Delta1212

I don't think it even matters to the point whether there is a delay between the "cause of creation" and the "act of creation." The photon's existence is a binary proposition. It either exists or it does not. There is no half a photon. If the photon exists, its speed is c. There is no point at which the photon both exists and is not moving at c.

I did say thousand miles rather than steps, though. So the length of the journey will depend on whether you've started stepping and how quickly you step, although obviously all frames will agree on how many steps you took once you've completed the journey. I liked it, if that's any consolation.

Good point. Once you start moving, the journey actually gets shorter.

Is there any aspect of relativity in particular that you struggle to come to grips with? Rather than going on a whole tangent about it, maybe just pick one key issue you have and see if we can work from there. Thousand mile journeys begin with a single step and all that.

You could always ask for help with getting it. The people on this site are a pretty good resource learning if you're struggling with something.

Geometry is really just a description of the relationship between shapes. People who weren't taught geometry had to measure various shapes and figure out the patterns for themselves. You could independently discover the Pythagorean Theorem, for instance, by measuring and comparing the lengths of the sides of a bunch of right triangles and working out the relationship between them.

Science is really the business of trying to come up with better theories than the ones we have. When we get a theory that a lot of people fail to best, it becomes the accepted benchmark for what new hypotheses need to be tested against until and unless we can come up with one that beats it. It also becomes generally accepted as working within the range that it has been tested. This is why, again, we still teach Newtonian mechanics because, despite the fact that we've discovered the universe doesn't actually follow the assumptions used to formulate Newtonian mechanics, the math still works really, really well when used for the types of problems it was originally formulated to address. Relativity and QM just work for a broad range of situations where classical mechanics begins to break down because they passed new tests where it failed.

I'm not talking about the ways that something can be interpreted. I'm talking about the fact that a given arrangement of words or configuration of matter can actually represent an entirely different creative work at different times. Contrary to what you're saying, meaning is extremely important to creativity. Words change meanings over time. Languages use the same sound as entirely different words. In German "Rock" means skirt, for instance. Context and meaning are extremely important. With time, context changes and so, the same configuration of letters or atoms or what have you can represent vastly different creative works that mean entirely different things. Sometimes subtly (as with the historical context of Animal Farm) and sometimes completely (as with using the same "word" as a completely different word). Since time, as far as we know, is open ended, this gives you infinite potential for creativity in the sense that new meaning can be creatively applied to old configurations without limit. And you're also leaving out the fact that even with a finite number of configurations being possible at any given moment, time dependent works (for instance, those animated shows you're taking about, open up the possibilities because there is nothing stopping them from running indefinitely, making them, in essence, have an infinite number of possible series runs. Now, every possibility won't come to pass, but you have more or less open-ended potential in that respect.

Here is a question for you: Do you think that Animal Farm would have the same meaning, essentially be the same work of art, were it written without the context of the Russian Revolution? If someone were to read it two hundred years ago, would it carry the same message for them as it does for a modern audience, or the same message that was intended when it was written?

That's not really how science works. We don't have proof, we have evidence. And most evidence comes from trying to disprove something and failing. So there are plenty of people who spend time working with relativity trying to come up with tests that could, depending on the result, disprove it in some way, or at least find the boundaries. So far, relativity has passed all such tests, and there have been many. As such, we know the domain in which relativity is applicable, and in that domain it is generally accepted as being highly accurate. In the other hand, one of our other most well tested and useful theories describes the realm of quantum mechanics. QM and General Relativity aren't compatible. In their respective domains, they've both proven extremely accurate, but reconciling them is something of an on-going concern. It's also important to remember that even if, in the future, something overturns relativity, it will still have to approximate the results with the same degree of accuracy in the domain in which relativity has been thoroughly tested, in the same way that we know Newtonian mechanics is wrong because we've run tests that falsify it, but if you use it for every day calculations you aren't even going to be able to detect the margin of error because it doesn't exist for all practical purposes for the domain in which Newtonian mechanics applied.

