mistermack

I suppose emotional blackmail would be a common phrase for it. The threat of suicide is used surprisingly often by manipulative people to get what they want. It's even made official, in cases of women who want an abortion. If they make it clear they are likely to kill themselves, they get what they want. The health professionals don't want the guilt of that on their minds so they recommend that they get it. It's become part of the process now, it's become general knowledge that it works. I know a guy who used that same threat to get recommended for a sex change. He underwent it, and is now seriously thinking about trying to get it reversed. Using the same threat again. Life can get incredibly complicated.

I don't think that proliferation into a niche is thought of as a major engine for change. The exact opposite is actually a more powerful factor, and that is a shrinking environment producing population "Islands" that cannot reach each other to exchange genes. As soon as a group gets cut off, you can get rapid specieation. This is what the Galapagos finches showed. It wasn't the new niches that were responsible, it was the lack of breeding opportunities with the previous large populations. If the finches had been able to interbreed across the Islands, you wouldn't have got the specialisations. Same goes for the tortoises. If there had been a land bridge for them to hop from Island to Island, you would probably have ended up with just the one species. Adapting to a niche must surely play a part, but probably over a much longer timescale.

I don't know a name, but I wouldn't say it's always a fallacy. If you run over my cat, and I have to take it to the vet and have it put down, then you are responsible for it's death, even though I ok'ed it and paid for it. Some might be fallacies, some might be true, and there would be lots of grey areas. Like if someone steps out in front of your car, and you instinctively swerve to avoid them, and end up killing two cyclists. Were you to blame for swerving, or was the pedestrian to blame for not looking? Or is it a bit of both, with bad luck added to the mix? I suppose the most common case where it IS a fallacy is domestic violence. "You made me lose my temper". But even that isn't necessarily a fallacy. I remember I watched a whole documentary once, on battered women. I've never hit a woman in my life, but I have to admit one or two of them could easily have got me close to it. They just had something that touched all the nerves. In real life, I'm sure I would have just run a mile, and avoided the situation altogether.

Thanks Marcus, that's an interesting post. The problem I have with it is that if everything is as you describe, then all of the past and future must be sitting there available to be re-run, like your film in the projector. It's a gigantic expansion of the notion of the universe, if every incident that ever happened or ever will happen is lying around somewhere. You also have the problem of random uncertainty. You have to have every possible incident lying about, not just the actual ones. That makes for a gigantic expansion of a gigantic expansion, of something that was unbelievably gigantic to start with.

I think the question of liability will be one for the insurance companies. Right now, you have to have third party insurance so that even if you are the one at fault, it's the insurance company who is responsible to cover the damage. If the vehicles are insured, and it can be shown that they have fewer crashes than humans, then I can't see the problem. The question of blame would only come into it, if there was a lack of proper maintenance, or not following laid down regulations. The chances are it will very quickly become much safer than human drivers. When you tot up all of the human things that we do wrong, it's horrendous. It's a wonder we are allowed to drive at all. Maybe when ALL cars are driverless, the computers will be able to talk to the car in front. So if a problem arises, the information is passed back down the road so that all the following vehicles are ready for it. That way, you wouldn't get the multiple pile-ups that you get now, especially in fog.

My brother-in-law's daughter is profoundly deaf, she was tested as the most deaf person in the county years ago. She does make sounds as she signs, but they are very quiet, and clicky, and not really of help except to those who know her. But it's definitely the lack of hearing that caused her inability to talk. I have read that you need to be able to hear in the first few years of your life, to learn to speak well. I'd be interested to know how someone like her, ( she's now in her thirties ) would progress speech-wise if she got a cochlear implant. According to the speech theory, it wouldn't enable her to learn to speak, her brain has passed the vital years. But that might be complete rubbish. I'm guessing. I'm trying to remember what her laugh is like. I've never thought to take notice, so I can't say if she laughs out loud or not.

I haven't concluded that. Although I can see how you could jump to that conclusion. I'm wary of concluding anything at all in physics, or indeed any other science. Exploring the concepts, and making theoretical arguments is something I enjoy. I certainly don't nail my colours to a mast, just because I'm currently exploring in the same direction. If the river model brought up any contradiction to GR, I would of course view it as faulty. To me, at the moment, it's a different way of viewing the same thing. Instead of curved space-time, it's a picture of a flow of inertial frames. I haven't come across any work that declares that it doesn't work for bodies other than black holes, as you have asserted, so I would appreciate any link.

I'm sure the first bit's right, but what wrong conclusion have I jumped to?

Even in the wikipedia first page on GR, you get statements that give a very "river-like" picture. " Wikipedia said: Special relativity is defined in the absence of gravity, so for practical applications, it is a suitable model whenever gravity can be neglected. Bringing gravity into play, and assuming the universality of free fall, an analogous reasoning as in the previous section applies: there are no global inertial frames. Instead there are approximate inertial frames moving alongside freely falling particles. Translated into the language of spacetime: the straight time-like lines that define a gravity-free inertial frame are deformed to lines that are curved relative to each other, suggesting that the inclusion of gravity necessitates a change in spacetime geometry." So you have a flow of inertial frames at the surface of the Earth, accelerating at 32ft/sec2 relative to me.

Not so. Even if you reject a flow of space time, you still surely have to acknowledge some movement. How else can it curve, as a super massive black hole passes through it or near it? How can gravitational waves be transmitted? I know that's not the same as tranlational movement, but I don't see how you can maintain that it's static. And if you can accept that space time can be re-shaped violently by gravity (or rather, by matter, causing gravity), it's not such a huge step to picture that it can flow. Studiot, I'm with you on some of that. I'm not picturing space as a fluid like water. It's clearly not. But what is the difference, between a flow of the properties of space time, and a flow of space time? Looked at in reverse, what is water, but a collection of properties of space time? But we are content to say that the water flows. It's a bit long winded to say that a river of water is a river of space time properties.

