. . . since we get quizzed so much on the material universe, this isn't a discussion until somebody explains the following:
1) Spirit
2) Spiritual
3) Spiritual Universe
I'm thinking you're think that "explaining" 1-3 is an exercise much like explaining the physical universe, where words relate to quantafible people, places or things, in other words, to stuff we can know and to some extent, make clear (make "it" assume some recognizable or tangible form).
Is that what you're wanting for an answer? 1, a spirit, is this and that, with these properties, et al.
since we have forgotten the origins of most of our cultural heritage going back millions of years, with a few moldy texts going back only 2000-5000 years, and all buried in a immense deluge of socially manipulated disinformation materials in the past 10-200 years...
Seriously? Those pesky master manipulators. They're just so damn busy up there in the office of social disinformation that no one would ever work for them if it weren't for all the perks. Of course it's somewhat better these days what with all the automation.
It is much easier to say these other entities are inferior or unable to feel, thus providing justification to inflict pain, suffering, and destruction upon them.
It is much easier to say these other entities lack a soul...
I'm beginning to think Rupert Sheldrake shouldn't feel quite so all alone.
It is much easier to say these other entities lack a soul...
Yes, that is the basic insanity of our society that provides justification for us to destroy everything we don't myopically understand, love, or appreciate.
Credit: TomCochrane
I'm beginning to think Rupert Sheldrake shouldn't feel quite so all alone.
He has a lot more company than would make you comfortable.
Seriously? Those pesky master manipulators. They're just so damn busy up there in the office of social disinformation that no one would ever work for them if it weren't for all the perks. Of course it's somewhat better these days what with all the automation.
I wasn't specifically referencing your job title. You have plenty of competition from many directions, mostly well intentioned...
Which title is that? I wasn't referencing yours either...
Yes, that is the basic insanity of our society that provides justification for us to destroy everything we don't myopically understand, love, or appreciate.
I'd say that - and 'social disinformation' - is largely over-thinking it. It's a simple matter of consumption and no different or more elaborate than swabbing a sterile culture medium in a petri dish with a bacterial strain - the results are eminently predictable.
Tom
Thanks for the critique
Of course I say you are wrong in your impressions of me
I guess you missed my history, and when I was Dr. Guru F.
and would have agreed with 100%,
that was the 70s through the 90s
I evolved, and now have a solid relationship with Reality
Of course I say you are wrong in your impressions of me
I guess you missed my history, and when I was Dr. Guru F.
and would have agreed with 100%,
that was the 70s through the 90s
I evolved, and now have a solid relationship with Reality
Well, admittedly a bunch of text and pictures on a screen is sort of a Plato's cave for trying to understand someone. I did catch your Dr. Guru history. I am no guru, but I don't think having a 'solid relationship with Reality' is necessarily anything to be proud about in this barbaric society. I am all too familiar with that 'solid Reality', enough to know that we have much to learn and not so much to be proud about.
Holy cow this is embarrassing. I mean, even just being on the same continent as Oklahoma is getting pretty embarrassing. You guys down under the 49th parallel must be just squirming with embarrassment huh? Why does Oklahoma let their pet dinosaurs set science curriculum anyway?
Insist That People Coexisted With Dinosaurs…and Get an A in Science Class!
—By Dana Liebelson| Tue Feb. 19, 2013 3:02 AM PST
In biology class, public school students can't generally argue that dinosaurs and people ran around Earth at the same time, at least not without risking a big fat F. But that could soon change for kids in Oklahoma: On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Common Education committee is expected to consider a House bill that would forbid teachers from penalizing students who turn in papers attempting to debunk almost universally accepted scientific theories such as biological evolution and anthropogenic (human-driven) climate change.
Gus Blackwell, the Republican state representative who introduced the bill, insists that his legislation has nothing to do with religion; it simply encourages scientific exploration. "I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks," says Blackwell, who previously spent 20 years working for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. "A student has the freedom to write a paper that points out that highly complex life may not be explained by chance mutations."
These bills are "a kind of code for people who are opposed to teaching climate change and evolution."
Stated another way, students could make untestable, faith-based claims in science classes without fear of receiving a poor mark.
