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Mathematics is unbelievably more clear and precise than English could ever hope to be, yet you refuse to learn the language and base your criticisms of science on toy models made to try to give the slightest bit of understanding to people like you. The analogies such as rubber sheets are toys, they're not what the theory really says. If you want clarity, learn the math. Again, learn the math. What dilates is what clocks measure. What is it that clocks measure? They measure time. Time, if you'd bother to learn the math instead of using toy models as straw men, is (like space) a separation. Where space is a separation between objects, time is a separation between states. In fact, space and time are so similar that we treat them almost identically. This is why we speak of spacetime as a whole unit. Time dilation and length contraction are different aspects of the same effect. In my example I posed to you earlier, what is the total kinetic energy? For those who just joined us, the problem I'm talking about is: 1)What is the total kinetic energy in that hypothetical universe? 2)Which reference frame is the "correct" one?

No, no you don't. You've consistently shown that here.

Should this measurement be taken from orbit, the surface, or subsurface? Each will give different values. Which is the "correct"?

I took the liberty of properly utilizing the quote function for you so that swansont knows you took a shot at him. Now, back to the question you refuse to answer: How do you know which frame is the 'correct' one? Nope. Which rest frame? In my example you predictably ignored, both frames A and B were rest frames. Another point in my last post you completely ignored is relevant here. Length contraction is a PREDICTION. We didn't see it coming. It was predicted that space changes magnitude. It would be an incredible coincidence for space to appear to contract the exact amount that space was predicted to actually differ. The point I raised above is still rather pertinent here; which frame is the correct one? How do you know? You say the rest frame, but with respect to what is the frame at rest? Another pertinent point from my last post you completely ignored: If length contraction is only apparent, how can we see light 'bend' around stars? Oh, but it really does. You see, as I have pointed out above, both frames A and B in my example are rest frames. Which one gives the "correct" answer? Yet the tick varies consistently among all clocks, even when the 'clock' is the halflife of a particle in an accelerator. This, again, is a point you completely ignored. Basically, you didn't really respond to my post at all and every one of your points remains defeated.

How do we know which frame is the accurate one?

If you try to loosen a nut and the wrench doesn't fit, is the nut defective or are you using the wrong size wrench?

It's not physically impossible, because physics doesn't apply to nothingness. Physics is an abstraction of how our universe behaves. Our universe is not nothing.

No, no it doesn't. You may want to relearn thermodynamics. You're doing it wrong. The energy doesn't go anywhere; it becomes less useful.

What on earth are you talking about? That doesn't jive with physics at all.

While that's slightly amusing, I actually gave reasons to support my position. You know the whole applying physics to nothingness is invalid thing? Yeah, that.

I don't think that's the case.

It is often claimed that something cannot come from nothing. Often this is just a colloquial formulation of the conservation of energy, however, it is also used as some sort of metaphysical intuition as a defense of certain premises in logical arguments regarding beginnings. The trouble with the latter sense of the claim is that it is a rather poor intuition. Intuitions aren't innate beliefs, but rather inductive inferences. This inference, however, is based on faulty information. Yes, it is true we do not see things pop into existence out of nothing (vacuums are not 'nothing'), but that doesn't help us. Why is that? Well, we lack the necessary and sufficient conditions to acquire any information at all about whether something can pop into existence from nothingness. Of course we're not going to see things pop into existence from nothingness if we're not looking at nothingness! You can't expect to gain information about whether or not ducks can swim in water if you only look at pools of lava. Similarly, to get any viable information, we must look to nothingness. Unfortunately for us, we have no access to nothingness. This means induction is not going to cut it. Hopefully deduction can save the day. So far as deduction goes, it is often claimed that something cannot come from nothing since nothing has no potentiality and thus the potentiality cannot be actualized! This actually sounds very good.........at first. Once one looks a bit deeper it is soon revealed that this cannot work precisely for the reasoning used to say that nothingness has no potentiality. Nothingness is just that-nothingness. There is no mass, there is no length, there is no time. It lacks all that it is to be something. We cannot accurately apply the rules based on how our universe behaves to understand the nothingness. Causation and conservation are thus thrown in the rubbish bin. What does that mean? It means we cannot say that things cannot pop into existence from nothing, but does it mean they can?

