Greg H.

IIRC, the Greeks had some sort of ladle that worked on this principle. You dunked the bowl with small holes in it into a water source, covered the hole on the end of the long neck with your thumb and lifted out a bowl full of water. I'll have to see if I can find it.

At this point I am withdrawing from this discussion so that I don't violate the rules of the forum. I may rejoin if the OP decides to post some actual science, as opposed to conjecture. Good luck gentlemen -- I have a feeling you'll need it.

We've given you about a hundred different posts on why this idea of yours (stop calling it a theory - it's not a theory, at least not in the scientific sense. It barely counts as a hypothesis) falls apart, and you have not yet provided any reason to make us recant our collective position. It's not that the scientific community is "out to get you" or "hide the truth from the masses". You're just wrong.

Fair enough, and I definitely appreciate the honest consideration of the question. Some people would have just blown it off.

At this point I am not even sure what to say. We've essentially refuted your idea with science that's been done over the last hundred years, yet you offer no new reasons why we should reconsider your idea. You're not offering any mechanisms for the expansion of the earth which haven't already been shown to be wrong (or just flat out impossible) and when we ask you to back up your assertions with some kind of evidence, or even a proposal for some new mechanism, you tell us you haven't thought that far ahead yet. This is what my dad would call a half baked idea. Put it back in the oven a while.

This much is true - we expect assertions to be backed up with evidence, not hand waving and repetition of the same idea over and over again. Contrary to popular belief, saying something repeatedly does not necessarily mean it's true. Unfortunately for you, that's the way the rest of the scientific community expects it to be presented too. Also, your analogy to the man creating fire is a bad one. Man discovered fire, he didn't research it. Most probably he found a burning bush or tree from alighting strike, or some other source - who knows. The point is, he didn't need science to discover the fire itself. It was already out there waiting for him to stumble over it. Where the science comes in is, how does fire work? What does it mean to burn something? What changes are happening during the burning? These DID require a scientific approach, positing of theories and then testing those theories to acquire evidence. As a result, we now have a pretty solid idea of the chemical changes that happen in fuels being burned. The problem with your idea is all the evidence for the last century refutes the idea that the earth is expanding, and you haven't presented any new mechanisms or causes that might force a reversal on that course.

Haven't watched the video yet - I am still working my way through the TED Talks series. I am just curious why his religious stance (or yours) matters at all, and why you felt the need to preface your topic with an exposition of the difference.

You may need to explain why this matters a bit more than you did. The fact that oxygen is bound up in molten iron isn't that big of a surprise since iron captures oxygen so readily (it's called rust in the vernacular). However, once it's bound it up, it doesn't just go giving it away willy nilly. Also your first source is nearly forty years old judging by the date. Isn't it just possible that someone may have done some more current research? As for your second source, which scientists? Is there a list of references of a bibliography on that website that would point us at the material they based their writings on?

A little new... A little old...

Ok, there is so much wrong with that statement I don't even know how to respond to it. First, not all liquids will readily mix - ever eaten oil and vinegar on your salad? It's a nonsensical statement unless you know which gasses or liquids you're talking about (i.e. you have some kind of empirical evidence of these gasses so we can all be on the same page). And the phrase "liquid gasses" makes no sense at all. They're either liquids or gasses; not both. They may be liquefied gasses but those present their own special problems. Once the crust ruptured to start letting the "liquid gasses" out, the overall pressure would begin falling even more rapidly as the liquid began to boil out. At a certain point, the surface of the earth in that area would subside significantly with the falling pressure, and keep subsiding as the pressure chamber continued emptying. I was kind of wondering that myself.

Try telling someone you mass 4.66 slugs and see how many odd looks you get.

I would just like to point out that pressure vessels that fail (the pressure causes them to crack or fragment) do not normally remain in a single identifiable piece. They normally end up scattered all of the landscape. If you've ever seen a pressure cooker with a bad lid, you know what I'm talking about. What you are suggesting is that the earth cracked just enough to bleed off pressure, without shattering. We know that the earth's crust is somewhat flexible due to the uplift in the crust that happens after massive glacial regression. If however, there were a massive bubble of gaseous pressure at the core of the planet that suddenly popped it's way out, you would expect to see the surface of the earth suddenly retract from that spot, in exactly the same way a stretched balloon does when you put in too much gas. In short, expelling the gas inside a volume doesn't make the body larger - it makes it smaller. Unless your proposing that the rate of gas formation is larger than the rate of release. In which case we should expect to see the fracture sites getting larger over time (since pressure, like just about every other force in nature, will take the path of least resistance). You'd also need to explain why the gas pressure generation increases over time, since eventually the gas creation rate and the expulsion rate should reach equilibrium (otherwise we're back to the shattered planet scenario). Oh, and while you're working out the increasing gas production issue, feel free to work on the why this hasn't cracked the planet in half like a walnut issue too.

