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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Paul and MikeL,
What are some noble acts you have done?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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jammer, let me put it in non-edh but hfcs terms...
you just proved yourself a dumbass in modern physics.
"BTW..." -jammer
Also a smart-ass.
Welcome to the Blu club.
Congratulations.
.....
I'm with Neil Tyson and others. Advances in civilization are made probably by .1 per cent of the population. As far as the rest, when they're not laboring or jacking off, chances are, they're throwing feces at each other.
Atheist God help us.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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What are some noble acts you have done?
Providing insights and pathways to knowledge, wisdom, and love through the use of words and art with concern to meeting each individual's ability, may be one of the more noble'r deeds : )
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Lollie
Social climber
I'm Lolli.
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Seems to me Compassion is devalued somewhat when it is declared simply an evolutionary advantage when, in fact, it is a noble human trait..
What's the contradiction? Please explain, I don't get it.
Are you saying a good and noble human trait can't be evolved through evolution? You mean only bad traits can be the result of evolution?
I seriously cannot understand how anybody believes those fairytales about creation. That's nothing but pure selfchosen ignorance. A volontary return to the Middle Ages. You better pray that your fellow countrywomen believes in science so you can stay among the top countries in the world. Or you will, as it already has started in the South, become a country where simpel assembly industry is located from richer countries because salaries are low and people ignorant. Don't you know ANYTHING about history? Science is what gives you your mobilephones and the computer you write those utterly silly ideas on. Incredible.
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WBraun
climber
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Creation and evolution are always simultaneously ongoing ......
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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I think that you guys have it all wrong about human evolution.
Obviously, we can cure genetic diseases, and those people can have kids, so natural selection isn't working properly with humans now.
I saw something a few months ago that was very interesting. Women would have in vitro fertilization, and the technologists were waiting until that embryo had, say, 32 cells. They would carefully remove the nucleus from a single cell (which apparently has no effect on the later fetus or child).
They were taking that one nucleus and running its genetic code to search for genetic diseases. There are many such diseases, and a lot of them are known. If that embryo contained the gene for breast cancer for example, they would flush it and try another, until they had found one that was free of inheritable disease.
It was an expensive process, but an important one. You can now sequence an entire genome very quickly with supercomputers, and genetic markers for disease are being discovered very quickly. Regularly, but imagine how far this will have gone in another 30 years?
I can see a time in the near future where all babies go through this screening. I can even see a time when genes are spliced into the genome of the embryo to give it favorable qualities.
Every parent wants their kids to be healthy, smart, and good looking. We love them all regardless.
This technology is currently expensive and rare. Like most technologies, the cost will come down, but I still see a possible future where there is a class of designer humans competing with normal, roll of the dice humans.
Just like in the film Gattica.
We will guide our own evolution. Those who can't afford it will be a permanent lower class, possibly ending up as an inferior species.
I'm not saying that I like the idea. I'm only saying that not only is it coming, it has already started.
The time is near where everyone is intelligently designed, thanks to patented technology.
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Lollie
Social climber
I'm Lolli.
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Interesting. But not every gene, is my guess. I have something called the Viking disease. It's just a crooked (and therefore very weak) finger which gets locked against your palm, and by surgery or a special injection one gets rid of it, when it has developed fully. This disease is only found where the Vikings been, hence the name. It can only be found in the genes of males, the only way to find out if a woman has it is if she gets it.
:-) which by the way also tells I am a straight descendent of Vikings.
Anyway, diseases and other genetical issues must reside somewhere else but in the specific male or female cell, if the screening you talk about will work.
Did you know that we, the human race, mutate constantly? Most of those mutations doesn't mean a thing, except that one can track your ancestry and relatives to you through it? My greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreat grandmother (8 greats...) had a mutated gene, only inherited on the female side. Everybody who has that specific combination is related to me.
Genetics is so very interesting.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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BTW, no one KNOWS why time slows down for faster moving observers. Seems plausible that it is due to less interaction, and so fewer actual events happening, for the faster moving observer.
