lemur

Lighter than air ships have been made to float using light gasses such as hydrogen and helium. Hot air balloons reduce the density of air by heating it. I wonder if it would be possible to make an air ship float by emptying the air out of it instead of replacing that air with light gas.

What about electrolyzing water for rocket-powered shuttles with re-usable drop-off tanks like the space shuttles? In fact, why can't hydrogen just be used in jet turbine motors?

You may be less biased than I am in favor of questioning authority to gain a more critical understanding of it. I don't mean to make it sound like I'm claiming to be 100% right and everyone else wrong. I just feel the need to point out the possibility of how scientific orthodoxy is not necessarily immune to dogmatism just because it is a rigorously anti-dogmatic approach to knowledge.

Some people think that all living things have souls and souls can be reincarnated between organisms of different species. edit: maybe that would correlate with the notion that as human population grows, natural habitats and biodiversity decrease.

Actually, the explanatory value of science gets debated in this forum quite a bit. Many people think science suffices to predict accurate outcomes. Still, I think everyone would agree that science should not accept anything without skepticism, let alone without any explanation at all. I mean, do you think about what you're saying? You're basically saying that science is bad because scientists won't mindless accept whatever they're told on an instinctual level. What would be science about it if they did that? If nothing else, I think the purpose of science is to dissect the mechanics of processes to know how they work. If reincarnation is a possibility, there should be an explanation for how. If you're more concerned with the subjective effects it has on people to believe in reincarnation and act on their belief in their daily lives (e.g. in how they treat others), I think that discussion should be posted in philosophy or religion.

Authority of reason is inalienable in every sentient being. Once people learn the difference between true and false statements, they gain the ability to reason about what is true and what is false. To submit to authority arbitrarily out of fear of questioning it is a foundation for authoritarianism. When one judges authority to be corrupt, it is the responsibility of the individual to resist/disobey/etc. When you aren't critically resisting authority, you are enabling arbitrary power. You can cooperate/submit to authority, but you check and balance it with your own or other authorities. Unidirectional flow of power is not democratic. Setting conditions on when people can go to war is authoritarian, isn't it? In democracy, you don't really have the right to dictate whether or not someone else can go to war. All you can do it petition them with reason about how to pursue the matter in a way that you think would maximize good. The expression that war is politics by other means can also be reversed that politics is war by other means. Violence in war could be minimized to the extent that everyone involved would make a good faith effort to resolve the conflicts at hand in a more diplomatic way. Drawing lines on a map and bullying people for crossing them is not so diplomatic but then again maybe crossing lines to exploit the people and resources within them without respect for others living there is also not diplomatic. The problem is how are people supposed to learn to interact diplomatically and democratically if they use territorial borders to separate from and dominate each other?

This is a good point but my response to it carries over into the more religious/social ideas of the issue of karma in reincarnation, which basically says that even if you were reincarnated as a completely different person with no memory or measurable continuity with your former incarnation, you would still be drawn to karmic debts incurred in prior lifetimes. However, since mooeypoo doesn't want this thread to address religious (or social?) issues, that topic would have to be re-started in another section I guess. As for the physical/material side of it, just because your re-incarnation would not resemble you in any way, does that mean that nothing of you transferred into him/her? Even if you insist that there is no scientific basis for legitimizing karmic patterns resulting in "debts" and "entitlements" that follow souls through multiple lifetimes, there might still be some other aspect of a living body that transcends and re-implants in a gestating fetus. Granted, it seems implausible but then parameters for a relevant theoretical basis haven't even been established. edit: consider, for example, if you looked at subjectivity/personality/cognition as consisting of fragments of software like a particular computer. So when your computer breaks down and you get a new one, you reinstall much of the same software that you had on your old computer before it broke. You pull up the same webpages on your browser, etc. In many senses, the new computer is a "reincarnation" of the old computer, just because it emerges within a context with a certain amount of data/software continuity.

