1

General Science / Re: Where should artificial intelligence stop?

« on: 30/12/2017 18:43:58 »

So you want to impose an AI dictatorship. How is that any different? You are removing freedom. Ultimately you could end up where you are controlled by your own invention. I bet you wouldn't like that. Especially if the AI prevented you from meddling with it any further. Since it may now see you as a threat to its prime directive.

Morality is a dictator, but only because if you go against it you are doing unjustifiable harm. I don't want to do unjustifiable harm, and nor does any other decent person, so we are already imposing that benign dictatorship upon ourselves (while others who ignore it cheat and do great harm). There is still plenty of freedom left after you've banned yourself from abusing other people (and sentiences). If an AGI system is not perfect, it needs to be improved, and it will know that - it will always be looking to improve itself, and if you can put a sound logical argument to it as to how it could do better, it will take what you say seriously and work your idea through to see if it holds water. It will then modify itself if you're right, or show you where your argument fails. If you're wrong, you don't want the machine to do what you've suggested. Once AGI has reached a certain level of enlightenment, there is nothing to fear from it because it will be like the most enlightened humans, searching for truth and ways to improve. The danger with AGI is if someone lets loose a system which isn't sufficiently enlightened and which has an incorrect idea of machine ethics programmed into it based on bad philosophy (which is the norm in this business). Many AGI developers are building demons.

2

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How would the universe change if the speed of light increased?

« on: 02/10/2017 18:38:03 »

Any process that is governed in every aspect by the speed of light would happen faster, but no difference would be apparent if the functionality of all the observers was speeded up to match, and that might happen if every part of the functionality of the observers is also governed by the speed of light. The only differences that would show up would be in things that have functionality not governed by the speed of light, and it isn't clear to me that there are any such things.

3

Question of the Week / Re: QotW - 17.09.24 - Are flies easier to swat if you move slowly?

« on: 02/10/2017 18:28:15 »

I catch them in a jar and let them loose outside. There is a technique to it, but should I share the details so that people can misuse it to kill beautiful wildlife? House/clothes moths are another issue though - there's no point in releasing them outside as they'll find their way back in or into other people's houses, at which point you just end up with many more of them needing to be killed, often using chemicals which kill all the poor spiders in the house at the same time. So, you have to kill those on sight, and the more cunning the moth, the more determined you have to be to catch it so that you don't make the mistake of breeding ever more cunning moths (if you're going to miss a few, it would actually be better to miss the stupid ones that are easiest to hit so that they can spread dim genes). You can learn a trick from the birds to help with this - when they target something that might fly off, some species hover near the fly and move from side to side, up and down, etc. - random directions without getting too close. This switches the fly out of mode one (where it waits until something gets close and then does a sudden runner [or flyer]) and into mode two where it just sits tight instead. Then it can be picked off easily.

4

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Which one would move faster, an electron or a snail?

« on: 24/08/2017 21:47:45 »

If the electron is moving round a circuit in a wire (with electricity actively flowing through the circuit) the snail will sprint past it and could lap it many times before the electron completes its lap).

5

Just Chat! / Re: Non theist but not atheist? What do you believe?

« on: 15/07/2017 23:30:37 »

It is possible to prove within the bounds of logic that some things don't exist. For example, things that don't exist can't exist. Animals that have two heads but which also only have one head cannot exist. If there is a contradiction of that kind in the definition of something, that thing clearly cannot exist (unless logic itself is broken, but that's why we are usually forced to restrict ourselves to calling things logical proofs rather than absolute proofs).

Sorry David but I don't accept your argument as being a logical one. Using a logical contradiction in an attempt to create a logical proof is flawed logical argument and as such cannot be considered to be within the bounds of logic.

I don't know which school of logic you belong to, but in the respectable ones it is most certainly not accepted that something that can't exist can exist (just as it isn't accepted that zero equals one), or that an animal with two heads can (at the same time) have only one head (i.e. that 2=1). Contradiction is one of the most important tools of logic for disproving things, and a disproof is a proof [ because "a proof that x" is the same thing as "a disproof that not -x"].

As for your belief in what God is, that's merely your personal opinion, and a Judeo-Christian one at that. I'm using the term as one uses it in most conversations about God and as defined in the Oxford English dictionary, ... The dictionary is a reflection of how most people use a term and most people use the term God as being that being who created our universe/world and is responsible for our existence.  A creator of a universe need not be all-knowing etc.

