joigus

The concept of "nothing" is but a phantom, I think. If quantum physics has taught us anything for export in the philosophical realm, I think these two nuggets are the most interesting ones: 1) "Identity" is an illusion. 2) "Nothing" is an illusion

I agree 100%. I don't consider this a serious proposal.

As said, no way in hell that photons can "look like" muons in another frame of reference. This is incompatible with conservation of charge and covariance of 4-momentum to mention but the most outrageous. Repeat: No way in hell. Maybe in parallel hells, as @KJW suggests. Very good points. Photons lead long lives; gluons live cryptic ones. And muons, blink and you missed them.

I'm not saying that you are against GR. Sorry if it came across that way. Let me be a tad clearer about what I said. Some of these effects you could simulate with a linear theory. Eg, you could simulate the precession of Mercury's perihelion by assuming that, instead of the 1/r law for the potential, you had a 1/r1+something law. This has been tried, and has failed. Also, perturbations with another object which simply is not there. The thing is you cannot concoct a spherically-symmetric field equation as simple as Poisson's field equation for gravity that gives you solutions differing from 1/r law. You simply cannot. Einstein already observed this. Analogously, you could perhaps concoct a modification of Newton's gravity (and the corresponding generalised Poisson field equation) that gave you all the other effects, like Lense-Thirring, gravitational lensing, etc. So the best explanation we have for all these effects is that the equations are non-linear. A Taylor expansion g=η+h as Mordred has suggested will give you a host of first-order corrections that will do the job.

Sorry. @MigL beat me to the punch, although I had read your comment. I was pre-configuring the answer in my mind as something like "degeneracy pressure is more of a statistical consequence (of general principles of quantum mechanics) rather than an actual interaction". (Something like that.) But MigL's answer is actually much better.

All of them? Deviations of trajectories at intense field values explained Prediction of black holes confirmed Lense-Thirring effect Gravitational time dilation confirmed Gravitational waves confirmed Gravitational lensing confirmed etc. All of those are consequences of the non-linear structure of GR. Arguably BH's can be sensibly talked about with a linear theory (Laplace). Gravity is not renormalisable. I don't understand. Why do you need a limit in order to adds things up? Maybe you're referring to a continuous spectrum? Easier said than done.

"Gravity gravitates" does not lead to circular thinking, as far as I know. It only means the equations for the gravity field are non-linear in the gravity field. So the gravity field couples to itself. Gluons "gluate" too, if you will. The equations become incredibly more difficult to solve, because gluons couple to themselves. But no logical circularity. True. I think @MJ kihara is mixing up "normalisation" with "renormalisation", which are two very different things. Normalisation is about probabilities adding up to one. Renormalisation is about some observables growing arbitrarily large when other observables grow arbitrarily large (or small), so you must declare a cutoff for the actual laboratory condition. So it's about asymptotics of observables. Those are different things.

Oh, yes. You mean those hundreds of atheists who plague Christian social networks trying to break people's faith. Atheists probably invented the word "agnostic" just to be left alone by religious types. The way it goes is not atheism misleads you into a flawed interpretation of evolution. Rather, understanding evolution makes it very hard to hold any belief in a personal god. It makes the idea extremely unlikely. As many who argue in a similar way, you totally misunderstand "random". Deserts and jungles are very stable for millenia (non-random as compared to, eg, the life-cycle of lizards). If environmental conditions varied very wildly every hour, there would be no room for evolution. It requires something slow (non-random enough, if you will) for there to be the chance for the adaptive system to actually adapt. The adaptive system cannot be "too random" either. It must allow for some part of the configuration space for random variation, while being very conservative with the part of it that's worked well (which is most of it).

"Imaginary" in mathematics does not mean "external to reality". It's part of an algebraic extension of the other numbers. It makes perfect sense and it is used to describe "reality" in the usual sense. The impedance of a circuit has an "imaginary" part, for example. The absorption coefficient of an optical medium can be understood as the imaginary part of its refraction index. Imaginary numbers appear in quantum mechanics too. Special relativity can be understood as velocities being imaginary angles... So nothing "unreal" about it.

