Greg H.

Since maintaining anything forever is an impossibility, your question is ridiculous. Nothing is certain.

That's a false dichotomy, my friend. There are middle grounds that could be taken, and indeed sometimes are, for instance, repression of an article if the information could prove harmful if given to a terrorist organization.

I wouldn't call it faith. I have confidence that they know what their talking about - at least, until something proves them wrong. I base that confidence on their experience and expertise in their chosen field. Faith has become one of those imprecise muddy words that we English speakers like to use when we really mean something else. To me faith has connotations of trust (or belief) without evidence, or any real reason to support it. I don't have faith in my doctor, I have confidence he knows what he's talking about because he's been trained to be a doctor, and he's been my physician for ten years. Perhaps it's not a fair comparison at that, but I have a hard time understanding why people refuse to learn enough about a subject to make an informed opinion, rather than having their opinions force fed to them. Is that a societal issue?

We don't accept science from a position of faith. We accept science based on the evidence it produces. No one can know everything - there simply isn't enough time to relearn everything the human race has uncovered in the last few thousand years. When I need facts about science, I read people who are acknowledged in that field - physicists, chemists, biologists. We I need information on a medical condition I consult a doctor. If I need information concerning faith, I consult a religious scholar. I don't consult a priest about science, especially cutting edge science, because it would be an unreasonable expectation on my part to assume the priest knows as much as the scientist. There's nothing wrong with accepting the advice of experts. But you have to choose people who actually are experts. Really? Do these same people also have trouble differentiating between a neurosurgeon and an auto mechanic? I don't know squat about either one, but I have no trouble figuring out which one I need to fix which problem.

The difference is the difference between accepting the word of someone who knows what they're talking about, and someone who does not. It's like taking medical advice from an 8 year old. Sure you can, but it's not really a good idea.

You make a good point. Personally, I don't have the impartiality necessary to do either of those two jobs (moderate or police).

As a friendly word of advice, telling a moderator not to get his panties in a knot when you're questioning the way in which they do their jobs - not a good idea. That's a bit like punching a cop and daring him to tase you.

I am going to chime in with my own two cents. Honestly, I don't give a crap if the moderators are flesh gobbling aliens from the planet Xeezelbrox 9 here to steal our souls and turn our bodies into cat food. An Internet forum is not a democracy of the members, it is an oligarchy run by the staff and admins. If anyone has a problem with a particular moderator or moderation of a particular thread, bring it up in the appropriate manner. The rest of us really don't want to read another bitch fest about it. If anyone dislikes the way the forum is run, feel free to unsub and move on to greener pastures elsewhere. Thank you. Can we now all get back to our regularly scheduled debating, already in progress?

In short, yes. Different calculators have different levels of precision. FWIW, my TI-92 gives the same answer as the google calc.

Individually, we always have choice. As a species, I am not so sure. As for breaking our "addiction" to learning new things, it's hardwired into who we are. As a species, humans are as successful as we are because we continue to dig into the mysteries around us. I mean you think about it, if that were not the case, the Earth would "still be flat", the sun would "still orbit the Earth", and people would live to the ripe old age of 35.

I don't think that's part of human nature, to be honest. We're explorers at heart (maybe I'm romanticizing a bit here) and we're always looking for the next frontier. I don't know if that's something we can just ignore.

I'll admit Aristotle made some mistakes in his life, but then so did a lot of other people such as Einstein. That doesn't change the contributions Aristotle's propositions and his syllogisms made to modern logical thought, or that they served as an antidote to the sophistry so popular in his day.

I argue that the discoverer of fire and the inventor of managed agriculture (farming) had far more impact on human history than Jesus or his compatriots.

Actually we can still define a discrete A, even in the face of the idea that everything changes. The discrete line is that which changes separately from that things around it. If I remove the table from dining room, I can instantly see that it is a separate and discrete object from the chairs, because they are still there. If table = chairs, then they should all be in the same place. If I cut one in half, the others should suffer a similar fate - since they do not, I can rightly conclude that the one is separate from the others. Even at the atomic level, in order to say that these items form a single unit A they would need to undergo the same atomic changes at the same time. The alive - not alive argument you presented makes no sense to me. On the one hand you are speaking of viruses, which are a kind of edge case to begin with, since they really can't even reproduce without other life to support it. For another thing, you talk about when is a human being considered to be a human being, which isn't the same argument. If you mean when is a human being considered alive, then the cells would be alive from the moment of conception - whether is counts as a person in the legal sense is a completely different matter. Defining the idea of i is less concrete than it might seem, because it is inward facing, rather than outward. At the very least, I believe the concept of I can be said to include your consciousness and your physical body. After all, does not one think and the other do? And while there may be some debate of what happens to the consciousness after death, I think we can agree that the physical form, at least, ceases to function correctly once the consciousness has left it. As for the argument of human and not human, human is only a stepping stone on the road from what we used to be towards what we will become. In another hundred thousand years we might not even be able to breed with our descendants, and they will have ceased being human. That does not mean we cannot define what it means to be human - genetically and morphologically. In summary, I am failing to get how any of this refutes Aristotle's foundations of logic, and more specifically his syllogisms, which are as useful in discourse and philosophy as they are in math and the sciences.

I could support that as a working definition.

I know, but I only grabbed the ones that really jumped out at me. I did not know that. That's interesting. And that's why I love this forum. I'm always learning something new.

This is some of the most ridiculous nonsense I have read in a very long time. The Earth went pear-shaped? The moon's surface is two different ages? This is pure unadulterated crap, and I would suggest you marshal some actual evidence to support your claims aside from a vague reference to a single map.

Agreed.

Not necessarily. If they're responding contrary to the mainstream of physics, I expect the bar on their evidence to be that much higher, but I don't automatically dismiss their claims unless, as pmb said, they are simply blatantly wrong, or putting forth arguments that have been repeatedly addressed and found lacking.

I understand that as far as the equations are concerned, there really is no direction in time. They are equally valid whether time moves in a positive direction or a negative one. I don't have the math skills to use the equations, so I'll borrow an example from Greene again. He says that, based solely on the math of the equations, it is far more likely that a partially melted ice cube sprang into existence from a state of higher entropy (for instance a glass of water) than from a state of lower entropy (a completely frozen ice cube). The question he goes on to ask is - why do we never see this happening, if there really is no flow to time? You have to admit, the idea of an arrow of time is a compelling one. So what makes you, personally, accept the idea it's not a good explanation for what we experience (with the proviso, of course, that what we experience is not always the best measure of reality, as quantum mechanics so forcefully teaches us)? I'll check that out - thank you again.

So I read the paper. Fascinating stuff, and it shows me that we still have a lot to learn about the deeper roots of the universe. However, one of the ideas presented in this paper is not that time does not flow, but that time does flow, and that flow, as well as the arrow of time, are fundamentally tied into the universe at a quantum level. The author goes on to state that: Brian Green at least echoes the sentiment of there being a defined direction in time's flow in his book The Fabric of the Cosmos: Professor Greene goes on to say in the end notes for that section: Now, I grant that both the book and the paper are at least four years old. What prompted such a drastic shift in the mindset of the physics community between then and now to bring us to the conclusion that the flow of time does not really happen?

I was told there would be cake.

Thank you - I'll let you know what I think after I have had time to read it and digest the information. I appreciate the information immensely.

Then there would be a weight discrepancy between the original sample and the constituent elements left over afterwards. Nature, unlike mankind, does not try to fool you, or obfuscate itself. It may be difficult to understand or to believe, and it may not make much sense once you do understand it, but it's not deliberately concealing itself from scientific inquiry.