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Mordred, Well thank you for the epoch discription. Makes sense, but seems to indicate that scientists switch readily between the hypothetical universal now, and the Earth as here and now, as I have been trying to describe on various threads, with some regular chiding about such notions coming from several sources. This switch between what we see, to what we know must be the case is something I figure to be required inorder to hold a proper model of the place. I am glad to understand that this switch is already understood as required, and people know when to make the switch and how to add back between the two perspectives. But this as well worries me that sometimes the required shifts of ALL components are not made in all cases. I worry for instance, when someone states something like they know how many photons there are in the observable universe, that they might be double counting, and counting the same thing once from here, and then again from the hypothetical universal now. For instance as we look out at our galaxy we see only the very closest stuff within a moment of it happening. We know something is happening at Proxima now, and we know we see something happening at Proxima now, yet the two things, what we see and what we know, are separated by a couple of years. But there is only one instance of Proxima, that can be understood in two different ways, alternately, and taken together to understand the huge model that comprises both the Earth and Proxima, and understand what we see, based on what we know to be the case...but an equation or survey that includes Proxima, must be specific about which way Proxima is being considered, and such specific defined ways of viewing a thing, must be consistently applied to everything else in the survey. If the difference between our here and now, and the universal now is not mentioned in the equation, how is one to know that it is being looked at properly? Regards. TAR Strange, Yes, I was asking if any actual material thing was transferred during the act of gravitational attraction. Was there something over there that is now here, and was something that was here now over there? Impulse or field, or mass or energy, virtual or actual, particle or wave? Anything transferred from one place to the other. You say no, but dark matter and energy seem to be somehow related to gravitational attraction, and so far I don't think how the stuff works is very well understood. If angular momentum is conserved, how do you know how much you have currently, if currently is spread out over 100 thousand years? Regards, TAR

Scheme drawn on pingpong ball. Same ball, five different shots, sort of following the red hexagonal plane around.

SwansonT, I think steady state is a reasonable approximation for some considerations, but not necessarily for others. That is the nature of my inquiry here. When is it not appropriate to assume a steady state over an entire system that is so large as to have communication between its parts take 100,000 years? Mordred, I am only 5 pages into the 35 page survey you linked, and it is very good and I am learning a lot, so I will refrain from forming any conclusions at this point, but a couple questions. When the author speaks of the current epoch what is he talking about? How long is an epoch and from which point of view are we to take it? Is it from this point (Earth) that we view, or is it from a God-like position, where all items and elements in the universe are currently 13.8 billion years old, that we are considering "this" epoch to be occurring? Strange, From the enegy survey article is this proof that main stream scientists do what I was suggesting earlier, and it is not only puedoscientists that work the data into the equations rather than let the data establish the equations. It appears that most of the baryonic components are observationally well con- strained, apart from the largest entry, for warm plasma, which still is driven by the need to bal- ance the budget rather than more directly by the observations. Regards. TAR Thread, Another notion related to this discussion occurred to me as I was reading the mass/energy survey article. As energy "goes out" from an item, does mass also have such loss? If gravity travels at the speed of light, is there a "something" that changes position as gravitation attraction is happening? And if so, should this transaction be accounted for in taking a large system into account? Like on a childhood playground ride, the speed of the spinning could be adjusted by moving your body toward the outside or toward the inside. Or a ballet dancer or ice skater can slow or speed her/his spin by extending or retracting her/his arms. As material is expelled by a star the wheight of a system is redistributed, but does the "act" of gravitational attraction cause any redistribution or evening out of some actual stuff (mass), analogous to photons in the exchange of electromagnetic energy? Regards, TAR

Strange, But here, the how, of how when is to figure the thing, is the area where the significance resides. Consider the amount of energy a star puts off. It is quite significant. Significant enough to cause a chemical reaction at the back of your insignificantly tiny eyeball. This energy that that visible star put off has gone off in all directions, has been going off in all directions and continues to go off in all directions. Enough photons, enough energy hits a small thing like an eyeball, at a distance of a few ten thousands of lys, to cause us to see the star. How may eyeball size areas are there in this area of the galaxy that the energy of that star is currently hitting? Some photon from that star is currently hitting an eyeball size area a billion lys from here. And that occurence can be said to be occuring in every direction, at every distance that there is, from that star. Locations in and outside the galaxy are currently receiving photons from that star. In addition that hypothetical area in question that is currently receiving a photon from that star, also received one yesterday and a year ago and a billion years ago from that star and will recieve one next year and the year after. This same thing can be said for every eyeball size area in the entire universe, or at least within the same number of lys distance as years old that the star in question is. Seems a significant amount of energy to me. With or without numbers attached. Regards, TAR

