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A question of space and time?

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Gibbs505 said:
Okay, my admiringly untutored and amateur musing.
First, the only equation that I know, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Also known to all engineers, accident reconstruction experts and hunters/shooters (Those who make their own ammo anyway) as energy equals mass time velocity squared
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E = MC2

Actually the translation is 'Total Energy equals Mass by the Speed of Light Squared' ... which in effect translates to the total amount of energy stored in any given amount of matter is equal to the mass of that matter multiplied by the speed of light squared'. In other words, tiny amounts of matter can be obliterated to produce comparatively massive amounts of energy.

And as I said in the previous post .... actually obliterating matter (even if you use highly efficient reactions ... like matter/antimatter) is the difficult thing so extracting that energy is hard (and typically not done by natural processes).
 
dfg42 said:
It isn't said that dark matter doesn't exist, it is said it is not seen: Dark. There are experiments running that try to find yet not detected elementary particles, which could then be the dark matter or part of it. The other possibility is that the laws of nature we know have still some space for improvement, as you mention. But also there work is done, look as example for MOND theory
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If it can't be measured and it can't be seen, and interactions with it can't be verified, for all scientific intents and purposes it doesn't exist.

Otherwise, I could get away with the idea that it was the fairies at the bottom of my garden that controlled the expansion of the universe. For 'fairies' substitute 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'

That said, that's pretty much what String Theorists do.
 
cynthia the inocent said:
Some of you will undoubtedly tell me to go to hell for this statement , but as you know I dont believe there is such a place.
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It's rather amusing to think of people telling you to go somewhere that doesn't exist, simply because they think you should suffer for your point of view. Not sure how that jives with most religious teachings which seem to be about being considerate of other people. I always think if you're using your religion to point out how bad other people are, or to condemn them, you're doing it wrong. ;)
 
Jollyrei said:
It's rather amusing to think of people telling you to go somewhere that doesn't exist, simply because they think you should suffer for your point of view. Not sure how that jives with most religious teachings which seem to be about being considerate of other people. I always think if you're using your religion to point out how bad other people are, or to condemn them, you're doing it wrong. ;)
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So many have died in the name of their religion. If you dont dont believe their way you are labeled infidel.
 
Heineudo said:
Well then we just have to convince death that he has to dispose of the souls in the black holes in the universe. The only problem is, how do you contact Death, does he have an email address?
Another difficult question, is the death male or female?
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* A 45 cal semi-auto to the head, pull trigger, then contact Death in person.
** Death is both.
 
Silent_Water said:
OK, but simply imagine now what might already be now in this box concerning the propositions during the last postings:
A cat of which we do not know if it is a cat or a Black Jaguar, at least three persons which are most probably enemies to each other and of whom do not know either if they are alive, dead or undead! Don't you think, we complicated the first scientific initial premise a bit? Just a little bit? Don't we need a bigger box? Hm, much bigger?
:eek: ;)
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For the record, I was not attempting to make a serious contribution to this discussion. Which is good because I would have failed miserably.:frown:
 
FrankO said:
If it can't be measured and it can't be seen, and interactions with it can't be verified, for all scientific intents and purposes it doesn't exist.

Otherwise, I could get away with the idea that it was the fairies at the bottom of my garden that controlled the expansion of the universe. For 'fairies' substitute 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'

That said, that's pretty much what String Theorists do.
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You are right in a principal way, but this is not consistent the way you should work in science. For some time you must work with theories and ideas which are probably wrong, till you get to a point when the problems with experiment are no longer unsolvable. In that way one should leave the string theorist doing their work, which is cheap anway and unproblematic. The only problem I see there is the silly interest of the public in one idea of the universe among many, many others (like the holographic universe).
 
wulf said:
For the record, I was not attempting to make a serious contribution to this discussion. Which is good because I would have failed miserably.:frown:
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I do not think anyone here expected a cat transformed into a Black Jaguar in "Schrödinger's cat" - box, eating three human beings who are also there because of our nonsensical theory to be a serious contribution to an almost scientific discussion. But probably because I really have relatives in a country with a high population density of vampires and werewolves, I like all kinds of unexpected transformations and metamorphosis.
;)

By the way - and I cannot state this often enough - "Schrödinger's cat" is not identical with my cat or the "philosophical" cat which (or who?) I am looking for!

