I didn't add the point about Newton's idea of time because it could be argued it comes from Hebrew ideas of time (whereas cyclical time is associated, for instance, with Hinduism) and it would become too long a point to just insert in the comment as an edit. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
I argued that time is created by motion
I'd just ask him (but won't bother to register): What is "motion"? You just replace one axiom with another. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I realize my command of modern physics isn't sufficient to allow me to raise questions as to its veracity
As for my point about light speed, if that expanding balloon has units marked off on it, called light years, such that two galaxies are a billion light-years apart and we blow that balloon up further, the number of light-years doesn't increase.
I use the term "energy" in the Newtonian sense; That which cannot be created or destroyed and for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If I'm defining it in terms of a unit, that makes it both energy and information. A joule of energy can be expended and while the particular unit no longer exists, the energy has continued on into other forms. As I said, energy goes past to future. Information goes future to past.
generalist, metaphor-ridden, system overviewing, political-philosophical polymath leaps into unknown without benefit of insurance or sound map, to be nudged -not judged- back onto the straight and narrow by specialist, informed, data-driven, wonky-but-articulate spokesman (somewhat unwillingly, lol!).
there's a great tv show in there.
i don't 'understand' Bach the first times listening, but the poetry in the lines is immediately felt.
similarly, reading the discussion on that thread was a bit like eavesdropping on aliens from sirius discussing interstellar overdrive, but there's such majesty and loft in just allowing the words to resonate, the synaptic activity is palpable, even if the normal outcomes of linear enquiry and understanding are as far away as alpha centauri.
i appreciated jake's analogy about the SUV, and your reply about the ugliness of even trying to explain, that was illuminating, both in terms of the sheer ridiculousness of the proposition (to convince the driver of his unaesthetic choice), and in the hint of the verticality of this knowledge, the lonely-at-the top vibe, of having been initiated and seeing the ideas oversimplified for us dummies down on the plain, how pure it is up there, and how tiresome it is to see those presumptuous idiots trying to will themselves up, when anyone who has been there knows that unless you take the correct way up, you will always be muddled, and never be able to go back and check the results mathematically, therefore irrelevant, even annoying.
i also appreciated your feelings that ET is nor a place to speculate about science. i see that you feel this blog might be denigrated by serious people if posters use it too much as a playground for abstractions. apologies if i have misunderstood.
it seems that there is a huge appetite to try and grok this stuff, and yet the gap between those in the know, and yer average joe seems nigh-unbridgeable, more's the pity.
it would appear that the difficulty in mastering the levels of mathematics necessary for initiation precludes the masses being able to share in the wonder, at least until mathematics is taught in such a way that even the most innumerate can be gently handheld through addition and subtraction all the way to the intellectual himalayas of abstract mathematics.
not an easy job, pedagogically, or we'd have maths whizzes popping up like mushrooms everywhere.
i can imagine how strange it might be to write a diary from scratch about something so difficult to language in letters and words, when you know most people do not even have the abc's yet.
like writing a symphony for the deaf, or painting a masterpiece for the blind.
perhaps it's because i'm so clueless, but if i were a physics professor, and i had a student like brodix, i'd feel fortunate the guy was so into digging into his reality and trying to find points of reference others could share, letting his questions teach by 'not-even-wrongness', as representative of a layman's questions, wrongheaded perhaps, but in good faith.
but the that presupposes that people with your level of knowledge and understanding actually enjoy trying to share it, which was clearly not the case, unless 'ugh' is a sound of pleasure!
anyroads, you may never write that diary for us, and if you did, you may only have 3 or 4 comments on it because the rest didn't want to make fools of ourselves. so maybe it's not worth the candle...
meanwhile, i got what i wanted, (evil cackle...)
it took me quite a while to distinguish between a 6th chord and 6/9th, i don't imagine understanding einstein will come at any more accelerated a velocity.
brazilian bossa chords, so deliciously inside, so teasingly tangled, so sexily inverted, so languorously exciting, mmm. and that's before getting into the pantherlike surreptitiousness of the syncopation. or was it after?
maybe music and math will rejoin as one, one infinite starry night full of mystic melodies and dancing equations...
reading discussions about your field is as mysteriously moving as listening to great music.
fsm knows why! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I'm glad you're finding this entertaining. I'm not. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
Crackpot index
10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it. (10 more for emphasizing that you worked on your own.)