Strange, I have seen many a term dropped as not significant that I thought was significant. Even in this discussion it is often claimed that the effect I am talking about is too tiny to make a difference. When I know the difference between a item we see, and the same item after the time it takes light to get here from it, is significant. Items that are 1 billion lys away have had 1 billion years to evolve and move. You cannot talk of two instances of a thing that can only be one instance of thing. Doing so would allow for a significantly incorrect system equation. Regards, TAR

SwansonT, Sorry about my large mistake, missing the percentage, but energy released by suns does not stay in the galaxy for long. Maybe a hundred thousand years, but after that it is outside the galaxy. Otherwise we could not see other galaxies. So mass/energy calculations should include a time component, as some energy has left, is leaving and will leave, according to whether you are considering energy on this side of the galaxy or on the other. Regards, TAR

SwansonT, Mordred, Strange, I appreciate that the science and accepted measurements of Z and proposed volume and density calculations point to an expanding universe. My intent is not to try to prove current science wrong, but to question if the inferences make sense. Taking a measurement and fitting it to a mathematical model is appropriate. Establishing a mathematical model thusly and seeing that measurements fit the model is good confirmation that the model is workable. However, the well understood science is a somewhat similar body of knowledge that we had just a short time ago, when everybody thought the universe was slowing down its expansion. My conondrum is figuring out which pieces of information are derived from assumptions and data that was properly vetted for time and distance considerations, and uncomfortably, whether or not the time and distance assumptions made were based on knowledge and measurements taken before or after certain insights and constant adjustments were made. It is not unusual to find a cyclical nature to the reasoning of time and distance, where an assumption provides the distance and time figures that are plugged into the equation from which assumptions about distance and time are inferred. Like Z. And now, the areas of the universe that are just now visible to us as CMB, which at the time of photon launch were 380thousand years old, are now 13.8 billion years old. Those areas are thusly two different sizes in terms of volume, the way we see them, and the way they are. Yet Strange submits that there is no universal now, as if it is not required that the universe actually be, at this current moment, larger than it appears. So, with the differences in models between current physicists, and the changes in models over the years as new inferences are made and new observations made to fit into the models, and with the "difference" in models derived from what we see, as opposed to what we know to have been the case, and what we know must currrently be the case, it is hard to visualize the model that a particular scientist is using when making a particular statement or writing a particular formula that encompasses an entire system that is larger than a moment in radius. Regards, TAR

Vexen, Reading the Sam Harris link, I was of the opinion that drugs are a cheat, as he guessed at one point in the article. And this. " As Daniel Pinchbeck pointed out in his highly entertaining book Breaking Open the Head, the fact that both the Mayans and the Aztecs used psychedelics, while being enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice, makes any idealistic connection between plant-based shamanism and an enlightened society seem terribly naïve. " My opinion, and one not completely distillable into one of your poll selections, is that drugs that alter your normal mental states should be avoided, but should never have been made illegal, nor be put in the hands of the medical community to distribute. Altering your mental state, into one you would prefer seems to be the basis of conscious life, anyway. The horrors occur, I think, when one person seeks to control someone elses mental state, for their own gain. As in a drug dealer. It does not matter significantly whether that dealer/user relationship is sanctioned by society or not. What matters is whether the dealer has the wellbeing of the user in mind, and the user trusts and should trust the dealer. I quit smoking back in April after 47 years of regular moderate to heavy smoking. Nicotine should certainly be legal, as it makes a person feel good, in a general (cheating) way, but probabably best to withhold from a person until old enough to make such decisions. What this age should be might be hard to decide upon. I started smoking cigarettes when I was 13, tried pot and hashish a number of times when I was 17 and 18, sniffed gas a couple times (not recommended, kills brain cells quite readily,) tried mushrooms once (very interesting and pretty auras and rays around everything), tried LSD once and had a bad trip, tried it again to check on the situation had an uncomfortable situation develop again, and swore off mind altering drugs, since. Still drank and smoked, but have not done any pot, or hallucinagins, or anything since. Never tried crack or speed or coke or heroine and am not about to. Pain killers I use only a little when I really really need one, after a surgery for instance, and stop taking them as soon as the pain is bearable. Even stopped drinking while in the Army in Germany in 1980, with all that good beer around, because it killed brain cells, allowed you to do stuff you wouldn't normally do, could get you into an accident or cause you to lose you license, would require a night out with your drinking buddies, which would disallow that night being spent with any girl I would meet and fall in love with and desire to marry once I returned to civilian life, and because getting drunk was not a very good role model to set for my subordinates as I was up for promotion to Spec5. So in terms of your poll I would want us, as a society to keep the cheating ways to feel good away from our youth, but not be too hard on the young people that try things out, but to be very cautious and attentive when it comes to drug dealers, and people that would control other people through their need/desire for euphoria. The three most important considerations, to me, in this discussion, are the ideas of control, judgement, and trust. A person should use good judgement, be in control of their own mental state, and trust only trustworthy folk. Regards, TAR

