lemur

You can take the psychological/philosophical route to understanding it, as an educated person, if you want. If you believe that every cause has an effect, then there must be an infinite series of antecedent causes. Thus you could end up with the question, "what caused causation?" That is, of course, a tautological question since it asks about causation in reference to itself. So that leaves you with the subjective freedom to choose what to do about this tautological trap. That (creative) subjective freedom can best be explained in reference to itself because there is no other explanation that doesn't involve a prior antecedent cause. I.e. "if there exists an original creator, who created that? Did the ability to create precede the existence of the original creative being? etc. etc." So once you just acknowledge that creative power in fact exists (somehow), then you can use it to CREATE whatever explanation for it you want and include whatever you want in your creation. I.e. you have total poetic license. But how do you use it? You are totally free to decide. etc. etc. I believe that these are the kinds of questions that led up to people writing holy texts like those of the bible. Eventually they came to fundamental beliefs about good and evil and decided it would be good to write about those in a way to enlighten other people to whatever insights they had developed in their free thinking. The interesting thing though, imo, is that creative power is self-referential in theology. The theologist creates God by writing about "Him" and attributes the creativity to do so to "the creative spirit" itself. This always makes me think of the first lines of the book of John that go something like, "in the beginning there was the word and the word was with God and the word was God." It's all very self-referential philosophy but it makes sense in a way if you don't get caught up in trying to dissect it as a material claim. It is philosophy. Its fundamental basis is knowledge. Materialism presumes knowledge to be a perfect conduit of material factualities, but if that were the case how could you end up with issues like "how did the act of creation begin?" You know what it means for things to "create" but you can't even define it without creating a definition. So you CREATE the concept of God to refer to the entity that was originally responsible for the earliest acts of creation and then philosophize (theologize actually) about what "creation" means and how far it extends, etc. Too many people seem to want desperately to close off thought to anything except materialist thinking but wouldn't that in itself defy the materiality of the mind and its innate ability to think beyond materiality?

I figured the reason you posted a thread was to discuss your post, not promote the article.

Thanks for posting the MO diagram, but I'm afraid I can't read it except to see the familiar electron pairing and that the geometry seems to represent something relevant. What I meant by "sub-atomic forces" was not the nuclear force but rather the positively charged electrostatic force from the protons. I.e. I think you could look at (valence?) interactions between atoms in terms of protons of one nucleus interacting with electrons of another nucleus. When I read that shorter bonds are stronger, for example, this sounded logical because attractive force gets stronger as distance decreases, but the attractive force in question isn't between the electrons themselves but between the protons and the electrons, right? So it seems as if the electron/shielding of atoms/molecules is also mitigating how much the positive charge from the nucleus is exposed and where. I hope you can sort of see what I mean with this because it's really just vagueness in my head at this moment, but it seems like a promising lead to mentally modeling atoms/molecules as more than geometrical patterns of combinatory rules.

I actually tried that url to see if it would work. I have read the rules of the speculations forum and, while I find them a bit strict, I understand and respect them. I am curious, however, what you would expect this poster to do to make his ideas testable. There are two I've been able to discern that I find interesting: 1) particles repel each other or annihilate due to the direction of their spin relative to each other. 2) fundamental particles have 7 layers, and that this is somehow related to the 8 electron-places in atomic "shells" Both ideas could be fleshed out qualitatively and maybe used to deduce testable propositions, in which case they would become falsifiable. To get to that point, though, I think the mechanics of the presumed structures would have to be very clearly defined, which I don't think they are - but only divinum can really say.

