lemur

But the marriage isn't even an actual material relation but just a summary institutionalization of the idea that there are various actual material relations that do (or should) be occurring between the two people deemed spouses. So, if you would get divorced, for example, you might stop sleeping in the same bed but would you stop interacting in every possible way? Probably not, which shows that while you would attribute different meanings to your post-divorce interactions than while you were married, they would still exist as substantive interactions, e.g. "discussing whether a child needs new clothes." Spacetime is similar: even if you denied it as a general ontological phenomenon, the Earth would still orbit the sun at a given distance, which would allow other matter, such as Mercury, to get between the Earth and Sun. You can say that various aspects of the Earth and sun "create space" between them, but you could also just say that they gravitationally attract each other and other matter in a way that results in certain dynamics. You can, but doesn't that suggest that the space exists independently of the forces that allow things to move "through it?" I think that if you were being really descriptively rigorous, you would just describe everything as being engaged in various levels of force-relations with other things. I agree that there are epistemological contradictions that emerge when you analyze deeply. Still, I don't see why "spacetime" has to immediately be taken to refer to something that transcends the gravitation that is "its" curvature. A related question is whether gravitational field force is an entity, and whether it should be viewed as emanating from and extending beyond the electron-fields or whether the electron fields should be viewed as embedded near the center of the gravitational field as its own entity. But Earth and Mars wouldn't even be orbiting near each other, probably, if the sun was absent. So a laser shot between them would be in the context of two lone planets drifting away from each other at some arbitrary distance. It's like with the asteroids. Their relationship with each other (spatially) has everything to do with their orbital motion around the sun. If the sun were absent, they would just be a bunch of rocks drifting in space with, probably, no special relationship with one another. So I think it makes more sense to view space as organizational arrangements among things due to their force-energy interactions. The fact that there appears to be "empty space" between them can be attributed to their relative coalescence relative to the energy that allows them to move away from each other. E.g. if a cloud suddenly condenses into to rain, there is "empty space" between the rain drops; but as long as the cloud was uncondensed water vapor, it was simply a continuous flux of low-density substance, held together (I think) by electrostatic attraction. Once that attraction condenses the drops into mutually separated regions of liquid, their emerges a potential for other things, such as more rain drops, to pass between them. Sure, then you would have a set of concrete object relations to use as reference. I.e. you could count the number of atoms in the wire and assume they weren't dilating and contracting relative to each other and whatever gravity they were exposed to. But when there's no wire and just a few random particles here and there, how would you know if you were getting hit by a particle or if you were running into it?

To me it sounds like what you're saying is that observed physical behavior of everyday objects is subject to certain limitations that are removed in quantum behavior. On the other hand, there are other limitations in quantum behavior that do not correspond with those of observable everyday objects. So, for example, the fact that a partial photon can't be created by making an electron emit it in a certain way or sub-dividing an existing photon somehow is a limitation that doesn't make (intuitive) sense from a broad perspective on analog physical behavior in which things can usually be further subdivided and partial version of things are possible (although I can think of numerous other examples where you could say that, e.g. a partial plant can't be created - although it can be subdivided once growing, etc.) However, once you understand that electrons emit whole quanta of energy and this corresponds to whole numbers of waves in their electrons, and that electrons spin either up or down but never at different speeds or not at all, these things can become someone intuitively referenced, imo. For example, I can imagine a perfectly frictionless sphere that must always spin because it cannot remain motionless, and that the direction of the spinning could change instantly if the sphere had no inertia. In fact, this concept becomes more intuitively logical if you understand that light has no mass and always travels at C or gets absorbed, with no in-between speed. It may not be intuitively plausible in terms of how observable objects with mass move, but how does that prevent you from imagining it in its own right? What I would like to know is if there are totally anti-intuitive forms of math in quantum physics. The example I have in mind of this is a statistical T-test, which eliminates the use of subjectivity to analyze a research question by replacing intuitive analysis with a seemingly-arbitrary mathematical protocol which acts as a black box. i.e. you feed your data into the black box and it gives you back numerical output that can be interpreted as telling you that either your hypothesis is supported or it's not. E.g. it works sort of like those liquid-filled 8-balls except there's only two answer "hypothesis supported" or "hypothesis not supported." To me, what "intuitive" really means is that you develop a deep understanding of how the parameters work and you are able to make further predictions and theorize from that understanding. So, for example, if you just understand mathematically that acceleration is change in speed and that force is acceleration of a mass, you could calculate the relationship between force and momentum at a given speed at a certain rate of acceleration. But if you deeply understand these concepts, you can intuitively conceptualize how a waterfall can run a turbine and do work that generates energy, etc. You may not be able to calculate the exact quantities without the equations, but you can even develop an intuitive sense of relationships between things. E.g. I watched a documentary about the first telephones recently and it seemed quite intuitive, according to Planck's comparison of electricity with gas-dynamics, that sound could be translated from air-waves to electron-waves through a conductor. Yet I can remember being amazed when I was young that Bell was able to transmit sound through a wire (i.e. because it wasn't intuitively logical at that time for me).

