WHR

Good!!! Thank you. Then before I proceed, I must respectfully ask that terms like "fail" not be used in this discussion, because they automatically imply that the reasoning skills, education, knowledge, or authority of the person assessing the" failure" are superior to the other participant. That is not a discussion, it is a classroom lecture.

I will answer....when I have more time. But before I do, why do you think I should make any effort to convince you? Particularly so if I don't care if you are convinced or not?

I do not accept your failing grade. You are not my teacher and I am not your pupil.

Your comment assumes that I've claimed that the scientific method never has triumphs. But my point is that it isn't the scientific method that actually triumphs, it is the human mind. The scientific method is a doctrine that tethers the human mind rather than freeing it. Like a dog on a chain. This doesn't prevent the dog from sniffing around the area within his confines and making the best of his barriers. We have exhausted the value of the scientific method. Or at least come close to it. Like the dog, we've explored the radius that the shackles confine us to and become quite familiar with our surroundings. I imagine if a dog could count, he'd know how many blades of grass were within his reach. That's pretty much what we've done this far with science. Counted all the blades of grass within our reach. But we refuse to unshackle the chains and move out to the next level of truth and knowledge. And yes, who you are is certainly relevant to me. I don't expect you to reveal your identities any more than I'm going to disclose personal information. That's the unfortunate thing about using the Internet to discuss higher order concepts. The guy on the other end literally can be anyone.

Who are you and why should I value your thoughts or your objections to mine? I don't really care what anything "sounds like to you". I hope you aren't actually a research scientist, because I would question your ability to analyze observation objectively.

