lemur

I was sort of curious if there was enough theoretical connectivity between physics and chemistry to venture predictions about hypothetical elements based on knowledge of their component aspects. You could ask the unicorns but you would need a frequency translator because they breathe and speak only with pure helium;)

Like does the Earth's gravity decrease because it is rotating?

Ad hominem attacks are annoying in discussion forums because they shift the focus from content to users. The whole point of facebook is to make the users the content. It is a totally ad hominem medium. Childish at best; social ego-control at worst.

Interesting. What about if it was in a high-gravity situation, e.g. in orbit of a black hole very close to the event horizon? Would higher gravity increase the amount of energy required to release the 2s electron from the atom? If so (or in the other situation you described in which the He could be temporarily ionized, could it then bond with other atoms and if so is there a way to predict how the compounds might behave? Is this just pointless speculation about how unicorns would fly if they had pterodactyl wings?

Bush's fiscal stimulus caused people to question fiscal stimulus. His bank bailouts caused people to question government intervention in the economy. His "commander-in-chief" status caused people to question authoritarianism. His wars got people comfortable enough with war to start criticizing it again (they were afraid to when it all started). His "wire-tapping" and "torture" discussion caused people to deal with long-standing deep-seated fears implanted in the popular psyche from years of subtle insinuations. So Bush sort of affected everyone in a way that made them more independent by causing them to question government, which is basically what the republican movement has been about since its inception how many centuries ago? If she does, she will only be exploiting a divide that is already strong - and I will bet that it will weaken in the course of her deconstruction of it. Just as Bush started with high approval ratings for being "commander-in-chief," was compared with Hitler, and was accompanied by a strong culture of repression of dissent; and by his second term he left with a terrible approval rating and hardly a soul who was still afraid to critique him (I think I was/am the only one left maybe); Palin may have similar deconstructive effects. This sounds strange to me. Are you trying to make a point about racial identity in politics and, if so, why not just explicate it instead of playing with impressions?

You would wake up from surgery not knowing for certain whether you were your new body with memories of your old body or a transplanted soul. Your old soul might actually die with your old body and your new body's soul might just take over your new brain's identity as its own.

You won't feel pain but you might end up in limbo between life and death instead of actually dying. In fact, I think it is harder to kill a healthy body than many people expect when they take on the task of attempting it. I think a general rule of thumb should be that basically anything intended to kill yourself or another living thing is more likely to stimulate an intense survival response than anything else; not really a promissing prospect when you're overcome by the death drive for whatever reason.

So what exactly is it she is selling? Is she preaching anything beyond reactivism against liberalism fiscal and social? I think what you're failing to recognize is that a big selling point for many voters is that a politician should not be a pragmatist and compromise with what they believe is wrong just to maximize their popularity. People consider this somewhat spineless and like politicians that have a strong vision of what's right and work to resolve issues of the opposition. I.e. they think that if the president is right, that s/he should be able to convince the opposition. The problem is that the opposition is just as convinced that they're right and they're willing to scrap as many presidents as it takes to dominate with their prerogative (this is my impression anyway). Like Bush, she may end up being a president who is a president of all people but in unexpected ways giving them what they need more than what they want. I don't think there was anyone who wasn't ultimately disappointed by Bush in some way, yet somehow they are mostly better off because of that. How is it you expect her to divide the USA? What about the world as a whole? My impression is typically that any president who doesn't do anything possible to enrich the global power-classes as much as possible "divides" people, but that is imo because exploitative power has been normalized and anyone who challenges it is treated as themselves exploiting/hurting "the country/world."

Would density and/or temperature make a difference?

You seem to be giving information that is related to my questions, but I can't exactly directly apply it to answering the questions. I'm not sure it's worth your trouble to sort it out with me. What do you mean, in general? I am talking about conservation of energy within the two magnetic fields that extend beyond the magnets. Does all the energy imparted into those invisible force-fields end up back at the magnets or does some of it get emitted directly between the invisible fields and other electrons outside the magnets? So the heat is due to friction among the atoms within the magnets, and that friction is caused by all force of pushing the two fields together being returned to the atoms in which the field is anchored? The eddy currents are electric currents that run through the magnets themselves? When you say there is no conservation of field, do you mean that no electrostatic force within the material of the magnet itself has to be diverted into the force fields extending beyond the magnets? I.e. the forces of binding and configuration among the electrons of the iron atoms remain constant and new force emerges in the formation of the magnetic fields extending beyond the magnets?