Couldn't you also say that if God was not capable of simultaneously existing and not existing, His omnipotence would be limited and therefore he MUST be able to not exist as well as exist, by whatever logic is required to permit both states to co-exist in some way? This makes sense to me, since God is deemed the creative power behind EVERYTHING, including the possibility of atheism, evil, etc. Yes, I know the argument that if God is everything then what's the point, because ubiquitous things have no distinguishing value - but the point is that everything is known and evaluated by means of bringing creative power to bear. It's within your authority to say that because it is your prerogative. But consider the following logic as well: if distinguishing between subjective and objective is valued as a sane trait by psychology or even popular opinion, does the authority of either psychology or popular opinion trump whatever authority was behind their creation. E.g. if popular opinion is based on, say, Freudianism (just for discussion sake), and Freud based his opinion that subject and object must be distinguished on, say, Kantian philosophy and then Kant's philosophy was, say, based on the book of Genesis claiming that God distinguished light from darkness and the heavens from the Earth and that was good, wouldn't that provide a basis for questioning what Moses' authority in claiming such was and whether it was fundamentally valid/true or whether there was some higher authority that could reveal its falsity?

The problem with your reasoning, imo, is that you are trying to insist on certain epistemological approaches without first making a point to understand the one's you're criticizing except in negative relation to the one you prefer. So instead of first understanding the basis for why this woman is thinking what she's thinking, you're presuming to immediately jump to your own basis for thinking the way you do and elevate that to the status of legitimacy. It's fine for you to legitimate one way of thinking and delegitimate others according to your own authority (that's your prerogative), but you're still failing to understand her, why she would put her own emotions and sub-consciousness reasoning process over respect for objective evidence, etc. Note: I am not saying that you fail to legitimate her when I say you fail to "understand her." What I mean is that you literally fail to understand what is (or could be) going on inside her that would cause her to think in the way she does. So, on the one hand, there is your inner process that causes you to think the way you do and evaluate her in contrast to your ideals (again, that is your prerogative) and then there is her inner process; and the two may be brought into conflict with each other through various discursive means, i.e. on various terms, etc. The altitude of a peak in the Himalayas or the fact that the Taj Mahal consists of stone are objective facts. The idea that the region is a country is more of a political/social fact. If everyone decided tomorrow to call it eastern Pakistan, that's what it would be (to them - to rebels that maintained it was still "India," that's what it would be to them). There are objective facts about how institutional knowledge is negotiated, though, and those are objective knowledge, such as the fact that passports are printed with the name "India" on the cover. That is a fact whether or not the word, "India" is deemed to have any meaning in its subjective apprehension. You're right that both are subjective, but there's still a difference between having a dream that you ate ice cream and telling people you had a dream that you ate ice cream when you didn't actually experience any such dream. I.e. subjective experience is a form of empirical data, only is doesn't refer to the content of what was experienced as being real but to the experience itself. E.g. the words on your computer screen are not ink printed on paper but you experience them that way and it is an objective fact that the words reach your mind when you read them. You're also right about objective things being different from subjective, but the criteria for things being objective isn't public agreement. It is physical/material existence. So, again, it doesn't matter whether every human alive agrees to deny the existence of Mt Everest, as long as it continues to stand. Likewise, everyone on Earth can agree that the Earth is round, but if it turns out to be objectively flat, then it is. Human life consists of competing regimes of knowledge that struggle for power (this is Foucauldian btw and maybe Nietzchean). I tend to have faith that truth itself is a displacing mechanism, but of course all power is inseparably connected to its own resistance, so truth is no different. I think if you start getting protective of positivism, you would risk promoting dogmatic acceptance of it, which would not be a good thing, imo - since dogma is always anti-reason. As I say that, though, I have to admit that dogma can have a didactic function in many cases. There is a tense balance between using dogma to teach and that resulting in people becoming dogmatic ritualists who eschew active reason. btw, speaking of conflicting regimes of knowledge/belief, have you seen the show, Caprica, yet. It is a scifi series I just discovered on Hulu that has as part of its story line a conflict between monotheism and polytheism that basically has everyone engaged in guerilla terrorism against everyone else. Personally, I think people should distinguish between subjective and objective things. However, I realize that this seems to contradict what I was saying about people epistemologically construing things like God with objective status. I suppose imo objective status should be reserved for direct empirical observabilities. The extreme example of this would be acknowledging the objective existence of the visible side of the moon, because we can empirically observe it, and then acknowledge that the far-side of the moon is a subjective construction/projection based on the belief, routed in observed patterns, that objects and therefore planets/moons exist from all vantage points and don't simply disappear when you go around them. That would be the most rigorous possible approach, i.e. to know exactly on what basis you know things you know at the moment you know them. That would be extremely tedious, though, to be so specific so for convenience sake we say "there's bread in the freezer" instead of saying, "I believe there's bread in the freezer because I am currently observing a memory that I bought some today and put it there."

