Then perhaps you would care to clarify how our ability to detect dark matter due to the influence it exerts on other things is different from our ability to detect something more "mundane" like magnetism also through the influence it exerts on other things?
Wow. I don't think you could be more wrong. At Stanford I worked among some of the top minds in physics in the world, and every one of them found it a funny joke. I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if a physicist wrote the original joke in the first place. It's just self-deprecating humor.
Sigh. I admit to being somewhat oversensitive toward negative perceptions of science, and I've seen that joke before in collections with other jokes that had a much stronger anti-science bias. It appears I have been outvoted regarding the humor value of the joke in question.:(
And if you can't laught at yourself, you shouldn't be taken seriously.
Certainly true. Of course, in my defense, I'm not actually a physicist, so that doesn't apply to me here.;)
The analogy is correct because your question is an attempt to extrapolate an additional orthagonal relationship from any given n-dimension while somehow still remaining in the confines of said dimension.
Wow.
I'm pretty sure you understood my analogy better than I did when I wrote it.:)
Yeah, I'm aware of that, but that's generally done in cases where a spherical object in a frictionless environment offers at least a rough approximation of real-world behavior.
Okay, fine. It also appeals to some physics undergrads and the easily amused.;P
I never said the joke wasn't funny. I said it was humor derived from misrepresenting a concept, which is a type of humor typicaly received more favorably by the less educated.
Yes, I understand that, you understand that, but what it is going to do is add fuel to the fire that "These 'big shot' scientists are resisting review of their own views when they shout we should review ours; when they do review their data, they find their base assumptions are wrong; assumptions that are used in the secular view of a godless universe. If their model is wrong when assumed right, and they assume our model is wrong, then are their godless universe assumptions also implicitly wrong?"
Well, I admit that I am ill-equipped to deal with the refutation of patent nonsense. If you have any suggestions on the matter, I'd love to hear them.
Substitute 'science' for 'religion' and I am sure I have heard a number of preaches say the exact same thing.
And it would be perfectly appropriate in that case as well. If you ask an honest theologian for a religious answer to an irrelevant question, they'll tell you exactly the same thing.
Any organization that refuses to attempt to answer questions it can not, and tells its followers not to ask them is based on faith, plain and simple.
Total non sequitur. Please do not state nonsense.
Rather to the contrary, an organization that attempts to answer questions that are impossible for it to answer is dishonest and probably malicious. It is the people who prefer meaningless answers to honest uncertainty that take things on faith, because they insist on absolute certainty where it is not possible.
Do you also blame science for not answering questions such as "Should I put mustard on this hamburger?" or perhaps "where did I put my car keys?" Forget all the successes of modern science that make things like posting on slashdot possible, clearly science is based on faith, because it is unable to answer such simple, everyday questions! Oh, the humanity!
On another note, what are your thoughts on abiogenisis, science has never proven that but many people accept is as fact.
It is accepted as highly likely because there are plausible mechanisms for its occurance and no superior explanation for the origin of life has been proposed. I'm uncertain of the relevance here.
If they both began at that point then where did the vast amount of energy which was present at the big bang come from? Remember that energy can never be created or destroyed so.... Where man, where?
Who knows? We don't. All we know is that that energy was there. Science is not in the business of speculating on things that cannot be determined or falsified.
Really, like others have said, the scientific theory of the big bang is based as much in faith as the religious insanity that claims god created everything.
No. No, it isn't. The theory of the big bang is based on logical extrapolation from what we can observe about the universe. Just because the current understanding does not satisfy your curiousity does not make it arbitrary.
How is your analogy even remotely correct? I am not asking a question which has already been proven to be false, I am simply asking science to explain, even a tiny amount, the origin of the whole basis of their theory.
No, you are asking science to answer a question that is MEANINGLESS. The "origin of the whole basis of the theory" lies in the data we have collected about the universe today. The big bang theory wasn't just made up because it sounded nice, it was reasoned out as an explaination for observations, and not knowing what happened "before" the big bang does not in any way detract from the descriptive and predictive value of the theory.
I personally believe in the scientific explanation of the creation of the universe, I also admit it is based on faith. (I have heard it called the 'cult of scientism')
For you, it may be based on faith. You say you believe in science, but clearly you do not understand it.
EXACTLY! But ever notice how most of the science community refuses to even address this issue (kinda like you are now by hurling random insults). While the big bang is not based on speculation, EVERYTHING that happened before it is. If you are comfortable with an explanation that refuses to address anything prior to its own existence and attempts to dissuade people from even asking questions about it, more power to you brother. (most people call it religion but I guess you can call it science)
Science refuses to address the issue for the same reason that they refuse to address the issue of whether I should wear a black or a blue shirt today--because the "issue" has no bearing on science whatsoever. Furthermore, I HAVE addressed the issue, by explaining why you are misunderstanding the concepts involved. It is not my responsibility to give you a science education; I encourage you to seek a better understanding of science if you still do not understand.
