Dekan

You got it String! There's nothing special about Homo Sapiens - we're just like any other Earth-bound organism! So, let's hear from our fellow Earth-bound organisms. They must be busting to engage in this discussive scenario. How soon will they be posting their views?

Thanks Cygnus47 and Chilehed. Actually I was being a bit disingenuous in citing all the many meanings of "logos". It does have many meanings, depending on context. But its core meaning approximates to the English words "Reason" or "Rationality". So if we use this meaning, St John's Gospel will open with: "In the beginning, was Rationality". This is very heartening, because it suggests that Religion and Science are not so far apart after all. They are both seeking a Rational explanation of the Universe.

No, Arete, I don't need to. I am a human being (well almost) and from my knowledge of human behaviour, I'm quite confident that anyone who says he wants to venerate some old bones, actually wants some money. De essentia hominum.

Satan keeps tempting humans into evil. Yet God stands by, and lets Satan go on doing it. If God doesn't want evil, why doesn't He destroy Satan now? Is it because He can't - or does He approve of Satan?

Doesn't "Faith" mean: believing in something, even though you know it isn't really true.

Ok, perhaps I'm being too cynical. Perhaps the Aborigines genuinely want to venerate the purloined bones. But personally, I think lawyers told them: "You could get some compensation money out of this". You mentioned Britons, and how they might react. A few years ago, it emerged that specimens of liver, or kidneys, had been taken out of dead babies. These specimens were preserved in jars, to benefit the progress of medical science. Quite rightly so. But when the relatives of the deceased babies, found out about it, they raised an outcry. Claimed they were "outraged" and "devastated". Wanted the bits of offal back. To be decently buried. Grisly or what! Do you reckon the relatives were motivated by: (a) the desire to bury detached kidneys; or: (b) the desire to win some compensation money I rest my case.

I ME, could you help clarify for me, what's meant by space expanding faster than light? Surely "space" isn't a substance? It's just a word we can use for the empty gap between objects. Eg, if two objects are 1 mile apart, we can say there's a "gap" of 1 mile between them. Or we can say there's a "space" of 1 mile between them. So the words "space" and "gap" seem to be synonymous. If that's true, then the above quote from your post, could be rephrased: "General Relativity says that a gap itself can expand faster than the speed of light, and it does." But what exactly would we understand by that?

As for mummies, perhaps the authority is this - the mummified person clearly wanted to achieve "immortality". Otherwise, why bother to get mummified at all? But getting mummified, while necessary, isn't sufficient. Not if you want to achieve "immortality", in the sense of being a kind of continuing "presence", recognised by future generations. You can get future generations to recognise you best, if you're on display in a public place - such as a museum. Like the Cairo museum, where Tutankhamen is displayed. (Or least his coffin is - the actual mummy is presumably down in the basement, getting X-rayed and pulled to bits). The point is - Tutankhamen has achieved his world-wide fame and immortality, by reason of being displayed in a museum. If he wasn't in the museum - if Carter and Carnavon hadn't dug him up in 1922 - he'd be just an insignificant minor pharaoh, unknown to the world at large. So don't you think Tutankhamen must be very pleased to be in the museum - it's given him his desired "immortality." Or at least, the best version of it a human can achieve.

All this hoo-ha about displaying corpses in museums. Doesn't it mainly come from ethnic minorities like Native North Americans and Australian Aborigines. Who are only raising the silly issue, to get back at Whitey and reap some compensation money. Wouldn't you be gratified and honoured to have your corpse preserved and displayed in a museum? It's a kind of glass-cased immortality. I love the idea.

Without having read the book, and going purely on the way humans behave, I think Heisenberg would've built an A-Bomb, if he'd been able to. He only said he didn't really try, for 2 reasons: 1. To excuse his scientific failure 2. To ingratiate himself with the Western Allies, post WWII. (The Hero Who Stopped Hitler Getting The Bomb!) It's like when the Soviets failed to put a man on the Moon. They claimed they never really wanted to. Oh Yeah?

Many thanks Arete, for your reply. With regard to the linguistic style of scientific papers, I fully accept the need for a scientific terminology. You're right, scientific terms are usually concise and exact. Whereas everyday words can be vague and capable of multiple interpretations. It's just that scientific terminology is often misused, for the purpose of dressing up simple ideas, to make them sound impressive. I'd like to discuss this subject further. However there don't seem to be any Linguistics forums! Turning to the three further links you courteously provided - I've read them with interest. The first two articles, from the "New York Times" and "New Scientist", deal with overfishing rather than pollution. Obviously, we humans bear the responsibility for overfishing. The depletion of oceanic fish-stocks shouldn't perturb us unduly though. We can always "domesticate" cod and salmon, and rear them in fish farms. But I'd certainly regret the casual extinction of marvellous wild creatures such as Blue Whales. The third article, from "National Geographic", does deal with pollution. The pictures of damage are striking. They're pictures of surface damage though. And although the article claims that "pollutants collect at the ocean's depths, where they are consumed by small marine organisms and introduced into the global food chain", is that true. Is there much interchange between really deep-sea organisms living not 5,000, but 20,000 feet down, at the bottom of the sea - and organisms living on the land?

What exactly is meant by "whole insect"? Does it mean an insect, that is completely intact. It still has all of its bodily parts. No parts, such as legs, wings, even bits of carapace, have been removed. If so, need you worry about processed foods. Such as bread. Even if a completely intact insect gets into the original grain, won't the process of grinding, milling, baking, etc, mutilate it? Some bits of the insect, are bound to get removed - by being knocked off, or burned off. So the finished bread may contain a mutilated insect. But don't the mutilations make it a less than "whole" insect - so it should be OK? And the same reasoning applies to any food that has undergone any form of processing.

