Phi for All

Pick a small country, and there should be fewer religious people. Vatican City is the smallest country... OK, how about Monaco? I doubt the millionaires who make up the country's population allow much door-to-door Bible-thumping.

! Moderator Note Please save this type of speculations for the appropriate section. There is a difference between "This is my assessment, am I right?" and "Do they lose mass at an equal rate?" The leap at conclusions/assessments is NOT rigorous enough for Relativity. Please stop forcing speculation into this discussion. A little bit more effort is all it takes to change your "assessments" into legitimate inquiry. Please take this on board. And resist the urge to respond off-topic to this modnote.

We have a Speculations section. You aren't the only person reading this thread, and many of those are students looking for the best, mainstream answers so they can pass school. They aren't looking for guesses, so we keep mainstream mainstream. Now you don't fail, hopefully, and neither do the students.

! Moderator Note Not our job. We're a science discussion forum, not an advertising platform. The rules you agreed to spell that out pretty nicely.

! Moderator Note STOP interjecting your own made up ideas into mainstream threads. When someone is trying to determine our best current explanation, we don't need unsupported guesses, we need evidence and science. You've been told this many times before, so have a warning point too. Do NOT respond to this action in thread. Report it if you object. That's what someone else did to your post.

The hypercube doesn't have to be moving. It's not related to time until you assign that coordinate (a place on a map only needs 3 dimensions to tell you where; time will tell you when something happens at that place). And you don't really "place" something into any dimension. Dimensions aren't places, they're part of the information you need in order to know where and when anything is. Weird, I know. Here's something to think about. Living in 3 dimensions (even though we only see in 2D), we're able to look at a 2D object and see anything inside it (imagine a square, with 3 circles inside it). So technically, if someone could see in 4D, they could look at us 3Ders and see our insides!

! Moderator Note Four more pages on this topic, and all agree that analogies have limited but definable use in science. Beyond that, we risk stretching the point into unrecognizableness. Arguing further about this doesn't seem productive. Beyond the above, subjectivity increases and spoils any efficacy you might realize. Please don't bring this up again, MSC, it's not a discussion we need so many pages about.

It's a coordinate system for determining any spot, both physically and temporally (x, y, & z coordinates to pinpoint the spot in space, and t to let you know when to be there). I had it explained this way. 1D is a line, and if you take every point on that line and move 90 degrees, you have 2D, length and width, in this case in a flat square. Now take every point on that square and move 90 degrees from that, and you'll have a 3D cube. NOW, take every point on that cube and move 90 degrees, and you'll have a 4D hypercube. That's the one that's difficult to grasp. How do you move 90 degrees from every side of a cube?! The rest (including the 4th spatial dimension) are part of different theories, which is the way all science works. When you say something is theoretical rather than fact, you're misusing the term "theory". Theory is the best you can get in science. Theoretical doesn't mean "unsupported guess". Science doesn't try to "prove facts". It's all about the evidence that supports a concept, and a theory is a model of how we're explaining reality.

! Moderator Note Excellent idea. I think you can place it here, as a "most updated" version, rather than starting a new thread.

Yeah? And that seems like an appropriate response to outmaneuvering them politically, to beating the tar out of them at the polls where it counts? Actually, for them to bring their guns to the voting booths would be par for the course for a party that regularly tries to circumvent normal Congressional procedures by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. If I were talking about physically slapping Republicans, even you don't think it would be out of character for one of them to pull out a gun and kill me for it. That's your conclusion, based on what you know about conservatives. And I think you're right, many conservatives would find a way to justify an outcome like that. They understand strong emotions, because that's what they base all their decisions on. Someone slaps you in public, you shoot them dead. This type of behavior is textbook psychosis. There is something NOT RIGHT about extreme conservatives, NOT RIGHT IN THE HEAD. Conservatives are much more likely to have antisocial personality disorders, and so might easily justify murder for a perceived slight that hardly warrants such a response. Be honest, would you put it past some of the conservatives you know?

Oh, we started out, and have always been, the bigger humans, at least in terms of reasonableness. That time is gone, I'm afraid. If we want to stop the insanity of running Middle Eastern wars like a business, growing terrorism by throwing fear fuel on the ever-growing flames, causing us and the rest of the world to commit insane amounts of resources to the fallout, we need to stop asking and just punch their goddamn political lights out. We need to kick the crap out of the conservative establishment and leave them so bloody they won't be able to get up to any shenanigans for a good 50 more years, to offset the damage they've done for the last 50. Perhaps they'll be able to see the good in the changes that happen without them while they're in timeout, perhaps not. But we won't be the American Clowns anymore, and maybe we can help the rest of the world avoid this conservative trend we're seeing do so much harm. I think the Sanders Movement should be called the American People Movement. Like all the social movements before it, it's not going to happen by consensus. Smart people need to step in and slap some folks, make it happen, and then step back and say, "You're welcome".

! Moderator Note In observing so much of the confusion rampant in many of the threads you're engaged in, Robittybob1, I find your propensity to unnecessarily quote yourself to be very misleading, especially when so many of your conclusions are conjecture, or just misunderstood, or just wrong. It occurs that perhaps using yourself as a source for supporting your arguments is counterproductive. It's also frustrating to have to re-read something to no purpose. It's also frustrating because it makes it seem like you're only listening to yourself instead of responding to the replies of others. Take this on board or not. I'm concerned that so many members are either calling for clarity regarding your posts, or trying to explain their own responses to you. The signal to noise ratio is getting out of hand, imo.

