Strange

I am not exactly surprised after him being so quiet for so long. A BBC journalist said he thought it was because Michael "Baby Face" Gove was running. I had assumed it was the other way round.

I think existence is vast, amazing and puzzling. I think we should use our brains (our God-given brains, if you wish to believe that) to try and understand the universe and everything in it. I think it is a criminal waste of your mental powers to just reject learning about the universe because you think you have a simple answer. If your God exists, he would be ashamed of you and would probably be yelling, "Good grief, boy, open your mind and study the world around you. That is why I created it. Don't waste that brain I created with so much care!."

And your God let him. Shame on him. And shame on you for thinking it is a good idea. That isn't the only option. It isn't an option at all. NO ONE THINKS THAT.

You can get simulators of electromagnetic fields, but I think you are heading in completely the wrong direction. Are you thinking of simulating all the electromagnetic interactions and then from that the behaviour of ion channels, and from that the behaviour of neurons and from that, eventually, the behaviour of the whole brain? All the supercomputers in the world probably couldn't do anything useful on that basis. You need to learn about modelling and abstraction. When we simulate microprocessors, for example, we can do it at various levels. If we just want to model the behaviour, we might simulate it at the level of functions such as adders, multipliers, registers, and some gates. At this level, we can simulate entire software programs running and make sure the behaviour is correct. If we need to be sure about the timing and the lower level interactions, then we can model it at the level of individual logic gates. But this is much slower and so we can only model short bits of code. Then we might want to look at a lower level: check the function and timing of the transistors making up the gates. In this case, we might have to simulate only a small part of the processor at a time, perhaps only for a few cycles. It is impractical (and pointless) trying to simulate the whole processor like that. Then, of course, the designers of individual transistors and the semiconductor manufacturing process might simulate things at the level of charges moving through silicon using quantum theory. But there is no way to simulate the whole processor at that level. So you need to be clearer about what you want to achieve and what level of modelling to use. My guess is that modelling anything below the level of individual neuron functions is unnecessary and impractical. Modelling anything but a small insect brain might be impossible at that level, anyway.

Why does he do that? Does he find it amusing, like watching a cat playing with mice? Are you are saying that God created a perfect world, and then the Devil added volcanoes, tornadoes, parasitic worms and the Ebola virus? No one says that "humans arose from a somehow perfectly set up univers just by chance." That is something you made up. The choice is between believing in a universe run by the laws of physics, which we can attempt to understand by observation and experiment, or believing in one created by magic by some entity that there is no evidence for. Making up an opinion that no one has, is called a straw man fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I was appreciating your joke. Fair enough. I had only come across people taking it completely literally. (And I thought that was the point of the movie, Lucy.) There has been a large amount of scientific research into this. That is all I was saying. I'm sure there are various definitions, I was using a simple one along the lines of "things that are not part of our conscious thought processes - i.e. things we may not be aware of our mind doing for us" I didn't intend to claim any such thing. Sorry if I gave that impression. Just that his work has little to do with science. That also wasn't my intention. Sorry if I gave that impression. I was just curious how much of the science on the role of unconscious/subconscious thought you had looked into.

As it is exerting the same force on distant stars as it does on nearby stars, can you explain why the stars orbiting Sagittarius A* follow keplerian orbits. As some of these orbits are very eccentric, I would expect a noticeable correction to the orbit from the effect your describe. (I might calculate it but you don't provide any data that makes this possible.) It also isn't clear why black holes form in your model. If gravity is caused by the inflow of space-time, how does this create a black hole? That means that the volume of space time flowing towards the black hole goes up as the square (cube?) of distance. If you have more "stuff" flowing towards the black hole further away, then it must disappear before it gets to the black hole.

In English a comma can be used before a conjunction for emphasis.

The software is just a set of (changing) states in the memory and gates. It is not a separate thing. Rather like consciousness. Nothing is uniform.

