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Steve_Mollett Inner circle Eh, so I've made 3006 Posts 
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On a tangent, Ayn Rand was an ATHEIST from ROOSKYVILLE.
Author of: GARROTE ESCAPES
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth. - Albert Camus |
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Steve_Mollett Inner circle Eh, so I've made 3006 Posts
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On 2012-07-29 08:56, R.S. wrote: CARRIE--which, in her reality, makes it true. 
Author of: GARROTE ESCAPES
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth. - Albert Camus |
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Bill Hilly Elite user 449 Posts
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On 2012-07-28 11:31, Carrie Sue wrote: You mean it ruined the marriage because he executed his wife for being an adulterer? I'd say SHE ruined the marriage by committing the adultery. Or if you meant he went around executing adulterers I suppose that could ruin a marriage if she got tired of his chosen occupation. And what of Old Newt? What if he had been executed before he got his forgiveness? How long should we wait for the adulterer to ask for and obtain forgiveness? I suppose these executions are done with guns or cannons, or even dynamite. Otherwise, WHAT THE H3LL DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE BIG BANG?! |
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Jonathan Townsend Eternal Order Ossining, NY 27300 Posts
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Executing with big bangs might make better reality TV
:(
...to all the coins I've dropped here
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Pop Haydn Inner circle Los Angeles 3691 Posts
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On 2012-07-28 19:16, Carrie Sue wrote: Divorced men are committing adultery when they remarry, according to the scriptures... |
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MobilityBundle Regular user Las Vegas/Boston 120 Posts
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On 2012-07-29 13:58, Bill Hilly wrote: Topical question. I got side tracked from this thread around page 5 or 6. I tried to engage Carrie in an intellectually honest and satisfying way, and I was unsuccessful. The summary was: Carrie: "Hey, consider this scientific stuff..." Me: "That scientific stuff doesn't sound right, for the following reasons." Carrie: "I don't understand what you said, but all that scientific stuff sounds a lot better when I hear it from creation scientists. Moreover, I don't have time to discuss that stuff, because I have a life and I'm busy. Now pardon me while I engage everyone else in polarizing religious discussion in a science thread...." Me: :| I don't think Carrie is trying to be a troll per se, but regardless, she sure is a successful troll. As with all trolls, the best thing to do is not feed them. Of course, I wouldn't go so far as to say that Carrie isn't a valued member of the online community 'n all that. But when the opportunity to participate in an exchange of scientific ideas presents itself, Carrie doesn't appear to be capable of bi-directional exchange. Given that, I'm not sure what the upside is to attempting to get such an exchange. To that end, I'd implore Carrie and everyone else to respect the topical discussions here. Naturally, threads often take a life of their own. But when a thread that originally didn't start with a religious topic starts to devolve in to religion, please either fork the discussion and start another thread or just resist the urge to follow the thread in that direction. That said, any other big bang or cosmology discussion welcome in this thread. |
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critter Inner circle Spokane, WA 2653 Posts
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Every topic here devolves into a discussion on religion, or politics. Even ones about kitties.
Therefore, religion and politics must always be topical... 
"The fool is one who doesn't know what you have just found out."
~Will Rogers |
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MobilityBundle Regular user Las Vegas/Boston 120 Posts
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On 2012-07-30 15:42, critter wrote: Understood. But... we can do better.
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Ed_Millis Inner circle Yuma, AZ 2292 Posts
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Is it safe to come back in now??
Just wanted to say thanks again for the patient and polite responses I received to my questions. And add apologies if I inadvertently leaned the discussion in a down-hill direction. Don't know if this question would be on-topic or should be broken off: Thermodynamics ws brought up, and I did some bits of reading. Again, I may have horribly misunderstood, but this is what I came away with. It seems one question that arises is closed versus open systems. It seems that the more we discover, the more we find how open our systems are: energy may be breaking down in part of the system (be it our sun or our planet, individual molecules, or the universe as a whole), but is getting fed back in from other sources, some of these surmised but not yet discovered or defined. So if thermodynamics is built on the assumption of a closed system (all the energy contained in a closed system will remain constant, no matter what form the energy takes; and as the energy is used, its "by-products" [probably not the correct term??] become less and less useable), but we are finding out how open and intermingled our systems are, what laws and constants are we left to work with? My original question of "where did it all come from?" at "Bang-1" was based on the assumption of a closed system, meaning all the matter and energy that exists would have to be injected into this closed system somehow. But if we're finding out that every system from our universe to particles is more open that we knew, then doesn't that turn a lot of previous understandings into head scratches? Because now you've injected the potential for unknown inputs from unknown sources? (Undiscovered natural sources - not supernatural, please.) Ed |
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MobilityBundle Regular user Las Vegas/Boston 120 Posts
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On 2012-07-30 16:16, Ed_Millis wrote: 1. Let's make it safe to come back.
