You should also notice that many religions, especially Christianity, fundamentally exclude the reality of other religions. Christianity is totally atheistic regarding the gods of other religions -- except regarding its own god. It even goes as far as to deny the worship of other gods; why would the supreme God deny the existense of his other representations and actually threathen to send people to eternal damnation or death if they worship them?
What? Where do you get this conclusion from? Christianity certainly doesn't exclude other religions. What if their God is the same thing? As per what God would do, I wouldn't presume to question God. Perhaps those statements should be looked at in context, rather than in a broad sweeping generalization - maybe then they'll make more sense. "Love God above all others." "Love your neighbor as yourself." Done. If a person does that, then they're Christian in my book.
Also other religious doctrines are totally contradictory between religions (you can consider each person's religious views a different religion in this sense). In most forms of Christianity, repetitive rebirth is simply impossible. In most forms of Hinduism, the Christian "eternal life" might be considered an abhorrence (they seek towards eternal death, not eternal life).
There's nothing that says that repetetive rebirth isn't possible. That could be what heaven is. It's not like anyone knows. Ditto with the "eternal life/eternal death" thing. You don't know there's a difference, and I can easily believe that it's the same thing.
One says that it has a trunk and big ears and another that it has a muzzle and small pointy and hairy ears.
And no one ever thought it has two sets of ears and two noses? Remember that the blind men don't know what an elephant looks like. Just like we don't know what God is. I personally do not presume to place any limitations.
If there's more than one God, then the collection of them could be called "God". Same thing. Semantics. It's a little difficult when we retain old ideas of what "god" is, when you can clearly extend it to something singular (see later).
As per the statement in the Bible, what does "god" mean? Do you know? Do you know the real etymology of the term, when it was first applied? Are you sure it's distinct from "idol" (which is what many translations use)? It doesn't necessarily imply a multitude of gods. It more logically implies a multitude of things which could be worshipped, and above those all, worship God. Doesn't every religion say that? Isn't it reasonable to suppose then that they're all the same thing?
As per "what niche has but a single individual in it?" - your idea of "individual" and what God is may be two distinct things. God is that which created the Universe. All I'm presupposing is that it is conscious. Nothing more. Make arguments for plurality later.
Well first off, Hindus don't believe in God but rather thousands and a Wiccan worships nature not any God..
I don't see any reason why all of those deities couldn't be the same thing, seen by humans and mangled into (mostly) unrecognizable forms. The fact that they appear distinct is exactly what the parable is trying to address.
Indeed, how can we ever know God?
He gave us a wealth of experimental data. We call it the Universe.
Oh He can, and He does. But there is a problem with your opinion. Because you see not every religion says the same thing... Now why would God contradict himself so much?
How do you know that every religion says different things? They all fundamentally say "Be nice to each other". And every one stresses some spirituality. Isn't that what Christ said is important? You're quibbling over details.
Want a test? Sure. Take a child. Take him to as many religious ceremonies as you can think of. Now ask him or her what the philosophical difference is between them. I'd bet that he won't be able to tell you. (I know. I was one of those kids.) This isn't because he's stupid, or he doesn't understand - it's because you've become stupid about this kinda thing, and you don't understand that they're all saying the same thing.
And as for God contradicting himself, He's not ! That's what the elephant story explains! What you see as contradictions are merely different people seeing God in different ways, and then mangling and destroying the religion due to human greed, envy, and suffering. Every religion is like that - Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Muslim, Judaism, Wiccan, all of them. But all of them have the same kernel of truth in them.
Well thats up to God. But you're only talking about those people who never heard about Christianity. I'd say disqualifies quite a number of people from your argument. And I am sure God will deal appropriately with those who could not make the decision on their own (babies, mentally ill, etc.)
I think you're insane to believe that God has a list of "by-laws". What about those who were slaughtered during the Crusades? They heard of Christianity - it was at the end of a sword. To believe that up in Heaven, God's got a list of "exceptions" - that's crazy. If that were true, every lawyer would go to heaven just so they could work for God.
No - if you believe in a salvation and damnation, it better be independent of religion if it's universal. Otherwise God is nothing more than another human being. It has to be some basic simple fact about human existence.
In fact, the two explanations are exactly identical, right? They produce the exact same situation (the Universe was created: whether it happened on its own, or because it was created by something) and have no differences between the two. In fact, the two questions are irrelevant for effects - if you presuppose an action, then whether or not it was "done" by something or it just happened, the effects will still be the same, and the two situations will be indistinguishable.
Given that, one would suppose that Occam's Razor would hold true, and that the simpler explanation would hold true. The one thing that people consistently miss is that the simpler explanation between "it just happened" and "God did it" is currently (stress currently) "God did it". The problem is that "it just happened" is not an explanation. It is a statement lacking explanation - a non-explanation, in fact. It in fact implies that it was caused by something, because "happen" implies a causal relationship. So "it just happened" falls flat on its face.
If you want to say that the Universe always was there, well, there's experimental evidence against that.
If you want to say that the Universe self-sprang into existence... there really isn't any good evidence for that, either, and it's got as many variables (if not more) as the deity hypothesis. Moreover, "self-sprang" from what perspective? From our perspective it would, but from outside the Universe, it may not.
Religion isn't fiction. It's thousands of years of people trying to understand the bizarre fact of the fact that you are here. That's your evidence - you are here. We don't see aliens, and we don't see any evidence of them having been here. However, we know that we are here, and therefore that fact requires explanation. There have been quite a good number of discussions on that fact, although I think the lack of scientific rigor really is holding us back. But that's what religion is. Answering that fact.
You exist (maybe. I can only speak for me!) Explain that. Explain the entire world around you. Not Earth, not humans, not the duck-billed platypus - everything. The Universe. That's what religion is trying to answer. You're ignoring the question - and that is a character flaw, not me trying to answer it.
Similarly, if anyone were to use logic to examine, for example, the Bible, they would be shot down by the very same Elephant Argument you are quoting here: the Bible reveals only a part of the story, and therefore it's perfectly reasonable to find contradictions. However, once we allow a system that is by definition contradictory, then we cannot study it scientifically. It's that simple.
Part of the whole scientific process is to weed through seeming contradictions to find the truth. That's the whole point. If you can find the contradictions, you can understand them, and resolve them. Nothing can be truly self-contradictory ; some things can appear self-contradictory, but are not (much of Hinduism, Taoism, etc.) because once you think about the contradictions, you see they aren't contradictions at all. If there are contradictions in the Bible, they can be reasoned out, or something's seriously wrong. This doesn't preclude study - it encourages it!
I, too, like the Many-Worlds interpretation of free will. You will note, however, that it doesn't resolve the question of free will versus fate.
No, it does. If all paths are already taken, then the choices we take are all predestined, because there are no other paths to take. However, it doesn't presuppose the uniqueness of the life being lived - you still have free will. You are the one making the choice, but the choice will be made. If you're thinking about something like Calvinistic determinism, then that's a little different - whether or not you were fated to "go to hell" or to "go to heaven" when you were born. That's a stupid argument, anyway - it presupposes that going to hell/heaven are determined by your actions, rather than by your self. Actions are of this Universe, "self" - as in, the Observer in each of us - is not (if you want to debate this, enjoy, but you won't win. I won't either, though) - so it makes more sense to be judged by the self.
I dislike the Elephant Argument because I dislike the God it describes. God is all-powerful according to Christian dogma, right? If he *is* all-powerful, why did He make us so dumb that not only do we not understand him, but we cannot find any "beyond reasonable doubt" evidence that He exists, and our records of him are all confused and sometimes flat-out state the opposite of another, equally credible record?
