studiot

Confusing maybe and I am sorry for that. Impossible, certainly not. You are looking for hidden difficulties, when I am trying to simplify and make as plain as possible. Imagine, if you will, a super bright torch, say the star Arcturus. 36 and a half years ago the the light that arcturus was generating is now arriving on Earth. On its journey, the light passes AlphaCentauri (I haven't checked if this star is in the correct orientation so please bear with me for this thought experiment - it is only an illustration) and some falls there and could be observed. The rest of that part of the output which is coming our way continues on and in turn I can observe some of it on Earth. More still will carry on to other locations. What I should perhaps add is that this is an illustration that the speed of light should be constant at different times as well as different places, according to Einstinain relativity.

Good enough. +1

There are clearly as many views on the meanings of philosophy, science and reality as there are posters here. Small wonder there are such differences or that this type of discussion belongs in the pub. Let's all go down to the pub to finish it.

Well I already made some comments you didn't bother to answer so why should I bother pointing out the flaws in your latest post?

Thank you for responding to these to questions about my post, Strange but this is not what I meant, although true of itself. The question was Is the speed of light constant? One of the axioms of Einstinian Relativity is briefly that The speed of light is the same for all observers. So some observer in Alpha Centauri observes some light passing by from a more distant star and measures the light as c1 then relativity asserts that it will still be c1 when I measure the same light passing me 4 and a half years later. So the speed of light is constant.

But it would only work on Sundays.

'becoming' is not a complete verb. It can only be used as such in conjunction with an auxiliary verb such as was becoming, is becoming etc. Strictly it is the gerund part of the verb which is the posh name for a verb used as a noun. 'before' is a preposition So you have preposition + noun = preposition phrase

I don't know what you made of my last comment but I would suggest you might ask What validity does the concept of causation have ? Here is more on my last comment. All the presentation so far is' linear' or 'sequential' But can you still establish 'causation' and what does it mean if The same set of circumstances can lead to different effect if repeated. That is one cause can have multiple effects. The process is non linear as in a tunnel diode so the effect depends upon path you approach through. There is Hysteresis in the system.

+1

I looked at your website, but I cannot endorse it as it contains too many misconceptions. The principle one being that the only non water substances in water are the organic ones. and that the inorganic substances that make water 'hard' are harmful. Both of these statements are seriously false. Also, since you mention it specifically here, they give you 'electrolytes' in hospital not plain water because if you keep replacing body fluid with water, the substances normally in your body fluids will graduyally become more and more dilute. These substances are part of the normal biochemical processes in the body, so this is potentially very serious. This danger also happens to athletes and others who loose much fluid through perspiration. The simplest 'balanced' electrolyte solution is a mixture of common salt and sugar, dissolved in plain water (probably what is called deionised not distilled). This is usually called 'saline' in hospitals. Salt is inorganic! Sugar is, of course organic. Further the organic material in so called 'happy waters' is often found to be contaminants from organisms or their residues when analysed by our local water authorities, which they regularly do. As regards to hard water; The hardness of tap water is regulated in most areas because 'soft' water is slight acidic - acidic enough to attack copper and other (lead) pipes and introduce heavy metal poisons into the water. Highly undesirable. Hard water also has a well documented beneficial effect. Studies have shown that in soft water areas such as Glasgow and Scunthorpe the risk of later life heart disease is significantly increased over hard water areas such as London and the South East of England. The Scunthorpe data was particularly telling since they changed sources to softer water and the heart disease rate went up, so they changed back and it went down again. Such studies obviously take decades. So full marks for wanting to get thing correct, I look foward to hearing of suitable improvements on your site. I say this because you should not take my opinion to be that 'Everything in the garden is rosy'. It most certainly is not. You just have to find and follow the right experts. Try this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tired-Toxic-Sherry-Rogers/dp/0961882123 Dr Rogers talks a great deal of sense about modern living and ways of doing things. There have been many contaminated water scandals in America.

The OP asked about compatibility between all Buddhist teaching and Science. This implies that there is no Buddhist teaching incompatible with science. A claim was made in post#16 that a certain buddhist sutra over 2000 year ago offered quantum mechanics, amongst other scientific things and a non English reference was offered following reuqest in post#18. I found a translation and posted a small part in post#20. This makes the snake oil claim that if you hear the sutra 108 times your life will increase. This runs completely against the claim of any science and thereby answers the OP that the answer to the OP question is No Buddhism is not generally compatible with Science, even if some of it is. I have received no response to this observation.