There are lots of ways to organize human labor to generate sustenance and value. There's a difference between using social power to coerce others into doing things your way to give yourself the better end of the bargain and using the same power to negotiate a mutually beneficial arrangements where all parties involved are voluntarily involved and (truly) free to decline when they disagree with the terms of the contract. E.g. Telling someone they have to do it your way because they're free to quit, when you know that you can give them a bad reference and destroy their career, is exploitative and the manager who uses this tactic is perfectly aware of it which is why they use it to coerce people in the first place. A less coercive way to negotiate would be to tell someone that you require them to fulfill minimum contract requirements and then recommend another workplace where you believe their point of view will work better and then to give them a good reference for it. All your job as a manager really should be is to clearly communicate your business interests and see if there's a way to work together with those of employees. Coercive labor practices are, well, coercive. I think a lot of older people would love to go to school to pursue a new career but the investment is big and the chance it will pay off is not guaranteed. So if they retrain at their own cost, they could end up having done nothing more than stimulate a recessionary economy with their tuition money, fees, book costs, etc. Then they'll end up working to make the money back in fast food anyway, so why not skip the intermediate step of going into debt for schooling? Any of these things may be unfair but they are hardly the definition of unfairness. They are just special cases that should be discussed case by case. People always do that. They always take the suggestion that there should be more economic freedom to the extreme in order to ridicule me into accepting whatever terms of labor I am told are necessary. I'm not saying that people can completely define their labor-force participation on their own terms; just that there's not enough good-faith effort going into constructively working toward it. It's more like there's this epidemic attitude of complaining when employees don't just shut up and do as they're told. That's disturbing, don't you think? Oh, so now you're going to get tough with your language to hammer in your point? Should I cry and accept that you're right now just because you used insulting language? If you would think constructively, you could imagine that experienced mechanics could use a work-order system to plan a work-schedule for them and then show up at a convenient moment to get some work done. The problem with auto-mechanics, I suspect, is that they're constantly overwhelmed with an excessive work-load because of how many people drive their cars like they don't care and then throw money at mechanic shops to make the problems they cause magically disappear. More people should do their own auto repair so they know what a pain it is and that mechanics aren't always ripping them off when they have to fix the same problem 3 times because they were eliminating possible causes. You know, the "drop-in-and-work-when-you-feel-like-it types" insult can be turned on consumers who think they have the right to consume other people's labor just because they get overpaid for their bureaucratic position. Yes, as long as economic recession doesn't cause you to get laid off, you can complain about lazy people who want to work at their convenience but when you lose your career and have to work in auto repair or food service, it will be people breathing down your neck to serve them day and night for low pay. IT is advanced enough that people should be able to pull up a list of exactly what their mechanic is working on and see estimates of how long those jobs take and where they are in the queue. My problem is with the mentality that the customer is king and the workers have to hustle to serve you when you can't even fix your own vehicle. If these people have better mechanical knowledge and skills than you do, you should be grateful that they are even available to help you get your car running again in the first place. The free market is not allowed to maximize both. Instead it is abused to protect a certain privileged class of people who never have to taste what it's like to be on the service end of their consumption. If everyone had to perform some amount of such service labor, I think you'd be surprised how quickly the middle class would be reforming consumption practices and service-demand. Great. Go get a job working at any of them and then tell me whether you felt exploited. Were you happy doing you job? Did your personal life suffer in any way? If so, how? These are the questions I would like you to answer after working such jobs for a sufficient period of time to be able to answer from the worker's perspective. Because if the sheet rock worker buys lemonade for $10/glass and the lemonade maker pays it to the sheet-rock maker, etc. and generally drives up prices and business-access in the economy, it makes it costly for people to use their labor to provide for themselves. If lemonade costs $1 at the fast food restaurant, it shouldn't cost $10 at the elite lemonade kiosk. In a rational free market, that wouldn't happen because no one would be foolish enough to pay $10 for something they could get for $1. Yes, and democracy is about using you brain to reflect on it and discuss ways of making things better. Rich people are only attacked by people who are jealous of them and want to bring others down. People of any class status can be abusive; it's just the more money you have the more people do it on your behalf to provide you with the things that put them in your favor. It's not fair that these people manipulate you like that; it is really them that are being economic abusive but yet people blame the rich person because they are the one that receives the privileges. Yes, you rant too much instead of having a cool reasonable discussion about a specific topic. It's like you're trying to establish that you're whole worldview is correct and everything that disagrees with it is categorically wrong. What's the point of discussion if you have that attitude?