Ah, the limitations of the human mind.:) God is all-powerful - but not in the way you're thinking. You're thinking that God can "do" things. "Do" implies time - before this instant, it wasn't done, after an instant, it was done. It's an action verb. God's outside of time, so "actions" don't really apply (this is the kind of rigorous analysis I mentioned). God can't do anything. In that sense, he's impotent. Then again, he's already done everything. In that sense he's omnipotent. The span of possibilities in the Universe is extremely large, but it is not boundless - there are "cause and effect" relationships. People often say "Why did God do this?" "Why did God let so and so die?" etc. - or in your case, "Why did God make us so stupid?" You're all missing the point. God didn't do any of that - he created the Universe. The form you currently have followed from that creation. The disasters people attribute to God are simply due to the fact that the Universe exists.
If your statement is "why didn't God make a Universe where the conscious beings in it are capable of understanding him?" - the simple fact is, you don't know what's possible and what's not. Self-contradictions can't exist - and it's easy to believe that there's no way for a conscious being to be able to understand God in a consistent universe.
The next statement might be "well, what exactly does God do then?" It's not that He's impotent. We know that we make choices all the time throughout the day, and we know that we have "impulses", and feelings, and instinct - "It just feels right." There might be some logical answers to those, but not all. It's like saying "why" an electron fell out of its energy level at that exact time - scientists say it's random, but that's implicitly acknowledging a reference frame. What's random to us need not be unguided.
Yes and no. The idea is that what an elephant looks like will completely and always elude blind men. They don't have the capability. They can only relate to the elephant in terms of other objects. Note that they do not say "an elephant looks like a snake" - because, well, they don't know what a snake looks like either. They say an elephant is like a snake.
They can gather all the sensory information they want (which they were doing) and then try to put it together. But without the visual information as well, they may never be able to do it. This is the situation humans are in.
As per your next statement, it's ridiculous, and it's what's been holding back theology for thousands of years, in my opinion. There is no reason that religion can't be studied in a scientific manner. We are not "presented" with several branches of bizarre math, but we can still study them easily. If nothing else, a belief system must be self-consistent, and that we can determine - the Catholic Church tried to do this when it tossed out the Apocrypha (unfortunately, it's possible a lot of fake stuff didn't get tossed out, and a lot of real stuff did, but at least they tried). There are several portions of major religions which fall apart just requiring self-consistency, and it's ludicrous for them to still be there - it doesn't collapse the entire belief structure, it just requires a rethinking. (Unfortunately I worry that I'm a rarity in having a rather flexible belief structure...) There's no reason "self-consistency" checks shouldn't be going on in religion, and approached in a scientific manner, giving alternate explanations and such. It's an extension of philosophy, which is to some extents, an extension of logic. It's straight forward.
And that's my point. If the blind men hadn't been so insistent that their answers weren't contradictory, they might've been able to realize more about the elephant, just in the same way that if you were presented with a 4D object, and instead of being put off by the inconsistencies, explored them, you'd figure out more as well. Take, for instance, the logical problem of free will vs. fate: how do you resolve those two? They seem mutually exclusive - either you can decide your future, or you can't. But if you try to resolve them, you can discover a whole host of new ideas - imagine the Universe as the sum total of everything that could happen, and everything that will happen, and your life is just a path through that multidimensional Universe. Then you would be choosing your own path, yes, but your future would be predetermined - because everything already has been determined.
Sorry, I'm rambling - one of my pet goals has always been to try to rationalize a lot of metaphysics with current physics, because I feel that the two have a lot to offer each other, and I think they're being sorely neglected by each other.:)
I can't understand how you're displeased with the elephant argument. It's basically saying "God is beyond us" - well, duh. You're talking about an atemporal being who sees the entire Universe - all stretch of time - as a whole, and also each individual life and being creeping its way through. Our minds are distinctly limited by the environment they're in - God can't reveal "parts" of himself. He can only reveal himself, and it is us that misperceive them as being distinct parts, not God's malevolence. The elephant parable could have been done with anything - it is the limitation of the men, not the elephant.
That was my point. You're basically saying that yes, God has acknowledged that everyone has the chance to acknowledge him. What I'm adding is that God also never said that it would be crystal clear who had acknowledged him and who hadn't. In other words, we shouldn't necessarily believe that those who don't follow our specific doctrine aren't following the same God we are. To do so trivializes an omnipotent being. There are certain "common truths" between all religions that should be recognized as the hand of God. The Good Samaritan parable shows that extremely well.
As for "why not Christ in the first place?" the answer to that is simple - God's outside of time. It's not important when Christ came. It's important that Christ came. People might have believed that things were different before Christ, but they weren't. Human time to a being outside of time is meaningless.
Well put. Very well put. The other question you need to address is the "believe in God" part. For that, the best I've heard is the elephant parable. I don't know where it's from first - I heard it a long time ago in a sermon by one of the best priests I've ever heard (there have to be a few each generation, right?).
Three blind men stood around an elephant. None of them had ever encountered an elephant before, and none of them could see, so they all had to rely on their sense of touch to examine the elephant.
One of them felt the trunk of the elephant, feeling it long and round, like a large snake. "Ah," he said. "An elephant is like a very large snake. Yes, I understand."
One of them felt the skin of the elephant, noting how cracked and wrinkly it was, like the skin of a lizard. "Ah," he said. "An elephant is like a very large lizard. Yes, I understand."
And one of them felt the tusk of the elephant, and noted how sharp and hard it was, like the blade of a sword. "Ah," he said. "An elephant is like a sword. Yes, I understand."
And then the blind men talked to each other, and each of them was adamant about their observations, and they left completely confused about what an elephant was. How could something be like a lizard, a snake, and a sword all at the same time? It didn't make any sense to them.
(note that there are many more examples than the three above)
We're all blind men trying to figure out what God is. It makes perfect sense that the vast majority of the answers we have are junk and contradictory. Just because we can't make sense of them doesn't mean they aren't all true. And so you can't judge how other religions practice their faith, because you really don't know - if you look very closely, you may see elements that resemble your own, just... from a different angle. The fact that certain things seem to contradict is a distinct limitation of being human. Best not to put those limitations on God.
So here you are thinking for God. If God says you must believe in him to be saved, why is that so hard to follow? And how can you say a Hindu believes in the one true God? Because a Hindu doesn't. It's not most people on this planet haven't been exposed to Christianity and can say "Well I never knew!". It's not like its a hard religion. You don't have to follow hundreds of laws, you don't have to bow down 5 times a day...you just have to believe. He's made the path fairly easy and if people don't follow it then its because they chose to not follow it and miss the train. It's silly for people to keep arguing how evil God is because he'll send everyone to hell who refuses to believe in him.
Wow. That's really bizarre. Where to start...
The first question to ask is "what/who is God?" Without that, your question doesn't mean anything. Note that God, in the Bible, didn't even give himself a name - just "I am" (which is about as fundamental as you can get). Who are you to say that what a Hindu, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Wiccan believe in isn't God as well? If you haven't heard the elephant parable, you should - basically, if a bunch of blind men are trying to describe an elephant by touch, you'll get a ton of completely disparate answers, which, when looked at from a higher stance, all make sense. It's much the same way with religion. All religions have the same kernel of truth to them - it's up to the people to figure them out.
I find it amazingly hard to believe that people put such huge restrictions on God, that he can't present himself to billions upon billions of people in billions upon billions of ways.