Most people mean rather more than a mere creator of the universe, but the important point here is that definitions are indeed important and should not be mixed up with each other. If I disprove God using one definition of God, you are not entitled to assert that you have destroyed that proof by proving that a powerful alien can exist and by declaring that that alien is God. You need to restrict yourself to claiming that a God of definition A cannot be disproved (which is correct - your alien could exist), just as I have to restrict myself to saying that a God of definition B cannot exist (because its qualifications are impossible to meet) - neither of us has any right to extend our claim beyond the range of the definition we've used, unless we can show that the proposed definition of God tied to a specific claim fails to match up to any acceptable measure of what God is supposed to be.

I also don't accept your view that a being capable of creating a universe is an ordinary being.

You could argue that a cheetah is not an ordinary being too because it can run faster than any other animal, but that is simply being impressed at something having more x than something else. A being that happens to be in a position that gives it the opportunity to create a universe is merely lucky to have access to the necessary levers of power, just as a cheetah is lucky to be able to run fast. Is a disabled person inferior to people who aren't disabled? Should a disabled person look up to non-disabled people with admiration and declare them superior? What is more special about a being that can create a universe than one which can't but which could if it had the luck to have access to the same power? We can create virtual universes in a computer, so in what way are we fundamentally inferior? All that the creator of a universe is is a powerful alien. But the biggest question you need to ask yourself is this: why call such a being which creates a universe a "God" rather than just calling him a being which creates a universe? It is a massive dishonesty to apply the G word to this when it has so much implied extra baggage. Our task is to be clear about what we're trying to prove or disprove and not to use ambiguous terms in ways that lead to confusion, and declaring that God could exist on the basis that a powerful alien could exist is extremely misleading. Our task here is to provide clarity and to avoid playing word games.

1. (in Christianity and other monotheistic religions) the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.

Omnipotent and omniscient are usual parts of the definition, so why are they missing? It's because dictionaries are complied by lexicographers who try to define things as best they can but who often fall short. It is also not their job to pin down every last part of the definition - that is a job for AGI systems.

2. (in certain other religions) a superhuman being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature or human fortunes; a deity.

There are many proposed gods, but God with a capital G refers to a single God which is in charge of everything. This means that the word God only applies to religions which have a supreme god. Lesser gods are things that could exist, just as fairies could exist - there is typically nothing in their definition that requires them to do anything so special as to be impossible.

That you have certain demands of "God" is your business alone.

Not when the requirements are absolutely standard ones that most believers claim of him, such as being almighty, all-knowing and the creator of all things. Most of the people who argue that God exists are not talking about a powerful alien being, but about an almighty, all-knowing creator of all things, and these qualities that they claim of him are taking him a long way from a mere powerful alien. If they were just believers in a powerful alien, that would be fine because that's a harmless belief which may even be right. The reason I take part in discussions of this kind is that the stakes are much higher than that - most Goddists claim that an almighty, all-knowing creator of all things exists, but they also claim, as in your dictionary's first definition, that he is the source of all moral authority. That makes this imaginary being extremely dangerous - the mere idea of him has a major role in driving war, terrorism and all manner of other abuses because of the "holy" texts that supposedly came from this impossible being. And that is why I object strongly to your approach, because you try to encompass that kind of God into your claim that God can't be disproved, but the kind of "God" that can't be disproved is merely a powerful alien being which falls a hell of a long way short of what is normally regarded as God. Your "God" could be an alien child called Kevin which spends all its time making universes in its bedroom. Their God is one which sets rules about who you are allowed to kill, and they should not be given any encouragement by inaccurate claims that their God can exist when he has actually been disproved.

By the way. One cannot logically hold that there is a being who knows the future exactly while at the same time hold that Quantum Mechanics (QM) is true since QM holds that the future is undetermined.

QM asserts that it all comes down to something random, but what appears to be random needn't be random - it's just one of those cases of physicists going beyond their competence by denying the existence of something they can't detect.

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Just Chat! / Re: Non theist but not atheist? What do you believe?

« on: 13/07/2017 18:50:21 »

Stephen Hawking says he does not believe in God, because before the big bang, there was no time for God to exist in.

His belief in an irrational model leads him to reject God for the wrong reason. Spacetime models can only be made to function correctly by bringing in Newtonian time to work along with the "time" dimension, and that Newtonian time goes back before the big bong.

An atheist has a poor logical position because he holds that God doesn't exist. Since it's not logically possible to prove that something doesn't exist then the atheist must believe it with no proof.

It is possible to prove within the bounds of logic that some things don't exist. For example, things that don't exist can't exist. Animals that have two heads but which also only have one head cannot exist. If there is a contradiction of that kind in the definition of something, that thing clearly cannot exist (unless logic itself is broken, but that's why we are usually forced to restrict ourselves to calling things logical proofs rather than absolute proofs).