I can't imagine where you read that. Certainly not on anything related to science. Think of the operation of a computer program, perhaps an interactive 3D game. Is the gameplay a current or a resistor or a logic gate? Obviously not. It is an emergent property of all the components working together. It would be impossible to study the behaviour of all the individual transistors to understand how to play the game.

Ironic understatment? Really? I thought people (erroneously) took it literally to mean we only used 10% of our brain. Do they? It seems it was only a few days ago I was reading about the cognitive benefits of learning more than one language. Perhaps because they are caused by similar metabolic processes? Regarding your speculations about the subconscious mind, it sounds like you haven't done much research into this. And I mean the science not things like Buddhism, Fraud Freud, Jung, etc. For example: Is totally wrong (based on the little I have read on the subject).

You seem to be suggesting that consciousness is separate from the brain. As consciousness appears to emerge from the function of the entire brain (and maybe the whole nervous system, maybe even the endocrine system) loss of a single neutron is unlikely to have a significant effect. Loss of function of groups of related neutrons can cause loss of specific functions, some of which may be related to consciousness (in the most general sense); e.g. the ability to form new memories. I would rather not be associated with any such conclusion.

OK. SO I think you are thinking the asteroid will be pulled backwards and forwards between the planets? Some of the problems with this are: 1. The effect of the planets will be minute compared to the suns. For example, the mass of Jupiter (the largest planet in the solar system) is about 1,000th of the mass of the sun. 2. The system is not stable. As soon as the asteroid moves one way or another it will experience a greater gravitational force from the sun & planet on that side (and less from the other). This will eventually mean it falls towards (and possibly into orbit around) one of the suns. Note that the only way of calculating what happens in this sort of N-body system is through simulation 3. If you could extract energy from the asteroid, you have to remember that it will affect the planets so you are removing energy from the whole system. This would, in the very long term, affect the orbits of the planets.

Don't lie. Obviously he makes people suffer. And that is a pretty bizarre and cruel way of making people believe in you. Sounds like Stockholm Syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome It is already called "the questioning forum". If you don't want your ideas challenged, don't post on a science forum. There are plenty of places on the web where people will agree with you without thinking. You think it is good that your God makes children suffer and die, just so that people will admire him more. No one thinks that.

Maybe you should ask the mods to change the title of this thread as this has nothing to do with theory. I think everyone should believe something. I believe I will have another drink.

As this is, apparently, able to have a significant effect on stars, gas and dust hundreds of thousands of light years way it presumably also affects things much closer to the black hole, Correct? And, presumably, the effect close to the black hole must be proportionally much larger than the effects far away. Yes? Depending on your answer to those, I have some follow-on questions...

Well, obviously. After all He created Satan and humans with the will to do bad things, and venomous snakes, and deadly viruses, and earthquakes ...

https://www.random.org

The devil is good? That is a new one. How can it be perfection to make a world where innocent people are killed by volcanoes, tornadoes and sharks?

Except get rid of the devil. So on the one hand, your justification is that He is "mysterious". But then you ask us how we think he would feel? I think he should feel very slightly embarrassed. Including the devil?

How do Bill & Ted know Rufus' name ... ?

How could he love us if we didn't exist? He must have made us and then decided he loved us. So it sounds like he messed up by failing to make us perfect and then came up with a feeble excuse about "free will". I think He should have just admitted he made a mistake. I don't think I could a love a god who made such a bad world. He takes the credit for all the good bits and then blames us for the bad things he made.

Not really. You seem to have two suns with a planet in orbit around each. And an asteroid somewhere in between them. To work out anything about these orbits you would need to know their masses and distances. I don't understand what the asteroid is doing. Which way is it moving? An object in a stable orbit can stay there for a very long time (hence "stable orbit"). But probably not forever there will be tidal losses and interactions with other objects which will eventually change the orbit.

Why does He need us to improve? Why didn't He just create us perfect in the first place? Maybe He made a mistake? Or He could have given us free will but no desire to be bad. Or not bothered to create us at all. I assume He did that because He needs to be worshipped. He must feel very insecure... Or be very arrogant.

No.