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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / If I go back in time and kill my parents, will I die too?

« on: 27/04/2008 11:20:10 »

this is a quicky, just to draw the three threads I started together, because that makes sense.  The relevant post is in the thread titled: how do we know the laws of physics are really laws.... , posted under the alias rainwildman

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Is physics becoming a thing of that past?

« on: 27/04/2008 11:18:19 »

this is a quicky, just to draw the three threads I started together, because that makes sense.  The relevant post is in the thread titled: how do we know the laws of physics are really laws.... , posted under the alias rainwildman

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / How do we know that the "laws" of physics are really laws, i.e. true everywhere?

« on: 27/04/2008 11:14:42 »

Hi, I,m back!  'Bitter and Twisted Troll', alias 'bitistoll' (get it? BITer and twISTed trOLL?), alias rainwildman.   I just love that epithet and could not waste it... bitter and twisted troll, all those 't' and 'd' sounds just trip along, onomatopea, pure poetry, I love it.

So why is she back?  Because mummy is needed to bring some order to this site.

I have been round and about the internet quite extensively, and my explorations have taken me to many discussion forums, and I have found that there is a pattern, and it is exibited here as much as everywhere else.

These forums are make an ideal playground for bullies and teases.  They get into a little gang and patrole the site like guard-dogs ready to savage anyone who enters their territory ... and that is what they are about, that is where they get their kicks.  All else is just pretence and empty noises.

I know the type well.  I had an older brother who was just the same.  He only ever joined in my games so that he could spoil them, break my toys, and give me a thumping!  My first recourse, and a wise one it was, was simply to refuse to play with him.  But lord he could be persistent!  Eventually I would succumb to emotional blackmail (how can you be so mean? and the like) and the result would be the broken toys, the spoiled game and the thumping.  I once asked mother why she never interfered, never stopped him or gave him a row for such bad behaviour, and she gave me what was probably the most valuable gift she ever gave me, a 'pearl of wisdom,.  She said, 'it's your own fault.  IF YOU DID NOT REACT HE WOULD NOT DO IT.'

Now harsh that seemed, loading the onus for his good behaviour onto me.  But she was right.  The world is full of bullies and teases and once you know how, and once you can identify the type, they are very very easy to deal with.

You see, they are like little boys throwing stones at dogs: when the dog howls and runs around trying to dodge the stones and cowers with its tail between its legs, that is what they get off on.  If the dog were to completely not react to the stones, they would soon get bored and go off to cause trouble elsewhere.

So that is the nature of the hard-core that skulk around these forums arguing and bullying and spoiling it for those who actually want to discuss things.  And that is what concerns me... those of you out there who actually WANT to understand things, to learn and discuss and do all the things that these boards, on the face of it, are supposed to do... you need to know what you are dealing with and how to take care of it.

And this is how: DO NOT PLAY WITH THEM.  That is, when you have identified the ones that come on scary, the hard-core, then DO NOT REACT TO THEM.  Do not argue with them, do not respond when they try to argue with you.  Talk to other people who are trying to have a decent discussion and ignore the interjections of the teases and bullies.  Above all, DO NOT BE AFRAID OF THEM.  They really are not dangerous at all.

The thing is that by their bad behaviour they do themselves more damage than anyone else, and the damage they do themselves is to lose sight of reality, of truth.  They tell lies and try to trick you and play all the games beloved of arguers, and that is not about truth, it is about winning an argument by any means possible, including lying.  You have to SOUND good though, and that is what does the trick.  But if you find yourself reading down the posts these people are posting, and you find you are having difficulty grasping hold of things, difficulty understanding what they are saying, believe me, THE FAULT IS NOT YOURS.  IT IS NOT THAT YOU ARE STUPID, BUT THAT THEY ARE SAYING NOTHING.  They spout good sounding, but empty phrases that they have  learnt parrot-wise.  The WHOLE POINT IS TO INTIMIDATE, SO DO NOT SUCCUMB.

I have onserved that there are a lot of people looking at the posts I have put up, but blessed few of them open their mouths.  I only hope this goes some way to remedy that situation.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Is physics becoming a thing of that past?

« on: 23/04/2008 12:01:24 »

When you talk of artist applying restrictions to their work in order to get it going, in order to make it more challenging, you are talking about people who need challenge.  These are people who have forgotten the child-like ability to play, to allow curiosity and interest to lead, and they need competition and challenge to motivate them.  I would argue, from my experience, that when people need to drive themselves like that they, in fact, have lost the best, and real motivation behind creativity, and the work that results is, for the most part, trivial.

When I talk about visual information, I am not talking about science fiction films ... or not in the straight forward manner.  Actuall Star Trek does contain a very great deal of information, but it is information ABOUT THE CULTURE and character of the society that produces such entertainment.

But consider the information that is carried in the visual appearance of, say, a cat.  You just have to look at a cat, and even if you have never seen one before, you can deduce a very great deal about what it is and how it live and what it eats and so on.  It has eyes that face forward; it has fur; it has claws;it has four legs; it breathes air; it has ears; The list of the information that you can get from just looking at the visual appearance of a cat is endless.  this is metaphor.  One could say that the visual appearance of a cat is a metaphor for what a cat is and how it functions, just like the waste paper basket icon on my screen is a metaphor that tells me what a certain piece of software does.