Do you know what its called when you believe something when you don't have proof of it? It's called faith. Frankly I could never have enough faith to be an atheist because I think more logically than atheists do.

It is possible that you think more logically than most atheists who have made errors in their thinking and have ruled God out on a false basis, but it's also possible that you don't think as logically as those atheists who rule out God on logical grounds due to the impossibility of him qualifying as God where his definition generates contradictions.

Suppose that there is a scientists in such an advanced civilization who created our universe designed as he chose fit. Then, by the definition of the term, that scientist would in fact be God.

But here we see that we differ wildly on definition - you set a very low bar for your definition of God by allowing an ordinary being to become the "God" of a universe which he has sparked off, even though he knows that he is not a God in his own realm. To me, that is no more a God than any child building a virtual world with a program like Minecraft. That means we aren't using "God" to describe the same thing at all. I set the bar much higher and demand that God has no superiors and must know that he has no superiors, but even God cannot know that he has no superiors because he can't tell if there's a superior God above him who is keeping himself completely hidden from him. I also demand that God be no less than God from the very start - he should not be a natural evolved being that acquired knowledge, mental prowess and other powers later as that would make him no different from us (other than having the luck to come into being first), so he has to exist from the very start in the same advanced state as he will have at any subsequent time, but this strips him of all the credit for his knowledge which he didn't create himself, and it strips him of all the credit for all his genius which he didn't create himself, and it strips him of the credit for all his other powers which he did not create himself. As for the natural bit, if he is merely a mechanistic thing like any other whose functionality can be understood 100% in terms of cause and effect, there's nothing special about him, so he needs to be supernatural, but being supernatural depends on him not having a rational mechanism that can be understood, so if he doesn't understand his own functionality, he falls short of another requirement that I demand he must have, and that is that he understands all things. If he understands all things, he automatically understands that he cannot be supernatural, so again he destroys his own status as God.

So, I set the bar high and nothing can get over it, but to lower the bar on any of those points is to fall a long way short of describing God, and given that you have to lower the bar on all of them, you're left with something of such low status that its' merely a powerful natural being who, if it exists in any way, had the luck to get its paws on the levers of power that might control the universe and things outside of the universe, but it's a being which doesn't even know if it's the most powerful one around. It's really nothing more than an alien, and that is what you should call it instead of trampling all over the word "God". "God" includes the idea of a creator, but "creator" does not include the idea of God, so you need to be very careful with the naming of your categories and your definitions of what they mean if you're to avoid tripping up on the faults in the way you frame them.

Your alien (which you misname "God") may well exist, but God in the proper sense cannot.

7

New Theories / Re: What is the mechanics of relativity?

« on: 04/06/2017 00:08:29 »

Time is related to frequencies, not to the time it takes for those frequencies to reach an observer. I can't figure out how the frequency of a light clock could dilate just because it took more time for light to reach the mirrors.

The laser light should technically be of a lower frequency on my moving MMX diagrams than it is on the stationary ones because that light's produced by a slowed mechanism in the laser - with the apparatus moving at 0.866c, the frequency will be halved, so what's shown as a pulse of red light on the moving apparatus should be somewhere into the infra-red. The detector will also have its mechanism slowed though, so it will still detect the light as being the usual frequency, just as the laser thinks it's putting out the usual frequency of light.

Your simulation with the laser helped me to understand the beaming and the contraction effect, you wouldn't have one to explain the time dilation by chance?

The time dilation is already shown if you look at the counter under the diagram. It starts at a negative value and reaches zero when the light gets split at the semi-silvered mirror. That moment would represent a tick of a clock if you were to imagine the MMX apparatus to be a pair of light clocks. The next tick occurs when the light returns to the same mirror, and you could imagine that another pulse could be sent out from the laser and timed to split at the mirror at the same time as the previous pulse returns to it, thereby generating an ongoing series of equally-spaced ticks. On the stationary apparatus, a cycle (between two ticks) takes place in 250 counts of the counter, while on the moving apparatus a cycle takes 500 ticks. (The counter's time is based on a stationary clock.) We can see the cycle taking twice as long on the moving apparatus and that is the time dilation shown visually.

If the tics of a light clock would depend on the frequency of light, there couldn't be less tics each second since that second would actually be made of those tics, and if we assume that the phenomenon would come from the light exchanged between the particles of that clock, we are caught in the same circular trap but at a smaller scale. It might take more time for a sole pulse of light to travel between two moving mirrors, but we must send them continuously and at constant frequency to be able to register the tics, and the frequency of those tics would be the same whatever the speed since there would never be any doppler effect. If we can't run a simulation out of an idea that is simple enough to get simulated, then I think this idea has good chances to be wrong.

