lemur

I know, but I don't see the relevance of that. My point is that two repellant fields can be described as having volumes according to the distance they achieve before deflecting. So if my two magnets deflect from each other at 10cm, you could call their volume "sphere with r=5cm" but if they deflect at 5cm distance, you could call their volumes "sphere with r=2.5cm." Of course I'm assuming the "sphere" shape for lack of a better assumption and I'm assuming they're contributing equally to the deflection because they are presumably identical. What's the problem with this? Why does volume of a field-force particle have to be the same in all contexts? It's not a solid object but a force-field. Good point. Isn't this where you could get into relativistic velocities and spacetime dilation and length-contraction and that kind of Einsteinian craziness?

I think I've gotten this thread mixed up with another one where that issue of space consisting of particles came up. It's not mine. I was arguing against it. After reviewing this thread, it seems that I was actually trying to make the point that gravity can be viewed as space-time curvature itself instead of as a cause for spacetime curving. I think this is where the issue of whether it would actually matter one way or the other came up, which is your point. To me, if science regards space(time) as a fabric or container separate from its contents, it facilitates an empirical approach to "the universe" as if it was a single unified entity/container filled with contents. I think this is an obfuscation of the empiricist logic that what is observable is all that there is. I don't think science should assume a container for observables unless that container is itself observable. This is why it is important, imo, to ask what space(time) actually is and whether it exists as a thing in the same sense as matter-energy exist because they are empirically observable as non-absent entities.

To me the only way to think about this is to begin with what you assume you know about the progress of an early universe during a "big bang" and then use existing physical laws and knowledge to project further back under the assumption that forces and energy worked the same way in that context as in the one the knowledge is derived from. If energy can't be created or destroyed, what would have caused it to emerge at the moment of the big bang (without resorting to deus ex machina)? Since my current hunch is that force-fields were extremely dense and tight early on, I think energy emerged from the expansion and fissure of the dense field(s) itself, like a giant macro-neutron destabilizing and beginning to spit and expand into smaller particles. I don't see how energy and matter could exist as a dichotomy, let alone particles of matter in multiplicity in such a dense situation. What other explanations are there for the existence and/or dynamics of such an initial "egg?" My best guess would be that the "egg" was the inside of a black hole in another universe that existed prior to the formation of the black hole. But then of course you could ask where that universe came from, etc. If the answer was another black hole in another universe, you'd have a chicken-egg problem. Maybe at first, but then wouldn't you have to ask what caused the nothingness to differentiate into energy and anti-energy? Then you would have some causal factor that did not add up to zero, right? . . . unless there was some anti-factor that would cancel out that cause and so forth. Another chicken-egg problem, no? Suppose this universe is ultimately destined to all end up falling into the same black hole. Then suppose that black hole contains the seed of another big-bang and that there's no particular relationship between time inside the black hole and outside; so the big bang inside the black hole begins at a single moment in its time whereas that single moment spans the life of the black hole from inception to the moment all matter-energy in its universe has fallen into it. In that case the total contents of each subsequent universe could be finite and ultimately equal to the universe preceding it, no? Do you have a logical reason that would be "satisfying," like the summing to zero, or are you just waxing content with regard to the privilege of experiencing life in the universe as you know it?

So if you theorize that space consists of particles, it is a scientific topic but if I say that you'll always continue to have the problem of explaining what is in between the particles as "space," then you say it's not a scientific topic? I agree with you that to claim that space exists purely as the discrepancy between (loose) gravitational field-force and other "tighter" forces, that should somehow be observable or testable. I have been trying to think of ways to do this. So far I've only come up with trying to find some region of space where gravitation is absent. I don't see how this could be even theoretically possible unless gravitation would have a lower limit at which it became non-existent. How is gravitation measured in space, actually? Is it just a question of measuring the speed of objects orbiting each other? Don't you then have to know their mass? How do you know a planet or star's mass except in reference to its celestial motion relative to other bodies? It seems like all these measurements are interdependent. Which can be measured independently of the others and how? Mass? Distance? Speed? Gravitation? The only thing I can think of is that you can measure the speed of a falling object at sea level. Then you can measure the circumference of the Earth (by surface maps?). Then how do you get the mass of the Earth except by assuming Newton's inverse square formula to be true? I guess I should go google how this law was/is tested in the first place.