You are indeed correct that the idea of anything happening before the big bang is speculation. That is precisely why science does not say anything about it. Please do not ask for scientific answers to non-scientific questions and then blame science for refusing to answer!
Noone knows for SURE the big bang happened. What we DO know is mountains of data for which the big bang is the best current explanation.
In contrast, creationists have evidence roughly amounting to "because that's how I want it to be", with a pile of fudged data and outright lies to prop it up with.
I trust the difference between the two is easily understood.
Not most of the science professors I've taken classes from. Then again, some of them were pretty humor impaired.:D
Suffice it to say it sounds funnier the less you actually understand the subject matter. It has a very shallow perception of the subject; someone who actually knows the material is more likely to think "wait, that's not how it works..."
Have you ever seen technology-oriented jokes of the variety that poke fun at how difficult simple electronic devices are to use? The whole "haha, the power went out a month ago and the VCR still flashes 12:00, isn't that funny" variety of stuff. People who are clueless about technology usually find such humor funny; people who actually know their stuff are more likely to scratch their heads and say "but that's stupid." The same thing is going on with that joke.
Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that even if an entire theory is proven to be crap, that doesn't change the fact that the now-crappy theory still makes correct predictions within a certain subset of data.
Even if everything we think we know today about science is later proven false, the new theories will not contradict our current theories when applied to measurements we currently have, anymore than discovering an improved theory of gravity will make apples suddenly fall upward. (deciding whether or not thousands of Macs suddenly flying off into space would be a good thing is another matter.)
There is a tendency among people who enjoy highly speculative ideas that contradict known physics to say "well, we don't know, so faster-than-light travel/instantaneous communication/psychic powers/creationism/whatever COULD be possible." Really, it's not probably going to happen.
Your question is meaningless. There is no "before" the big bang, because time AND space began at that point. "Prior" to the big bang is about as meaningful as asking what point on the Earth's surface is the center of the world.
There is no known way--and likely never will be--to know anything about existance outside of the post-big bang observable universe, other than indulging in wild and baseless speculation.
I, on the other hand, am very suspicious of how knowledgeable you are about physics.
While the simulation in question makes huge sweeping simplifications (including the amusing--if reasonable--omission of the relatively insignificant contribution of visible matter), it seems to be based on cosmological physics that have been thoroughly tested and produce reliable predictions. The more speculative stuff doesn't really even enter into it.
Besides, the purpose of a simulation like this isn't to be accurate itself. The purpose is to draw out the logical conclusions of our current understandings of the universe so that any INaccuracies can be noted and used as guides on how to further refine the existing theories.
I generally find that joke is found to be funny in direct proportion to the audience's scientific illiteracy. "Har har, look at those silly scientists, spouting their nonsense. I'll just sit here and laugh at them while I enjoy all the lovely modern technology their work has made possible."
While mildly amusing, it betrays a deep failure of understanding the value of analytical simplification. Just because something sounds silly to the uninformed does not mean it has no value.
As pitiful as the current public understanding of science is (as evidenced by such things as the rampant belief in nonsense like 'creationism'), it'd be nice if the problem not further exacerbated.
Whether we know WHY visible matter moves the way it does is not at issue; the issue is that we do know HOW visible matter moves, and in fact we understand it very well and can predict it with great accuracy and consistency. Of course the universe doesn't recognize our "simplistic definitions"--our definitions recognize the universe. There's quite a difference.
There's nothing arbitrary about it. Science is a description of how the world around us behaves; inventing fanciful and largely frivolous reasons to explain WHY is best left to philosophers and theologians.
I suspect your science education has been thoroughly inadequate. Please rectify this tragic oversight before having further opinions on scientific matters.
So, where does the notion that we can reason about "free will" in response to the real world come from? It seems to me to be little more than an attractive bit of philosophical maundering; a comforting ideal with little evidence to support it. In conclusion, let me pose two questions: (a) "In what tangible, measurable sense does free will really exist?" and
(b) "What tangible form of emperical measurement could we use to prove that your answer to question (a) is correct?"
I've considered these ideas before; here's a possible angle of attack you've not quite covered.
For the purposes of this post, 'deterministic' will mean "behavior can be reliably predicted well in advance by outside observers" and 'free will' will mean "strongly self-influencing and cannot be predicted in advance".
