md65536

Some advice I got from this site that I think is applicable is that a paper pretty much needs to have references in order to be taken seriously. In this case, you make a claim that I disagree with, and there is no reference for me to follow, to see that the claim is backed up with evidence. Otherwise, you could explain a claim and provide evidence yourself, or omit it if it's not important. Is the above statement necessary? However, I don't think that you'd find any good references to back up that statement, because I don't think it's true. If gathering references seems like a chore or unnecessary, it might indicate that not enough research was done. In that case you can still write a paper but it's best to avoid making claims or assumptions about what is known and what is out there in existing sources. The little details are important because probably most serious readers will tend to start losing interest after reading statements that are wrong or hard to understand.

Would it? By that rationale, wouldn't a "true theory of evolution" be able to predict the outcome of future mutations? If a TOE includes uncertainty, predicting that a result would be uncertain, would that count as predicting the outcome of an experiment? I think that if you can prove that the outcome of any experiment corresponds to the predictions made by a TOE, then it would be a true TOE without needing to actually predict the outcome of any experiment. For example, chemical reactions correspond to quantum electrodynamics, and biological processes correspond to chemistry, but you don't have to be able to predict the outcome of a biological process using QE to prove it. Definitely. And plenty of it. There must be millions of pages of crackpot theory out there. Why should anyone read any particular one of them? If we can get a few people to even start reading our hypothesis, just to have them continue reading we have to make it clear enough to be understood without the reader solving a brain teaser, and we have to make it correct enough throughout that the reader won't become doubtful of what's left, and we have to make it compelling enough to keep the reader's interest. A statements like "Consciousness acts like energy" does not convey a clear enough meaning to be understood, has nothing to convince anyone of correctness, and doesn't convince me to care. Anyway Approachingavoidance, post away and people will read it, but it's an uphill battle to change the world this way.

Hahaha. I'm going to feel so stupid one day when I read the headline "Lack of evidence for oblate earth disproves relativity". Probably about as many times as you must repeat "2+2=5" before we "get it". Repetition doesn't make a wrong statement understood. owl, where in your false dichotomy would you fit someone who holds the belief that our reality, or some aspect of it, is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc., but also believes that length is not such an aspect and is instead observationally dependent?

I think this is the most important unanswered issue here. Even if we ignore "what is real" as owl suggests, and concentrate only on the philosophy, there's still the problem of the false dichotomy. Essentially there is invalid logic being used in the assumption that "if length is not fundamental, then nothing is fundamental but the mind". Ie. "if length contraction is a part of reality, then reality can be described by subjective idealism." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_idealism) It is a false dichotomy because it leaves only two options, where either 1) length is not fundamental and therefore nothing physical is fundamental (which doesn't follow logically), or 2) the only other option is that length and some other arbitrary set of physical attributes are fundamental. owl, how does length not being fundamental imply that nothing real is fundamental? Does length being objective (as you argue) imply that everything is objective and nothing is subjective? And if not, how do you determine a dividing line between what physical properties are fundamental and which are subjective?

What is the point of repeatedly objecting to those who accept modern science and relativity's logical necessity of length contraction, and then repeatedly asking if they accept a consequence of length contraction, only to again repeat your objection? If you want to avoid a discussion of reality as measured by observation, why not just stick to pure philosophy and keep it abstract? As soon as you claim that an idea represents reality, you are forced to deal with the problem that it must correspond to observed reality, and if it doesn't and you can't explain why it doesn't, then your claim cannot be accepted. I remember being taught that much of the development of logic was done with the goal of proving the existence of god, but they couldn't prove the existence of something real based only on reasoning about abstract concepts. Perhaps it's even been proven that it's impossible to deduce the reality of something based only on abstract logic. Is this true? If so then any progress you make in describing reality will be revolutionary in both science and philosophy. I just don't think that "Imagine a universe where the principle of relativity doesn't hold; seems alright to me; I rest my case" is enough.

I think the most useful specification of the rule is that the random guard would have to pick between being truthful or a liar, and be consistent throughout the question. If he could switch halfway through, then any multi-part question could probably essentially be given random truth values, and the final answer would probably be random and thus useless. If there's a way to phrase it so that this doesn't matter (I doubt it's possible), that would definitely be Nightmare Mode for this puzzle! It's so simple it took me a long while to get it. For some reason I'm reminded of NAND gates. However, given that the random guard could one day answer truthfully and another day answer falsely,