The next Einstein? Who says I'm not Einstein currently? Seriously, though, I find these ego-reflections on the (potential) status of one's thoughts stifling to creativity. Sure, it might be fun to fantasize that your idea could radically improve life and you would be showered in praise, prizes, other professional recognition, and of course money and material rewards - but of course the shame of openly desiring such things must override the will to actively pursue them. People who do wish to hold on to such dreams usually attempt to endow them with a higher level of realism by inserting themselves into the honing machinery of academic degree programs, where they "position themselves" among other scholars who are perceived as truly elite heirs of the forefront of modernization previously inhabited by the scholars they recognize as having utmost historical importance. One of my favorite things about online forums compared with academic journals, books, and other publications is that they are short, to the point, and relatively ephemeral. People don't spend pages and pages building up their knowledge and ideas in a way that will serve as a historical reference point if their perspective turns out to become canonical. Imagine Einstein or any of the physicists of that time had indeed regularly posted thoughts, ideas, data, speculations, etc. in an online discussion forum. Imagine, then, that numerous other people interested in physics at the time did as well and the forum(s) were filled with all sorts of ideas/thoughts across the spectrum of possibilities. Academia, imo, tends to promote a presentation and approach to knowledge that fetishizes it (or maybe it's not academia but the culture that surrounds it, idk). When an aura is built up around ideas/research and their thinkers, such as Einstein, it weighs down the ability to freely, actively, and creatively engage any and all ideas you learn about. Academicians "put each other in their place" when they engage knowledge differently than they are expected to do according to their qualifications. This happens, imo, because there is an assumption that if random people could read about science in their free time at the library and generate valuable scholarship as a result, it would threaten the status of the institutions as being necessary channels for anyone to become a truly valuable productive scientist. Why do I personally post new ideas? Because I have them and I think they're interesting to think about and discuss. Whatever else the purpose of science is in a grand sense of discovery and technological/cultural progress, etc., it is also a means for people to keep their minds active and vital. If you work at a university or in some other situation where you have opportunities to engage in stimulating discussions and research with bright, intelligent, creative people - then you may take that privilege for granted. But think about all the people who are stuck in some dead-end job, or that are old and/or otherwise constrained socially. For them, and anyone else for that matter, I think it is nice to have online forums where they can achieve the same sense of creative collaboration and personal discovery that people working in academia get regularly. So even if I think an idea I have is somewhat crazy, if it's interesting I will try to at least develop it into something that can be subject to some level of rigor so that it can be critically engaged. Then, even if it turns out to be nonsense, I think at least it provided an opportunity for people to practice critical engagement skills and for others who don't have such skills yet (or not to a very strong level yet) can learn from reading the exchange. Also, such critical discussions can end up being venues for proven scientific knowledge to be learned in terms of how they apply to concrete issues. So someone could learn what momentum is by googling it, or they could learn what it is by reading critical discussion in a thread where momentum becomes an issue.