The photon always moves at c.

You do realize that whether there are infinite possibilities has nothing to do with whether anything you create is coming from some "predetermined set of possibilities" right? For example, there are an infinite number of integers. Any number you can come up with, you can add 1 to and get a new number. That new number, however, didn't pop into existence when you added 1 to the previous number. It always was, and always will be, the number that comes after that number. Every number that anyone has ever worked with and ever will work with, including any numbers that will only crop up one time in a single instance of human history, have always been those numbers with the same relationship to all other numbers. You can't come up with a "new" number, and yet there are an infinite number of possible numbers. Similarly, anything you do, even in a universe of infinitely possible creativity, anything you create is something that could, hypothetically, be created. There are an infinite number of possibilities in the set, but those possibilities are no more or less real than the possibilities in the finite set of creative possibilities. You are being no more or less creative regardless of whether there is finite or infinite possibility. It literally makes absolutely no difference to anything whatsoever in either practical or even theoretical terms.

36*36*36*36 = 1,679,616 So that gives you a little over 1.5 million possible 4 digit codes. At most, you could represent all of the numbers between 1 billion and 1.0016 billion with that scheme. Any more than that would require representing multiple numbers with the same code, which obviously doesn't work. You need a code with 41.999 trillion possible configurations to uniquely represent every possible number in your desired range.

Anything you will ever do is possible or you could not have done it. That doesn't mean it is a pre-determined possibility in the sense that is usually used. I could, for instance, take my pen and draw a circle on the piece of scrap paper I have on my desk right now. That circle I will draw exists as a possibility. I can picture it quite clearly. But it does not actually exist unless I draw it, and, similarly, if someone else were to draw it, it would not be the same circle I would produce that I am envisioning right now. There are a vast number of creative achievements that can only come into existence if you create them. There is nothing special about, for instance, the Harry Potter books that would prevent me from sitting down and writing those exact same words. I could have done that 20 years ago and made a fortune. It's a straightforward mechanical action. But the reason I didn't comes down to the fact that those books could only come into existence in the exact form that they did if they were written by JK Rowling at the time and in the place that she wrote them. Likewise, if you give into despair, there are great works of art and creative endeavors that may exist in the abstract which will never be given form because the only person who could possibly bring them to fruition is you. They are your works, waiting for you to create them.

I suppose theoretically there is a limit to the possible books that could be written and configurations of matter and so forth, but I think you are underestimating that limit. "Vast" doesn't begin to cover the possibilities. Talking about the purely technical "this is how many words there are and there are only so many ways to arrange those words" limitation, there is a limit to the possibilities, but humanity will never, ever exhaust them all. If you take 1,000 nouns and 1,000 verbs you could make 1 million two word sentences. Add plurals and you double the number to 2 million. Add past tense and that's 4 million. That's 4 million two word sentences using something like 1% of the English language. If you type at 100 wpm and had it as your full time job to just type those two word sentences and went 8 hours a day, 5 days a week without slowing, it would take 8 months to type out this set of small sentences using this tiny subset of one language. If you add a single adjective to the sentence chosen from a subset of just 1,000 common adjectives, that grows to 4 billion three-word sentences and it would take you 648 years to type them all out. Every added word increases the sentence complexity by a comparable amount and that's using this incredibly stripped down vocabulary. Make use of the full range of possible words and there are more possible sentences in English than will ever be written. And that's just sentences. We're not even talking about stories which can arrange sentences in novel configurations, repeat sentences and basically be any length. Let's take the longest book you've ever read. We could change the ending and make it continue longer if we so chose. Even if you founded an organization that dedicated itself to spending the entirety of the next millennium attempting to working out every possible story that could be told in five sentences or less, you'd still have all the six sentence stories still to tell. For all practical purposes, the number of possible things you can create might as well be infinite. You will never, ever come close to even perceiving where the limit is. It might as well not exist as far as humanity is concerned.

