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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/25/23 in all areas

  1. Rather than just rebuttals of far-fetched "designer" claims, how about a thread that concentrates on the evidence that the universe is NOT designed? And in particular, that it's not designed by a god with humans as the object of the exercise. Of course, those opposed are invited to try to rebut the arguments, but it would make more sense if they kept arguments FOR a designer for the other thread, and just posted rebuttals on this one. Here's a few to start with. If a designer wanted to create a home for humans, why did he create a universe so mind-blowingly vast? The only bit that's relevant to humans is one tiny solar system, in a galaxy of 250,000,000,000 stars. And that galaxy is just one, of about 200,000,000,000 galaxies in the observable universe. And why make the rest of the Universe so mind-blowingly distant, that humans can never go there? And what designer would design something, and then wait 13,800,000,000 years for the object of his creation to appear. And then, even though his human creation is supposed to be in his image, he messed around with less intelligent versions for millions of years, before arriving at one that he was happy to inseminate and produce a son from. Of course, a lot of the design people claim that the entire universe is only 6,000 years old, so in their case, the evidence for no designer is the same scientific evidence for the age of the planet, solar system and universe. So those design theorists need to disprove an awful lot of science, if they want to prop up their version of design. I don't want to construct a huge OP, although there's loads more material. People can post their own take on it. But I think it's best to keep this thread for evidence and argument for NO design, and use the other one for proposal and rebuttal of design claims.
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  2. It would depend on the specific chemicals involved.
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  3. You need 3 invisibility cloaks. First have 2 people under different cloaks texting each other using 5G. Now take a 3rd cloak and cover both the people. This will cause a feed back loop between the magic (at least one of the people texting must be a witch or wizard) and physics resulting in the formation of a worm hole. The hard part is finding invisibility cloaks and witches/wizards. Seems like this shouldn't be in the engineering section...
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  4. Yes it is, and it's informative, a tricky thing to do. But I'm with @studiot, the timeline issue confused rather than informed because, unlike "Pulp Fiction", the narrative didn't help to link to the story/entertainment. In this context, I don't see a difference TBH. I enjoyed it. I wonder if it was because of overlapping (as in a Venn), a contiguous timeline would just add to much complication for the average viewer.
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  5. The actual definition of a geodesic is a curve that parallel-transports its own tangent vector. This requires a connection, but not necessarily a metric - IOW, a manifold that is endowed with a connection but not a metric, will exhibit a geodesic structure. Of course, if you have both a connection and a metric (as is the case in GR), then the geodesic equation can be written in terms of derivatives of the metric tensor. But that is not its fundamental definition. I don’t know what you mean by this. A metric is a structure on a manifold that has a very precise definition, which has to do with fiber bundles and tangent spaces, but not with any particular coordinate choices. What, exactly, do you want to replace here? The Einstein equations are a covariant tensor equation, so its form is the same irrespective of what geometry the manifold has. That’s the entire point of general covariance. IOW, you are quite free to use a different concept of time (coordinate basis) to describe your scenarios, but that doesn’t change the laws of physics, and thus all tensor equations remain unaffected. In that case you will obtain incorrect predictions for the polarisation states of gravitational waves, which cannot be modelled by any rank-1 model. You need at least a rank-2 model to correctly account for all relevant degrees of freedom, so gravity cannot be a force in the Newtonian sense. It’s not absolute, it’s just a convenient choice of coordinate basis that makes certain astrophysical calculations easier. You are always free to choose your coordinates and units as is convenient - that doesn’t change anything about the laws of physics, in particular not their form when written as tensor equations.
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  6. I know. Likewise, I don't see a reason why it would not be possible in principle. If you take determinism really seriously, it's kind of a given really. Determinism is an inevitable logical consequence of: (1) generalised use of analytic functions, and (2) the physical law abiding by the principle of the differential equation. If that paradigm is correct, you can always reconstruct the value of all physical parameters everywhere and at every time by just Taylor-expanding the functions, provided you could measure field inhomogeneities with infinite precision (derivatives of arbitrarily high order.) It's just a corolary of our model (perhaps delusional?) of the world. The alternatives always involve step-wise changes that are unpredictable, but have the unfortunate[?] character of being ad hoc, somewhat contrived... (Collapse of the wave function, fractal algorithmic "steps", discrete updating law of cellular automata...)
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  7. praseodymium orthoscandate (PrScO3) crystal https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/05/cornell-researchers-see-atoms-record-resolution
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