The Last Word

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

That is an example of an unflattering place description. I use it as one, I know that, place special emphasis on "from".

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

It's the same with my home town. We've got two paper mills and export hockey players. 'Nuff said.

 

And I'm moving back there in a couple of months. ^^

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

Permanently, or just until the heat dies down a bit?

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

Not sayin'.

 

No, I'm doing the clinical part of my education in Norrbotten's County Hospital outside Luleå, and I'm planning to commute from Piteå. I figure one hour in bus, one way.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

Take reading material. Unless you are more adept than I am at sleeping in a vehicle.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

I have no problem with that -- basic training taught me to sleep anywhere and wake up when I have to. ^^

 

I imagine it will be a golden opportunity to read up on my homework.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

No' date=' it's not about [u']perception[/u]. Clocks moving with respect to each other must "tick" at different rates, assuming they "tick" at the same rate when you bring them to a common velocity.

 

This is because the speed of light is finite and a constant and the same constant in all frames. This means that you cannot watch the "ticks" from clocks far away from you "as they occur". You receive the "ticks" from those clocks at a time after they were made at that clock, and the time difference is related to the distance of the clock ... which changes if the clock is moving with respect to you.

Well you did say previously that relativity is hard to grasp by lay people...

Chrystal clear.

 

Yeah ditto.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

That's a good last word.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

Yeah, relatively speaking

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

The problem lies in your naive, untested assumption that time is the same everywhere. In common terrestrial experience you don't encounter things that lead you to recognize that you are even making such an assumption. It made the papers earlier this year when relativistic differences were detected in ordinary-scale experiments at Earth's surface ... it took tremendous advances in metrology (measurement technology) to measure them.

 

This is why physicists find it often exasperating to have discussions like this. The philosopher labels physicists as narrow-minded and unable to question their assumptions while insisting on all kinds of unreasonable things, but the same philosopher is incapable of recognizing that he is clinging to an unrecognized -- and testable! -- assumption about the nature of time and is being utterly unreasonable in his rejection of an alternate point of view. There is a steadfast refusal even to acknowledge that assumption is being made, let alone that one could test the assumption by experiment. That would involve numbers and math (and ooh, philosophers hate math, hate hate hate, because some math problems have answers that are either right or wrong and no amount of, ah, dialectic, can sway the rightness or wrongness of the answer) and getting one's hands dirty with an instrument.

 

Time doesn't go at the same rate everywhere under all conditions. That assumption is wrong. Predictions made with that assumption don't match what you observe, when you're in a situation where that assumption actually matters.

 

Instead, the thing that is the same everywhere under all conditions is the speed of light.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

Plaudite, cives!

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

The problem lies in your naive' date=' untested assumption that time is the same everywhere. In common terrestrial experience you don't encounter things that lead you to recognize that you are even making such an assumption. It made the papers earlier this year when relativistic differences were detected in ordinary-scale experiments at Earth's surface ... it took tremendous advances in metrology (measurement technology) to measure them.[/quote']

Time doesn't go at the same rate everywhere under all conditions. That assumption is wrong. Predictions made with that assumption don't match what you observe, when you're in a situation where that assumption actually matters.

Is there a relationship between consciousness, perception, and time (and space)?

 

You mentioned above "common terrestrial experience", what about those people who have put their conscious outside of "terrestrial experience", would not they know that the assumption is made and render an informed opinion on that assumption?

 

I myself have had an "uncommon terrestrial experience": I was sitting in a room when it felt truly as my consciousness was beyond the boundary of time, and nearly put my consciousness outside the boundary of space too. There is indeed something that is beyond our terrestrial ability to comprehend Nature.

 

 

This is why physicists find it often exasperating to have discussions like this. The philosopher labels physicists as narrow-minded and unable to question their assumptions while insisting on all kinds of unreasonable things, but the same philosopher is incapable of recognizing that he is clinging to an unrecognized -- and testable! -- assumption about the nature of time and is being utterly unreasonable in his rejection of an alternate point of view. There is a steadfast refusal even to acknowledge that assumption is being made, let alone that one could test the assumption by experiment. That would involve numbers and math (and ooh, philosophers hate math, hate hate hate, because some math problems have answers that are either right or wrong and no amount of, ah, dialectic, can sway the rightness or wrongness of the answer) and getting one's hands dirty with an instrument.

What does that give humanity? Knowledge, wisdom, truth, or some other benefit?

 

 

Science is but a tool for humanity to use, not the only tool. The part quoted above suggests that science is the only tool that should be used to provide knowledge for humanity due to its ability to test assumptions with experiment. Am I reading your intent correctly?

 

Addendum: Giordano Bruno was a philosopher who hated math. Sir Issac Newton was a philosopher who loved math.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

Instead' date=' the thing that is the same everywhere under all conditions is the speed of light.[/quote']

An assumption. Simply we do not know "everywhere…all conditions" as our consciousness cannot fathom what "everywhere" and "all" is. It seems naive to suggest this is so. For instance that there is only one 'universe', *our* universe. We don't know if there are others nor do we know if ours is the only universe for "everywhere under all conditions" to be true or false.

 

Another is the materialistic & mechanic paradigm of modern science, reducing life, consciousness, intelligence et al, to their base elements. Are you stating that the speed of light is the same in these spheres (namely consciousness) too?

