# Lets Talk About Things Science Cannot Explain



## BAYLOR

Let's start with the well worn well used Shakespeare Quote

" There are more things in heave and Earth Horatio then are  dreamt of in your philosophy"

" We can also use Ocam's Razor " The simples explanation is usually the correct one"

What do you think are top mysteries  that science has no real explanation for ?  This one is wide open.


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## Venusian Broon

Wow, that's quite a wide remit. 

Right, I'll start: STENDEC


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## BAYLOR

How about hauntings and things that go bump in the night?


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## Brian G Turner

It's worth noting that, until very recently, the laws of physics said that bumblebees were too heavy to fly, and that fish should not be able to swim at the speeds they were observed moving with. It took advances in the mathematics of turbulence to explain both.

Sometimes, the biggest mysteries are under our noses.


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## Ray McCarthy

Funny how since almost everyone got a camera in phone that sightings of Bigfoot, Yeti, UFOs, ghosts etc have gone down.
But more videos and photos of meteors etc.


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## HanaBi

ESP/Deja Vu, perhaps?


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## Venusian Broon

Ray McCarthy said:


> Funny how since almost everyone got a camera in phone that sightings of Bigfoot, Yeti, UFOs, ghosts etc have gone down.
> But more videos and photos of meteors etc.



Actually I'd argue sightings of UFO's have gone up (reported ones even that is) but invariably 99.9% of them are Chinese lanterns, speeding gulls, reflections that the taker never noticed when they took the picture at the time (a classic!), or some other mundane source* - however to take a good picture of a tiny spot of light in the sky with a mobile phone is pretty difficult, which shows you how good the human eye is. For example, I tried to take a picture of what was clearly a Chinese lantern getting blown to the NE really quite high up in the atmosphere - must have been a good 300 metres+ up (which then got extinguished and plummeted down to earth leaving a bit of a trail of smoke like it had been shot down.) Camera on the phone couldn't pick it up at all. 

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* Apparently Walthamstow, which is basically next to where I live is a 'UFO hotspot' with many 'sightings'. However I know for a fact that the main European traffic for Heathrow comes in above my head, takes a duck down to the Millennium Dome then the planes straighten out to land at Heathrow (done it plenty of times myself whilst in a plane). So I'd hazard a guess that quite a few of these sightings are in fact Heathrow traffic. (See David Bowie who saw UFO's while living in London that - in his words "_They came over so regularly we could time them. Sometimes they stood still, other times they moved so fast it was hard to keep a steady eye on them_". Yep I'm pretty sure you could time them, otherwise they'd be late for arrivals at the airport....)


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## Dennis E. Taylor

You mean, "can't explain _yet._" As Brian Turner points out, things that formerly were unexplained are now explained. Every year, more things get discovered/explained.

The thing about ghosts/paranormal and UFOs and yetis, is that the system is on their side. All they have to do is provide ONE irrefutable case, and they're golden, regardless of all the "failed" claims. Yet they haven't. Of course, the next step is to invoke conspiracy.

Personally, I'd love for some of that stuff to be real. ESP? Extraterrestrials? Life after death? Woot! Bring it on! But I'm pragmatic enough to understand that my desire does not determine reality. So I'm still waiting.


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## Ray McCarthy

Bizmuth said:


> ESP? Extraterrestrials? Life after death?


ESP: James Randi just retired but offer is still open
ET: Maybe there are. Have they visited us already? Only People that prefer money or fiction to facts believe it.
Life After Death: Hard to see how the living can know. There is a simple experiment ... We all EVENTUALLY get to know the answer to that one. "Not Life as we know it, Jim." Obviously. As McCoy would have said. So in one sense the answer is obviously no. Do we as personalities, remembering what we used to be persist after death? A question unlikely to be answered by science.

There is no point in trying to explain what has never been shown to exist, or explain in physical terms something with no physical manifestation.


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## Allegra

Telepathy
Genius
The power of music
The intelligence of African grey parrots


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## Ray McCarthy

Telepathy: Can't explain because never been demonstrated.
Genius: Can't explain because we have no adequate agreed definition of Genius
The power of music: Can't explain because we have no method of measuring "emotion", "appreciation", "beauty".
The intelligence of African grey parrots: Can't explain because we have no adequate agreed definition of Intelligence. What ever it is, why have Crows got more and many much bigger brained animals including some primates less?