Right, exploitation typically occurs in chains. Various people are exploiting you, cheeseburger manager, including me the cheeseburger-customer, and then you try to exploit your employees to escape the exploitation yourself. More than likely, you try to add a little to it for your own benefit as well. But the way to really see where the coercion takes place is to simulate what happens when someone opts out of obeying the will of others. E.g. imagine you decide you're no longer going to coerce your employees into doing things they don't want. Then, all your employees tell you they only want to work during the day and not evenings or nights. So you change your opening times accordingly and then you lose your customers because they all go to other fastfood restaurants that do stay open in the evenings. Then you decide, "fine, I quit then," and you seek something else to do with your time but let's say you don't come up with anything so you go looking for a farm to work on in exchange for food but all the farmers tell you to get lost - so then you look for your own plot of land to farm for sustenance, but the police come arrest you for trespassing, so you find out the hard way that you should have kept your cheeseburger restaurant open evenings and coerced your employees to work then because "the customer is king"(sic). But, yes, coercion is more complex than unilateralism and unfair-pricing. Right, and this is good, imo, because it keeps economic exploitation consolidated/rationalized to a minimum. I think there are always going to be certain tasks that have to be done regardless of whether people want to do them or not, but it is ethically logical to me to minimize those tasks and the amount of time spent on them. Ideally, such work should be spread out among the maximum number of individuals possible so that any one person would only have to spend a small amount of their life performing them, somewhat like jury duty. But higher wages and profits can also have a coercive effect. Let's say you find it unethical to keep your cheeseburger place open 24/7 but you find out that people are willing to pay $10/cheeseburger after 2AM. At that point you could offer bonuses to employees that chose to work night shifts, but wouldn't those employees only make this choice because they felt unable to sacrifice the bonus to choose for their quality of life? Imo, what's less coercive is to simply not patronize businesses that don't promote ethical practices or to use them as little as possible. So, for example, if everyone only bought a cheeseburger from you once a year for as cheap as possible, your franchise would recognize that demand in your area was low and close down all but maybe one of its restaurants. That way, all those employees would be free except for one restaurant. Then, in an ideal world, all the other workers from the other restaurants would take turns manning the one restaurant so that they all only had to work a couple weeks/year. Yes, your body/stomach coerces you into seeking food. This allows others to use food-access to coerce you into doing things for them. Try it one day; leave all your money at home and take a one-way bus ticket to another city. Then start going around asking for food and see what you end up getting stuck doing in exchange for it. Chocolate and other addictions are also used to exploit people for money. Remember when people were addicted to $3 lattes? There were people spending $100s/month on coffee. They were having trouble keeping up with bills but yet they still had trouble cutting into their coffee money! That's not exploitation? The deal is basically you pay $100/month or suffer caffeine-withdrawal headaches as punishment. When people are in control of their consumption (can take it or leave it), it's not exploitative/coercive. Don't get me wrong, it's the addict's fault as much or more than the supplier, but the co-dependency relationship generally is exploitative/coercive as a whole. That's the funny thing about it. Exploiting your addiction involves NOT denying you the chocolate, cigarettes, heroine, etc. That's why smart businesses (including drug-dealers) often start with free samples. Then, once you are addicted it is unethical to deny you your fix, not because of any merit judgment but because it causes you suffering to withdraw from what you are denies. The irony is that the only way to free you from your addiction is to deny you access to your addiction (ideally, you do this on your own to maintain control over your own life but the whole fundamental issue in addictive substances is that people lose the will to deny themselves access). That's why intervention is such a big issue where addiction is concerned. There is not 'only' one ethical choice. Ethics are complex and you can take different approaches to participating in exploitative/coercive/addictive products. Most things are addictive to some extent, so it's not like there's any totally free path. However, there are many different strategies possible for seeking freedom from states of relative attachment/bondage. Do you define freedom as good and bondage as bad? If so or if not, why? So why don't you get yourself addicted to crack and heroine then? Do you have any reason to avoid strong, expensive addictions like these then? I have to reply to the rest of your post later. I am almost running late because I am so attached/addicted to finishing my response, but I have to be strong and put the rest off for later:)

What do you mean by, "experience as our physical self?" Do you mean accepting the arm as a coordinated part of your body system or actually feeling it as connected to your nervous system? If you just mean coordination, then a crane or other heavy machinery could be experienced as part of oneself, as could a Wii character.

