so are we saying that what came before the signs that preceded the supernova are already in our past, but the supernova itself is not?
Exactly.
The "time" is essentially a numerical label you can apply to events. Typically the label is chosen in such a way that an event at a higher time can't affect an event at a lower time. But when events are outside each other's light cones there are different ways to label spacetime so that in some labelings, one comes at an earlier "time" than the other, and in others the order is reversed. There are no physical grounds for picking one labeling over another. The point is, this labeling isn't very interesting from the point of physics. The laws of physics don't really care which has the earlier label (this is part of what Lorentz Invariance means). But the laws of physics do make a big distinction between events inside and outside a lightcone.
So, you could go with the default labeling of the events of spacetime that cosmologists use - cosmological time. From that point of view, it might be that the supernova has "already happened". But this is of no physical consequence whatsoever, it's just a convention. It's about as interesting as the date 1/1/2001, a date that some humans find special but the rest of the universe couldn't care less about.
Shaking a branch yields fruit that otherwise is unobtainable and the behavior has a definite evolutionary edge
What do you mean 'definite'? Solving such a problem requires a lot of brain power. That means a bigger brain. Brains consume energy at a prodigious rate. The human brain requires about 400 calories per day. Have you carried out the kind of cost-benefit analysis required to determine whether or not such a brain would be advantageous? Given that the vast majority of organisms on earth have brains that are smaller than humans it seems pretty clear that the advantages of large brains are not as obvious as they first appear.
Some things to weigh up in your cost-benefit analysis: the number of calories available per fruit in pre-agricultural times was much lower than what you can expect from modern cultivated fruit and if you manage to shake fruit from a tree limb you still have to share the resulting fruit with any other organisms in the area.
It seems to me you're just making up a 'just so story' without a shred of evidence. I could make up a story like that to explain why cats have wings.
I wonder. Is your inability to construct a sentence that carries meaning a clue revealing your inability to think?
And that doesn't mean these things are unknowable, and it certainly doesn't mean that there isn't or can't be a high being then ourselves such as "God" and it also doesn't mean that such a higher being could not have created us as lower lifeforms then themselves.
This is like Star Trek except with bad grammar. "high beings", "lifeforms", what are you talking about? And you need to learn the distinction between "than" and "then", something most 5 year olds understand.
...at this point, everything found in biology supports evolution.
I think you're confused. At this point everything found in biology is usually interpreted within the context of evolution. But to say that everything therefore provides support for evolution is a circular argument. Phenomena are interpreted within the context of evolution because the case for evolution was successfully made long ago. If A implies B, and you therefore deduce B because you know A, you can't then use B to go back and bolster the case for A.
This really is a bad metaphor. Nobody is cracking any code, not even metaphorically speaking. The code was cracked in the 60s. What's actually happening is that people are still trying to recover the ciphertext.
The truth is that the world hasn't been created yet. We are merely the fake memories implanted in the minds of the people that God will create when he gets around to it.
Something like "World of Warcraft is making the game market more streamlined because game companies now have stiff competition." I think that's more appropriate to a world where game companies don't have an automatic right to revenue regardless of how poor their products are.
I also noticed that most Indian entrepreneurs ignore the business regulations, tax requirements and licensing regulations
But I'm sure they rapidly remember regulations about property ownership when their hungry neighbors try to grab what they have. Indian businessmen ignore regulations that are not in their favor when it's convenient, not because they are making some anarcho-capitalist point. Just how dumb are you?
Except that a real orbit is a geodesic in space*time*. But one in space might be a good start. (I think Gauss had this idea in *space* before Einstein had the idea of doing it in *spacetime*.)
I'm not sure it would help with most aspects of relativity.
It might help people understand the notion of a quotient space, a topological space that is constructed by "gluing" different points together so that they are treated as the same point.
Portal technology allows you to join arbitrary regions of space so that light travels from one to the other, So here's a room divided into 4 quadrants:
+-------+
+.A...B.+
+.......+
+.C...D.+
+-------+
Go east from A, say, and you get to B. With portal technology you can throw away D and join the south edge of B to the east edge of C. The next result: you walk 270 degrees around the room and you end up back where you started! This is essentially what physicists mean by a curved spacetime. In this case the spacetime is "piecewise" linear with all of the curvature concentrated at the center of the room. And when you join regions with portals you can potentially use any affine transform you like. For example you could have a ring corridor with the property that when you walk around it once you are half the size you were when you started. You might see yourself half size (or twice as large) if you look far enough. This is similar to the way a mathematician might build a manifold using 'charts' and 'atlases'. (A non-orientable manifold would be one where walking through a certain door reflected you, or the universe, depending on your point of view.)
(Note, I don't mean that there are 3 rooms, A, B and C. I mean one big room with 3 regions, and maybe a thin pillar in the center. It would look like an ordinary room until you dropped some objects and started walking around it. And of course it would get very tricky to deal with someone in one of the other regions shooting at you. You'd see them in multiple directions.)
