Delta1212

It's good you are thinking creatively, but there are a few reasons why that doesn't match the evidence that we have. Let's start with the easiest to understand and go from there. First, if it was a simple matter of all the matter in the universe being part of a single star that then went nova, that primordial star would have immediately collapsed into a black hole. There would have been no star at all and thus no potential to go nova. Second, despite the name, the Big Bang was not actually an explosion. It's simply an expansion more akin to a balloon being inflated than a grenade going off. It's also an expansion of space, which carries the matter along with it, rather than an outward expansion of matter. Which brings me to my third and final point. There is no center from which everything is expanding. The expansion is happening everywhere in the universe at once. The observable universe is a finite "bubble" of sorts with us at the center and everything expanding away from us in every direction, but this is exactly what the universe looks like from every pointin the universe. The bubble is a result of the speed of light. The farther you get from Earth, the older the picture that we see gets. The sun is 8 light minutes away, so when you look at the sun (not recommended) that's what it looked like 8 minutes ago. The next closest star is 4 light years away, so when you look at it, you're seeing what it looked like 4 years ago. Once you're looking far enough away, the distance is so great that it would take light longer than the universe has existed to reach us from there. That defines the boundary of our observable universe, and since it's a set distance away from us in every direction, there is a sphere around the Earth with a radius of ~13 billion light years that encompasses the observable universe (of Earth). Everything is expanding away from us, because the expansion is caused by the addition of "more space" between points rather than actual movement. Going back to that balloon, if you were shrunk down and plopped on that balloon before it was inflated, you could draw little dots on the surface all around you. When the balloon inflates, every dot will appear to move away from you, and the farther they are from you, the faster they'll seem to be move. But that will be how it looks from any point on the surface of the balloon and how it looks to all of the dots as well. In reality, the balloon is just stretching and there is now more balloon between you and each dot.

Everyone starts out ignorant. It's only a permanent state of affairs for those people who aren't willing to correct it.

Really, it'd be a lot easier and more practical to just launch a very large spaceship out into interstellar space. Even a hollowed out asteroid or something.

The broadest overview of physics would go something like this: It's the methodology for determining the behavior of everything in the universe, and the body of knowledge regarding that behavior accumulated using that methodology. The methodology, in this case, being the scientific method (observe, hypothesize, test, repeat) and the body of knowledge generally consisting of mathematical formulae that describe the behavior of some aspect of nature. As far as getting the whole picture, there's a reason that textbooks tend to start with an introduction to the subject: it's a huge subject and almost everything in it builds upon previous levels of knowledge. Any kind of broad overview that doesn't build on the basics that are probably in your textbook is going to be superficial to the point of being useless. It'd be like trying to teach someone calculus without first teaching them how to count. The lesson is going to boil down to something like "you can use it to describe curves" which is nice but useless as far as helping someone actually understand calculus.

That is, more or less, the reason wood will never melt. The reason it burns is that some of those chemicals undergo an oxidation reaction at high temperatures which gives off heat and light. That's what fire is.

People like stereotypes and generalizations because coming up with broad categories that can be given labels is easier than trying to determine the specific attributes of each individual instance of everything we encounter from scratch. Sometimes this gets us into less than favorable territory (see: racial profiling and the like), but in general it's pretty useful. You know what an apple looks and tastes like, right? In my experience, no two apples ever look and taste exactly alike, even the same variety. Sometimes the differences are larger and sometimes they're more subtle depending on where the apples are grown, when they're picked, etc, but there are actual differences between every apple. Imagine that, rather than saying "apples are my favorite food," you had to say "my favorite good is the apple I ate last Tuesday" and no one was able to relate to that because they didn't taste that specific fruit and don't have a concept of what apples taste like "in general." Or imagine learning how to use a computer and then borrowing your friend's laptop, the exact same model as yours, and having to relearn how to use it from scratch because you don't have the ability to generalize skills you've learned in one situation to another situation, even if it is almost identical. So generalities are pretty useful, and because of that we're hardwired to make use of them on a pretty near constant basis. Everything we see and interact with during the day gets categorized. Chairs, signs, computers, phones, food. We can tell at a glance what category everything falls into, which is good because having to closest inspect every object we encounter to figure out what it's used for would be a colossal waste of time. Uniforms function on this principle by allowing us to quickly identify the role a particular person is functioning in at a glance. The association between roles and manner of dress gets deeply ingrained through repeated exposure. What a person wears colors how you view them. And this applies to how we see ourselves, as well. Obviously, an impression we get from the way other people dress is going to more strongly impact our impression of them than the way we dress will affect our impression of ourselves, but that isn't because our self-image is any more the result of careful self-examination and rational appraisal of who we are. It's because in general we already have a lot of beliefs about ourselves that any new impressions will be competing with, but it will still have an impact. If you dress in a way that you associate with productivity, you are more likely to see yourself as being productive and therefore more likely to act in a productive manner.