1) The assumption is made that the human mind is not intrinsically different from the rest of the universe, because anything else ranges from absurd to merely unproveable.
2) Quantum mechanics requires that the universe behave probabalistically; over multiple events these probabilities strongly converge to certain typical behavior which is well-defined and predictable. Thus the universe is deterministic with very minute variations.
3) Some large-scale systems can be easily observed that, despite being clearly deterministic, behave in ways that allow small differences in starting condition to propagate into very large differences in condition over time. The rate of divergence will vary, but for any given resolution of measurement and understanding of the system, there will eventually be a predictive horizon past which further attempts to forecast behavior will be no more accurate than random chance. Such systems are called "chaotic" and the weather is a typical example.
4) The human brain is strongly self-influencing; both because all of its input comes from organs under its control (the eyes let the brain see, but the brain tells them where to look, etc.), and because it is capable of considering its own structure (we can study the brain's functions). The brain's own lack of sensation and isolation within the skull protects it from more direct interference by outside conditions.
5) The human brain's current state changes with great rapidity, even when the human it is attatched to is relatively inactive.
6) Individual neurons are small enough for quantum effects to potentially be observed; thus small variations can be easily introduced into the current state of the brain.
7) If we consider other isolated, self-modifying systems we find that they are inevitably chaotic in behavior (as in point 3).
8) The brain is therefore subject to random variation in current state (#6), and small variations propagate into large variations (#7), and all of this likely happens quickly (#5), suggesting that the predictive horizon for the human brain is likely very short, and will remain so even with better understanding of it.
A self-influencing system whose behavior cannot be predicted with any accuracy is not what would generally be called 'deterministic' in any meaningful way, and certainly isn't under the definition I gave above. It may not be 'free will' as defined by complacent philosophers who neither understand nor care about advances of the physical sciences, but it's the closest you're likely to get to a rigorous definition of the term.
I am aware that I've probably defined the weather to have free will; as much as this might amuse proponents of the gaia hypothesis, applying a term meant for humans to a planet is probably not meaningful, even if it has the same properties. Whether a system of that size could be regarded as having a "mind" is akin to considering whether an ant colony or a major urban area could be considered as a single organism, and while interesting is largely beside the point here.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Then perhaps you would care to clarify how our ability to detect dark matter due to the influence it exerts on other things is different from our ability to detect something more "mundane" like magnetism also through the influence it exerts on other things?
Gives a new meaning to "thumbnail"...
Wow. I don't think you could be more wrong. At Stanford I worked among some of the top minds in physics in the world, and every one of them found it a funny joke. I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if a physicist wrote the original joke in the first place. It's just self-deprecating humor.
:(
;)
Sigh. I admit to being somewhat oversensitive toward negative perceptions of science, and I've seen that joke before in collections with other jokes that had a much stronger anti-science bias. It appears I have been outvoted regarding the humor value of the joke in question.
And if you can't laught at yourself, you shouldn't be taken seriously.
Certainly true. Of course, in my defense, I'm not actually a physicist, so that doesn't apply to me here.
The analogy is correct because your question is an attempt to extrapolate an additional orthagonal relationship from any given n-dimension while somehow still remaining in the confines of said dimension.
:)
Wow.
I'm pretty sure you understood my analogy better than I did when I wrote it.
I think you've lost your sense of humour.
;)
It's not lost at all! It's filed away neatly in my closet with other assorted knick-knacks of no real importance.
Yeah, I'm aware of that, but that's generally done in cases where a spherical object in a frictionless environment offers at least a rough approximation of real-world behavior.
How delightfully amusing. Shall I mark the date in my calendar, perhaps?
Okay, fine. It also appeals to some physics undergrads and the easily amused. ;P
I never said the joke wasn't funny. I said it was humor derived from misrepresenting a concept, which is a type of humor typicaly received more favorably by the less educated.
Yes, I understand that, you understand that, but what it is going to do is add fuel to the fire that "These 'big shot' scientists are resisting review of their own views when they shout we should review ours; when they do review their data, they find their base assumptions are wrong; assumptions that are used in the secular view of a godless universe. If their model is wrong when assumed right, and they assume our model is wrong, then are their godless universe assumptions also implicitly wrong?"
Well, I admit that I am ill-equipped to deal with the refutation of patent nonsense. If you have any suggestions on the matter, I'd love to hear them.
Substitute 'science' for 'religion' and I am sure I have heard a number of preaches say the exact same thing.
And it would be perfectly appropriate in that case as well. If you ask an honest theologian for a religious answer to an irrelevant question, they'll tell you exactly the same thing.