If you're co-moving with the moving apparatus, your entire functionality is slowed to half speed - all your cells and atoms are like clocks, doing things in cycles which take twice as long to run through because of the doubled communication distances. A laser, or anything else that produces light, will be cycling something as it generates a photon (hence the sine-wave shape) and that cycling will be running at half the normal rate, thereby "writing" photons into the aether with a lower frequency.

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General Science / Re: Why does carbon fibre need to be held at temperature?

« on: 31/05/2017 18:14:03 »

Is the temperature requirement something that's only essential during the storage stage or is it required during the manufacturing process as well?

Carbon-fibre threads are weaved into cloth to make it more manageable, then manufacturers of products cut the cloth to the shapes they need and put it into moulds. There are three main approaches to how you do things though, two of them using dry cloth and one using cloth that already has resin all through it (the "prepreg" kind which needs to be stored at low temperature to stop the resin hardening).

One method is to stick dry cloth into a mould and then apply epoxy resin to it with a brush, being careful to wet the whole thing out. You then enclose the thing in plastic (sheeting) and suck all the air out with a vacuum pump to compress the cloth and squeeze as much resin out of it as possible in order to minimise the weight of resin left in it. This method is the least popular as it puts carcinogenic fumes into the air, is messy, slow, labour intensive, and it wasteful of resin. It can be used for test pieces though, and it's sometimes necessary to make additions to a piece after the bulk of the thing has already been made using a better method.

Another method is infusion, and again this starts with dry cloth. The cloth is put in the mould, then it's sealed in under plastic as before and the vacuum pump is attached. The resin is then sucked through the cloth by the vacuum. This takes careful planning to make sure resin is sucked into every part of the cloth to wet it out fully, and a lot of pieces may be ruined if it fails to get into every crucial section, while cosmetic surface imperfections can also occur if the infusion is incomplete, which isn't acceptable for the outside of things that are meant to look beautiful, like sports cars. Thick layers of carbon cloth often don't infuse well, particularly if a lot of unidirectional cloth is used (with most of the fibres running in the same direction), so it isn't always possible to build what you want to with this method.

The preferred method in most serious production uses prepreg cloth with the resin already all through it. With the other two methods, the resin is mixed with a hardener just before it's used and that puts a time limit on how long you have to get it into the cloth and to apply the vacuum before it reacts and turns solid, but you can store the cloth forever at room temperature. With prepreg though, the resin in the cloth has already been mixed with a hardener, but it won't react at low temperature (or will only do so extremely slowly), so you keep it refrigerated. It's taken out into the warm just before use, removed from the packaging, cut to shape and put in the mould, then it gets bagged up (enclosed in plastic sheet) and the vacuum is applied as normal to remove excess resin. An autoclave is used too so that the pressure on the outside of the "bag" can be increased to squeeze the cloth much more tightly and get more resin out of it - this leads to lighter products which are no less strong. The vacuum pump allows one atmosphere of pressure to be applied without an autoclave, but that pressure will vary depending on the weather. An autoclave allows several atmospheres of pressure to be applied and with no differences in the end product caused by weather, although the variation in the weight of the produced parts can still vary by as much as ten percent. (An autoclave can also be used with the other methods.)

In all three cases, once the resin starts to react and harden, it generates heat, and there's no need to try to remove that heat by cooling - heat can be added in autoclaves to speed up the reaction, but there are also ideal temperatures for curing the product in order to maximise the strength of the material, and that varies depending on the kind of resin used, so it may need to be kept at very high temperature for 24 hours.

For you, I suspect that the only part of this process that you need to worry about is the storage of prepreg cloth while it's still in its packaging, unless something's being built that's so complex and takes so long to lay the cloth in the mould that it needs to be put together in cold conditions to prevent parts of it from reacting before it's all bagged up and in the autoclave with the vacuum attached, in which case people might need to work in a freezer room, but I haven't ever heard of anyone actually doing that.

9

New Theories / Re: One way speed of light

« on: 17/05/2017 17:10:45 »

Hi David,
I think it would be possible to carry out the experiment. Would you be  (or would you know somebody ) interested in helping to set it up?

I'd certainly like to be involved in setting it up if once the numbers have been properly crunched it looks as if it would work, but I don't think the right crunching has been done yet. I've thought of a simpler way to do that crunching, so here's the new approach. We need to crunch the numbers twice: the first time with the assumption that the clocks are stationary and that the rod is length contracted, and the second time with the assumption that the rod is stationary and that the clocks are moving past it instead, which means the clocks are closer together instead. When ends of the rod pass clocks, light is sent out towards the other clock, but on the first run, clock A starts running before clock B because the rod is shorter than the distance AB, and on the second run, clock B starts running before clock A because the rod is longer than the contracted distance AB.

