Markus Hanke

My point was about outcomes, not tools. The laws of the universe don’t depend on anyone’s god concept, or lack thereof. Take for example a simple table-top set-up, such as the Cavendish experiment. Anyone can do it, even at home in your own living room; and the outcome of the experiment will always be the exact same, regardless of the experimenter’s religious conviction - you always find the same Newtonian inverse square law, with the same gravitational constant. Concepts of a religious nature are simply irrelevant to the observed laws of nature - which is why you cannot draw conclusions about god (one way or the other) from the natural sciences.

But my point was that whether you are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, something else entirely, or nothing at all, makes no difference - it’s always the same universe, so experiments performed on it have the same outcome, meaning you always find the same laws of nature, irrespective of any god concepts.

Lol +1 Oh how I love being among nerds…

The universe that’s being studied by science is the same now as it was before the 20th century, so I don’t quite understand this comment.

Yes, you answered someone else’s thread with your own personal theory. This needed to be pointed out.

We don’t know the mass of the universe. And what about other sources of gravitation, like radiation? You haven’t accounted for that at all. We don’t know this either. We know only the size of the observable part of it. Right now the evidence is more consistent with the universe being spatially flat on cosmological scales. No. You can’t. Gravity isn’t a force at all, except as an approximation in the Newtonian limit. It says no such thing. Free fall is always along geodesics, irrespective of spacetime geometry, meaning a=0 at all times. No. You can’t. If the topic was locked, then you shouldn’t bring this up again. We’re done here.

Also, this here: is of course incorrect, irrespective of numbers. If you are surrounded by a spherical shell of matter, assuming an approximately uniform distribution, the net Newtonian gravitational force acting on you is exactly zero, irrespective of your state of motion, and irrespective of where within the shell you are located.

No. The most accurate accelerometers we have are around ~10E-7m/s^2. Please show in detail how you arrived at that number. There is no such thing as “inertial acceleration”. An inertial frame is defined to be one where there is zero proper acceleration; if you measure acceleration, no matter how small, then you’re not in an inertial frame. So even if the universe were somehow more gravitationally attractive in one particular direction (which it isn’t), you’d still be locally in free fall in that direction, and your accelerometer reads zero.

It’s an expansion factor. It tells you how the spatial distance between the same two arbitrarily chosen points change over time. Think of it as a placeholder for “we don’t know yet what happens there”. That’s because if you go far enough in time, both gravity and quantum physics become relevant simultaneously, and we don’t yet have a theory of quantum gravity. Hence we don’t know (yet) just how exactly the universe started off, we only know how it evolved after a certain very early point in time. Without DE the rate of expansion would be a constant (but the equations still work). However, the data we have suggests that this rate isn’t constant, but accelerating - so DE is a mechanism that actively pushes the universe apart. The exact physical nature of DE is as of yet unknown. This is not easy to answer in a non-technical way. Think of a tensor (as it is most commonly found in GR) as a function that takes as input vectors, and produces as output a new vector, a real number, or sometimes another tensor. That depends what kind of background knowledge you have…? Perhaps the Wiki article on General Relativity is a good starting point.

If you put an accelerometer in free fall (inertial motion), it reads exactly zero at all times. This is an experimental fact. Thus, due to F=ma with a=0, no force acts on freely falling test particles.

The one that the Christian far-right in the US advocates. Not in their eyes, unfortunately. They are fully convinced that their own interpretation of the faith is the only correct one. What values are those, in your opinion? I’m not a Christian, but I’ve read the Bible, and there’s a very wide range of differing views and values advocated in there. There’s some good things that I can somewhat stand behind, but there’s also some pretty horrific stuff that I wouldn’t want to go near with a barge pole. Some really disgusting stuff. So who gets to decide what “Christian values” actually are? Modern science doesn’t say anything about God (Christian or otherwise), since the concept is not amenable to the scientific method.

I wonder what the US would actually end up looking like if somehow their brand of Christian Nationalism was in fact fully implemented. Seems to me it wouldn’t be too far off a Republic of Gilead type situation. How could anyone actually want to live in that type of society? This is just beyond me. Maybe they simply don’t understand the ramifications of what it is they are advocating for. Even in Atwood’s novels, many of the main architects of the RoG are portrayed as secretly loathing what they had created. As they say, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.

In Germany, giving the Hitler salute is a criminal offence - mostly you’d get fined, but technically it could earn you up to three years in prison. Either way you’re left with a criminal record upon conviction. But yeah, he probably thinks he’s making America great again.

It wouldn’t be a war with Denmark, it would be a war with the European Union. People here wouldn’t look kindly on an act of military aggression against any of our member states, and I dare say neither would the rest of the international community. Given the level of national debt of the US, and the degree to which its economy relies on foreign trade, such a move would be…ahem…unwise.

If an extraterrestrial spacefaring civilisation actually exists, and decides to visit earth over the next four years, I hope they won’t choose to land on US territory, because Trump is going to deport them as illegal aliens… I’ll see myself out.