Bignose

looks like a step size to me. That is you step t from 0 to 5 in 0.1 increments: 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, .... 4.8, 4.9. 5.0.

edit never mind, my bad

I do not like being called lazy when you don't even attempt to answer any question I pose, or attempt to understand. You are doing the exact same thing you are accusing us of! How can the sampling rate for a probability NOT be important when trying to estimate how likely it is that an event could have occurred? It is a critical piece of information. 10^260 is indeed a big number. But without a rate to compare it to, it is meaningless in isolation. It is beyond comprehension when there it no rate to compare it to. Just stopping at this point and saying "IT'S SO BIIIIIIGGG!!!" is lazy. To be meaningful, let's see how big it is in comparison to how often the sampling occurs. This is YOUR idea, so it is up to YOU to provide details on how you estimate a rate. I actually wouldn't mind seeing details on how 10^260 was calculated either. Himora, the above is trying to help you, to make your numbers MORE meaningful. 10^260 only carries a lot of meaning when it is compared to something else. Calculate that something else, and THEN draw meaning from it.

You need a better calculator, then. Both Python and Mathematica have no problem with 10^260. It is just a number. You didn't address my question at all. Which is how many experiments per unit time occur? If you can play 10,000 poker hands an hour, you're going to get more royal flushes than 10 hands an hour. It really becomes important to know how often the experiment for 'life' is conducted to put meaning on 10^260. I don't know how to estimate the rate, but I know that without the rate, 10^260 is just a number. I mean, 10^0 is a large number if the sampling rate is 10^-260 per year. One number is only large when compared to another. One number is isolation is meaningless and arbitrary, really. And, I have played plenty of poker myself. I do not need a treatise on the game. What I need is a compelling reason to think that the dealing of 5 cards to many players and seeing whose hand is stronger is in any way a model for the formation of life. Because I still don't see it.

Despite all the valid issues about how chance alone is NOT how most scientists working in the field would describe the situation, yes 10^260 is a big number (I'd actually like to see the calculation that got this number, too, if you'd be kind enough to cite it). But how quickly are experiments happening? You can't just dismiss a number because it is large without knowing how many times it is being sampled, or how often the experiment is happening. If it happens 10^245 times every second, then 10^260 doesn't look so imposing anymore. If it happens 10^10 times every second, then we can talk. But without an estimate on the rate of trials, 10^260 is meaningless in isolation. To go back to your previous favorite analogy, a royal flush happens only once every 649,740 hands in poker. That is a pretty large number. Say your favorite casino deals at 40 hands an hour. That means, on average, a person would have to spend over 16000 hours playing poker at that casino. Even an avid player is going to take quite a while to accrue that number. Most importantly, note that I provided a sampling rate at how often the experiment (a hand dealt) happens. THEN, conclusions are drawn. So, please provide an estimate how often the 'experiment' is conducted before you can draw any conclusions about it.

I am of the opinion that the randomness in poker is a rather poor analogy to explain much at all about life. But I am open minded enough to listen to well-founded reasons that show it. Please provide in exacting detail how shuffling and dealing cards relates to the development of life.

I think that this statement needs some supporting evidence. I think a good argument could be made almost the completely other way, considering the very wide variety of harsh environments life has been found on this planet -- from the bottom of the ocean, to hot spring geysers. And, I think that there is good reason to believe that there are at least microscopic life elsewhere in the solar system (Mars and Europa). I think that a statement about if life is the result of chance, then winning is inevitable, isn't that hard to believe because life has shown itself to be pretty darn adaptable. It speculation because as near as I can tell, it is all opinion. Support some of the statements with scientifically verified facts. You make way too many statements in the form of an argument from incredulity, a logical fallacy. Just because you think "The idea that the Earth can somehow maintain the conditions necessary to support life for 4.5 billion years as a result of "good luck" is completely unacceptable" doesn't make it so. You need to show facts that show why it is unacceptable. Nature is under no obligation to be acceptable to you or me or anyone.

do what to the series exactly?

black holes emit Hawking radiation, and thus the entropy of the universe increases even as mass or energy falls into a black hole.

Actually, there are several good mathematical definitions of entropy, all of which strictly increase with time. There is the definition from thermodynamics, and the definition from the kinetic theory of gases.

This should be easy enough to make some mathematical predictions with. That is, you should be able to figure out how much angular momentum it takes to cause a certain amount of distortion. And then make the calculations for all the large objects (planet and sun) in the solar system and show us just how well your predictions match the experimentally verified numbers. Can you post this info?