2. Classical thermodynamics is a very neat and tidy set of tools, but yeah, the applications are often very subtle. The main ways for thermodynamics analyses to go wrong are (a) not realizing a system isn't closed, in some subtle way, or (b) not accounting for the presence of energy, which might show up in a subtle way. In fact, sometimes other forms of energy or matter are discovered because of an apparent violation of conservation of energy. (The neutrino was the first such particle to be predicted on this basis.) But there are difficulties in extending classical thermodynamics to certain regions of the universe. For different reasons, quantum thermodynamics is tricky, black holes are tricky, and treating the universe as a thermodynamic system itself is tricky. (With regard to black holes, I can't help but mention a favorite bizarre fact: black holes have a negative "specific heat." A material's specific heat describes how it behaves as a "thermal conductor": materials with low specific heat, like metals, conduct heat very easily. Materials with high specific heat, like styrofoam, conduct heat very poorly. A negative specific heat means that the heat flows in the opposite direction you'd expect. If you put a hot black hole in a cold environment, the black hole will get hotter and the environment will get colder, in contrast to what you'd expect if, say, you put a hot coal in a bucket of cold water. Weird...) There's a chance that the universe as we currently understand it is an open system. But that's an easily-fixed problem: just throw the mantle of phrase "the universe" around whatever new phenomena was unaccounted for in the old definition. It's not so hard to obtain a closed system in that way: just throw in all the stuff "outside." The real problem is accounting for all the types of energy there are. We don't necessarily know about them all. For example, as I mentioned above the phenomenon of gravitational redshift appears to violate the conservation of energy, but a potential resolution is to associate an "energy term" for the expansion of the universe. Moreover, note that not all energy is positive in magnitude. Dark energy -- a phenomenon we only first observed in the '90s -- is, in a concrete sense, negative energy. We don't know a lot about dark energy right now, but it's at least possible (and maybe even plausible) for the amount of dark energy in the universe to exactly balance all the matter, radiation, and other "positive" energy in the universe. That would mean the net energy content of the universe is zero, which would be consistent with Krauss's "universe from nothing." |
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Ed_Millis Inner circle Yuma, AZ 2292 Posts
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The Higgs boson was originally theorized in the 60s, based on observations and then-current knowledge. Look how much we've learned in the last 50 years (like dark matter) that could not have been factored into any formulas of theories.
Yet the experiments yielded results consistent with those theories. (Hypotheses?? Sorry if I'm butchering terms here.) To me, that's amazing! If I remember right, I also read that the results also included unexpected traces? Like possibly the result of unknown particles?? So while we seem to have caught a glimpse of the Higgs, we also may have some new questions? Seems as though trying to nail down a definitive answer about almost anything is like trying to tie Jello to a tree! Ed |
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Bill Hilly Elite user 449 Posts
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Ed, M.B., and Critter,
THANKS for bringing it back. |
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MobilityBundle Regular user Las Vegas/Boston 120 Posts
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On 2012-07-31 00:55, Ed_Millis wrote: I'm not sure what all came out of the ATLAS/CMS experiments besides the probable Higgs. Could be other surprises in there, but I haven't heard. They looked at something like 500 trillion events and produced about 100 petabytes of raw data. (To put 100 petabytes into perspective, a full length HD movie typically runs about half a gigabyte in size. On that estimate, 100 petabytes is the size of about 20 million movies. It's actually a little worse than that, because the information density of movies is much lower than the raw experimental data.) The point is, I don't think we're through sifting that data yet. But you're right, there's always some new mystery lurking around any corner, even as old mysteries are solved. I think that's what keeps physicists (or scientists, more generally) excited. I don't know about the tying jello to a tree analogy. There is a wonderful and short essay by Issac Asimov called "The Relativity of Wrong" (full text at http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html ) that touches on what it means to be "wrong" in science. Taking an example from the essay, a long time ago people thought the Earth was flat. That was wrong. Then they thought the Earth was a sphere. That's wrong too. But HOW wrong are either idea? Locally, the Earth IS pretty flat. Asimov reports the curvature of a spherical Earth at about 8 inches per mile. So while the flat-Earth folks were wrong, they weren't THAT wrong, in some sense. Their "universe" didn't involve long trips, so there was no real opportunity to detect the 8 inch per mile curvature. Of course, as we started to observe larger and larger areas of the world, evidence of curvature started to build up. Eventually the spherical Earth model became prominent. That's also wrong -- there's a bulge at the equator and some flattening at the poles. The actual curvature is about 7.97 to 8.03 inches per mile. The point is, even though the models are all "wrong," they're less wrong as time goes on. Just by way of illustration, quantum mechanics and relativity were radical departures from Newtonian physics. However, both QM and relativity inherently contain a "copy" of Newtonian physics. Specifically, if the speed of light were infinite, then relativity is just Newtonian physics; and if Planck's constant were 0, then QM is Newtonian physics. Of course, the speed of light is huge (but finite), and Planck's constant is minuscule (but nonzero), and those differences have important consequences. But it shows that, structurally, Newtonian physics isn't so far removed from modern physics. It's not as if we did the double slit experiment and the Michelson Morely experiment and then threw out the Newtonian rulebook. Structurally, they differ only by a slight variation in a single parameter, just like the difference between a flat Earth and a spherical Earth. So to me, it's not as if getting a definitive answer on something is impossible. We got an answer to the Higgs question in about 50 years, which is actually pretty remarkable progress, considering the energy levels required to get those answers. |