Your argument is just weak - what about all of the people who were born before Christ? What about all of the Native Americans, who were geographically distinct? What about infants? God presents himself in many different ways to many different people, and the truth is that they're all true. Just because you can't handle many seemingly contradictory things being true doesn't make them not true.
Unfortunately this is only one of many "hot Jupiters" as they're called. The prevalence of these odd planets is primarily due to an observation bias, as our method of detection is only sensitive to large-mass objects close to a star. Thus, when you look, and see a lot of "hot Jupiters", go fig, that's all you could detect.
Giant planets with orbital radii 1 AU are not, however, completely impossible to understand. The current theory is that they form out beyond the ice-condensation point (this is what allows gas giants to balloon to such a huge size/mass), and then some mechanism forces them to slowly migrate inward toward the star. They've managed to do this in simulations, however, it's not a wonderfully good explanation. It doesn't, after all, explain why Jupiter is where it is for us.
Depends on the foundations of the assumptions. Take C12/C14, for instance. Here we know that the C14/C12 ratio is NOT constant, because C12 is being turned into C14 all the time in the upper atmosphere, and that depends on the solar cycle and activity. Most likely things like the Maunder minimum would strongly affect C14 production, and thus the C12/C14 ratio over the Earth. This can be corrected for with other calibration techniques, of course, to get through isolated events like this.
Here, it's much more likely that their assumptions are solid, as they're chemical in nature, rather than astrophysical: hafnium is bound in the mantle, tungsten is unbound. Since hafnium is bound, when tungsten forms, it's bound as well. As for loss, you'd lose both at the same rate, so the ratio should be fine (it'd be a proportional loss, rather than an absolute).
As for the location of the asteroid, if it came from a core, it'd show other signatures of coming from a core. Cores are molten, so they form different alloys, and all that.
And finally: ignore the whole "change in the speed of light" thing, or at least read up on it more closely. The current data (which is not convincing in the least: it's only 2 sigma from no change!) indicates less than a 1 part per million change over a good fraction of the life of the Universe. It's not important. It's probably not even true.
You're not going to get any argument from me here: "FSB" was a term that stuck around far past when all chips had moved cache on die, and should've just been called "system bus" for a while now, especially when the system bus speed and the memory bus speed were independent, which means that the "system bus" wasn't even really a "memory bus" - it was just a bus to a chip that contained a memory controller. NVIDIA's nForce chipset really showcased that, with the DASP integrated into the chipset. They were really trying to be a secondary processor. Now, with a HyperTransport link out, the best term would be "system interconnect" to satisfy those who can't stand using "bus" for a point to point protocol.
As per the North Bridge/South Bridge distinction, I'll agree that the original idea of the word no longer applies, but no one really has a good set of words for them yet. The "I/O" chip isn't really a pure I/O chip - AGP is an I/O port as well, and it also contains system monitoring information. Yes, it's input and output to the processor, but, well, everything is by a strict definition.
I dunno. "AGP tunnel" and "I/O chip" don't sit well with me. The first name stresses AGP too much, and while it's the main reason for the chip right now, it may not stay that way - in addition, the AGP chip doesn't need to be a tunnel (I think one of VIA's Hammer chipset is still using V.link, since they're using an old southbridge - I think). I think I'd prefer "High Speed Peripheral Interface Chip" and "Low Speed Peripheral Interface Chip" - that's pretty much dead on for the differences between the two chips, and the reason for the separate chips. Yes, there are those who merge the two chips (thus creating a combined Peripheral Interface chip) but many motherboard vendors will want to keep the two chips separate for reuse in multiple platforms.
It'd be more appropriate to call it a "North Bridge with AGP8X and HT Tunnel", as there's definitely no requirement that the north bridge connects to the south bridge using an HT link. I think one of VIA's chipsets is doing that so they can use an old south bridge... Anyway, it'll be most appropriate to ditch the "North/South bridge" concepts if they ever switch to one die for the PCI bus+AGP port+everything else. Then it'll just be a HyperTransport system hub. Of course they'll also have about 1000+ pins on one chip, but who's counting?:)
However, it really all comes down to what you define as the "FSB", which is tough because Intel just made up the term back with the PII. You can call it the core/memory/I/O interface, in which case, yes, it's internal now. You can also call it the processor's external data bus, in which case it was replaced by the HT link. One block diagram I saw from AMD called it the "system interlink" or something like that.
It's difficult to try to use old acronyms on a new design, especially because Hammer is really quite a striking difference from the old designs. I'm sure AMD will use something like "system interlink" or something like that for the main HyperTransport link. I doubt it, though - people use "bus" for just about any topology now. Wasn't the EV6 bus for the Athlon really a point-to-point link, anyway?
Well, though, if there's one thing we can agree on, though, no one will ever be claiming that a Hammer-based processor is limited by its "system interlink" or whatever. 6.4GB/s is way more than enough for now, especially when all you're doing is shoving data at the PCI bus and the AGP port.
Re:FSB we don't need to stinking FSB
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AMD's Athlon XP 2700+
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Depends what you define as a northbridge, and what you define as a FSB. The bus type (EV6, HyperTransport, whatever) is just a name for the signaling and protocol - the name of the bus itself can still be "Front Side Bus".
The "traditional" northbridge had a memory controller and an AGP controller, as well as a PCI controller. The PCI controller got moved completely off the North Bridge to the South Bridge and replaced with a proprietary interconnect in a lot of modern chips. The memory controller was moved on die, but the AGP controller is still off-die, and thus needs a chip for it. This chip could be called the "north bridge". It's just a name - AMD calls it the "HyperTransport AGP 3.0 Graphics Tunnel" (which doesn't really make much sense, as it also has a HyperTransport link to a south bridge - how does THAT relate to graphics?) but it's still a North Bridge, just without the memory controller.
There are two HT links on the system, which is why it makes sense to call it a "north bridge" and a "south bridge": there's a HT link from the CPU to the North Bridge (the AMD 8151) and a HT link from the North Bridge to the South Bridge (the AMD 8111).
So, yes, they do have a FSB, unless you want to call it something else: "highspeed HT link" and "lowspeed HT link" (for the North Bridge-South Bridge interconnect) maybe? Got me. It doesn't matter. The FSB has always been the high speed link out of the processor to a bridge chip, which then has a low speed link to another bridge chip which has all the PCI, LPC, ethernet, all that crap. Hammer doesn't change that, it just removes the memory controller from the North Bridge.
The FSB of a Hammer chip is the bus linking the chip to the North Bridge, which no longer includes the memory: it still has the AGP port, and needs to get to the PCI bus somehow. In the Hammer system, the FSB is actually a 32-bit HyperTransport link, running at 400 MHz DDR, so 800MHz effective, for a combined bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s. So yes, Hammers still have an FSB.
What about the charge? Lepton number? Baryon number? (unless ridiculous amounts of weak processes are going on) In the case of a wormhole, it should only have energy, mass, and charge, right? So when an electron enters it and begins heading "backwards" along the time axis, the time machine would have to gain lepton number, and charge, etc. etc. etc. Essentially the time machine would have to be an arbitrary quantum number sink, and to me, that's just not realistic.
Time travel machines are artifacts of a pure gravitational theory, in my opinion. They just don't exist.
Well, the idea of "borrowing" energy from one time to give it to another is a little suspect. It sounds a lot like several quantum effects, which are all extremely short, because of Heisenberg uncertainty : here you're talking about a huge shift in energy, over an arbitrary length of time - from a quantum point of view, this just doesn't sit right.
Actually, we can measure the energy of a wormhole needed for these things: it's relatively easy, since we know the curvature of spacetime, which determines the mass. So, it's pretty much straightforward.