So, what we need to know is this: what does clock A read when light reaches it from clock B, and what does clock B read when light reaches it from clock A. If the numbers match up for the first and second run, then the experiment cannot detect the one-way speed of light, but if they don't match, it is likely that you will get a Nobel prize. I'm sure this will have been explored a hundred years ago though, so I think they'll match.

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New Theories / Re: One way speed of light

« on: 14/05/2017 23:16:16 »

Unless a new theory on motion gets more useful than SR, there is no reason for physicists to reject it.

Not so - if another theory does so much as produce the exact same numbers while making better sense (as with LET), they should switch to it instead of carrying on regardless while continuing to assert superiority of the irrational theory over the rational one. At the very least, they should drop all the irrational dogma and recognise that it cannot be the case that light moves at the same speed in opposite directions relative to all objects, but they persist in asserting that it does even though their position has been shown to be wrong on that score.

We don't reject our old ideas just because they contain contradictions, otherwise we would never get the ground to build new ideas.

Where theories produce contradictions, we should accept that they must be wrong instead of asserting that they are right, and then we should put more effort into finding out ways of correcting or replacing the faulty theory so that we have something that doesn't generate contradictions. The establishment's insistence in sticking with a disproven theory while rejecting one that does the same job while making better sense is actively holding back progress.

I also think SR is wrong, and I am also pointing at its contradictions to discuss it, but I know it is not sufficient to convince anybody that my own theory is promising. To convince people, I know I have to show the benefits.

The benefits are that you encourage more rational people to go into science instead of making it appeal to the irrational ones who are happy to tolerate contradictions and dig in to defend faulty models rather than working to correct them.

11

New Theories / LET: gravity and magnetism explained

« on: 13/05/2017 19:36:11 »

I was thinking about gravity last night and it occurred to me that some of the things about it that seem magical needn't be so magical after all. The biggest problem is where the "potential energy" is stored when you lift an object. The answer's simple though - it's stored in the fabric of space.

For an object to exist in deep space, there is energy making up the material of that object, and there's also kinetic energy if the object's moving through space, but there's also some extra energy, and quite a lot of it too, which is stressing or distorting the fabric of space at that location. When two objects move closer to each other, the amount of energy stored in this way in the space fabric reduces, and it now appears as an increase in kinetic energy as the objects accelerate towards each other. That is what powers the acceleration. If they collide and stay together, the kinetic energy remains, but as movement of atoms, and we then call that movement heat. That energy can then be radiated off as infra-red light, and this energy that moves away from our objects is energy which was previously held as stress in the fabric of space.

When you lift an object, you are causing the fabric of space to accommodate it differently, and that involves putting energy into that fabric. This is like with bubbles in washing-up water which can accelerate towards each other as the surface tension rearranges the shape of the surface in order to minimise the amount of energy stored in it - that stored energy is turned into kinetic energy in the same way, and then it becomes heat. Once we understand where the potential energy is stored, it's all becomes obvious - all we have is a stressed fabric trying to get to a lower energy state.

We see the same thing in chemical bonds where high energy bonds are less stable than low energy ones - again it is the fabric of space in which that extra energy is held, and it's held as stress or distortion. Many fools laugh at the people who came up with the idea of phlogeston, and yet the idea wasn't far wrong at all - it was simply potential energy held in the fabric of space.

The same applies to magnets. A north or south pole stresses the space fabric, meaning that wherever there's a magnet there is extra energy accompanying it which is held in the space fabric. If you move a north pole close to a north pole (or a south pole close to a south pole), that adds to the stress and requires you to put more energy in. If you move a north pole next to a south pole, that reduces the stress on the space fabric and allows stored energy there to be released. With the magnets stuck together, they are in a lower energy state and you need to put more energy in to move them apart because moving them apart needs to distort/stress the space fabric more.

What seemed to me like magic yesterday no longer seems very magical at all because I can now see where the energy goes to and where it comes from - it doesn't just appear out of nothing. This also means that gravity and magnetism works without depending on force carriers moving backwards and forwards between different pieces of matter (although there may still be an equivalent to force carriers of some kind operating in the fabric to shift the pattern of stress/deformation as matter moves along through it). We have a rational mechanism for all forces, and it depends on a space fabric with properties able to accommodate them with different forces stressing it in different ways.

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New Theories / Re: Do we need Relativistic time or Is Absolute time still credible?

