lemur

I had to google what eddy currents are. These must only occur as electric currents in a conductor, though, so how would they form by magnets interacting in air? Would they expel current via moisture in the air? As for the blackbody radiation, are you saying that the magnetic fields themselves radiate as a result of energy put into them by bouncing? Or do you just mean the magnets themselves are made of iron that emits blackbody radiation according to temperature? What I am really interested in knowing is whether the bouncing of the magnets against each other itself generates EM waves and whether the (very long) wavelength of the waves would be modulated by the speed of the bouncing (sorry for using the word "bounce" so much. It sounds silly to me but I can't think of a more scientific sounding word for alternately compressing and releasing two opposed magnets as the repel one another).

The origins of science you find depend on what aspect of science you're trying to trace or seek precedent for. Enlightenment scientists like Galileo do seem to have been part of the same ideological movement as the protestant reformers of the time, like Martin Luther, in that they were not interested in submitting to authoritarian governance of their studies of nature, interpretations of scripture, theorizing/philosophizing, etc. The anti-religious character of the enlightenment/renaissance was, however, more of a crusade against authoritarian control and dogma than it was a rejection of theology. Protestant reformers were disenchanted by "false idolatry" and other corruption they saw in their churches and they sought reform with reference to higher ideals prescribed by Christianity, such as putting authority of truth ABOVE worldly authority (and they saw the church administration as worldly and thus sought a more direct connection with divinity). The state, on the other hand, evolved from a long history of authoritarian institutionality. Statists have been influenced by theology and ethics, and they are interested in utilizing science for social-economic purposes, but I don't see the state as having developed the same level of anti-authoritarianism that science did, except to the extent that advocates of republic and self-governance by reason promoted freedom/independence. Actually, I shouldn't accuse statism as having a monopoly on authoritarianism because a lot of science has been appropriated for social control purposes as well. Personally, I see science as a spirit of critique toward existing knowledge in favor of questioning, testing, falsification, etc. but some see it as the process of refining established knowledge for the purpose of establishing truer dogmas to adhere to. Obviously, religion seeks to do the same thing but I see that as a radical digression from the original ideologies of Christ, which promote questioning of religious dogma and direct revelation through (holy) spirit; not uncritical adherence to church doctrine.

It really depends on what you mean by "why," i.e. what kind of reason are you looking for? Maybe a better question is what you want to know and why you want to know it. It seems like a lot of people seek knowledge for the purpose of being knowledgable, which seems like a bad reason to me. The kinds of questions they ask are geared toward philosophical dominance, i.e. for the sake of claiming more general or fundamental knowledge of the widest array of phenomena merely for the sake of being broad or deep. Knowledge for its own sake is fine, imo, but knowledge for the sake of social status can get annoying. I'm not saying that this is what you're doing - it just came to mind with regards to various reasons for inquiry/knowledge.

I know the story of the trail of tears. But I also know that many Cherokee integrated with whites, although I don't know under what conditions. I don't deny that the migration was unnecessary and harsh. I haven't read anything, however, about what plans were made for food supplies and economic re-establishment once relocation was complete. I don't know, for example, if there was an honest good-faith intention for the relocated people to become prosperous on the new land or whether there was indifference to potential and actual trauma. Obviously, history records the trauma but it's hard to believe that every one of the soldiers was completely lucid in the intention of genocide. It would be quite interesting if there was evidence of individual soldiers' perceptions of what they were contributing to. Not necessarily. They might have just been sent home with a dishonorable discharge. The question is what ideologies structured their perceptions of the acts they were committing individually that would have allowed them to either abuse or respect other individuals' humanity regardless of ethnic difference. Well, it may indeed have been the case that stupidity combined with obedience were the main factors influencing the soldiers. I have read that Cherokee living was not nomadic but I don't know why they were evicted if not for the cotton land. Maybe the cotton industry was displacing people into the mountains and these people wanted people of Cherokee identity evicted because of the hate of difference, as you put it. The question is what would it have taken for Cherokees and non-Cherokees to co-exist and become mutual respectable ethnic affiliations (and even for multiculturalism to develop)? Obviously this didn't occur, but the question is exactly how it failed to occur for each individual involved, imo. It is doubtful that the question can ever be answered framed in this way, but it is the correct framing nevertheless imo.