I already explained this word to refer to the belief or assumption that a human expert is the ultimate authority in some form of knowledge. It is not a stupid word. It very clearly describes a deviation from authority by nature, empiricism, reason, etc. If you provide factual proof or logical reasons why or how knowledge is inadequate or can be improved and some "expert" tells you that you don't have the authority to question expertise, that is authoritarian, is it not? I agree that people should say so when they don't know something, but they may (and probably should) apply their knowledge to elaborating why they don't know what they don't and how their existing knowledge could be extended to find the answer. I also agree that referring someone to a knowledgable person could be helpful. I just took what you said to mean that all roads of inquiry lead to experts (human authority) and not to your own research process that may include but should not be limited to consulting the expertise of others. What does "knowing all of science" have anything to do with this? Questions are answered one at a time. The answers are not passively waiting to be uncovered in books. Everything you know is just a set of resources you can draw on to answer questions and pursue further research. The end goal isn't to be knowledgable but to answer the question in question or postulate further questions to elaborate/develop knowledge. I don't know why else you would set up a dichotomy between knowing everything yourself or consulting others for what they know except to depict an authoritarian view of science where scientists are the keepers of knowledge instead of researches in active pursuit of such knowledge, whose authority ultimately lies beyond any single individual or text. I guess that means you didn't really read or understand what I wrote there.

It sounds like he is committing vandalism with the property damage and assault if the nurses are legitimately afraid due to him actively threatening them. My guess is that he is acting out because he feels some frustration with not being able to achieve some social goal(s) but he does not know of any possible method of approaching the achievement of those goals constructively. Has anyone had a conversation with him about what he wants and what he's angry about to motivate his behavior? The economic problems I believe you're are dealing with go beyond cuts in healthcare spending and recession, imo. You are probably dealing with an economy where wealth is redistributed to promote care and leisure, which may be very humanitarian, but it promotes the expectation that care and leisure will be well-funded and compensated. This in turn promotes the culture that if people are getting paid to take care of others, they will do something else for money. Think about what would happen in a REAL recession. People would not have ANY means of making money so there would be relatively few paying jobs. People would have to occupy themselves by attempting to create their own daily welfare. If they had family and/or friends in need of care, it would be up to them to help those people or not. There would be no organized "system" except for what unemployed individuals choose to do (or not) of their own volition. The recession you are talking about is one in which profits from global trade are diminishing, making less imports available for wealthy economies. The budget cuts you're dealing with are people bickering over who should reduce their standard of living. Why shouldn't people who do caring work consume less and accept income cuts if other workers are as well? Why should people stop caring for others in need unless there is some direct material benefit to doing so? Why shouldn't people giving and receiving care also perform other kinds of work, like farming, to provide their own food? They don't have to be slaves to the general population, but if they can contribute to their own sustenance, why shouldn't they be allowed to? The reason most people aren't in modern culture is because work is organized in a way that there is relatively little (if any) freedom to provide for your own needs. If the only choice you're given is to conform to an authoritarian economy or be relegated to a position of dependency on that economy's generosity, how is it ethical to overweigh how to treat such persons? Once you take away someone's freedom, you become responsible for their welfare, don't you? How do you know this boy has been adequately diagnosed in the first place? You are assuming he is "inherently violent." How would you like it if someone decided they didn't like your behavior so they labelled you "inherently pathological" in some way? Also, why should it cost a fortune to inform this person of his rights and responsibilities and then set him free with the awareness that if he breaks laws, he will face criminal justice? Unless he is incapable of understanding criminal penalties, he should be able to choose for himself whether to commit crimes or not. Maybe he is just acting out to test how much of the criminal justice system he can take. Is he fully aware of the consequences and penalties of his actions? To me, the best measure of ethics is to ask yourself how you would want to be treated if you were in the situation of the person you are judging and intervening in his life. If you lapse into thoughts like, "I would never get myself into this situation in the first place," it probably means you're not regarding the person ethically. If you think to yourself, "if I was in this situation and I was given this option, I would find it reasonable and fair," that's a good sign. Then there is the ethic that individuals are not all the same, so if the person is expressing something different from the way you think about it, can you reasonably listen to their point of view and reasonable communicate about your differences and the best way to solve them? If the person refuses to communicate/negotiate and so do you, then you have left yourselves and each other with no other choice but to try to dominate each other with force. When you win, you become responsible for the welfare of the person you dominated because you are taking away his freedom, imo. "Considering him sick" is not (or should not be) an act of mercy for a mentally healthy criminal. Criminality should be dealt with as such and mental health problems as such. There is too much confusion between mental health and social deviance already, imo. Mental illness is when you suffer from inner anguish/pain. Social deviance is when your behavior is judged negatively according to cultural standards of those evaluating you. These are two completely different issues, although they may influence each other.

