Cap'n Refsmmat

I'd rather not create a forum dedicated to holding the festering inanity. I'd rather eliminate inanity altogether. Unfortunately, maintaining a high bar for politics admission would bring many challenges. How would we define who should be let in? Would we end up just letting in people who agree with us? When do we revoke access? I think the problem is not necessarily the people who post in Politics but the lack of moderation there, and the difficulty in providing good topics of discussion. I'm not sure what we can do to improve on this.

As far as I know, this works only for small collections of atoms. To produce liquid helium or liquid hydrogen you need something a little more practical, like what CaptainPanic described.

But if the capitalists were forced to pay for their bad gamble, they would not be likely to gamble on Greece again, and the country would still endure unemployment and welfare cuts, because it would not be able to get loans to finance its activities. Right?

You may be thinking of cases where teenagers took lewd photos of themselves and send them to other teenagers, resulting in child pornography charges against them. In some cases the police threaten to prosecute the other teenagers who receive the photos and forward them to their friends. The problem is that possession of child pornography is illegal, so if it's sent to you, you are obligated to delete it immediately. I don't think you could successfully prosecute someone if you simply send them child porn and then call the cops, though.

I don't think that's necessarily the case; presumably, I could build an incredibly fantastic rocket engine and sit just outside the event horizon, stationary. You don't have to approach light speed. The other problem with the OP's idea is that it conflates relativistic mass and rest mass; the black hole won't gain infinite rest mass if a particle hits it at near the speed of light.

My perspective depends on your frame of reference. Har. No, I don't have a perspective on ontology, because I do physics, not ontology. No, we don't. How could we? All of our measurements occur within Earth's frame of reference, and under the relativistic model we'd expect all measurements within one frame to be consistent. Hence our measurements are consistent with relativity and with whatever objective-reality model you might propose. Excluding, of course, a number of more advanced experiments (i.e. experiments beyond measuring the distance to the Sun) which test specific relativistic predictions. "There is no objective universe" does not follow from "different frames of reference see different things" if there is an objective universe, but we see different portions of it depending on our frame of reference.

If I am correct that the 4D spacetime-slicing model represents general relativity accurately, than it is not a conceptual, metaphorical thought experiment; it has testable predictions -- namely, every effect that general relativity predicts -- and has been subjected to rigorous experiment.

How does the Biblical story of Abraham being ordered to sacrifice Isaac fit into this?

That's quite enough.

Not necessarily. A relativistic explanation would involve a four-dimensional spacetime which we view three-dimensional sections out of, and different frames of reference necessarily view different three-dimensional sections out of the four-dimensional (immutable) whole. But I'm not a general relativity guy -- ajb would have to make sure I'm talking sense here.

It may be an experiment, but it's clearly not a psychology experiment, because a psychology experiment requires a tall, well-dressed white-bearded man and a leather couch. Everyone knows that.

Then why have mathematicians spent so much time developing the field of statistics? It is designed precisely to draw conclusions from data that is not always constant or predictable. Science is more than just smart people writing papers.

We've recently made further clarification to the forum rules to make our policies clearer and more flexible. Here's a summary of the changes: We've clarified our anti-spam rule to say that links relevant to discussion are permitted, and that links to commercial sites in signatures and such are not permitted. You're free to link to your personal blog or Twitter, of course. Our rule on hazardous materials has been updated to give staff greater discretion. Previously the rules allowed posting of procedures for making hazardous materials, so long as the disclosure is legal; now we have given staff discretion to remove posts we believe are a significant danger. For example, a post which explains procedures for making unstable explosives, even with disclaimers about safety, may be removed. You can view the complete rules here. In the future I hope to clarify and streamline our forum rules further so members understand what's acceptable and what's not. Let me know if you have any questions.

This:

As I've said, you're bringing up questions of physics and doubting accepted theory, you can't move onto the philosophy until that's resolved. If time is just EDPP, than physics just measures how EDPP behaves. It doesn't really matter. We're limited to what can be empirically observed, and at the present that does not include the nature, or lack thereof, of time.

The range of potential locations can be determined with the Uncertainty Principle: [math]\Delta x\, \Delta p > \frac{\hbar}{2}[/math] where [math]\Delta p[/math] is the uncertainty in momentum and [math]\Delta x[/math] the uncertainty in position. If you know the approximate velocity of the electrons you can determine the range of potential locations, but it varies with the electron's momentum.

Quick answers: The electrons don't physically wiggle up and down in a sine wave pattern, no. One interpretation is that the waves represent the probability of finding the electron in a certain location, rather than the electron's actual location. When you make a measurement to determine its actual position, the result you get will match the probabilities. You can see it in action in quantum minigolf: The slits have to be fairly close together for this reason. The experiment will not work if the slits are too far apart.