Also, no one KNOWS what time is. My idea of it being a record of the changes, so a record of chemical processes, is my own :)
I think you might want to study special relativity a bit... you seem to be very confused. But your confused reaction is not uncommon, special relativity is confusing for most people first encountering it.
The reason why time "slows down" in a moving inertial frame (relative to another, "non moving" frame) is to preserve the "length" of the 4-vector (which includes time)... the velocity dependence of the length and duration change so that the 4-vector length remains the same.
This implies the constancy of the speed-of-light, c, in all inertial reference frames.
The original statement of the principle of relativity dates back to at least Galileo, who used the concept to explain why, if the Earth is moving around the Sun at a very high velocity, we don' seem to notice that motion.
A more formal consideration of Galilean relativity leads a transformation of coordinates from one moving frame to another. Galileo noted that doing a science experiment in one moving frame will give the exact same result as doing the experiment in another moving frame.
Einstein realized that Maxwell's equations didn't satisfy this invariance under Galilean transformations, and derived the transformations that they were invariant under, the so called Lorentz transformations. Which requires bringing the time "dimension" on an equal footing with the space dimensions, thus our "modern" view that we live in a 4-dimensional space.
This space is not Euclidean, that is, the definition of "length" squared is not the sum of the squares of the "lengths" in the individual four dimensions. This is captured in the generalized definition of multi-dimensional spaces by defining a "metric" that tells us how to formulate the "length" in the space. Our particular 4-dimensional space is Minkowskian...
This leads to a lot of interesting physics, but basically we find a set of invariance principles form our universe's particular space-time "structure," the Poincaré group, which defines the algebra of the universe.
It is interesting to continue to speculate, from the less controversial idea that space-time itself is a product of the physical nature of this universe (where causality plays a major role, essentially defining the two light cone regions "before and after" connected by the point of "here and now") to my more controversial assertion that the same mechanism that creates space-time also creates mathematics (see G. Birkhoff's Lattice Theory pp 191-194 for this inspiration) since the "logic" of quantum mechanics is an othrocomplemented modular lattice, that of classical mechanics is a continuous Boolean algebra...
The description of physics without reference to any coordinate system is entirely possible, and has been available since Laplace, Lagrange and Euler... and extended to quantum mechanics by Wheeler and Feynman and later to field theory by Coleman.
All this is to say that your statement that "nobody knows..." is rather off base, many people know things that exclude your own speculations, at a very deep level. And while it is quite fashionable on this thread to state, essentially "nobody knows anything," it is a rather uninformed statement.
But that is not surprising for the crowd of ipse-dixiters that inhabit this thread.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Ed: thanks for accusing me of being intellectual. I'll wear it instead of my freak flag...
I thought you were both. And many other things—and neither, really. It’s hard to say what you are, wouldn’t you say?
MH2: What are some noble acts you have done?
Interesting question. (BB might have beaten me to an answer.)
My answer might be, “everything / anything human.” I’ve loved, hated, written, built, conceived, taught, climbed, read, meditated, cooked, gazed, etc. I walk, I talk, I crawl on my belly like a reptile. But more pointedly: “I am.” I am awareness becoming aware of awareness.
There’s no reason to single out “doing.” Doing is a small subset of what is.
Of course, you might then wonder, “What does it mean to be human?” “What is awareness, then?” (Sorry for the thread drift.)
Everything is noble. Everything is special. Everything is a marvelous, magical mystery. Even things like evolution. (Just look.)
Lollie: I seriously cannot understand how anybody believes those fairytales about creation.
I haven’t yet come across anyone who lives and talks science only. Everyone I’ve met also seems to rely upon their instincts, their own sense of magic, their narratives, their beliefs, their values, their own (cultural, community) sense of values, their sense of artistry, their own sense of morals, etc. No one goes around solely speaking in equations or spouting data. People have feelings, they have desires, they have interpretations, they have aversions that they have no conclusive scientific evidence (nor actually the direct experience in any scientific discoveries) for. I think anyone can see that without difficulty. The world you imply is that of robots. By your writing, you do not seem to be a robot. (But Ed or MH2 might say that I cannot know.)
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Lollie
Social climber
I'm Lolli.