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## kythe

How about:  Why people continue to believe superstitions and other non-truths even when presented with strong evidence to the contrary?  On a related note, why do emotional experiences affect people so much more strongly than facts?


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## BAYLOR

kythe said:


> How about:  Why people continue to believe superstitions and other non-truths even when presented with strong evidence to the contrary?  On a related note, why do emotional experiences affect people so much more strongly than facts?



Because we're human beings not vulcans?


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## Stephen Palmer

kythe said:


> How about:  Why people continue to believe superstitions and other non-truths even when presented with strong evidence to the contrary?  On a related note, why do emotional experiences affect people so much more strongly than facts?



This is probably the most important question anyone could presently ask. It's astonishing to note how little general acceptance there is of any theory of human emotion. But, of course... how many psychologists, especially the early ones, are men. Even a brilliant man like Erich Fromm once referred to the "basic needs of man" to be "food, water, shelter and females" (I'm paraphrasing slightly). He was brought to book about that in the 1960's.


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## Venusian Broon

kythe said:


> How about:  Why people continue to believe superstitions and other non-truths even when presented with strong evidence to the contrary?



An interesting question. Personally I _believe_ that Science and scepticism is how we will learn more about the universe and its mysteries, but I would have to frankly admit that this means that, for all the 'interesting questions' I can only ever get a contingent truth - for as soon as I get a set of observations that break the laws I really must discard the old laws and formulate a new view of the universe.

(One could argue that the new laws must 'incorporate' the old laws in some manner - for example, in conditions we live in, Einsteinian General Relativity must produce a Newtonian world...but in a very deep and real sense an Einsteinian Universe is nothing at all like a Newtonian Universe.)

And I believe (there's that word again) that in the future new observations _will_ alter our views on the universe.


Such belief is really just as without foundation as any other belief and I'd probably use similar sorts of arguments to justify it as any other free standing philosophical system.


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## Mouse

Ray McCarthy said:


> Life After Death: Hard to see how the living can know. There is a simple experiment ... We all EVENTUALLY get to know the answer to that one.



If there is nothing after death (which is what I believe, and which is why I go ghost hunting - because I want to be proven wrong), then no, we wouldn't get to know eventually. We wouldn't be "knowing" anything, cos we'd just stop.


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## Ray McCarthy

Well, if the answer was positive, you'd know. Otherwise not. I agree. Sloppy engish agran


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## BAYLOR

Mouse said:


> If there is nothing after death (which is what I believe, and which is why I go ghost hunting - because I want to be proven wrong), then no, we wouldn't get to know eventually. We wouldn't be "knowing" anything, cos we'd just stop.



On  Ghosts, many of the stories can be explained away rationally , but all of them? I just don't think so.  There are just too many such  stories which tells me there is something to them .


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## Ray McCarthy

Ghosts could exist and be nothing to do with dead people.


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## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> Ghosts could exist and be nothing to do with dead people.



Ever see the photo The Ghostly Airman ?


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## Kerrybuchanan

We have one here who I have seen three times and my daughter once. Neither of us believe in ghosts and both believe there's a rational explanation,  but my husband insists on calling it our ghost.


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## Ray McCarthy

Even if they look like people ...
Jinn, demons, angels, faerie, elves, sidhe, transdimenional aliens. Though there has been not a single proven ghost. Lots of fakes.


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## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> Even if they look like people ...
> Jinn, demons, angels, faerie, elves, sidhe, transdimenional aliens. Though there has been not a single proven ghost. Lots of fakes.




I agree, there are plenty of fakes but there are  a few that can't be explained to anyones satisfaction.

No question we have great scientific knowledge and understanding about a great many things, but in the context of the universe, It's a drop in a very big bucket.


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## BAYLOR

Kerrybuchanan said:


> We have one here who I have seen three times and my daughter once. Neither of us believe in ghosts and both believe there's a rational explanation,  but my husband insists on calling it our ghost.



A previous occupant of the property? Just a thought.


