joigus

I never mentioned any "mediation". I broke down the word in "pre-" and "meditation" "Pre-": in advance, beforehand, in anticipation of. "Meditate": To think, to consider, to evaluate, to ponder, to examine, etc. Try to be more careful with the terms and with the logic when you're trying to make fine points. You are addressing Swansont's questions and objections by spilling over into just about everything that crosses your mind. You deal with mine by misunderstanding my meaning of my words, whether it be on purpose or not. You seem to be under the impression that a mind is needed to explain how photons move about. The average positions and polarisations of photons can be predicted from wave equations. The particular positions and polarisations of photons are random. What role does that "mind" play in it?

No. I know where I'm going, and I know where you're going. Confused by an idea that was discarded as superstition in the Ionian islands 26 centuries ago? Why should I?

This is a very good question. IMO, the only reason to withhold something that you think to be true, after reflection and examination of evidence, is not because it may cause anger or demoralization, but because of the danger of this piece of knowledge being revealed. I remember this point to have come up before in my life, and I've compared the anger or demoralization that you mention to the cauterization or sterilization of an injury: Pain or annoyance are different from harm. I'm a firm believer that people are better off if they are able to rule out assumptions that are not worth considering. seriously. As to topics about which I haven't made up my mind yet, I prefer to stay quiet, as you say, and let others talk until I find my position, if at all. What's your position?

Meditated by whom? Can you write something that makes some sense for a change? This "meditation" involves the wave equation. Why do you call it meditation?

I don't really know. I suspect it based on what scholars say. Perhaps a good account of it is here: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/52384/did-the-babylonians-know-the-pythagorean-theorem-before-pythagoras-formulated-it The lowdown of it is: Apparently the Babylonians (well, the scribes, accountants, etc. what? just a 1% of the population?) got close to the Pythagorean theorem by discovering Pythagorean triplets. They found a funny coincidence: Sometimes for triplets of whole numbers you can arrange triangles so that the long side is, say, 5, and the shorter, perpendicular ones are 3 and 4. And, lo and behold, 52 = 32+42. Wow! it's what they seem to have said. But you're right. We don't really know. Imagine this analogy for your "selective memory" example (based on the storage method): Some big shot among the scribes actually knew the theorem, but he decided not to tell, keep the secret and look like a genius to everybody else. The only fragment of that knowledge is tablets in which he (and others downstream on the line of culture and knowledge) show only punctuated examples in the form of Pythagorean triplets. That would be the equivalent of computer memory that has not been cached. So you may be right. The suggestion is that they didn't understand how to generalise. But we cannot be sure. I can only guess that only tablets that were extremely important and official were baked and hardened. But many tablets that were just for students homework were never baked. Many were probably lost. Only those that burnt in the destruction layers survived. My intuition* tells me that it was the Greeks who took the big leap. I mean. Think about the alphabets. The Phoenicians already had it, but they forgot to include the vowels. The Greeks copied and improved it, by adding vowels and putting them to many other different uses. *Not just my intuition. It's been claimed by scholars for centuries now. And I think they had a point. The Greeks were the essential communicating vessel between East and West.

For three billion years there was not much more than cyanobacteria ruling the Earth. Cyanobacteria are not capable of much thinking. So my bet would be yes, intelligence emerged, or evolved. Whether the laws of Nature were always there is another matter, much more difficult to answer.

Average brain size grew in the past, among other things to accommodate the relational cortex, the capacity for prediction of events in the prefrontal cortex. Cultural expressions developed in sophistication and changed in manner, the adequacy of people to respond to challenges also developed. Intelligence evolves as a response to the challenges of the environment. This is not a matter of opinion. There is a record of it in the fossils, and in the tools that our ancestors left behind, and in the change of the environment that they induced. Intelligence is proven to be a part of Nature. Intelligence is a product of evolution. What else could it be? There is no supernatural, pretty much for the same reason that there is no under-natural, or co-natural, or parallel to natural, or perpendicular to it. Everything is natural. "Supernatural" is just a silly word, like "over-possible".

Exactly my thoughts.

I'll pop open my best bottle of wine. Thank you. Unfortunately the video didn't work. Maybe later. I've never underestimated soil. It's gold dust in terms of biology. Long live soil!

Oh, you're most welcome. It's such a pleasure to have a sensible conversation for a change...

I've been thinking about this too. They had a lot of practical knowledge and "played" with the maths very cleverly, but they didn't have the real drive to relate and understand, the basis for prediction. They were basically concerned with measuring the land, accounting, and measuring time.

Mmmm. Maybe. You follow that line of inquiry. I'll keep searching for traces of moss growing in ancient Babylon. Carlson doesn't sound very Babylonian to me though.

That's exactly what it is. But you're all missing the overriding moss-Babylon connection, which was intended to make a point. Or, shall I say, a blob, or a blip, or a blur.

Ok. Let's see: (my emphasis) What's the surprise then? So to you it's perfectly normal to say: "I'm Chinese, but I speak Chinese". I would rather say: "moss will grow without soil, and indeed I discovered moss growing on rock". Unless the word "but" means something completely obscure to me. And I still haven't got the faintest idea what the Babylonians have to do with all this. Start with getting away from the internet and the computer. That's not very Babylonian.