It is common to hear the claim that quantum physics or other forms of modern physics are not intuitive and that any attempt to understand them intuitively can only result in increasing misunderstanding. So what exactly does it mean to think about or understand something intuitively? What other kinds of thinking/understanding are there that are not intuitive? I would guess that everything that is understood is understood intuitively in some sense, but maybe others see the possibility of totally non-intuitive understanding and, if so, what does/would that mean?

I think I'm going to start a new thread on this to avoid going off topic with it. Since yours is such a common forthcoming claim, I think it merits discussion about what "intuitive" does or should ultimately refer to and to what extent comprehension can be described as either "intuitive" or something else, whatever that would be.

"Scientology" isn't a contraction for the words, "science," and "ontology?"

How do you define the boundaries of the objects with precision?

I don't know the answer, but consider this: If you had two magnets that were entirely one pole so that both magnets only repelled each other; and if the two magnets' fields were such that they could never collide with enough force to penetrate each other's fields so that the two pieces of iron would touch, would you say that the two fields "touched" or would you say that they just absorbed the force of collision until they reached a point of returning the energy, like an object that keeps going up until it turns around and starts falling? Does a ball launched into the sky "touch the sky" before falling? Does Earth "touch" the sun and the moon by the fact that their gravity fields intersect? What exactly do you mean by "touch" anyway?

There are lots of ways to think critically. Questioning the limits and assumptions of any of them is also a way of thinking critically. When you are questioning authority, what gives you the authority to do that? When you go beyond citing the research of others to making claims about it, what gives you the authority? The answer is either nothing or something, so when someone says there's no higher authority than X, you can find one, even create one. That creative power, to create valid authority (i.e. not just make something arbitrary up), to seek truth where its not already confirmed, that is original creative power. You can just call it OCP if you like. You can even use it to define it some other way. Just do me a favor and don't beat me down in the process for putting in my two cents opinion, please. I guess it ultimately depends on what you understand deity to mean. If you define it as some ridiculous authoritarian controller, the way many atheists seem to, then of course it's not helpful even if it could be interpreted as relevant for adding force to authoritarian ideologies. If you define it as the creative power to either create without precedent or create from precedent in radically innovative ways, I find it very relevant and useful. If you define it as the power for humans to act repressively toward each other by trying to control their ability to freely explore thought/ideas, I would say it's more detrimental than beneficial, at least in the long term. Think about the meaning of absolute creative power. If it was bound by logic or any other system of defined parameters, would it be absolute? What if it was unlimited and included every possible form of power you could imagine, including the power to analyze and evaluate all those forms of power according to relative goodness or badness by all possible definitions/approaches? How would you deal with that amount of processing power? Logic would probably help, but do you think it would be sufficient?

Do you have any idea how many variables are interdependent in most real-world situations involving humans? How can you presume to assign accurate probabilities to weigh different possibilities against each other in a way that doesn't rely heavily on subjectively defined criteria/parameters like perceived-probability?

But consider this: If you had to use the absolute minimum possible land to produce the maximum amount of nutrition sustainably, would you use the forest cattle for beef or dairy or both?

Maybe there is some underlying sexual basis for my fondness for unicorns, idk. That horn is somewhat phallic, though, isn't it? Now I'm going to have to go google unicorns and see if there's an explanation for this. Hope I don't get any kinky art. edit: nope, it appears to be symbol of sexual purity and faithfulness in marriage. Maybe that's why it's so horny though

How's this? Obviously, but I think the idea is that people should have sex for the sake of maintaining positive relationships and shouldn't spend unnecessary energy on achieving sexual pleasure. I think that people are supposed to be married to have babies is so that both parents support each other's role of supporting the child as well as possible. It's basically putting the well-being of the child above the egos of the parents, imo. What does it matter? If Paul said something you disagree with you would question it but not if Jesus did? What makes you assume that Jesus hasn't been misquoted or words attributed to him by people who wanted to exploit the uncritical submission of dogmatic Christians? No, I agree that expressions of scripture are interpretations or "translations" and only the original text is truly the text and no one has true access to it because even if you're reading the original words in the original language, you're still interpreting it within you own intellectual framework(s). I think this view is actually derived from Islam, but it makes sense to me.