Ok. I withdraw the word "oxymoron", which is the one I used. I can say though that "sub-quantum" doesn't seem to mean anything precise here. Same goes for "flux", or "echo", or "resonance", etc. I see nothing flowing, echoing, or resonating in this "theory". If anything, it reminds me (in that sense "resonates") of other quasi-literary attempts to introduce a suggestive vocabulary. Nothing more. As Swanson implied, no predictions, no evidence, nothing much to say scientifically speaking.

I see. So oxymoron is just a figure of speech, while this would fall under the category of plain contradiction?

I see. Thank you. I agree with Studiot that a rotation does not necessarily imply a radius, btw. Usually, it implies an angle and a point (centre of rotation), as far as I know.

Let me then follow suit. If you ask me, "is this a good idea?" I would say, "Yes and no."

I'm all ears for things forbidden. Imaginary angles?

Isn't this an oxymoron?

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Indeed. Then you envision the wrong thing, as infinity has no inverse while rotations always have an inverse (they are elements of a group). Aristotle already integrated physics with logic. He did the wrong kind of physics, but physics has never abandoned Aristotelian categories, and logic. Quantum mechanics even has an underlying logic that generalises binary logic in some sense. Buy physics has never been alien to logic. It's been an integral part of the structure since its inception. One could argue that humans have always implicitly used logic.

Thanks for pointing this out. I asked a question that was never answered. What makes one guy become a victim of shootings and bombing, or your pants exploding, and the other the fortunate owner of a convenience store in Ramallah? I must plead ignorance here. Let's hear the answers. This is a very good point. Has he taken advantage of the radicalisation of a big part of Israeli society? It is possible. It's hard to believe that he allowed October 7 to happen while being keenly aware of the dimensions of the upcoming slaughter. Maybe he didn't think it was going to be as big as it was. Maybe he miscalculated. Or maybe he's been a filthy Jewish supremacist since the get go. Maybe his only concern is holding on to power and he doesn't care how many lives are spent. I don't know. It doesn't seem likely to me, but it's not impossible. I think it's more likely that he's increasingly been driven to do deals with that particular devil. I think it's possible that you're doomed to become devilish when rockets rain upon you for decades, when you are eagerly awaiting for the Olympics to start and you have to see your whole National team get slaughtered, when your brother's life has been taken when trying to rescue innocent civilians taken as hostages in Entebbe, etc. It might influence your views, I'm just saying. A Spanish politician (Manuel Fraga) once said that politics makes very strange bed partners. Some people say it may have been Winston Churchill who first said it. In any case, that's what might be going on here. The law of unintended consequences infiltrates all of this, IMO, and it's all too easy to demonise one part while lifting responsibility from the other. We just love binary logic.

Exactly. So we've narrowed it down to "who is playing Johnny's mum or dad here?"

Being inclined is a relative term. The Rarámuri call themselves "the people who walk straight". I suppose to them everybody else is tilted.

Members of the Knesset, bankers, entrepreneurs, etc. All of them Arabs. Almost none of them seem to be impelled to stab people to death on the street, blow themselves up, etc. Isn't that peculiar? Why is that? Same ethnicity, same language, same traditions. Completely different behaviour. No abuse on them, no shortage of anything apparently, apart from the regular strifes of life, like finding a job or having access to a house in a certain area. They easily and frequently become friends with the other Israelies. I've been curious about that for many years. Everybody should be amazed. Many people today --certainly many political commentators-- seem not to be in the least curious about this fact. To many of these people, as Drummond said to Brady in Inherit the wind, I'm tempted to say, "It frightens me to imagine the state of learning in this world if everyone had your driving curiosity" I find it very, very peculiar. Maybe some of our knowledgeable members can clarify this in simple analytical terms, and giving a rest to terms of hyperbole like "fascist", "concentration camp", "genocide", etc that anybody can apply to anybody else without giving it much thought. Analysis is better conducted in dispassionate terms. I've personally have had enough of cliches already.

I can't believe you can't figure out my analogy.

