joigus

There you are. Music is another thing that unites people. I wasn't familiar with the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald song. I like music with a story. When a tune lives on for generations there's always an important reason behind. Music has the potential to unite people from different centuries. What about that? Ditto.

I would like to take the opportunity to welcome you and @Peterkin to the forums. Both of you are very welcome 'acquisitions'. This is one of those topics in which I don't have a very strong opinion, but yes. Focus on the show-business part without any emphasis on sport for everyone, is kind of the obvious 'dark side' of sports. In a manner of speaking, it's about praising Titmus for her feat, while saving Russell Crowe from heart disease. And I love Australia, by the way. I have Waltzing Matilda committed to memory.

Interesting related point in interesting article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/24/tokyo-olympic-sport-displacing-athletes David Goldblatt IOW: I'd rather see more people cycling to work than eating cheetos in front of the TV while they watch the Tour de France.

I do. You look young & rugged, @J.C.MacSwell looks young & smart, and @beecee looks ageless & 'iconic'. I can't say I didn't expect Weinberg's passing one of these days, but it makes me feel older suddenly anyway.

Pity even.

Read all the answers, because they're very helpful. Make a drawing with @TheVat's hints. The June-December clue gives you a baseline. Remember your trigonometry.

Awesome book. Totally compliant with Einstein's alleged* motto 'as simple as possible, but not any simpler'. The Making of... might be worth checking out. *https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05004-4

Pitty. You have never disappointed. 👍

Hyperbolic functions. It's done in relativity all the time. Whistle if you need more help. Clues: Rescale x and y; then assign hyperbolic cosine (cosh) and sine (sinh). z goes along for the ride.

He was. He didn't have the aura of genius that others have accrued perhaps, but nudged physics into common sense many times.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/steven-weinberg-nobel-winning-physicist-who-united-principal-forces-of-nature-dies-at-88/2021/07/26/75d8d24a-ee31-11eb-bf80-e3877d9c5f06_story.html Nobel-Prize-winning Steven Weinberg dies at 88. One of the makers of the standard model. His influence in the world of physics in the second half of the 20th century has been only comparable to that of giants as Feynman, Gell-Mann, and 't Hooft. His books Dreams of a Final Theory and The First Three Minutes are a must-read for anybody willing to understand physics and how physicists think. He was notorious for his view of a universe without a purpose. May he rest in peace.

May be relevant to the discussion: http://www.olympedia.org/lists/55/manual https://www.insider.com/michael-phelps-weight-of-gold-olympians-suicide-depression-epidemic-2020-7 I'm not suggesting that these sources can be taken as particularly rigorous, or that any conclusions should be immediately drawn. Depression seems to be very common among elite sportspeople, whether successful in their careers or not. But upon first inspection, it doesn't seem that successful sportspeople are spared a lot of this alleged suffering. Gold medalist Jesús Rollán was a case very much debated in Spain 15 years ago: I haven't made up my mind on this topic. If I wanted to give an idea of what I think it would be a collage of sentences by other members. I agree with some points by @Peterkin and @Prometheus, but I'm not blind to the fact that sports have many positive values, aesthetic included, mainly represented by @beecee. I suppose it's one of those things that can make you or break you.

Unfortunately one's only covered for a colonoscopy.

As you posted this question in the Quantum Theory section, I'm going to assume you're pitching it at consequences of the holographic principle for human experience. Unfortunately there are none that we can discern so far. It is too fundamental, and at the same time too poorly understood, for anybody to be able to draw any conclusions for consciousness or any other presumably emergent phenomena (big clusters of matter doing something collectively). 'The universe is a hologram' is a catchphrase for a deep physical principle that is in the process of being understood. There is no direct connection to the double-slit experiment either. The connection may be more elaborate: quantum fluctuations being related to gravitational entropy.

As I said, Whether a fear or a hope, I can't tell; but an obsession it is.