Any organization that refuses to attempt to answer questions it can not, and tells its followers not to ask them is based on faith, plain and simple.
Total non sequitur. Please do not state nonsense.
Rather to the contrary, an organization that attempts to answer questions that are impossible for it to answer is dishonest and probably malicious. It is the people who prefer meaningless answers to honest uncertainty that take things on faith, because they insist on absolute certainty where it is not possible.
Do you also blame science for not answering questions such as "Should I put mustard on this hamburger?" or perhaps "where did I put my car keys?" Forget all the successes of modern science that make things like posting on slashdot possible, clearly science is based on faith, because it is unable to answer such simple, everyday questions! Oh, the humanity!
On another note, what are your thoughts on abiogenisis, science has never proven that but many people accept is as fact.
It is accepted as highly likely because there are plausible mechanisms for its occurance and no superior explanation for the origin of life has been proposed. I'm uncertain of the relevance here.
Yes, and by that standard, the existance of atoms, gravity, and a host of other well-understood phenomena have only been inferred indirectly.
Just because you can't SEE something doesn't mean its existance can't be reliably measured.
If they both began at that point then where did the vast amount of energy which was present at the big bang come from? Remember that energy can never be created or destroyed so.... Where man, where?
Who knows? We don't. All we know is that that energy was there. Science is not in the business of speculating on things that cannot be determined or falsified.
Really, like others have said, the scientific theory of the big bang is based as much in faith as the religious insanity that claims god created everything.
No. No, it isn't. The theory of the big bang is based on logical extrapolation from what we can observe about the universe. Just because the current understanding does not satisfy your curiousity does not make it arbitrary.
How is your analogy even remotely correct? I am not asking a question which has already been proven to be false, I am simply asking science to explain, even a tiny amount, the origin of the whole basis of their theory.
No, you are asking science to answer a question that is MEANINGLESS. The "origin of the whole basis of the theory" lies in the data we have collected about the universe today. The big bang theory wasn't just made up because it sounded nice, it was reasoned out as an explaination for observations, and not knowing what happened "before" the big bang does not in any way detract from the descriptive and predictive value of the theory.
I personally believe in the scientific explanation of the creation of the universe, I also admit it is based on faith. (I have heard it called the 'cult of scientism')
For you, it may be based on faith. You say you believe in science, but clearly you do not understand it.
EXACTLY! But ever notice how most of the science community refuses to even address this issue (kinda like you are now by hurling random insults). While the big bang is not based on speculation, EVERYTHING that happened before it is. If you are comfortable with an explanation that refuses to address anything prior to its own existence and attempts to dissuade people from even asking questions about it, more power to you brother. (most people call it religion but I guess you can call it science)
Science refuses to address the issue for the same reason that they refuse to address the issue of whether I should wear a black or a blue shirt today--because the "issue" has no bearing on science whatsoever. Furthermore, I HAVE addressed the issue, by explaining why you are misunderstanding the concepts involved. It is not my responsibility to give you a science education; I encourage you to seek a better understanding of science if you still do not understand.
You are indeed correct that the idea of anything happening before the big bang is speculation. That is precisely why science does not say anything about it. Please do not ask for scientific answers to non-scientific questions and then blame science for refusing to answer!
Noone knows for SURE the big bang happened. What we DO know is mountains of data for which the big bang is the best current explanation.
In contrast, creationists have evidence roughly amounting to "because that's how I want it to be", with a pile of fudged data and outright lies to prop it up with.
I trust the difference between the two is easily understood.
Not most of the science professors I've taken classes from. Then again, some of them were pretty humor impaired. :D
Suffice it to say it sounds funnier the less you actually understand the subject matter. It has a very shallow perception of the subject; someone who actually knows the material is more likely to think "wait, that's not how it works..."
Have you ever seen technology-oriented jokes of the variety that poke fun at how difficult simple electronic devices are to use? The whole "haha, the power went out a month ago and the VCR still flashes 12:00, isn't that funny" variety of stuff. People who are clueless about technology usually find such humor funny; people who actually know their stuff are more likely to scratch their heads and say "but that's stupid." The same thing is going on with that joke.
Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that even if an entire theory is proven to be crap, that doesn't change the fact that the now-crappy theory still makes correct predictions within a certain subset of data.
Even if everything we think we know today about science is later proven false, the new theories will not contradict our current theories when applied to measurements we currently have, anymore than discovering an improved theory of gravity will make apples suddenly fall upward.
(deciding whether or not thousands of Macs suddenly flying off into space would be a good thing is another matter.)