 

~~~

Honest physics question 1: what are instantons exactly. Physics or pseudo-physcis? if they are a physics notion, what is its speed? I ask as it is one notion that to me may be faster than light.

 

Honest physics question 2: Are both space, and time, inherent properties of our universe?

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

My immediate reaction is, ok, the recurrence of Humpty Dumpty's argument.

 

Instantons ... frankly, were never mentioned in my education. Looks to be a math thing, but let me do some reading.

 

And you really think you're going to get the secret of space and time in clear for free on a public board? As the quote goes in a different RPG, you don't have sufficient security clearance for that, Citizen.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

My immediate reaction is' date=' ok, the recurrence of Humpty Dumpty's argument.

My immediate reaction, after reading the link was it works both ways.

 

Instantons ... frankly, were never mentioned in my education. Looks to be a math thing, but let me do some reading.

I think this is fairly new, post 2000-ish. I was also going to mention torsion fields, but after a bit of reading, seemed more on the end of pseudoscience, well at least I thought from your pov, and which wouldn't improve my post.

 

And you really think you're going to get the secret of space and time in clear for free on a public board? As the quote goes in a different RPG, you don't have sufficient security clearance for that, Citizen.

hee hee. Are you sug-jesting that the secret of time and space is known to the NSA and CIA? And it doesn't hurt to ask. Then again, I suppose the secret to immortality is...well you are not asking about that...so I'm not obligated to answer, Citizen.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

As far as the constancy of c throughout space ... The spectra of atoms depend on c and several other fundamental constants -- Planck's constant h, the mass of the electron and the elementary charge, and the permittivity of free space (though that is intimately related to c and perhaps shouldn't be counted as a separate constant -- the combination which is the most direct one is the "Rydberg Constant"). A variation in c would have observable consequences for atomic spectra ... and atomic spectra are things we can observe almost everywhere in the observable Universe and compare to those measured in terrestrial laboratories.

 

Probably the closest "near miss" ... something that might have been a result of a variation in fundamental constants, but wasn't ... came in the spectra of quasars (specifically, the quasar 3C273, the nearest one, and the first to be identified in the sky, something accomplished via radio observations made at Parkes). The spectra were bizarre, with broad emission lines that at first did not correspond to any known spectral features. Schmidt made a guess that the spectra were "normal" but severely redshifted, but even he was astonished at the magnitude of the redshift, almost 16% ... an unprecedentedly large shift at the time.

 

Astronomical observations require c to be the same over most of what we can see of the Universe, which is a specific cut through space-time (on large, that is, cosmological, scales). That "cut" gets broader when you consider nearer parts of the Universe (within the Local Group, say). And, of course, no observation or measurement precludes variations in the future.

 

AFAIK the most interesting speculations about a variable c are those which put most of the variations back into the early Universe. Before the radiation that became the microwave background was released about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe was opaque, so you can't see directly what happened before then. There are, however, indirect clues about what conditions were like before then in the inhomogeneities of the microwave background as measured by several experiments, perhaps most notably the WMAP results. I'm not enough of a cosmologist to know off the top of my head how strong a constraint the WMAP results put on possible variations in the fundamental constants.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

Philosophy, understanding and loving the wisdom of our universe.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

This is, in the opinion of all the physical scientists I know, a nightmare we pray never happens.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

What do they believe the literal meaning of Philosophy means? The word IIRC was coined by Pythagoras.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

Bazz, did you follow Cancer's link?

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

The literal ancient meaning of the word "philosopher" isn't the issue. It is the current image of presently-alive philosophers, and since scientists often are on university campuses and have to work with (on university committees if nowhere else) them, there is some first-hand acquaintance there.

 

The perception of modern, present-day philosophers is of people who are lost in the semantic woods, generating unreadable tomes of deconstructionist gibberish with approximately no connection with the reality, physical and social, that most people perceive ... and that they revel in and seek to amplify that lack of connection to common reality, which they seem to take to mean that only they know can know anything. Can't see the forest for the trees, and spends most of their time in debate about what the word "forest" actually means and whether any location can be either included or excluded from the category. And that leaves out the ones who are lost in arguments about whether it is possible to identify anything as a tree, or whether tree-dom is an unuseably vague inherently self-contradictory concept with no logical validity.

 

Several impolite words come to mind about this sort of activity, but the quotation from the soliloquy Macbeth is both pointed and succinct and hints at the contempt. One of the reasons string theory has fallen into poor repute in much of the physics community is that it isn't clear whether (for all its mathematical elegance) string theory can ever be connected to a physical phenomenon well enough for it to make a meaningful, testable prediction. If it can't, then the connection of string theory to anything other than pure mathematics is ... well ... philosophical drivel.

 

And the idea it might happen to us (speaking now as a physical scientist) is cause for despair. The ultimate horror is to find yourself becoming that which you despise.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

... I don't know about ultimate horror, but it's up there in the top five.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

Bazz' date=' did you follow Cancer's link?[/quote']

 

No as there was mo link to follow

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

The perception of modern, present-day philosophers is of people who are lost in the semantic woods, generating unreadable tomes of deconstructionist gibberish with approximately no connection with the reality, physical and social, that most people perceive ... and that they revel in and seek to amplify that lack of connection to common reality, which they seem to take to mean that only they know can know anything. Can't see the forest for the trees, and spends most of their time in debate about what the word "forest" actually means and whether any location can be either included or excluded from the category. And that leaves out the ones who are lost in arguments about whether it is possible to identify anything as a tree, or whether tree-dom is an unuseably vague inherently self-contradictory concept with no logical validity.

 

Several impolite words come to mind about this sort of activity

'Intellectual tomfoolery' comes to my mind, describing the above. Agree?

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

Addressed to no one in particular, in so much as a rhetorical question:

 

So what then is 'reality'? And what then is 'unreality'?