As the human population increases, more of the Earth's biomass, will be used to make human bodies. So there'll be less biomass available, to make non-human bodies - ie the bodies of other animals and plants. So I conclude: More humans means fewer other, non-human, animals (and plants). I can't cite the demanded reference source for this conclusion, but it seems bleeding obvious.

Thanks Arete. About the writing style of scientific papers - you've hit the nail on the head, by referring to "peer reviewed". Scientific papers have to be written in that weird way. Otherwise the reviewers would reject them. Regarding the WWII vessels. As you say, recent examples of oil pollution, such as the Exxon Valdez incident, caused immediate effects. That's because the oil was spilled on, or close to, the surface of the sea. So we could all see the damage caused. Whereas the sunken WWII oil-tankers, are out of view, thousands of feet below the surface, at the bottom of the Atlantic. Down there, they may be causing some local effects on deep-sea fish. But I doubt they'll cause catastrophic effects on the ocean as a whole. The oceans are too big to be seriously upset by us puny humans fiddling around with them.

Thanks Wanabe for your post#12 I think I've got it now. QM applies to single "particles". And a Lead atom isn't strictly a "particle". It's an agglomeration of a large number of particles - lots of protons, neutrons and electrons. Therefore the Lead atom isn't affected by QM. It will always behave according to Classical Physics - ie, stay in the same place, and not suddenly start jumping about in a QM-ish manner. But what about a very simple atom. Such as Hydrogen. That contains only a single proton and a single electron. Just 2 particles. That can't be regarded as a large number. So I wonder whether Hydrogen atoms, might show signs of QM-influenced behaviour?

Thanks Arete for your reply, and for the links you kindly supplied. I have honestly tried to read the articles in the links. But the articles are hard to understand. They're written in a peculiar convoluted language. With an esoteric vocabulary, which seems designed to impress people by using big words. Rather than to express ideas clearly. Is this is done to hide the banality of the underlying ideas - by dressing them up to sound hi-falutin'. And so get a grant? Anyway, that's going OT! If I may get back to my earlier point, about all the millions of tons of WW2 ships and U-boats sunk in the North Atlantic. Have they caused specific, noticeable, effects?

What I find hard to understand, is this: Hasn't the Higgs been thought up, as a way to explain why particles exhibit a property we call "mass". According to the Higgs idea, this mass isn't a real, intrinsic property possessed by a particle. Mass is just a kind of resistance experienced by the particle, when the particle moves through the Higgs Field. Like a baseball experiences air resistance, when it moves through the air. Is that right? If it is, then why do physicists who are trying to find the Higgs, keep speculating what the mass of the Higgs is? I mean, if mass is only a kind of illusion caused by the Higgs, then how can the Higgs itself have any mass? What causes the mass of the Higgs?

Dr Rocket, could you help me please, with this point - when you say "large numbers of particles", how large does the number have to be? I mean, before Classical Mechanics stops applying, and Quantum Mechanics starts. Suppose we're looking at a lump of lead - in the form of a 1-inch cube. The cube contains billions or trillions of particles as lead atoms. That's obviously a large number. So the cube will always behave in a "Classical" way. It will stay put where it is. We'll never see it suddenly change position by jumping sideways or upwards. And if we make the cube smaller, by shaving lead of its sides. Until it's reduced to a 1-mm cube. Even at that small size, it's still got billions of atoms in it. So it remains Classically static. But what if we continue the reduction, until it's only got a few thousand atoms, or a few hundred. Or just 27 atoms - in a 3 x 3 x 3 cube. Is 27 atoms still a "large" enough number to maintain Classical mechanics. Or will QM start to take over, causing the cube to move about?

Thanks Zedition, excellent and insightful post.

Thanks Ringer. But the 2 kidneys though. They must be somehow better for survival, than the logical single central kidney. But it's not easy to see why.

The human body has some internal organs which are single. But others, we've got two of. For example, we've got two kidneys, and two lungs - but only a single liver. Yet the liver is an essential organ. If it fails, we die. Shouldn't it have a back-up, like a kidney has - if a kidney fails on one side, there's another on the other side, to take over. A person can survive with one kidney. And it's the same in the case of the lungs. A person can have a lung surgically removed, and still get by on the other "back-up" one. This "back-up" principle seems very sensible and prudent, from a survival viewpoint. And survival is what Natural Selection is supposed to be all about. So I wonder why Natural Selection hasn't resulted in duplication of all our essential organs. Surely it would advantageous to have a duplicate liver - is there a good reason we haven't got it?

"Allah" is just the Muslim name for their God. "Islam" means "submission".

self-deleted as exasperated at US failure

Your mention of lion fish prompts a thought - perhaps we should dump more nuclear-reactor waste into the oceans. The radiation might generate exciting new marine organisms! Like gargantuan 100-metre whale/tuna-fish hybrids! True, they'd probably have three heads. But the heads could be cut off before canning, so consumers would never know. Should we lightly dismiss such potential atomic food supplies?

A very interesting idea, that red light weighs more than other colours. Isn't it supported by observational evidence? Evidence such as the appearance of the Sun. When we see the Sun high in the sky, it has a white or yellow colour. But - what about when it's low down in the sky, and close to the Earth's horizon - eg, at sunset? Then we see it as red. This red colour could be explained, by the heavier red light-rays, getting "dragged down" by the proximity of the Earth's horizon. The horizon would naturally pull more strongly on " heavy" rays. Which explains why the red rays, get concentrated down at the horizon. However, the horizon does not pull so strongly on the less heavy, blue rays. So these blue rays escape upwards, towards the zenith. Which accounts for the zenith still being blue, at sunset. Isn't that a highly satisfactory scientific explanation of the "red sunset" phenomenon?