I think we need to restate the rules for this new variation. The original rule was "You walk up to a guardian and ask him the one question you are allowed and he tells you which door to take." If the guard can give more than one piece of information, why not 3? Why not ask a question that needs to be answered in essay form? I'd interpret the original rule to mean that a guard can basically indicate a single door in answer to any question. (The precise wording is bad, because if you ask "what door would the other guard tell me to take to avoid death", a valid answer is not the same as the guard telling you which door to take.) Edit: The rules should be that you can choose whatever door you want based on however the guard answers, however in the case of 3 doors the question would by necessity have to make the guard indicate the good door (not one of the 2 bad doors, which wouldn't give you enough information to choose). Restated: 1. 3 Guards-- One always tells the truth, one always lies, and one who tells the truth or lies randomly. Also, by "randomly" I think we mean the guard either answers a full question truthfully or falsely, rather than giving a random answer. 2. there are now 2 death doors and 1 good door 3. You can ask any one guard any question and the guard will indicate a door in response, if it's possible and consistent with rule 1. (Otherwise their head explodes, I think is the standard rule.) Can it still be done? (I assume your version is not the same... can you restate it?)

I think I judged these explanations with the wrong criteria. I'd assumed that explanations involving the fewest requirements are superior, because if another explanation requires some other precondition, then the former explanation must be more general and account for a greater range of phenomena. But I think instead that all that matters is whether or not the required precondition is observed in all cases that the various explanations cover. In this case, the precondition is the requirement that "all mass must oscillate at the speed of light." So the only question is whether or not that's true, which I think it is (based just on a vague understanding or misunderstanding of matter and energy). If it's true that all mass oscillates, then an explanation of gravity that makes use of that could actually be simpler or perhaps more intuitive, because it may correspond more closely with reality. However, correspondence with reality means correspondence with observations and thus also with theories (and their explanations) that correspond well with observations, and the judgment of that is how well the math corresponds. I've been trying to convince myself that this speculation "works", while avoiding figuring out the math, which is probably foolish. Since we already have equations that correspond well with observations involving gravity, I think the way to turn an idea into a viable explanation is to "massage" the idea and the math to fit each other, while ensuring that one has a reasonable explanation for why each step is being done. Ideally, I'd like to take some already accepted ideas about mass (such as ubiquitous oscillation) and spacetime curvature, and show that existing equations can be derived directly from that.

That makes more sense. If you try to accelerate away from the mass with that force, it will balance gravity and you won't go anywhere. If you accelerate away with a higher force, you'll move away but it will take infinite time and energy to escape it, until you reach the escape velocity (which will be smaller the farther you are away from the mass, corresponding with decreased gravitational acceleration which can be seen in the video as the slope of gravity wells getting shallower the farther you are from the mass). At escape velocity, your momentum will carry you further from the mass and its diminishing gravitational force will not ever be able to slow you to a stop, and you can escape without any additional energy spent. Just out of curiosity, would escape velocity instead correspond to the height of the well at any point? Which would also correspond to the integral of the slope of the well wrt. time, along the infinite line of an escape path of an object moving directly away from the mass?

Every mass pulls on every mass (gravity has an infinite range). The moon's gravity well is not "small" but "shallow", especially at the range of the Earth. The slope of the well corresponds to escape velocity (I think), ie. how much effort is required to escape from the mass. If you could accelerate the Earth, it would be much easier to make it fly off from the moon than from the sun. Or another way to think of it: The Earth's velocity around the sun keeps it in orbit, but it would be fast enough to escape the moon. (We don't escape the moon however, because the earth/moon barycenter also goes around the sun, while the Earth's velocity around that barycenter is relatively much slower).

If there was no chance of it happening then it didn't happen. The chance of something like a grain of sand "tunneling" through a piece of paper is a macroscopic event that is unlikely to occur in the lifetime of the universe (just a guess; can anyone confirm?). A car passing through another would be ridiculously less possible. A more probable situation is something like this: There was a way of swerving to avoid the car. Possibly the subconscious mind was able to react, and through a combination of quick reaction and luck, the driver was able to squeeze by. Meanwhile his conscious mind may have been in shock or otherwise unable to register or recall what happened in that short amount of time. So it only seemed that it happened too quick to be possible, according to the conscious mind. The story relies on human perception. It is astronomically more probable that that wasn't so accurate, than it is for a car to tunnel through another. It would also be more probable for the driver's brain to instantly completely spontaneously combust, than for a car to tunnel through another. It would also be less improbable for the driver's memories to be instantly randomly replaced by false memories of an entire alternate life, and to wonder why he'd suddenly teleported into a moving car. It sounds like it was a glitch in the matrix.

Yes, the speed of light is constant. A wormhole doesn't change the speed of light, but changes the distance between 2 points, providing a shortcut. It's kind of a cheat. If you measure the distance between the two points with ordinary space, but allow light to travel between the two along a different distance, then light can travel at c but for a much shorter distance. To calculate a faster than light speed, you'd use the longer distance, which is a cheat because light didn't actually travel that path. Personally I doubt that's possible. Defining distance with "ordinary space" seems to be consistent. Any cheats and corresponding violation of causality would probably involve inconsistencies, and the universe appears to be consistent as a rule.