I always figured that uranium or some other radioactive element did actually have a green glow and that was where the stereotype emerged. Cell phones and microwaves don't concern me much. I do wonder about magnetic fields though since I would think they would cause the iron in your body to (attempt) to re-arrange according to the direction of the field. I can't imagine this would pose a problem except maybe if you spent a lot of time in the same house or office with the same field strength and direction on you all the time. If that happened, I would expect some patterns of iron build-up in your blood to occur or something. Idk, it's admittedly very speculative based on a vague sense that magnets affect iron dust. When I read about radium-drinks being sold as "liquid sunshine," it made sense to me that exposing your digestive tracts to "sunshine" could have a positive (anti-biotic) effect, the way that it can be good to expose infected flesh to sunlight. I suppose what you keep saying about the ionizing vs. non-ionizing is that some radioactive material can ionize and thus bond within your cells instead of flushing through your system, in which case you'd have to deal with longer-term exposure.

First, thanks for elaborating on how functional groups can have a lot of variability. Mississippichem said there were something like 20 of them so that made it sound like all larger molecules are constituted from a short "vocabulary list" of certain "fundamental" configurations. As for forgetting about protons in chemistry, I understand how you would say that based on the way chemistry tends to focus on the combinability of particles based on their "shell-fullness" and charge/ionization. But from a sub-atomic perspective, it would seem to make sense to at the positive charge of the protons extending beyond the electron-negative charge in a way. Maybe it's wrongheaded of me, but it seems almost like electrons are shielding for the positive electrostatic field-force of the nuclei. I know that standard chemical logic works according to electron diagramming, but I'm trying to incorporate what I think I understand at the sub-atomic level into the way I imagine inter-atomic dynamics occurring.

I'm not that concerned with "locking out" everything from my mind that doesn't immediately fit data. I find it interesting to think about things in different ways to compare the limits of qualitative description/theorizing. Sometimes people post things like this and I don't even bother to keep reading because the ideas just don't make sense to me. This one just happens to not be causing any allergic reaction so I am giving thought to the parameters to see where they start to blatantly fail in terms of my own knowledge/understanding, which admittedly is far from being as rich as many people's. What, then, would cause particles to maintain or change orientation in the way you suggest? I suppose you could say that stable molecules can lose or gain up to 7 electrons in ionization. This makes me wonder if its possible for at atom to ionize a full eight electrons to reach a different level of stability than its natural one. edit: btw, I had another idea about the cause of gravity since engaging in this thread: I wondered if it is a form of residual electromagnetism, like that which causes surface-tension in water. I can't think of any deducible hypotheses to test this idea, though, unless the electrostatic residue of a massive body would cause gravitation to vary independently of mass, i.e. because of specific composition and chemical state(s) of the massive body in question.

They are limited by spending (government and private) and GDP growth (which is basically the same thing, right?). It is logical that financial investment has grown as a function of industrialization, economies of scale, etc. What isn't so logical is that free market competition has not driven businesses to utmost levels of cost-efficiency where there would be practically no surplus revenues to re-distribute in the first place. Presumably this would just create even more of the same old unwaivering pressure to make and spend money in every possible way. The question is whether the general economic results of this are favorable. Is it really good to have a continuously expanding economy that generates increasing dissatisfaction as part of its drive to increase revenues? Why would public-pressure solve anything? Wouldn't that just lead to even more insistence on pushing economic activity to increasingly higher levels? Can you actually ever imagine the public urging government to reduce GDP to give people a chance to find peace-of-mind and satisfaction in simple activities that don't cost anything or generate any revenue? I think at least with decentralized finance, private spending is free to save money when it wants to. Once it becomes "state finance," majoritarian public opinion could insist on stoking economic growth just because so many people are immature and manage their households inefficiently. edit: Actually, it may be worthwhile for government to create forms of debt-mitigation besides bankruptcy. That way, borrowers could lose their credit rating more gradually instead of being able to keep borrowing at full steam until they're up to their necks in debt.