You don't. But if you are testing the hypothesis that there is a flow of space downwards of approx 11km/sec then a clock moving downwards at 11 km/sec will be moving at the slowest possible speed in that flow. Anything slower or faster would give you motion in the flow. (if it exists) So 11 km/sec would give the greatest effect. It doesn't mean that it HAS to be that figure. Lesser speeds might still give a measurable effect, but higher speeds would be pointless. I was just pointing out that the numbers wouldn't be particularly important. You just need to discover if the clock runs slower, or faster, than the stationary clock.

You're just trolling now. I guess that's you're thing.

If YOU are made from sound waves, and so is your clock, you would have no way of identifying the medium, or whether you are at rest or in motion.

Not in 1922. You are pathetically avoiding the real point.

Atomic clocks are getting smaller all the time. If one could be designed for small size, rather than accuracy, you could possibly set it up. You don't need phenomenal accuracy, you just need to establish the difference between two, if any, and the direction of change.

Yes, but their's no hint that he was referring to race. He was referring to local conditions, local ways of life. Did he make any reference to inherited characteristics? Not in the stuff I read. And I'm not going to comb through that junk. His observations are cultural, not about inherited racial characteristics. That is not in any way racist, for 1922. When I was a lad in the fifties and sixties, Gloucester people were just as sweeping about the people living in the Forest of Dean. Not to mention the Welsh !!

I read some of what you linked, even though I wouldn't normally give Fox News a second glance. Your inferences are rubbish. Nowhere that I read does Einstein link his observations to race. He's observing nations and their cultures, and their current situations. It would be frowned on today, but it's not racist, certainly not for 1922. My father was one generation later than Einstein, born about 1907. He was a nice enough guy, he worked with some black people, but I never ever heard him refer to black people as anything other than n....rs. In 1922, the year of the diary, blacks were still being regularly lynched in the US. You are simple trying to make something about Einstein out of the fact that he lived in a different time, of very different attitudes.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2014/06/gravitys-river-new-black-hole-theory-suggests-gravity-is-a-fluid-.html

No you don't. But you need to be a bit along the racist path, to think that the tiny differences are worth making something of. Or maybe to have a touch of something like Tourettes, giving a compulsion to tip the apple cart.

I don't think you've understood what I wrote. I'm proposing a totally new universe alongside ours, previously undetected, with it's own forms of light and matter and energy. The only difference is that THEIR light travels at c/2. Otherwise, relativity works the same as here. They will produce SR and GR in the same way, the only difference being the speed of their light. They would conclude that the clocks in their own frame never vary, but moving clocks would appear slow, and clocks moving close to the speed of sound relative to them would appear almost stopped. And others in other frames would conclude the same about them. All of the arguments for relativity would apply in the same way. Because you are observing using sound, and your clocks operate on sound. The doppler effect works the same way for light and sound. So would time dilation. The reason we don't observe time dilation in sound waves, is that our clocks are not governed by sound, they are independent of it.

I'm talking about an unknown form of matter and energy, similar in all regards, except that the speed of light is c/2. I'm not saying it exists. I'm saying "what if?" If there was such a world, the argument would be made that no information can ever be passed faster than c/2, and causality would be violated if it was. It's exactly the same situation that we have here. Ok, here's another what-if. Imagine that there are blind creatures living deep in the ocean. There is no light available to them, and no land to get a fix on. All they have is the speed of sound in water, and their clocks operate using sound waves. As they move through the water, their clocks slow, (because of the extra distance the waves have to travel) and if they could reach the speed of sound, their clocks would stop altogether. You basically have relativity under water. Anyone, in any frame, will measure the same number for the speed of sound, for the same reasons that we get the same number for the speed of light in any frame. If particles of matter were composed of sound waves, then no matter could exceed the speed of sound, by being accelerated using similar matter. And in the same way, these hypothetical water beings, using relativity, would conclude that information could never be transferred faster than the speed of sound, and if it was, causality would be violated. You could then come along with your torch and prove them wrong.

Not a rocket with a clock. Maybe an isotope with a known characteristic frequency could be fired downwards and checked for how it compared to a stationary one? ( I'm just speculating ). Why two solutions? Well, if a river of space is passing downwards, then a stationary clock on the surface is moving at high speed relative to that space, and should be slowed. Whereas a clock co-moving with that space (ie stationary in that space) should run faster. According to time dilation due to motion through space. Whereas if the river model was wrong, then the surface clock is gravitationally slowed ( effectively the same) but the descending clock should be slowed even more, due to it's relative motion.

No, that's not right. The frames are just imaginary constructs and would work equally well for both sets of materials. All it would need for c/2 to be measured in all frames is for an equivalent symmetry to exist in the new material.

We established on another thread some months ago that the time dilation on Earth's surface due to gravity is exactly the same as what would be caused by a downward flow of space time at the speed of the escape velocity. The formulas are identical. If there WERE a flow of space time into the Earth, at that speed, then by dropping a clock at the same speed, the clock should run faster. (I'm SUGGESTING this, not proposing it as a fact. ) I'm asking the question, could such an experiment be used to disprove the notion of a flow of space into a gravity well? I don't see why not.

I don't see why. It would require an unknown type of space time to exist alongside our own.