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## Kerrybuchanan

Quite possibly. He's benign,  whoever he is. He just walks across the yard past the front window. Always the same time of night, but leaves no footprints in the snow and doesn't set off the security light.


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## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> Telepathy: Can't explain because never been demonstrated.
> Genius: Can't explain because we have no adequate agreed definition of Genius
> The power of music: Can't explain because we have no method of measuring "emotion", "appreciation", "beauty".
> The intelligence of African grey parrots: Can't explain because we have no adequate agreed definition of Intelligence. What ever it is, why have Crows got more and many much bigger brained animals including some primates less?




How does the brain create that which we call consciousness?


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## Stephen Palmer

Not enough space here to answer the above. Check out this book if interested.
If you enjoy it, follow with this one!


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## Venusian Broon

BAYLOR said:


> How does the brain create that which we call consciousness?



Well, readers of the august British Journal _The Beano _well know that there is no such thing as a brain. Instead we are operated by small creatures called Numbskulls:




 

Of course the question arises, how do the Numbskulls think and operate? The of course are operated by even smaller creatures called 'Little Numbskulls'. And how do these beings think...

...Let me tell you, it's even littler people. All the way in. Forever.


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## Kerrybuchanan

Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
Wish I could remember who wrote that....


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## Ray McCarthy

Kerrybuchanan said:


> Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs


I suspected Swift.
I searched Google and 1st hit was _The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (5 ed.) _
Earlier this week I was given _The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs_ (c)1982 printed 1983 version
1733 Swift _Poems II _651 "... a flea hath smaller fleas ..."
1872 de Morgan _Budget of Paradoxes_  377  "... Great fleas have little fleas ..."
1979 R. Barnard _Posthumous Papers ii_  "Big fleas and little fleas, you know ... "


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## Dennis E. Taylor

BAYLOR said:


> On  Ghosts, many of the stories can be explained away rationally , but all of them? I just don't think so.  There are just too many such  stories which tells me there is something to them .



This argument comprises a couple of common fallacies. The first is that quantity equals quality. There are a lot of ghost sightings, so there must be something to them.

Well, there's certainly "something" to them, but that "something" doesn't have to be ghosts. It could simply be human psychology.

The second fallacy is that if science can't explain them, then by default they are proof of the paranormal.

Well, no. "You can't prove I'm wrong" isn't proof that you're right. Take UFOs. A common argument is that you can't explain all of them as Chinese lanterns, venus, and swamp gas. The implication is then left hanging that they are then ipso facto E.T. spying on us. Actually, it just means that they are UFOs. They are objects, that are flying, and are unidentified. Cough up a phaser or a light saber, and we'll talk.

This is why I generally don't get involved in those kinds of arguments. The enthusiast will have a million examples (usually memorized), will demand an explanation for each and every one, and often isn't above modifying the story to make it more difficult. Remember crop circles? Proponents claimed that mathematicians couldn't come up with any way that they could be designed so elaborately from the ground. Proponents claimed that tests had shown that the wheat had been changed at the molecular level in ways that couldn't be explained. Then a couple of college students (IIRC) showed how they did it with rope and some planks. And one of the debunkers demanded to see the actual report about the molecular changes. Poof. No more crop circles.

The first thing to keep in mind when you're met with paranormal/UFO/religious/miraculous claims of some event is that (to quote Gregory House) _people lie._ If someone claims that scientists haven't been able to identify the substance of the item found under their skin, it may be simply because the person won't let scientists look at it. Hey, strictly speaking, the statement is then true, right?

Sorry for the long rant, but I've been closer than the average person to a couple of situations where claims were made publicly that I simply know weren't true. And I got to watch as the public and the pundits went around in circles trying to rationalize and explain what were, basically, lies.


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## BAYLOR

Venusian Broon said:


> Well, readers of the august British Journal _The Beano _well know that there is no such thing as a brain. Instead we are operated by small creatures called Numbskulls:
> 
> View attachment 23175
> 
> Of course the question arises, how do the Numbskulls think and operate? The of course are operated by even smaller creatures called 'Little Numbskulls'. And how do these beings think...
> 
> ...Let me tell you, it's even littler people. All the way in. Forever.



We are our own multiverse.