This is one those theories that, years from now, people will look back on and wonder how anyone even thought this might actually be right.

The reason why light takes 8 minutes to reach earth from the sun is simple; we're eight light-minutes away from the sun. Light doesn't go anywhere instantly.

People's behavior that has little to no impact on me rarely upsets me. I simply file the inconsistency in their behavior away for future reference. I also try not to judge people without knowing precisely what I am judging. Perhaps the atheist in question was simply bowing his head for a moment of silence out of respect for something and not really praying. I myself have been invited to attend religious events (usually weddings) and when the officiant calls for a moment of prayer, I will also normally bow my head out of respect for the couple being married. I'm not praying, however much it may look like I am.

Agreed.

Which leads me to ask, if I'm interested in 1 of Britain's 70 million people, why do I pick something other than people?

I'm just not sure how you could pick imaginary discrete objects like people. Conceptually, it's very hard to picture.

As uncool said, DH has already pointed out that the articles themselves are pretty much bunk. Saying "read them again" isn't going to make them any less wrong. Your job, at this point, is to make a convincing argument why DH's refutations, and our subsequent arguments are incorrect (or fallacious, if that happens to be the case), not telling us to re-read what has already been demonstrated to be incorrect.

And had you bothered to read both my comment and the linked source, you wouldn't have made such a crucial mistake in interpretation. Michelson-Morley never claimed the aether did not exist. Their experiment resulted in a null hypothesis - they could not reject the idea the aether did not exist. To clarify, what they basically determined was that they did not have the evidence required to prove conclusively that such a material existed and was responsible for the expected predictions. Subsequent experiments also came to the same lack of proof, leading contemporary scientists to conclude the theory was incorrect. You're gong to need to start ponying up some actual substantial discussions if you expect anyone to continue debating with you. Invoking God in every other post is not what I would call scientific evidence of anything, since you would first need to be able to prove that God exists (scientifically).

The second comment wasn't uncool's, it was mine, so I'll take up the argument here. First, the luminiferuous aether was proposed as a light bearing medium to explain how light propagates from one place in the universe to another. It was proven to be an incorrect notion by several experiments, with the Michelson-Morely experiment being arguably the most famous, in which the fellows concluded that they could not reject the idea that there was no aether. Several other experiments, including some of different methodologies followed, and all came to the same conclusion.1 The idea that Dark Matter and Dark Energy are a rekindling of the aether idea seems kind of a stretch. The gravity that affects the motions of those outer stars has to come from somewhere - the fact that we cannot see what causes those gravitational effects does not mean we're conjuring up something for which we have no evidence. The laws of gravity and nature (as we understand them) require that something create those gravitational effects. Just because that matter is non-luminous does not mean we are now suddenly accepting the idea of the luminiferous aether again. The existence of dark matter, unlike the aether, has experimental evidence to back it up, most notably the work of Vera Rubin.2 As for your argument that just because we found dark matter, it necessarily follows that there must be other substances that cannot be seen is pure conjecture. No evidence for such substances exist, and if they did exist, we should expect to see them interacting with normal matter in some fashion, even if weakly(i.e. the gravitational effects of dark matter). The follow-along idea that this somehow proves the existence of God is nonsense bordering on absurdity. ---------- 1 - Luminiferous Aether @ Wikipedia 2 - Greene, B. (2004). The Fabric of the Cosmos. Vintage Books: New York. pp 294-296.

Humans are very good at coming up with new and interesting ways to kill each other, and new and strange reasons to excuse it. "God told me to do it" is neither new nor strange as far as reasons go - it's been around since at least the dawn of recorded history. The only thing that's changed is which god is doing the talking.

And while we're on the subject of unanswered questions, can we return for a moment to my question in post 3 of this thread about what any of this has to do with materialism and atheism obfuscating the truth of physics? I'm still kind of wondering what that has to do with any of the rest of it, or if this whole thing is just random thought wanderings scribbled down on the back of an electronic napkin.

On this particular forum they use a software called Latex. You can read more about it here: Quick LaTeX tutorial thread.