I tend to think of force-fields, including those of bar magnets, as media for energy not energy itself. This gets confounded in discussions about matter being reducible to energy, though, but unless you are dealing with nuclear fusion or fission, I think it is safe to say that force is conserved while acting as a medium for energy-transfer, including magnetic field force.

Any form of financing, regardless of the source, has the same ultimate economic effect imo. It helps people expand their economic activities and by doing so, makes them that much more dependent on maintaining the supply-chain and distribution networks formed as a result. Take an example of a subsistence farmer who manages to provide enough food for herself and her family without engaging in trade. Then she realizes she can buy a tractor on credit and farm cash-crops to pay back the tractor so she does. Let's say this process goes well and she keeps expanding her business making lots of revenue, re-investing it, and increasing her family's consumption lifestyle. Everything is great until recession comes and suddenly she can no longer afford to pay the second mortgage on her farm and she loses her property and has to move to subsidized public housing in a city after declaring bankruptcy. At that point, will she wish that she had not taken bank loans, even if that meant continuing to farm at a subsistence level? Commercial trade has many benefits but people should also be aware of the risks. Face it, what most investors are doing is attempting to extract money from businesses just by lending them money. The same is true of workers. Neither cares if the enterprise goes out of business or produces in a wasteful or otherwise unethical manner as long as their income keeps increasing. So the more banks or other investors inject capital into enterprises, the more vulnerable those enterprises become to market fluctuations because of their dependence on financing and labor inputs. So maybe it is better for businesses to build up slowly on their own instead of using finance to grow rapidly. The question is how difficult it has become to do this as a result of modern standards/levels of economic interdependency - and should these standards/levels be reduced and, if so, how?

I realized the context of the post was regarding nuclear accidents, but I find it confusing to many lay people to think of radioactivity as fundamentally different from, say, particulate glowing coal dust. Basically, I tend to think of radioactive material as hot coals that don't require oxygen or any other external inputs to generate heat. Still, I realize this analogy doesn't address the effects of non-EM particles such as neutrons. Right, I think I used to think that there was something inherently poisonous about radioactive material that had nothing to do with the heat/light generated. I think neutrons and higher frequency EM waves (UV, X-ray, and gamma-rays) can damage cellular DNA because they penetrate flesh, but I think this would be somewhat like having open-heart surgery in the sunlight. Your inner flesh would probably get sunburned much quicker than your outer skin, but it would still take a couple minutes, I think, and at low levels, radiation tends to have beneficial effects, I think, like exposing an infected wound to sunlight. But shouldn't someone calculate the concentration of the particles in their air if its getting exhausted as vapor? If ppm levels drop to low enough levels, doesn't the long half-life of the particle practically guarantee it won't split while in your system, and even if it did, would it cause that much damage acting in isolation? I think like any other kind of exposure, it is relatively intense exposure over prolonged periods that raises risk. Isolated exposures to relatively low-concentrations can't have very significant effects with radioactive material any more than chemicals, can they? I would guess that many people who would be in panic if they were near the Japanese reactor right now have no problem using relatively strong chemicals (such as oven-cleaners) or eating food prepared using equipment cleaned with them. I've actually read that prior to WWII, radiation therapy was widely used and even sold over the counter as "liquid sunshine" to be ingested as a general cure-all and elixir. The main problems of radiation were suffered by doctors and technicians who were subject to constant exposures. The book I read on this even showed that cancer rates are actually lower in areas with slightly higher levels of background radiation and among workers who built nuclear weaponry. There was also a table of longevity vs. life expectancy in the areas where the nuclear bombs were dropped in WWII, and it showed that while there were shorter average lifespans for people according to distance from the blast-center, there is a point just before "average longevity" where people actually lived longer on average due to radiation exposure. Of course, this is little consolation to anyone whose life was shortened by exposure, but it is striking that some lives were actually prolonged (according to this book I read anyway - it was titled "the Good News about Radiation" btw). Misinformation about radiation tends to inspire fear in people. I can remember a debate some years ago whether bananas should be irradiated to preserve freshness and people were afraid of eating irradiated bananas, as if they would become radioactive from being exposed to UV lamps or whatever they were doing to them. What's worse about this, imo, is that once people accept food-radiation as safe, though, they no longer care that it sterilizes the seeds so they can't be used by farmers, for example. That's a topic for another thread, though, I know.