Yes, moss is a major contributor to soil formation where there is no soil. How does that contradict the fact that moss grows on rock, with no soil? That's what it does, and you said it. And more importantly, what does that have to do with the Babylonians? If you don't subscribe to modern science, my suggestion is: Don't use electricity, ok? Use Babylonian science only.

I forgot that one, thank you. Apparently the intelligence that rules it all does it at the price of producing thickness at some places. I know what you did. You are easier to guess than a ball of jello. Let alone 17. Agreed. See?

At this point, I must conclude, either: 1) You are intellectually challenged 2) You are being purposefully disingenuous 3) You are in an altered state of conscience I see no other possibilities. Will you ever get my point?

Live long and prosper! Ad hoc explanations are weak, because you can substitute them for just about anything and they are essentially the same. It can be 17 balls of jello, or it can be an intelligent world, or it can be a pair of thinking shoes. Anything goes. Many ancient myths are like that. They can also be extended ad infinitum (an intelligent world that rules another intelligent world, that rules another intelligent world, that... that rules the universe). You can't tell the "good" theory from the "bad" one because they're all equally bad. They're all non-theories. That's why we don't accept ad hoc arguments in science. Science has a built-in optimization algorithm.

(My emphasis) This is simply ignorance of ongoing physics. There are many attempts at explaining space-time as an emergent phenomenon: Google search for "emergent spacetime" Markus has told you about a couple of them. There is another current of thought in theoretical physics summarised by the sentence "space-time is doomed" (at Planckian scales, ST must be substituted by another concept): Google search for "spacetime is doomed" Etc., etc. As far as I'm aware, nobody's asking you to care about anything, except facts. It's you who's come here claiming a view, and demanding attention to --or, shall I say, demanding belief in--, it. We're telling you some of the problems you will encounter, or calling upon you to explain your points more clearly, circumvent the difficulties. We know some of these ideas have been tried and failed. And you say you don't care? Ok. I even took the time to consult with some of my friends who regularly publish in PRA on non-linear optics (ultrashort laser beams), because I couldn't believe that a high-powered ultra-short laser beam can produce entangled coherent photons. I wanted to make sure whether your method to obtain entangled photons (different from parametric down conversion) does or does not make sense. And it doesn't. Those are multi-photon pulses. You need one photon to split coherently into two photons of lower energy. And you need the crystal to conserve angular momentum. You would have total angular momentum zero, as entanglement requires the spin state, \[\left|\downarrow\uparrow\right\rangle -\left|\uparrow\downarrow\right\rangle\] Reproducing spin 2 would require, \[\left|\uparrow\uparrow\right\rangle\] or, \[\left|\downarrow\downarrow\right\rangle\] which is not entangled. --> no graviton A couple of photons would have a mass (centre of energy) --> no graviton A couple of photons would have EM coupling 1045 stronger than required --> no graviton A couple of photons would not comply with the equivalence principle (couples to charge, not to energy) --> no graviton You've also said that the graviton is in the Standard Model, which simply isn't true. Etc., etc.

You still don't understand the argument that everybody else has understood. Got it? You're still not here. As soon as you come around, tell me. As Swansont said, you're dodging the questions and decided to get personal. Some questions don't make sense. Examples (you seem to need a lot of help to understand): Is the universe optimistic? What is the genetic code of my wristwatch? Does Jupiter's atmosphere like me? What's the purpose of Mount Kilimajaro? Understand a little better? --this one does make sense. I hope so. I expect not.

@Kartazion, You proposed the idea that an "intelligent world" rules our universe. Ok. What is that world? Where is it? How do you define its "intelligence"? How does it relate to "the universe". Why another "world" besides the world? You do not bother to justify at any length what you say, and not only you expect everybody to make a rational argument from it, but you get angry with me to the point of being insulting when I show you that your non-argument is vague at best, by substituting "intelligent world" for some equally ad hoc notion, shoehorned into the same question. I think a change in your attitude is in order if you want to raise your standards a little bit and get people to respect you as a valid interlocutor. I don't care for your insults, nor do I care for your neg-reps attacks. Nor do I care for your apologies, but if you want to offer your apologies, I will accept them. I will keep trying to call on you to raise your rational standards. --knock, knock, anybody there?

Just for further clarification, Parametric down conversion involves feeding one photon at a time into the crystal and getting two salient coherent photons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_parametric_down-conversion Not an ultrashort high-intensity beam, which is made of many photons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrashort_pulse

Why? You'd be equally clueless. You still are. Exactly, to make a point. And you still don't understand, I see.

I'm not 100 % sure of what's bothering you, but it's useful to distinguish in these integrals the field point \( x \) and the source point \( x' \). Now, the sources \( \boldsymbol{J} \) do not extend to spatial infinity. Nor do the fields \( \boldsymbol{A} \) (at the field points: the points at which the field is calculated, \( x \) ). So, \[\int\frac{\partial}{\partial x_{i}}\left[f\left(x\right)g\left(x-x'\right)\right]=\left.fg\right|_{\textrm{boundary}}\rightarrow0\] The boundary is spatial infinity. I hope that helps.