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This sort of phrasing leads people to the misunderstanding that there's a causation at a distance effect going on here. That's why people often think entanglement is so much weirder than it really is. For example, the terrible film "What the Bleep do we Know?" talks about applying a force to one entangled particle and having it felt by the other one. Unless I've completely misunderstood how entanglement works, that's not even close to what is going on. From what I've been able to gather, entanglement is a type of linked uncertainty. You entangle particles by putting the two in superposition of states in such a way that they are linked (such as one will have spin up and the other will have spin down upon observation). One can then separate the two and if it is done in a way that does not measure the state which is in superposition, the entanglement holds. Upon measurement, the measurer will know the state of the other particle and the entanglement will be broken. That's just my understanding of it based mostly from reading posts by Swansont. I've not formally studied QM, though. Posts like this are how I got my understanding as explained above. I may have completely misinterpreted them, though.

The traditional view of cognition would disagree with you as thought is the combination of representations within the consciousness. It always traces back to sensory data.

We do? Care to give examples?

Would you rather have 1 hovercraft city, or over 100 time machines?

It shouldn't seem odd that Empirical Science would be based on empiricism. Since all of the data we have from which we can understand the universe comes from our senses and extensions of our senses, we are obviously limited to senses and their extensions as our foundation of knowledge. All of our senses and their extensions are based on interactions. This means all we can possibly know about things is how they interact and how what we can deduce and/or infer from said interactions. If you've read any real philosophy you'd know this and you'd know that any "essence" of things beyond how they appear to us via interaction are forever beyond the reach of human reason. All we can possibly know about something is from how it behaves with other things, so for our purposes, that IS what it is. It IS what interacts in certain manners. This is what physics does; physics tells us how things interact. It does so in a language mindbogglingly with more precision than English, Russian, Arabic, or any other natural language could ever hope to have. Physics, and the mathematics in which it is written, provides us with the best ontology possible. As I've said above, all of our knowledge of the universe is via the senses. We map the universe from how the universe appears to us via our senses. We use these observations to build our models. In philosophy, your arguments are based on premises that are derived from other arguments, observed, induced from observations, or assumed. Bad philosophy uses assumed premises. In good philosophy, you can trace it all back to that which comes to us from our senses. When an area of philosophy gets sufficiently good, we call it "science". Science is the perfection of philosophy. If we can have knowledge of it (remember that all knowledge traces back to observation), then it is within the scope of science. If science can't answer a question, why on God's green Earth do you think making stuff up could do any better? Some people say that questions of "why" or of "purpose" or of "morality" are outside the bounds of science. I say that they are wrong. As why is a question of intent of a causal agent, "why" is a silly question to ask if there's no causal agent. Purpose is similar, though it is not quite the same. With purpose, you can divide into the intended purpose (which is roughly synonymous with the "why") and actualized purpose (which is how it is used). There are two main ways of answering these questions and both are scientific. One way phenomenologically and the other is behaviourally; We either ask the intentional agent and/or we observe it and it's interactions with the byproducts of the causal event. If there is no overall intended purpose due to a lack of a causal agent, that does not mean there is no actualized purpose. If there is no purpose from gods, then there is still purpose from humanity; your purpose is up to you. So too with questions of morality, science gives us the answer for a given value set. As every ethical system is merely what one ought to do in order to achieve a desired outcome (be that being in accordance with what one believes to be revealed divine statutes, minimizing harm, complying with a categorical imperative, etc), I'd say science is the best tool we have for the job! The scope of science may be limited, but it is limited in the same way that all of human reason is. "Scientism" is the pejorative those who believe in magic give to Empiricism so they can pretend making stuff up is on equal footing with Science.

Do you know about DeMorgan's rule? What have you tried so far on the questions?

For the love of the FSM, how does one think the truth of the FSM was revealed to us? Oh, and Nova has a good episode on the Dover trial available (at least it used to be) on their website.

I'm not sure what the actual parameters will end up being. Right now all I know is that we will need a heating coil and a cooling system. Our plan right now is to play with it and adjust as necessary to get what we want. We were using a 5V supply, but that wasn't heating the nichrome up much at all. We've yet to try the 12V. I'll look into it. We were looking at eventually using a digital controller anyway.