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## BAYLOR

The temple complex of Puma Punku  in Boliva.  Nobody's been able to figure out certain aspects of it construction . Some parts of structure have holes and shapes   that look like they  drilled and carved with modern tools. The how they drilled them is the mystery since the complex was built centuries ago. How did the inhabitants build such a place?


And no , I don't think it was built by aliens, but the how and why of it's construction  is an interesting mystery.


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## Dave

Bizmuth said:


> You mean, "can't explain _yet._" As Brian Turner points out, things that formerly were unexplained are now explained.


I was coming to say the same thing: *It isn't that Science can't explain them, it is merely that we don't understand the Science.*

There are certainly many things that we cannot currently explain:

Ball Lightening
Ghosts
Telepathy



Bizmuth said:


> Well, there's certainly "something" to them, but that "something" doesn't have to be ghosts. It could simply be human psychology.


Agreed. I have a theory they are all of the time-travellers that we ought to be seeing if time-travel was possible, caught between dimensions. My theory doesn't include why they would be carrying their own severed heads.



Ray McCarthy said:


> Telepathy: Can't explain because never been demonstrated.


I agree that 99% is illusion and fake parlour tricks, but have you never thought of someone that you have had no contact with for months, or years, only for the telephone to ring at it be them calling? That has happened to me more than once. Other people claim to know when people have died or when something awful has just happened ("I feel a strange disturbance in the Force...")


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## Ray McCarthy

Dave said:


> no contact with for months, or years, only for the telephone to ring at it be them calling


That's simply you remember all the positive co-incidences and don't remember the null events.  It's no more often than random.

Doesn't stop me having Telepathy in almost every story I write.


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## Mouse

I've been on more ghost hunts than I can remember now and I've not seen one ghost.  Still gonna keep looking though. My 'nothing after death' belief is horribly depressing.


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## Dave

Mouse said:


> I've been on more ghost hunts than I can remember now...


I'd forgotten about you telling us about those weekends.


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## Kerrybuchanan

We are setting up security cameras in our yard, sadly because of a recent theft, so if I get our ghosty person on camera I'll upload it here for you, Mouse.


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## Mouse

Last ghost hunt I went on was Bodmin Jail and I was _certain_ I'd experience something there and I didn't. Was most disappointing! (Still fun though).

Kerry, please do! That's be excellent.


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## Stephen Palmer

Mouse said:


> My 'nothing after death' belief is horribly depressing.



Perhaps your feeling that there's nothing after death could be a fantastic opportunity for freedom. Freedom from illusion. Just a thought.


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## J Riff

Well, there's (----------) .... then there's that XXXXX stuff..... that (DELETED) .... can you imagine if people knew about that stuff?


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## Venusian Broon

Stephen Palmer said:


> Perhaps your feeling that there's nothing after death could be a fantastic opportunity for freedom. Freedom from illusion. Just a thought.



Actually when I realised at a very early age that, for me,  religion had no answers regarding the afterlife I found that the fact that _absolutely anything _could happen after death incredibly freeing (whose to say that you just fall away into nothingness? Isn't that just the same as saying you'd go to heaven or hell?)

I'm hoping I wake up after death finding that I'm in a total reality game and meet Duane Dibbley, Jake Bullet and the Doyles moaning about getting 4% in their game (but we're not in the horrible society that the despair squid painted for them...)


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## Ray McCarthy

I think we have to treat it as per Schrödinger's cat.
*Act as if both possibilities are equally true. *

There is nothing
You still exist



Venusian Broon said:


> after death finding that I'm in a total reality game



See  https://xkcd.com/393/





Text =  "RIP Gary"


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## BAYLOR

Stephen Palmer said:


> Perhaps your feeling that there's nothing after death could be a fantastic opportunity for freedom. Freedom from illusion. Just a thought.



Nil


Venusian Broon said:


> Actually when I realised at a very early age that, for me,  religion had no answers regarding the afterlife I found that the fact that _absolutely anything _could happen after death incredibly freeing (whose to say that you just fall away into nothingness? Isn't that just the same as saying you'd go to heaven or hell?)
> 
> I'm hoping I wake up after death finding that I'm in a total reality game and meet Duane Dibbley, Jake Bullet and the Doyles moaning about getting 4% in their game (but we're not in the horrible society that the despair squid painted for them...)