Basically what you're saying is that transcendence of the suffering involved in both situations is key to the pleasure of engaging in (practical) theorizing. Yet there are progressive levels of immanence that transcend transcendence, so to speak, thereby bringing the theorist ever closer to the experience they are studying. The board-game general, for example, might move on to engage in paint-ball battles or become a general in an actual war. In either case, they would be moving a step closer to actual war from their boardgame, and thus the pleasure of transcending the deepest suffering of war would be intensified by becomiing that much more immersed in the reality of it. The same may be true for a person with the means to transcend poverty to experiment with transcending it by non-monetary means. Sure, if you have the money you can buy your way out of any tight situation, but when you discover a problem-resolution that costs next-to-nothing, you just transcended poverty in a way that is accessible to anyone on a tight budget. If you share your findings with someone else in poverty, it could directly improve their life. That is real, direct power imo.

I agree. Explore nature. Don't trust women unless they're inflatable or worth the risks. (if you don't understand all the risks, stick with inflatable). If you can get one that's not inflatable to walk through nature with you, do that and don't mention anything about inflatable women.

It's not so much that results would change, imo, it's that people would get a clearer view of the relationship between spacetime and point-particles, which would aid further theorization. (Faulty) assumptions can result in bias that branches out into multiple applications of a base theory.

Well, if the person has life-insurance, you could cover the procedure costs against the value of the insurance. On another level, though, the point is that if a procedure is expected to prolong someone's life significantly, it also prolongs their ability to make money. So you as a health care provider can exploit the extension of the patient's life. Ideally, health care would extend lives for the benefit of the patient, but why shouldn't it be used to transform people into slaves? Right, but by spreading it around you create a pool of money that stimulates inflation in medical procedure prices, no? I don't follow what you're saying here. I think health care already gouges on prices to compensate for getting gouged by non-payment of bills. I don't like it nor do I think it's right. Why should those who pay be asked to overpay because others don't?

Too late. I already posted that you think snot is a special element on the periodic table and that urine is close to follow. You'll be banned for sure now! Ok, so you're basically asking why a process that created something from nothing would start or stop. To know that, wouldn't you have to know the conditions that would cause "nothing" to differentiating into something and anti-something?

I have heard that the prostate can be stimulated via anal penetration, and this seems analogous to me with G-spot stimulation in vaginal intercourse. The mechanics of sex are as flexible (no pun intended) as your imagination, but it is ultimately imagination itself that makes the biggest difference in erotic stimulation. What is the eroticism of heterosexuality vs. homosexuality and what is the relationship between them? If we could discover this, it would be the holy grail of male sexuality (no?) since homosexual contact seems much easier to "get" than the heterosexual variant. Supposedly the term, "gay" comes from the fact that men having sex with men didn't have to worry about pregnancy. Maybe this lack of worry also contributed to the enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Of course now that pregnancy is more controllable and homosexuality is burdened with the stigma of high HIV risk, maybe the roles have reversed. In any case, I don't think it's totally impossible to understand homosexual eroticism and physical pleasure without actually engaging in it. Pain and pleasure have an interesting relationship in various sex acts so once you understand the general connection between the two, it's not a far stretch (again, no pun intended) to imagine how everything from the actual physical pain to the confrontation with homophobic fear/disgust could be exploited for sexual pleasure. The possibilities are probably endless and if you can justify it ethically and otherwise, maybe the best way to really research the topic is to experiment yourself. Saying this, however, I would have to add that sexual experimentation comes with similar or higher risks than experimentation with addictive drugs so your virginity might ultimately be worth more than the knowledge you gain, so think twice before trading it in (I would say the same about heterosexual sex, btw).