I was thinking the same thing, actually. It's one thing to have a change in government, but it's another to force people out of their homes so others can move in.

We're kind of experimenting right now. We're starting with nickel chromium wire for the element and a 12V power supply.

Which is why you watch the documentaries of BOTH sides-hence the request for Israeli documentaries after having seen a Palestinian one. Cold numbers aren't enough for me. We're talking about people here. Breathing, living, loving, bleeding people. "Unbiased" history alone doesn't give the whole picture. I want to understand the human element as well. I'm not saying either side is correct. I just want to know how the differing sides of the conflict view the conflict and how they feel about it. I want the love and I want the hate. I want to understand the situation before it's been sanitized. I'm not sure if that makes any sense to you, but it made sense to me. Is THAT really why the US supports Israel? It can't be the stated reason, as it would be blatantly unconstitutional.

I'm building something requiring a heating coil that hovers at 500-600F and quickly jumps to about double that, sustains the high temperature for 1-5 seconds, and then drops back down to the original temp. How do we get the temp to double extremely quickly? I'm thinking we just make the high voltage for a temperature that is WAY higher and it will reach the actual desired high temperature more quickly, but I don't know whether or not that will work.

Also, there's apparently context to the remarks. I don't know if the study and the speech are related, however.

The thing about documentaries is that you get not only what happened (most of it, anyway), but you also get their viewpoint. If you watch documentaries supporting one side and you watch documentaries supporting the other side of a conflict, you not only get the facts that each side wants to be known, but you get the ones the other side wants to suppress. So, you get what happened and is happening as well as how each side views the situation and how they feel about it. No report other than dates and adjusted figures is going to be unbiased. That approach also misses the human element. So while reading history is important, documentaries, imo, go a long way in understanding as well. How does one give away land that is being used? The few Palestinians I've talked to thusfar talk of homes that are legally owned by Palestinians being invaded by Israeli settlers and the IDF defends the squatting settlers rather than arresting them. These cases can be challenged in court, but the courts are (as said by Palestinians) set up against the Palestinians as the required proof of ownership for the court is almost impossible to give. Then there are cases of Israel demolishing legally owned Palestinian houses to build settler villages. I don't know about you, but I'd certainly be pissed if Canadians came into my town and knocked down my house or gave it away. I'd be pretty pissed if a foreign army set up checkpoints every few blocks to restrict my movement to and from home and school, work, the grocery, etc. I'm not saying the actions of the Palestinians are justified, but the anger is more or less reasonable.

The phrasing isn't exactly constructive, but the question is valid. Why does the US support Israel to the extent that it does?

If you believe Steven Colbert, reality has a well known liberal bias.

Would it be fair to broadly generalize and say that Palestinians view the situation as a human rights issue and Israelis view it as a legal issue? Thanks you; those were interesting.

From my tone? There wasn't really enough text to gather any sort of tone. I'm just gathering information. If I was "pro-palestinian or whatever", I probably would just leave it at Occupation 101 (if you haven't seen it, it is rather shocking at times). However, this is not the case as I asked for recommendations for documentaries explaining the Israeli side of the situation. So, going back to the OP, know of any good documentaries?

I just watched a documentary called Occupation 101. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_jvXnPG9Xc Does anyone know of a good documentary that argues for the Israeli side?

Or he may as well have:

Does anyone know any good derivations for the Einstein Field Equations?