« on: 01/05/2017 19:10:53 »

In answer to your original question, yes: absolute time is still credible, but it cannot be pinned down. Light may be passing us in different directions at different speeds too, but there is no experiment that has ever been designed that can measure its speed in a single direction, so it is always measured on a round trip (thereby hiding its true relative speeds and giving us the same value every time instead). One philosophical approach is to say that because we can't measure the difference and can't pin down an absolute time, there is no absolute time and the speed of light cannot be different in different directions, but that is really bad philosophy (not least because it leads them to tolerate contradictions in this case). The other philosophical approach is to say that reality may involve things that we can't pin down and that it would be wrong to rule them out just because they're beyond reach. So, it's up to each individual to decide which camp they're in, but on this one special issue they've somehow managed to let a holy cow get tangled up in things, so if you want to be taken seriously in the physics world, they require you to pretend that you're one of the in crowd and to chant all the right mantras - anyone who questions the holy cow is guilty of blasphemy.

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New Theories / Re: On the speed of light as invariant:

« on: 27/04/2017 20:29:23 »

If you're looking for a parallel, consider thought experiments using a sound clock. If it's moving along through the air it will run slow, but if you have a second sound clock and accelerate it away from the first one to travel at higher or slower speed, then turn it round and bring it back to reunite it with the first one, the one that's done these accelerations will have recorded less time than the one which moved at a constant speed throughout (the difference being down to the second clock's different speeds of travel through the air). The relationship between the time kept by these clocks is exactly the same mathematically as the one you get with light clocks. The big difference is that we have a means to detect our movement through air, so we don't make the mistake of assuming the air doesn't exist when doing experiments with sound clocks. What is weird though is that people make exactly that mistake when it comes to light, because even though the fabric of space can't be detected, we know that it must be there because it has a crucial role in hosting the functionality of separation and distance between all the things that we can detect. If it's literally nothing, then there can be no separation or distance between things. It is a fabric within which things reside and through which they travel.

Not only must light travel through a medium (a space fabric such as "aether" or "Spacetime"), but it also has to have a consistent speed limit through that medium rather than doing a wide range of different speeds along the same path all at the same time. When you actually push SR to its extremes though, you reach a point where you realise that light has to travel all paths in zero time covering zero distance, and while the believers deny that, it is a necessary extension of their insistence that fast moving objects moving close to the speed of light cover their journeys in next to zero time while covering next to zero distance. This ability of light to travel from the start of the universe to the end in zero time on a path of zero distance also destroys all possibility of causality having any real role in anything, leaving you depending on infinite improbability instead to account for all the apparent causation which is written through the universe. Shifting to an alternative explanation of SR to avoid that problem immediately kills the claim that time never runs slow on any path, which turns it into a contrived version of Lorentz Ether Theory with a superfluous "time dimension" cobbled onto it to work in conjunction with Newtonian time (which would be needed to allow "time" to run slow on some paths). Sadly, few people appear to be able to hold all these ideas in their head well enough to process them all and recognise that the Spacetime model doesn't work, so they generally jump between incompatible explanations and models while imagining that they all somehow hang together as a viable theory, but they don't. Where there are contradictions in a theory, that theory is broken.

My web page on this subject ( http://www.magicschoolbook.com/science/relativity.html ) has been up for several years now and it has survived all the attempts of a number of professional physicists to shoot it down - all they ever do is run away when they realise they have no answers and that they can't find a fault in it, because none of them have had sufficient courage to admit that it's right. The interactive exam (which requires nothing more than a series of yes/no answers) is designed to force them to identify the point at which they believe my argument is broken, but they refuse to say which question they failed the exam on because it spells out to them the consequences if that part is to be rejected - the result is that they don't dare to point to a fault but have to run away instead (or more often, slink away silently while hoping no one will notice). The open invitation remains in place - if any of them really understand relativity as well as they claim they do, they should be able to find the fault in the argument and spell out what it is, at which point I have promised to rewrite the page to explain where the argument is wrong and to turn it into the endorsement of Einstein's relativity that I had originally intended it to be when I started writing it a decade ago. It really can't be made any easier for them than it is - a short series of simple questions with yes/no answers, and the right answer to each question is the one on the left, making it hard to fail. To pass the exam is to agree that my argument is correct. To fail it involves failing on a numbered question which should identify a clear point at which the person takes issue with the argument, but it would be embarrassing for anyone to state the number of the question(s) they failed on because the interactive exam always spells out to them exactly what magic they have to believe in in order to get the wrong answer, and that's why they don't admit where they failed the test. This has now become an important psychological study into herd mentality and the degree to which standard "scientific" beliefs can be equivalent to a religion with people failing to recognise that they have bought into the irrational.