No, I think my overall statement can be summed up by saying that knowledge advancement does not require a play book. It is that simple. Our play book is a fabrication of our species. The truth is the truth, knowledge is knowledge. Let's step outside even our own species and find examples where evolution provided understanding of nature and ingrained it as instinct. Birds migrate based on an instinctual ability to orient themselves to the magnetic poles. They also mastered flight through evolution. Nature itself provided the means for a less evolved life form to take advantage of basic physics and fly, whereas many men died falling from heights trying to replicate what birds instinctively know. Of course, I'm not arguing that birds understand flight, magnetism, or aerodynamics. They just fly. But the terms "understand, flight, magnetism and aerodynamics" are all constructs of language, and language is our special gift from nature like flight is for birds. Our special ability is to share our knowledge through conceptualization. But the argument remains, there are other ways to exploit truth, other paths. Evolution itself provides a simple and limited means. Evolution is not intelligent and does not follow a method, it may be a process but it's not a method. So, I already know that someone who can't think outside of rigid boundaries is already reading an argument that evolution has a relationship with how the human mind discovers things about nature and is thinking "crackpot". Someone with a more liberated mind can see the connection. This is just one example though. We do not know that the complexities of understanding that lie ahead for us as new paradigms replace old ones (and they will) and as we exhaust the limits of understanding. Many futurists believe that we are quickly approaching the technological/biological singularity where brains, bodies, and computers will merge. The Internet itself is a new way of networking knowledge and exchanging ideas across great distances at the speed of light. Yet we do not use this to its fullest potential. When we do, it can lead to great things. NASA used a foam material that was light but super strong to catch the debris from a comet several years ago. There is an Internet based project that encourages amateurs to examine the photos to pick out possible cosmic material and identify it. Many astronomy projects use the Internet connected to telescopes and databases and encourage novices at home to help search the heavens for various phenomenon. Many eyes, many minds, many hours of labor. Yet, forums all across the Internet where topics of science are discussed are met with hostility. We haven't yet learned to use the internet's vast abilities to link our minds and advance our knowledge by orders of magnitude. We remain stuck in the 19th century model where only members of a royal society can be scientists or participate on science. I really enjoy the work of Michio Kaku. He has a knack for making science something for everyone. He isn't afraid to speculate. He can talk about two competing concepts in cosmology or physics in the same breath and not ridicule one at the expense of the other. He can talk about dark matter and energy and an accelerating universe, then give honest credence to the possibility that we don't understand something and talk about the ramifications of a "big crunch" in the same lecture. That's an old paradigm that may one day be revisited as our understanding of nature grows. But he is in a position where his intellect is already acknowledged. He doesn't have to worry about staying in good graces with colleagues. He works within the mainstream, but somehow I think if some bright young amateur came to him with an untested idea, he'd facilitate the idea rather than argue with them on the Internet for hours and call them a crackpot. I think he knows intuitively that in 30 to 50 years all of our brains will be networked together and shared ideas with liberal methodolgies will become the rule of science as science itself evolves to keep up with the new paradigm of life itself. That pretty much sums it up. Ummmm .....common sense????? Are you so far removed from everyday life experience that you couldnt make that obvious connection without having to prove it?? Are there no obvious aspects of nature that we just sorta figure out with the gift of our intelligence? One human being cannot experience every experience that existence may offer, but somehow we know certain things even without ever having experienced them. For example, the color red is associated with danger, poisons, heat, things that might harm you. Animals with red fur, markings, eyes, etc are usually considered dangerous. If I were bitten by a snake with red stripes, I would probably deduce that insects or arachnids with red markings or flesh might be dangerous too. I might fear a bird with red feathers and assume it was aggressive. I may sometimes be wrong about it because red might also be a mating color for some species, however, my common sense and ability to make associations and connections without having to TEST my fears would probably help preserve my health and maybe life. What I'm saying is that we have built into us the faculty to discover and comprehend so many things, yet we have unintentionally chained our collective minds with the rule book of the scientific method. We were given two hemispheres to our brains for a reason, but science forces is to abandon one in favor of the other. Let me put this another way. The scientific method as a doctrine has one purpose and one purpose only. It's the same as the rule book for chess. It forces kids playing in the sandlot to get along and play fair. It's no different than the rules that tell me I have to be at my work at a certain time, or that I can't walk up to be superior and punch him in the face. Our species must have order. This order that the scientific method brings is not because it is the one and only holy road to truth. It's because people can't work together without a rule book. Now go back to chess. Does the fact that chess requires rules also mean that two people can't entertain themselves and challenge each other's minds in a game completely impromptu without a rule book? Children do it all the time. They have quite a knack for inventing all sorts of games that entertain, even making up rules as they go along. But someone working a problem through on his own. He is the most liberated of all. There are no rules that chain him and force him to play a rigid game. His mind is free to explore and discover. Back to children. I am the father of a 3 year old. He is yet to learn the word science, yet he is exploring the world and discovering nature in thousands of ways completely on his own. I can already see a genius for music and mechanical aptitude. He builds things, balances things, stacks, rolls, totes, creates. Is imagination is a beautiful thing. If that pure, innocent child's imagination could be harnessed by an adult with superior intellect, the combination of intelligence and imagination would be absolute perfection. But we forget how to harness that creative side after we've been conditioned by rule books all our lives.