I don't think farmboy was saying that there was no point to learning the names. I think he was saying that there are underlying dynamics that the names refer to and it is more important to understand those than to (just) memorize the names. Ok, so you are farmboy both agree that chemical interactions are not as complex as language but you don't see any way to learn "chemical intuition" about why/how reactions occur in certain ways except to develop it through processes of reading and practicing different reactions? That sounds exactly like learning a language where you can explain long lists of formalized rules but using them to construct a coherent sentence or fluidly read a paragraph would be awkward and take a long time. I just got the idea of some kind of periodic-table-like list of fundamental groups because these groups sound like they function as super-atomic configuration with reactive properties like those of atoms, only at the molecular level. In other words, I was starting to get a feeling for how quantum behavior of electrons/atoms relates to their reactive behaviors and that made me think that maybe I could "fundamental group" behavior could be understood the same way, only instead of single atoms/ions, I take it the fundamental groups behave as units in reactions until sufficient energy is applied to break them down into constituent atoms. Maybe an even simpler way to phrase this would be using the analogy: fundamental groups are to atoms what atoms are to their subatomic constituents. I know that atoms are more centralized/concentric than molecules and these fundamental groups, but what I mean is that they are built up using electrostatic charge differentials and fragmenting them into smaller parts requires energy (and it can consume or release energy). Also, atoms have certain ionization and combinatory tendencies based on their position relative to noble gases, and I would guess that fundamental groups also exhibit such tendencies in terms of having weak points/atoms that easily break off and leave certain sections ionized in a certain way, etc.

That assumes that sanity is a sufficient basis to verify omnipotence as more than an impressive claim. I don't see how omnipotence could be verified in any positive sense, which is why I think theology is necessarily "faith-based." Humans have the capacity for faith beyond what can be rationally verified, and this is the best argument/cause for the existence of God, imo. I.e. God = faith. "Hypothetical 'pretend' games" are the way most science is applied, and the way most other everyday knowledge is applied as well. Can you imagine having to teach students to analyze every homework problem using only empirical experimentation? Theoretical modeling is the preferred method because imagination is immediately available and is very powerful. Then observe your own imagination at work. Yes, you are capable of subjecting all your thoughts and perceptions to physical laws and declaring them plausible or not on that basis. But that doesn't stop you from defying those laws in your imagination/dreams/subjectivity. Please imagine for a moment what subjective experience would be like if you were completely incapable of imagining anything that defied physical laws. Now don't imagine it to perform a simulation of the inability to imagine it. Did your imagination quit? That's because the same God gave people the power to choose, if in fact She was the truly original creator and not relegated to the role of mother for a creation not totally of her own design. Good points. I bet you could, given enough motivation. That is why fear of death motivates people to believe. They have to believe that something preceded their existence and will continue after their death or they become paralyzed with fear and unable to live their lives. And if such people's minds could be stimulated to function this way, why wouldn't it be a potentiality latent in all humans? Now, whether it is positive or negative that they reach such a state of consciousness is another question.

Even if this would happen, how would the entity PROVE that it was God? Theologically, I don't think it could because such 'proof' could just as easily be construed as an evil being (Satan) attempting to trick/seduce people out of faith-based belief into evidence-based belief. Thus, some people would buy into it while others would see it as a test of their faith and seek divine revelation through prayer. This sort of relates, imo, to why Jesus has gained popular acceptance as messiah - i.e. because he preached direct revelation through Holy Spirit. If he would have taught people to ignore their direct relationship with God and obey him as God without question, he probably wouldn't have been revered as messiah or accepted as God incarnate by so many people.

How can something that is expanding faster than light (or anything else that can traverse it) have "bounds," unless by "bounds" you mean places you can't get to? I can see how you could conceptualize an unreachably receding horizon as a type of boundary, but since you never actually reach it, it's really just more of a concept than a physical boundary, isn't it? I mean, it's not a THING.