Are you implying that only people who favor radical politics create ideology/propaganda that can be used as a basis for motivating violence? You don't think anything said in a calm tone by a bureaucrat or non-radical politician can be used to motivate violence? You may be surprised to learn that the most intense violence is reactionary. In other words, it's not radicals but those that react to them that cause the most violence. Radicalism in and of itself actually dissipates the desire for violence by promoting democratic dialogue. People attack when they feel no other way to express their politics. Radicals express relatively uncharted terrain and thus provide channels to dissipate violent force into democratic dialogue. Fairness in communication is listening to opposing viewpoints and responding to them with serious consideration instead of just shutting them out, talking over them, obfuscating them. provoking them into hanging themselves, or otherwise undermining them in an effort to avoid constructive discussion.

Ok, I'll bite. Why is it logical that the universe would contain infinite energy at t=0? I can't decide if its a type of pun or humor of overly literal interpretation. Let me guess: your password is something like "containsatleastoneCapitalanda$ymbol."

What I mean to say is that if I push one magnet toward another with the south poles repelling each other, and let's say I move the two magnets together at 1cm/s. As the two magnets get closer, their repulsion will increase until they divert from each other (let's say this occurs at 1cm). Now increase the speed to 2cm/s. Now the magnets will not divert from each other until, say, 0.5cm. (I know these numbers aren't correct but they're just approximates for illustration). So the range at which the magnets divert from each other could be viewed as their volume-boundary. At higher force-level, the volume is smaller because they penetrate further into the field before diverting. See my point now? Maybe something to do with motion patterns in the various layers/levels of electrons and a tendency to converge and diverge in regular intervals forming an asymetrical arrangement? I was saying/asking if magnetism is caused by relative alignment of the electron orbits, then would the strength of the magnetic field correlate with the amount of non-randomness in the electron orbits? So, for example, a totally aligned set of electrons/atoms would translate all their electrostatic force into magnetism, in which case none would be left over for what we normally think of as "material solidity." In the same way, is the solidity of non-magnetic material due to total randomization of the electric fields around the atoms?

You could look at health insurance like a source of money people pool together to be able to lend it to someone when they get sick. If someone waits until they get sick to seek coverage, a plan could take them but allow them to pay-off the expenses they incur over a number of years. So if you needed expensive medical treatment, you could shop around for which insurance offers you the lowest monthly payment, the way you might shop for a car or house. You wouldn't expect a car dealer or real estate agent to price-gouge you just because you waited until you needed the car, house, or apartment. You would just expect to be able to buy it at the going market price and pay according to the going rate of payments. Why couldn't health insurance do the same thing for people in need of care?

Ok, Maslow. Personally, I don't see any barrier to intellectual richness in living various forms of material struggle. I forget if it is Foucault or Deleuze or both that talk about philosophy being not just about thinking but about embodied living as well. How empty would it be to theorize abstractly about physics and never pay attention to things like inertia, momentum, heat, energy, etc. going on around you and through you as you engage in various life activities? I think a big part of the joy of theoretical philosophy is engaging in practical activities that give you direct experiential data on your study object. I was actually just thinking recently about how much it undermines the study of poverty that relatively privileged students and others are told how terrible it is that people are so poor and how much they suffer, etc. How are people supposed to get motivated to improve poverty the way they get motivated to develop a new type of battery for the latest greatest gadget technology? If you take poverty as a challenge, however, like a sport of living with very little money, facing various forms of adversity and struggle, and developing innovative techniques to be happier and more comfortable amid unkind conditions, it can be very interesting. For example, even if you have the means to heat your living area to a cozy comfort level, you can attempt to deal with the lowest temperature possible for as long as you can take it and see what works best for you. Presently, I find that Walmart's discounting of the Snuggie from $19 to $15 is a great contribution to easing the suffering of people who are trying to get out of debt by lowering their energy-bill. If I would not have experimented with it for myself, I would have just theorized that it was an insufficient solution to a deeper problem, because I would have confused theoretical depth with practical experience. In practice, Snuggie is an anti-poverty technology.

I don't think it matters all that much whether the knowledge is kept totally secret. All that matters is that the "members" feel as if they are part of some privileged elite. Think of all the TV ads that claim to be letting you in on some big secret to health, longevity, better cooking, etc. People can figure out that anyone else watching TV is getting let in on the same secret, but they like the feeling of believing a little bit that they're getting included in an elite club. Some people get into this feeling so much, they continuously pursue the end-of-rainbow dream of finding a true secret society that can reveal to them mysteries or privileges unavailable to anyone else. Personally, I recommend Jehovah's Witnesses if you are looking for such a society - though they're not really that secretive imo. Nevertheless their is something special-feeling about knowing the true personal name of God, if you allow yourself to believe. In this way, you can develop a feeling of personal intimacy with "Jehovah" that goes beyond what many other religions offer. I'm not actually promoting religion now - it's just an example.