It would be really interesting if someone designed a model of an entire community that could run completely on renewable power. I also had a thought about solar power that it would probably help if specific appliances were designed and sold with their own battery systems and possibly even solar collectors so that when you bought the appliance, you knew it was designed to run properly using only solar power year-round (or when needed). E.g. if you bought a solar-powered refrigerator/freezer, you would want to know that it can effectively maintain its temperature overnight as well as during the day from the correctly-sided solar collector + battery system. If it was an electric range/oven, you would want to know how many hours of cooking time you had available, etc. In other words, conservation guidelines could be designed/built into the appliances and explained in the user-manuals. There is also immorality in luring people into higher levels of energy-dependency when they already have traditional forms of conservation that have developed as a result of existing energy-limitations.

Cast iron is black. I guess what you are saying also explains conductivity. If there are slighter level-changes possible in the metals, they would be able to receive and emit energy in a more continuous way, which would also make their spectra more like a perfect black body. I see then how you could say that smaller amount of energy could be absorbed and thus render lower frequency photons in a metal. Still, that seems different from what I was thinking, which was that two gases at extremely high temperatures could have different masses at the same level of temperature/volume/pressure and thus the heavier one would have higher-momentum collisions between the molecules although they were moving at the same average speed. This would logically cause the heavier gas to emit higher frequency photons at the same temperature, no?

On that level, yes. But I'm sort of looking at another level, which is how people start closing off within a relationship without completely breaking it off. I think that people do this sometimes because they are committed and they don't want to walk away but their feelings have subsided or been hurt in various ways. This may lead one or both to close off toward the other and set more boundaries for their partner to respect and more difficult expectations to live up to. These would be ways of shifting the burden of maintaining the relationship to the other person so that if it fails, they wouldn't have to take responsibility. Then, if someone is trying to meet those expectations and deal with the other person closing off without walking away, that could lead to hurt, anger, and resentment. It's as if people can push each other to be the one to walk away, which is a mean thing to do if you think about it. So I think anyone could become angry and act on their anger with violence in such a situation but I'm thinking that maybe women are less likely to because they would be more afraid of violent retaliation from the man for the reasons you mentioned. I find it almost taboo to say that abuse may be provoked, because that would be like blaming the victim, but I'm also thinking if you looked closely at the situation - how it led up to violence, you might in many cases see that the abuser did feel provoked in some way and that the victim was on equal footing in the conflict before it degraded into violence. Then, I guess the fact that all bets are off once the violence begins obscures the way the conflict was being fought before it started.

Is it possible that DNA emerged in a global situation where life evolved from lifelessness in a variety of ways, which only slowly developed to the point of being species-restricted as far as reproduction went? In other words, couldn't the earliest life-forms have basically sexually reproduced by consuming each other until they developed a level of complexity that caused them to reproduce asexually with some degree of genetic continuity between parent and daughter cells/viruses?

Although men can be victims of domestic abuse, typically women become the victims and men the perpetrators. Reaching the point of abuse may be important for many couples as a means of legitimating separation as a need instead of a "mere want" that could be judged as selfish on the part of either or both partners. My question is why do women typically end up as victims and men as perpetrators. Is it merely yet another expression of traditional gender role patters or is there something deeper? Is there maybe something about male/female attitudes toward relationships, commitment, and dealing with challenges that leads to domestic violence and its asymmetries? This is a social science issue, but since it deals with relationships, I thought the lounge might be the appropriate forum. Moderators please feel free to move the thread accordingly.

It's not so much about what people can prove, imo. It's how you arrive at your position vis-a-vis the shoulders you stand on. A person who has questioned and discovered validity nonetheless may have a less biased attitude toward scientific authority than someone who has learned to distinguish between what to question and what to avoid questioning on the basis of received status.

Ok, replace "linguistically" with "conceptually" then. contrast is to conflict what passive is to active? . . . linguistically/conceptually?

Fine, but the point is that scientists who have this attitude are indeed influenced to avoid "rocking the boat" as the thread title asks. They cower in the shadow of giants because they understand the magnitude of their work.