During a global recession where so many people are crying about money, my first concern with any political upheaval would be that it has been provoked/incited as an attempt to draw military intervention as a means of stimulating economic activity. Obviously no one wants to promote the idea that creating outbursts is a constructive approach to address economic problems. So while it may be as simple as interest-alignments, I would like to believe that intelligence people are wise enough to consider the historical precedents of crisis-driven GDP growth through military and other interventionary spending and attempt to encourage other routes to economic stimulus by resisting reacting to crises except in the most rational way. Is it your impression that these political uprisings going on lately are more politically motivated or are they more a result of economic disenchantment? My sense is that it's more economic disenchantment, but even if it's not I don't understand why there is practically no reporting of the underlying issues either way - it all seems to be about the crisis with only subtle suggestions about the causes and reasons.

How can you call a photon from the sun "radiation," and then say the same photon is not "radiation," once it is absorbed and re-emitted by an atom? To me the word, "radiation" just refers to anything "radiating," and "radiate" refers to anything moving linearly away from a source. Thus, I would think it would refer to all EM waves/photons, plus neutrons and other particles that radiate away from their source. If that definition is too broad, how can you justify differentiating between two photons of the same wavelength just based on their circumstances of emission? As particles/energy in themselves, they are indistinguishable from each other, no?

I don't find it cognitively difficult to conceptualize both past and future as being features of an ongoing present. I can also conceptualize the past and future as separate from the present, but I find this to be more of a subjective projection than an empirical state of affairs. After all, the future can't exist prior to the causes that produce the effects that render it as it becomes; and the past can't continue to exist in the form that it did prior to the causes of the effects that transformed it into the present. So both past and future are really more representational than the present, insofar as the present can be directly engaged. Past and future are just ways of modeling time as being fragmented into sequential moments. I don't see how the subjective ability to imagine them suffices as evidence of their existence beyond subjectivity. Nevertheless, I agree with you that it would be difficult if not impossible to conceive of things and events without projecting antecedent moments or future potentialities onto them. It is, however, possible to interact/engage situations in the present with a sense that the effects of ones action also take place in the present. E.g. as I type this post, I am not thinking about some of it being in the past and/or the future - rather I'm just typing what I have to say in the present (subjectively speaking).

I actually find it interesting to read your ideas since they are at the same time so divergent from other claims I am familiar with but yet they are also more plausible sounding and easier to follow than most theories that get bashed with the 'crackpot' label. My favorite part is the comparison of paired electrons and gravitons as both having neutralized charge, only the gravitons are harder to separate. Do you see matter/antimatter as being like ionization for gravity? The part I find interesting but don't get is the seven layers to every particle. While I can appreciate the idea that protons and electrons could both have the same structure but different densities, why seven? Why not six or eight? It seems like a very arbitrary number, and really what is even the point of theorizing them as multilayered at all? Do the layers change or give way in certain situations to make the more inner layers relevant in some way?

So these functional groups can be viewed as fundamental structures above the level of the elements/atoms themselves? Would it be possible to create something like the periodic table but for these fundamental groups?

To me the mystery of gravity is what causes it and why its not dipolar the way electrostatic force is. Apparently nuclear force is also purely attractive without dipoles, but why does it not seem to have the compounding effect that gravity and even magnetism have when numerous small fields combine to create a single larger field? Somehow, certain fields seem to be able to expand far beyond the atoms they emerge from, but nuclear force doesn't behave this way. Why? Could nuclear force and gravity be somehow related as attractive forces? Could gravity somehow be a "shadow" or "residual" field that extends beyond the electrons of the atom? Could the reason the nuclear force seems to "taper off" long before reaching the electrons have to do with those electrons' ability to cancel out the nuclear force in their vicinity only to have it re-emerge beyond the electrons as gravitation? I realize these are all wildly speculative notions but I don't know how else to discuss potential issues that gravitational theories could address beyond the Newtonian and Einsteinian approaches. Generally, though, I feel that the OP is right, that there ARE still mysteries of gravity, esp. its most fundamental causes.

How do you define the boundaries of a fundamental particle of matter in order to measure its volume?