I correspond with danger, but I won't any longer if you remove a stem I will become stronger What am I?

Thanks. An oscillation is cyclic, which means that it will return to the same state again. The timing of one cycle of a clock is well-defined but doesn't require a net change. I suppose time can't be defined without some "difference" between two points in time (whether it involves a continuous change or whether it involves a static measure such as the spatial difference between 2 points). Since the difference between two reference points in time can result in no change, I don't think that "change" is quite the essence of time, at least not on a small scale... But then again, since an oscillation repeats, you'd need to distinguish between similar phases, such as by counting the cycles. On a larger scale or with more complexity, time may be a measurement involving change... though "entropy" seems a more appropriate word. The important thing I think is that it's not a measure of the amount of change itself, but rather a measure based on the regularity with which a reference (a clock or a timing process) oscillates.

Actually I must retract this proposition. I don't think that the development of knowledge could be passed down for say 5000 generations, and grow in a steady, stable way. It must have developed in a sort of punctuated equilibrium, with a lot of dead ends and lost knowledge. I still don't think there needs to be some effect that prevented the development of some specific technology in a timely way (for example, is there some force holding us back from developing the things that we've never imagined yet? Will future generations wonder why we didn't just do it?). But climate change definitely sounds like it would have a disruptive effect on development and hold back agriculture.

An oscillation is a "regular fluctuation". There is an inherent metric relating the different phases, or relating repetitions of the same phase (because of the regularity). So time definitively has a length. The phase of an oscillation is not absolutely meaningful; it only has meaning relative to other phases in the oscillation (otherwise it'd be just a state, not really a phase?). So I'd say that time's length essentially defines time. Time is a measure of length between events -- but since I don't know how to separate the spatial aspects of length from the temporal ones, I couldn't give a proper definition. But anyway, I think we could give several definitions of time that could be equivalent. Some of them conceptually simpler than others. Time defined as a length would require some oscillation to define the metric (such as light waves or caesium quantum transitions), so I guess it would not be functionally simpler. Edit: Upon further thought: Perhaps "time is the length between events occurring at the same spatial location". Remote events can be described in terms of information being received from that event, and the reception of that information can be considered a separate event. I defer to the experts however. I disagree with the quoted interpretation of the quoted quote. Assuming that Dirac means that space and time are not intertwingled means that Sorli is assuming that 3 spatial dimensions are a requirement in physics. Another interpretation is that neither time nor distance are fundamental (they could both be emergent, as some conjecture), however they are still pretty mixed up together as relativity has proven.

Perhaps knowledge is the key factor? If you were raised by wolves and had no contact with humans, do you think you'd be planting and harvesting crops due to some instinctual knowledge? I don't. Another aspect is our accelerated rate of development. As we develop we get better at figuring things out and at passing on knowledge of what we've figured out. So perhaps the first hundred thousand years were not wasted sitting on our fat asses watching cave tv, but instead involved developing the prerequisite knowledge for graduating from "hunter gatherer". Developing language or communication skills, ability to use tools, building an understanding of plants, etc. Certainly climate has an impact on development. As we've developed, we've also gotten better* at reducing the disruptive effects of climate (through the use of fire, shelter, etc) on our ability to survive and develop further. * That is, until the modern era, I suppose... Anyway, I think your hypothesis sounds reasonable and intriguing. However I don't agree that a relatively short period of relatively rapid development implies that similar development "should" happen in another period requiring only similar environmental conditions.

Any transfer of information across distance requires time (with a lower limited determined by c). The acceptance or use of any received information could probably be described by definition as a "change". For example, without time, light cannot propagate... nothing in the universe can be observed or interacted with. "What is the existence of something besides whatever information can be received from it (ie. what effect it has on others)?" is a question I don't think I could answer, which for me means that I wouldn't know what a "paused video game" universe would be (if anything at all!). Also, the lack of a tenable concept of a "universal instant" further complicates the idea of a universal paused state. What observer's instant would it be that everything is paused in? Would the state necessarily be different for different observer locations? This is not classical physics however. I think if you remove "change", a lot of other things become undefined. Also, I think it's possible to remove time without removing "change" simply by allowing causal relations without distance (like if you removed time and distance at the same time). I don't think my answer can be considered "accepted science", sorry.

However, information has a speed limit: c, which couples time and distance. If you want to have an arbitrarily long causally related sequence of events occur in an arbitrarily short period of time, it will have to occur in a correspondingly small enough space. There's only "an infinite amount of time" (or more precisely "an infinite rate of events" -- the reciprocal of time) in an infinitesimal space. c makes a rate of time finite for any non-zero distance.