I think the reason you don't want to discuss your personal God(head) is not because you don't want to hijack the thread but because you don't want to view your beliefs in the same light as all other humanly constructed divinity. By using words like "cosmic consciousness" and "not divine, just natural," you are just re-constituting divinity as its empirical basis (i.e. nature) and you are acting as if divinity itself means anything more or less than "cosmic consciousness." All these concepts are human constructs used to transcend the banality of the particular. All divinity is is projecting human knowledge onto some entity imagined to transcend embodied human existence.

Ok, back to basics then. What is the relationship between an electron and its electric and/or magnetic fields? My impression was that electrons have electrostatic charge, which repels other electrons (negative charge) and attracts protons (positive charge). Electric current, I thought, was when energy is transferred through electrons as a kinetic medium, the way air pressure travels through the atmosphere as wind. Magnetic fields, I thought, appear at a right-angle from electric fields when they are moving as current. I'm not sure how static magnetic fields emerge without the motion of current, but I know they generate a corresponding electric field when they move, which is why magnets can be used to produce electricity. Where I get confused is what the difference is between an electron itself and the fields it generates. If you call it a point-particle and distinguish it from the fields, what empirical basis do you have for the point-particle other than it being the center of the manifest fields? It makes more sense to me to say that the force-fields ARE the electron, but then I get confused about whether electric and magnetic fields are separate or parts of the same entity. Likewise, what is happening with the multitude of electrons and their field-force when they 'align' in the case of a magnet? Are the atomic-level force-fields combining to form a single macro field or are they all separate and interacting as separate entities? I don't know if it helps or not, but I look to the emergence of a gravity field from a multitude of atoms/molecules as similarly merging into a single macro-field, but is there some reason the fields of individual fields would interact differently in the case of gravitation as electrostatics? Then why do atoms tend to remain microscopic? Is there any difference between the electrostatic repulsion of a magnetic field and the electrostatic repulsion of non-magnetized matter? Right, but does any of the work done in moving the magnetic fields not get conserved and returned to the magnets as they are compressed and released (bounced) against each other? Or do they contain/conserve the energy perfectly and return it in the same amount as it is imparted?

You wrote that when one expert fails to know the answer to a question, they defer to an expert in a different field. You did not mention the authority of nature/empiricism/reason and neither did you mention that any person is capable of refining their inquiry through systematic research and reasoning from observation and logic. Sorry if "authoritarian" is a harsh-sounding word. All I meant is that the authority of living scientists is not the ULTIMATE authority on scientific matters. There is a "higher power" that they must defer to, whether you call it nature, empiricism, reason, or . . . oh never mind. In practice, axiom and postulate are indeed similar. "Postulate" taken literally sounds more like something put forth as a basis for something else, so I can't decide if it automatically implies or rejects empirical/critical validity testing. Suffice it to say that some approaches to knowledge assume knowledge to be axiomatic and relative to some foundational paradigm, thus implying that all knowledge and truths are relative to arbitrary underlying assumptions. Other approaches to knowledge do not take knowledge and truth to be relative and apply critical rigor to the task of pushing knowledge and truth ever further. Personally, I think that when paradigms collapse, it is because obfuscation has either given way to reveal a clearer picture of reality or obfuscation has established a more solid basis for further obfuscating. To me, true science involves a willingness to question paradigmatic assumptions and coherence where contradictions emerge. I don't see any reason why one or more paradigms would "hold fast" waiting for a paradigm-shift unless the "scientists" involved were subjects of an authoritarian regime instead of being independently critical.