It still doesn't work. Maybe, but don't you see that if I don't understand HOW I am misunderstanding it, I have no basis for accepting your claim or anyone else's that I am? What's more, if you don't explain your reasoning about how your perception of my understanding differs from yours, how can I even know what it is you are perceiving as the gap between my understanding and your knowledge is? I know this feeling while dealing with people who can't/don't understand things I'm trying to explain. I will do my best to at least understand something before discussing it, but the problem is that everyone believes that they get something once they FEEL like they get it. It sounds like what you're saying is that I should submit my own authority to someone else's, like an authoritarian student-mentor relationship but I dislike that model of pedagogy. I prefer clear communication and leaving the student (in this case me) to have the ultimate say in whether something makes sense or not. You can teach students to relinquish their self-trust in favor of trusting others, but then they can't really reach a point of deep understanding because they're always busy checking if what they're saying matches their mentor's expectations instead of evaluating whether it makes sense for themselves. Well, there has to be a way of "fairly" negotiating discrepancies in understanding and communication problems without anyone relinquishing their authority over their own comprehension.

Oh, that's a pony. I thought it was a unicorn. Too bad.

In my experience, it can work both ways. If I am hungry, I can be grumpy and distracted and this can be solved by eating. However, I can also intentionally fast for a period of time, during which I cross a sort of threshold where the hunger subsides and my body feels "tighter" in a way, or maybe "neutral" would be a better word. Then there is a sense of heightened consciousness, as if I was a little bit drunk on days when I eat normally and I sober up during the fast. Right, but what can happen is that by getting into a pattern of always satiating desires, it actually makes you that much more vulnerable for disturbances in your expectations of satiation, which have become psychosomatic responses. So, for example, if you're always used to stopping and getting drive-thru food whenever you feel like it, you might go through frustration if you for some reason had to limit your diet to two or three planned meals each day. However, someone who is used to regimenting their diet this way has less trouble (maybe) encountering fast-food restaurants. I say "maybe" because I think there are people who get that much more frustrated at the presence and constant patronage of such food because they are experiencing repressed desire. Still, the question is whether it would be better for such people to indulge whenever they have the urge or to practice controlling their desires and satisfaction of them. I think there are valid arguments for both approaches, and drawbacks to each. Yes, that would be a good example - and this is, I think, the protestant complaint about the Catholic Church "selling indulgences" by allowing people to pay penance in economic contributions. Who knows, maybe it is all just a sublimated passive aggressive power game to subjugate people by controlling their access to the objects of their desires, but then that power game goes far beyond any church. The difference with religion is that there are at least some people who legitimately seek the (spiritual) benefit in things like fasting, poverty, etc. Regardless of what subconscious motives may be behind the ideology generally, such individuals are often pursuing spiritual practices "in good faith" as a form of discipline, similar to practicing yoga or golf.