Curvature in space-time. It's analogous to swansont's analogy of parallel lines on the equator. One can mathematically imagine a universe which is ever-so-slightly curved, such that parallel lines remain parallel except when they travel exceedingly long distances. Perception and measurement do not "create" reality in relativity, though one may argue the point in quantum mechanics. Reality is merely different in different reference frames. The trouble with using the word "reality" is that it implies there is one absolutely correct version of how the universe is, and anything which diverges from that is invalid. That is a faulty assumption. That's not an argument. Also, you must have missed the bits when I explained that it only appears to shrink in one axis, so it's not simply 1/8th the diameter. Length contraction falls out of relativity as a natural consequence, and many of the principles required have been tested. Particularly interesting are tests of time dilation, since in relativity, time dilation in one frame is length contraction in another. Time dilation is explained through length contraction in the reference frame of the dilated object. Because there is no reason to assume that the universe must behave according to Euclidean rules. It is quite plausible that the universe is fundamentally curved, for instance, such that two parallel lines eventually intersect and then wrap around to their starting places. Physicists tend not to care what things like time and space really "are," since it has no bearing on our understanding of physical phenomena. What time "is" cannot be determined by experiment. How time behaves, whatever "time" might be, can be.

You uploaded it as your profile picture, rather than your avatar, so it only displays in your profile. The distinction is kind of arbitrary, and the software makes it confusing. I don't know why it bothers.

They're both correct, in their respective frames of reference. There is certainly interesting distortion that relativistic effects cause -- relativistic beaming, various weird bendy effects, and so on. But in relativity, length contraction is real, and the contracted earth is just as correct. Perhaps you would accept the possibility that Euclidean geometry, while very convenient for flat sheets of paper, does not in fact describe how the universe works? A popular interpretation of relativity has a fourth dimension as time -- not a spatial dimension but a temporal one, but connected with space nonetheless. Hence the term "spacetime." The mathematics that arises out of this is what has described the behavior of the universe so well.

They are still parallel lines, by definition. They just have a different definition because we're not using Euclidean geometry. I think you need to understand the physics before you can approach the ontology and reach reasonable conclusions. Fortunately, physicists base conclusions on evidence rather than personal incredulity. I have already explained that Earth does not "shrink" to "accommodate" measurements. There is no force applied. From the perspective of any single observer, the Earth does not change size, shape, or distance from the Sun. There are two fundamental principles: (1) From different frames of reference, the universe appears to be different. (2) All frames of reference are equally good. (2) is true for the same reasons as the example I gave earlier about a rock in empty space. Furthermore, we might base our measurements of Earth's orbital radius from a perspective where the Sun is stationary, but it isn't -- it's moving. And the galaxy is moving. And other galaxies are moving. It's impossible to assign an absolute velocity to Earth, and because of length contraction and time dilation, it's impossible to assign absolute times. They're all determined by your choice of reference frame. And of course (1) is true because we've tested relativity in almost every way we can think of and found it's right. Frame dragging, time dilation, gravitational lensing, and so on.

I'd expect that since your body constantly produces additional waste heat, you'd need the air to be several degrees cooler so that the waste heat can be adequately dumped into the environment. If you sat in 98.6 degree air, the heat your body produces would have nowhere to go.

Indeed. I should hope that one's ontological inquiries are informed by accurate physics, rather than being based on an invented, more convenient version of physics.

The assumption is that the mathematics explains the consequences. The same explanation could be written up in text, as I have attempted to do in summarized form in post #161, but if you follow the mathematics you will understand why this works. Furthermore, I couldn't get from "it becomes an oblate spheroid" to "and so the energy is exactly the same" without using mathematics, since that kind of depends on the mathematical behavior of oblate spheroids. Relativity does not advocate that "reality" depends on perception/perspective. It states that what you perceive to be the universe at this "instant" depends on your frame of reference. Perhaps I can make a more satisfactory explanatory analogy for you. Imagine I have a movie camera and I am filming the motion of objects on a flat (two-dimensional) surface. I print each frame of the movie on transparencies (like for an overhead projector) with the objects in black and the background surface as transparent space. Now I stack each frame of transparent film together to make a flipbook. If I flip open to a specific frame, I'm looking at the state of the objects at one specific point in time -- the time at which the camera captured that image. If I close the flipbook, I have a thick chunk of transparencies and I can look through and see objects at different points in time. Right? Now I stick the transparencies in the oven so they all melt together into one block of plastic, retaining their shape and relative positions but stuck together as one. Now I take a small guillotine and slice the transparencies into pages again, but at a slight angle. Each transparency has one instant's worth of objects on it, but it might have portions of objects from the frame before it or after it, since I cut at an angle. So if I cut at different angles, I see different versions of the same motion, where different events occur simultaneously or not, in different sequences, and so on. This is analogous to reference frames in relativity. However, if you want to extend the analogy to reference frames, you must use a camera that takes three-dimensional images, you must print them in three dimensions, and you must stack them together in the fourth dimension. You can see the difficulty in visualizing it.

I'm not sure what the issue is, but I'd suggest checking over on the Ubuntu Forums, where there should be plenty of people who can help.