BULLPLOP!!! I've given the reference that described the first experiments that provided evidence for quarks many times in the this thread. They are hardly 'undetectable'. There are many experiments have been done since. This thread has moved from nativity to borderline trolling with this continued refusal to actually attempt to learn anything about the vast body of evidence that is out there. If you understood the evidence that exists, and you still wanted to debate it, that is one thing. But, just declaring quarks 'undetectable' because it makes you happy is trolling. I hope this isn't true, but I am very low on patience for people who refuse to be open to learning about evidence that already exists.

newts, this thinly veined insult has been written by you a few times now. Can I please ask that you not use it again? No one here has been personally attacking you, and calling our asking for more evidence and predictions from you and your theory 'religious' is frankly both insulting to the people doing the asking and to most religions. Considering that you keep asking us to believe in something that you fully admit that you cannot mathematically describe (and hence cannot make any predictions with) and cannot measure, aren't you, in fact, the one asking us to be much more overtly 'religious'?!? Because you are asking us to take your vision on faith, aren't you? I ask you to please really try to think about this from an outside point of view. And, finally, your calling belief in quarks 'religious' is downright laughable, because you have also admitted in this thread that you are basically completely unfamiliar with the wealth of evidence to support quarks. If perhaps you would take the time to learn some of the evidence that supports their existence, perhaps you wouldn't be so offhandedly dismissing it as 'religious'.

Khaled, DrRocket is right. Some of your equations are quite wrong. For example, this equation is very naive in its assumptions. This is only right if the probability of every event is exactly equal, but that is hardly necessary. Consider an unfair coin, where heads will come up much more often than one half. Your equation above is wrong, because even though the coin is weighted to be unfair, there are still two outcomes, yet the probability of heads is already stated to not be 1/2. Or, consider rolling 2 fair six sided dice, and call the result the total sum of the pips on the top sides. Your equation above predicts that each sum, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 are equal because those are the possible outcomes. But, the chances of rolling a sum of 2 is only 1/36 while rolling a sum of 7 is far more likely. 6/36 in fact. Also, there is a very precise definition of conditional probability that is in exceptionally common use, it probably isn't a good idea to redefine it willy nilly...

So you have a theory that you are saying cannot be calculated nor can be measured. Can I just ask a simple question, then: what is the point? Or, to put it another way, if you are saying that your theory cannot calculate nor be measured, then you certainly aren't putting forward anything scientific. No calculations and no measurements mean it cannot be falsified, and falsifiability is a pretty fundamental part of a scientific theory. You need to be able to propose a result that would show your theory to be clearly wrong.

Let me start by agreeing that average cost of a college text is too high in my opinion. But, it is a question of sales. The average hardback will sell more copies than any college textbook. Many, many more copies. If the publisher only can make $1 a copy, they make their investment in volume. This does not work for college texts. They have to make their profit from a large margin on very low quantities of sales. It is the same idea behind journal articles, too, which only make money from the subscriptions paid by the universities and institutions that subscribe to them. I do think that self-publishing is going to be more prevalent in the sciences. Either publishing a collection of lecture notes online, or using one of those services that will bind them together, etc. A real question is that in the future, as the actual paper copy of books becomes less common, is: what does the publisher actually do for scientific texts and papers? I mean, they are peer-reviewed, not reviewed by people at the publishers, so they don't have to hire experts to determine if the work is worthy of being printed or not. E-publishing doesn't really require a facility and certainly not a printing press anymore. A computer server is just about it, right?

I suspect I won't get an answer for it, but I am curious, with an attitude like this, why would anyone even want to write a book if it is just going to be copied? And, on the flip side, if you place any value on a book, why not recompense the author for taking the time to write it and compiling the knowledge into one convenient place, the editors for editing it, the publisher for using their resources to publish it, etc. etc.? My personal opinion is that I don't particularly enjoy paying the higher prices books are these days -- but I pay them so that more and newer books continue to come out.

Gonna try one more time. Scientists are hostile to anything without evidence or anything without predictions or anything with predictions that disagree with experiment. As uncool wrote, most scientists are actually eager to be able to get in on the next big thing. Even better, they want to be the one to invent the next big thing. If there weren't people to constantly poke the existing theories and try something else, there wouldn't be scientists at all. But, a good scientist also only follows actual evidence. A lot of them are dreamers, but if their dreams and thoughts and guesses don't follow actual physical evidence, they abandon them. That is how science works. Provide the things uncool asked for, and I guarantee you can get some attention from actual scientists. I know that this is a daunting task, there is a lot of work ahead of you. A lot of math, for one. But, it is how you'll get the attention you seek.

You actually didn't answer anything related to my question from post #72. To repeat (and bold the parts to put even more emphasis on it): Seriously? again, if you cannot handle an anonymous Internet forum's critique, how can you ever think you'll be able to present it to the scientific community. It's not like this thread has gotten vindictive or anything. Again, criticism makes a theory stronger. You do want a stronger theory, don't you? If not, I suggest you take up writing science fiction. Science itself is not for you if you cannot handle criticism.

Better get used to it. This is what science IS. If your idea cannot stand up to some casual scrutiny on an anonymous Internet forum, how are you ever going to try to present it in a more formal environment like a conference or try to submit it to be published? Science and its practitioners are constantly asking questions about ideas. Instead of being annoyed about it, or claiming someone is just trying to score 'points' by asking questions -- answer them definitively. Every question you answer definitively and with good solid answers makes your idea stronger. And hence better. You should embrace every question as an opportunity to make your idea better. In several posts above, you bemoan that you can't get any scientists to pay attention to your idea. By making your idea better, you have a better chance to get scientists to pay attention. Also, I hope that I can get my question answered from post #72..