-F = -mg is unclear to me. What is negative force? Is it anti-force or is it normal force where negative mass/matter is involved? Further why wouldn't negative mass have its own attractive force in addition to being repelled by positive gravity of positive mass/matter? Then wouldn't you have to have something like -F = mg (where -m and -g cancel each other out to become a positive)? But wouldn't you also have to have -F = -mg in relation to positive gravity's interaction with anti-mass matter? Further, what would anti-acceleration mean? Would it be acceleration in an anti-direction (i.e. some direction in anti-spacetime?). I think these "anti" concepts tend toward convolution. Wouldn't it make more sense to just create new names for things instead of referring to them as "anti" variations of existing things?

I think to call something anti-mass, it would have to be gravitationally repellant instead of attractive. I think it would also have to be endothermic when converted into energy. So, for example, if you could get two particles with anti-mass to fuse, the difference between the sum of the parts and the resulting particles would consume energy instead of releasing it. As I understand it, fusion among heavy elements is endothermic anyway, but I think the mass of the unified particle is greater than that of the daughter particles, so if those particles had anti-mass, fusing heavier particles could be exothermic as the daughter particles lose anti-mass in combining. Would the particles with anti-mass be repelled from each other, though, or would they only be repelled from particles with positive mass and be attracted to each other? Isn't this just dumb speculative meandering? What's the point of wondering what negative mass would or could be?

This is an interesting topic. It would be interesting to survey the reasons for retraction to see if there are patterns. It makes you wonder if there are some cultural changes going on in academic soul-searching, or if it's related to shifting knowledge and/or analytical consciousness. Or maybe it is just coincidence or a trend of increasing doubt due to persistent threats of budget-cuts and/or other personal, professional, and/or economic insecurities.

I think advanced math mixes various skills. Part of it is coding. People have to be able to decode variables and symbols in a meaningful way while interpreting and processing them cognitively. It's like learning to read and think about what you're reading at the same time. It can be hard and requires a lot of practice. Math also requires simultaneous multi-stage processing. For example, it can be necessary to read and interpret numbers and variables with exponents while simultaneously processing their operators. Finally, a lot of math (such as calculus) builds on successive foundations. So even though there is abstract conceptual processing going on, this processing is aided by familiarity with related procedures. In other words, there are patterns of cognitive-logic that are translated through different types of math so the more types of math you've worked on to build familiarity, the better you get at learning new, more complex/advanced techniques. I'm not very good at math but I have noticed similar patterns with written ideas as well as with music. With music, for example, becoming familiarity with note-selection makes it possible to learn a new instrument fairly quickly once you have established a "feel" for how notes are keyed/selected and voiced. To a non-musician (or even someone who is narrowly specialized in a certain style of playing a particular instrument), it probably seems quite daunting to learn to play multiple instruments, just as to a person with little math experience, the prospect of learning the many forms of advanced math would seem daunting when in fact they build-on and reinforce each other, no? edit: I forgot to mention my own experience with statistics. I found that learning statistics was difficult because I already had advanced qualitative methods of working with theory directly. So many of the statistical procedures are complex quantitative procedures for performing analytical tasks. So when you are using math to test validity or model a simple yes or no question in terms of data-analysis, it is harder to swallow that the results are supremely valid when you've already learned qualitative methods for addressing the same questions with comparable accuracy. Btw, I'm talking about social science here, so all the quantitative data and variable are derived from subjective or interpretive observations of theoretically interpolated observations, so while the statistics produce accurate results, the results connect fuzzily with the source of the data. It would be like using an extremely accurate calculator to count breezes observed in a forest. Every time you observe a breeze you tally it and the calculator gives you an accurate sum of the tallies, but you can't eliminate the problem of when you count air-movement as a breeze and when it is a gust or just doesn't show up on your "radar" because it is too weak or escapes your gaze. So I think it would have been easier to learn the statistical math if I would have had faith that they would give me more accurate results than the data that was input in the first place - but statistics are only as good as the data.

