lemur

I rarely think about protons as being more than sources of mass/gravity and positive electrostatic charge, but I saw something today that made sure to highlight their transparency as consisting of different-directional quarks. I bet that before protons were known to consist of quarks, a physicist like you would have said that the question of whether protons consist of sub-particles or other constituent mechanics is not physics. It's ALL "potential physics." However, there's no way of knowing whether professional physicists will actually choose one direction or another. Personally, I think it's interesting when some issue is not formal physics (yet) because it allows anyone with tacit knowledge to contemplate how physics would or could approach the problem. I suppose that would be a "speculations" issue, but I still think it is potential physics research. The easy question I was trying to pose with regard to this, however, is simply whether physics is leaning toward establishing primacy for either force or energy. I mean, you could either try to dissect forces for energy-relations that constitute them OR consider force-fields as fundamental entities that express energy but are themselves neither energy nor reducible to it. This sort of gets back to the ever-resurfacing conflict between nouns and verbs, though, I think. I.e. between objects and motion.

I'm reading the wiki article on benzene and it says that the molecule is thermodynamically stable because the electrons are delocalized. Does this have to do with geometrical structure distributing the bond force in a way that prevents weak-points, or something like that (I know next to nothing about chemistry but it seems logical that if bonding was distributed in a way that favored some bonds and left others weak, that those would be less stable as energy/temperature increased)? Does it also have something to do with the gaseous behavior of the molecule, i.e. that it's "aromatic" because it easily evaporates into air? If so, is that related to the delocalization of electrons? I.e. are the molecules relatively less dense and therefore prone to evaporation?

Technically, yes. But how difficult is it socio-culturally?

My impression of the modeling is that electron interactions are somewhat predictable insofar as their force characteristics are known, but their interactions are highly unpredictable so they can only really be understood concretely where numerous particles are exhibiting average behavior. Still, ON AVERAGE, don't they push against each other purely due to force-repelling-force? As far as the basis for that force, does anyone bother to make claims as to whether force is fundamental or has antecedent causes?

What does knowledge about quantum states, such as electron shape and wave function characteristics, contribute to understanding of how atoms combine and break down in chemical processes? Are their fundamental revelations about atomic structuring that provide revealing insights into how atoms interact that were not apparent prior to quantum theory developments?

Nazism was a majoritarian movement and still people decided globally to intervene with force. Don't governments almost have a responsibility to intervene by force when some majoritarian movement is resulting in oppression? E.g. if mafia economics grew to majoritarian levels, wouldn't the government need to intervene if laws and due process were being ignored?

You have to stop assuming that Nazi-like majoritarian authoritarianism is the ultimate state of democracy. Democracy doesn't give people/majorities what they want. It gives them the ability to represent and express their will publicly and from their their ideas get checked and balanced into a form that escapes authoritarianism. American democracy is overflowing with authoritarian ideologies and interests, but the idea is that these gain less unilateral power because of public expression accompanied by checking and balancing. What these kinds of politics do is to disrupt the idea that democracy is a smooth-running process of electing public managers and letting them do their work. I recently watched an interview where Robbie Williams claimed to be able to be a better president than GWBush because anyone could. You can't empower people to that level of self-confidence in their own leadership abilities if everyone is busy humbling themselves before leaders they perceive as great to super-human levels. You're not going to hear Robbie Williams say he could be a better leader than someone like, idk, Gandhi, because he probably has to much reverence for him and would put himself down in comparison. US democracy encourages individual expression instead of subjugation, though it allows that too even if just to subject it to deconstruction.

Probably because you're gaining enough life experience and pattern-recognition skills for your feeling of newness in things you had as a child and as a pubescent adolescent to fade. Be careful not to fall into the habit of finding everything just another boring iteration of something old. Try to seek out the uniqueness of each experience and consider what makes it special. It's cliche' but it's like the expression that no two snowflakes are alike. All of nature is like this and even social experiences can be experienced as unique or just another repetition. In truth, social conformity does tend to make social interaction very repetitive, but if you look for the nuances and focus on those and attempt to innovate in your own expressions (in constructive ways please), I think you'll find that there is more happiness to be found than in dwelling on the blandness of it all. If you want a spicy life you have to cultivate spice and put it out there yourself. You can't rely on others and also be prepared for their blandness to suck up all the spice you can put out. Sorry for taking the spiced-food analogy so far but it seemed to work well.

Don't forget about the Christian belief that suffering can be a means of imitating Christ's cross-bearing and thereby achieve deliverance from pain. You don't have to destructively self-persecute like the way people used to whip themselves, etc. Many people do it subtly through fasting and/or various meditations. You can also just look for the life-lessons in various forms of adversity and witness how deliverance emerges from your perseverance through immanent conditions.