You may not realize that's what you're doing, but you're looking for a perpetual motion machine. Those are impossible. Everything breaks down eventually. Everything. Full stop. Any system will tend toward equilibrium until it runs out of usable energy. You can prolong that process by adding energy to the system, but in the absence of an external source of energy, eventually there won't be enough left to keep things "running."

See enough men kiss and it loses it's novelty. I credit plowing through the first two seasons of Torchwood some years back with stamping out any latent feelings of awkwardness about seeing two men kiss that I had left from previous lack of exposure.

How in the world do you get from the one to the other? Does anyone actually believe that if Rand Paul was the one in the White House right now he wouldn't be taking the exact opposite stance on this?

Most of its autonomic functions and reflexes are controlled by the brain stem, which was intact. Basically, just enough of Mike's brain was left after having his head chopped off for the body to keep running on autopilot. Edit: And... didn't look at the link so I guess that section of the article makes my post a bit redundant.

Flatworms do not have a brain. They have a very rudimentary nervous system that does not include a brain. Jellyfish, likewise, do not have brains. Just about the only thing we know about how consciousness works is that it is rooted in brain activity. Whether a jellyfish even has consciousness is up for debate, and if it does, we've no way to quantify it because, again, no brain for us to measure the activity of. So again, the answer is no. There is no immortal animals with regenerating brains that grow back missing chunks if you chop them out, and even if you were to regenerate brain tissue, large chunks of your personality, all of your memories and various other things that make up "you" are stored in a pattern of neuronal connections that you develop through experiences and is not stored in your DNA. It'd be like keeping a journal and having someone tear out the pages. Even if you replace them with new pages, they're blank. Anything written on those pages that you didn't have written down elsewhere as well is gone.

Flatworms don't have brains.

No.

Eclectic means the opposite of selective.

Asking what language a quantum computer would be programmed in is a bit like asking what language a newborn baby speaks. Programming languages are created by people to make it easier to program computers: They let people write commands in a way that is easy for people to understand and then let the computer translate those commands into machine language. Presumably quantum computers would be programmed in some version of existing languages that are modified to handle the way a quantum computer operates, or in totally new as-yet-undeveloped-languages that computer scientists of the future will develop for the purpose of more easily programming a quantum computer.

There isn't one. There are mathematical proofs and experimental evidence. You can accumulate evidence to an arbitrarily high level of confidence but you can't physically prove something 100%.

And this is why no animal in the history of the world has ever messed with a brontosaurus and lived.

Almost certainly. That's a bit of a non-sequitur, though.

Assuming there's no after life (I think that is probably a safe assumption, but I will admit that it is an assumption), there is no living forever. Even if you somehow manage to find a way to transfer your mind into some other construct, build on top of your current brain, or rebuild new, healthy duplicates of yourself every time your body gets run down, you will eventually die. The sun is going to expand and wipe out life on Earth. Before that, there are about a million natural disasters that will probably kill you and destroy whatever technology you might use to bring yourself back, including at least a couple dinosaur killers. And even if you somehow make it out of the solar system and avoid all of the million and one pitfalls that will probably kill you outside the bounds of our terrestrial home, the heat death of the universe means that there will eventually be no useable energy in the universe left to keep your brain (or whatever you are at that point) running. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about that. So basically, we are all eventually going to die no matter what life-prolonging tricks we might come up with. There is no immortality.