Has it occurred to you that maybe spacetime curvature is just another way of referring to gravity, just in terms of the effect it has on objects with inertia in motion in the absence of external force? Saying "gravity curves spacetime" may be like saying that food causes nutrition. Food and nutrition aren't two separate things; just different ways of looking at the same thing in terms of functional multiplicity. So while the term "gravity" refers primarily to centripetal force surrounding a massive body, "spacetime curvature" may refer to the way gravitation of multiple massive bodies interact to influence the motion of objects moving in the vicinity of those bodies. E.g. when you go from Jupiter to Venus, you are going "downhill" in the sun's gravity-well, and if Mars or Earth is close enough as you pass, you will also "dip" into its gravity-well a bit, if not completely. You're going in a straight-line in the sense of an unimpeded object taking the shortest path between points A and B, only the line curves when point C is in between A and B. Am I stating what's already known and just complicating it unnecessarily, or does this help?

I think the right to bear arms is actually a remnant of an old British law requiring people to own weapons are participate in militias. It was not that long ago that military service was required for everyone (or at least all males). Why shouldn't "we the people" identify certain basic needs that require labor and ensure that such labor is provided? Instead of mandatory military service, maybe everyone should be required to serve a certain amount of time performing mandatory medical service. I have already thought for a while that there should be some kind of agricultural corps where everyone has to serve a certain amount of time farming instead of hiring this labor out to non-citizens. I understand the logic that if the free-market can provide a service more efficiently, it makes sense to let it do so instead of doing it via government, but private business doesn't seem to be providing adequate medical care or people wouldn't be complaining. Actually, it is and what people are complaining about is the fact that they get saddled with high bills if they consume medical services. If people would join the military, they would receive VA benefits but many don't want to participate in military activities. So why not simply have a universal health-care corps and determine how much time people have to serve to receive unlimited free medical care for life?

I guess I'll have to read what this Richard Feynman person writes since his name keeps coming up and the mechanics/dynamics of these force-fields is very interesting to me. It makes sense that gravity decreases and ultimately cancels out at the center of the planet, but that is because the gravity of all the constituent particles cancels each other out there geometrically. So you're saying that even an individual particle can be r=0 because its field strength would be infinite, but why couldn't the field just be finite because it is, the same way light doesn't travel at infinite speed? Not necessarily. It could just mean that it doesn't have an absolute boundary/volume. Or you could say that its boundary-radius varies according to the force at which it collides with other fields. If I push my two repelling magnets together with little force, they deflect at a larger distance than if I push them together with greater force. This seems like it could be related to space dilation/contraction since higher gravitation promotes harder average collisions between electrons, which would mean they deflect at shorter distances rendering them smaller qua active volume. I'm trying to picture what you're saying about the two H atoms with repulsions and turning but I don't get it. I'd like to, though, because it sounds instructive. But what you're basically saying about the magnets is that not all the electrons in the magnets are polarized, only a relatively small fraction of them. So if all the atoms/electrons were polarized, would the magnetic field-force of the magnet exceed its solidity as a normal object? Could you even say that as magnetic polarization increases, EM randomness decreases and that EM randomness is the cause of material solidity?

Isn't it oxymoronic to say "an infinite amount was created" in the past-perfect tense? If it was created then it stopped at some point, right? And if it stopped than it is no longer producing more. BTW, did the forum guidelines happen to tell you that your username had to be "between 3 and 29 characters long" and you just followed the directions? If so, that is very funny. Even if that's not why you did it, it's still funny actually.