Right, and I'm trying to account for the factors. EM radiation is created when electrons first absorb energy and jump to a higher energy state, then dropping back down to a lower state. What confuses me with the magnetic fields is that these large fields seem to be extensions of the electrostatic fields that compose the electrons themselves, so it's as if the fields extending out of the magnets are themselves macro-electrons created from the amalgamation of numerous atomic electrons in the same orientation. So would these magnetic fields only generate photons if they would somehow become excited and change levels? I assume this wouldn't be possible since magnets lose their magnetism when they heat up. What perplexes me is what the relationship between the magnetic field of the magnets and the atomic electrons that compose them is. Is the large magnetic field an array of dipolar "threads" extending from a single atom on one pole and seeking the shortest possible route to a single atom on the other pole, which a chain of single-aligned atoms in between? Or do the "threads" simply combine with each other to form a unified field? Further, are there literally electrons extending out of the negative pole and bending around to the positive pole? If the atomic level electrons merge into a single unified field, does this field maybe have more resistance to changing levels than independent electrons at the atomic scale? Too many questions, I know, but hopefully you can see how I'm thinking and identify any blatantly false assumptions. So does this imply that the two magnetic fields wouldn't generate EM radiation merely as a result of interacting/colliding but only due to their motion? The fact that they resist each other's motion is meaningless but the fact that they are accelerating is? If F=MA, shouldn't the force they exert on each other constitute acceleration in the same sense that a grounded object accelerates into the ground by gravity? But how would you define the mass of a magnetic field? Would it simply be the mass of the electrons that constitute it?

What happens when you accept that God has only ever existed as a human construction/projection? Do you then reject all theology as being based on a projection or do you embrace God as human culture of (faith in) divinity?

Assimilation is just one possible strategy for competition. Yes, people could probably stand to benefit from studying Chinese examples and adopting/adapting aspects. Eventually, Chinese may once again be looking to western examples as seems to have been the case in the past. If by "work for peanuts," you mean cutting wages and other compensation paid out at all corporate levels, this is one strategy but it has to be balanced by constructive restructuring of those employees personal budgets or people could lose access to basic necessities because they are trying to avoid foreclosure or cover other costs that haven't adjusted yet. Still, I think you would be surprised how happy people can be with relatively little material wealth. Happiness depends on many other factors than how much you're getting paid and/or spending. I don't think you should view worker safety as a fixed cost. Obviously no one wants to compromise safety until they are paying for it out of their own pocket. But there are ways to increase the efficiency of safety-measures. It's not like safety always has to cost an arm and a leg. Well said. It is also likely that a good deal of economic restructuring would occur if/as wages were deflating. Probably many services, such as certain restaurants etc., would end up unable to maintain business levels if large numbers of people were having to streamline their budgets. Of course what could happen, which would completely defeat the process would be if money saved by cutting some wages and jobs would be spent to increase the wages/spending of others and create other relatively unproductive jobs. In other words, if fiscal stimulus is great (either through public or private channels), the incentive to restructure consumerism would be undermined by consumerism itself. It is very difficult for efficiency to evolve when inefficiency is getting subsidized.