My cat is a constant philosophical-allegorical mystery and it is always black!

The essence of religions is also such a "cat" for me.
On the one hand, religions are not necessarily something bad, for example the great French State theorist Alexis de Tocqueville ...


... wrote in his two books ...


... that all religions have the purpose of reducing the egoism of human beings, caring for each other, leading them to a kind of common society by believing in something.

The problem is on the other hand that you also can believe in something completely wrong and the worst religion - of which Tocqueville was aware of in his time - was a religious Indian cult for the blood goddess "Kali", in reality similar to the cult in the movie "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom".
The most cult members - called "Thugs" - were robbing and killing the members of rich caravanes through the deserts between today's Pakistan and India, which led to their extinction in several military operations by the British colonial army and allied Indian forces in Uttar Pradesh until ca. 1840, but there are strange murders in India up to today, which are said to be in connection with "Thug" cults.

Anyway, Alexis de Tocqueville also mentions that there are no charitable organisations around the world which would not have their roots in a religious organisation.

But we human beings can always be so terribly self-confident in our opinions that even a political ideology can turn into a kind of religion and Stalinism as well as Nazism had some characteristics of worst religious times in history, e.g. "show trials" in which the accused delinquent had to be guilty and sentenced to death because he was a danger for all "faithful believers" in this ideology. So, this kind of "Witch Hunt" is not only a religious characteristic of the Middle Ages, it is a characteristic of all human beings who do not want to think too much about their faith to believe in something, but in our times "Witch Hunt" can also be a reversed accusation of being attacked although being allegedly innocent. In Germany, there was at least one priest accused of sexual misbehaviour who called this accusation a "witch hunt" against him, which was a bit funny for most of the interested public, remembering the Middle Ages in Germany.

But back to the topic here because "FrankO" wrote here some postings before:

"If it can't be measured and it can't be seen, and interactions with it can't be verified, for all scientific intents and purposes it doesn't exist."

This is absolutely correct but because you can say all the same not only about "dark matter" or the string theories but also about religions, life or any existence after death, the "big bang" and the end of the universe, I herewith proudly present my own theory:

"Because I do not really understand all these phenomenons and aspects of the universe's life and death, our own life and death, all the multiple dimensions of the current "Wild Wild West" in scientific string theory ... they all must somehow be connected to each other!"

;) :facepalm: :amen:
 
cynthia the inocent said:
Anybody who has made contact with me on this site knows I am not the normal old lady, granny type.. I have studied several of the worlds religions ad dont subscribe to any of them. I dont believe in heaven or hell. I see our bodies as simply a vehicle to transport our spirit. ( I am a spiritualist ) The spirit is pure energy. In the Bible, an owners manual for spirits who drive a human form, I talks about fallen angels, who saw animals experiencing pain and pleasure. The fallen angels wanted to experience those things and entered the bodies of living beings. As punishment for this act, God didnt allow them to exit until the body died. When our bodies die, the spirit or soul escapes the confines because it is pure energy and energy can neither be created or destroyed. It goes on forever. Some of you will undoubtedly tell me to go to hell for this statement , but as you know I dont believe there is such a place.
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I disagree with you but I will not abuse you either. I simply ask that we agree to disagree and leave the matter there!
 
FrankO said:
OK ... yes, there is a relationship between matter and energy postulated by Einstein's famous equation, but in the final analysis the equation only means that a ridiculous amount of energy is stored in matter.

But the equation doesn't mean that either the energy is immediately accessible in matter ... certain preconditions (i.e. the complete destruction of said matter) have to exist before it can be accessed.

IMHO dark matter (if it exists) does not fuel dark energy (if it exists).

If, for the sake of argument, we assume dark matter exists (and that's a HUGE assumption BTW) converting it with natural processes to energy would tend to be really difficult .... unless you are relying on processes proton and quantum particle decay to be the engine, and that will occur naturally in minimal quantities over the next few TRILLION years as the universe sputters out to darkness.

Got to remember that, broadly speaking, matter is VERY stable store of energy (if you want to look at it that way rather than as a 'state') and it takes a hell of a reaction to make it completely yield up its energy .... the natural processes that we rely on to extract energy from matter - burning it, splitting the atoms, fusing it ... destroy only minimal amounts of the matter involved (less than .000000001% in the case of fission, less for fusion, and its all chemical for burning matter with no matter loss) and hence only produce (relatively minimal) amounts of energy.