The scientific method is awesome!! I mean it really rocks. It has advanced human knowledge in the past 200 years more than the previous 20,000. However, it has a fundamental flaw that prevents it from overcoming it's own limitations. The fundamental flaw is that it is a doctrine that says truth can only be obtained by following its rigid rules. That is absoluty 100% certainly false. A discovery that advances human knowledge and understanding of nature can be made without the tool of science. Thought experiment: take a human child at an early stage of development. Provide for his needs, give him a basic understanding of nature...fire burns, cold freezes, etc. teach him basic mathematics and the common sense knowledge that any human would require to sustain himself. If this child was average witted, he may not ever make a discovery on his own. He may not figure out that, for instance, fire requires a fuel and that the fuel must be replenished to sustain the fire. He may depend on other sources of heat to survive, or the source may have to be provided for him without advanced explanation. However, if the wit of this child was of extraordinary nature, with a gift for analytical reasoning, he might indeed discover the relationship with fuel that fire has. He might require loose applications of the scientific method to conclude experiment with various fuel sources and draw some factual conclusions based on his experimentation. But he would not be aware of a rule book. With a certain amount of experience, he might rightly conclude that "wood burns", but he might also INTUITIVELY know that dry leaves will burn too without testing it out. This conclusion might be based on the obvious connection that wood has with leaves. In other words, he may not find it remarkable that the leaves burn when he actually burns some. He already knew that they would burn based on intuition so it wasn't a surprise. He didn't use scientific method, he used simple reason. Yet his understanding of nature was indeed advanced purely on the power of thought without following a guide book. In fact, it is remarkable that some of the most profound advancements in human knowledge predated the scientific method by thousands of years. I know the argument will be that the scientific method is rooted in simple common sense processes that are innate to human reasoning. That we did a simple kind of science before we assigned it a name and definition. But we also had much less reference knowledge to bridge the gaps. These fundamental discoveries were almost pulled from nothing. I would conclude that the guy who figured out how to use a lever was every bit the genius that Albert Einstein was. I love science. I love the scientific method. I love the knowledge that science has given me. But I'm deeply disturbed by the thought that some people can't reason without a doctrine to govern them. It has become obvious to me that science is reaching an impasse where it will no longer be adequate to further human understanding. The leap from a type 0 civilization to a type 1 civilization will require a renaissance in human thinking. It will require the synthesis of science with other disciplines of intellect like philosophy, spirituality, etc. but more importantly, it will require an acceptance that profound understanding of the truth can come from pure thought, intuition, basic cleverness. We already gladly site the briliant thought experiments of men like Maxwell and Einstein. But these are men we learned about in school, men whose genius we already accept because we are told that they were right by our teachers. We do not welcome the thought experiment of the guy who lives down the street. He, after all, is a crack pot, because everyone knows that nobody but people with famous names in science textbooks can do valid thought experiments. Point being....I agree that when someone has an idea that they think might uncover a truth or make accepted concepts more simpke or elegant that some kind of evidence should be used to back the idea up. However, I do not think it a wise practice of science to dismiss the idea. This is iMHO the same as telling the guy who figured out that leaves burn that he is wrong and that you won't believe him until he burns some leaves right in front of you. A less lazy minded person might draw the same conclusion about the relationship between wood and leaves and say, "of course! Why didn't I think of that?" if more of us would take the Time to actually listen to the thoughts of others, we may actually expand human knowledge tenfold.

OK so I took the liberty of drawing my 4 dimensional model of space time. A picture is worth 1000 words, but unfortunately I don't have the computing power to superimpose an infinite number of segments or globes or spheres to represent every moment of history and the future...if further explanation of the model is needed I will be glad to expand later. Does anyone have a duster? The cobwebs in this cellar are rather annoying. I also apologize for the flipped image. My tablet app wouldn't let me fix it.

"point now" (a term obviously that I made up) doesn't have to violate special relativity. I as an observer in my local point in time and space do indeed have a "point now". You on your end of spacetime, wherever you may be, have a "point now". Our "point nows" may not be synchronized, but nothing in my model requires that. You may in fact be existing along spacetime in the superimposed, slightly smaller spacetime globe slightly to the left of my slightly expanded globe to the right (using the english left to right system as the logic for the arrow of time). We could exist in slightly different spacetime globes in relation to one another, or, the same globe, or in fact many globes apart (remember I do recognize the infinite nature of dissecting time, that's why I referred to my "MRI modeling" system of dissection as "googleplexes" of "slices" or globes. And I concede that toward the end of my original post that I did some speculating. Perhaps I didn't explain things clearly, and I won't argue that I'm wrong. It was a free flow of thought. But the overall thrust of modeling the 4 dimensions in the manner that I speak, I think, is pretty elegant and easy to grasp. I see no harm in taking the imagery and exploring questions that it might facilitate. Sweeping a topic Into a broom closet just because it isn't perfect is hardly the way to handle it, at least not until the wheat and chaffe are openly discussed. Essentially, I do not think it is fair to have a fairly reasonable concept (let's assign a reasonability scale of 1-10 and say that at least part of my conception warrants a "7") outright dismissed, then dumped in the rubbish pile with the the illuminati/new world order threads. That's a tremendous leap. The trouble with this style of censorship is that STEPHEN FLIPPING HAWKING himself in the flesh could come on this site, under a pseudonym, post an idea that he just floated, and because a moderator of unknown background, origin, or expertise comes along and decides its poppycock he may very well put the thoughts of the most brilliant man on the planet in the cellar. And Stephen Hawking would be laughing his butt off at this website. Of course Stephen Hawking has better things to do, and I don't have the intellect to shine Stephen Hawkkng's wheelchair....but the point is still valid. You see, I'm not some kook who thinks he's solved the entire riddle of the universe or has evidence to expose The Bush family as satan's spawn. I'm just a guy who had a neat idea and wanted to talk about it. Unfortunately in the blink of an eye my idea was buried without that opportunity. That's not science, it's censorship. Peer review can't be done by one individual. And this is the problem I have. First, I just read your reply again, and from the very start, the language insinuates that I'm wrong....so what you want me to do is draw a picture for you, so that you can come along and tell me why I'm wrong. Nowhere on your reply did you say that I should draw a picture so you can tell me where I am wrong, and "perhaps" point at concepts that may be in fact right or at least noteworthy ideas. You already decided I was wrong when I pointed out that I'm not an astrophysicist. This does not mean I'm not a scientist or that I'm a layperson. I'm in fact a chemist. I have no Nobel prize and I do work in the field of applied science and not research or theoretical, but nevertheless I'm a scientist. At this point we aren't arguing the subject, we are arguing my right to even be pondering such a lofty subject. My hero is Michael Faraday. That says it all. And my iPhone does not give me the option to post a Picture on this site, not the mobile version. I'll look into posting a picture from home. Also, the very last statement that says "I'd like to explain OUR side of the story IS in fact condescending. It is an us vs them statement. Who is "our"?