Mordred, I am questioning the statement "beyond that, there is no data". We have been looking at the stars and documenting what we see for what, maybe 5 thousand years? Do we have ANY current data from beyond a sphere 5 thousand lys in radius? We see stuff happening currently that is happening at vast distances, further away than even the far reaches of our emmense galaxy. Its the timing difference between what is happening at this point in the Milky Way, and at some point on the other side of the place, that I am questioning here, in asking whether there is a size limit to what you can reasonable consider one system, in total, all taken "at once" in a calculation, or inference. Such is my consternation when told that scientists have figured that the universe is not only expanding, but is currently accelerating its expansion. Really? You can take the status of the entire system as one thing and make a statement like that, based on the information gleened about the place over the last 5thousand years? And all this based on doppler shifts that show a thing is mostly moving toward us or away from us, or moving left and right or up and down against the background of really distant items? Those really distant items could have turned around and headed back toward us a billion years ago. We would not have any data about that turn around for billions of years. SwansonT, " If it did so at that rate for 1 billion years, that would be about .0068% of its current mass." So If you took 147 Suns, together they would convert a sun's worth of mass into energy and send it outward every billion years. Supernovas seem to actually beam large amounts of mass away into energy, in the person of a beam of cosmic rays heading out in some particular direction. Black holes seem to spew off a high energy beam as well. I don't know the numbers for the natural ways that energy is converted back to mass, nor "currently" what percentage of the universe is mass, and what is energy, but its an interesting thought experiment to perform, in reference to my current question of how large a system you can consider at once. Let's say for instance, that there is a certain cycle that occurs where through various mechanisms energy is converted to mass and mass to energy, and just for the sake of argument the cycle has an average period of 100 billion years. That is, that after 100 billion years, any selected peice of mass, was likely once energy instead, and any selected quantum of energy was once a particle with mass. Under this thought experiment when you see a distant quasar, the image is made up photons which carry with them energy which was once mass. Concurrently the area where the quasar once stood, has not only undergone some large amount of stellar evolution, and continual shining and concurrent loss of mass, but has been subjected to the photons of energy coming in from all directions, from all the other items in the universe, for 13.8 billion years. Which items of energy and mass are you going to count, in reference to that quasar, when doing your census of the system which is the observable universe, when the items of mass and energy related to that quasar are spread out across the entire observable universe? At least in a spherelike volume with a radius the distance between us and the quasar's location. It would be like having in your hand, your own skull as a 7 year old. You can't take the place at once. Regards, TAR

Swansont, I was not suggesting the super novas changed the mass of the galaxy, I was suggesting that its hard to know when to count a thing as one instance of a thing. Perhaps you have a point, that it would not matter that much to the rest of galaxy whether a supernova's mass was spread out over a relatively small section of the galaxy, nearby where the mass stood as an intact star. But perhaps that difference that the spreading out of the mass would make, would increase over time. For instance, after 1billion years subsequent to a super nova, that star's mass is highly distributed in dust and has accumulated to form perhaps another star, and given of light, which is energy and therefore mass, that has had a billion years to travel at the speed of light, away from where the star stood, a billion years ago. Such affects would be 1000 times less in only 1 million years and 10 thousand times lest in the mere time it takes light to cross a galaxy, but there would still be wide ranging effects. Effects that ranged as wide as the electomagnetic waves and particles and dust could reach, in the time frame in question. Let's say for instance incredible amounts of cosmic rays are issued forth from a supernova, and you are located 1 light year away. In a year you get boiled, but in two years...you are safe because the cosmic rays have already passed your location. There are other solar systems with planets that might be in the path of the cosmic rays eminating from that super nova, but your location is no longer in its sights. Now, when figuring the mass of the galaxy, by the methods suggested above, by Strange, are you figuring the mass equivalent of the cosmic rays, and their position and timing? Would it not matter if you took the "pictiure" now or last year, in terms of whether that mass was in the direction the star use to be in or in the other direction? Does it not matter at which instant you are "freezing" the galaxy in order to take your census of the place, in terms of its mass and the postions and concentrations of that mass? Regards, TAR Regards, TAR