Of course I understand why it is problematic to deny objective truth. Still, I understand the reasons people do it sometimes, and I can imagine that this woman got sucked into a lie because she couldn't reconcile her ability to hate people for being a murderer to her ability to unconditionally love her son - so she resorted to denying the murder. Ironically, this is a major issue in religion where people get upset about the universal attribution of sin in Christianity as if it's wrong not to exonerate some people as simply being innocent. Christianity makes it possible to love sinners because no one is without sin - i.e. everyone is in a process of dealing with sin and its consequences. Maybe if that woman had this understanding of sin in Christianity, she could have admitted her son being a murder without condemning him or withdrawing her love (i.e. forgiven him) but because she knows only unforgiveness (as many people do), she resorts to denial and lying to avoid shame (as many people also do). Maybe this is why "the truth sets you free" is another Christian expression. You're right that it is something akin to controlled psychosis. The thing that people forget when casually diagnosing psychosis/schizophrenia, though, is that it's supposed to become dangerous before it is pathologized. If someone insists on believing in Santa or other popular mythologies, it doesn't really harm them or anyone else and it could have benefits. Personally, I would advocate people distinguish between their recognition of "received realities" and their ability to generate "active realities." A fantasy or daydream could be called an active-reality insofar you experience it with some degree of realism, i.e. as if you're living it. However, this doesn't mean you have to commit pathological actions against yourself or other people. You can insist that people need to be able to distinguish between their fantasy realities and material realities to earn the label of saneness, but why is that important aside from social-control over people's minds and behavior? If people aren't a danger to themselves or others, why should you police their thoughts and beliefs? What's more, I would like to point out that there are loads of institutionalized beliefs that pass as everyday realities without anyone being stigmatized as psychotic/schizophrenic. E.g. Anthropology has disproven race as a valid biological category, and racial labels are thus fictional - but does that mean that everyone who views Obama as a "black president" because of his skin tone is in a dangerous state of hallucination? Even though racial identification leads to injurious actions in all sorts of contexts, no one is going to argue that someone should be put in an asylum because they label people according to pseudoscientific classificatory schemes any more than they would call someone schizophrenic for using astrology to decide whether they should apply to a job today or next week when a certain planet moves into a certain house. So what word would you use to describe the difference between a truly experienced fantasy and a fictional one that is made up for a character in a novel?

You're a pretty intense thinker and death/killing is a pretty intense topic. There's a lot of psychology regarding death-drive vs. libido, sex and death, mainly Freud and Bataille. Anyway, we could start a whole thread on it but the only reason I made a joke about it was because I get worn out engaging intense topics sometimes and it struck me as a funny comment. I'm not trying to accuse you of being murderous or something.

I do read about these things all the time. I don't just read forum posts and websites. I also read the books available at the library. I have read various less-known physicists as well as books by Hawking, Feynman, Planck, and Einstein. Hobby learning is an active process and the enjoyable part about it is that you don't have to follow someone else's curriculum. Reason can be your guide. You should not claim that the reason things you say are right is because they're physics and something else isn't. "Physics" is a general term that refers to a practically timeless approach to knowing how material physicalities work. It is as general a term as metaphysics. I understand that in academia, people are fond of teaching/learning fields as historically fixed cannons of scholarship and knowledge, but please acknowledge that that is not the only possible approach to knowledge. Just as you wouldn't like to be told that your metaphysics is not metaphysics because it doesn't follow some set cannon of philosophical writings, you shouldn't claim that my physical knowledge and analyses are completely wrong or invalid because it doesn't march in perfect lockstep with everything that is recognized in academic physics. As I say this, I want to be careful to note that I deeply value academic physics because it is my main source of insight for building my own understanding. That said, however, I don't like to be told I have to do things according to someone else's way or hit the highway, so to speak. Also, everything written or spoken (i.e. communicated through symbols) is "lingual." So your physics and every other physics is also "lingual." If you want to claim that your physics agrees with empirical observation better than mine, that's a legitimate claim and of course I wouldn't want to hear where anything I said diverged from empirical data. I try to use the most accurate language possible without betraying my own understanding. If I am certain that it is accurate to call light "EM waves" then I find it slightly less risky to say, "waves" then to venture into talking about the peaks and troughs of the waves since, although I typically think of waves as having peaks and troughs, the only model of EM waves I am familiar with describes them as alternating-direction electric and magnetic fields at perpendicular angles to each other. I could say "peak" and mean the oscillation of the wave in one direction and say "trough" to mean when it oscillates back in the other direction, but then there's a chance someone like Swanson will say that EM waves don't have peaks and troughs because that is a classical mechanical concept and those don't apply to QM. I try to stick with what will cause the least controversy, but then you criticize me using "wave" instead of "trough." If Capt. Ref had not have given me some leeway in calling them waves, how far would you or someone else have gone in demonizing me for terminology? I'm not stubbornly arguing that my terminology must be accepted. I'm just wishing that terminological mistakes or miscommunication could be noted without derailing the constructiveness of the substantive part of the discussion. My browser couldn't find the server, but it sounds interesting. I'm insistent that there are different approaches to learning, but that goes for any field. No discipline has a monopoly on determining the appropriateness of any methodology or learning style. I'm not trying to avoid what "the actual physics says." I'm learning from it constantly. Please don't do this to people. Don't put people in competition with establish institutions. All that does is put subjugational pressure on them. I'm neither trying to compete with any other physics or subjugate myself to its authority. I am just developing my own understanding and discussing things I learn, how I understand them, and thoughts they evoke. That's what I would do in any classroom in any subject. It is active learning. How is it "not fair?" Yes, good point. Light can't accelerate or decelerate. "Moved" "shift" "compress" "expand" "dilate" "contract" are all better words. If any of them are misleading, feel free to explain why so I can strike those from my list of possible synonyms to avoid using the same words over and over.