Fine, let's say I'm arrogant and condescending. That doesn't mean I'm wrong. To dismiss my post and use your claim of arrogance as the basis to do so is an example of a logical fallacy known as "ad hom". So, the position you find yourself in is one in which, to have any credibility at all, you must show that my supposed arrogance and and condescension are based upon falsities; you must prove me wrong. Unfortunately for you, you've been doing a bang up job of doing the exact opposite by consistently showing that you could pass neither an introductory philosophy course nor an introductory science course. Modus Tollens is an argument form rather than an argument form. Just as Modus Tollens is an argument form rather than an argument, each of its premises and its conclusion are sentence forms rather than sentences. The following argument (not argument form) is still of the form of Modus Tollens: A->~B ~~B ~A By use of a logical equivalence known as "Double Negation", we see that showing something to be true when it is predicted to be false means that the thing which made the prediction MUST be wrong. So, nice try, but you've yet again shown that you know absolutely nothing of philosophy. You're not doing very good at that proving me wrong bit. Furthermore, your first example is false for multiple reasons. It is not that we "cannot prove a negative" (which, as I have shown is trivially false) that we cannot prove that no deities exist; it is that the concept of deity is so vague and unagreedupon as to have no meaning. In addition, there exist several valid logical proofs of the nonexistence of specific classes of deity. As for your example with the earth, there is an immense amount of evidence which makes us believe that its shape is not invariant. You see, there are mountains of evidence (Bayes' Theorem says your denial is more than misplaced) that length contraction is real (please, for one example, show us how during an eclipse we can see galaxies whose line of sight with us is blocked by an enormous sphere of fusing plasma if mass does not "curve" spacetime). In addition to that, saying that relativity claims the earth "drastically morphs out of its *well documented* (a major body of evidence) nearly spherical shape" is (whether intentionally or not) a straw man of the actual claim of relativity which is that its shape depends on the frame of reference from which it is viewed. I offer up to you a challenge I've offered several other relativity deniers. It is rather simple and required very little math (none of which is above the level of that of a teenager). It is even done using classical physics: 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. Assuming 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, how much kinetic energy is there in our hypothetical universe? I was even nice and gave you units that give you an answer in Joules. There is a second question based upon the above situation. Your denial of length contraction and time dilation implies a preferred reference frame; that is, it implies that there is one reference frame from which we get the "real" answers. In the above scenario, which reference frame is the preferred frame? What else would it be? The better question to ask is why ALL clocks slow down in predictable ways, if not due to relativistic effects. Were the effects due to some feature of the clocks rather than that which clocks in general measure, then the effect would vary by type of clocks. Grandfather clocks would vary differently than digital wristwatches which would vary differently than atomic clocks which would vary differently than the half lives of particles in an accelerator. A key part of the question which swansont rightly pointed out is that it is a PREDICTION. This effect isn't something we expected at all. It is something that was predicted about time itself and then observed to happen in reality. So, if time does not dilate, then why do all clocks vary with remarkable accuracy that reflects the way relativity says time itself should be affected? That assertion is a trivially false one which shows neither you nor Ross know anything about philosophy of language. And your name drop as your sole support of this assertion is what another logical fallacy known as "appeal to authority". Why is it that you feel that English (which is unimaginably less precise than mathematics) is better suited to the task of ontology than mathematics? Because some other guy said so? That's not good enough. Mathematics is a man-made descriptive formal generalized abstraction of how the universe appears to work. The very definition of mathematics implies that it is designed for the task of understanding the universe. As a formal language, it leaves astonishingly little room for vagueness when compared to natural languages such as English. We use this language to make precise predictions and then test the predictions using the argument form of Modus Tollens. Each test narrows the error bars. This language tells us how the universe appears to behave. And as anyone who has taken an introductory course knows that both the rationalists and empiricists (and even Kant for that matter) all agree that we cannot know things in themselves, but only as they appear to us since our knowledge of them comes solely from observations of them and deduction based on such observations. Because we cannot know anything but how they appear, behaviourism rules the day. How a thing behaves tells IS the description of what it is. Even as Descartes deduced that because he thinks he is a thing which thinks, we know that because electrons appear to act as though they have a charge they are things which appear to have a charge. To go further than that, to try to ascertain things about the 'essence' (if that is even meaningful) of a thing is forever beyond the scope of human reason regardless of the magistra you use in your attempt to ascertain such things. So far as ontology goes, physics is as good as it gets, and physics is written in mathematics. You, good sir, appear to be fractally wrong.

That is quite false. As I have told you before, you need to actually go learn about philosophy before you try to act as though you know anything. p->q ~q ~p This is called Modus Tollens and is a very basic tool used in logic. It is the basis for a good deal of philosophical arguments and is the cornerstone of science. You see, this is how do do falsification. In science, you use induction to come up with an idea and then you use deduction to test it. Here is a brief run down of how science works: PS1->TT1->EE1->PS2 Given a Problem Situation(PS), we come up with Tentative Theories(TT)[tentative theories can range from hypotheses to actual theories] which we then subject to Error Elimination(EE) via testing predictions. How do we test predictions? We can't do it by proving the positive: If P, then Q Q, therefore P Is a logical fallacy known as affirming the consequent. The reason that it works is that there could be any number of reasons for Q aside from P. If we see Q exemplified, it could be because P is true, but it could also be due to a different reason and P happens to be false. We test our tentative theories by proving the negative using Modus Tollens. If P, then Q Not Q, therefore not P We perform our Error Elimination testing by setting up situations P, based on predictions produced by our Tentative Theory, and observe to see whether or not Q is exemplified. If Q is not exemplified, then we know our TT is wrong or at least not entirely correct; it needs replaces or refined. How do we know if it it needs replaced or refined? Well, many sciences have the great fortune of having a very precise mathematical underpinning such that we can predict Q accurately(and with a known allowable margin of error for the TT) based on the P from the TT. We can quantitatively see if we are close or orders of magnitude off the mark. This one test alone, however, is not sufficient to provide absolute validity for our TT as there is no viable method of induction; we must continue to test or TT and eliminate options to raise our confidence in our TT. With each test, the error bars on our set of possible theories shrinks. The end goal is to get them to shrink to the point that each of the possible theories inside the error bars are indistinguishable. Theories such as Evolution and Relativity have been so accurately and exhaustively tested that it is absurd to think that they are flat out wrong. However, there's always room for refinement. In effect, this one statement shows that you know nothing about either philosophy or science.

