Bell's Theorem says that quantum mechanics is fundamentally right. Wave functions collapse instantaneously (barring a nonlocal hidden variable theory). That would seem to imply that we can send information faster than the speed of light, but that's not true - there's no information contained within the wavefunction itself. You can't send information. No. No chance. No way. No how. Go ahead. Try. You'll never be able to.
"Things" travelling faster than the speed of light is not surprising. It is normal. Imagine two planets, say, 1 light year apart from each other. Now imagine you're thousands of light years away from them, perpendicular to the line joining the two planets. Now you shine a biiig flashlight on them, and wave it back and forth between the two planets. Now think about the shadow (or "lack of flashlight") - passing back and forth. Do the math - it's going to be going back and forth at several times the speed of light.
Is this a problem? Hell no. There's no information in that "shadow". There's no way for planet A to use that shadow to transmit information to planet B (without sending it to you first, which would... well... defeat the point).
Bell's Theorem basically says that the wavefunction is the quantum analogue of the magnetic vector potential - a quantum "shadow". Yes, it propagates faster than the speed of light. No, this isn't a problem. The EPR experiment, and others similar to it that Bell's Theorem addresses, cannot be used to send FTL messages. If they could, you'd be damned sure we'd already be doing it!
Actually, last time I checked, they had divided up DNS because they realized the problems that Earth-based DNS was having - namely, companies using things like "france.ibm.com" instead of "ibm.com.fr" - people want the TLD to stay the same.
So they split it up into a domain name, and a location identifier - that is, "mars.ibm.com, mars.sol". This is easily extendable to other galaxies, although there's no real need - parent stars will always be uniquely identified, I imagine. But "mars.ibm.com, mars.sol.milkyway" still sounds fine.
Notice how he deliberately leaves out the creation of the Sun at the same time. Kinda throws a nice big kink in the whole thing.
:) "Plants" seems a good substitute. Multicellular life appeared in an explosion of new life later - those are your animals forming.
Not really. First, Genesis never said "God created the Sun." It said "God said, "Let there be light" ". From a scientific standpoint, this could be talking about the solar ignition, rather than the solar formation, and the Earth was (at least) starting to form before solar ignition.
There was reference to "water" before solar ignition, which I'd buy more as a translation/interpretation/vocabulary problem. It seemed to refer more to "space" than "water", which I'd buy.
"Plants," as we normally think of them, probably hit the evolutionary scene before animals. They evolved together, yet the story seems to make the two separate, distinct, and most importantly unsynchronized events
The two did not evolve together. The first life to show up on the planet was cyanobacteria, followed by slews of other bacteria. Do you know the Hebrew word for bacteria - oh wait, there isn't one.
(Note that I'm not suggesting that the explosion was divine created - it's obvious, once you get to multicellular life, that things are going to differentiate, respeciate, and respread fairly quickly).
The one thing that I keep reminding people is that Genesis said something ridiculous at the time - it said to people, "The Earth was created. It took time to create. There was a time when the Earth was not here." Who would believe this? This is crazy! The Earth had always been here, as far as they knew. This was the point that was trying to be gotten across, not the specific order using pathetically bad vocabulary.
Bingo! You're exactly right. The problem is that far too many people look at two things, say "They look contradictory" and ignore them. So here I am, I go and say "you know, it might behoove you to actually try to figure out if they're contradictory, or whether or not you can understand them in a different light," and about seven or eight replies show up and say "No, they're contradictory, because my evidence cannot be interpreted any way except the way that I interpret it."
:)
If you have two explanations of an event, both with equal evidence to support it, and you can either a) interpret both in ways which make them contradictory, or b) interpret them both in ways which make them complementary, which do you think is going to be true? This is kinda like an Occam's Razor type philosophy: if a dualist interpretation can incorporate multiple other explanations, it will tend to be the correct one rather than an interpretation which excludes one or the other.
Physicists have dealt with this for years (wave-particle dualism, renormalization, etc.) which is why I started looking into this.