So the magnetic fields conserve force perfectly? All the energy you put into compressing and releasing the fields gets transferred back to the molecules of the magnets themselves? That seems strange to me since I would think that there would be some interaction effect of the fields manipulating each other. I googled Gibbs free energy but I can't get a concrete image of how it works. All I can think is that force gets translated into tensile tension in moving objects, which results in either momentum-transfer or friction/heat, variously. Since there can't be any friction between the repelling magnetic fields, I assume your comment about breaks in ferromagnetic structure would apply (I assume this refers to friction between the (blocks of) atoms. I thought maybe some of the energy would actually be absorbed by the magnetic fields themselves and thus have to be dissipated as electric current or EM waves/photons. I don't understand why particles of matter always seem to be radiating some level/frequency of radiation but magnetic fields wouldn't. Maybe the magnetic fields are too big and strong relative to the more independent atomic/molecular electrons of black bodies?

It was not a fair trade. From my understanding, cotton interests were elevated above individual economic freedom because the profit from cotton-trade was though to outweigh the benefits of economic freedom to use the land for independent homesteading. The military and force generally should not have been used to evict people from their land. Some form of nomad-rights should have been established and respected. Try to understand what I'm saying. It has nothing to do with denying the attrocities against native Americans or anyone else. My point is that from an individual perspective, white soldiers had the volition to choose whether to support a corrupt regime or resist and refuse to transgress the rights of individuals they attacked. In other words, this was not a war between two collectives but it is a collection of stories in which some individuals committed violence against others with ethnicity as a mitigating factor. My point is that collectivizing the events reproduces the racism that caused the violence to happen as it did in the first place. What you are doing is a form of ad hominem argumentation. It doesn't matter what my national-citizenship status is. You should be responding to the content of my posts. It's MLK day. Judge people (and posts) by the content of their character, not by tangential ascribed statuses.

So if there was light from distant stars curving through spacetime to reach Earth from beyond its hubble horizon, we would observe the curved light as an image completely distinct from the image of the star as it appears within our hubble horizon. I.e. if light is contained by the curvature of spacetime within a universe of relatively closed gravitation, we would still not necessarily be inundated with infinite starlight?

Two things I've read about Islam come to mind. The first is from a book by an imam complaining about the emphasis on freedom in the west. This confused me theologically, because I see the book of Genesis as explaining how God created humans as free being to choose between good and temptation of evil. So from my perspective, freedom is necessary for people to be able to choose. However, I understand this imam's perspective that freedom is not embraced in the west as an opportunity to self-govern by enlightenment of reason. Instead, people use it as license to get away with malicious actions and escape accountability for those. This is infuriating to someone who wants to see people at least TRYING to respect each other. Christianity, at its most rigorous, preaches forgiveness of ALL sin and harm but I don't know what the Islamic policy on forgiveness is. This actually leads into my second point, which has to do with killing infidels. Whereas Christ supposedly preached that people should forgive their enemies 77 X 7 times (539?), I heard Ayaan Hirschi Ali explain in an interview regarding the death threats again South Park makers why killing is legitimated by the threat-makers. Basically, she said that if the cartoonists would eschew the commandment not to depict Mohammed, they were basically choosing to go to hell and if someone would choose hell then being killed would pale in comparison to the suffering they will endure in hell. Of course, this doesn't make sense to me in terms of the commandment not to kill, but the logic does make sense. In other words, people who kill sinners may not be doing so from a perspective of hate but of mercy, since they recognize the hell that people are going to endure for their sins. Although I have a more worldly perspective on sin and hell (i.e. that hell is a state of life that results from sin prior to death), I understand how someone could view themselves as saving someone from hell by ending their life of sin, provided they believed that such a person was beyond redemption. As I said, this contrasts starkly with Christian forgiveness-ethic in which no sinner is supposed to ever be viewed or treated as beyond redemption. I'm sure some sins must be viewed as redeemable in Islam, but I don't know which or how. From the rumors I've heard, Islam offers only retribution justice (eye for an eye), but that seems like a stereotype made up by Christians to me. The sexual regulations actually make a lot of sense, imo. They at least cause me to think differently about things I take for granted in western culture. Why, for example, should a man wash his hands of a lover after cheating on his wife? Shouldn't he marry her to take responsibility for his sexual exploitation of her? Likewise, if a woman is dishonored by her husband committing adultery, shouldn't at least the man's mistress be at her mercy? You could also say that her husband should be at her mercy, but she needs him in order not to have to seek a new husband. So it makes some sense to me that it is the betrayed spouse's right to take mercy on the adulterer. Likewise, while I don't really think it's fair or nice for women to have to cover up a lot, it does make sense to me that this is something women can do to help men resist temptation. In the west, it's as if women are encouraged to be temptresses in their manner of dress and behavior, which makes them seem like opposers of morality instead of allies. Anyway, I am trying to understand various cultural issues from religious perspectives but I don't know how successful I really am.