The Big Bang wasn't an explosion. It's a universal expansion that is on-going. It hasn't finished "banging."

Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth around 200 BC. The idea that people thought the Earth was flat until a few hundred years ago is a myth. Secondly, the motion would not be instantaneous from the first to last atom but would propagate down the line as a compression wave traveling at whatever the speed of sound is for the medium in question.

So how would you measure speeds below that of sound using sound without using light?

We get prophets here and there, but they are rarely well received.

This is not what chaos theory describes. Chaos theory describes systems in which very small differences in initial starting conditions lead to drastically different outcomes. If chaos theory were in play, the difference between the conditions in the lab and the natural environment would lead to very different, very noticeable, differences in mutation rates and evolutionary changes. Since we don't see that massive difference, chaos theory is not a good argument for why we may have missed something. As for what evidence we have that mutations aren't responding directly to the environment in some way, well, we have a fairly good handle on how rapidly mutations accumulate in a population. We can track how long ago in time two species diverged based on a comparison of their genomes. If there were a novel mechanism for producing mutations that not only functioned solely when the organism is in the natural environment out of the lab, but produced mutations specifically beneficial for survival in that environment at a higher rate than random chance, our models for mutation rates and how quickly evolution happens would be horribly mismatched with our observations in the lab, and they are not. We may have less control over observing the specific mechanism producing each individual mutation in a population in the wild than we do when observing in the lab, but we can still readily observe the overall rate at which mutations, and specifically beneficial mutations, are accumulating in a population, and it simply doesn't match against what we'd expect to see if mutations were happening in response to the environment in a way we don't see in the lab. You are, in effect, asking how we have ruled out a phenomenon for which we have no proposed mechanism and which has no observable effect. There just isn't any evidence to support the idea that this is happening, and plenty of evidence that it isn't necessary for what we do observe to happen. It would be we're it not for the fact that all of the variation matches very well with our models of evolution using entirely random mutations filtered through natural selection. If mutations were being guided by the environment specifically, we would expect to see much, much faster rates of evolution than we actually do. Again, we have a fairly good understanding of how the environment interacts with DNA. It'd be like a physicist being handed a car to take apart. Without a background as a mechanic, he might not immediately understand what every piece of the car does, but he'd at least be able to tell that the machine probably doesn't fly. You are, in effect, asking whether the car might be able to fly when we can't see it because it got from one place to another very quickly. Based on what we've observed, there is no way for this to happen, and the time it took the car to reach its destination actually did take approximately the amount of time we'd expect based on speed tests in the lab, but sure it's difficult to specifically rule out that something is happening when we aren't looking. It's just that your evidence for why it might be happening (be it the speed of the cars travel or the variation found in nature) matches very well with what we've observed in the lab and so isn't actually evidence of it happening at all. When something has no proposed mechanism for how it might happen and no evidence that it is actually happening, we tend to rule it out as something that happens pending future evidence to the contrary.

As someone who doesn't see a conflict between free will and determinism, I have to agree that the entire debate about whether free will exists is pointless until you have a settled definition of free will, which is a lot more complicated to out together than it sounds.

Why not?

Conservation if angular momentum means that no, you will not stop spinning. Rotation is accelerated motion. You can tell if you are spinning even without an outside reference. You would not go "weightless" if the rest of the universe suddenly disappeared.

So you're asking why we have cerebrospinal fluid instead of blood that is stripped of all the biological impurities that would muck up the works in the brain and that just sits around the brain without mixing with the rest of the circulatory system?

There are books that say a lot of things that are wrong. The closest you're going to get to telepathy and telekinesis is, possibly, the ability to interact with a computer using your brain, and then having the computer send a message or interact with the world. You are not going to be able to, for instance, make an apple float with your mind. And, having some experience with talking to a computer using my brain, I wouldn't hold my breath on the ability to do anything complicated with reasonable efficiency any time in the near future.