How do physicists get so good at using social factors as a basis for reasoning about physical materiality? I forget in which thread it was where the issue of distinguishing between a particle and its field(s) came up, but I basically reached the conclusion that the field IS the particle. What basis is there to distinguish between field and particle? If particles are 0-dimensional points, then their volume is their field-force, no? Here's a vaguely related issue: in a magnet, what causes the solidity of the molecules of the magnet to be distinct from the electrostatic field surrounding it? In other words, if I'm pushing the south poles of two magnets together, I can push through the magnetic field-repulsion but the materiality of the magnets themselves are also the product of electron-electron repulsion, right? So why this distinction between the repulsive gradient of solid matter vs. that of a magnetic field? Don't both emanate from the same electrons?

First of all, thank you both for trying to explain the logic of probability clouds to me. I believe I understand what you mean and why. My problem starts when I try to decipher between statistical modeling and the underlying reality statistical probabilities try to describe. The electron is not "just a point" to the extent it has a surounding field with decreasing intensity. If I hold two magnets near each other, their attraction or repulsion begins at a lower level and intensifies as the distance between them closes. What are the "points" at the center of the fields except a geometrical center of the field-force, or at least one pole of it?

I think that you will find that all conceptualizable models are ultimately extensions of some visualizable instance. I don't see how cognition would be capable of moving from one comprehensibility to another with linkage. Why is it that in one post someone claims that the position of electrons is unknowable and in another someone claims that the orbital shapes are defined? Thank you for recognizing that nothing is 100% worthless. Now, if you could just acknowledge the importance of qualitative theoretical description . . .

Maybe people were too inflexible in their ability to modify the model to accommodate facts. Maybe they were fixated on aspects of planetary motion that didn't translate well as being essential so they didn't/couldn't modify the model sufficiently. What analogical model has been put forth to replace planetary motion as the basis for theorizing the atom? You have to have some empirically conceivable basis for modeling it besides just the equations. I understand that many QM devotees would love to dispense with all but equations but that's not really sufficient for conceptual modeling.

That is very astute analytically, but the challenge is to translate that into a more sophisticated economic analysis. People don't get compensated on the basis of "value to society" but on the basis of value to paying customer. Often it is neither rarity nor value that are rewarded but institutionalized need, which may be quite far from any kind of real "need." That's the difference between institutions and reality. That's not what meritocracy is, though. Meritocracy is the belief that people are supposed to be rewarded for their educational or other attainment of institutionalized milestones. Get a certain score on a test, get into a certain college, get certain grades, get the credentials to acquire a certain job, fulfill certain performance criteria and pass assessments, collect salary, benefits, and ultimately pension. The direct relation between worker and production is severed and replaced with institutionalized evaluation criteria. The lawnmower no longer has any relationship to the value of what s/he produces, only the standards of the employer and what the market value of lawn-mowing is. Economic-productivity becomes completely subjective. You're conflating theoretical and practical arguments. You're right that specialization facilitates products and services that wouldn't be available if everyone was a perfect generalist. That, however, doesn't mean that everyone has to be a totally specialized worker for things to function. What's more, it does not mean that the more specialized individuals become, the more beneficial their labor to an overall economy. That's oversimplifying. You have to look at concrete specifics. If you grow locally prolific vegetables in local farms, it reduces the amount of shipping necessary for produce along with a number of other labor-hours needed for longer-distance distribution. Oranges are only more efficiently produced by specialists in orange-groves to the extent that it's not efficient to replace some orange-consumption with consumption of some other locally-grown fruit. Every economic process has multiple levels on which it can be "tweaked" in various ways. It doesn't come down to an either/or question of whether specialism or generalism is ultimately more efficient for ALL economic processes. By this logic, it would be more efficient for a doctor earning $100/hr to pay someone else to wipe their butt, yet they don't do that because it is undesirable and unpleasant to be surrounded by loads of dependent servants. Still, a level of service-dependency has built up for various reasons that has undermined the ability of people to practice greater independence. This excess-dependency is a form of inefficiency, not efficiency. It may make sense to you that specialization and differentiation of labor should proceed ad infinitum but at some point it creates more inefficiency than it resolves. The trick is to figure out which forms of labor-specialization promote real efficiency and which forms of consolidation or multiple-specializations add more to efficiency. You may find that economics is more complex than you would assume in you one-dimensional "specialization = efficiency" logic.