Maybe someone else knows about empirical evidence, but the logic of light having an an absolute limit makes sense to me, so I'll explain how I understand it and maybe that will be of some benefit to you: Basically, light is taken to have no (rest) mass in the sense that particles of matter have mass at rest (idk what experiment demostrated this or if it's just assumed). Anyway, if light in fact has no rest-mass, then its speed should become infinite with any amount of force since F=MA (i.e. as mass approaches zero for any force, acceleration would approach infinity). However, for something to reach infinite speed, its energy would also have to be infinite so there has to be some limit to the speed of light. Likewise, without rest-mass light cannot accelerate or decelerate due to external impulses so it always travels as fast as possible within the medium it is traveling through. Now, supposedly when a light-source is moving toward its object, the velocity of the moving source does not change the speed of the waves but instead compresses the waves into a shorter wavelength. This is known as "blue shift." This is also somewhat logical since the momentum of the moving light-source has to somehow be imparted in the light-energy it is emitting, but since light has no means of accelerating or decelerating in relation to itself, it has to shift wavelength instead. I hope this all makes sense. I am also interested in the specific experimental tests, btw.

It is logical that heat transfers as vibration. Heat is basically kinetic energy of atoms/molecules. "Vibration" implies that the atoms/molecules are basically fixed in terms of their center of mass and are moving relative to that. The question is why their (average) center of mass would become mobile enough for them to flow, as in a liquid. It must have something to do with the viscosity of the electron-clouds/shells changing. What is holding them together strongly enough that it requires a great deal of heat to cause them to flow relative to each other? When they don't melt, what causes one material to insulate better than another? The energy has to go somewhere, right? So why does the heat travel through one material more easily and faster than another?

Imagine you have two magnets set up so they repel each other and cannot turn. Now you bounced up and down on one of the magnets repeatedly but not hard enough for the magnets to touch. You are imparting energy into this 'spring-cusion' but where does the energy go? Does some of it become electric current and/or EM waves? If EM waves are produced, is their wavelength determined by the rate of the bouncing and the speed of light? Can you modulate the wavelength of very low frequency radio waves by bouncing magnets off of each other and changing the rate of the bouncing?

You talk about protons maintaining distance and "structure-maintaining energy." What is the cause of structure except the configuration/shape of the atoms/molecules?

