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Go outside and take a walk. A brisk one; move all your muscles, breathe deeply, pay attention to your surroundings. Then come back in and sort your course material into four or more groups by priority: basic concepts, mechanical data, schematics, flow-charts --- whatever classification makes sense to you. Review one subject are, thoroughly, methodically. Put the books down, turn out the light. Go make a cup of tea. Drink it slowly, looking out the window or something, walk up and down the room, while thinking over the material you've just reviewed. Repeat as needed.

You have made some very valid points in this thread, but I believe Vashta is talking about our Universe. Further the rules of SF require our Universe as this was posted in classical Physics. I agree, but would go further and suggest that GR is inappropriate in this thread, except as a passing mention. +1 Incidentally Markus said solve Laplace, not deduce it. I have plenty of expositions of Newtonian gravity involving Laplace, I just want to help Vashta find the appropriate format. Of course solving Laplace will not get us the potential. It will get us the potential function, which is different. It is confusing to those just studying this subject that the word 'potential' is used in several different ways. I actually must now apologise and correct an incorrect statement I made earlier about the units. I said that potential energy and potential (difference) have the same units. This is not quite correct. PE has units of energy, potential by itself or PD has units energy per unit mass.

Agreed. "From the initial assumption" is a key phrase. We can make ANY physical assumption about a 2D universe. What would stop us? I wonder, why 2 dimensions in space. Wouldn't it be much more exciting to consider a universe with 2 dimensions of time?

Yeah. A nice guy who now and then decides to give some people this nicest of treatments: https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/fatal-familial-insomnia/#:~:text=Fatal familial insomnia (FFI) is,significant physical and mental deterioration. Just because... Ooops, he wanted to play with the order of their nucleotides. This is one of the most horrible deaths you can think of. Nice going, God.

Yeah, there were cyclic-universe models that AFAIK are not very much favoured by cosmologists today. It seems that cosmologies based on inflation (a period previous to the big-bang when extraordinary rates of expansion took place) are the preferred mechanism. That's because they have a considerable explanatory power of the present state of the universe (seeding for galaxy formation, large-scale homogeneity.) This mechanism can be easily accomodated into the dynamics of the vacuum in quantum field theory. You have to have the vacuum "sit" in some kind of scalar background (the inflaton field.) The unfortunate aspect of it is that you must make all kinds of arbitrary assumptions about this scalar (pure-number valued, not changing under rotations) field.

No, this is demonstrably false. OK, so you haven't studied any evolution, so proper responses won't be understood. What prompted you to just make stuff up? Do you think this is a reasoned argument? The rest of your post was built on this nonsense, so there's really nothing constructive to say about it. Wrong, please study the subject, and take another try at it later?

! Moderator Note Rule 2.1 says: Slurs or prejudice against any group of people (or person) are prohibited. Nobody is interested in your bigotry, and your posts are aimed more at controversy and prejudice than discussion. If this is your A game, please take it elsewhere. This is a science discussion forum.

One question at a time! Which god? All the ones I know about were egotists and racists and seriously flawed in several other ways. Fortunately, none of them were in charge of evolution.

Beautiful flowers frequently sprout from an excrement or a piece of rotting flesh. I suppose that's what's happened here.

Indeed. 1+2 gravity has no local degrees of freedom. Yet people still use it as a topological theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(2%2B1)-dimensional_topological_gravity Just a disclaimer: I wasn't thinking of GR when I asked my questions, even though we know it to be the right framework. I was thinking under the premise "if Newton's gravity were correct..." And I stand by what I said. Namely: we can't deduce any of that. We can't deduce Laplace's equation either. We can guess at it from symmetry properties. Also, I think it would be interesting, like @studiot was trying to do, to find out at what level the OP wishes the question to be answered. Maybe they're not familiar with GR.

Some interesting and worthwhile comments - from pretty much everyone except cultsmash, who seems to want to pre-emptively play the victim card despite not having been prevented from expressing his views here. I think lots of people want limits on freedom of speech for a variety of reasons - often to limit hateful and violence provoking speech or malicious falsehoods generally, which I agree with. But many also may support limiting access to opposing opinions for partisan purposes, which I don't agree with... so long as it isn't hateful, violence provoking and promoting malicious falsehoods. Freedom to tell the truth is not equivalent to freedom to promote falsehoods. There are also all those nations and communities where criticism of governments and institutions and officials and policies are indeed illegal - and yet those laws can still enjoy wide public support, perhaps influenced by social conventions and misinformation and not entirely "freely" - but in the absence of credible alternative government, they may be perceiving harms to the govenment's reputation as hurting them. Here in Australia we get "culture war" arguments that rosie glasses views of history should be defended for the sake of national identity and pride and "black armband" views that might induce shame or regret (like teaching about brutalization and massacres of aboriginal people in schools) should be left out - much like the US and learning about historic slavery and current institutional inequality via "Critical Race Theory". As for US constitutional "freedom of the press" aka "freedom of expression" - it appears to me (from outside) to be about the freedom of "press" owners (nowadays, media owners) to promote whatever political causes they like, without any direct requirement for what they say to be true. The US still has civil law remedies for slander - for falsehoods that cause harm to reputations and incomes but those are only for those who can afford to pursue them, after the lies have done the rounds and done them harm. I suppose some jurisdictions do include criminal laws against slander - limiting the right of citizens to spread lies about people - but I am not familiar with any.