Vixen, Perhaps I am half and half on "strange" stuff. Like a joke you don't get, is funny when you do get it, compared to finding it "strange" that the 20 dollars you thought was in your wallet is not there and you can not account for where it might have gone. I have an anti strange philosophy in the sense that the universe must already fit together exactly, and it would not be "strange" to find that it did indeed fit together exactly and everything made perfect sense, in more than one way...after all is considered. Like Pastuer's germs. Oh, that makes sense. Not what I was expecting. Not what I knew earlier to be the case, but it all fits together and makes sense, once you "get it". But the relationship of these different ways to take the word strange to the thread topic is whether or not its reasonable to assume that the world itself changes, once you "get it". And conversely, does the fact that the world does fit together flawlessly require that someone "got it" ahead of time and designed the thing in that flawless manner. It is alright, I think, to take the universe as a third person, that you can get to know. It is, by my way of thinking (pun intented,) the way consciousness actually comes about. The internalization of the outside world into the synapses and folds of a human brain, HAS TO, result in the model of the place, thusly configured in the brain, bearing some certain familiar relationship or analog pattern to the thing which is internalized. That is, the organization of the brain reflects the organisation of the external world first. It is second hand for the human to affect the outside world through thought or action. The patterns we maintain and create in the world are significant proof of earlier and other consciousnesses having existed, and existing in the world, but such proof of earlier and other consciousness does not extend to the galaxies, nor to the quarks. We may be related to, and reliant upon the galaxies and the quarks, but this, in a familiar way, not a strange way. The impulse and feeling that one has when considering the world itself as your mother, as in Gai, or as your father as in Zeus, or as your brother as in Jesus, or as your creator and judge as in Allah, is not completely wrong in a bunch of ways. Of primary consideration in respect to this thread is that fact that your consciousness came about as the result of the place, and did not pop up in contradiction to the place, nor was it "gifted" to you by an outside party that was not already fully associated with the place and therefore NOT an outside party. Considering the universe "strange", as in being an outside party, is not something I believe to be correct. We are already in and of the place. Anything we are capable of is because the place is capable of it, but that does not mean, as is suggested by the OP, that the place was conscious, as a void, nor does it mean that the universe is strange if it does something differently than the way we have before characterized its patterns and activities and structures and laws. We might just have an insight, or get a joke every once in a while. A baby on the other side of the world would be a strange face to me. Even today. I could possibly never see it. But the face is anything but strange to his/her mom. Regards, TAR Vixen, again, I just thought of something. I relates to consciousness and the model of the world we have in our brains, and the the consequential "strangeness" of your model and the world, not matching. Story: I was taking my Dad on a ferry ride around Manhattan to go to the new Yankee Stadium for a game. As we drove to the ferry port on the Jersey side I was describing to him the large ferry boat that was moored to the land and used as a station. I had crystal clear memory of the place, as I had used it several times to get to NYC and had been there on shore looking at it for hours waiting for my wife to come across the gang plank on 9-11. I fully expected to see the place as I was describing it to my dad...until we got to where we would have seen it, and the parking lots, and things were different. The ferry that used to act as the dock was gone, and a new terminal was built a little further North on the shore. Strange. In subsequent days I considered the fact that the new terminal had just been built, and the large ferry removed in the last couple years. An observer on a planet circling our closest star looking at Port Imperial on that day my dad and I went to the game, would have seen the old ferry boat station. (figuring the image of the ferry boat being moved had not yet reached Proxima.) Strange again.