You have just made one person quite amazingly happy. I actually had never heard of Joseph Campbell - I'll have to look it up, definitely! I had been terrified all of this time that I'm the only one who had thought that the questions that religion/mythology raised were worth studying in a scientific, rigorous manner.
:)
:)
As per the new religion project, I don't know. Some times I feel so strongly about how bad many of these religions are messing it up that I really want to, but I just don't think that my brain is wired right for it. I'd be a contributor, though!
Thank you very much for writing this - you've really relieved a lot of my fears about humanity.
The trouble is that the elephant argument isn't a scientific explanation. It's a faith-based explanation. If you have to use the elephant argument to explain a seeming contradiction, you are following the path of faith, not the path of science.
It's a principle, not an explanation. To use it as an explanation would be a cop out. But it's a principle - the idea is that seeming contradictions can be worked out by people, if they try hard enough. If you can't work it out - if you come back to a self-contradiction, then maybe you've got a real problem. But a lot of those seeming contradictions can be wiped out by just a tiny bit of work.
Redarding the Many-Worlds Interpretation of the universe, you have re-explained it, but have failed to demonstrate why it is a more scientifically compelling explanation of free will than, say "There is no free will", or "We are brains in a vat with God telling us what to do."
It's scientifically compelling to me because I have empirical evidence. Me. I know that I choose. I know that whatever someone says, I can choose to do something, and not choose to do something else. Yes, this is a slightly biased observation, but it's just not unprovable to me. You will never convince me that you can predict everything I will do. Free will is my own ability to choose what I say, choose, think, do. It's kindof a tautology if you think about it that way. Your suggestion that we're just brains being controlled by God is interesting - you're proposing it assuming that it does contradict MWI, but I don't think it does. First, I'm not talking about my brain - my brain doesn't choose. I do. If you're talking about God controlling me - point made. But that would make me "God with a limited viewpoint" which, in some sense, would be a new distinct being, wouldn't it? So whether or not I am distinct from God or part of God is an interesting question - definitely interesting! I raised this myself, or something similar - but it doesn't preclude free will. It merely brings up an interesting variant.
I'll pass on the "in His image" thing, because first you have to define what "we" are. I know what I am - I am my Observer. Not a human, not a brain, but my Observer. So "in His image" to me, means that God (the ultimate Observer) made me an Observer. Works with me.
"For with God nothing is ever impossible, and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment."
"impossible" is a poor word in the human language. There are two kinds of "impossibilities": things which are possible but unlikely, and things which are utterly impossible. It is utterly impossible for 2+2=5, for instance, without a redefinition of what 5,2, or + means, because it's basically a definition. Same way with things in reality - can't arbitrarily change the speed of light, permittivity of free space, and permeability of free space, because they're all the same thing. That's what I was trying to explain - what humans see as "possible" is just due to a limitation in scope, in the same way that what humans see as "impossible" can easily be possible. Bread falling from the sky, out of nowhere - that's impossible, right? Except it happened - because it is possible. Manna is the edible excrement of a plant louse in the Sinai peninsula. Poor human scope.
Note that I've already addressed the fact that Christian doctrine stating that nothing is impossible for God is poorly worded - God is outside of time - all of the Universe is already there. All the possibilities, everything - God can't change it because, well, change implies time, doesn't it? In that sense God is impotent, and everything is impossible for God. But God created the Universe, so in that sense he's omnipotent, and nothing is impossible for God, because he's already done everything.
It's kinda like Deep Thought in Hitchhiker's Guide - 42's a perfectly valid answer, and Deep Thought wasn't responsible for the fact that the people who asked the question didn't understand it. Same way here.
Nope. Because there's more to the Universe than the first cause.
Take you, for example. What are you? Precisely - not the "meat" you, the "you" you. What are you? You're an Observer - a quantum observer. You collapse wavefunctions, make choices, and move forward through time due to time's opposite metric signature. But what makes you make those choices? Some say your history, your upbringing, your genes determine all of that. I say bull, because I know that whatever choice I make, I could make another one. You can argue that with me, but that, along with "I exist" is something that I know - I make decisions.