We're so far from the "reality" situation it's not worth discussing - what you're saying makes it hard are all engineering problems, which from a theorists' point of view, can be solved with an appropriate amount of man-hours.:) The "on paper" bit is all that's important, because it's determining whether or not the whole theory is self-consistent or not, and from my point of view, it's not. Any bits of "well, the wormhole can gain and lose energy" are just cheap tricks.
That and it requires negative energy. Can't forget that.:)
That's such a cheesy way of justifying it. You still have problems with every other quantity that's conserved: charge, lepton number, spin, etc. And that's not even getting into the entropy situation. Last time I checked wormholes, like black holes, should only have charge+spin+energy. So the generation of ridiculous numbers of distinct particles by the wormhole would be exceedingly bizarre.
Plus then I would hate to think what would happen if someone heavier than the wormhole tried to pass through it.
The "rarity" explanation is a real dangerous one, because that then starts to break down a lot of physics that we have: equivalence principles, space symmetry, etc. It could be true. But we have no evidence for it, and it certainly looks like the Universe behaves itself even to ridiculous distances (like, back to 100Kyr after the big bang, when the CMBR was formed).
As for the hard evidence for time-translation symmetry, it's not really important whether or not there's evidence for it - the point is that relativity is basically founded upon the fact that there's no unique point in space or in time. If you break that, then the whole theory becomes questionable - then there is a preferred reference frame, etc. Since time travel as described here is based on relativity, it won't work (at least, not unless relativity really is wrong, and we're just getting really lucky coming up with this stuff with a wrong theory) because it's self-contradictory. How can you believe a theory when it disproves itself?
And the Big Bang, incidentally, is not any more special than any other point. Physics functioned the same way then as it functions now. The fact that there's no time before it isn't important. The time-translation symmetry says that physics works the same at any point in time, not that the configuration of spacetime at every point is identical.
Argh, to the fact that I had to travel for several days, so this will be gone in the mix...
The question I brought up before was a question of repeatability: if you pick a string of digits from Pi, and decode them as a JPEG, you might get a newspaper from 2020. However, that will only happen, say, one time in several times 10^50 or something like that.:) However, if a person comes back from the future, and gives information about the future, it is repeatable every time. I'm sure if I thought about it a bunch I could use information theory to show that picking a random string from pi has a very low information count, but someone coming back from the future has a very high information count - it's a question of the distribution of the system. The time traveler's information always HAS to work out, but a random string from Pi does not. That's how you could simply prove the truth of a time traveler.
Next step: What you're describing is what I described in other posts: something similar to Reimann surfaces in complex logarithms - a multiply-valued function. The only problem is conservation of energy - you can't just strip it from a "random" location, as how would it go away from there? Conservation of energy would have to be replaced with some multitemporal conservation of energy-thingy, and that (I think) would have some problems with Heisenberg uncertainty.
I dunno. It's crap. Basic stuff here: it's violating Heisenberg uncertainty, I think. Time travel is basically "borrowing" energy from the universe with the promise that you'll return it later (when the said time travel trip actually occurs). Heisenberg uncertainty basically says that borrowing energy is okay, so long as the time is infinitesimally short (spread in energy * spread in time = h-bar - yes, it should be greater-than, but in this situation it should probably be equal-to, as the situation should minimize it, or at least fix it) that is, energy and time uncertainties are coupled.
I wasn't talking about another time traveler. I was talking about the person himself coming back. That is, me telling me how to become rich. That's not something that could be passed off as coincidence.
There's also the issue of repeatability - if you could repeat your newspaper trick indefinitely, I'd say you just violated the laws of physics. However, I could repeat the time travelling trick indefinitely.
Regarding the information bit, you have to be careful: information is entropy, so there are physical laws regarding it - there's a big debate going on about whether or not black holes destroy information. If I thought about it long enough, I'm sure this would be an issue too. The question is "where did the information come from?" Once you have a sheet of paper telling you how to get rich, you didn't come up with it on your own.
Let me put it this way. You build your time machine, and say "When I become rich, I'm going to write it all down, bring it back to myself and give it to me now." So, your future self steps through your time machine, and hands you the piece of paper. He helps you through doing all of the things you need to do, and then when you're rich, he sends you off back through the time machine to give the piece of paper he gave you to yourself in the past. Think "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" (bizarrely enough). This is perfectly valid physics - everything I described is a closed timelike loop, INCLUDING the piece of paper that no one wrote that came into being and looped through.
Now, when you try to say "oh, well that can't happen" - if that can't, then neither can normal self-satisfying time travel. They're the same thing - closed timelike loops.
It's true that no evidence doesn't imply that it couldn't exist. However, conservation of energy is just such an overreaching principle that it would take a LOT of effort to dislodge it.
re: observations - That's my point exactly. We never would have developed the idea of conservation of matter/energy if this were true - but we did, because we didn't see any examples of it being violated.
Finally: the comment that I was making: Conservation of energy is a statement that the Universe is symmetric under time-translation - that is, there is no point along the time axis of the Universe that is "special". If we break conservation of energy, that implies that that period in time is "special" somehow. You can already see large portions of physics (including relativity, which is what this is based on!) going out the window...
Man. It's at these times that I like to bring up the "flying winged monkey" example to people to remind them exactly what closed timelike loops imply.:)
I swear - GR theoreticians drive me nuts. It's like they look at their nice little theory, find something that blatantly contradicts other theories (which are disjoint from their own - cf. gravity and quantum field theory) and in their own arrogance, insist that their theory must be right, and the other is flawed. They don't blatantly do this, of course, but stating that time travel can exist fundamentally is the same thing.
Personally, if I were them, I'd start looking at a way in the theory to disallow time travel, and see where that takes you. Throw it in ad-hoc at first, and go backwards from there.
Yes. Point. However, the idea is that we have a mountain of observational data supporting the fact that this does NOT exist, and none supporting the fact that it does exist. I tend to believe the huge reams of data.
That is, imagine back hundreds of years ago, when people were just figuring out conservation of matter - weighing burned wood and the gases left off, for instance: imagine if they had found out that in some bizarre circumstances, matter WASN'T conserved. They wouldn't've known it was due to time travel. It just would've appeared as violation of conservation of energy.
So, yah. I concede that point. However, throwing conservation of energy out the window is NOT something you want to do lightly. It screws up a LOT of things, even if it only happens under "abnormal" circumstances. Energy has to be conserved. If CTLs and stuff like that exist, then there's a "global temporal" conservation of energy, with conservation of energy locally as an approximation. It's possible. I just don't consider it likely.
Woah, woah, woah: all three of the statements you just made superscribe another "timeline" on top of time itself - you can't change a 4D universe - it's there, complete, done, finito. You can't "split" a 4D universe.
What you COULD say, however, is that all of the Universes were already there, and that when a time traveller enters history, or changes history, he moves into a parallel universe - that is, a Universe which is distinct from his original. Something like a Riemann surface shift. Apparently he gains 2 pi.:)
However, I don't buy this. It doesn't make sense. Take the example of a person going back and convincing himself not to enter the time machine. OK. He does. Now there are TWO of him in that universe, where before there was only one. Where the heck did that mass come from? (the other universe, yes - but when did we sacrifice local conservation of energy/matter - which we have mountains of observational data for - for "global temporal" conservation of energy/matter - for which we have no observational data for?)
Taken to its logical extreme, a civilization could turn an "open" universe into a "closed" universe by sacrificing some adjacent quantum reality. To me, this is way beyond the boundaries of what could happen.