There is a tendency among people who enjoy highly speculative ideas that contradict known physics to say "well, we don't know, so faster-than-light travel/instantaneous communication/psychic powers/creationism/whatever COULD be possible." Really, it's not probably going to happen.
Your question is meaningless. There is no "before" the big bang, because time AND space began at that point. "Prior" to the big bang is about as meaningful as asking what point on the Earth's surface is the center of the world.
There is no known way--and likely never will be--to know anything about existance outside of the post-big bang observable universe, other than indulging in wild and baseless speculation.
Where did you get the idea that dark matter is not oberservable?
Just because a magnetic field is invisible doesn't mean you can't put it on your fridge and see if it sticks.
I, on the other hand, am very suspicious of how knowledgeable you are about physics.
While the simulation in question makes huge sweeping simplifications (including the amusing--if reasonable--omission of the relatively insignificant contribution of visible matter), it seems to be based on cosmological physics that have been thoroughly tested and produce reliable predictions. The more speculative stuff doesn't really even enter into it.
Besides, the purpose of a simulation like this isn't to be accurate itself. The purpose is to draw out the logical conclusions of our current understandings of the universe so that any INaccuracies can be noted and used as guides on how to further refine the existing theories.
Bah.
I generally find that joke is found to be funny in direct proportion to the audience's scientific illiteracy. "Har har, look at those silly scientists, spouting their nonsense. I'll just sit here and laugh at them while I enjoy all the lovely modern technology their work has made possible."
While mildly amusing, it betrays a deep failure of understanding the value of analytical simplification. Just because something sounds silly to the uninformed does not mean it has no value.
As pitiful as the current public understanding of science is (as evidenced by such things as the rampant belief in nonsense like 'creationism'), it'd be nice if the problem not further exacerbated.
Whether we know WHY visible matter moves the way it does is not at issue; the issue is that we do know HOW visible matter moves, and in fact we understand it very well and can predict it with great accuracy and consistency. Of course the universe doesn't recognize our "simplistic definitions"--our definitions recognize the universe. There's quite a difference.
There's nothing arbitrary about it. Science is a description of how the world around us behaves; inventing fanciful and largely frivolous reasons to explain WHY is best left to philosophers and theologians.
I suspect your science education has been thoroughly inadequate. Please rectify this tragic oversight before having further opinions on scientific matters.
For the purposes of this post, 'deterministic' will mean "behavior can be reliably predicted well in advance by outside observers" and 'free will' will mean "strongly self-influencing and cannot be predicted in advance".
1) The assumption is made that the human mind is not intrinsically different from the rest of the universe, because anything else ranges from absurd to merely unproveable.
2) Quantum mechanics requires that the universe behave probabalistically; over multiple events these probabilities strongly converge to certain typical behavior which is well-defined and predictable. Thus the universe is deterministic with very minute variations.
3) Some large-scale systems can be easily observed that, despite being clearly deterministic, behave in ways that allow small differences in starting condition to propagate into very large differences in condition over time. The rate of divergence will vary, but for any given resolution of measurement and understanding of the system, there will eventually be a predictive horizon past which further attempts to forecast behavior will be no more accurate than random chance. Such systems are called "chaotic" and the weather is a typical example.
4) The human brain is strongly self-influencing; both because all of its input comes from organs under its control (the eyes let the brain see, but the brain tells them where to look, etc.), and because it is capable of considering its own structure (we can study the brain's functions). The brain's own lack of sensation and isolation within the skull protects it from more direct interference by outside conditions.
5) The human brain's current state changes with great rapidity, even when the human it is attatched to is relatively inactive.
6) Individual neurons are small enough for quantum effects to potentially be observed; thus small variations can be easily introduced into the current state of the brain.
7) If we consider other isolated, self-modifying systems we find that they are inevitably chaotic in behavior (as in point 3).
8) The brain is therefore subject to random variation in current state (#6), and small variations propagate into large variations (#7), and all of this likely happens quickly (#5), suggesting that the predictive horizon for the human brain is likely very short, and will remain so even with better understanding of it.
A self-influencing system whose behavior cannot be predicted with any accuracy is not what would generally be called 'deterministic' in any meaningful way, and certainly isn't under the definition I gave above. It may not be 'free will' as defined by complacent philosophers who neither understand nor care about advances of the physical sciences, but it's the closest you're likely to get to a rigorous definition of the term.
I am aware that I've probably defined the weather to have free will; as much as this might amuse proponents of the gaia hypothesis, applying a term meant for humans to a planet is probably not meaningful, even if it has the same properties. Whether a system of that size could be regarded as having a "mind" is akin to considering whether an ant colony or a major urban area could be considered as a single organism, and while interesting is largely beside the point here.