moth

I understand unconscious to mean not conscious. But you seemed to equate conscious with alive so I was looking for some clarification.

When I'm unconscious, I'm not alive?

If you try and glue a map to a globe you will find the land and oceans are a different shape on the globe than they appear on the map. One is curved, the other is flat. I disagree.

I can locate any point on the surface of the Earth using latitude and longitude, the surface of the Earth is 2-d. I'm not sure I understand what you are saying, are you saying non-Euclidean geometry is the same as Euclidean or non-Euclidean is impossible?

It seems you believe 2-d means "flat" but it simply means 2 coordinates are enough to locate any point on the object.

select two points on a sphere. now imagine all the circles on the sphere that intersect both points. measure the distance along the circles circumference between the two points,which circle minimizes the distance between the two points? You haven't said what your definition of a line is, but by the definition: a line is the shortest distance between two points, a Great Circle is a line. Other circles are not.

That makes sense, I didn't think it through. There are Neutron stars, which have no electric charge, that don't collapse to a black hole. But once enough mass is close enough together, a force that could stop the collapse would have to be infinitely large and so, not possible.

Interesting point. Is that after the electrons have been expelled, or is there another reason for the collapse?

The missing factor is density. If you packed the mass of the Earth into a region of space smaller than the Schwarzschild radius then you get a black hole. Not just by moving close to the center of gravity of a mass.

First thing, I'd like to apologize for causing you to feel an apology was needed. We're just talking here, no apologies necessary so far. One of the reasons you cannot draw parallel lines on a sphere is that a "straight line" on a sphere is a Great Circle. In a way, Geometry is about definitions. If you don't use the standard definition of line then any argument you make about parallel lines will be invalid. Same for triangles if you don't know what Extrinsic Curvature is you can't argue about the sum of the internal angles of a triangle. I don't think it's known if we live in Euclidean space or some other Geometry is a better fit to the universe.

I'm not a math guy but I believe the definitions are something like: a line is the shortest distance between two points. a triangle is three lines arranged so each line intersects with the other two. parallel lines do not have an intersection. a triangle is 2-d but it doesn't have to be "flat".

If you could give your definition of "straight line" it might make it easier to understand where the confusion begins. It's no more possible to draw the picture of a triangle you asked for than it is to fit a piece of paper to a sphere or saddle-shape, and for the same reason:although the (surface of) sphere,saddle, or plane are all 2-d they don't share the same geometry.

Your understanding of the words "straight line" seems too limited for this topic. Are you familiar with geodesics? The TED video demonstrates how, given a line and a point not on the line, how to draw many different lines through the point that do not intersect the given line. Did you watch it?

just attempting to

I think the other part of your question is about Euclid's paralell postulate. This TED talk is an intuitive description of hyperbolic geometry: http://embed.ted.com/talks/margaret_wertheim_crochets_the_coral_reef.html

I was having some 500 errors and slow response times after the upgrade, but chrome browser updated itself and I haven't had any more issues. I wonder if it could have been browser related?

What about Thinking of i as rotation? Not a physical object, but a physical transform. On the imaginary plane 1*i=1i or a 90 degree transform,1i*i=-1 another 90,-1*i=-1i and one more multiply and you're back to 1 for a full 360.

It's interesting how well the 3-d analogy of moving in the third dimension towards a 2-d surface making the 2-d surface appear to expand, fits with moving through the fourth dimension making 3-d space appear to expand.

I think there are a few of these Universe in a black hole Theories. You might google "fecund universe" or "cosmological natural selection", there are some informative threads here on sfn too from Martin and Bascule mostly (I think) from two or three years ago. I don't know if these would count as a wormhole to another universe,but I don't see any real distinction.

I wonder if the concept of area-filling curves could be relevant? In the same way an infinitely long line can be folded into a finite area, maybe an infinite volume can fit in a finite 4-d hyper-volume.

Another reason for optimism may be the poor returns of candidate wins for citizen's united money, or at least the 300+ million squandered on karl rove. There's some numbers on Open Secrets site:

Making the base as wide as possible increases stability because it's hard to lean far enough to get your center of gravity over the base of the wheel. Making the top of the wheels narrow makes the chair easier to push. If the wheels were separated by more distance than the pushers' shoulders, the elbows would have to rotate up and out to get your hands wide enough to reach the wheels, and the power of your stroke would be reduced.

Thank you for the links Ben Bowen. I had a chance to take a quick look and I'll get back to it soon. I should probably admit, this wasn't really the argument I thought "nothing is symmetric" would bring. I thought you might say: "nothing can't be symmetric. Nothing cannot be anything, it is a non-entity" which would imply "nothing" can't be understood, which is the definition of "incomprehensible", my definition of "nothing", which is what I thought we were arguing about. I suspect the rabbit hole of Nothingness goes wider than I care to investigate too thoroughly.

That's a great question and i wish i had a great answer. By space I think I mean something like: container for energy so probability space would "contain" probabilities I guess? The phrase "complex plane" has a few meanings, but I was referring to the Cartesian-like coordinate system with one axis representing units of the imaginary number i ([math] \sqrt {-1} [/math]). I just mentioned it as an example of an abstract space.

This is one reason why, for me, it would seem to be impossible to explain the "creation" of the universe using Physics. Where would these Physics laws exist? Can they be self actualized? If probability to exist can explain the universe then is there "probability space"? Are abstract "spaces" in general, "real"? Where is the complex plane?