First, don't get confused in the corporate-governance vs. elected-governance divide. Both are forms of governance that exercise forms of control that makes trade less free. It's easy to argue that corporate-governance in the absence of elected-governance is the same thing as a free market, but it's not. It's just private control instead of public control. In fact, both forms of control play off each other in subjugating individual economic freedom; although they also promote individual freedom in some ways as well. First you say they are subsidized to make them cheap, then you say we pay double. It sounds like you are arguing IN FAVOR of free trade instead of subsidizing farms. Also, if you want more flax seeds or something other than the ingredients you mention, why not lobby for promotion of those in farm subsidies? What makes you think that cutting subsidies to these other products will suddenly stimulate production of ingredients you want to see more of? I agree with the premise of what you're saying. I just think there are so many people who would get upset if you started subsidizing 'weird' health foods. There are people who eschew whole wheat bread in favor of white bread. Imagine putting sprouted grains or millet and flax on their menu. I'd be interested to analyze the economics of promoting more food diversity, but I think it's unfair to blame it on government and corporations when consumer preferences and culture may be the defining factor. Why is it that free trade doesn't give rise to this farmer's superior crops spreading to US farms, who look to her as an example for innovation? If consumer-spending wasn't such a lucrative source of income, free trade could be a means of increasing diversity instead of reducing it. I think this logic of closing borders to stop cultural homogenization is self-defeating; i.e. once you start using containment-strategy without doing anything about the root cause, you're basically just accepting the thing you're critical of as long as it goes on within a bounded territory. How can you assume that "products made in our nation" are made honestly and "foreign goods" are not? You are right to be concerned about the ethics of economic practices, but why must you filter these through assumptions based on national identity? Believing that everything 'American' is good and everything 'foreign' is bad is what allowed economic ethics to degenerate as far as they have already. But trade-relations facilitate political leverage to stimulate democratization, if the political will for such is present. It will not be, however, as long as people fear free trade instead of seeing it as a vehicle for progress. That would be fine, but then the regulations shouldn't be used to control markets in favor of the interests of influential players. Because it pushes US markets to become more efficient. Where efficiency is considered bad for some humanitarian reason, education and specific policies should regulate it. Banning trade with Chinese businesses indiscriminately would just obfuscate the economic details. It would be like seeing that a kid gets bad grades in a class and instead of examining what is causing their shortcomings, insisting that the solution is to change classes or schools. You have to identify specific problems before you can begin to come up with solutions. The biggest problem right now is that too many people treat recession as a general problem instead of focussing on specific goals and overcoming the barriers associated with them.

And by "mine or my country," you are referring to people you identify with or like . . . meaning you willfully afford less respect to people you differ with or regard as foreign? You know, you can have a soldier ethic without seeking out enemies on the basis of categories, right? I guess it doesn't matter though anyway. It sounds like you are married to the ideology of always elevating some to a superior status to others and doing whatever you can to buttress those you deem superior over those you deem unworthy. Am I oversimplifying your position? If so, this is your choice - but then you shouldn't be surprised when there are others who take the same attitude toward you. I guess when that happens, you just hope to win a battle for domination and/or separation from your enemies. Don't you ever think that peaceful co-existence would be better than always fighting to dominate or be dominated?

There's some truth in this, but I think it's a mistake to see it as a collective "us vs. them" conflict. Many native Americans integrated with migrants from Europe and elsewhere. Native american cultures also developed in some ways as a result of contact, just as European cultures did from contact with native cultures. I read, for example, that a written version of Cherokee was developed extremely quickly because someone studied written English or other languages and then developed one for Cherokee. I think a lot of historical perspective has been influenced by growing collective consciousness since the 19th century or so. It is interesting to see how the history would look different if it was written from a more individualistic perspective. Of course that is hard to do when the individuals involved regarded themselves and others in collective terms in their interactions.

I think I already said this, but I don't see why you would say that a black hole has no size because it's center is defined as a singularity. Why aren't you considering the entirety of the BH's gravitational field as its size? I don't see why a BH's gravitational field wouldn't interact with other gravitational fields as it changed position relative to them. If, say, a comet suddenly shrank into a black hole for some reason, it's gravitational field could still interact with the gravitational field of the star it was approaching, no? Wouldn't its geodesic path shift according to the interaction between its own gravitation and that of the star it was approaching? Wouldn't this occur with any two gravitationally significant bodies as they approach each other? Imo, if the observed universe was the product of spacetime expansion within a black hole, I would think all incoming matter/energy would be concentrated at the moment of the big bang. I don't see how matter/energy entering a black hole would coincide temporally/spatially with its appearance in the universe within. Where would such matter/energy suddenly appear if it were to enter the universe from outside? All points within the universe are supposedly moving away from the initial moment of the big bang through spacetime expansion. Do you imagine some radiant center of the universe where matter/energy captured outside the universe is consistently emitted into it like a gushing fountain of fresh input?