HB 1674 is the latest in an ongoing series of "academic freedom" bills aimed at watering down the teaching of science on highly charged topics. Instead of requiring that teachers and textbooks include creationism—see the bill proposed by Missouri state Rep. Rick Brattin—HB 1674's crafters say it merely encourages teachers and students to question, as the bill puts it, the "scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses" of topics that "cause controversy," including "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."
Eric Meikle, education project director at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in Oakland, California, says Oklahoma has proposed more anti-evolution legislation than any other state, introducing eight bills with academic freedom language since 2004. (None has passed.) "The problem with these bills is that they're so open-ended; it's a kind of code for people who are opposed to teaching climate change and evolution," Meikle says.
HB 1674 goes further than a companion bill under consideration in the state Senate by explicitly protecting students, teachers, and schools from being penalized for subscribing to alternative theories. It does, however, say that children may still be tested on widely accepted theories such as anthropogenic climate change. "Students can't say because I don't believe in this, I don't want to learn it," Blackwell says. "They have to learn it in order to look at the weaknesses."
"An extremely high percentage of scientists will tell you that evolution doesn't have scientific weaknesses," says the NCSE's Meikle. "If every teacher, parent, and school board can decide what to teach on their own, you're going to have chaos. You can't deluge kids with every theory that's ever been considered since the beginning of time."
For thousands of years spiritual teachers have been talking about the realm of the spirit. How silly when any physicist can tell you it's really just the Higgs Field.
BOSTON — A subatomic particle discovered last year that may be the long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say.
The mass of the particle, which was uncovered at the world's largest particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva — is a key ingredient in a calculation that portends the future of space and time.
"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said Monday (Feb. 18) here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on one of the LHC's experiments. [Gallery: Search for the Higgs Boson]
The Higgs boson particle is a manifestation of an energy field pervading the universe called the Higgs field, which is thought to explain why particles have mass. After searching for decades for proof that this field and particle existed, physicists at the LHC announced in July 2012 that they'd discovered a new particle whose properties strongly suggest it is the Higgs boson.
To confirm the particle's identity for sure, more data are needed. But many scientists say they're betting it's the Higgs.
"This discovery to me was personally astounding," said I. Joseph Kroll, a University of Pennsylvania physicist who also works at the LHC. "To me, the Higgs was sort of, it might be there, it might not. The fact that it's there is really a tremendous accomplishment."
And finding the Higgs, if it's truly been found, not only confirms the theory about how particles get mass, but it allows scientists to make new calculations that weren't possible before the particle's properties were known.
For example, the mass of the new particle is about 126 billion electron volts, or about 126 times the mass of the proton. If that particle really is the Higgs, its mass turns out to be just about what's needed to make the universe fundamentally unstable, in a way that would cause it to end catastrophically in the far future.
That's because the Higgs field is thought to be everywhere, so it affects the vacuum of empty space-time in the universe.
"The mass of the Higgs is related to how stable the vacuum is," explained Christopher Hill, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "It's right along the critical line. That could either be a cosmic coincidence, or it could be that there's some physics that's causing that. That's something new, which we didn't know before."
Strikingly, if the Higgs mass were just a few percent different, the universe wouldn't be doomed, the scientists said.
But even if the universe is in for an unfortunate end, there is at least one reason for consolation.
"You won't actually see it, because it will come at you at the speed of light," Lykken said. "So in that sense don't worry."
Well, one of my 'titles' was filming and sound recording Humpback Whales for URI while working on establishing of the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. I will proudly admit to being a disinformation specialist as part of my role in helping to get it established.
Well, one of my 'titles' was filming and sound recording Humpback Whales for URI while working on establishing of the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary.
While there I took it on my own to go out and do song recordings at midnight during all four phases of the moon to determine if a) they sang different phrasing at night, b) different phrasing at different moon phases, but mostly c) to see if countering the gravitation of the moon relative to maintaining neutral buoyancy could be detected in their songs. Would loved to have had the technology at the time to compare all of the above with accurate depth data. Unfortunately the computer power just wasn't available at the time do do any of the requisite analysis, let alone at the resolution required to make any real judgment around the proposition. That, along with wanting to automate animation stands and large-scale greenhouse operations, was why I got into computers.
tucked down at the bottom of the page to be out of the way
FINALLY!