Been trying to come up with a way to depict any direction using the 12 segments (spherical rhombic dodecahedron shapes) and finally did yesterday, after making a realization the night before. I had a clay ball with long toothpicks at tje eight corners of the cube(blue wirenuts in previous picure) and short tootpicks at the points of the octahedron(orange wirenuts). I scored the ball between the toothpicks to make the 12 spherical rhombic dodecahedron shapes. I put a large penhole in the center of each shape. Then I noticed (again) that the holes lined up in the 4 hexagonal planes we talked about. I placed small penholes every 10 degrees and looked at the relationship the holes had to the grid when you divide the shape in quarters by drawing a line parallel and inbetween the sides of the shape. I noticed the angle was off, but it was off consistently, with the diamonds facing one way then the other. If i made 20 degree marks in the hexagonal plane I could use those marks to draw my parallel grid. Each diamond was thusly dividable into "degrees" "minutes" "seconds" and fractions of seconds if you wished. Any point on the sphere could be named, exactly and reproducably, as long as you had a naming convention, which I developed yesterday, by starting with the center of an equatorial diamond and going up and to the right, around the hexagon, and then the other hexagonal plane that goes through that point, up and to the left and all the way round. 6 60degree sections adding up to 360 degrees. Then I moved over on diamond on the equator and repeated the process. Each of the four planes has its own letter/color, and I used a Capital Letter to signify having the degrees increase upward and a little letter having the degrees increase downward. Thusly each diamond has its own name and numbering convention and is related to actual degrees. The lines (degrees) on my grid are a little shorter than the actual degrees so there are more square TAR degrees than actual square degrees on the sphere. TAR degrees come to 43200 square degrees (60x60x12) Actual square degrees in sphere are 41253 (approx) but the conversion from TAR square degrees to actual square degrees is regular and acurate. 1.0471 times 41253 is 43200 and of course the reciprical .9549 times 43200 is 41253. 1.0471 is 1/3 Pi. so the scheme is usable and convertable. And a whole lot easier than the figuring you have to do using spherical coordinants. Regards, TAR

swansont, I don't know how mass transients are figured. It seems likely that a mass would "pull" from the direction where it was when we see it. Which is not the direction the thing is in now, as the light and gravity took some time to get here. So the distance between here and the observed item would matter, in determining its current position, if that is what one was trying to accomplish. Or is its apparent position the only one we care about? When considering something the size of a galaxy, if you considered apparent position only, your positioning of the close stuff would be more correct than your positioning of the far away stuff. My concern, is that the size is discounted and somehow ignored or considered unimportant, as if the age simplified the matter, where to me, the age increases the complexity. For instance, how do we think about a question such as "how many supernova happened in the galaxy in 2014?" If we saw one last week, did it happen in 2014 or did it happen 5 10 or 50 thousand years ago? If one is happening now 35 thousand lys from here, does that count as happening in 2014 or do we have to wait 35 thousand years to see it, to count it as happening in 2014? So are mass transients figured as effective mass, or actual mass? And what perspective makes any sense to take, that could see the whole galaxy at once? Regards, TAR Strange, The "total mass" inside the orbit, is a good example of my question. The orbit the Sun takes around the center of the Galaxy is very large and the stuff within it, very substantial. How do we figure all that at once, when it takes tens of millions of years to complete an orbit, and 50 to 150 thousand years to even see where the other end is at? Regards, TAR

Vixen, But is the "strange" world of quantum physics anything different from what quantum physicists expect out of reality? Is an ever expanding universe anything different from what a cosmologist expects out of reality? We did not know about germs, as we know about them after Pastuer, but we still knew not to eat dead things that we did not see killed. Consciousness has to be the way we do it. We are not conscious of any consciounesses that do not exhibit an awareness of their surroundings. We, to be conscious, must be aware of our surroundings. The external world must be internalized and modeled and remembered and thought about and acted upon, to make a conscious being. Therefore the external world has to already exist, prior an entity conscious of it. Where I think you are wrong, in calling our consciousness strange, and the nature of the universe strange, is the simple fact that we have no other way of knowing the universe, than the way we do, and we have no other universe but this one, to know. I respectfully disagree with your disagreement. Regards, TAR

