Cap'n Refsmmat

Indeed. My answer is "ask someone who understands it better than I do." Essentially. It would be known as a useful approximation, capable of giving accurate predictions in some cases, but otherwise superseded, like Newtonian mechanics has been replaced with relativistic mechanics. Indeed. My question is more "do you think it is possible for such an experiment or test to exist?", not "do you think anyone would carry such an experiment out?" The answer is the key to this discussion.

Oh, I'm sure that adequate access to healthcare would certainly prevent a lot of suffering. But it seems like people adapt to their new level of quality of life and settle back to the same level of happiness after a while, eventually finding ways to complain about their new stuff. Similarly, there's studies showing that people get happier as their incomes increase -- up to a limit, after which being able to afford yachts and 72" plasma screens and private jets doesn't make anyone happier. If anything, we should be focusing on basic quality of life, which requires healthcare and economic reform, not revolutionary scientific discovery.

False. The average is exactly defined to be 100, although there is minor regional variation. http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/rising-scores-on-intelligence-tests/2 Not necessarily true. Increased technology and quality of life does not always correspond to increased happiness. https://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/14091/ If altering the human species to achieve happiness is the goal, something like the society in A Brave New World would be far more effective.

Suppose I make predictions about the behavior of objects in curved spacetime using the math. My predictions are borne out by experiment. I now have evidence to suggest that the mathematics is correct. What kind of experiment or test do you think would establish the "reference in the observable cosmos" that you want? Momentum is not equal to mass. It is measured in different units and measures a different thing. Photons have momentum without mass. If you'd like details, I'd suggest a book on introductory relativistic dynamics.

I'm still curious about my points in post #8. Is your goal to make humanity smarter, or happier? Because ethically it seems we should aim for the latter, and I'm not sure you're going to achieve it via killing off half the population.

Also, I suspect that nearly everyone is a carrier for some recessive genetic abnormality or another. There are, after all, so many of them...

I'd be interested in that evidence, if you can dig some of it up. The point is not whether below-average people can make great scientific discoveries; it's whether increasing the current average will improve scientific discovery any. Also: How many of our global problems can't be solved due to technological and scientific reasons, rather than political and monetary roadblocks?

Do you have substantial evidence that high IQ is heritable, and that high IQ corresponds to success in science, technology, business, etc.? I'm not sure inherent high IQ is the only deficiency preventing our success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrubber

Physics doesn't say that kinetic energy is always conserved, so there is no contradiction.

That is correct.

These two sentences are mutually contradictory. Your questions about the theory indicated that you do not know how it has been tested or what its implications are.

There is an experimental upper limit on the photon mass, and it can't account for their behavior in gravitational fields. The point is moot. Other experiments and observations, such as the precession of Mercury's orbit, frame-dragging, and so on have produced results which cannot be explained through "mass attracted by mass" models of gravity. You should familiarized yourself with general relativity before you criticize it or propose alternate explanations. It would make the conversation significantly easier.

Mass attracting mass can't account for light being bent around massive objects. Hence it doesn't stand up to comparison with reality.

One could call it "that thingy in my equations" and it'd work reasonably well, although it'd be a bit difficult to refer to in conversation. I think most physicists already interpret "graviton" in that way. Certainly. I prefer a nice strawberry-banana myself. And no, it's not an argument by ridicule. It's a slightly ridiculous demonstration of my point: if your idea has no testable consequences, it's not part of science. Since the mathematical nature of spacetime is what gives us predictions about the universe, that is what is important to science; the ontological nature doesn't help us predict the outcome of experiements, so it is not. Unless you can give an example of how the ontological nature of spacetime would help us predict an experimental result? Not exactly. Science said, "if things are made of atoms, we should be able to observe this result when I perform this specific experiment." So scientists did the experiment and observed the result. Then they said, "if atoms have nuclei, I should be able to scatter particles off of them and observe this specific pattern," and they did. Theories are tested by the predictions they make. What observable predictions does the ontology of spacetime make?

Someone did sort of the same thing once. It didn't end well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski

The "reference to empirical facts" which occurs in science goes something like this: My math has something called a "spacetime" in it. That's interesting. If I use my equations, I predict that this binary pulsar system will experience orbital decay at a specific rate. The astronomers just looked with their telescopes, and I was right. One tests the predictions against reality. This is quite clearly a reference to empirical facts. One does not, however, do something like this: My math has something called a "spacetime" in it. That's interesting. I found the spacetime. It's brown, fuzzy, and smells slightly of carrots. Clearly, I was right. Once cannot test whether there is really a "spacetime." One can, however, test whether a model using spacetime produces predictions which are experimentally verified. Metaphysics, however, produces no verifiable predictions. A metaphysical question would be "What is spacetime?", since there is no experiment that could conceivably determine the answer.

Many systems in the universe are chaotic -- that is, you could try to simulate them and predict the future, but even the tiniest measurement or rounding error will lead you to a wildly different result. So in that sense, no, there couldn't be a computer that could calculate our destiny, no matter how powerful.

"Empirical" merely means that science is guided by the results of experiments. It does not mean that science's goal is to collect a Big Book of Facts which lists the absolute and accurate measurements of everything in the universe. Science (well, "natural philosophy") shifted from fact-gathering to model-creation a few hundred years ago.

It's true that a magnetic field creates a force perpendicular to the direction of the particle's travel, so it can't affect its speed. However, a changing magnetic field induces an electric field which can do work on the particle.

Where? Science's job is not to gather information about the world. Science's job is to build testable models which describe how the world behaves. If my observations are different depending on my reference frame, science must build models which produce different results depending on reference frame. And it does.

It's funny that you say this, since swansont is a practicing scientist. If science holds that there is no absolute reference frame, why must we determine which is "more accurate"? What does that get us? If you get that information, what can you use it for?

I thought we had established that an observation made by an astronomer in Earth's reference frame does not contradict length contraction, since relativity predicts that the astronomer will observe exactly what he does. Your previous questions were not well-posed, since it was clear you didn't know how such experiments work, and so they weren't answerable. Perhaps you could pose new questions after you learn more about the phenomena. Regardless, this is a digression from the topic, and I suggest we leave it here.

That's the point, isn't it? Which answers more important questions? I mean, studying advanced underwater sheep-shearing techniques certainly answers quite a few questions, but they're not particularly useful for anyone.

One would hope. Spam software has gotten clever; there are few methods we can use to prevent spam on SFN, for example. Software is getting good at reading CAPTCHAs, and tricks like question-and-answer verifications only fool them the first time they see it.