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You should also notice that many religions, especially Christianity, fundamentally exclude the reality of other religions. Christianity is totally atheistic regarding the gods of other religions -- except regarding its own god. It even goes as far as to deny the worship of other gods; why would the supreme God deny the existense of his other representations and actually threathen to send people to eternal damnation or death if they worship them?
What? Where do you get this conclusion from? Christianity certainly doesn't exclude other religions. What if their God is the same thing? As per what God would do, I wouldn't presume to question God. Perhaps those statements should be looked at in context, rather than in a broad sweeping generalization - maybe then they'll make more sense. "Love God above all others." "Love your neighbor as yourself." Done. If a person does that, then they're Christian in my book.
Also other religious doctrines are totally contradictory between religions (you can consider each person's religious views a different religion in this sense). In most forms of Christianity, repetitive rebirth is simply impossible. In most forms of Hinduism, the Christian "eternal life" might be considered an abhorrence (they seek towards eternal death, not eternal life).
There's nothing that says that repetetive rebirth isn't possible. That could be what heaven is. It's not like anyone knows. Ditto with the "eternal life/eternal death" thing. You don't know there's a difference, and I can easily believe that it's the same thing.
One says that it has a trunk and big ears and another that it has a muzzle and small pointy and hairy ears.
And no one ever thought it has two sets of ears and two noses? Remember that the blind men don't know what an elephant looks like. Just like we don't know what God is. I personally do not presume to place any limitations.
If there's more than one God, then the collection of them could be called "God". Same thing. Semantics. It's a little difficult when we retain old ideas of what "god" is, when you can clearly extend it to something singular (see later).
As per the statement in the Bible, what does "god" mean? Do you know? Do you know the real etymology of the term, when it was first applied? Are you sure it's distinct from "idol" (which is what many translations use)? It doesn't necessarily imply a multitude of gods. It more logically implies a multitude of things which could be worshipped, and above those all, worship God. Doesn't every religion say that? Isn't it reasonable to suppose then that they're all the same thing?
As per "what niche has but a single individual in it?" - your idea of "individual" and what God is may be two distinct things. God is that which created the Universe. All I'm presupposing is that it is conscious. Nothing more. Make arguments for plurality later.
Well first off, Hindus don't believe in God but rather thousands and a Wiccan worships nature not any God..
... Now why would God contradict himself so much?
I don't see any reason why all of those deities couldn't be the same thing, seen by humans and mangled into (mostly) unrecognizable forms. The fact that they appear distinct is exactly what the parable is trying to address.
Indeed, how can we ever know God?
He gave us a wealth of experimental data. We call it the Universe.
Oh He can, and He does. But there is a problem with your opinion. Because you see not every religion says the same thing
How do you know that every religion says different things? They all fundamentally say "Be nice to each other". And every one stresses some spirituality. Isn't that what Christ said is important? You're quibbling over details.
Want a test? Sure. Take a child. Take him to as many religious ceremonies as you can think of. Now ask him or her what the philosophical difference is between them. I'd bet that he won't be able to tell you. (I know. I was one of those kids.) This isn't because he's stupid, or he doesn't understand - it's because you've become stupid about this kinda thing, and you don't understand that they're all saying the same thing.
And as for God contradicting himself, He's not ! That's what the elephant story explains! What you see as contradictions are merely different people seeing God in different ways, and then mangling and destroying the religion due to human greed, envy, and suffering. Every religion is like that - Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Muslim, Judaism, Wiccan, all of them. But all of them have the same kernel of truth in them.
Well thats up to God. But you're only talking about those people who never heard about Christianity. I'd say disqualifies quite a number of people from your argument. And I am sure God will deal appropriately with those who could not make the decision on their own (babies, mentally ill, etc.)
I think you're insane to believe that God has a list of "by-laws". What about those who were slaughtered during the Crusades? They heard of Christianity - it was at the end of a sword. To believe that up in Heaven, God's got a list of "exceptions" - that's crazy. If that were true, every lawyer would go to heaven just so they could work for God.
No - if you believe in a salvation and damnation, it better be independent of religion if it's universal. Otherwise God is nothing more than another human being. It has to be some basic simple fact about human existence.
Prove that there isn't a God.
Now prove that there is.
In fact, the two explanations are exactly identical, right? They produce the exact same situation (the Universe was created: whether it happened on its own, or because it was created by something) and have no differences between the two. In fact, the two questions are irrelevant for effects - if you presuppose an action, then whether or not it was "done" by something or it just happened, the effects will still be the same, and the two situations will be indistinguishable.
Given that, one would suppose that Occam's Razor would hold true, and that the simpler explanation would hold true. The one thing that people consistently miss is that the simpler explanation between "it just happened" and "God did it" is currently (stress currently) "God did it". The problem is that "it just happened" is not an explanation. It is a statement lacking explanation - a non-explanation, in fact. It in fact implies that it was caused by something, because "happen" implies a causal relationship. So "it just happened" falls flat on its face.
If you want to say that the Universe always was there, well, there's experimental evidence against that.
If you want to say that the Universe self-sprang into existence... there really isn't any good evidence for that, either, and it's got as many variables (if not more) as the deity hypothesis. Moreover, "self-sprang" from what perspective? From our perspective it would, but from outside the Universe, it may not.
Religion isn't fiction. It's thousands of years of people trying to understand the bizarre fact of the fact that you are here. That's your evidence - you are here. We don't see aliens, and we don't see any evidence of them having been here. However, we know that we are here, and therefore that fact requires explanation. There have been quite a good number of discussions on that fact, although I think the lack of scientific rigor really is holding us back. But that's what religion is. Answering that fact.
You exist (maybe. I can only speak for me!) Explain that. Explain the entire world around you. Not Earth, not humans, not the duck-billed platypus - everything. The Universe. That's what religion is trying to answer. You're ignoring the question - and that is a character flaw, not me trying to answer it.
Similarly, if anyone were to use logic to examine, for example, the Bible, they would be shot down by the very same Elephant Argument you are quoting here: the Bible reveals only a part of the story, and therefore it's perfectly reasonable to find contradictions. However, once we allow a system that is by definition contradictory, then we cannot study it scientifically. It's that simple.
:) God is all-powerful - but not in the way you're thinking. You're thinking that God can "do" things. "Do" implies time - before this instant, it wasn't done, after an instant, it was done. It's an action verb. God's outside of time, so "actions" don't really apply (this is the kind of rigorous analysis I mentioned). God can't do anything. In that sense, he's impotent. Then again, he's already done everything. In that sense he's omnipotent. The span of possibilities in the Universe is extremely large, but it is not boundless - there are "cause and effect" relationships. People often say "Why did God do this?" "Why did God let so and so die?" etc. - or in your case, "Why did God make us so stupid?" You're all missing the point. God didn't do any of that - he created the Universe. The form you currently have followed from that creation. The disasters people attribute to God are simply due to the fact that the Universe exists.
Part of the whole scientific process is to weed through seeming contradictions to find the truth. That's the whole point. If you can find the contradictions, you can understand them, and resolve them. Nothing can be truly self-contradictory ; some things can appear self-contradictory, but are not (much of Hinduism, Taoism, etc.) because once you think about the contradictions, you see they aren't contradictions at all. If there are contradictions in the Bible, they can be reasoned out, or something's seriously wrong. This doesn't preclude study - it encourages it!
I, too, like the Many-Worlds interpretation of free will. You will note, however, that it doesn't resolve the question of free will versus fate.