I disagree it's the same with ethics. We can prove the billionth digit of pi exists - by finding it. How would you prove the absolute rightness of some ethical conundrum with that same precision? Pi can be defined in terms with no reference to humans, or any other agents. How do we define an ethical act without reference to humans (or some other agent). To state that ethics has a definitive answer is a common position, especially amongst the religious, but it's not one we can prove either way. Although this may well be at the root of the different positions in this thread, maybe this point is going too far off topic and requires its own thread?

I'd be happy with any attempt to try to quantify the efficacy of torture. I've never claimed torture is 100% ineffective, just that it's efficacy needs to be considered for any practical discussion. If my lighter works 50% of the time, i'll still say it's working. But if my parachute works 50% of the time... i won't be saying anything before long. If people want a purely theoretical discussion, just say we assume torture is effective, in the same manner we have assumed in this thread no innocent people are tortured. That's consistent with Plato's idea of ethics (apparently it's why he studied mathematics, he was looking for a source of absolute ethics). I see ethics as an entirely human creation. It manifests in the universe only in the relations of humans, (so far as we know. -perhaps other species have a primitive capacity). That should go some way to explain why i 'refuse' to answer the question - i just don't see ethics as something that can exist in isolation like a Platonic ideal. So what if i answer yes or no - it's never going to happen; there will always be doubts of the efficacy of the torture and the possibility that you are torturing an innocent person. All the theoretically pure scenarios i explore will at best not change this, at worst give me an inflated sense of my moral righteousness, and i probably have too much of that already.

The concept is not movable. A set of torture cases is large. Some of them fall into the constant concept of Wrong, the others fall into the constant concept of Right.

OK. We're reaching a stalemate here. I want to be convinced that torture would be effective so much as to grant consideration to use it as a last resort. I intuit that @dimreepr & @Peterkin agree with this particular point. You want to be convinced that torture would fail 100% of the time, as to grant consideration to use it as a last resort. If I understood them correctly, @beecee & @zapatos would abide by the latter. We've narrowed it down, it seems, to some kind of interesting but difficult burden-of-proof argument. This has to be done in such a way that this kind of evidence is obtained without experiments being performed to ascertain the matter. Ethical considerations on which we all agree being the reason. Your turn.

Dreams bring to my mind the psychiatric phenomenon multiple personality disorder. In both cases the "individuals" (the dream person vs. the awake person and one personality vs. anothee personalityl are separated by a hole/gap in memory: one usually doesn't remember one's dreams and the two/more individuals in multiple personality disorder don't remember/know each other. On occasion, when one is aroused during a dream, one can recall one's dream, but, from my own personal experience, the recollection is imperfect: you're left with only the thought that one had a dream without any idea or memory of the details thereof; it's the same feeling/experience as realizing one has forgotten something without ever finding out what exactly it is that one fails to remember.

! Moderator Note The answer is No. Also, nothing in the post seems logical, and the reasons for high death rates in the US are well documented and include: - dismantling of pandemic response forces and plans - downplaying the disease by politicians and especially the former administration - crippling CDC and other health professionals and undermining their message by the administration - as a result, anti-pandemic responses were fractured and often counterproductive (catastrophic PPE distribution, is but one of the many examples) - sowing vaccine hesitancy - lack of solidarity and trust in science We do not need a bioweapon, if we have facebook. Since this appears to be an attempt to promote conspiracy rather than a discussion, the thread is locked pending review.

It makes sense that if the ape could evolve into a human, so could every animal out there. Why would God just take a ape and be like, go thee and be human? Was God a charlatan? A racist? A bozo? Of course not. Religion and science will agree on one thing: God is a nice guy. So God, if he bequeathed the apes to evolve into humans, then obviously, he must have done so with the lizards, the sparrows, the dogs and the cats. Alternative example: why would ONLY the apes evolve in humans? Do they have some sort of evolution-gene that only apes possess? In which case, do humans have that gene too? And if we do, wont we go on evolving and evolving forever until we turn into robots manufactured by Japanese scientists in labs? The last thousand odd years have shown no change between humans then and now. The humans of the BCs were pretty much the same as the humans now. From which I conclude that no, humans dont have that evolution-specific gene that would allow us to evolve on and on. So I take it humanity is the ultimate milestone in the evolutionary chain. Which rules out the theory that monkeys have a special evolution mechanism fitted in their genetic makeup. Therefore, theory one must be true, that every animal evolved.

One thing we know, more Americans died of COVID-19 than people of any other country. It's almost as though the COVID-19 virus was fitted with a American-genome-adhesive feature that particularly fancied Americans. No really, look at the trajectory COVID took after "It's origination in the Chinese area". It could have spread out like a breeze, or it could have spread towards the Asian areas, but it took a definite course towards the USA....think that ain't weird? Now, who would want Americans dead? Many people, and not just people from middle eastern countries. If you look down history, who have Americans messed with? The list is long. Vietnam, Iraq, and Japan, in World war 2. Now the original deceased of Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be too dead to hate, but their kith and kin, their descendants, probably do take umbrage that grandpa Liang and Grandma Chang were taken out for no reason by a great big atom bomb in WW2. The descendants of the dead in Japan probably work respectable jobs today. Some of them are scientists, (and we know Japanese scientists are world class for brilliance. Technology is their middle name) Did one of those Japanese scientists devise COVID-19 to take revenge on the United States for what they did to hiroshima and Nagaksaki? Just asking the logical question.