And anteaters look a great deal like pangolins, but it's pangolins who are to blame for the spread of COVID-19... No, wait! That's another misinformation thread. Anteaters and pangolins, mmm... Someone must be guilty. It's either the ant-eaters or the pangolins. Certainly there's always someone to blame!! Here's an idea: Let's sell rockets and tunnel-drilling tools to the ant-eaters, and... Plus No, no, I know, I know, let's sell anti-rocket systems and drones, and other stuff to the anteaters. All with the tax-payer money of the armadillos... See what I mean?

Santa clause = the Santa that I learned about as a boy "that I learned about as a boy" is the clause, of course.

I've drunk of many sources, really. I greatly respect you, as the rest of the interlocutors here, but I realise we will probably never agree on this. And I don't think personal testimonies really settlle it. Most of my friends think like you too, so my ideological ambience has been quite a different one. So far I've only quoted Haniyah from Al-Jazeera. I didn't quote any so-called 'Zionist' sources. In fact, I could continue this discussion by only quoting Islamic and Cold-War era Soviet sources, if you want. It would be much harder though because I could prove that the numbers of victims that Hamas is providing quite simply cannot be true, and the rest of the world is taking them as just the truth at everyone's peril. But it can be done with just testimonies of the 'good guys'. I would be able to prove how tilted public opinion is to one side, at least in the West. The Muslim-Islamist actors in this drama have never made a secret of their real intentions. The actors in the Soviets that provided support for them during the Cold War did make it a secret, but it eventually leaked. Why the West systematically chooses to ignore it is not anybody's guess. It's a political weapon of prime importance. It polarises people's minds. It makes us (you and I, for example) potential enemies for reasons having zilch to do with our actual personal situations. You must take a side!!! You mention the Nakba, which is still in living memory, and was roughly at the same time as the exile of the Mizhrahi Jews, that's also in living memory. Here's another Muslim quotation (this one appeared on the eve of the famous Nakba): Here Mustafa Amin, the editor of Akhbar el-Yom, is quoting the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam. Seems like someone knew there was going to be a war of extermination before it happened. And happen it did. Notice he doesn't say "the Palestinians". He says "Palestine's Arab population". This distinction is essential. Back in 1945 Palestine was just a place. Nothing more. It's no coincidence that the 3rd most common Palestinian surname is al Masri, or El Masry. What does 'El Masry" mean?: "The Egyptian". I'm well aware of the fact that there are many rotten apples in the Zionist basket. There are Zionists who dream of a world colonised by religious Jews. And that the Messiah will not come until that dream is fulfilled. Those are just religious bigots. Same as Muslims who turn 'religious' and start saying, and thinking, and acting out on the idea that the world must be all for Islam, that the other peoples of the Book must pay the jizya, and that the politheists must die or convert. Religion is poison, whether it kills you, me or others depends on accidents in life. But the mechanisms of propaganda have worked on the minds of many people from all sides of this conflict, including many modern Western antizionist Jews who are not willing to make many fine distinctions, or perhaps are just tired, or who knows. Anyway, we're getting sidetracked here, I don't have the time to draw the argument as carefully as I would like to now, and the counterarguments to what seems to be @MigL's and my own's position here are piling up. But carpet bombing , @TheVat Com'on! There were leaflets and flyers, as well as phone calls and SMS messages in advance. The bombs were guided and from the footage I've seen, the targets were very specific. In many cases, secondary explosions reveal that the targets must have been explosive depots. In one particular case, from the footage, two or three 'fighters' or 'terrorists' were next to a cart pulled by a donkey. They were hit, but the donkey survived, only somewhat startled. That doesn't look like carpet bombing to me. Same as this (really!) doesn't look like a concentration camp: And the green-and-white map, @John Cuthber, that's just a piece of photoshop artistry. Nothing more. It doesn't mention the exile of hundreds of thousands of Mizhrahi Jews (or at least it paints them in no colour). It doesn't picture by what mysterious process two million odd of these 'Palestinian' became 'Israeli Arabs' and decided to stay in non-heavily-policed areas so-called 'Israel'. The least I can say is I see nothing of what I want to understand from those propaganda pieces that we are shown, from both sides if you will (although I generally see one and have to dig deep for the other). And yet I'm offered them every day as if must take a side. You must take a side!!!