No, it does. If all paths are already taken, then the choices we take are all predestined, because there are no other paths to take. However, it doesn't presuppose the uniqueness of the life being lived - you still have free will. You are the one making the choice, but the choice will be made. If you're thinking about something like Calvinistic determinism, then that's a little different - whether or not you were fated to "go to hell" or to "go to heaven" when you were born. That's a stupid argument, anyway - it presupposes that going to hell/heaven are determined by your actions, rather than by your self. Actions are of this Universe, "self" - as in, the Observer in each of us - is not (if you want to debate this, enjoy, but you won't win. I won't either, though) - so it makes more sense to be judged by the self.
I dislike the Elephant Argument because I dislike the God it describes. God is all-powerful according to Christian dogma, right? If he *is* all-powerful, why did He make us so dumb that not only do we not understand him, but we cannot find any "beyond reasonable doubt" evidence that He exists, and our records of him are all confused and sometimes flat-out state the opposite of another, equally credible record?
Ah, the limitations of the human mind.
If your statement is "why didn't God make a Universe where the conscious beings in it are capable of understanding him?" - the simple fact is, you don't know what's possible and what's not. Self-contradictions can't exist - and it's easy to believe that there's no way for a conscious being to be able to understand God in a consistent universe.
The next statement might be "well, what exactly does God do then?" It's not that He's impotent. We know that we make choices all the time throughout the day, and we know that we have "impulses", and feelings, and instinct - "It just feels right." There might be some logical answers to those, but not all. It's like saying "why" an electron fell out of its energy level at that exact time - scientists say it's random, but that's implicitly acknowledging a reference frame. What's random to us need not be unguided.
Yes and no. The idea is that what an elephant looks like will completely and always elude blind men. They don't have the capability. They can only relate to the elephant in terms of other objects. Note that they do not say "an elephant looks like a snake" - because, well, they don't know what a snake looks like either. They say an elephant is like a snake.
:)
They can gather all the sensory information they want (which they were doing) and then try to put it together. But without the visual information as well, they may never be able to do it. This is the situation humans are in.
As per your next statement, it's ridiculous, and it's what's been holding back theology for thousands of years, in my opinion. There is no reason that religion can't be studied in a scientific manner. We are not "presented" with several branches of bizarre math, but we can still study them easily. If nothing else, a belief system must be self-consistent, and that we can determine - the Catholic Church tried to do this when it tossed out the Apocrypha (unfortunately, it's possible a lot of fake stuff didn't get tossed out, and a lot of real stuff did, but at least they tried). There are several portions of major religions which fall apart just requiring self-consistency, and it's ludicrous for them to still be there - it doesn't collapse the entire belief structure, it just requires a rethinking. (Unfortunately I worry that I'm a rarity in having a rather flexible belief structure...) There's no reason "self-consistency" checks shouldn't be going on in religion, and approached in a scientific manner, giving alternate explanations and such. It's an extension of philosophy, which is to some extents, an extension of logic. It's straight forward.
And that's my point. If the blind men hadn't been so insistent that their answers weren't contradictory, they might've been able to realize more about the elephant, just in the same way that if you were presented with a 4D object, and instead of being put off by the inconsistencies, explored them, you'd figure out more as well. Take, for instance, the logical problem of free will vs. fate: how do you resolve those two? They seem mutually exclusive - either you can decide your future, or you can't. But if you try to resolve them, you can discover a whole host of new ideas - imagine the Universe as the sum total of everything that could happen, and everything that will happen, and your life is just a path through that multidimensional Universe. Then you would be choosing your own path, yes, but your future would be predetermined - because everything already has been determined.
Sorry, I'm rambling - one of my pet goals has always been to try to rationalize a lot of metaphysics with current physics, because I feel that the two have a lot to offer each other, and I think they're being sorely neglected by each other.
I can't understand how you're displeased with the elephant argument. It's basically saying "God is beyond us" - well, duh. You're talking about an atemporal being who sees the entire Universe - all stretch of time - as a whole, and also each individual life and being creeping its way through. Our minds are distinctly limited by the environment they're in - God can't reveal "parts" of himself. He can only reveal himself, and it is us that misperceive them as being distinct parts, not God's malevolence. The elephant parable could have been done with anything - it is the limitation of the men, not the elephant.
...
That was my point. You're basically saying that yes, God has acknowledged that everyone has the chance to acknowledge him. What I'm adding is that God also never said that it would be crystal clear who had acknowledged him and who hadn't. In other words, we shouldn't necessarily believe that those who don't follow our specific doctrine aren't following the same God we are. To do so trivializes an omnipotent being. There are certain "common truths" between all religions that should be recognized as the hand of God. The Good Samaritan parable shows that extremely well.
As for "why not Christ in the first place?" the answer to that is simple - God's outside of time. It's not important when Christ came. It's important that Christ came. People might have believed that things were different before Christ, but they weren't. Human time to a being outside of time is meaningless.
Well put. Very well put. The other question you need to address is the "believe in God" part. For that, the best I've heard is the elephant parable. I don't know where it's from first - I heard it a long time ago in a sermon by one of the best priests I've ever heard (there have to be a few each generation, right?).
... from a different angle. The fact that certain things seem to contradict is a distinct limitation of being human. Best not to put those limitations on God.
Three blind men stood around an elephant. None of them had ever encountered an elephant before, and none of them could see, so they all had to rely on their sense of touch to examine the elephant.
One of them felt the trunk of the elephant, feeling it long and round, like a large snake. "Ah," he said. "An elephant is like a very large snake. Yes, I understand."
One of them felt the skin of the elephant, noting how cracked and wrinkly it was, like the skin of a lizard. "Ah," he said. "An elephant is like a very large lizard. Yes, I understand."
And one of them felt the tusk of the elephant, and noted how sharp and hard it was, like the blade of a sword. "Ah," he said. "An elephant is like a sword. Yes, I understand."
And then the blind men talked to each other, and each of them was adamant about their observations, and they left completely confused about what an elephant was. How could something be like a lizard, a snake, and a sword all at the same time? It didn't make any sense to them.
(note that there are many more examples than the three above)
We're all blind men trying to figure out what God is. It makes perfect sense that the vast majority of the answers we have are junk and contradictory. Just because we can't make sense of them doesn't mean they aren't all true. And so you can't judge how other religions practice their faith, because you really don't know - if you look very closely, you may see elements that resemble your own, just
So here you are thinking for God. If God says you must believe in him to be saved, why is that so hard to follow? And how can you say a Hindu believes in the one true God? Because a Hindu doesn't. It's not most people on this planet haven't been exposed to Christianity and can say "Well I never knew!". It's not like its a hard religion. You don't have to follow hundreds of laws, you don't have to bow down 5 times a day...you just have to believe. He's made the path fairly easy and if people don't follow it then its because they chose to not follow it and miss the train. It's silly for people to keep arguing how evil God is because he'll send everyone to hell who refuses to believe in him.
Wow. That's really bizarre. Where to start...
The first question to ask is "what/who is God?" Without that, your question doesn't mean anything. Note that God, in the Bible, didn't even give himself a name - just "I am" (which is about as fundamental as you can get). Who are you to say that what a Hindu, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Wiccan believe in isn't God as well? If you haven't heard the elephant parable, you should - basically, if a bunch of blind men are trying to describe an elephant by touch, you'll get a ton of completely disparate answers, which, when looked at from a higher stance, all make sense. It's much the same way with religion. All religions have the same kernel of truth to them - it's up to the people to figure them out.
I find it amazingly hard to believe that people put such huge restrictions on God, that he can't present himself to billions upon billions of people in billions upon billions of ways.