I no longer need to rain down curses on or poke pins into the misshapen wax doll of the West Vancouver Library cardholder who I feared had stolen the book I had been coveting since 10th October of last year. That was when I walked into the library and tapped out 'Roger Penrose' on the keyboard of the sleek modern terminal running an archaic database that is confounded by first names. Thank God the eminent physicist was not surnamed 'Smith.'
I learned that the book I wanted was due that very day. Perhaps it had come in but not been catalogued? I checked with one of the humans still employed by the municipality to look quietly busy and helpful behind the front desk and was assured that as the book slid down the return slot at the library entrance a ray of some kind would leap from the machine to the book or vice versa and the file for the book in the library database would instantly switch from DUE to AVAILABLE. This kept me happily checking and re-checking the database until I remembered I had better things to do.
I continued to query the library database for the overdue Penrose book. Every two or three weeks I looked up the entry and found it stuck at DUE DUE DUE. I hoped the library had an intimidating robot they could send round to the address of the miscreant.
About a month ago I found the entry changed to BILLED. The only further recourse i could think of was black magic.
Whether it was the pins or the curses or maybe the truant's cat that leapt up onto the folding lap-table in front of the computer where it's owner had placed the book to prop his arthritic elbows when Googling for how to kill aphids, toppling the table and bringing the book and yesterday's tea-leavings down with a crash, somehow the book returned to the library.
it is so easy to post pictures of the charismatic megafauna... but they are such a small part of life on Earth... show me the soul of a single cell life form.... Werner would say it is alive because of that "life force."
Seems over analytic to me... when we balance the energy books, there's nothing left for the soul... which puts it in the right domaine (or is that left?), a part of our thoughts.
One can imagine almost anything looking at an eye... in fact, our minds perceive a lot that way, as Tom observes... but those perceptions, as we all know, might be misleading.
this might be a bit technical...
you could read this Nature article, but it won't help: http://ctp.lns.mit.edu/Wilczek_Nature/(72)vacuum_metastable.pdf
but even there they have put the current buzz into the second to last paragraph:
"This will occur, for instance, if the Higgs self-couplings are small and h but not A, couples strongly to some fermion field."
Where their h and A are different fields in their "toy model"... which gives "supersymmetry" and explains the parameters of the "standard model to be" not quite fully there in 1982...
However, the fear of the false vacuum predates this paper... I first heard about it from Gian Carlo Wick, whose Relativistic Quantum Mechanics course I took in my second graduate school year at Columbia U.
I remember Wick describing a visit to Berkeley to testify in front of the City Council about the safety of doing experiments at LBL with the then to be built Super HILAC... he referred to a work of science fiction in describing the effect of the propagation of the collapse bubble, a scene in which the astronomers observe the stars blinking off, one by one, as the bubble approaches...
Wick chuckled at this telling, and then went on to say he thought we were quite safe.
make the most out of what we have while we wait...
Plankton is the most prevalent life and food source in the ocean. Phytoplankton, which carries on photosynthesis near the ocean surface, serves as food for the zooplankton and fish.
The microscopic plants that underpin all life in the oceans are likely to be destroyed by global warming. Scientists have discovered a way that the vital plankton of the oceans can be starved of nutrients as a result of the seas getting warmer. They believe the findings have catastrophic implications for the entire marine habitat, which ultimately relies on plankton at the base of the food chain.
Plankton are microscopic animals (zooplankton) and algae (phytoplankton) that live in the ocean. They drift on currents and provide food for many ocean residents.
“A larger temperature difference between two water layers implies less mixing of chemicals between these water layers,” he said. “Global warming of the surface layers of the oceans, owing to climate change, strengthens the stratification and thereby reduces the upward mixing of nutrients.”
Scientists had believed phytoplankton, which survives best at depths of about 100 metres, is largely stable and immune from the impact of global warming. “This model prediction was rather unexpected,” Professor Huisman said.
“Reduced stability of the plankton, caused by global warming of the oceans, may result in a decline of oceanic production and reduced sequestration of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the oceans.”
Phytoplankton therefore acts as a carbon “sink” which takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and deposits the carbon in long-term stores that can remain undisturbed for thousands of years. If the growth of phytoplankton is interrupted by global warming, this ability to act as a buffer against global warming is also affected – leading to a much-feared positive feedback.
Let us know!