HomogeneityI have been following this discussion for over thirty years and there very much was an issue of how to explain why we appear at the center, due to the fact that everything, non-local, is redshifted directly away from us. The standard cosmological model is an exploration of the consequences of assuming the universe is on average homogeneous and isotropic - that is, that it looks exactly the same from every point and in every direction. This is an ansatz (simplifying assumption) of the theory, but it implies that "we appear at the center" because every point appears exactly the same, and every direction appears exactly the same, so all apparent motion appears to be radially away (or towards) the observer, any observer. By construction. That after 30 years of "following" "this discussion" you still haven't understood this basic point makes me wonder what you've actually been discussing, because the standard cosmological models can't be it. Migeru July 13, 2009 - 5:33am
I have been following this discussion for over thirty years and there very much was an issue of how to explain why we appear at the center, due to the fact that everything, non-local, is redshifted directly away from us.
This is an ansatz (simplifying assumption) of the theory, but it implies that "we appear at the center" because every point appears exactly the same, and every direction appears exactly the same, so all apparent motion appears to be radially away (or towards) the observer, any observer. By construction.
That after 30 years of "following" "this discussion" you still haven't understood this basic point makes me wonder what you've actually been discussing, because the standard cosmological models can't be it. Migeru July 13, 2009 - 5:33am
the lonely-at-the top vibe, of having been initiated and seeing the ideas oversimplified for us dummies down on the plain, how pure it is up there, and how tiresome it is to see those presumptuous idiots trying to will themselves up ... i see that you feel this blog might be denigrated by serious people if posters use it too much as a playground for abstractions ... people with your level of knowledge and understanding actually enjoy trying to share it, which was clearly not the case
...
i see that you feel this blog might be denigrated by serious people if posters use it too much as a playground for abstractions
people with your level of knowledge and understanding actually enjoy trying to share it, which was clearly not the case
Shadows in the cave, truly.
he's too attached to his "common sense".
A theoretic subatomic or galaxywide "creature" would probably have a quite differing view on "common sense" than we have... Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
When spotting apparent contradictions and oxymorons in modern science
He attacks the straw men erected for him by poor popularizers of science. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
The Agonist: Between Culture and Nature on Planet Earth
The reason Epi-cycles lasted for 1500 years was because it was far easier to add a patch whenever an anomaly came up, than to go back and rethink the entire theory. Now we have dark matter and energy. Math has to deal with the very fact that its precision can also be a weakness, if factors are overlooked. Just look at the physics PhD's who went to Wall St. and created enormous securities bubbles because they didn't consider the pedestrian element of declining house prices.
The trouble happens when you take the models and ignore the limitations because you damn well want to.
The problem with that approach are twofold:
First, the quintessential problem with a statement that is "not even wrong" is that it cannot be used to educate anybody about physics. If it could, it would simply be wrong. A "not even wrong" statement needs to be deconstructed at the level of epistemology. Which gets tiresome. And usually generates more heat than light.
Second, brodix, from what I've read of him, is not trying to dig into reality - he seems to be into constructing a mental framework that permits him to fix reality around an ide fixé. That is not terribly helpful when you are attempting to communicate.
It is one thing to say "I don't understand how [pop-science explanation] works." This is stating that the populariser has failed (whether because he is a poor populariser or because the subject is inherently difficult). It is quite another to say "I think this theory is wrong, because [pop-science explanation] doesn't work, for these reasons." That is quarrelling with the theory itself, which is not for the faint of heart.
This difference is not a minor semantic quibble or a matter of taste: The former statement admits to the knowledge that what you have read is not the actual theory. The latter does not. It means that the former case permits the misconceptions to be cleared up simply by the device of explaining the theory better, while in the latter case you have to deconstruct his wrong conception of what the theory says before you can even begin to explain the real theory.
It is, to take a more familiar case, the difference between explaining how the economy works to an interested layman and explaining how the economy works to an established neoclassical economist.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