Your argument is just weak - what about all of the people who were born before Christ? What about all of the Native Americans, who were geographically distinct? What about infants? God presents himself in many different ways to many different people, and the truth is that they're all true. Just because you can't handle many seemingly contradictory things being true doesn't make them not true.
Unfortunately this is only one of many "hot Jupiters" as they're called. The prevalence of these odd planets is primarily due to an observation bias, as our method of detection is only sensitive to large-mass objects close to a star. Thus, when you look, and see a lot of "hot Jupiters", go fig, that's all you could detect.
Giant planets with orbital radii 1 AU are not, however, completely impossible to understand. The current theory is that they form out beyond the ice-condensation point (this is what allows gas giants to balloon to such a huge size/mass), and then some mechanism forces them to slowly migrate inward toward the star. They've managed to do this in simulations, however, it's not a wonderfully good explanation. It doesn't, after all, explain why Jupiter is where it is for us.
Depends on the foundations of the assumptions. Take C12/C14, for instance. Here we know that the C14/C12 ratio is NOT constant, because C12 is being turned into C14 all the time in the upper atmosphere, and that depends on the solar cycle and activity. Most likely things like the Maunder minimum would strongly affect C14 production, and thus the C12/C14 ratio over the Earth. This can be corrected for with other calibration techniques, of course, to get through isolated events like this.
Here, it's much more likely that their assumptions are solid, as they're chemical in nature, rather than astrophysical: hafnium is bound in the mantle, tungsten is unbound. Since hafnium is bound, when tungsten forms, it's bound as well. As for loss, you'd lose both at the same rate, so the ratio should be fine (it'd be a proportional loss, rather than an absolute).
As for the location of the asteroid, if it came from a core, it'd show other signatures of coming from a core. Cores are molten, so they form different alloys, and all that.
And finally: ignore the whole "change in the speed of light" thing, or at least read up on it more closely. The current data (which is not convincing in the least: it's only 2 sigma from no change!) indicates less than a 1 part per million change over a good fraction of the life of the Universe. It's not important. It's probably not even true.
You're not going to get any argument from me here: "FSB" was a term that stuck around far past when all chips had moved cache on die, and should've just been called "system bus" for a while now, especially when the system bus speed and the memory bus speed were independent, which means that the "system bus" wasn't even really a "memory bus" - it was just a bus to a chip that contained a memory controller. NVIDIA's nForce chipset really showcased that, with the DASP integrated into the chipset. They were really trying to be a secondary processor. Now, with a HyperTransport link out, the best term would be "system interconnect" to satisfy those who can't stand using "bus" for a point to point protocol.
As per the North Bridge/South Bridge distinction, I'll agree that the original idea of the word no longer applies, but no one really has a good set of words for them yet. The "I/O" chip isn't really a pure I/O chip - AGP is an I/O port as well, and it also contains system monitoring information. Yes, it's input and output to the processor, but, well, everything is by a strict definition.
I dunno. "AGP tunnel" and "I/O chip" don't sit well with me. The first name stresses AGP too much, and while it's the main reason for the chip right now, it may not stay that way - in addition, the AGP chip doesn't need to be a tunnel (I think one of VIA's Hammer chipset is still using V.link, since they're using an old southbridge - I think). I think I'd prefer "High Speed Peripheral Interface Chip" and "Low Speed Peripheral Interface Chip" - that's pretty much dead on for the differences between the two chips, and the reason for the separate chips. Yes, there are those who merge the two chips (thus creating a combined Peripheral Interface chip) but many motherboard vendors will want to keep the two chips separate for reuse in multiple platforms.
It'd be more appropriate to call it a "North Bridge with AGP8X and HT Tunnel", as there's definitely no requirement that the north bridge connects to the south bridge using an HT link. I think one of VIA's chipsets is doing that so they can use an old south bridge... Anyway, it'll be most appropriate to ditch the "North/South bridge" concepts if they ever switch to one die for the PCI bus+AGP port+everything else. Then it'll just be a HyperTransport system hub. Of course they'll also have about 1000+ pins on one chip, but who's counting? :)
However, it really all comes down to what you define as the "FSB", which is tough because Intel just made up the term back with the PII. You can call it the core/memory/I/O interface, in which case, yes, it's internal now. You can also call it the processor's external data bus, in which case it was replaced by the HT link. One block diagram I saw from AMD called it the "system interlink" or something like that.
It's difficult to try to use old acronyms on a new design, especially because Hammer is really quite a striking difference from the old designs. I'm sure AMD will use something like "system interlink" or something like that for the main HyperTransport link. I doubt it, though - people use "bus" for just about any topology now. Wasn't the EV6 bus for the Athlon really a point-to-point link, anyway?
Well, though, if there's one thing we can agree on, though, no one will ever be claiming that a Hammer-based processor is limited by its "system interlink" or whatever. 6.4GB/s is way more than enough for now, especially when all you're doing is shoving data at the PCI bus and the AGP port.
Depends what you define as a northbridge, and what you define as a FSB. The bus type (EV6, HyperTransport, whatever) is just a name for the signaling and protocol - the name of the bus itself can still be "Front Side Bus".
The "traditional" northbridge had a memory controller and an AGP controller, as well as a PCI controller. The PCI controller got moved completely off the North Bridge to the South Bridge and replaced with a proprietary interconnect in a lot of modern chips. The memory controller was moved on die, but the AGP controller is still off-die, and thus needs a chip for it. This chip could be called the "north bridge". It's just a name - AMD calls it the "HyperTransport AGP 3.0 Graphics Tunnel" (which doesn't really make much sense, as it also has a HyperTransport link to a south bridge - how does THAT relate to graphics?) but it's still a North Bridge, just without the memory controller.
There are two HT links on the system, which is why it makes sense to call it a "north bridge" and a "south bridge": there's a HT link from the CPU to the North Bridge (the AMD 8151) and a HT link from the North Bridge to the South Bridge (the AMD 8111).
So, yes, they do have a FSB, unless you want to call it something else: "highspeed HT link" and "lowspeed HT link" (for the North Bridge-South Bridge interconnect) maybe? Got me. It doesn't matter. The FSB has always been the high speed link out of the processor to a bridge chip, which then has a low speed link to another bridge chip which has all the PCI, LPC, ethernet, all that crap. Hammer doesn't change that, it just removes the memory controller from the North Bridge.
The FSB of a Hammer chip is the bus linking the chip to the North Bridge, which no longer includes the memory: it still has the AGP port, and needs to get to the PCI bus somehow. In the Hammer system, the FSB is actually a 32-bit HyperTransport link, running at 400 MHz DDR, so 800MHz effective, for a combined bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s. So yes, Hammers still have an FSB.
What about the charge? Lepton number? Baryon number? (unless ridiculous amounts of weak processes are going on) In the case of a wormhole, it should only have energy, mass, and charge, right? So when an electron enters it and begins heading "backwards" along the time axis, the time machine would have to gain lepton number, and charge, etc. etc. etc. Essentially the time machine would have to be an arbitrary quantum number sink, and to me, that's just not realistic.
Time travel machines are artifacts of a pure gravitational theory, in my opinion. They just don't exist.
Well, the idea of "borrowing" energy from one time to give it to another is a little suspect. It sounds a lot like several quantum effects, which are all extremely short, because of Heisenberg uncertainty : here you're talking about a huge shift in energy, over an arbitrary length of time - from a quantum point of view, this just doesn't sit right.
:) The "on paper" bit is all that's important, because it's determining whether or not the whole theory is self-consistent or not, and from my point of view, it's not. Any bits of "well, the wormhole can gain and lose energy" are just cheap tricks.