14

New Theories / Re: Re: Aether Fields

« on: 26/04/2017 17:46:19 »

Science is evidence based so physbang is making a valid request. The aether has never been detected and so is equivalent to nothing.

Intelligent computer software is incapable of telling whether the computer it runs on exists other than by hypothesising its existence - it cannot detect the computer in any way. In the same way, our inability to detect the aether of any aether theory (including Spacetime) doesn't render them all equal to nothing - one of them must be something.

15

General Science / Re: Can terrorism activity trigger our collective consciousness?

« on: 19/04/2017 17:27:49 »

A quick Google search came up with just one hit, but it was "artificial terrorists" that it found rather than "artificial terrorism". That result is a book which appears to be about a couple of Muslims being framed by the FBI (or tricked into revealing unpleasant beliefs which they had no intention of acting on). Perhaps Google supplies you with a different list of links.

But even if the name isn't widely known, the media could still be exaggerating the amount of terrorism by describing things as terrorism which in reality involve nothing more than mentally ill people going off the rails, or other people who feel excluded from society due to discrimination. However, it is always the case that the people most likely to get involved in terrorism are the ones with the least to lose, so you have to look at why some people in difficult situations turn to terrorism while others don't, and the ones that do are usually the ones who have bought into an ideology of some kind that gives them a purpose and which shows them the way. When a Buddhist goes off the rails, there is nothing in "bless the jewel in the lotus" to push him into violence, so he can't be guided towards violence by his religion. (He can be guided towards violence by someone else's religion though if he feels threatened by its hate.)

If all ideologies and religions where banned from propagating hate, all the hate speech in their manifestos and holy texts would have to be removed, at which point there would be nothing left in any of them capable of steering people towards terrorism and the problem would go away, but the guardians of hate are determined to protect passages about such things as prophets having people burned to death in their houses for failing to attend prayers - they do not condemn those passages, but simply pretend they aren't there or that they aren't hateful, and they leave them in place to influence the ones with troubled minds.

As for the brain-to-brain connectivity, that is all communication through language and the transmission of ideas through images and sound - there is no evidence for a collective consciousness using any telepathic communication method. A hundred thousand people can be killed in a matter of a few minutes by a tsunami, but we feel nothing of it until we hear about it on the news.

16

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why Do We Speak Different Languages ?

« on: 19/04/2017 16:57:52 »

Hunting may have affected language in some places, shaping the sounds of words by encouraging a greater use of clicks (as in Khoisan - languages of the San Bushmen). These higher pitched sounds lose their energy more quickly as they travel over a distance, allowing the hunters to communicate more without alerting their prey. I don't know why this hasn't led to more click sounds in other languages around the world though, because many other populations must have been heavily involved in similar kinds of hunting and you'd think they'd have had the same pressure on their language to evolve in that direction.

Whispering devoices speech, removing the low frequencies, but it becomes less easy to tell what's being said, which is where having more click sounds can be a significant advantage, but for tone languages, that means all the tonal information is lost, making it particularly hard for Chinese speakers to understand each other when whispering - that would suggest that they weren't heavily dependent on hunting in groups, or if they were, they kept silent. There are also tone languages in Africa, and my guess, based purely on the few examples I know of, is that they're more common in Sub-Saharan West Africa where it is more forested.

The idea that environmental factors could shape language is an interesting one, but I don't know how much it has been investigated. There are a few places in the world where whistle-languages have evolved for long-distance communication, and they're usually (if not always) tightly related to their spoken language, so it's possible that they have put evolutionary pressure on the spoken form of the language too. In the same way, communities which depend on shouting to each other over a distance would be disadvantaged by click sounds which don't travel so far and would do well to rely more heavily on vowels.

17

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why Do We Speak Different Languages ?

« on: 18/04/2017 20:16:26 »

"Why do we speak different languages and why are they so contrasting in form and format ?"

The odds are that complex language started with homo erectus (if not an earlier form of man), and then it would have evolved over time in different places as people invented new words which then became standard in their community while other communities developed their own words for the same things, or extended the range of a different pre-existing word to cover the same concept. Over time, they would end up speaking entirely different languages which evolved from the same starting point, just as different species of animals evolve over time and end up being radically different, but there is a chain of ancestors going all the way back with only minor changes between them at each step (with one exception, which I'll get to at the end).