Resource-conservation or depletion isn't about status, whether someone is elite, privileged, or how much money they have or spend. All those things can play a role but people need to get beyond the game of blaming or exonerating themselves or others for social, economic, or ecological effects. Shame and pride don't solve any problems. I don't get why you shift around so much in your posting. One moment you seem to be on to an issue, but then you seem to drop it before any rigorous critical discussion can evolve. First you seemed concerned with limited national resources. Would you change your concern if it turned out global resources instead of national ones were the issue? Or would you seek a new reason to protect nations against 'intruders?' What is the ultimate goal? To defend nations against non-citizens for ethnic reasons or to optimize economic good and individual freedom?

It would be very interesting if someone would theorize about a potential situation in which equivalence between energy and matter or between matter-matter or energy-energy was not fixed. What natural event can you postulate where matter or energy would emerge from none or less preceding matter/energy? What about an event where matter and/or energy just disappear without converting into some other form? I don't think that there "has" to be such an equivalence, but I can't imagine any situation where there wouldn't be or how it could happen that there wouldn't. The only possibility I've ever contemplated was that force-fields/particles could be the result of relative strength differentials between them. Thus, maybe in an expanding gravitational field, where the density of field-force was diverging from that of nuclear force, EM energy released from collisions could increase relative to the momentum of the particles because spacetime itself is expanding relative to their motion. In this sense, energy could be said to be created, or rather intensified, due to it being expressed within a gravitationally "colder" spacetime matrix. Would such a thing fulfill your criteria for transcending energy-equivalence?

I can't tell if when you say that "particles don't inter-penetrate each other because of the different quantum numbers," you are referring to some physical reason they prevent it or if you're just referring to correlation patterns between measurements and events. By "entanglement," are you referring to chemical bonding?

Ok, thanks, but what about my question of how the electron clouds of atoms/molecules prevent them from interpenetrating if the electrons are locationally intermittent?

Because if matter or energy could be created or reproduced without transforming some input of equivalent amount, what would limit the process of matter/energy creation? Why wouldn't new atoms and energy be popping up everywhere all the time? If matter/energy could be destroyed, why wouldn't things just magically disappear from time to time with no trace of what happened to them?

Look, Rigney, I thought about this post and I was concerned that we're not having a constructive discussion. I get impatient when discussing these kinds of issues because the stakes seem very plain to me, while others seem to be either willfully or unknowingly oblivious to the kinds of arguments that are being made. You didn't explicitly say the quote about "protecting our superior economy from hordes of barbarians," but the video you posted about the colored gumballs being far too numerous to allow into the country was the same kind of reasoning. I was trying to make it transparent for you to see how these kinds of people make it seem natural that national regions should be buttressed against immigration. The logic they're suggesting is that there's wealth inside the border(s) to protect. This in turn promotes a reactionary stance among believers in the the ideology. What I was trying to explain to you is that nationalism itself becomes a form of racism (i.e. national socialism) when the inhabitants/citizens of the nation are differentiated from others. All racism really is is an ideology where people are sorted into groups on the basis of physical characteristics. Nationalism doesn't always directly make reference to bodily traits the way racism usually does, but it does make reference to things like birthplace and culture, with the assumption that culture is inherent to some and alien to others. So when you start piling up all these kinds of sorting-logics and differentiating people and separating them into different regions, it promotes groupism in various forms, which means that individuals regard each other in terms of group-identity instead of focussing on individuality. This leads to stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, etc. Since I don't assume you are a bigot (you seem like a good-hearted person to me from your posts), I am taking seriously your concerns that the US (or other regions) have limited resources and capacity for population growth. Then, what I'm trying to do is ask you to look at the fact that people in these developed regions/economies have already surpassed the resource-capacity of the regions as circumscribed. In other words, the global economy (colonialism) has long made Europe dependent on other continents for resources and European lifestyles and consumerism/materialism/industrialism have spread to create a global middle class. These global middle-class people are consuming BEYOND their national regions' capacity while the global poor are conserving these resources by not consuming as much, albeit involuntarily. So I can't tell if what you are really concerned about is depletion of global resources by the global middle-class or something else related to the US region(s) specifically. My opinion is that preventing population-growth by restricting in-migration and/or birth rates will not prevent US consumerism from depleting and degenerating local resources. Resource-conservation requires cultural changes to consumption/lifestyles. Stifling global migratory freedom cannot prevent citizens from running their ecologies and economies into the ground. Given a more resource-conservative economy, there would be much more room for population expansion than there is when great inefficiencies, waste, and everyday decadence are taken for granted to the point of not even thrilling people anymore. Gluttony has become nothing more than avoiding the difficulties of resource conservation.