HnadyAndy and post#7 After all the recent discussion on modern physics being about models not absolutes I think there are too many absolute statements in post#7, many of them may have some truth in them but may also be false in some circumstances. eg Photons are polarised waves with inertia. One very useful modern model of photons is the solitary wave or soliton model. Much of soliton maths also fits well with QFT maths. But like every model it works well where it works but does not answer every question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton

As regards books, Science is a pretty big expanse these days for one book but try these Fundamental Formulas of Physics : Menzel : in 2 volumes. A compendium of mathematics and Physics : Meyler and Sutton These are both a bit old now somewhat more modern are The Physics Handbook : Poole, Jr. The Princeton Companion to Mathematics : Fischer-Cripps

Thank you MigL for your appreciation of my comments. Just a small point, I did not identify modern quantum theory with classical particulate one, I merely pointed out that new information brought about a reintroduction of some particulate properties. Here is a thought about QFT. Imagine an electron in some block of substance. Do it create a field; is it a field ? If so How far does that field extend? As far as my eye? If so why does it not interact with my eye? Now Fred comes along and heats the block with a blowtorch so the electron emits a photon. You say blythely that this photon is a 'disturbance in the field' So what happens after the photon has entered my eye and been absorbed by my? cones. Does the field still exist? If the field exists when there are no photons is that not in effect a non corporeal ether? Does a QFT field ether not posses the ehter like propertiy of pervading all matter? To return to my original comment that we now teach that from the quantum point of view light has some properties of a wave, but not all and some properties of a particle, but not all. Some find this a very disturbing concept, but as a generalist I observe that such symbiosis is very common in natural processes. Even in waves, not all waves have all wave properties, as I have already noted with polarisation. But thin of plasticity. This offers some of the characteristics of a fluid and some of the charactistics of a solid. So is it solid or liquid? Why the either or?

Well thank you for your discussion example in classical Latin about electrical generators. As I understood it the most the Romans knew about electricity was the word 'amber ' and lightning. Anyway after this success I look forward to your translation into aboriginal of Bessel functions and elliptic integrals of the second kind into Australian Aboriginal language. I had always understood that the Aboriginals mathematics consisted of the numebr system one, two, many. Since I must bow to your superior knowledge I bow out of this thread.

I agree, I thought the general response rather heavy handed at the time. I also feel offended if religious preaching is presented as pseudo science and some may have thought this was the case. However the question you ask "what is light" is a vital one in science and has been the subject of a fascinating investigation stretching back at least 400 years in our civilisation alone. So I will attempt serious discussion answers to your plain questions. When we investigate something in science we abstract observations and then try to construct a model within our known theoretical structure that matches and replicates the observations and provides predictions for us to make new observations to stengthen that model. Nature does not always play ball with our models and sometimes we find that we have to make new models to suit new information. This has happened during development of several models of light. It should be said that even today we do not have a single model that explains everything. In some circumstances light behaves like one model and in other circumstances it behaves like quite a different model, even to possessing apparantly contradictory characteristics. That is what makes it so challenging. So in the modern era the first theory was due to Newton and called the corpuscular theory which regarded light as a purely mechanical stream of bullets that we now identify with 'photons'. Young offered an alternative wave explanation, still mechanical, but with some properties concerning refraction mutually exclusive to the corpuscular theory. Tests over the next century favoured the wave theory and your question about waves received much discussion. It was discovered that light could not be like sound waves because it is a purely transverse wave. That is the vibrations occur at right angles to the direction of propagation. Sound waves are longitudinal - the vibrations occur along the line of propagation. This was discovered because it is only possible to polarise a transverse wave. A longitudibnal wave has only one vibration direction available, a transvers one has many and polarisation is the process of selecting one of these. The following century was completely occupied with the issue of the medium. Up to that time the only known waves were all mechanical and all required a mechancial medium of propagation. But light can transit a vacuum. So the ether ( in fact several ethers) was proposed and much work went on to investigate the properties of the ether. The most famous of these was the Lumeniferous Aether of Lorenz. No such Aether or ether has been discovered but light was shown to be a version of the electromagnetic waves predicted by Maxwellian models and wave theory consolidated. Towards the end of that century two new observations came about. The photoelectric effect and the stability of the electron in the atom. These were incompatitible with wave theory and led to the quantum theory which allows that light has some characteristics (but not all) of waves and some characteristics of (again but not all) corpuscles or particles. And that is basically where we are today. Dos this help?