I don't expect anyone to simplify anything beyond the level of complexity with which they understand it. Since I am not a professional physicist, though, I have the leeway to study the available knowledge in the interest of making my own intuitive conceptions of physical phenomena more robust. You could say I'm not so much doing physics as you would define it as I am developing my own natural-philosophical approach to understanding, explaining, and predicting physical phenomena. Although I can't always understand or fully appreciate the anti-intuitive total-math approach that some people really seem to like, I do like being able to mine little gems of insight when I can and incorporate those into my more intuitive picture - which I express in the event that others may recognize some misinterpretation I have made and correct me before I build further on it. I hope it doesn't bother you too much that I'm not trying to do physics in exactly the same way you or others do it. Well, I have to cooperate to the extent that you are providing me with valuable information and I shouldn't make it difficult for you to do that. However, I can't get around the fact that I look at and understand things slightly differently than you do, or so it seems anyway. Well, sometimes definitions are phrased in a way to privileges one type of application and obscures another. If your definition is mainly geared toward the mathematics of specific equations, it may not be as robust in terms of qualitative-reasoning about the logic of the model. E.g. with this redshift/blueshift stuff, you seem to be focussed mainly on calculating the parameters and variables to arrive at results. I am more interested in intuitively understanding what is happening when you accelerate relative to a stream of EM radiation/waves. The two approaches have to overlap because they both must ultimately describe the same phenomenon accurately, but that doesn't mean that they won't confound each other epistemologically in some ways. That's why I accept critique welcomingly and use it to rethink my initial conceptions in light of new information. At some point in your post, it became clear to me that this whole miscommunication is due to the fact that when I use the word, "waves," you think I am talking about a collection of waves as a unit, whereas I'm using it as a plural noun. So when I say waves have a frequency, it literally means how frequently a wave intercepts its receiver, which in the case of light is the result of the speed of the waves and their (wave)length. Shorter waves arrive more frequently when they're traveling at the same speed as longer waves, no? That's not intuitive? I don't know what you mean by "plug in as a detail." To me, redshift/blueshift is a doppler-type shift similar to that of sound-waves except with sound waves, the higher frequency is due to adding the velocity of the receiver to that of the waves. With light, the waves always travel at C so the increase in frequency is due to the fact that the same amount of energy has to arrive in a shorter period of time because the speed of time has shifted for the moving receiver. Red and blue light have different frequencies/wavelengths but the same speed, so a shift from red to blue involves a time-shift relative to the sender because the blue light is moving at the same speed as the red light that it used to be before you accelerated toward it. Does that description work in terms of your approach too? Isn't that because they're all moving at different speeds relative to each other? See, this is what I meant earlier. When you say "the peaks are closer together" you are talking about the distance between the peaks (wavelength) along a series of waves. So when blue light is shining on you, the waves (peaks) are more frequent because there are more of them per second (which is why they deliver more energy than shorter-wave light). Well, I understood what you meant when you said "peaks" instead of "waves" because I know that waves are described in terms of peaks and troughs (even though I'm not sure that EM waves have peaks and troughs, actually, though they do in wave theories where two peaks can amplify each other when they overlap or cancel each other out when a peak and a trough overlap - though I never understand how energy could possibly cancel other energy out without violating conservation of energy. Yes, I see this is where I frustrated you, because I'm thinking about it in a way that you see as non-standard and therefore not-allowed for a non-vested physicist (not that you would let me use that term to describe myself - not that I would want to fight to define myself as such). Still, I think it makes sense to simplify distance/time into simply the number of waves encountered/emitted during a journey, since spacetime varies according to the speed of the observer. In a sense, there is no distance between them EXCEPT the amount of waves and the amount of time measured for those waves by either observer. I mean, it's not like you can say that the distance in infrared waves, based on that wavelength is the correct one and the one measured in x-rays is different, since each measures the wavelength of the waves and time elapsed in their own frame, right? The emission-point observer will measure the traveller's distance as farther because they're counting infrared peaks and the moving traveller measures it as shorter because they're counting x-ray peaks. So what else would the distance and speed be relative to except the distance and time as measured by each observer in their own frame? I understand your concern with not giving false impressions about how to model light waves, but is does it really make a difference in the context of redshift/blueshift frequency/distance/time variabilities? How about we just call each of us rigorous and committed to staying true to our own way of doing things, but being concerned enough about communicating with others that we don't give up easily bridging gaps of difference in understanding? I thought of that. And you could also just measure the amount of energy received by a photocell and divide by the amount of energy of each wave at that frequency, I think. But what got me confused is how you choose two separate moments as starting and stopping points for counting. If you start counting when the ship departs, when do you stop counting except when it arrives? I actually thought of that too but I couldn't explain it as clearly as you just did. I guess you would just have to look at a whole spectrum distribution from a star and compare it to the shifted version of the same spectrum to see how much you'd accelerated. Is that too easy a solution?