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Ed, I've read about some teories which says there's likely several dimensions existing along with our world, (not meaning the four dimensions you just wrote about, but in the sense of worlds existing parallell with another). Do you happen to know if there's any truth in that? That physicists explore the possibility?
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Lollie
Social climber
I'm Lolli.
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MikeL,
It seems as we don't talk the same language. It's quite an interesting conclusion you drew out of my post. I'm intrigued, I would like to find out how you arrived at it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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what constitutes a "reason?"
your impression does not support your claim of knowledge...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Ed said:
It is interesting to continue to speculate, from the less controversial idea that space-time itself is a product of the physical nature of this universe .
First, when you say "space," aren't you really referring to fields.
Second, how about the physical content of the universe being a product of space, or perhaps fields?
Interesting to speculate how the big ass bang could be a one-off if it was a "product" of extant physical stuff.
JL
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Lollie:
You lambast people of religion. It’s the title of the thread. You seem to propose (along with most others here) that anyone who believes in religion or adheres to religious principles is stupid or ignorant. I posted your own words as a quote.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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any truth to multi-dimensional space?
let me avoid the "truth."
Multi-dimensional spaces can be a way to explain what we currently know. One way around the problem of having infinitesimal point particles is to make them strings... but then we have to have a space where most of the string resides in, with only the intersection of the string in our own 4-dimensional universe, making it look like a point.
Having hypothesized this multi-dimensional universe (I think it is 10- or 11-dimensions), you have to "fold up" the other dimensions in some physical way... and then having done all this, proceed to show how our observed universe is consistent with that expanded universe.
This has been done in a program called "String Theory" basically a theory that is consistent with what we know... and avoids the particular problem of point particles... criticism of this program basically declare it to be a "conspiracy theory," that is, it is carefully constructed to agree with all the known "facts" but rests on things that are, otherwise, speculations (which may not be possible to test).
Generally we don't care about the conspiracy theory allegations if the theory is predictive, but so far the String Theory program has been short on predictions, especially in the domain of cosmology. The most stunning example being the existence of "Dark Energy," which was observed before the theory pronounced on its existence (and initially the String Theory crowd pooh-poohed the observation's interpretation). Later String Theory absorbed Dark Energy, but that one incident shows how useless the idea is at this time.
Physicists were liberated from our classical notion of space and time by Einstein, who fused them together in a dynamical theory (General Relativity) going from 3-dimensional space to 4-dimensional space-time. Since Einstein, proposing multiple dimensions to explain physics is not such a radical act... a proposal for a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) invoked 5-dimensions... we don't talk a lot about GUTs these days...
Multi-dimensional spaces aren't such a stretch, and as I said above, there are ways of doing physics without any dimensions at all... equivalent to an infinite number of dimensions...
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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What's the contradiction? Please explain, I don't get it.
Are you saying a good and noble human trait can't be evolved through evolution? You mean only bad traits can be the result of evolution?
I seriously cannot understand how anybody believes those fairytales about creation.
I'm saying that the human achievement with regard to virtue has left evolution behind and in ascribing that achievement completely to evolutionary processes humanity's considerable achievements, which often violate a successful evolutionary process, are diminished .
As far as those fairy tales go... simply dismissing them as false ignores their wisdom. You don't criticise a novel of fiction or a movie by simply saying "Hey that's not real." You wouldn't say Aesops fables are BS because animals can't talk... because the wisdom is in the moral.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I'm saying that the human achievement with regard to virtue has left evolution behind and in ascribing that achievement completely to evolutionary processes humanity's considerable achievements, which often violate a successful evolutionary process, are diminished .
so nice to view humans as exceptional and unique and so alone in the universe...
...and far from "leaving evolution behind," humans live in an ecosystem that is evolving, and this period of freedom from bacterial infection may be a brief hundred years (if we're lucky) before those nasty bugs defeat the noble work of medical researchers like Pasteur through that ignoble mechanism of Darwinism... and we are once again brought down to the level of equality with our competitors.
no, we have not escaped evolution... nor can we. We might dream of it, but someday there will be no one around to know that we once dreamed... no matter what we now hold as noble.
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