People call it liberating ? I find the concept of nothing after death to be a supremely depressing concept.


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## BAYLOR

Okay so who is going to bring up Bertrand Russell's Teakettle in space ?


One import thing remember here ,   if you are a teakettle in space , no one can hear you steam.


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## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> I think we have to treat it as per Schrödinger's cat.
> *Act as if both possibilities are equally true. *
> 
> There is nothing
> You still exist
> 
> 
> 
> See  https://xkcd.com/393/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Text =  "RIP Gary"




3. This is all a dream.


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## Ray McCarthy

@BAYLOR 
Am I a figment in your dream, or you in mine, or is it someone else dreaming us?


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## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> @BAYLOR
> Am I a figment in your dream, or you in mine, or is it someone else dreaming us?



We could both be a figment of a Dream that Schrodinger's cat is having .

The thought that this is all dream has crossed my mind on more then a few occasions. If so ,I doubt im the dreamer. Im just not imaginative enough to dream this level of detail.


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## Stephen Palmer

So little skepticism!


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## BAYLOR

Stephen Palmer said:


> So little skepticism!




When it comes to skepticism,  Im rather skeptical of it.


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## Dennis E. Taylor

One very real possibility is touched upon in Baxter/Clarke's book "The Light of Other Days." In the end, the protagonist wakes up in a hospital bed. Turns out he died. In this distant future, humanity has the ability to look back in time and scan and reproduce everyone who ever lived. It's kind of a Riverworld alternative.

So if it's even remotely possible for humanity to ever get this advanced, I expect to die and then wake up instantly in a hospital bed. And the first thing I'll ask is, "what's the date?"


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## Ray McCarthy

Bizmuth said:


> look back in time and scan and reproduce everyone who ever lived


But why? (I mean why everyone  )

There is a more fun, lower tech method of reproduction. Some religions even claim it brings back dead people.


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## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> But why? (I mean why everyone  )
> 
> There is a more fun, lower tech method of reproduction. Some religions even claim it brings back dead people.




Who knows? If y, such might be the case


Bizmuth said:


> One very real possibility is touched upon in Baxter/Clarke's book "The Light of Other Days." In the end, the protagonist wakes up in a hospital bed. Turns out he died. In this distant future, humanity has the ability to look back in time and scan and reproduce everyone who ever lived. It's kind of a Riverworld alternative.
> 
> So if it's even remotely possible for humanity to ever get this advanced, I expect to die and then wake up instantly in a hospital bed. And the first thing I'll ask is, "what's the date?"



Then there's the H. P Lovecraft story *The Shadow Out of Time .    *


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## Dave

Ray McCarthy said:


> But why? (I mean why everyone  )
> 
> There is a more fun, lower tech method of reproduction. Some religions even claim it brings back dead people.



There are already too many people on this planet. Why not just give people multiple memories instead in the manner of Bene Gesserit Other Memory (genetic memory.)

I feel this thread has strayed well off topic from the OP.


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## BAYLOR

Dave said:


> There are already too many people on this planet. Why not just give people multiple memories instead in the manner of Bene Gesserit Other Memory (genetic memory.)
> 
> I feel this thread has strayed well off topic from the OP.



Any thoughts on how the Puma Punka Complex in Bolivia was built ? This one should hopefully put things back on track.


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## J Riff

I thought everyone knew it was built by giant ants and monkeys, mindcontrolled by aliens. Or maybe I mixed up some SF book with reality again.


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## BAYLOR

J Riff said:


> I thought everyone knew it was built by giant ants and monkeys, mindcontrolled by aliens. Or maybe I mixed up some SF book with reality again.



But how did the builders achieve  uch precision in the construction of the place?


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## Ray McCarthy

String with knots.
Three guys with poles.


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## Ray McCarthy

You can do VERY long straight lines with three guys with poles (or spears).
With pegs and knotted cord you can do a multitude of accurate shapes of desired size.
Circle, ellipse, square, rectangle, triangle, hexagon, spiral, octagon, etc .
You can establish orientation easily by observation and even a stick in ground and peg out shadow etc.

Establishing a level is also easy 3000BC +

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveying#Ancient_Surveying
(there is MUCH more that people knew how to do 5000 years ago not listed there.)


