Delta1212

When a wave is directed at a double slit, the slits will effectively act as two new points of origin for the wave on the opposite side of the barrier, and those two waves will interfere with each other, creating a distinctive pattern. A (classical) particle fired at a double slit will go through exactly one of the two slits, and obviously will not interfere with anything because there isn't anything else there. When a single electron is fired through the double slit, it hits a detector screen on the opposite side and we can see where it hits. It's a single point which doesn't have any interference pattern (because how could it if it's just a point?) which you'd expect from a particle. If you keep firing electrons at the double slit one at a time and track the locations, however, an interference pattern emerges as if the probability of the electron landing on any particular spot on the screen was determined by a wave that was interfering with itself after passing through both slits. That wouldn't be terrible surprising with a large number of electrons all fired at once, but the fact that it happens even when firing a single electron at a time men's that each electron must individually be passing through both slits on the way to the detector, not terribly difficult for a wave but very unparticlelike. And we know it's not just some weird deflection pattern as it passes through the slit, because if we only have one slit for the electron to pass through, the interference pattern doesn't present. If the electron was only passing through one of the two slits during the double slit experiment, this shouldn't make any difference, but it does.

I have no idea what "In the past you will lay and lie" means, which seems to be a problem for your idea right off the bat.

Bergen here. I'm actually going to be in Monmouth this weekend.

There's no such thing as an airline lunch.

Only one way to find out. Bottoms up!

I've heard it tastes charm.

My high school in New Jersey did not.

Ok, let's put it this way: assuming that the premise of the creepy pasta is correct (it's junk, but let's treat it as reality for a moment), the odds of you being reborn are astronomically small but, according to the pasta there is infinite time so it's bound to happen. Well, the odds of an entire world tailored specifically to your tastes spontaneously appearing with you as supreme ruler are even smaller, but hey, infinite time, so it's bound to happen. Or three of you popping into existence right next to each other. Even less likely, but again, infinite time. In that case, who is the real you? Are any of them? In fact, going with this premise, it's entirely possible for a version of you to appear that is identical in every respect, except that you think your mother's name was Bob. So is that you or someone else entirely? Does it have to be the exact configuration you were in on your deathbed to count? The odds would theoretically be equally likely that the version of you that exists right now would pop into existence as the version of you that existed on your deathbed. So you could be sitting on a bus and then suddenly find yourself floating in space billions or years after some other version of you continued on living life as normal until dying at the age of 92. And a version of you popping back into existence without remembering the previous times you've popped back into existence is no less likely than one who does. For that matter, the version of you that pops back into existence remembering all the previous times you popped into existence just to die is just as likely to appear before those times happen as after them. It's all utterly ridiculous even before you get into the physics of why their "it's very unlikely but there is infinite time so it's bound to happen" argument is specious. After all, 1 divided by 9 is 0.1111111111... It's a decimal string that goes on to infinity but the digit 2 is never going to appear in that string just because it has infinite chances to do so. Or pi. 3.14159 etc etc. it's non-repeating, goes on to infinity and contains every digit at some point, but an elephant is never going to crop up no matter how many places of pi you go.

It's the evolutionary principle of more more: There tend to be more of the things that make more of themselves more often.

I got this far: before my mental alarm bells blew my brains out the back of my skull and I was unfortunately unable to continue.

I'm going to assume the link removed was to a cookbook.

To be clear, no, the lion is not literally a king that rules all the other animals. In the sense that it's fairly dangerous but even more puffed up by outward appearance and ultimately a scavenger, I'd say it makes a pretty good kingly metaphor.

Pretty much. The thought experiment really only "works" if you treat the entire interior of the box as being in a superposition, rather than just the cat, and the interior needs to be completely isolated from the rest of the universe in a way that isn't physically possible for any box that could actually be made.

Well, I'd say the argument would be that it's God's fault for creating them at all, rather than creating them in a specific way. If he'd created them differently, he wouldn't have created them at all. He'd have created someone else. So they're not responsible for their own actions insofar as they didn't choose to exist in the first place, but I'd say they bear as much responsibility for everything after that as one can bear anything one chooses. And obviously this is all hypothetical since I don't think God actually created anyone in the first place. I just don't think that omniscience, on its own, is inherently in conflict with free will. Adding some more attributes that are typically ascribed to God complicated things and my stance may change depending on precisely what we're talking about in those circumstances. So far, I've purely been arguing against the issue of omniscience vs free will.

I had a pet theory once, but I forgot to feed it and it died.

According to the model of the Big Bang, the universe was once extremely hot and extremely dense to the point that it was opaque and impossible for anything even as complex as an atom to form. This obviously changed as it expanded and cooled. Where that initial hot, dense universe came from is still something of an open question.

Not if you extract the energy really, really slowly and in very small amounts!

The Big Bang isn't actually a bang. It's a model that describes the inflation of the universe from a hot dense state to a cooler less dense state. There was no explosion and considering that the inflation is ongoing, the universe is technically still "banging" as we speak.

Yes. Life is a complex system of chemical processes capable of replicating themselves. There's no "inner spark" that sets life apart from other arrangements of matter. It works on the exact same principles as everything else. Energy is simply a property. You can have kinetic energy, heat energy, potential energy, but there is no such thing as "life energy." That's an old idea (vitalism, as mentioned) that is now considered to be roundly discredited.