And this is one root of the major issues people have with this thread. You are trying to tear something down without even knowing what it is. If you 'do not know about it', how can you fairly judge what the model does and doesn't say? And what the evidence does and doesn't say? Seriously, how can critique something you admit you don't even know about?

No, it doesn't. Mercury's orbit's precession was not correctly mathematically described until the general theory of relativity.

You've done the exact same thing! "It seems that gluons are merely defined to behave in accordance with the experimental evidence" --> you've taken the mass of known particles, noted the changes in mass and charge, and therefore called the differences a "one type of thing". There is no prediction from your theory as presented -- you have set the mass of your particle to fit the experimental evidence. Apply your own critiques to your own idea! Show how this number you've calculated comes from some fundamental, not just some coincidental addition and division. Show how your idea is something more than just defining your model to fit the data! And, to answer your question, there is plenty that could falsify a quark, or at least redefine it. I say redefine, because there is a fair amount of evidence for something that behaves in the way quarks are described today. We may find sub-quark particles, or find a unification for them, etc. But, quarks don't just disappear, anymore than the discovery of quarks did to 'falsify' the idea of neutron. The idea of the neutron has been redefined to include the quark today.

but Occam's razor cannot be a major determining factor in which theory is preferred. As I posted above, it is useful when you have two roughly equal models -- then the one with less variables is slightly preferred. In all likelihood, neither will be dropped until one or the other is shown more accurate. Other than that, arguments for Occam's razor are hollow: again, nature does not have a requirement to be understandable to us. In fact, pursuing Occam's razor has sometimes led in wrong directions. Trying to unify things in a wrong manner or things that aren't unified leads to wrong conclusions. I think that the current pursuit of super symmetry and string theory are good questions about the current state. Both try to simplify things, but to date, have made only very limited predictions. I think it is fair to question if there truly is super symmetry in nature, and if there is, why can't we find strong evidence for it? If it turns out to not exist, it was a pursuit of simplification (and ease of understanding and all the other subjective criteria in this thread) that went wrong. In short: NATURE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE SIMPLE. Demanding that it is will be intentionally putting blinders on -- why would anyone trying to discover facts about nature do that?

This is a horrible metric for judging a theory. You really completely missed a key word in my question: objective. Consider this as a farcical example: My theory is that unicorn farts are the cause for all the forces that ever have been and ever will be. By your standards -- it is easy to understand, it really reduces the number of things necessary to just 1 (the aforementioned farts), and if you just believe in it hard enough it makes sense. Do you see why your criteria are rather useless for advancing scientific knowledge? There is no objectivity in them at all. What 'makes sense' to you, may not make sense to me! How does that fit? What is the standard for making sense?!? Same question for 'easy to understand'. Again, what is easy for you, may not be easy for me... And finally, the reduction may have a tiny bit of value. As in that other currently on-going thread on Occam's Razor, if you have two ideas that are otherwise equally good, there is a slight preference toward the one with fewer variables. But, a theory with numerous variables that is excellent at making predictions that agrees with observation will always be preferred over a theory with few variables that makes poor predictions. If a theory needs 1 or 1000 different variables to make accurate prediction, so be it. There is no reason to really believe that nature should be easy to understand to us. And, so I am back once again to matching prediction with experiment. What you have suggested are not objective, but very subjective criteria on how to judge a model. Science pretty much only judges a model on how useful it is, and useful is pretty much defined by how well does its predictions match with known observations. The great thing about this criteria is that it is objective. If one model has an error of 25% in its predictions, and another only has 10% error, the second is considered superior. There is no debate on how easy either one is to understand, no debate on which makes more sense, or any of the other subjective measures. One does a better job at predictions than the other. Period. So, with all that, unless you can show your model makes some pretty darn good predictions, you are going to continue to be ignored by the scientific community. It really isn't personal. It is simply business. Science is in the business of creating models that make predictions that agree with observations. If your model can't do that, it is going to be ignored. Because science already has a model that makes some pretty excellent predictions. Again, this is not to say that the current state model is done -- because we all know it isn't. Your idea may very well be right -- but right now all you have is a story. You need to translate that story into mathematics, and show how your equations do at least as good a job of making predictions that agree with experiment as the current model. If this can be done, I guarantee that you will get plenty of attention from the scientific community. This really is all it takes. If you can make mathematical predictions based on your idea, you'll get interest. And, on the flip side, if you can't make predictions, you'll be ignored. Look, you're made statements like 'the strong nuclear force is caused by the electrical interactions between the charges on the surface of nucleons' There are mathematical implications of a statement like this. Show us how the electromagnetic force acts like the strong force. I suggest you look at how the electromagnetic force and weak force were unified for inspiration. Quite frankly, if you can show your statement to be true, there is probably a Nobel Prize in it for you.