Jump to content

Leaderboard

Popular Content

Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/23/21 in all areas

  1. Sigh. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/12/23/covid-omicron-variant-live-updates/ (This page always free to nonsubscriber) (Literally hundreds of US news outlets have similar free coverage)
    1 point
  2. Beautiful. Man with watch always knows the time, man with two watches is never sure, man with Bach feels time's substance.
    1 point
  3. 1 point
  4. One explicit avoidance of outright technobabble was the baryon sweep, which was an attempt to not just make something up http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/1043
    1 point
  5. We do know what it is not: Not hot, not atomic, not electrically charged. There are some other nots. Some candidates to explain what it is are: 1) Swarms of little black holes 2) Exotic particles coming from super-symmetric extensions of the standard model of elementary particles 3) Really a signal that Einstein's equations must be modified at long distances (ordered according to my personal preferences)
    1 point
  6. Because when a QM entity is confined by a potential barrier, the wave function penetrates the barrier to some extent. The barrier can be thought of as "damping" the wave function progressively to zero. The lower the barrier, the further the wave function penetrates. If the barrier is also sufficiently thin, the wave function may not be damped to zero by the time it reaches the far side. In such a case, that represents a finite probability of detecting the QM entity outside the confining potential barrier.
    1 point
  7. This has reminded me of, (My emphasis.) Interesting approach, the 'cognitive' one. Angel = hidden mechanism that people (especially in ancient times) indulged in very often --anthropomorphisation of just about everything they didn't understand. I value this approach. I wish I understood it better. I rather lean towards the archaeological/historical perspective,* which is the direction in which I've tried --unsuccessfully, I have to say-- to bring the discussion. To me, the closest we can get to understanding how or why these old timers came up with this angel stuff, is by digging under the ground and then thinking rationally about what their possible motivations must have been. The fact that these intermediaries between people and the gods had wings --Sumer, Akkad, Babylon's cherubim-- does not surprise me at all. Birds appear as symbols of deities as far back as Gobekli Tepe --end of the last glacial period ca. 11000 years ago. In other early human settlements birds also appear depicted as taking the decapitated bodies of the dead. The bird appears strongly in Egypt too. It must have symbolised a connection between the living and the dead for obvious reasons. In the case of Gobekli Tepe, it's vultures we're talking about. Now, it doesn't take a long stretch of the imagination to conjecture a possible reason why people believed that vultures were sacred beings in charge of helping the transit of the deceased to the netherworld. One small step, I think, takes the average Bronze-Age sophisticated mind from different kinds of birds to different kinds of angels. * They're not mutually exclusive, of course.
    1 point
  8. So you say. But that is exactly what a malware spammer would say too, isn't it? Why would I believe you, when I have no idea who you are? As several others have now also said, post relevant text directly here if you want to discuss something. Apart form the malware question It is bad form, and a bit lazy, to send readers off-site, without providing at least the gist of the issue in your own words here, first.
    0 points
  9. Nor have you posted any helpful summaries as requested so I doubt you will get many responses.
    -1 points
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.