The fact that your son is related to your brother may mean that he is more likely to be more predisposed to addiction than the average person... But that's a lot of maybes. For one, you don't know if your brother himself is actually predisposed toward addiction. You don't have to have a strong genetic component to struggle with addiction, although it certainly doesn't help if you do. For another, a physical resemblance doesn't mean they share all of their genetics. On average, your son probably shares about 25% of his DNA with your brother, give or take a few percentage points. So does your daughter. You share even more. So a genetic predisposition toward addiction in your brother is more likely to indicate it's presence in you than in either of your children, regardless of appearance. And if it's not present in you, it isn't going to suddenly crop up in your son just because he looks like your brother (unless his father's side has it's own addiction issues). Basically, just because two related people look alike does not mean that they share all of the same genetic material, and certainly doesn't mean they are more likely to be predisposed toward the same things than anyone else in the family, other than, obviously, looking a certain way. But again, having an addiction problem doesn't necessarily mean you have a genetic predisposition to addiction, and having a genetic predisposition toward addiction doesn't necessarily mean you're going to suffer from an addiction problem. If you're really concerned, you could probably get some DNA testing done on your children, but either way the real deciding factor is going to be more down to whether they get involved with substance abuse in the first place rather than how disposed they are toward getting hooked once they've taken the plunge, and that's going to be down far more to education, environment and, frankly, luck than it is to DNA.

I think it might be worth your time to examine the specifics why creating life doesn't create energy for your own benefit and education. I'm sure plenty of people here would be willing to help in a patient and friendly manner. Just be a little but more careful about how you pose questions, because "disprove this statement" is less of a question and more of a command, and it's a command that is very difficult to fulfill because "disproving" something is, strictly speaking, physically impossible outside of demonstrating that something is mathematically inconsistent with itself (which does not apply to a whole host of wrong ideas), so the closest we can come is with a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, which is quite a lot of work to assemble even when it's all already known, and can still be dismissed as "not absolute proof" by someone who really wants to. And a very large number of people want to, so anything that looks like someone setting up to do that tends to be regarded with an extra degree of suspicion. It's far better to say "Here is my idea. Is there anything wrong with it and, if so, what?"

And here I think I need to make the point that You're defining free will as requiring some sort of tangible existence of an alternative possibility where I do not. For instance, if given a choice between eating ice cream and dirt, I will choose the ice cream. It is, of course, physically possible for me to choose to eat dirt, but outside of some coercive force that drastically tips the balance toward dirt being preferable to ice cream in my eyes, that possibility will literally never occur. So it is possible for me to choose the dirt over the ice cream, but it is not possible for me to choose the dirt over the ice cream based on how I value each option. My choices are determined by who I am. If you know who I am with perfect clarity, all of my motivations, beliefs, judgements, habits, etc, then you should be able to predict how I will behave in a given scenario without invalidating the fact that I chose that behavior because I am me. If you also know every scenario I will encounter, then you should be able to perfectly know the entirety of what will happen in my life and how I will act. Those actions were still taken by me. And it's true that the alternatives were not taken, and that, perhaps, they never were going to be taken by me. But it's not because someone was using invisible marionette wires to force me down a predestined path against my will. It's because that was my will, and based on who I am, what I know about the situation, my mental state at the moment, I will always make the choice that I will make. Either my actions are determined by who I am, in which case they are predictable if you know me well enough, or they are not determined by who I am, in which case they are either determined by something else or there is an element of randomness to them. If there is an alternate determiner, then I don't think free will applies as something other than me is making choices for me. If there is an element of randomness, then I'm just a complicated random number generator and which decision I go with has an element of luck rather than being within my control, which I think undermines free will. I realize that everyone has a tendency to look back on decisions and think "Oh, if only I'd done this" or "It's a good thing I didn't do that." While it was certainly physically possible for you to have made those choices, in the sense that it wouldn't violate any laws of physics or anything, there is a reason that you went with the option you did. For you to have made a different choice, you would either have to have been a different person, or you would have to have been in a different situation. Maybe the difference would only have needed to be tiny, or perhaps it would have needed to be huge, but while there were multiple options arrayed in front of you, you chose the option that you did because of who you are and what you knew about those choices at the time you made them. Perhaps I should couch that in the following caveat: Either there was a reason that you made the choice that you did, in which case knowing that reason ahead of time would allow the choice to be predictable and it is therefore compatible with omniscience, or else there was not a reason for the choice, which introduces an element of randomness into the decision and I don't accept randomness as being equivalent to (or even compatible with, frankly) free will.

An equal and opposite reaction to what?

If I throw a super ball at the ground, it will bounce up to several times the height it started from and bounce a large number of times before coming to a rest. If I flick a crumb off my desk with my finger, I only push it for an inch or so but then it flies all the way across the room. The problem isn't that the system is outputting more than you put in. It's that you are making a false equivalence between the motion of the system as you are putting in the energy and the freely moving system after you've released it.

Aside from reproduction, the Earth also unquestionably fails on the following criteria for categorizing life: It is not made up of one or more cells. As I stated before, it is made of rocks. It does not grow (i.e. Increase in size in a structurally organized way) It does not evolve adaptations to its environment over successive generations, in large part because there are no generations, because it does not reproduce. Those are all parts of the scientific definition of biological life. The Earth does not meet any of them.