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## Stephen Palmer

See also the recent pair of BBC 'Stonehenge' programmes.


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## Kerrybuchanan

Here are some explanations for things science cannot explain:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/melting-ice-caps-expose-hundreds-of-secret-arctic,2806/


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## Venusian Broon

Off topic - here is what they think Greenland would look like if melted off all the ice. Looks kinda weird with that big lake in the middle:

EDIT - ooh, if we see lots of big oil bosses and 'Lex Luthors' buying up land and real estate in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet to get good lakeside properties, then we'll know that AGW is definitely real and in fact deliberate


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## Gramm838

Why all the hand-wringing and worry about all of this - it an be answered with a two-word phrase...

"Stuff happens".

Just get on with life.

(As you can tell, I appear to have no sentimentality gene)


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## BAYLOR

Gramm838 said:


> Why all the hand-wringing and worry about all of this - it an be answered with a two-word phrase...
> 
> "Stuff happens".
> 
> Just get on with life.
> 
> (As you can tell, I appear to have no sentimentality gene)



Yes but there why does stuff happen?


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## BAYLOR

More then a few things

Faith Healing 

The event's in  Zeitoun Egypt between 1968 to 1971


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## BAYLOR

The rust free Iron pillar in Delhi India .


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## Dave

Okay, when you accidentally drop a piece of toast why does it always fall with the buttered side down?

Now, Ray will say:


Ray McCarthy said:


> That's simply you remember all the positive co-incidences and don't remember the null events.  It's no more often than random.



However, I'm not so clumsy to drop things that often, so I can probably remember all of the times.


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## BAYLOR

Dave said:


> Okay, when you accidentally drop a piece of toast why does it always fall with the buttered side down?
> 
> Now, Ray will say:
> 
> 
> However, I'm not so clumsy to drop things that often, so I can probably remember all of the times.



The toast would be a bit heavier on the buttery side ?


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## BAYLOR

Then there the phenomena known as Foo Fighters(_ not the singing Group._) towards the end of World  war 2 the strange bobbing and moving lights that pilots saw while flying missions of over Germany .


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## Ray McCarthy

BAYLOR said:


> The rust free Iron pillar in Delhi India


You been reading the lies in "Chariots of the Gods". It's not really rust free.
He's more dubious than Mr Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, who originally published his stuff as fiction.


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## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> You been reading the lies in "Chariot of the Gods". It's not really rust free.





Corrosion resistant then? Iron tends not to last like that out in the open. It's an impressive feat of metallurgy.


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## Ray McCarthy

A lot of "inexplicable" stuff is nothing of the sort, but mis-represented.  "Witnesses" can lie, omit vital facts to shade the truth, be mistaken or misled by others with a vested interest.


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## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> A lot of "inexplicable" stuff is nothing of the sort, but mis-represented.  "Witnesses" can lie, omit vital facts to shade the truth, be mistaken or misled by others with a vested interest.



Ray I understand all of that  and your quite correct.   But by the same token, that doesn't  mean every single case of the inexplicable follows that path either.


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## BAYLOR

Ive  never actually read a copy of Chariots of the God. I did see the film based on it and thought it a fluffy piece of movie entertainment.


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## Ray McCarthy

Well, of course there is "really" inexplicable stuff. But most people don't realise how much stuff reported as fact is either myth (modern or old), nonsense or fraud.

http://snopes.com/info/whatsnew.asp
http://web.randi.org/

So lets not waste time on nonsense that's  been debunked, or else have a thread on Modern Myth.  Is the oldest Modern Myth the Victorians alleging older times believed the world was flat, especially in Columbus' time? No-one of significance in any age appears to have believed it. It's a modern myth.


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## Ray McCarthy

BAYLOR said:


> never actually read a copy of Chariots of the God.


I did, when I was a teenager. I hadn't learnt much about critical thinking then. I hadn't read enough SF&F, myth and fantasy. All of which is good insulation against nonsense. Problem is that most of the "facts" presented in the book are actually lies!