And if we do not use such information, it is wasted.  Why DOES a cat look like it is, so to speak.  I mean, it is possible to have animals that look different from their true function, animals, that in fact, use disguise to make themselves look like leaves and things.  So visual information is used in the animal world to convey precise information.  Wolves can even use it to tell the health of their prey.  The extent and type of information that can be conveyed visually is amazing, and we have only begun to scratch the surface of what it can do. 

Another consideration is this: if physics is too hard it will reach a ceiling beyond which we cannot take it.  As an example, the writing of novels has been getting into trouble in recent years.  People are wondering what new can be done, and we are getting into a situation that very trivial advances are being accepted and lauded because, well, only trivial advances are possible now and that is better than nothing.

Why is this the case?  Consider what it take to write a novel... Some novelists lock themselves away in isolated rooms for a year or maybe two because only by working for a year or more in complete isolation with no distractions can they get the novel written!  When novel become this hard to write then nothing greater is humanly possible.  The cost of writing novels has become to high.  so what is the way forward?  You must find some way of making novel writing EASIER.

The ethic of making hard things easier is the ethic that allows unlimited achievements.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Is physics becoming a thing of that past?

« on: 22/04/2008 11:42:23 »

I work in communications, but with people rather than computers, and in particular, I am working with visual communications.  I am interested in the information carrying capacity of images, and what one finds, is that it is very high compared to other ways of communicating, such as words or numbers.

what one finds is that using images one can deal with much more complex scenarios, communicate much more complex information, than one can with mathematics, and that suggests that maths is not an efficient way of dealing with describing complex things, like our world.

Mathematics is, of course, a language, just the same as English, and visual language, but each language has its own particular characteristics that make it useful in different circumstances.  The peculiar characteristic of maths is that it is predictive and quantitative, but there are always trade-offs, and what is traded is semantics, that is meaning, and complexity, that is, the ability to deal with, describe things that are easily accessible to word languages and visual language.  The peculiar characteristic of images is that they can deal with extreme complexity, but they are not predictive, or minimally so... I think.

One has to ask then, are the restrictions of mathematics holding science back?  If it restricts us to thinking and being able to deal with only simple things, then maybe there comes a time when one says, prediction is not everything, and, at the very least, we perhaps should be exploring just where visual language could take physics?

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / If I go back in time and kill my parents, will I die too?

« on: 21/04/2008 12:15:49 »

When we talk of the universe as being like a computer rather than like ue, that is, we are capable of being self-regulating and correcting, but the universe is not, I wonder if we should not consider OURSELVES as part of that universe, and if we do, then the universe, at least in its PARTS, and that includes planets like the Earth, which has a self-regulating biosphere, IS self-regulating.  The question would then become, what significance does one attach to those parts? 

One can imagine a scenario in which universes are being born and dieing by the billion all the time.  A universe is born with a set of laws, and only the ones that have a VIABLE set of laws will survive, and ours is one of those rare survivors, BECAUSE the laws it was born with worked.

But it is surviving on a knife-edge, incapable of coping with random events.  If it is going to continue to survive it must somehow deal with this, must develop the ability to cope with change, random or otherwise.  To put it another way, the only universes that can survive long-term, are those that are capable of changing beyond their first set of laws... and that is where we and our planet come in... we are the universe developing the ability to self-regulate!

We are used to the idea of the universe evolving, we are just not used to thinking of ourselves as a significant part of that evolution, but, out planet with its self-regulating biosphere evolved before we did, and that is more  understandable.  That is sort of like saying that BIOLOGY is the universe developing a way of being self-regulating.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / If I go back in time and kill my parents, will I die too?

« on: 20/04/2008 11:36:52 »

Someone above said that they do not believe that randomness can exist in the universe because, like a computer, the universe is delicate.

Do you really think the universe is as delicate as a computer?  I mean, what about self-regulating systems, such as our world?  Computers do not have the ability, except in rather trivial ways, of mending or correcting themselves.  We do, we recover from many seriour illnesses, and our environment is also self-regulating, in that, eg, if we deplete the oxygen them microbes in the ocean respond by creating more, but if we put too much oxygen into the atmosphere, then the microbes of another kind flourish and work to counter the excess oxygen. So we are surrounded, at least in our world, by evidence that the universe is CAPABLE of being self-regulating, and of recovering from mistakes etc.  If it is capable of doing so on the small scale, is there reason to suppose the bigger universe might not also be self-regulating?

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / If I go back in time and kill my parents, will I die too?

« on: 19/04/2008 12:17:30 »

I have been thinking about that well known paradox about time travel, the one where you go back in time and shoot your parents and then you could not have been born and if you had not been born you could not have gone back in time and shot your parents....!?!?

Would this answer: If I go back in time and CHANGE the past, then it is NO LONGER THE PAST.  The past becomes the future.  I think of the analogy of the expanding universe.. it can go both ways, as it were, from this point... it could shrink and go right back to the big bang and start all over again, or it could go on expanding.  Maybe time is the same, so the future is not always what is AHEAD of you, it could also be BEHIND you.. so the future would just be the direction you are going in, the direction of change.

this may be an old idea.  I don't know.  Maybe there is a flaw!

Bitistoll