Strange

Why is this in Speculations, rather than Biology or Morphology?

I don't. (I don't really care either, to be honest.)

That is not always true. Sometimes the test team works along side the developers (ideally, the tests would be written from the specs before the coding starts). But,even without being able to see the source code, it is still one of the best ways to develop critical thinking skills ("how can I demonstrate that this code doesn't work" or "what other tests can I do that might provide more data to the developers") and learn about good and bad practice (company A always has loads of bugs and delays because they don't write specs / company B always includes testing time in the project plans which means they finish ahead of schedule / etc.)

I have said several times: the big bang theory says NOTHING about the creation of the universe. The big bang describes the evolution of the universe from an earlier state. It does not say how that earlier state came to be. We don't know why that earlier state came to be. So, in summary, the big bang theory does not say anything about the creation of the universe. Is that clear? I assume you mean the rule that in special relativity nothing can travel faster than light? No, this is not violated by the big bang theory. A few points to explain this: 1. Special relativity only deals with objects in inertial motion. It does not include gravity and therefore does not include expanding space and the big bang model. 2. The big bang model is based on general relativity. This was develoepd by Einstein as an extension to special relativity. Therefore they must be consistent. 3. The light speed limit is only a "local" limit in general relativity; that is, it only applies where the situation apprxomates to special relativity. 4. Do you really think no one has ever asked that question before? As your equation does not seem to be based on the FLRW solution to general relativity it is hard to see how it is relevant to the big bang. The big bang model does not describe material moving through space so your equation for velocity is not relevant. There is no statement in physics about the creation of particles, of universes, from nothing. This is a "straw man" fallacy. The big bang theory is based on theory (general relativity) and experiment. It appears that you don't like things that you don't understand or that disagree with your intuition/emotion/beliefs/. And if you object to the big bang again because of "creation" or "something from nothing" you will be pleased to know that I will ignore all your future posts!

I cam across the following example (again) the other day: Imagine two people standing on the equator some distance apart. They both start walking due north. They both think they are walking in a straight line with no forces acting on them but they still get closer together. Now, you might be thinking that the Earth is playing the role of the "fabric" of space time. But we don't need the Earth there in this example. It just makes it clearer. We can start with two people located on the circumference of an imaginary sphere. They both move in a "straight line" along great circles defined by this imaginary sphere. They will get closer together, even though there are no forces, just the curved coordinate system.

The only reasons there is any more resistance to new ideas in this area is because the existing theories are incredibly well-tested and supported. It would need extraordinary new evidence to change theories on which so many things rely (including the functioning of almsot every component in your computer). Idle speculation will not convince anyone.

Always a good idea. A good way of experimenting with and learning new languages, tools and techniques. I would suggest looking for a job in software testing, initially. I probably learnt more about good and bad development, debugging, and critical thinking during my time as a test and verification engineer than at any other time. You might be able to find contract work with a company that provides software test services.

We don't know. We don't even know if they did come into existence. It might have always existed. So, if you want to propose that your god created the big bang, there isn't currently any evidence against that. I guess quite a lot of intelligent Christians believe that God set the whole thing in motion; created the laws of physics and chemistry that would allow the universe to evolve from its intial hot, dense state and then allow stars planet and, eventually, life to form and evolve into modern humans.

Actually, the concept had been around for a long time before that. Even some ancient Greek philosophers had speculated about it. What Wallace and Darwin did (independently, which is a nice confirmation of the scientific method) is come up with a theory to explain it.

Actually it was the "photons have a front and back" bit I was curious about. (The bit you describe sounds like the photoelectric effect, which was one of the first bits of evidence for quatum theory - got young Albert his Nobel Prize.) In prinicple, yes.

Of course not. Firstly, someone has already mentioned that there needn't be a conflict between science and religion. You could take a look at this, for example: BioLogos: Science and faith in harmony Secondly, you can see evolution happening all around you - how do you think we ended up with modern food plants? What about anti-biotic resistance? What about the various experiments that people have referred to, where evolution is recreated in the lab? You have just chosen to ignore those. Why? What about the fact that all organisms can be shown to be related in a structured way (the "tree of life")? (Maybe your "creator" has a very orderly mind, but why didn't she ever create one organism that didn't fit into an evolutionary description? Not one organism with completely different DNA - or no DNA at all.) No doubt you will come up with more excuses (like "I'm only talking about humans" earlier). Or you might say "but they are only small changes within a 'kind', not new species". In which case you might want to look at this: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html (Actually, I'm sure you won't want to look at that. You might be in danger of learning something.) We all accept that there are other scientific possibilities. But ID is not scientific - and is contradicted by the evidence. I'm afraid that if it is a choice between religion and reality (i.e. objective evidence) then reality has to win.

It's always funny how people who don't understand science think that. On the other hand, scientists know that their theories are provisional and subject to change. Do you think they haven't noticed that this happens fairly regularly? Or that it is the people who create the paradigm shifting theories who get the big prizes? Common sense is often wrong. Which is why science insists on objectively testable theories. Yep, science is hard. And doing it well is doubly hard.

Quanta, photons, particles, corpuscles ... just words. The use of corpuscle is a reference to Newton, who spent a long time wondering if light was corpuscular. Eventually, based on the available evidence at the time (cos that's what science does), he came to the conclusion that it must be a wave. Now we know it is (or can be described as - which is the same thing in science) both. I haven't heard that before. Do you have a reference to where he said it? Because it is a mathematical model that works. Whether the EM field (or spacetime) is "real" (and what "real" means) is a question of philosophy, not science. Exactly. (BTW, thanks for an interesting and positive discussion - doesn't often happen in Speculations!)