Ive started one thread on this site, in the astronomy and cosmology forum, that was moved to the "speculation" forum. At its base, I do not have a problem with a thread being moved (which is essentially a form of censorship but that's OK) if the subject steps into the realm of "hey I've got a new idea or concept and I want to bounce it around". But there is a difference between discussing a new idea that is based on accepted mainstream science vs a pseudoscientific, conspiracy theorist, tin foil on head, Mayan calendar, 2012, 7 headed Revalations beast, fountain of youth discovered thread. Anyone with an IQ of 100 can sniff out the lunatics. It becomes particularly annoying when your topic of fancy is one such as physics, astronomy, cosmology, etc. where the entire field requires a whole lot of "thought experimentation" in the first place...for a thread of that nature to be lumped with the 9/11 conspiracy theory threads is an insult. My suggestion is that there should be one or more forums for "unconventional discussions of mainstream ideas" where at least the topics that get a lot of traffic like physics and perhaps evolutionary biology can be legitimately bantered about and not be lost in the shuffle of threads discussing preparations for the end of the world in December 2012. Thanks for your time.

Why is a proposed visual model for the universe that is pretty much fitting with mainstream ideas about the universe (accelerated expansion, entropy, spacetime, dark energy, singularities, big bang, etc) and also touches upon other mainstream ideas that haven't been outright dismissed and are still talked about in mainstream circles (big crunch, linear expansion) considered a "speculation" thread? I didn't propose anything that falls short of accepted mainstream concepts. I just proposed a visual model that helps to see all of those concepts and tie them together. But then, when I visualized my model, it opened my eyes to questions that might be considered speculations, but isn't that what "theoretical" physics is all about, in fact isn't it ALL pretty much speculation based on observations??? Do me a favor. If this thread is indeed only fitting to be hidden away in the broom closet, go ahead and delete it entirely and I will also delete my account. I don't mind criticism of any specific points but I really don't care for censorship, that's not what science is about. To be clear, I did not propose that the universe is actually a big potato and that we are living in one of the eyes. I didn't propose a model that shows how the big bang took 7 days to happen. I didn't claim that I found the fountain of youth in my back yard. But I'm pretty up on why there is a "catch all" forum called "speculation". It's the "trash box" file for the forum. It's a catch all that prevents the place from looking totally censorious and closed minded, but it's kind of like the room where the crazy uncle lives and any idea from making a fussion reaction with yeast and toilet paper to whatever other wild idea is put there. No thanks.