This is how royal sovereignty originally emerged, in my understanding. Kings were people who were the most victorious in subjugating others by violent force and maybe hegemony to some extent. This is where I understood the ritual originates of bowing one's head to the king while the king withholds the right/power to cut off the head by touching the sword on the shoulders mercifully. This is also resonant with the political logic of, I think it's Locke but not sure at this moment, who argued that the only way to avert total war of all against all is for people to submit their power to the sovereign in exchange for mercy and order provided by the sovereign. Authoritarianism emerges when people learn to submit to authority out of fear of violence, etc. Republican democracy is what occurs when no one wants to make anyone else king and submit to them but they also don't want to persistently engage in violence to the point of eliciting submission. This is when individual sovereignty to self-govern by reason emerges along with checking and balancing of power where social-power is exercised instead of self-governance. The debate of whether ontological/political primacy should be attributed to states or individuals is an endless and rather senseless one, imo. The point of state-power is to exercise social control in favor of at least some individuals and at the expense of at least some. So the conflicts that emerge from social-control and its discontents are enacted as struggles between individuals and states, struggles among individuals to achieve state-recognition as an independent nation, struggles between people representing themselves as state-interests, and struggles of individuals to deconstruct statism and interact without collectivism. Why does it seem so unimaginable that people with different national identities could interact as individuals the same as people who have the same citizenship? Do people have to contextualize every interaction between two or more individuals with different national citizenship as "international relations?" Does everyone have to be treated as a representative of national interests? If people treated each other like this on the basis of racial identity, it would be bizarre - claiming that you are a member of a sovereign race and viewing inter-racial interactions as negotiations between autonomous collective entities.

I'm glad you mention this. It is easy for people to assume that individuality and ego are the same thing. Ego is actually the impetus force used to drive people into collectivism. This happens when collectivists continually criticize individuals as being selfish egoists until they willingly submit to collective interests. Then, they end up substituting the collective "we" for the personal "I" and their ego pride and shame becomes centered around the collective identity. This works to hide and protect their ego in two ways: 1) as mentioned, it satiates the collectivists that attacked egoism relentless in the first place to bring it into collective submission 2) it hides the ego and thus allows it to operate more covertly and safely, which makes it more powerful. This is why collective identities like nation and race result in so much pride and aggression; i.e. because people are sacrificing their individual egoism to support the collective, and thus projecting their ego-sensitivities to a more public level with a more powerful (collective) means of exercising material power. This is why war, the ultimate violent power expression of "us vs. them" usually comes down to rallying and battling for collective egoism. Sometimes war can be kept rational, but usually at some level people start taking and making the violence as personal and they resort to collective egoism because they feel too vulnerable as an individual to withstand the violence and subjugation without submitting to collective identification. This is the destruction of individuality by evolving egoism.

Then you can get into an analysis of the path opinions take from the individuals where they originate to popularity. Truth and reason tend to be resisted when they conflict with vested interests, but eventually they become popular because of the will the power that is served by applying them in an irresistible way. However, once ideas become popular they tend to evolve into increasingly dogmatic forms and become empty vehicles of vested interests until they become vulnerable to new ideas that re-emerge from authentic discourses of truth and reason, imho.

lol. I thought it seemed like a thread I had started. Sorry to laugh - it's all I can do considering the embarrassment. And here I was thinking I wasn't a crackpot because someone else was entertaining a similar notion.

I think he means that agricultural science and technology (has) developed the ability to provide sufficient sources of protein, calories, and other nutrients that it is possible to eliminate meat-consumption without suffering any kind of malnutrition. I would add that it is also supposedly more ethical (civilized) to substitute non-meats for meat because of environmental reasons, though I am not so sure that every field/forest used for grazing livestock could be more efficiently used to grow plant-based foods. It would be interesting, though, to do some case-by-case comparisons of how much nutrition could be harvested from a given livestock field by growing crops. I once read the ratio 7:1 for the amount of land area per unit food-consumption produced for vegetables vs. meats. Also, meat raising, slaughter, and processing uses MUCH more water than crops, presumably just because of all the hygiene measures and cleanup involved.

Believing in evidence still requires faith. Faith that the evidence is valid. Faith in your logic of linking the evidence to the issue it is supposed to prove or disprove. It makes me laugh when I hear people say that Galileo (or Copernicus or someone like that) offered the pope to look through his telescope to see for himself that the planets move around the sun. How would looking through a telescope (once) provide direct empirical evidence of anything except the fact that there was light reaching the lens? I don't know what it means to say that "100% of the world is the same." The same as what? In what sense?

I'm not sure what the OP meant by "rippling" but it makes me wonder whether two repellant bar-magnets squeezing tightly against each other doesn't change the shape of the field. The two magnets only make contact via their mutual repulsion, so something has to transfer the force through the fields to the magnets themselves. So that leads to the question of whether the fields are perfectly inelastic or if they flex, bend, ripple, etc. Too bad they're not made of light so you could just blow smoke through them to see what they're doing.

This is the problem with sovereignty, imo. Supposedly, everyone in the world within Libyan citizenship is supposed to not interfere, but in the mean time people express solidarity with the rebellion and/or comment on Gaddafi's (il)legitimacy without due process according to ANY legal or otherwise accountable reason. Indeed people have the right to defend against the use of force against them, but in what sense is a government "overthrown by force" anyway? It's not like people have to invade a state building to begin governing. They can just do so without assaulting anyone else. So the question becomes who's assaulting whom and for what purpose EXACTLY. Vague political rhetoric isn't sufficient. There needs to be direct accountability, imo, of who is doing what exactly and why (at the ground level).