Ok, this is indeed the "how" at one level. But what about how the electric field induces the magnetic field and how the two fields launch into leap-frogging at C? This is an authoritarian, human-centered view of science. Another perspective would say that nature (empiricism) is the ultimate authority that has to be consulted by anyone, expert or otherwise to reach valid scientific explanations. Obviously anyone can reach a point where they don't know the answer. However, you can use your existing knowledge and creativity to contemplate how the question could be answered and/or what information or knowledge would be needed to move forward with answering it. Interesting. I wouldn't call an axiom that is testable an axiom. I think of axioms as assumptions taken-for-granted in order to build on them. This gets into the arbitrariness of paradigms a la Kuhn. I also wouldn't say that physics or any other science has ceased to be a form of philosophy. You make a good point that not all philosophy insists on empirical rigor, but philosophy that does is called science, imo. You can't escape the necessity of thinking and reasoning in physics or any other science. Computers can't do science by themselves, can they? It depends on the kind of "'why' question" in question. "Why" questions that are refinable into empirically viable "how" questions are scientifically interesting, no? I don't even think all valid scientific questions have to be testable. It is more important that they play a critical role in existing knowledge/models. E.g. it will never be possible to observe the electron as it passes through the slits but that doesn't make it unscientific to wonder what it is doing as it moves from one side of the slit to the other, does it?

Is your point that the magnetic fields form a perfect spring with no internal friction, which return exactly the same amount of energy as is put in? A spring in a vacuum wouldn't make a sound but EM fields seem to behave as if they are surrounded by a medium, insofar as nothing can insulate EM emissions. Another way to frame my question/issue is that when electrons are compressed against each other at the molecular level, they transfer energy, which sometimes causes them to change levels and emit photons. So what would prevent two magnetic fields from interacting in the same manner as electrons at the (sub)atomic level? So the eddy currents occur in the solid metal of the magnets? Here's what I don't get. If electricity conducts through the electrons within the conductive material, why wouldn't it conduct through the magnetic field? Isn't the magnetic field just an aggregate field consisting of multiple microscopic electrostatic fields? So it seems like if you could observe the atoms of a conductor transmitting electricity at the atomic level, you would see many electric fields repelling each other in moving waves, no? By "accelerating" the charges, which charges are you referring to? Not the (macro) magnetic fields themselves? You mean accelerating the charges at the microscopic level of the atoms? BTW, are the macro magnetic fields different force than the electrostatic force at the micro-atomic level? If so, how do they get so far from their nuclei? Ok, so your body or other resisters the electric current finds its way into will dissipate the current as heat. But does the compression of the magnetic fields also dissipate any energy? Or does it perfectly conserve it until it is transferred to particles it pushes against? If nothing else, the accelerating and decelerating motion of the magnets would result in "recoil" that would eventually dissipate the motion of the spring, I think. Thanks all for fielding this question/issue so well. I'm still not conclusively convinced of whether some of the energy gets emitted directly from the magnetic fields or whether they are a perfect frictionless spring with no emissions from the fields directly. If anyone wants to generate a conclusive yes/no and why/how, that would be interesting. Otherwise, thanks for contributing to my ever perplexing partial understanding of magnets.

Imo, the aesthetics of experience are an extreme luxury for those who have more or less total control over the conditions of their material (and spiritual) existence. To me the point of science and philosophy and other knowledge is to progress in terms of power and freedom. I don't see the point of "being aware of one's existence," as you say except to progress in that existence. I don't see humans or knowledge as static things but as constantly evolving dynamic processes in flux. So now that we have shared personal philosophies of knowledge, you still haven't said what you mean by "why" when you ask "why nature behaves the way it does." Do you have a clear understanding of what kind of answer you are looking for, or are you just attempting to find an unanswered question to work on answering yourself? I think it depends how you interpret the question, "why." You could say that plate techtonics explain why earthquakes happen. You could say lunar gravity explains why their are tides. Yes, science can and should (imo) dissect the mechanics of how such processes occur. But science often leaves me hungry for a better explanation of how that are not answered by current theories. For example, people often explain why light is produced by electrons, but they don't explain how an electron suddenly expels and electromagnetic field at the speed of light. If there was some medium, that would be a basis for understanding how, but most people seem adamantly opposed to re-opening the discussion of a medium for light. Personally, I think gravitational field force or some other massless connectivity in force-relations must act as a medium, but I don't want to hijack this thread (although that question is sort of related to why C is constant, I think).