Not to mention, it's been essentially falsified by looking at large scale geometry. Either this is the last cycle, or it is the only one.

Furthermore, in context, the birth isn't even the prophecy. The birth is the timeframe for the prophecy. The entire prophecy is that, by the time the child with which the young woman is pregnant is old enough to know right from wrong, all of the enemies of King Josiah will be defeated. Luckily for Isaiah, he wrote this prophecy after the events occurred, so he got this one right. That's a fairly convenient way out. I shall remember that trick should I ever decide to write prophecy.

You should actually do that at some point. Actual intro to GR texts will use this analogy to help familiarize students with a general idea so that the actual theory isn't as daunting. The rest of the book will be using a language better suited to the task than any you know to explain what spacetime is. You see, this "curving spacetime" is actually changing what is called the metric of spacetime. In terms of math you might know, it's almost analogous to the magnitude of the gravity vector changing. That's part of what spacetime is; it is a thing whose magnitude is dependent upon energy density. Functionalism rules the day. It seems that once again, the xkcd comic is useful, so I'm going to quote mississippichem. These analogies are toys; they're not real understanding. The real understanding only comes when you learn the theory in a language capable of handling it.

If you don't have the ability to take warranted criticism without getting your feelings hurt, then you're in the wrong place. If you use bad logic, we'll call you out on it. If pretend like you have a clue while you consistently show that you couldn't pass an introduction to philosophy class, you'll get called out. It's not my interpretation. It's what it is. We cannot legitimately know things as they exist, since we only have phenomenological access to how things appear to us. Saying that this is merely my interpretation again betrays how little you actually know of philosophy. Anyone who has taken an introduction to Philosophy course knows that this is a theme of not only Kant, but also all of the Empiricists. You're wrong and appear to have pretty much no knowledge of philosophy. It's very apparent to the philosophers here and it's even apparent to the scientists. Perhaps you'd get better results if you try to learn first. You appear to be the equivalent of the person who comes here claiming to have a grand unified theory, but doesn't even know calculus. It's great that you're interested, but you're at the point where you need to learn first. Thanks for informing me. See, I thought that I thought that philosophy is very valuable. In fact, physics is a subdiscipline of philosophy. And, yes, physics DOES indeed provide an ontology. You see, since we do lack the phenomenological access that I spoke of above, functionalism rules the day. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. It's the basic idea in the early part of Descartes' meditations. You know, "I think, therefore I am a thing which thinks"? Yeah, that. We can apply the same thing to space: it separates objects, so it is a thing which separates objects; its magnitude changes with energy density, so it's a thing which is dependent upon the energy density in a given frame of reference; etc. That IS what space is. It's described ever more precisely than you can handle right now, because it is done so in a language that you don't know. It just so happens that the language doesn't translate to English very efficiently. Being expressed in English does not give some higher level of meaning to an ontology; in fact, it lessens the understanding in this case. So, again, drop the condescension and pick up a book. It does? Really? I don't think that's the case. See, last time I checked, energy was present at time epsilon of the Big Bang. That means there was no time at which energy did not exist. How, then, could the energy have "come from nothing"? Perhaps you should pick up a few science books as well.

Tar, if you knew any philosophy at all, you'd know what you're looking for is what Kant would say is "beyond the reach of reason". Physics IS ontology; it's just in a language you don't know, so it's scary.

So, have a thing. What do we know about the thing? Well, we know how it interacts with other things. From that, we divine several of its properties. This thing has a relatively minuscule mass. This thing has a charge. This thing has a certain spin. What more of "what it is" is there? It is a thing that is a small mass, a charge, and intrinsic momentum. That IS what it is! "What something is" is definitely within the scope of science. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. If you're looking for some innate substance behind all the properties, then you're a bit behind in your philosophy.

If you think there is a difference, you've not asked "how does it work" enough times.

That's not a logical contradiction, btw. It is, however, of the type of statement used to show certain systems cannot be both consistent and complete.

Owl, go read some Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein.