Delta1212

Is it possible that the black hole would evaporate before you reached the singularity?

If the Big Bang were the result of matter spewing out of a wormhole, it would all be expanding outward from a central point. That is not what is happening, so that is not what happened.

I imagine a white hole would be fairly warm. Did you mean wormhole, though?

"Released into the universe" was a simplification. The energy was already present in the universe, but in a useable form. It is "released into the universe" in an unusable form.

That's not how we define things as "complete." A theory is complete if it accurately predicts all results we see in nature. It is not complete when we find results that match everything it predicts if there are also results it does not predict. Science doesn't "complete" a theory by finding all of the things it predicts and then moving on. It "completes" a theory by finding everything the theory doesn't predict and then figuring out a way to modify or replace it so that those things are accounted for.

Probably not, no.

The most effective thing I ever did to prevent myself from procrastinating? Find something else I needed to do but didn't want to, and use doing the work I needed to get done as an excuse to avoid doing the other work I needed to get done. I figured that procrastination was an on-going issue that I had trouble beating, so I might as well stop fighting it, plan that I was definitely going to procrastinate and just procrastinate productively.

Am I correct in believing that you are asking whether there is some act that is so evil, so unethical, that no one would ever do it? Then I'd say the answer is: No, not for any act that it is within the power of enough people to accomplish.

It's also possible that he could meddle if he wanted to, or even that he did or does meddle, without that fact invalidating science. I could program a simulation and watch it play out, but leave myself an input to change things as they progress. The rules the simulation follows when I'm not messing around with it would still be the rules, and it's entirely possible that someone watching the behavior of the simulation in order to determine the rules would never notice my little edits if they were subtle or infrequent enough.

Practice speaking. It's common advice that sounds kind of stupid, but it's common because it works. Even if you just sit in front of a mirror and practice speeches/conversation/whatever with yourself, it'll be easier to speak more fluently when you need to. As far as keeping yourself from shutting down portions of your brain when you get in front of a lot of people... I find that it helps to address one person at a time (even if no one else realizes you are doing so) or in my case, though I don't know how helpful this will be for most people, to address the air and not worrying about the people who happen to be listening (you need to remind yourself to make eye-contact more with this one than the former one where it tends to take care of itself, though). Edit: And yes, knowing what you're talking about is immeasurably helpful. During college I could give 20 minute presentations to a crowd of people with minimal prep time if it was a familiar subject or I was speaking about a project I'd spent a lot of time on, but still fall flat on my face when expected to speak for two minutes on a subject that I hadn't been given adequate time to familiarize myself with.

The more you know about life, the less useful the term "life" becomes for defining things. It's an arbitrary distinction. Everyone knows it's an arbitrary distinction. It doesn't really matter because life isn't really an objectively existing "thing." It's a category we made up that can cover or not cover whatever we want (depending on how we decide to define it) without being "wrong."

While no analogy is perfect, mass really has no effect on whether something can escape a black hole, and since mass is intimately related to gravity, assigning it a property in an analogy that is does not have in reality can make things more confusing rather than clearer.

I realize this is basically a pointless question but: Why can't it switched on or off?

I avoid MSNBC in the same way I avoid Fox. Better than 9 times out of 10, I already know what they're going to say on a given topic even before I know more than the barest details. I find that Fox tends to be more manipulative and/or outright wrong in its reporting than MSNBC, but both inject a heavy dose of opinion into their reporting and political bias into their choice of stories, which I don't care for. I watch both occasionally, but I don 'to consider either a good primary news source and don't treat them as such: because they're not. You can argue about degree and kind in terms of why they're each awful, but since there are some actual good news sources out there, I don't see any reason to value one over the other just because it uses a different, less poisonous form of terrible journalism. Edit: Just because Fox News is lying when it says that every other source of news but them is a biased, lefty piece of garbage does not mean that there aren't news sources with a pronounced liberal bias. I'm way left of the American center, but I don't need my news to come from an echo chamber, even if it agrees with me. In fact, I'd rather watch Fox if only because it's easier to spot the lies you disagree with than the slant that you already believe to be true.

Humans can't change the laws of physics. We can modify our descriptions of laws, but we cannot do so arbitrarily: only as the evidence directs us. Right now, there either exists a way for time travel to take place or there does not. If there is, we have yet to discover it. If there is not, there is nothing we can do to make time travel possible. So to answer your question: We may, in the future, find a way to travel through time and modify our knowledge of natural laws to reflect this. If in fact it is impossible, however, there is no way we can make it possible and attempting to change our descriptions of the laws of nature to make it possible will merely cause those descriptions to be wrong; it will not allow us to travel through time.

That's not really how a metaphor that is meant to explain something works. If it can mean whatever you want it to mean, then it doesn't really mean anything at all.

Also, keep in mind that even if you could alter the DNA present in every cell of your body, there are some things this could do and some things it could not. If you replaced all of your DNA with someone else's somehow, for example, you would not morph into their twin. Some things (perhaps hair?) may become more like theirs, but your height isn't going to change nor are your facial features going to rearrange themselves. For some things, it would be like editing a blueprint after the house is already built: It's not going to change the house. For other things, though, it'd be like editing the product plans for an assembly line: you start spitting out new material. So for on-going processes, you can alter how they function, which may improve things or make everything go haywire. For processes that have already finished, altering your DNA isn't going to go back and rewrite everything that has been done as if you'd had that DNA from the start.

When I was younger, I thought comics/statements like that were jokes or exaggerations. Then I learned more and the world became a very different and increasingly more fascinating place.

I'm wondering if he thinks putting that together creates a nuclear reactor, or if we'll all just want nuclear reactors as quaint decorations in our homes that we'll be able to build because of all the free energy.

There is a serious degree of misunderstanding of how genetics works. DNA isn't rigidly expressed. How your genetic code is interpretted and what results it produces when building you is highly dependent on environment and this has been found to be especially true of intelligence. Brain development is highly dependent upon proper nutrition and an engaging environment. It is a complex organ and sub-par building materials will result in a brain that reaches less than full potential. A hazardous, stressful environment which discourages mental development will also hinder mental development in comparison with a secure environment that fosters learning. It's enough of an effect that people with "average" genetic intelligence can have well above average intelligence while those with "exceptional" genetic intelligence can be comparatively stunted. And choosing a partner based on her own intelligence won't tell you whether she's someone who has exceeded her potential despite average genetics because of environmental factors, or whether she's someone who has exceeded her environment because of even more exceptional genetics. You could get lucky or wind up with a lemon either way. The single best thing you can do to improve the intelligence of your children is to properly care for them, not choosing a mate for her presumed genetics. Adequate nutrition and encouragement to enjoy learning won't turn an average person into Einstein, but they will allow your child to reach his or her full potential which will probably be above what most people achieve regardless of how "natively" smart they are.

122. There's a man that Bolivian records claim is 123 (if you trust Bolivian records) and the oldest person with confirmed documentation is a now-deceased 122 year old. Assuming no one else has lived to 122 (and I think that is probable) and the Bolivian man is actually 123 (somewhat less probable, but still possible) then the answer is 122.

There is one I like, a short story that I can't remember the name of, that inverts the usual human-advanced alien civilization tropes. Humanity is frequently the young upstart civilization that comes into contact with a more advanced civilization with tall, beautiful aliens who live long lives and are more enlightened. By comparison, human lives are "nasty, brutish and short" but humanity is also much more innovative than the advanced but stagnant civilization. So this story had humanity descend on a pre-industrial planet with a small, ugly indigenous population whose reproductive cycle is extremely violent and who only live for an average of 2-3 years but who are brilliantly adaptable and with only minor input from humanity manage to go from a Stone Age level civilization to roughly WWI industrialization in like a decade.

That was sort of my point, but it was still an interesting read. Thank you.

Adjusting my perspective on something to more closely match the way it behaves seems both rational and defensible to me. That doesn't mean that my new perspective is "the real ultimate truth of the universe" but it certainly more closely matches the behavior of the universe than my old perspective. It's not as if that original perspective has an innately better claim to being true simply by virtue of coming first, after all. Our initial conception of how reality works is essentially just a model of reality based on our experiences, but we develop it at an age where we're too young to realize we're doing that and often don't remember most of the experiences that led us to form and refine our ideas about how reality works. Since we don't realize we're creating a mental model, we tend to accept the assumptions we've made as being true until they are indisputably challenged (and sometimes not even then). The only difference between changing our perspective based on scientific evidence and the development of our initial perspective is that we're aware of what we're doing and why we're changing it in the case of conforming to the evidence. "Counter-intuitive" results are really just results that are unlikely to happen in daily life and so fail to be incorporated into our initial conception of reality. There's nothing that makes them inherently more problematic than the intuitive ideas except that we're more used to them.

I'm also wondering what the difference between a material and non-material entity and what qualifies spacetime as being the latter? Ok, I realize that sounds like a silly question on the face of it, but... What makes an entity material? That it's made of "stuff?" What is an electron made of? But ok, an electron has mass so maybe that means it's material. Is a photon non-material, then? But you can interact with a photon, and since the argument is that you can affect spacetime because it is non-material (or at least, that it seems counter-intuitive that you should be able to affect a non-material entity) then I have to assume photons are material. So if it's not mass, is it that material entities have a defined locations? But again, electrons only have a very broadly defined location, and really, everything can only sometimes be defined as having a specific location when the scale is small enough, and since I'm assuming things don't constantly switch between being material and non-material... What makes spacetime special that you shouldn't be able to alter its geometry? This seems like one of those things in science that is "really weird" but still no less weird than a ton of other results that initially seem counter-intuitive until you've adjusted your perspective of how the universe works to be more in line with what experiment says happens instead of what your preconceptions say should happen. If reality was intuitive, science would be superfluous.