double-post. please delete.

I just threw that out for the sake of discussion on the other thread. I'm actually more interested in the idea that separate(d) gravity-wells, such as those in this solar system, form by coalescing from relatively uniform-density cloud-matter into spatially-divided regions of relatively high density. I don't know if there is astrophysical consensus on any theory/ies, so this is just my pet-hope, but I mention it to avoid people thinking that I'm intentionally spreading my pet-theory as fact or dominant opinion. Basically the reason I like to think along these lines is because I like to think of vacuum space as deepening fissures that form like canyons between plateaus as rivers cut increasingly deeper valleys. Maybe you find it a stretch to analogize decreasing density within a cloud to a deepening riverbed, carved by flowing water, but they are similar processes in that the gravitational differential increases as the altitude difference grows between the river and the land it cuts through. If you look at an extreme example like the Colorado river cutting through the Grand Canyon, it may be easier to imagine how vast the altitude gap can grow through time. Then, if you consider two planets as plateaus with infinite possibilities of "falling" in any direction forever while traversing the gap between them, this would be an even more extreme example, although it's somewhat flawed considering that gravity increases with altitude-loss above sea-level, while it decreases as you move farther away from nearby gravity-wells. Anyway, I'm going into too much depth here since the only relation to the OP is that you mentioned my idea from the other thread about how planets could emerge from the sun. To respond to the OP, though, I don't see why you couldn't just as easily hypothesize that the planets are in a reverse timeline where mercury is the oldest and Neptune the youngest. In that case, maybe gas collects into large balls and, as a result begins to attract toward the sun. As it slowly spirals inward, it collects increasing deposits of other matter that fall into it, which causes it to form a (larger) rocky core. As the (increasingly dense) core creates a tighter gravitational gradient from the center, it could (I think) cause a rift between the gravity of the large gas atmosphere and that of the suspended core. This could, I think, create a relative vacuum between the core and upper atmosphere that could generate turbulence (maybe this would explain Jupiter's storm). As the storm(s) grows more turbulent, maybe this would cause more and more gas from the upper atmosphere to be flung to altitudes where it would drift away, eventually leaving the rocky core exposed to take its place with whatever other planets have yet to spiral into the sun. This is just a counter-hypothesis to show that such theories can be formulated in numerous conflicting ways. What well-reasoned bases do you have for considering the timeline of planets to be from the inside outward?

I'm sure they would just throw out whatever votes were already cast and plan new primaries, conventions, etc. It would be interesting if they had already won by a clear majority. I wonder if it could then be possible to swear-in whoever was next in line for the presidency, such as the speaker of the house, etc. btw, Marat, do any of your posts not involve some form of killing?