So could God influence the Universe? Not what happens, no - because God is outside of time. Everything that can happen, could happen, will happen, He already knows. But what He can do is point us down the right path. Ever wonder why some things just "feel" right? In my mind, that's God. Instinct. That's God.
So what about all the stories? Eh. All of them can be explained. Paul was a temporal lobe epileptic - but what exactly generates the visions that a TLE seizure causes? Ah. And that's the kicker.
God doesn't "do" anything. He guides.
"God did it" is not anthropomorphizing if we try to elucidate exactly what God is. Then it's a statement - especially if we don't necessarily attribute human qualities to God. Saying you can't do that is not trying. I think you can do it. I think that's what religion has been trying to do for years.
:) )
You might not know. That's fine. But you wonder, don't you? And so you must have ideas. Thoughts. Questions. If you don't, I'm sorry for you, as that would be a very sad life.
Even if you end up not believing in God, it's worth thinking and questioning about it to see if there's any basis for your disbelief other than personal feelings. I know for me that there is no basis for disbelief, as my beliefs are self-consistent with the Universe as a whole. I don't have another option that works for me. If someone wants to try to argue a different method for the Universe being created, go right ahead. (Quote Stephen Hawking if you want - it's the beauty of being a physicist - I can even argue against that.
I apologize for being overly emotional here. A few things are hitting point which I am incredibly angry that most people ignore.
Well two issues here... One is that many times these dieties exhibit traits and personalities that conflict with each other.
You mean like being human and being not human? That seems to be pretty conflicting, yet Christianity resolved it pretty well. Don't limit God by pathetic human understanding.
Hmm, well Islam says that in its marketing materials but there is an awful lot of conquest, killing of the infidels, etc. in the Quaran. So it is a god of Love or War?
Christians killed a ton in the Crusades, and justified it. If we had written a book on Christian actions, it'd look a lot like the Koran. There's a ton of killing in the Old Testament - Sodom, for instance. This is poor logic - you're using examples of people misusing religion to disprove it. Poor implementation doesn't disprove the idea.
Geez I don't know where to start. Get a book on world religions and then try to tell me they all say the same thing. They don't. Not even close.
YES, they do! They all say "Be nice to each other!" How is that hard to understand? You're seeing differences where none should exist.
Also a child isn't a good example, what does a child know? They know they are sitting in church being bored and would like to go get an icecream cone.
Children know everything. They don't have the prejudices, the biases, the hatreds and the fears that adults have. Children are far smarter than any adult. Look how fast they learn.
And what do children know? How to get into Heaven, by Christianity's own admission.
"He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven."
Matthew 18. Christ knew - and I listened. You, and many other people who disparage children, apparently did not.
Matthew 19.
"Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."
Do you think they are listening to or understanding the sermon or anything else? If they are then they must be smart because I certainly wasn't when I was young.
Yes. They are extremely smart - and you were too. You're not smart now, because a) your brain is no longer expanding as fast as it was then, and b) you've forgotten what it was like to be a child. I only wish I could be as smart as I was when I was a kid!
Kids don't understand prejudice, religious differences, hatred, or any of that stuff. Not because they're stupid. They're not - they pick up thousands of years of human learning in extremely short timespans! No - they don't understand these things because there's nothing to understand. Those things are stupid.
I don't understand this. What rules says salvation and damnation cannot be part of religion? If a religion says "God created you. He'll decide how you spend eternity". That seems to fit religion very well.
You're correct - it does. But it's also not what religions say. For instance, they might say "Say you believe in Christ, or you'll be damned." That's not God deciding - that's humans deciding that God cares what you say!
Christians claiming that only Christians will be saved are usurping God's right to judge, and that's damned wrong.
Christianity does exclude other religions. Check the Bible. Jesus says that he is the light and the truth and the only way to the father is through him. That's kindof specific don't you think?