You can even do weirder things like make portals work in spacetime...
It's as factual as the aliens who built the pyramids, the UFOs in the bible and the plots to assassinate JFK that have been reported on the History channel.
...trivial to say on this uninteresting subject, here's the story again, and this time we'll help you by providing a selection of trivial and uninteresting comments that you can copy and paste into your own trivial and uninteresting replies.
Slashdot Mirror
The "time" is essentially a numerical label you can apply to events. Typically the label is chosen in such a way that an event at a higher time can't affect an event at a lower time. But when events are outside each other's light cones there are different ways to label spacetime so that in some labelings, one comes at an earlier "time" than the other, and in others the order is reversed. There are no physical grounds for picking one labeling over another. The point is, this labeling isn't very interesting from the point of physics. The laws of physics don't really care which has the earlier label (this is part of what Lorentz Invariance means). But the laws of physics do make a big distinction between events inside and outside a lightcone.
So, you could go with the default labeling of the events of spacetime that cosmologists use - cosmological time. From that point of view, it might be that the supernova has "already happened". But this is of no physical consequence whatsoever, it's just a convention. It's about as interesting as the date 1/1/2001, a date that some humans find special but the rest of the universe couldn't care less about.
Some things to weigh up in your cost-benefit analysis: the number of calories available per fruit in pre-agricultural times was much lower than what you can expect from modern cultivated fruit and if you manage to shake fruit from a tree limb you still have to share the resulting fruit with any other organisms in the area.
It seems to me you're just making up a 'just so story' without a shred of evidence. I could make up a story like that to explain why cats have wings.
And that doesn't mean these things are unknowable, and it certainly doesn't mean that there isn't or can't be a high being then ourselves such as "God" and it also doesn't mean that such a higher being could not have created us as lower lifeforms then themselves.
This is like Star Trek except with bad grammar. "high beings", "lifeforms", what are you talking about? And you need to learn the distinction between "than" and "then", something most 5 year olds understand."Nachash" () is merely the Hebrew word for snake, not anyone's name. (And I notice I can't insert Hebrew characters into a /. posting.)
Keep reading up on it. Eventually you too will figure out how to put something on the web.
What do they teach in relativity class these days?
Is that 'comming' as in "I'm coming to get you" or "I'm cumming all over her"?
This really is a bad metaphor. Nobody is cracking any code, not even metaphorically speaking. The code was cracked in the 60s. What's actually happening is that people are still trying to recover the ciphertext.
The truth is that the world hasn't been created yet. We are merely the fake memories implanted in the minds of the people that God will create when he gets around to it.
...the English language. Peaceful, not peaceable.
Hammurabi, Star Trek, the text only Lunar Lander, Those were the days!
Something like "World of Warcraft is making the game market more streamlined because game companies now have stiff competition." I think that's more appropriate to a world where game companies don't have an automatic right to revenue regardless of how poor their products are.
The Sahara is currently as dry as it was about 13,000 years ago.
What? Are we only supposed to joke about nice things like ponies and fluffy pillows?
Except that a real orbit is a geodesic in space*time*. But one in space might be a good start. (I think Gauss had this idea in *space* before Einstein had the idea of doing it in *spacetime*.)
It might help people understand the notion of a quotient space, a topological space that is constructed by "gluing" different points together so that they are treated as the same point.
+.A...B.+
+.......+
+.C...D.+
+-------+
Go east from A, say, and you get to B. With portal technology you can throw away D and join the south edge of B to the east edge of C. The next result: you walk 270 degrees around the room and you end up back where you started! This is essentially what physicists mean by a curved spacetime. In this case the spacetime is "piecewise" linear with all of the curvature concentrated at the center of the room. And when you join regions with portals you can potentially use any affine transform you like. For example you could have a ring corridor with the property that when you walk around it once you are half the size you were when you started. You might see yourself half size (or twice as large) if you look far enough. This is similar to the way a mathematician might build a manifold using 'charts' and 'atlases'. (A non-orientable manifold would be one where walking through a certain door reflected you, or the universe, depending on your point of view.)
(Note, I don't mean that there are 3 rooms, A, B and C. I mean one big room with 3 regions, and maybe a thin pillar in the center. It would look like an ordinary room until you dropped some objects and started walking around it. And of course it would get very tricky to deal with someone in one of the other regions shooting at you. You'd see them in multiple directions.)
You can even do weirder things like make portals work in spacetime...
It's as factual as the aliens who built the pyramids, the UFOs in the bible and the plots to assassinate JFK that have been reported on the History channel.
...trivial to say on this uninteresting subject, here's the story again, and this time we'll help you by providing a selection of trivial and uninteresting comments that you can copy and paste into your own trivial and uninteresting replies.