So, is this still an illusory length contraction? This is a huge example, actually. You see, the length contraction here changes the energy of the photon. If there is no length contraction, then the energy of the uninteracting photon is constant and invariant. However, if there IS length contraction, the energy of the uninteracting photon is constant, but not invariant. If there's only one real answer for the energy, is it from the frame of the emitter or from the frame of the measurement? This brings us back my old thought experiment. Imagine a universe which operates exactly as ours does in every single way. This universe, however, only contains three objects. These objects are spheres of a mass of 1kg. Spheres 1 and 2 are at rest with respect to each other. In reference frame A, spheres 1 and 2 are at rest and are approached by sphere 3 which is traveling at 100 m/s. In reference frame B, sphere 3 is at rest and is approached by spheres 1 and 2 each traveling at 100 m/s. Assume the amount of kinetic energy in a system is given by the equation KE=(1/2)mv2 where KE is kinetic energy, m is mass, and v is velocity. 1)What is the total kinetic energy in that hypothetical universe? 2)Which reference frame is the "correct" one? I say you're wrong. Since I actually know philosophy and a fair bit of science, I know that it's the pragmatic application of Empiricism. Hmm, isn't it odd that Empirical Science would be based on empiricism? I'll let your recover from me blowing your mind just now. Are you better yet? Ok, let's continue. Since all of the data we have from which we can understand the universe comes from our senses and extensions of our senses, we are obviously limited to senses and their extensions as our foundation of knowledge. All of our senses and their extensions are based on interactions. This means all we can possibly know about things is how they interact and how what we can deduce and/or infer from said interactions. If you've read any real philosophy you'd know this and you'd know that any "essence" of things beyond how they appear to us via interaction are forever beyond the reach of human reason. All we can possibly know about something is from how it behaves with other things, so for our purposes, that IS what it is. It IS what interacts in certain manners. This is what physics does; physics tells us how things interact. It does so in a language mindbogglingly with more precision than English, Russian, Arabic, or any other natural language could ever hope to have. Physics, and the mathematics in which it is written, provides us with the best ontology possible. It's not an ontological question that physics doesn't care about; It is an ontological question which has answered long ago whose answer you refuse to accept or even learn. I'm going to try to do this as simply as possible for your sake since you refuse to learn the proper language. As such, I'll only deal with the "going faster" bit instead of that and "being in a (edit:, oopse, *stronger*) gravitational field" since the mathematics behind general relativity would make your tiny little head explode. We need to start with clarification of terms that I've already done in this thread, but you still get wrong. If something is constant, its value does not change within a given frame. If something is invariant, its value does not depend upon the frame in which it is measured. Length and duration are not invariant; That is, their values depend upon the frame. It is not that the Earth shrinks in your frame when a spaceship zooms by. It is that the Earth's length depends on which equally valid inertial frame from which it is measured. Interestingly enough, your frame is NOT an inertial frame, so the spaceship's measurement (assuming it's not accelerating at the time of measurement) has a greater claim to reality than yours! The speed of light is both constant and invariant and this has devastating consequences for your dogmatic grip on poor amateur philosophy. We start with what we call Maxwell equations: [math]\bigtriangledown\cdot{E}=\frac{\rho}{\epsilon_0}[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\times{E}=-\frac{\partial{B}}{\partial{t}}[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\cdot{B}=0[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\times{B}={\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial{E}}{\partial{t}}[/math] These are the equations that describe how electric fields and magnetic fields interact. They convey unfathomably more information than "electric fields and magnetic fields are related". This is the basis of our ontology of electricity and magnetism. Since you almost certainly cannot decipher it, I'll give you some toy ideas with which you can follow the rest. Think of [math]\bigtriangledown\cdot[/math] as describing whether or not a vector field is pointing inward or outward, think of [math]\bigtriangledown\times[/math] as describing which in which direction and how tightly a vector field is curled, and think of [math]\frac{\partial}{\partial{t}}[/math] as being the rate of change of the vector field. A vector field is a space where there is a vector at every point. A vector is a mathematical object with both a number and a direction. Having no charges to worry about with light, we can set the charge density equal to zero which makes the equations: [math]\bigtriangledown\cdot{E}=0[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\times{E}=-\frac{\partial{B}}{\partial{t}}[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\cdot{B}=0[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\times{B}={\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial{E}}{\partial{t}}[/math] Now, let's take the curl of the curl equations and see what happens. [math]\bigtriangledown\times\bigtriangledown\times{E}=-\frac{\partial}{\partial{t}}\bigtriangledown\times{B}=-{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial^2{E}}{\partial{t^2}}[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\times\bigtriangledown\times{B}={\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial}{\partial{t}}\bigtriangledown\times{E}=-{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial^2{B}}{\partial{t^2}}[/math] Since [math]\bigtriangledown\times(\bigtriangledown\times{V})=\bigtriangledown(\bigtriangledown\cdot{V})-\bigtriangledown^2{V}[/math] for any vector field V, we can write: [math]-{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial^2{E}}{\partial{t^2}}=-\bigtriangledown^2{E}[/math] [math]-{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial^2{B}}{\partial{t^2}}=-\bigtriangledown^2{B}[/math] which we rearrange to get: [math]\frac{\partial^2{E}}{\partial{t^2}}-\frac{1}{{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}}\cdot\bigtriangledown^2{E}=0[/math] [math]\frac{\partial^2{B}}{\partial{t^2}}-\frac{1}{{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}}\cdot\bigtriangledown^2{B}=0[/math] which are the electromagnetic wave equations. The speed term is [math]\frac{1}{\sqrt{{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}}}[/math] where [math]\mu_0[/math] is the permeability of free space and [math]\epsilon_0[/math] is the permattivity of free space. Plug in the numbers and that's how we get c. One should take note that c is both invariant and constant. This combined with the fact that all inertial reference frames are equally valid lead inexorably to length contraction and time dilation. I was going to do so here, but since Cap'n already did and was outright ignored, it's not worth my effort. As distance is the separation between objects, so too is duration a type of separation. Rather than separating objects, however, duration separates states. Duration and distance are so similar, in fact, that we treat them nearly identically mathematically. We do this extremely accurately. What we observe in the real world correlates with the math every time. In fact, relativity is the most well tested theory ever. Tell me, owl, where does it break down? You've gotten invariance of c from me and you've gotten the ramifications of that from Cap'n. Each of which have been tested ad nauseum. Time dilation and length contraction aren't assumptions; their conclusions which prove true under observation. You should probably look up the definition for the word "assumption" because you continue to use it incorrectly. How has that science failed? It's the most accurately tested science of all time. Do you have any evidence, or just assertions? Back to some basic philosophy of science: Physics IS the reality check. Apparently so. That's about the gist of it. There's also the bit where owl pretends to know any philosophy.