JustThinking, Well, what if our consciousness developed. That is, that it did not exist priorly as a void consciousness, but was earlier a quite empty headed void. A very simple minded place could become very complex with only the distinctions of different places, within it. My thinking (no pun intended,) is that each entity in the universe, is such, merely by being distinct, in some manner, from everything else. As human beings, we exist at a particular place, a quite unique place, that is occupied by only one human. One instance of each of us, distinct from the rest of the universe in exactly the way a human being is a separate entity than the shirt on her back, or the room she is sitting in, or than the person on the road outside the building. Different, as the Earth is from Saturn, or the Sun is from Alpha Centuri, or the Milkyway is, from Andromeda. A void consciousness would not be able to make any distinctions. Everything would be the same. No time. No space. No here, no there. No before, now, and later. Only by being a separate entity would one have the ability to be conscious of other entities, and to count oneself as one. So if there was a void entity, a consciousness that included the whole shebang, that consciousness would have been, for all intents and purposes, without any intent or purpose. No movement or change would be possible. A singularity... Hum...as is suspected to be the kind of thing the universe is from. Then, in an instant time and space came into existence. Then Suns, and elements were forged. Then planets and water and air and primodial gloop. Then life, form and structure, grabbed from a universe otherwise heading toward entropy. What makes you think we ever had the internet before? Could be a first. Regards, TAR Vixen, Consciousness and the nature of the world one is conscious of are neither strange. Conscious is the only thing we are, and nature is the only thing we are conscious of. I would say both are quite regular, possible and required. Sort of the opposite of strange. Quite familiar and lovable, actually. Regards, TAR

Studiot, So in particular I am concerned with the rotation of a Galaxy, in regards to the proposal of the need of dark matter to be "present" to explain the rotational speed. How can one figure such a large item as a galaxy as one thing, happening at once, according to a simple gas law? Regards, TAR

When considering the total energy or the total mass, or the total entropy, or the total momentum of a system, what happens when the far reaches of the system are separated by a significant distance, where light or gravity cannot get from one end of the system to the other in less than a moment? Let's say a moment is between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 seconds, and is somehow related to how we sense and remember and think in terms of existence and cause and effect and such. A system, larger than half a million miles in diameter, would not be understandable as happening "at the same time". Any equation, like the application of the gas law, would be suspect, unless "when" the far reaches were being considered, was well defined. So is there a size limit for considering a system within one equation?

Imatfaal, You are right, I can not solve 5 completely unknown in 2 tries, all the time. Sometimes yes, but I have not come up with a foolproof stategy. So I need 6 with my method. Your 5 method looks good though. Regards, TAR

Imatfaal, Again I am not finding where to mark a section of text as spoiler, so don't read any further. Regards, TAR edit - by imatfaal Tar Highlight text to be hidden - hit button 3rd along from left hand side - top row and a box saying special bb code appears - scroll down to spoiler.

I don't know how to mark spoiler, so don't read this since it might be a solution in 5 trials or less.

MattMVS7, "This would be because, when we say something is neutral (such as our thoughts and personal created meanings in life being neutral), then what we are saying here is that these thoughts are nothing more than just thoughts. That they are nothing more than words, sounds, images, etc. So this would be true." What if even the mere act of having a thought is good, and not neutral? The basic assumption of your logic would be suspect. "Just a thought", would not be a correct statement. There is a strong argument that being alive is better than being dead. That is, that life itself is good, regardless of whether you have a sweet or sour taste in your mouth. Regards, TAR

For instance, after establishing a predictable pattern of incident photons from a certain experimental setup, subject the whole experimental device to a strong magnetic field with the lines of force running in each of the 12 main directions and see if the pattern of incident photons changes in a predictable manner. Or a strong static/electric field. Or a strong gravitational field. My guess would be that there would be identifiable differences in the incidences of the photons on the CCDs in the different identified directions, for a combination of two different types of reasons. One, the different directional orientations of the fields might change the directional orientations of the atoms in the center of the experiment itself, thus causing the atoms to be "facing" in a certain direction when struck by the laser. And two, the space or air or vacuum between the center of the experiment and the CCDs might be conditioned by the fields into an arrangement that guided the photons in certain directions, or to borrow Mike Smith Cosmos's term, along certain "tubes of opportunity" or pathways.