Thanks somecallmegenius. Even if you take away the idea of the universe accelerating (which I would personally love to see disproven because it just makes no sense, and currently requires us to "make stuff up" to fit the mathematics i.e dark energy....I still feel pretty good about visualizing the shape of spacetime and the universe from the outset of the BB til now and projected into the future in this left to right ever expanding super imposed globe model. The only difference being that if you don't believe the expansion is accelerating, we can model the universe growth linearly so that the shape is truly conical from left to right. Or, if you think that the old idea that the universe is actually slowing down its expansion and will eventually "crunch" when gravity wins the battle, then perhaps the model of the universe would be still a singularity, a conical expansion, a point at which the limit has been reached, and then a sort or Rorschach or mirror image of the cone, still going left to right, back to another singularity, and so on infinitum. This would be a cyclical or wavelike model in 4 dimensions. Somewhat sinusoidal (another natural geometry that I find appealing.) Actually it would quite remind me of a steady carrier amplitude modulated EM wave to be honest or at least how textbooks depict them

First of all, I am an amateur. I'm also not here to argue or debate this simple idea that may easily be dismissed with mathematics or a fundamental law. So if you are closed minded to thought experiments that require a certain amount of speculation and imagination, this won't be for you. However, if a mathematical equation or fundamental law easily and obviously negates this idea, I welcome it. I read and devour cosmological physics ideas from a variety of sources. Recently I was watching a documentary that poked into several topics...the "arrow of time" concept, entropy, matter and antimatter, and dark matter/energy. The program touched upon a female astrophysicists who many years ago was comparing the revolution speed of the planets around the sun to the revolution speed of the stars around galaxies. The data when plotted for the solar system shows a 45 degree angle graph with distant bodies moving much slower through space than the inner planets due to lower gravitational forces. The speed of stars around galaxies showed a linear plot on the graph. A straight line with distant stars from the inner SM black hole moving just as fast as inner stars (this not meaning the period of revolution the same, that would imply outer stars moving much faster). This broke with Newtonian physics and implied unaccounted for energy on the grader scale of galaxies. Ok that was interesting, but what really interested me was the graphs when coupled to the arrow of time concept and Einstein's unification of spacetime. So I had a vision of how the universe, spacetime, would SEEM to look if one could model it...from the big bang until now. Accounting for the accelerated expansion, the big bang, entropy, spacetime, space curvature, event horizon, and the tendency for the known universe to be dominated by matter rather than antimatter. Ok so imagine the singularity before the "BB". A single massive point. An unknown and unexplained event caused the singularity to become unstable. Within the first second a huge expansion occurred with matter and antimatter anialating one another. We know that matter won. Why? Perhaps the very thing that caused the BB is rooted in this imbalance and no matter how many times we might "replay" the BB, matter would always win out. And this led me to another thought process. Think about standing a pencil on its end. You might get it to stay that way for a short time, but eventually the table will get bumped, a door will open and cause a pressure shift in the room, etc, and the pencil will tip. This caused me to reckon that perhaps in a *matter* dominated universe, the arrow of time will always move from order to disorder, toward entropy, and in the familiar way that we see time moving. Now hang with me. My model would have the center of the entire known universe not located IN TIME in the same location in reference to where the singularity originated. Instead of Time being the universe's 4th dimension, it is actually THE FIRST, and what any model should be based on. So the universe was born on a journey through time, not through space. So, since in English we read from left to right, imagine the BB singularity as a period on the left hand side of your screen, the future a tremendous globe on the far right side of your screen. The present an intermediate globe in the center of your screen. And much like an MRI or CAT scan takes paper thin cross sectional pictures of an object along its length, this model of the universe superimposed a slightly larger globe in increments from left to right (imagine a funnel shape made of these googleplex of progressively larger globes, the smallest point most leftward, and the ultimate sized globe (the end, full entropy) on the right. But also realize that the globes are expanding at a faster rate...so the funnel will not be cone shaped but rather more vortexlike, or like a horn. So time is the progression in a particular direction (for our purpose left to right) it is also represented by the ever increasing size of each globe progression not being linear but rather logarithmic.