My understanding is that GR, being based on differential geometry must be continuous. This makes it a challenge to produce an equivalent model that is discrete/quantized.

In both case, what carries the effect from one chrage/mass to the other is the changes in the field/spacetime. In the case of the EM field, it turns out that those changes are quantised and can be described in terms of virtual photons. But, of course, the same things can be explained classically using continous changes/ripples in the EM field as Maxwell, inspired by Faraday did. (Would you describe those as "compression"? I guess not.) In the case of spacetime no one has worked out how to quantize it and so the graviton is just a hypothetical if-we-could-quantize-gravity-this-is-what-we-would-have kind of thing. Some of its properties are known, even without a quantized theory of gravity. So it isn't a shunned step-child (many people are reserarching it). It is just that no one has fugured out how to do it. Yet.

Strictly speaking, you don't have a model (this is a word that is often misunderstood, like "theory") you have a mental image. And, I'm afraid not a very accurate one when it comes to GR. The reason Eisntein doesn't mention "compression" is because this is not a concept described by the equations. It is something that the diagram I posted appears to show and that one might imagine is described by the equations. But isn't. The maths of GR is waaaay over my head. But I have learnt a bit about how it works. One of the most important things I have learnt (by being frequently corrected) is when not to extrapolate based on intuition and mental model - occasionally that will egt you the right answer but more often it will lead you astray.

Firstly, we were (or I was) talking about your description terms of spheres and their surface areas. That is the inverse square law that I said was obvious. (That can be derived from GR, but it isn't simple.) Secondly, people's mental image of space-time curvature (including your idea and the picture I posted) all come from the mathematics, not the other way round. If you tell me that you came up with the idea of space-time being curved and compressed without ever having read anything about Einstein or GR then I won't believe you. Even Einstein had to do a lot of (mathematical) work before he could understand that was what was required.

I actually have a lot to say about this (I didn't see it before) but I don't have much time right now. Firstly, I suspect that calculating the total space-time curvature between two objects is very hard, even when they are stationary. (If they are orbiting each other, then my understanding is that it cannot be solved analytically.) You can use your/Newton's inverse square law to calculate that the net force is zero. But I'm not sure that means the space time curvature is zero. (For example the net gravitational force at the center of the Earth is zero, but the space-time curvature is maximal.) So we can't come up with a quantitative (i.e. scientific) test from your idea unless we can predict exactly what the magnitude of the effect is. For example, we can look at existing pairs of bodies in space (Sun-Earth or Earth-Moon, for example) and see that there is no wormhole created there. So how large do the masses need to be? How far apart do they need to be? Could we do it in a lab with two large weights? Do they need to be planets, stars, galaxies? Galaxies are bigger but further apart - are they more or less likely to meet your requirements? Which galaxies are big enough? And on and on. You are not going to get anyone to lend you their spaceship and team of scientists until you can answer questions like this. Ultimately, this is why science relies on mathematics - why a theory must be mathematical. One way we could test your idea is to use GR to calculate what theory predicts would happen. But if you think GR is wrong, then that doesn't help.

But you don't need GR to describe that. I imagine most people have figured it out for themselves at some point. It is fairly obvious so much so that I was shocked when I first found out that that there are fields and forces don't follow an inverse square law.

I just did, where I congratulated you for working it out intuitively. If you can't even recognise 1/r2 as what you described, then you have a long way to go. I already posted a crude 2D representation of the warping of 3D space - you were quite thrilled by it, if I remember. Your EM field case is easier, because you are looking at something 2D and then drawing it in 2D.

But on your website you say: "Exactly how it does is secret but, it is possible." There is no point requesting people to assume the impossible. What your argument comes down to is: if you can do something impossible, then you cam make an impossible machine work. I think this is what is commonly known as "magic".

And we do exactly the same with space time curvature - we directly measure it as gravity, gravitational time dilation, etc. We can even directly measure the frame grabbing ("twisting" of space time) as the Earth rotates.

You have derived the inverse-square law from first principles, which is pretty clever. This is a fundamental aspect of Newton's law of gravity. [math]f = G\frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}[/math] However, that turns out to be an approximation that is not appropriate in more complex situations. For example, Newtons law of gravity was unable to correctly describe the motion of Mercury, which was part of the motivation for Einstein and others to come come up with an alternative. p.s. Just a nitpick but 9.8 m/s2 is not "energy". At this level of (not very scientific) discussion that may not really matter, but if you get to a point where you want to present a formal theory, then that sort of error will get attacked quite harshly.

What else: the electromagnetic field. But what is charge? It is just a property we can measure and use to build models. That doesn't tell us what it is. And the field is just a mathematical abstraction (that is relatively easy to visualise at a basic level). The mechanism of gravity of mass and the "Einstein field" (space-time). But what is charge? It is just a property we can measure and use to build models. That doesn't tell us what it is. And the field is just a mathematical abstraction (that is slightly harder to visualise but can still be done at a basic level).

The use of c2 in equations like this (and e=mc2) is just a conversion constant because of the units we use for measuring time and distance. If we used different units, it could just be 1. You can have a negative square. For example, 4 is 22 but you can still have -4. Think of it as -1 x c2, if you prefer. Two things. Firstly the local galaxy cluster is held together by gravity and so is not expanding. So we can only see the expansion by looking at objects further away than that. Secondly, the acceleration is quite small so would not be noticeable as a change in spacing (we can only measure expansion and acceleration by comparing velocities).