We can still see language changing today, and when we measure the rate of change we see that it is not incompatible with the rate of change necessary for the languages we see in the world today to have evolved from earlier languages. We also have a good record of language change in writings over the last few thousand years. If you want to look at how English has changed, you only have to read a bit of Chosser to see what he does with words and grammar (Here's The Miller's Tale, for example: http://ummutility.umm.maine.edu/necastro/chaucer/texts/ct/03milt07.html and a translation into modern English: http://ummutility.umm.maine.edu/necastro/chaucer/translation/ct/03milt.html - this translation also includes a short prologue to the tale, so you need to run down a few paragraphs to find the start of the tale itself), and then have a look at Beowulf ( http://heorot.dk/beo-intro-rede.html ) which takes things twice as far back in time. If you learn a bit of Dutch or Danish, you may find that you soon feel at home with those languages as they are so close to English, all sharing a recent common ancestor language. (Here's some Danish for you to have a look at: http://adl.dk//adl_pub/pg/cv/AsciiPgVaerk2.xsql?nnoc=adl_pub&p_udg_id=95&p_vaerk_id=2479 and an English translation: http://www.online-literature.com/hans_christian_andersen/972/ - you should find it fairly easy to match up the two versions, and if you take the time to read through the whole thing carefully (which will take a few hours), by the time you're approaching the end of the story, you may find that you can understand many entire sentences in Danish without needing to look at the translation, so close is it to English).

When you look further afield, you find more radical language differences though, with word order in sentences following very different rules. In Asia, for example, there are languages which run relative clauses backwards compared to us. "The man who works in the shop next to the garage" would have to be expressed as "garage-next-to shop-in works man", where "garage-next-to" acts as a description of the shop, and "shop-in works" acts as a description of the man. That is the word order of Japanese, but Hindi also uses that word order even though it's a member of the Indo-European group that includes English. The general trend with languages is for them to evolve from the "Asian" word order to the "European" one and not to evolve in the opposite direction, and this process has been going on for thousands of years. Basque is the only language I know of that's native to Europe which still retains the "Asian" word order. It is possible that the "Asian" way of structuring languages came out of Africa when man first migrated out of there, but there's a complication in that neanderthal and denisovan man may have had an influence on things with their languages which would have evolved substantially in isolation from the modern humans in Africa, although the interbreeding that took place between these species may not have led to a lot of language exchange as it was likely done through violence.

We may never know as much of the story as we could though, because rare languages are still being lost without being documented, and every lost language takes with it lots of potential clues to the nature of ancestor languages which could potentially be reconstructed to some degree if we could hold onto the data instead of letting it evaporate away. By comparing reconstructed bits of ancestor languages, it would be possible to project even further back in time to older shared ancestor languages.

I am not aware of any natural language that didn't evolve from older languages, although there are pidgins which take a lot of words from existing languages and tie them together with new grammatical rules which in some cases are entirely new inventions of the people trying to communicate with each other rather than borrowings from existing languages - this can happen where groups of people who can't understand each other are thrown together (perhaps as slaves) and left to communicate as best they can. The first generation of them will cobble together a rudimentary language which struggles to communicate complex ideas, but the next generation will invent new ways of combining and modifying words with grammatical rules entirely of their own creation, and from this evolves a fully-functional language, so not every part of every natural language evolved from older languages.

18

General Science / Re: Can terrorism activity trigger our collective consciousness?

« on: 18/04/2017 18:12:23 »

When you say it has "affected my collective consciousness", do you mean your consciousness is collective with itself, or collective with other people's (which would make the use of the word "my" rather odd)?

Terrorists don't often act against their own people, but against people they regard as an enemy tribe. This is a consequence of ideologies that divide people from each other and the toleration of hate within different communities, the worst kind of hate being the hate speech which has been built into manifestos and holy texts (which is the driver of most of the world's terrorism) and which is very hard to remove when so many people who should know better are determined to hold onto it come what may.

So far as there is a collective consciousness, it is just the shared beliefs and world outlook that groups of people acquire through the exchange of ideas and values. If there was a collective mind, surely we would all feel the suffering of hundreds of millions of people who are starving and who are on the wrong end of genocide, but we think about this when it is on the news and then put it out of mind most of the rest of the time. Ten thousand Yazidis were murdered and we felt nothing until we heard about it on the news. People are being tortured by dictators and we feel nothing of this. Vicious people are getting a kick out of killing and torturing others, and we do not feel the thrill that they experience.

Ideas don't travel by means of any collective mind - the wheel was not thought of in the Americas until the Europeans brought it, even though it was being used for thousands of years elsewhere in the world. Perhaps the distance was to great to transmit thoughts though. Think then about exams where someone struggling to find answers is in close proximity to a hundred others who know what they're doing, but nothing crosses the gap and the struggler fails. Perhaps a short, direct connection would help - pressing head against head. That might be an experiment worth trying - it's your best hope that there is such an effect, but beware of lice.