(I'm not a math wiz but I assume this is a fitting description of the acceleration that is observed). So the known universe at any given moment in history is represented by these globes, and time is pretty well depicted by the distance from "point NOW" to the singularity...and this assumes that time had been a linear progression since the singularity (that's something I can't wrap my head around, but perhaps it wasn't and when gravity was super strong near the singularity on the early universe, time might have been distorted?) Ok, this model I've described may not be anything new, you tell me. But I also will suggest one more idea. The same "pencil topple" that got time moving like an arrow, from order to chaos, created a matter dominated Spacetime rather than antimatter....could it have also set the universe in a vortexlike spin or tumble THROUGH TIME? What I am getting at...let's take the singularity of the BB and move along our model to a point where the universe is recognizable, big enough to map, establish reference points. Let's place a red dot on this "MRI scan segment" on the page in the center of the globe (we'll call it the universe's equator) but instead of our equator being on the horizontal plane, the rotation we're imagining is on the vertical. So as we progress out universe in time from left to right, the red reference dot moves up, reaches "north" circles the blind side of the universe (we'll call it west)....then south, then east again and we can see it rise from the bottom of the page back to the center on the "visible side" SO, as the universe moves through time, it also rotates. This rotation was a random natural consequence of the imbalance of the BB, the favoring of matter over antimatter, the favoring of entropy. It works like so many other forces that can be seen all around us. Look at a mushroom cloud from a large blast. The blast favors an upward distribution of the matter and energy because the earth itself pushes it that way. The matter moves up (through time) as it disperses, but it isn't a conical shape. It is funnel shaped, and in fact vortexes can usually be seen. Some imbalance in the explosion and the environment causes the matter to swell upwards in a rotational way. (I'm even less an expert on the dynamics of explosions than I am an amateur astrophysicist but I'm visualizing videos I've seen of several megaton explosions over the years). But without a doubt, vortexes are a very thematic shape in the universe, all the way from the double helix of DNA on the micro scale to the spiral of the typical galaxy. Ok last thought. If space and time and thus the universe are one and the same, unified, connected....this may be a huge leap...but I'm trying to explain "dark energy" or at least the force that is causing the acceleration of the physical universe's expansion. 1) could a rotating universe moving through time in a vortex like fashion have so much stored energy (that we have underestimated) like an untwisting rubber band? My gut is that an untwisting rubber band would release more energy in its initial stages than toward the end so that seemingly falls apart. 2) since spacetime and thus the cosmos are unified, one in the same, could the singularity "still exist" (in a sense)....if the past is itself a part of the whole, and could this prehistoric gravity still be influencing the expansion of the universe across the expanse of TIME rather than space? If we decide to make time the FIRST dimension rather than the fourth, then time becomes more "visible" in a sense. This the singularity can still exist in this funnel/vortex model of the entirety of spacetime. Go back to the mushroom cloud. As the matter and energy of the cloud rises, the higher elevation matter and energy (thus "later") if one could MRI cross section a mushroom cloud, would be logarithmically larger than each progressive slice moving downward. If I understand this process, it's essentially because gravity overcomes the upward and spiraling manifestation of the matter involved and disperses it. Of course I've applied no real math or computer modeling or analysis to any of this. Im just thinking and sharing online. Poke holes wherever they should be poked. Is the "exho of gravity" from the BB singularity pulling against the matter of the present and future Universe and from its distance in time (and not space) causing a mushrooming effect toward the finality? But last observation. If the universe can be modelled As I've described, spacetime and all, it looks to me a lot like the inverse of a black hole singularity. I've heard the term "white hole" but I'm not sure if this fits. But the event horizon would be that point in time where matter overcame antimatter and the tipping point was reached that allowed for time to become the dominant dimension etc. Ok I'm done with my BS vision thanks for reading. If this some day wins a plagiarist the nobel prize, I want this bookmarked ;-) I did want to add...all of my disjointed speculation about the singularity echoing its effects over the expanse of time, the universe moving through time as a vortex, etc...this is secondary to my attempt to visually model what the universe in 4 dimensions would look like if one could draw it or shape it with a computer simulation. My point was that time shouldn't be an afterthought (OK so let's draw the universe....ok so we have this big round sphere of matter and energy....now how do we add time? My thought was that if you start off with time as the linear horizontal axis and then imagine a way to do this "MRI style" imaging, but rather than cross sectional slices, you would superimpose 3D spheres inside an ever expanding funnel (that would have a googleplex of superimposed spheres, since time can be infinitely sliced). So the imagery of this model was the thrust of my post. The rest is entirely layman's speculations. Even if something interesting might be there.