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Ed_Millis Inner circle Yuma, AZ 2292 Posts
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Structurally, they differ only by a slight variation in a single parameter, just like the difference between a flat Earth and a spherical Earth. That's a pretty wide swing for one variable!! :O But that of course opens up the door for non-Euclidean geometry, which every math teacher loves to spring on the unsuspecting young'uns: "Draw me a triangle where the sum of the angles is greater than 180 degrees." Ah, the sound of little minds going POP! Okay - we got a long ways away from the original opening gun: Krauss' book. I'm going to assume it was written for the lay person of decent intellectual skills - otherwise the library would put it in the reference section with the other university-level textbooks. But I found myself without a sufficient background to process a lot of the content. A degree in physics would be awesome, but it a bit out of my reach at the moment. Are there books you can recommend that would give me a decent grasp on the background concepts to be able to tackle this book again? Especially Asimov - loved his stuff; I could understand his work with thiotimoline. Ed |
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MobilityBundle Regular user Las Vegas/Boston 120 Posts
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Book recommendations are a little tough. Back when I was a young upstart, I read a few books that helped provide me with some facts, but I'm not sure they provided me with much understanding. I enjoyed reading them, but it always felt something like: "Hey, turns out, you can't go faster than light. But the very early universe expanded WAY faster than light, for a little bit. Then it slowed way down. That didn't break the no-faster-than-light rule, because the universe is allowed to do that. You're not though."
And I was came away with facts, but no real way to digest them in any satisfying way. The satisfying way only came once I studied a lot of physics and a lot more math. That said, all is not lost. If you are familiar with very basic physics... like at the level of "distance = speed * time" or "velocity = acceleration * time"... and if you're familiar with very basic math ... like at the level of algebra and the pythagorean theorem... then you know all you need to really learn special relativity. When I say "really learn," I mean come away with an understanding on par with an undergraduate physics major. The book that will get you there is called Spacetime Physics, by Taylor and Wheeler. To be sure, this book isn't a page turner. If you go through a few pages an hour, you're making fast progress. But if you make it even a quarter of the way through, you'll understand special relativity better than you would from reading a hundred "Brief History of Time" type books. The same group of guys wrote a book called Exploring Black Holes that -- shockingly -- serves as a very gentle introduction to general relativity with virtually no mathematical prerequisites beyond basic algebra. To be sure, there's a few things you'll have to take on faith. (For those who know a little GR, this book STARTS with the Schwarzchild metric, rather than obtaining it as a solution to Einstein's field equations.) But the Exploring Black Holes book gives you the tools to answer many natural questions. For example, many people know that at the surface of a black hole, there is no escape: everything must fall in. But at what distance from the black hole is orbiting no longer possible? If you master the Exploring Black Holes book, you can figure that question out yourself, instead of just learning it as a fact some author tells you. Beyond those two books, Feynman has some stuff. Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces. I actually never looked at these books, but from what I understand they're excerpts from his more comprehensive Feynman Lectures on Physics. They're worth a look, but perhaps browse before you buy. Finally, this might sound strange, but Wikipedia. Wikipedia's physics coverage is actually pretty good. And as far as immediate gratification, doesn't get much better than that. |
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Jonathan Townsend Eternal Order Ossining, NY 27300 Posts
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There was a recent episode of the radio show "infinite monkey cage" on the big bang/mulitple universes topic. The hosts and guests are informed and pleasant about their discussions.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/timc
...to all the coins I've dropped here
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MobilityBundle Regular user Las Vegas/Boston 120 Posts
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Nice podcast, Jonathan.
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Ed_Millis Inner circle Yuma, AZ 2292 Posts
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Thank you, gentlemen. I've enjoyed learning from you.
Ed PS - But I *still* wonder "where did it come from"?!! Maybe one of these days .... |
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Posted: Jul 29, 2012 12:56 pm 
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