That might seem like a nonsense, but all the fission plants and bombs, and all the hydrogen weapons, and all the energy plants that have EVER existed on Earth, have never produced even a milli-second's worth of the energy generated by the Sun. And the amount of mass lost by the Sun to produce that second's worth of energy in its fusion furnace is less that a gram - the rest of the immense hydrogen mass is not lost and is fused to make helium and heavier elements.

And the G Type Sun is a pretty undistinguished star amongst the 250 billion in our galaxy ... unlike the big O types that fuse their hydrogen to Iron in only a few million years .

But only a vanishingly small amount of the Suns mass (and the mass of those massive O types that will 'destroy' themselves .... but not their matter ... spectacularly in supernovas) is ever truly destroyed in line with Einstein's equation.
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Oh I agree with you in many respects but postulate this, first we can measure the speed that the universe is expanding. Let us accept, for the moment, that our measurements are correct and also, that the rate of expansion is increasing. this requires a lot of energy which has to come from somewhere. Why couldn't my suggestion, I won't give it the status of a theory, have a measure of rationality?
 
Silent_Water said:
Oh I agree with you in many respects but postulate this, first we can measure the speed that the universe is expanding. Let us accept, for the moment, that our measurements are correct and also, that the rate of expansion is increasing. this requires a lot of energy which has to come from somewhere. Why couldn't my suggestion, I won't give it the status of a theory, have a measure of rationality?
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Given our poor perspective (from a planet, in a solar system, in a nondescript spiral galaxy) with all those trillions of overlapping gravity wells messing up our viewpoint, causing time dilation viz-a-viz different locations, and comparative discrepancies in our observations of the intergalactic spaces we are looking at, I think any serious attempt at 'measurement' is impracticable .... especially using measurement mediums that are subject to the speed of light and all the limitations that implies.

Hey, when they invented satellite comms they had to calculate relativistic differentials to make GPS and other 'real-time capabilities work. (And that's just for objects orbiting our planet at between 500 and 1000 miles.) Imagine how chaotic it is with an infinity of more distant locations affected by time and space dilation.

We can make broad generalisations about what we see ... and Galileo, Edwin Hubble (damn his red-shifted soul to Hell!) and any number of other observers complicated what had been a pretty easy to understand model of the universe (Earth being the central of all things on the back of the turtle, with the Sun and the planets making up the universe ... and all those sprinkly twinkly thingies scattered around for effect) with their observations and theories.

That said, it's safe to assume that space-time is expanding, but its ludicrous to think that it's doing it at a uniform rate. The aforementioned mass concentrations like stars and planets and galaxies, and black holes (some of which somebody calculated only a couple of years back may date from the beginning of the universe, but be as little as 600 million years old behind their event horizons) mess up the uniformity, and hence time progression, and hence the rate of expansion at different points of space-time under different gravitic regimes

If Einstein's relativity has taught us anything it's that Space and Time is infinitely malleable and shaped by Gravity. Nothing we observe at any moment in time can be taken as gospel ... in effect Shroedingers Cat exists not only at the quantum level, but also at the Relativistic Universe level.
 
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Baracus said:
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Blimey! More doctors than the NHS :p I never knew the first one was a woman of colour.
I still think Bertrand Russell would not look out of place among them…
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dfg42 said:
You are right in a principal way, but this is not consistent the way you should work in science. For some time you must work with theories and ideas which are probably wrong, till you get to a point when the problems with experiment are no longer unsolvable. In that way one should leave the string theorist doing their work, which is cheap anway and unproblematic. The only problem I see there is the silly interest of the public in one idea of the universe among many, many others (like the holographic universe).
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I'm reluctant to can any theory with a logic that is consistent with other theories ... especially if its testable according to the Scientific Method.

That said a lot of physics nowadays is venturing into metaphysics. Some of the ruminations are helpful, others not so much.

Multiverse theory seems to me to be OK, if you allow for other dimensional constructs, probability theory, and causative schisms ...but will only be accepted by the body scientific when there is definitive evidence of same. Does make the problem of time-travel paradoxes much easier to handle for sci-fi authors though.
 
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