DNA doesn't keep track of what mutations have previously existed or not, but this has nothing to do with the existence of identical twins, who will almost certainly wind up with at least a few different mutations from each other, anyway.

Depending on how you define "intuitive understanding," yes.

In fairness, no animal in the history of the Earth has ever messed with a brontosaurus and lived.

When you get into General Relativity, the rules are a bit different because gravity isn't treated as a force so much as a change in the geometry of space. That new geometry means that an object that is "standing still" may be accelerating, and an inertial path can take you in a circle. That said, you can no longer calculate time dilation just using relative speed at that point. You have to take into account gravitational effects as well, which changes the result. So you still can't set up a system the way you had described and obtain the result you were asking about.

That math is literally garbage even for the mistaken way that the person is trying to calculate the odds. That said, yes, the odds of all of that happening by chance are astronomically small. But evolution isn't random. The mutations are random, but they get filtered by natural selection, which is not. Ok, let's say you want to flip a coin 6 times and get heads every time. There's a 1 in 64 chance of that happening. If we treat each set of 6 flips as a discreet event (rather than just continuously flipping the coin until you get 6 heads in a row), it will take 64 rounds, on average, for you to get your set of all heads. Now let's consider that, in the real world, you're not going to have one animal of a particular species at a time. You're going to have a fairly sizable population all reproducing and mutating at once. So we're going to give you a population of 8 coins to flip at once. This, right here, brings the average number of rounds down to 8. The coin that gets heads flipped 6 times in a row in the first scenario needs to be flipped an average of 384 times. In this situation, the "winning" coin only needs 48 flips. That's pretty good. Now, let's add natural selection. After the first flip, we remove all of the coins that came up tails (roughly half), and the remaining coins "reproduce" and make copies of themselves that we'll treat as sharing the same flip history. So after the first flip, we wind up with 4 coins that came up heads and 4 that came up tails. The tails coins die, so we just have 4 heads. Now the heads coins reproduce, so we have 8 coins that came up heads in the first flip. This happens each flip, and so at the end of each flip, we have 8 coins that are treated as if they'd come up heads every flip thus far. That means that at the end of 6 flips, the end of a round, we'll have our 6 heads in a row. The only way this doesn't happen is if every coin comes up tails at some point, and the odds of 8 coins all coming up tails at once are 1/256. Since there are 6 flips, and thus 6 chances for this to happen, it comes out to a roughly 2.5% chance. That means that you have a ~97.5% chance of getting your set of 6 heads in a row on the first round, compared with a ~1.5% chance of that happening by chance the way your friend attempted to calculate it. So you can see, natural selection skews the odds a bit when there is a selection pressure towards a particular trait. Each trait doesn't have to appear fully formed, and they certainly aren't all appearing fully formed at once in a single generation. That is what your friend was calculating the odds of, and everyone agrees that the odds of that happening are so remote as to be physically impossible. Instead what happens is that a trait appears that makes the hyena-thing slightly better at swimming. As the population spends more and more time in the water, those who are better swimmers are less likely to drown, more likely to obtain food in the water and less likely to get caught by something that could kill it (either on land by escaping into the water or in the water by being a better swimmer). Each new generation is a population with all of the best traits of the previous generation, and in the environment these animals were living in those traits are more whale-like. This is something that would have happened over many, many generations each of which consisted of a very large population of animals with each generation building on the progress of the last, not something happening to an individual all at once. It'd be like calculating the odds of one guy in an ancient hunter-gatherer society making all of the discoveries and inventions necessary to land on the moon and then declaring that, because it's basically impossible for this person to accomplish the task single-handedly in his lifetime, it is impossible for people to go to the moon. Edit: typo

I don't pretend to know who is going to win this far ahead of the election, but I do know that Rand Paul won't be our next President.