IIRC, this derivation was first done before we knew light was an EM wave.

We start with what we call Maxwell equations. These are the equations that describe how electric fields and magnetic fields interact. Having no charges to worry about with light, we can set the charge density equal to zero which makes the equations: [math]\bigtriangledown\cdot{E}=0[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\times{E}=-\frac{\partial{B}}{\partial{t}}[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\cdot{B}=0[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\times{B}={\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial{E}}{\partial{t}}[/math] Now, let's take the curl of the curl equations and see what happens. [math]\bigtriangledown\times\bigtriangledown\times{E}=-\frac{\partial}{\partial{t}}\bigtriangledown\times{B}=-{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial^2{E}}{\partial{t^2}}[/math] [math]\bigtriangledown\times\bigtriangledown\times{B}={\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial}{\partial{t}}\bigtriangledown\times{E}=-{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}\frac{\partial^2{B}}{\partial{t^2}}[/math] Since [math]\bigtriangledown\times(\bigtriangledown\times{V})=\bigtriangledown(\bigtriangledown\cdot{V})-\bigtriangledown^2{V}[/math] for any vector field V, we can write: [math]\frac{\partial^2{E}}{\partial{t^2}}-\frac{1}{{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}}\cdot\bigtriangledown^2{E}=0[/math] [math]\frac{\partial^2{B}}{\partial{t^2}}-\frac{1}{{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}}\cdot\bigtriangledown^2{B}=0[/math] which are the electromagnetic wave equations. The speed term is [math]\frac{1}{\sqrt{{\mu_0}{\epsilon_0}}}[/math] where [math]\mu_0[/math] is the permeability of free space and [math]\epsilon_0[/math] is the permattivity of free space. Plug in the numbers and that's how we get c. I accidentally hit "Add Reply" instead of "Preview Post".