Jacques, I was not sure why you had the atom going to the left, when the photon came from the left? However, if there was a laser firing from the left on a suitable group of atoms, I would guess that the secondary photons released from the atoms, might go in certain directions more than in others. I apologize for bending the rules in mentioning this, but I have been thinking of an application of the 12 identical sections of the sphere, to this directional question. The Sperical Rhombic Dodecahedron has identical sections that can be regularly divided in quarters, and each quarter can be divided in quarters , down to whatever pixel resolution one would desire. Such a scheme allows for definite numbering and identification of each "direction" from the center that one of the divisions would represent. Outfitting the inside surface of each of the Sperical Rhombic Dodecahederon "diamonds" with CCDs (charge coupled devices), one could count the incidence of photons going in each of the defined directions. All the directions would be represented with equal internal angle, and any regular deviation from random distribution could be identified and easily pictured (reproduced in color or whatever on another sphere similarly segmented). Run the same experiment with the device locked on to Earth, or Sun, or Galaxy, and notice any deviations. Regards, TAR Thusly finding out if photons have a tendency to go in certain directions, for certain reasons.

Strange, But acceleration is a change in speed over time. Isn't it? Don't you have to know speed and position and how the rate of change of speed is occurring to talk about acceleration? How can the acceleration be absolute, but the derivative not be. One might think you can not have speed without distance and time. Similarly how can you have acceleration if you have not already defined the space you are moving through in terms of time and distance, so that you can notice a rate of change? Been thinking about this thread a lot, in terms of performing a thought experiment where spheres are within spheres, able to move on any axis. Place a dot on the outer sphere and orient the dot in the direction of the great attractor, and figure and contruct the thing so that the dot remains in that direction (from the center of the experiment) regardless of the motion of the Earth and Sun and Galaxy. Then, on a sphere inside that one, place a dot that is figured to stay pointing at the center of the galaxy. Then inside that, a sphere constructed to stay with its dot pointing at the Sun, and inside that, one pointing at the center of the Earth. Probably not difficult from there to draw another symbol on each of the spheres, 90 degrees from the dot, showing the direction that sphere is going (with a velocity) around the thing the dot is oriented toward. With such a device, either really contructed or just imagined, one could be aware of the different motions that the device was undergoing. And the different directions, that remained the same and moved in reliable repeatable sequences of relationships to each other. With such an indicator one could orient an experiment to one or another of the spheres and keep it oriented a particular way, and see if there are any real things, fields, and forces that stay associated with one sphere, more than the others. Would anything build up in or vacate a particular direction? We know at least a ball bearing placed inside the Earth sphere would likely reside near the center of the Earth Dot. What forces do we have at our disposal as the Earth passes through a magnetic line of force from the Sun? Is there any difference to anything that is with or against the direction we are going? Regards, TAR

MigL, I like to figure things out on my own. If someone in a book suggests that someone is traveling at a relativistic speed, lets say 9 tenths the speed of light, my instant assumption is that they are traveling 270,000 km per second. They have to be going that fast relative to something, or the statement is meaningless. They would have to be going that fast, relative to a something that was not going that fast. In the twin paradox there are assumptions made as to what this twin would measure and what the other twin would measure, as per distance. I am not sure why, if there is no preferred frame of reference, why it is the traveling twin that is moving at 270,000 km per second, and why she is not stationary and the rest of the galaxy is moving at 270,000 km per hour in the other direction. If you can take it either way, then clocks slowing down and speeding up and distances shortening because of motion does not make any sense, because the effects would cancel out, if it was all relative and there was no establishment that was created by the already setup arrangement of the planets around the Sun and the stars around the center of the Galaxy and the local cluster's movement around the great attractor, all in reference to the CMB. So, for me, you are left with a timing difference, when things are very far away. That is why I suggest there is a universal now, where things are happening 13.8 billion years after the big bang. If the traveling twin goes off, very fast in a certain direction, in a second she will get to a place that is almost a second away from us. Much like the Mars rover was 14 minutes from us. The Mars rover never left reality, and alway was in a portion the the universe that was exactly as old as every other portion. If the Mars rover would be returned to Earth, according to my theory, it would still be as old as the universe is, and would have never gotten any younger or older than the place. How could it? It never left reality. Just took a different route through what was always now in the universal sense. The question would be, how many instances of the Mars rover do you figure there are? I figure there is only one instance. Since it was 14 minuties away at one point, it existed in the universal now as only one instance of the Mars Rover, even though that instance took 14 minutes to be seen or sensed by someone or something here on Earth. Regards, TAR