I believe that the ultimate understanding of something in physics comes from an understanding of the math. For example, you might say "The power density of a sound wave decreases as it expands" and that might give you a grade-school understanding of it, with very limited usefulness. Or you could say "The power density of a sound wave is proportional to 1/r^2" and that gives you a precise and useful mathematical understanding of it, but you might not know why it is so. Or you could say "The power of a sound wave propagating as a spherical shell remains the same as the sphere expands, and is spread evenly across the surface area of the sphere," but you might not know that surface area is proportional to r^2. The last two statements say the same thing, and they are both mathematical (area is a geometrical concept which is mathematical). Using just numbers and equations might work well but leave you unenlightened; using just words may give you knowledge without being able to apply it. Having the math and understanding why it works is in my opinion the essence of true understanding. That said, it must be noted that physics can progress just fine without knowing why the equations correspond to reality. Observations still give you useful data, and those data can be used to evaluate the equations and suggest new ones. I do believe that knowing "why" (and having logical explanations to go along with the math) does provide extra insights that suggest new ideas which lead to new experiments, observations, and theories. Logical explanations are a bonus; the math is required.

Either the observation fits the model or it doesn't. I thought different interpretations of the same thing share the same predicted observations. Where the observations differ, the models differ (not just the interpretations). Can you give an example of what you mean?

It was parody, not a logical argument. If my post is treated seriously, the implication that my argument is equivalent to owl's is certainly a straw man. To brush it off as just a straw man is a good way to avoid thinking critically about one's own arguments. Perhaps it could be considered an extreme example of similar reasoning that owl is using, but that in itself does not prove that owl's flawed reasoning is flawed. It adds no weight to the argument but provides an opportunity for thinking about it in a different way.

That looks like an excellent resource, thanks. After a quick glance at the section it looks like his explanation works with simpler requirements (his works with slow-moving objects but mine requires high-speed oscillation of all masses). I'll have to spend some time trying to figure out the lecture notes.

In various topics on this forum, I get the idea that it is still a mystery how or "why" spacetime curvature causes gravitational acceleration. Am I mistaken? Did Einstein and others who understand GR also understand that gravity immediately follows from spacetime curvature? It seems intuitive to me that it does (thus "why"), however the details are not at all intuitive, and I wouldn't even begin to know where to begin with the math. My basic "understanding" of how spatial curvature causes gravitation is as follows: 1. Movement through curved space means that the distances between remote points changes as you move through space. I think this is because distances in curved space are defined in terms of local flat spatial curvature. For example, if you go to google maps, you get a flat representation of the curved Earth; if you scroll the page north or south, the map scale ruler will change in size, meaning that the relationship between pixels and meters changes. In real life, the scale ruler would stay the same size while the "map" (ie. your measurements of the universe) changed and scaled or warped. 2. Uniform oscillatory motion of particles in a curved mapping of the curvature of space will tend to be non-uniform in a flatter mapping of the same space. 3. Repeatedly moving according to one mapping of spatial curvature (eg flat), and then changing the mapping to fit the different curvature of the new location in curved space, will tend to accelerate you towards greater spatial curvature or whatever. As an analogy of this, consider a typical world map (Mercator projection). Uniform distances on these maps do not map to uniform distances on the Earth. A very small area around the poles is expanded to take up the entire width of the map. Imagine someone doing a random walk on the flat map, and then following that path on a globe. They could do this by picking a random direction to move, and moving by a fixed (or random) distance on the map. Clearly they would tend toward the poles more than toward any other specific point on the globe, because the poles take up so much more room on the map. An observer on the globe who is unaware of the map but saw the walker tending towards a pole might think that some force is drawing them there, but there is no force... just a uniform movement in one mapping that corresponds to non-uniform movement in another. Obviously this isn't exactly how gravity works because it's still a random walk, and the person will still wander away from the pole, and gravity is not evidently random. This map example ignores point 3, which would involve something like the walker creating a new and different map at each step, or perhaps changing step size with each step; so acceleration isn't demonstrated. The details of what such new maps (or step size) would look like is a complication that eludes me. They would certainly not be Mercator projections. Does this make sense? Is this a good analogy for how gravity works? Are there already similar analogies (and better)?

I'm in the reality where North America is up, and Australia is down. I've heard there's another reality where Australia is "up" to some people in the southern hemisphere. If that were so, then North America would have to be down, to them. Since my "up" can't be "up" and "down" at the same time, and I haven't seen any evidence of up and down morphing (for example, if I woke up to find I'd magically floated to the ceiling during the night), this is obviously false. You can't have it both ways. Up is either up or down, not both. Some observer being somewhere else doesn't change which direction I fall. So I must conclude that Australia doesn't exist. I think this is compatible with your baseless objections to the modern concept of time. As long as we're rolling back science a few hundred years, why can't we roll back maps of the Earth too?