If you watch an oscillator starting ie before it 'settles' (settling time is an important feature of oscillators) you will see an initial non oscillatory output, which is fedback by a regenerative path this inturn boosts the ouput, which regenerates more until the oscillator is operating correctly. So the cause of output lies in part at any rate in the presence of feedback. But you can't have something to feed back until there is an output.

Feedback?

Does the heavily coloured picture in post#3 come with any explanation?

I have to say that I understand and agree with the sentiment expressed here, although I find the exposition a trifle short. I remember at school getting into trouble following a BBC educational programme aabout bouyancy. The official explanation was "Object float if they are lighter than water and sink if they are heavier" and I was censured for daring to suggest that in fact objects denser than water sank. Roll on a few years after I left school and some astronomy had enetered the physics curriculum; pupils are now taught that a given object weighs more on Earth than the Moon. The heavier than water explanation is still common use, especially in primary schools however. I come back to that victorian puzzle Which weighs more a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? Which has more mass? Weight varies with location, mass does not. So no, I would not define heavy as having mass.

Of course light can be and is stored. Ask any (pussy)cat for details. The problem is the process is not efficient, certainly not as efficient as you envisage, but it does work.

Not being a whatever speaker I don't understand dimreaper's comment and request a translation if there is a joke involved. However, more seriously, I endorse his choice of extract as it highlights what I (following my history teacher from years ago) see as a misconception. Let us try some examples Please translate electric power generator from English into (Roman) Latin? Please translate the Saxon word for cow into the Norman word? I think there are differences between languages and a proper linguist could no doubt come up with a myriad of untranslatable concepts. How many words do the Eskimo have for snow and how many do we?

It's actually stronger than this. Einstein's relativity and to some extent earlier ones, can be raced to the desire to declare the homogenity and isotropy of the fundamental axes. Earlier relativities could say that the (3) fundamental axes of space (What Mordred calls volume) could have isotropic and homogeneous properties - The same everywhere in all directions but still allow these properties to be different at different times. This was possible because time was thought to be a completely independent variable in earlier relativities. However following Einstein and the introduction of spacetime this is no longer tenable since time and space axes are no longer independent. So not only do we no have to say isotropy and homogeny include everywhere but also everywhen.

Yes there is a difference between perpetual motion, which is required by Newton's First Law, and a perpetual motion machine. +1 (PMM) Also there are types of perpetual motion machine. Your description refers to PMM of the first kind which is forbidden by the First Law of Thermodynamics or conservation of energy as you say. There is another, trickier, type of PMM called a PMM of the second kind, which is forbidden by yup you guessed it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Probably the most relevant enunciation here is that due to Clausius. It is impossible to transfer heat from a colder body to a warmer one without net changes in other bodies. This forbids what amounts to a double first law machine being used as a PMM (that's the tricky bit)

Almost let's see Let P be any point on the straight tunnel AB and O be the right bisector of AB, through Earth centre C. Then the geometrical relationships are as shown in the first sketch. The acceleration due to gravity at P is g' and acts towards C as shown in the second sketch. This therefore has a component acting along APOB, given by the triangle as also shown in the second sketch. Substitution shows that this acceleration component is proportional to the distance of P along AB from O and by definition must be directed towards O. This is the definition of simple harmonic motion. So the ball executes SHM between A and B with a period [math]2\pi \sqrt {\frac{a}{g}} [/math] Travel time from A to B is half this or [math]\pi \sqrt {\frac{{4000*5280}}{{32}}} = 100\sqrt {66} {\rm{seconds}}[/math] or about 42.5 minutes. Note that this is like the pendulum, independent of the Amplitude, (ie the distance along y) but depends upon the movement arm. Perhaps you can also see why the use of a, the distance to the Earth's centre is better than the depth, d. That is the High School derivation, if you really want to do a double integration then the equation of motion is [math]\frac{{{d^2}y}}{{d{t^2}}} + \frac{g}{a}y = 0[/math]