If ocean temperatures were rising along with air temperature, wouldn't this cause more evaporation and more cloud cover? If so, wouldn't the additional clouds reflect a great deal of sunlight back into outer space? Could this be a natural check on global warming? On the other hand, if cloud cover increased significantly and sunlight decreased accordingly, what effect would this have on plant-growth and the ability to process CO2 into O2? BTW, I started to post this on the thread about sea level and sea floor but it seemed too divergent.

Ontological individuality, imo, is not so much related to the genetic uniqueness of a particular body. Twins, after all, have identical genes but are different individuals. Ontologically, individuals are individual because the have separate sensory and nervous systems as well as monopoly access to direct control over their voluntary musculature. No one can see through your eyes or hear through your ears. A mother can empathize with a child when he falls down but she cannot directly feel his pain except through approximation, however accurate that approximation may be. A commander can solicit, manipulate, or otherwise achieve high levels of submission among subordinates, but the authority to follow orders always ultimately rests with them because of their individual will. But people mean various things by "individual," so that is just the materiality of it. You can also get into identity issues, behavioral/thought conformity of individuals and whether that makes them "less individual," etc. What do you mean by "what birth and death truly mean?" You say it's a scientific question as if meanings are objective facts and not the subjective providence of philosophy, religion, psychology, etc. If what you're referring to is how culture makes use of birth and death in terms of ascribing identities, that's another discussion. I don't see what it has to do with individuality, unless you're referring to the kinds of everyday social-logics that individuals are just sub-units of collectives defined by birth and death patterns (nationalism tends to make reference to both birth and death in the logic of naturalizing why one individual supposedly belongs to one nation and others different ones). Is that what you're referring to? I.e. whether individuals are connected to super-individual social entities by way of their birth and death circumstances?

Oh thank goodness I'm not the first person who thought of it. I was afraid they were going to saint me and then martyr me for it It is pretty logical, though, especially from the perspective of someone who can dare to contemplate the fact that religion has life on Earth as its main source of insight and focus of influence. Ideas of afterlife are primarily significant for their influence on the here and now.

What about courts of law, open critical reasoning/discourse, elite ideological regimes, and divine revelation?

Probably another thread should be started about capitalism generally, but I'll try to be brief in saying that I think you'll find that the reason capitalism tends to behave as you say has to do with its appropriation as a means to sustain class-distinctions and privileges instead of being used exclusively as a means of regulating the rational production and distribution of economic means. So, for example, the "artificial demand" you mention that keeps money flowing really has the purpose of maintaining certain lifestyle privileges for numerous people who do not work on farms, in factories, or provide many of the services they take for granted in their daily consumption habits. If artificial demand didn't exist, arguably, people who spend money on lavish lifestyles would gradually end up losing all their money to people who sold them the lifestyles they consumed. Then, those people would have to work to provide the same lavish lifestyles to the people who served them before until they saved up enough money to once again be the ones who enjoy the lavishness. However, because class-privilege sustainability is desired by people who enjoy lavishness and wish not to have to take jobs that are 'below' their level of education, an elaborate system is needed to ensure lots of money gets to people who spend lots and those who work to make the money they spend are continually motivated to provide the things the big spenders like to spend money on.

I could see some advantages to this. First, it would maybe help eliminate the use of covert classifications for whiteness that are perhaps embedded in other scholarships that don't explicitly mention race/ethnicity. Second, if people self-identifying as 'white' would compete for a white-only scholarship and lose the competition against other whites, they would be less likely to complain about (reverse)discrimination than when they feel excluded from scholarships or admissions due to non-qualification for affirmative action assistance. The disadvantages would be that either people would get stigmatized as white-supremacists for seeking white-only scholarships OR they would actually embrace white-supremacy as an ideology legitimated by the scholarship program, though it really depends on how it would be done, I think. The problem would also be that critics of racial inequalities would say that so many formally ethnically neutral assistance programs favor whites or whiteness that a white-only scholarship only further unbalances the playing field. What would really help the whole discussion, imo, is for people to formulate and discuss visions for what it would mean to have a truly level "playing field." This would, however, bring out a lot of discussion about white privilege, historical white-supremacism, and other issues that tend to trigger white-guilt and animosities. Then, people either start getting defensive/aggressive or they start apologizing repeatedly and lamenting how terrible racism is without taking any practical steps forward.

It would probably helpful to elaborate what is meant by "being an individual" before exploring and analyzing how it would or wouldn't occur in practice.

Shouldn't there be some threshold of energy for a "ripple" to result in an EM wave? Or would the threshold for resulting in the EM wave be the same as the threshold of energy needed to generate the ripple in the first place. Another way to look at this is whether a magnetic or electric field has the capacity to contain "ripples" without that energy "spilling" out as EM radiation.