This is just a current tactic to make conservative people listen. It's perhaps more forceful for the same reasons you turn up the volume when you realize your audience doesn't seem to be able to hear you. Nothing before has worked either. How should the change be accomplished, how can we talk about change in an effective way to conservatives? Please don't suggest we be more reasonable with them.

Or maybe it's like saying, "Figure out the puzzle, do the work, learn the maths, and you'll find the jigsaw maze beneath the concrete block. Not only that, you'll have better tools for navigating the maze." Not everyone likes cheap shortcuts. Science is many complex disciplines. One should expect some hard work involved.

I just posted in a thread about analogies, so I'm going to attempt a very limited one. Just remember not to stretch it too far. Using my limited phrasing, and that alone, might help to make the analogy effective. Imagine someone is doing something very destructive, like kicking a support post in the basement of a building. It's clear they don't understand the danger involved. When you mention it, they insist the post isn't necessary, and that it needs to be removed as soon as possible. You have the blueprints in front of you, and the knowledge that removing the post could bring the whole house down, so you go into more detail, explaining why removing it would be wrong, using all the knowledge you have about similar situations. But the reply makes no sense. This person insists that posts like this don't work, that they're too inherently unstable, and that the house will be better off without them. And then we can take the money we save by not using posts, and spend it on better fencing. And you watch incredulously as this person grabs a sledge hammer, and starts to really beat against those support posts. The more detail you bring up to show it's a really bad idea, the more passionately he swings the hammer. And now you turn around and realize the basement is full of people, and half of them are cheering this guy on as he tries to remove the supporting posts that are keeping the ceiling from being the floor with you under it. They're thinking about saving money, and about the freedom to walk around a basement free of posts. They're cheering all the good things they think are going to happen pretty soon, and the guy with the hammer is promising them it's going to be great, drowning out your efforts to point out that his changes are going to cost about $35T over the next 10 years. You're screaming now, pointing to the cracks in the ceiling as the load loses support. How can you stop these people, short of grabbing the hammer out of their hands? When you threaten this, they tell you that if you try to put the support posts back in place, they'll do everything they can to hamper your efforts. It's hard not to think of it as insanity. Were it not for the fact that so many conservatives believe so many things that aren't true (Socialism = Communism, walls will work to keep illegals out, welfare creates dependency, the list is really large), and believe them with a fervor that defies fact and reality, I could sympathize with those who've been so heavily manipulated by extremists. It's hard not to think of it as insanity when so much hard evidence is ignored in favor of screaming speeches about hatred and fear, and changing all that by being MORE hateful and fearful.

I would venture that the most informed, knowledgeable people in a subject have the same amount of wild guesses as anybody. The difference is that they're able to use their knowledge and critical thinking to dismiss points that a lesser understanding might spend a lot of time trying to reason out. Here's an analogy about analogies: when someone doesn't quite understand your explanation of a phenomenon, using analogy is like trying to get them from point A to point B by routing them through a system of caves. IF they follow the right route, they'll get to point B, but there are SO MANY more chances they'll stray from the path and get lost. Maybe eaten.

This now seems like a rant to encourage wild guesswork over constrained methodology. Personally, I think a lot of wild guesswork goes on, automatically screened by rigorous methodology, and the vast majority is then rejected. Mike, you seem to be romanticizing the vast majority of wrong ideas, like we should spend more time on things with little chance of bearing fruit. Should excitement and fun be allowed to carry you full tilt into so many brick walls? Methodology can help limit the number of lances you break as you tilt against the windmills.

There seems to be a strong correlation between those who misuse the term "theory", and those who rail against mainstream science. My guess is they consider their own ideas to be "theories", and they know they are all based on guesswork with little evidence and no maths, so that's what they assume real scientists are doing, just making it up and then reverse engineering it to see if it's "true". They have little grasp of all the mountains of testing, evidence, and review a true scientific hypothesis has to go through before anyone calls it a theory.

I don't see how you can consider analogy to part of the nature of "reality". It's NOT the real situation, it's merely analogous. As someone who has relied heavily on analogy to explain various phenomena in discussions here over the last decade, I can say that it often causes more problems than it solves. People always stretch them too far. I think the less educated someone is in a subject, the more analogy can cause confusion and misunderstanding. And you reach a point in your knowledge of a subject where analogy is no longer necessary. So I would say analogies best serve a small portion of people who are fairly well up on a subject, and just need a change of perspective perhaps for more clarity. After that, it's like advice; wise men don't need it, and fools will abuse it, and stretch it into unrecognizability.

Not completely true, not by our current definition of personhood. His fellow branded corporate persons stand to profit big time if they could manage to get him elected.

So you have to force me to break physical laws to make your statement true?

Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind, 1994): "People are stupid. Given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true."

I can travel all over the 3D Earth, drive through chunnels, spelunk through the middle (volume!), winding up back where I came from, and never see an edge. Your statement is false.

I think most people are willing to do some part in alleviating this kind of suffering. It's in our nature as a cooperative species. But their opinions become manipulated, by commercial media wielded by corporate interests usually, so they're made to fear the outcome that will mean the least profits for the manipulators, in this case pledging lots of social resources to house refugees that have nothing to exploit. Politicians owe favors to the campaign-funding manipulators, and they love passing legislation that makes them seem like they're doing something about Fearful Situation X.

"Tearing the fabric of space-time" is a favored fiction image. It implies there is something on the other side of the "tear", but as far as we can tell, the universe is all there is. There's no "outside the universe" for the tear to lead to. The image has been around since Pandora. The "tears" usually let something bad in, like an intruder, rather than letting something good out, like a hole in your pocket. But none of it is applicable or accurate in reality, even though many ancients looked at the heavens as a tapestry they thought you could poke through.