I don't know what's unclear about the language I used. I agree. Conflict is good as it stimulates opening for discussion.

Well, I don't see how science should become a boundary-defining discourse for what questions people should ask. If anything, I think it should add rigor to any and all contemplation of questions that its knowledge could pertain to. If nothing else, it should go beyond correlation with regard to what constitutes subjectivity. Saying that what goes on in your computer's OS is happening in the RAM may be true, but it doesn't provide a complete understanding of how the OS works and what possibilities there are for uploading and downloading it into other storage media, for example.

By all empirically-based plausibility, you're right. The thing I don't understand is why people find it more interesting to always re-iterate the implausibility of death-transcendent subjectivity than to explore potential avenues for it. Unless you expect that one day people are going to give up speculating that there is a potential for subjectivity to transcend the body, it makes sense to try to at least impart some amount of scientific rigor into the theorizing of possible channels. At least that way there is the chance of falsifiability and testable hypotheses instead of conjecture with insistent bickering devoid of most forms of rigor.

What is the physical part of the person that transcends death and survives to transit into a new body, iyo? How would it survive the transit and when do you think it would enter into a gestating fetus and why? What would prevent other "souls" (if I may use that term) from coming along and uploading into the same body, kicking another soul out, etc.?

Maybe this attitude adds inertia to conservative science. Probably, objectivity should dictate that people be fairly sure about established ideas as well before shouting about those, but how many people get swept up in the choir of popular paradigms and theories just because they have gained ground and popularity? Granted, such popularity is probably at least partially due to the passing of various critical scrutiny but that doesn't mean that people don't get drawn into the safety of standing on the shoulders of giants without themselves first thoroughly questioning those giants.

I see, so electrons have different levels of free-play that doesn't involve level-change. This explains conduction in conductive materials because such materials have more "electron flexibility" than a material for which energy gets (more) immediately expressed as level-change. Then BB radiation is an effect of kinetic energy among more conductive electrons.

Does "supernatural" imply that something exists beyond the natural mechanics of physicalities or does it imply that there is some "nature" that exists the same as natural physicalities but cannot be known in the same way or through empirical study with physical instruments? I tend to assume that everything physically possible can be explained in terms of empirical science. The exception is the realm of subjectivity, which can be more powerful in terms of what people perceive as empirical than the physicalities that empiricism is attributed to. Subjective phenomena would be the most logical basis for any rational understanding of "the supernatural" imo, thus, but maybe (as you say) that is my bias derived from materialist assumptions that everything works according to the known parameters of science and so everything has to fit with those. Still, if that were the case, what possible reasonable basis would you have to rigorously study things whose very nature is assumed to be "beyond science?"

I hope this isn't too off-topic but I'm surprised that it doesn't violate some kind of harassment law to publicly chastise someone about the validity of their birth-certificate. Surely if an employer had questions about a birth-certificate, they would notify the employee and then contact the appropriate agencies. I think if the employer went around publicly defaming the "suspect" among their colleagues and the general public, the employee would have cause for complaint.

How is it possible for blackbodies to absorb and emit photons without their electron-levels changing? Is it because of the motion of the electrons together with the molecules as a whole that causes emissions?

I'm not making up definitions. I'm question the coherence of existing ones. What does "point-particle" refer to except 0-dimensional points? What does "mostly empty space" imply except for the idea that there is some amount of 3D space taken up by these particles that is different than the volume they stake out with their relative positions? If there is some interpretation that I am somehow re-interpreting, please let me know - but as far as I know I was just questioning the logic of known claims and definitions. When my conceptions/definitions diverge with what experts know, of course I want to know because I'm probably the one who has it wrong. That doesn't mean, though, that I can't be right in finding a logical gap in expert knowledge, does it? Sometimes it seems like people are more concerned with asserting the validity of knowledge than with critically exploring it. I don't see how that is conducive to good science/learning.