This intermittency of electron position makes it difficult to believe that electrons are actually capable of creating volume around the nucleus. How is it that atoms avoid interpenetrating each other's electron clouds if electrons are as absent as they are present? Or is it that at the speed of electrons, atomic/molecular motion are relatively slower thus making it possible but highly unlikely for an electron to teleport at the moment it is approaching the electron(s) from another molecule that it will bounce off of?

How do economies produce clothing, housing, education, and medical care? Answer this question and you can begin to think about how to provide these goods and services to people or how to give them access to what they need to do it for themselves. Your economics seems to naively assume that prosperity flows magically from paying money. People that think in terms of magic-money don't seem to understand that something has to be DONE for the money to make economic productivity happen. If you can shift your mindset away from finance to material economics for a moment, please tell me why unemployment and poverty are a problem? What is it that is stopping people from using their labor to harness other resources and generate a better life for themselves? When you can answer this question, it doesn't matter what flag is on people's passports. It comes down to a global economy that is (dis)organized and (mis)managed in a way that over-coddles a privileged few while oppressing others. What's worse, imo, is that I don't even think it's a question of people in wealthy economies sharing their prosperity, because I don't think everyone in the world needs to drive cars and consume food prepared by someone else, etc. In fact, I think that there are very basic things that improve people's quality of life in the situation they're in, such as relative freedom from violence/terror/fear, healthy water, food and/or fertile farmland, and maybe the freedom to go where they want and do what they want as long as they respect others' rights. I really don't see what is so hard about achieving this globally. What it really comes down to is that people in developed economies are brainwashed into believing that there is scarcity because that is the way capitalist economies work. As a result, a fascist-type "national-socialist" mentality emerges where people see reducing the ratio of population to wealth as the ideal means of increasing prosperity. Instead of focussing on scarcity and protective territorialism, why don't people focus on increasing efficiency and thereby productivity to expand economic prosperity as much as possible? I find the whole endless ideology of "protecting our superior economy from hordes of barbarians" outdated and tiresome. It's an ideology that draws on and reproduces racism and competitive violence so there needs to be something else in its place.

This is how I would guess super-fast super-long-distance travel could work: Someone will figure out a way to create relatively small black holes. These will be configured into some kind of configuration where they orbit each other or otherwise generate regular gravity waves. If the gravity waves are large enough, I would think a vessel would be able to be carried within one. I don't know how such a vessel could enter and exit such a gravity wave, but maybe it's possible somehow - perhaps it's just a question of accelerating in the right direction at the right moment, and exiting might just be as simple as entering but in the other direction. I don't think making sub-atomic processes work for visible-scale objects sounds very promising. It seems about as likely to me as keeping a body permanently alive by ensuring that each cell continues to replicate eternally. Cells already do that, but the longer they replicate the greater the likelihood of mutations. If cancer can form in an organism's worth of cells in less than 100 years, what kind of problems would be caused by modulating the quantum tunneling of all particles of an organism simultaneously? Of course, people probably said the same thing about using electricity to revive the dead at the time Frankenstein was written and today electrical resuscitation seems to be quite common (judging by medical TV anyway).