Exactly. One should always try to catch for patterns, not only in the facts, but also in human narratives, whatever the level of accuracy in reporting facts. I think some kind of crude facts generate this phenomenology, I have little doubt about that. But in the chain of narrative, something gets lost (or added), like in a complex, socially-driven, broken-telephone game. I think there's a lesson to be learnt in biblical (and other mythical) narratives that's very much related to what's happening here. Some Moses figure must have existed, but probably a very different guy from the one we imagine. It wasn't 2 or 3 million people leaving Egypt, but maybe a couple of hundred people, etc. Narrative distorts, and it doesn't do it in any old way; it does it according to your present fears, hopes, etc. Our emotions as a people are the gestaltic element that makes this Rorschach blot into a consistent picture of elder brother trying to help us.

If one analyses UFO reports and close-contact stories, and from the purely story-telling POV, it all sounds very much as humans (bipedal, anthropomorphic) from the future doing the time-warp/FTL thing (or from a parallel dimension) and trying not to leave too much of a fingerprint (so as to avoid big ripples of retrocausal interference). These 'beings' are invariably portrayed in such a way that the number one feature that strikes me is how much they look like moderately-distant relatives that care about us. I wonder if the whole thing is not just a re-edition of the biblical stories about angels, with the necessary literary elements that translate them from the olden-days folklore into a folklore that we can recognize and accept. We don't know nearly enough about time yet to say, without a shadow of a doubt, that they're completely beyond belief; but in the meantime we can entertain ourselves discussing the literary values of such stories. And literary values there are.

Yes. Konrad Lorentz is one example. Another is Werner Heisenberg --also a Nazi. And I'm not crazy about Pauli either --physics is my background.

For a particularly creative way of using our running skills, look up 'persistence hunting' and research thereof. Very interesting way of sophisticated thinking* making up for lack of speed. *Foreseeing the consequence of a chain of consecutive actions, rather than 1st-order causal thinking --the immediate consequence of an action. Corvids and psittaciformes!! I think @Peterkin's link partially overlaps with very interesting talk by author mentioned in mentioned link --John Marzluff: https://youtu.be/1Wp_R0Eo-NE?t=1183 (Ends at 38' 10''.) In the second Marzluff video, he mentions the observed conclusion that crows hold grudges --and pass them on culturally-- against their particular villains. I've set the starting time to when he starts mentioning that. The experimental method involves adding radioactive markers to glucose that reveals brain activity. Homologous areas like amigdala, cortex, and hippocampus reveal different circuitry being activated depending on kind of stimulus, and whether experience is first-time (hippocampus significantly involved) or later experiences (amigdala).

It's clearly undergone circumcision.

Although from the big bang you cannot infer gravity (meaning Einstein's field equations), there is a connection between both in the opposite logical direction. Singularities are a consequence of Einstein's field equations. This is the content of the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorem. Under a set of assumptions that amount to saying that causality holds (until you reach a horizon, that is), horizons themselves, and the singularities hidden behind them, are a must. Another way of saying it is that congruences of geodesics are not complete. So you could say singularities are a consequence of classical gravity (GR). We do not believe classical general relativity is the whole story though. You need quantum mechanics to really understand gravitational horizons. Quantum mechanics must be heavily involved there.

Einstein's equations are compatible with a menu of possibilities, with positive, negative or null cosmological constants. They're also compatible with different choices of initial conditions, so it's not that simple.

Bipedal two-eyed little people with two hands and a metabolism that's compatible with an atmosphere rich in oxygen? The most natural hypothesis is that they're human descendants, millions of years from now, travelling back in time. I see big problems in trying to build an explanation from what's essentially witness accounts. Human memory is very faulty. Especially when one tries to reconstruct events one didn't quite expect or understand. When we get startled, our cultural background plays a very active part in building up a 'consistent' picture of what we saw.

I think what's bothering @geordief is the fact that the photons from the tip of the measuring rod reach the observer's eyes with a delay. If that's the case, my explanation would be that Einstein's definition is based implicitly on the assumption that you can always measure rods' lengths by comparing them to a ruler at rest with respect to different observers. IOW, you can completely fill space time with as many rulers as you need, each of them at rest with whatever observers you want to discuss, and whatever their state of (inertial) motion. Later introductions to SR appeal to light signals. Is that anything like what troubles you, @geordief, and have I been any helpful?