No. It's not. It's only specific if you think that Christ isn't present in many other religions as well. It's only specific if you read the letter of the text and not the meaning. "I am the light and the truth" - OK. So if the light and the truth is elsewhere as well, isn't Christ there as well? Transitive property of equality - if a=b, then b=a.
Christianity specifically teaches that there is an afterlife and a judgement and you get one chance at this life. It's scattered throughout the whole Bible, especially the new testament. Revelation has some good parts about people sleeping (dead) being raised and the like. Never anything about reincarnation, etc.
Christ also said forgive your neighbor seven times seventy times. Do you really think he meant 490 times? After 490 times, damn, you're screwed, and then you can pelt him with stones. Come on. Stop treating certain parts of the Bible as literal and others as figurative. It's all figurative, because we, as humans, don't have the capability to see otherwise.
I'll dissect this for you. "You get one chance at this life" - We're not talking about retrying your current life. That statement is there to stress that you cannot change what you choose - that your choices are permanent, they define this life for you. What reincarnation COULD mean is taking different choices along a totally different path. In a sense, a totally different "you".
"there is an afterlife" - What afterlife? What happens there? What do you do? What can you do? What can't you do? What's the daily schedule?
Yes, but what if the elephant says it has a trunk and two big ears, then it doesn't matter what the blind men say.
God's never been that specific - he can't be. We wouldn't understand. If you've read the Belgariad/Malloreon by David Eddings, you'll know kindof what I'm talking about - there, the two "Godlike" entities needed to talk through madmen, and the corresponding prophecies were garbled. Whisper down the line and all.
To God, all of mankind must be like madmen - and so even when things appear to be completely obvious, it's amazing how twisted humans can distort them. Even Christ - we know that the Gospels were written down long after Christ's time (because the religion was in hiding before then) so whisper-down-the-line had a long time to take effect. You have to look at the Bible and try to figure out exactly what was meant.
The worst thing that's happened to Christianity was the Catholic Church saying the Bible was immutable, when they themselves changed it over time, retranslated it, reinterpreted it. The Bible was written by men, and one cannot blindly read through it without working to try to see the hand of God behind it.
That's completely not true. The power consumption of the CPU is everything - the fans themselves draw the same amount of power between an AMD setup and a P4 setup (they better - in many cases they are the same fan - look around. Many HSFs are usable in socket 478 and socket A). While it's true that it's more difficult to cool an Athlon core (the thermal dissipation - W/mm^2 - is higher since the core is smaller) that just translates into a slightly higher ambient temperature or a slightly higher core temperature, neither of which consumes power. Athlons might take a bit more effort to cool, but that effort is physical (larger heatsink) rather than electrical.
The only other way an AMD setup should draw more power is due to a) lack of adequate standby circuitry (see other posts on system disconnects with Athlons: it is possible, and is probably what's drawing all the power) or b) overly high motherboard chipset power consumption. I don't know about B - I'd have to go look up the Northbridge specs - but I highly highly doubt it.
AMD and P4 systems draw the same amount of power under heavy load. "Cooling difficulty" doesn't translate into more power consumption.
The AMD XP/2000+ you're quoting is a Palomino part (0.18 micron process) and the P4 is a 0.13 micron part. Of course there's going to be a ton of difference.
You should be comparing the 2.53 GHz part with the XP/2200+-2600+, which are also on a 0.13 micron core, or at least looking up the data for a 0.13 micron part. The XP/2000+ on a 0.13 micron core draws 54.7W, the XP/2200+ draws 61.7W. I'm not sure what the 2400+ or 2600+ draw, as I don't have that document. You can check me using the datasheet for the Athlon XP model 8 core off of AMD's website. I'm using typical draws here, rather than maximum.
Check your sources next time - they draw basically the same amount of power.
OK, more later, because I want to go home now. :) but if you're wondering really about whether or not there's a consistent belief structure here, no, there isn't. There's an inconsistent belief structure (like all the others) that I'm working to make consistent. Go to my home page and check out "views". That's a good place to start.