:)
Actually, we can measure the energy of a wormhole needed for these things: it's relatively easy, since we know the curvature of spacetime, which determines the mass. So, it's pretty much straightforward.
We're so far from the "reality" situation it's not worth discussing - what you're saying makes it hard are all engineering problems, which from a theorists' point of view, can be solved with an appropriate amount of man-hours.
That and it requires negative energy. Can't forget that.
That's such a cheesy way of justifying it. You still have problems with every other quantity that's conserved: charge, lepton number, spin, etc. And that's not even getting into the entropy situation. Last time I checked wormholes, like black holes, should only have charge+spin+energy. So the generation of ridiculous numbers of distinct particles by the wormhole would be exceedingly bizarre.
Plus then I would hate to think what would happen if someone heavier than the wormhole tried to pass through it.
The "rarity" explanation is a real dangerous one, because that then starts to break down a lot of physics that we have: equivalence principles, space symmetry, etc. It could be true. But we have no evidence for it, and it certainly looks like the Universe behaves itself even to ridiculous distances (like, back to 100Kyr after the big bang, when the CMBR was formed).
As for the hard evidence for time-translation symmetry, it's not really important whether or not there's evidence for it - the point is that relativity is basically founded upon the fact that there's no unique point in space or in time. If you break that, then the whole theory becomes questionable - then there is a preferred reference frame, etc. Since time travel as described here is based on relativity, it won't work (at least, not unless relativity really is wrong, and we're just getting really lucky coming up with this stuff with a wrong theory) because it's self-contradictory. How can you believe a theory when it disproves itself?
And the Big Bang, incidentally, is not any more special than any other point. Physics functioned the same way then as it functions now. The fact that there's no time before it isn't important. The time-translation symmetry says that physics works the same at any point in time, not that the configuration of spacetime at every point is identical.
Argh, to the fact that I had to travel for several days, so this will be gone in the mix...
:) However, if a person comes back from the future, and gives information about the future, it is repeatable every time. I'm sure if I thought about it a bunch I could use information theory to show that picking a random string from pi has a very low information count, but someone coming back from the future has a very high information count - it's a question of the distribution of the system. The time traveler's information always HAS to work out, but a random string from Pi does not. That's how you could simply prove the truth of a time traveler.
The question I brought up before was a question of repeatability: if you pick a string of digits from Pi, and decode them as a JPEG, you might get a newspaper from 2020. However, that will only happen, say, one time in several times 10^50 or something like that.
Next step: What you're describing is what I described in other posts: something similar to Reimann surfaces in complex logarithms - a multiply-valued function. The only problem is conservation of energy - you can't just strip it from a "random" location, as how would it go away from there? Conservation of energy would have to be replaced with some multitemporal conservation of energy-thingy, and that (I think) would have some problems with Heisenberg uncertainty.
I dunno. It's crap. Basic stuff here: it's violating Heisenberg uncertainty, I think. Time travel is basically "borrowing" energy from the universe with the promise that you'll return it later (when the said time travel trip actually occurs). Heisenberg uncertainty basically says that borrowing energy is okay, so long as the time is infinitesimally short (spread in energy * spread in time = h-bar - yes, it should be greater-than, but in this situation it should probably be equal-to, as the situation should minimize it, or at least fix it) that is, energy and time uncertainties are coupled.
I wasn't talking about another time traveler. I was talking about the person himself coming back. That is, me telling me how to become rich. That's not something that could be passed off as coincidence.
There's also the issue of repeatability - if you could repeat your newspaper trick indefinitely, I'd say you just violated the laws of physics. However, I could repeat the time travelling trick indefinitely.
Regarding the information bit, you have to be careful: information is entropy, so there are physical laws regarding it - there's a big debate going on about whether or not black holes destroy information. If I thought about it long enough, I'm sure this would be an issue too. The question is "where did the information come from?" Once you have a sheet of paper telling you how to get rich, you didn't come up with it on your own.
Let me put it this way. You build your time machine, and say "When I become rich, I'm going to write it all down, bring it back to myself and give it to me now." So, your future self steps through your time machine, and hands you the piece of paper. He helps you through doing all of the things you need to do, and then when you're rich, he sends you off back through the time machine to give the piece of paper he gave you to yourself in the past. Think "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" (bizarrely enough). This is perfectly valid physics - everything I described is a closed timelike loop, INCLUDING the piece of paper that no one wrote that came into being and looped through.
Now, when you try to say "oh, well that can't happen" - if that can't, then neither can normal self-satisfying time travel. They're the same thing - closed timelike loops.
It's true that no evidence doesn't imply that it couldn't exist. However, conservation of energy is just such an overreaching principle that it would take a LOT of effort to dislodge it.
re: observations -
That's my point exactly. We never would have developed the idea of conservation of matter/energy if this were true - but we did, because we didn't see any examples of it being violated.
Finally: the comment that I was making:
Conservation of energy is a statement that the Universe is symmetric under time-translation - that is, there is no point along the time axis of the Universe that is "special". If we break conservation of energy, that implies that that period in time is "special" somehow. You can already see large portions of physics (including relativity, which is what this is based on!) going out the window...
Man. It's at these times that I like to bring up the "flying winged monkey" example to people to remind them exactly what closed timelike loops imply. :)
I swear - GR theoreticians drive me nuts. It's like they look at their nice little theory, find something that blatantly contradicts other theories (which are disjoint from their own - cf. gravity and quantum field theory) and in their own arrogance, insist that their theory must be right, and the other is flawed. They don't blatantly do this, of course, but stating that time travel can exist fundamentally is the same thing.
Personally, if I were them, I'd start looking at a way in the theory to disallow time travel, and see where that takes you. Throw it in ad-hoc at first, and go backwards from there.
Yes. Point. However, the idea is that we have a mountain of observational data supporting the fact that this does NOT exist, and none supporting the fact that it does exist. I tend to believe the huge reams of data.
That is, imagine back hundreds of years ago, when people were just figuring out conservation of matter - weighing burned wood and the gases left off, for instance: imagine if they had found out that in some bizarre circumstances, matter WASN'T conserved. They wouldn't've known it was due to time travel. It just would've appeared as violation of conservation of energy.
So, yah. I concede that point. However, throwing conservation of energy out the window is NOT something you want to do lightly. It screws up a LOT of things, even if it only happens under "abnormal" circumstances. Energy has to be conserved. If CTLs and stuff like that exist, then there's a "global temporal" conservation of energy, with conservation of energy locally as an approximation. It's possible. I just don't consider it likely.
Woah, woah, woah: all three of the statements you just made superscribe another "timeline" on top of time itself - you can't change a 4D universe - it's there, complete, done, finito. You can't "split" a 4D universe.
:)
What you COULD say, however, is that all of the Universes were already there, and that when a time traveller enters history, or changes history, he moves into a parallel universe - that is, a Universe which is distinct from his original. Something like a Riemann surface shift. Apparently he gains 2 pi.
However, I don't buy this. It doesn't make sense. Take the example of a person going back and convincing himself not to enter the time machine. OK. He does. Now there are TWO of him in that universe, where before there was only one. Where the heck did that mass come from? (the other universe, yes - but when did we sacrifice local conservation of energy/matter - which we have mountains of observational data for - for "global temporal" conservation of energy/matter - for which we have no observational data for?)
Taken to its logical extreme, a civilization could turn an "open" universe into a "closed" universe by sacrificing some adjacent quantum reality. To me, this is way beyond the boundaries of what could happen.