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## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> Well, of course there is "really" inexplicable stuff. But most people don't realise how much stuff reported as fact is either myth (modern or old), nonsense or fraud.
> 
> http://snopes.com/info/whatsnew.asp
> http://web.randi.org/
> 
> So lets not waste time on nonsense that's  been debunked, or else have a thread on Modern Myth.  Is the oldest Modern Myth the Victorians alleging older times believed the world was flat, especially in Columbus' time? No-one of significance in any age appears to have believed it. It's a modern myth.



The shape of the world was known in ancient times. Eratosthenes of Alexandria around 240- 45 BC calculated the diameter of the earth  and he was accurate to within 100 miles . The ancients knew  alot of things about the World around them.


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## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> I did, when I was a teenager. I hadn't learnt much about critical thinking then. I hadn't read enough SF&F, myth and fantasy. All of which is good insulation against nonsense. Problem is that most of the "facts" presented in the book are actually lies!



It was all the rage in the 70's inspired a fanciful  nonsense science fiction film or two  , *Starship Invasion *,*Hanger 18 .  * It was popular into to the 80's faded and then in the 90's withthe  approach of he Millennium  had very brief revival.


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## Dave

BAYLOR said:


> Corrosion resistant then? Iron tends not to last like that out in the open. It's an impressive feat of metallurgy.


For Iron to rust it needs water as well as air. Rust consists of hydrated iron(III) oxides Fe2O3·nH2O and iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (FeO(OH), Fe(OH)3).

In hot dry climates, cars hardly rust at all. In the 1980's in Malta they used to have old 1940's buses running (they have modern Aviva buses now) but you can still see classic cars. I've heard that the same is true of Cuba and African countries.


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## BAYLOR

Dave said:


> For Iron to rust it needs water as well as air. Rust consists of hydrated iron(III) oxides Fe2O3·nH2O and iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (FeO(OH), Fe(OH)3).



If it's located in Delhi , they do have monsoon season there and significant rainfall and wouldn't that hasten the corrosion of the Iron?


----------



## Dave

BAYLOR said:


> If it's located in Delhi , they do have monsoon season there and significant rainfall and wouldn't that hasten the corrosion of the Iron?


Maybe, I don't know anything about it, but just thought it could be a possible reason.


----------



## BAYLOR

Dave said:


> Maybe, I don't know anything about it, but just thought it could be a possible reason.



Still, it  is interesting that its been around as long as it has, Intact.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

It has rust. It's just iron. There is nothing special about it at all.


----------



## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> It has rust. It's just iron. There is nothing special about it at all.



I can see that it's rusty . Photos never lie. We'll ....


----------



## Brian G Turner

BAYLOR said:


> If it's located in Delhi , they do have monsoon season there and significant rainfall and wouldn't that hasten the corrosion of the Iron?



IIRC, I read somewhere about the iron used contains a lot of vanadium - it's the same source as was used in Damascus Steel and Ulfberht swords - and that it's this which forms a thin layer on the outside that specifically helps to resist corrosion.


----------



## BAYLOR

Brian Turner said:


> IIRC, I read somewhere about the iron used contains a lot of vanadium - it's the same source as was used in Damascus Steel and Ulfberht swords - and that it's this which forms a thin layer on the outside that specifically helps to resist corrosion.



Interesting, didn't know that.


Damascus Steel. That's still a lost secret isn't it ? Nobodys  has ever been able to duplicate it?


----------



## Brian G Turner

BAYLOR said:


> Damascus Steel.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel#Verhoeven_and_Pendray:_crucible


----------



## BAYLOR

Brian Turner said:


> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel#Verhoeven_and_Pendray:_crucible




So they were able to actually recreate it.


----------



## Dave

BAYLOR said:


> Damascus Steel. That's still a lost secret isn't it ? Nobodys  has ever been able to duplicate it?


I don't know anything about this one either, but you sound like you're quoting this from the same kind of book or website as the one about the Iron Pillar. I'd very much doubt that there is any kind of "lost secret" involved. Someone could easily make Iron with a high Vanadium content if they so wanted but Vanadium is rare, and therefore very expensive. Does anyone care enough about replicating such a process to be able to afford to do it? They accidentally worked out very early how to add high a Carbon content to Iron. The blast furnaces were very primitive fires but worked quite well. I doubt that the process was the key here, but rather the peculiar quality of the Iron ore, which must have been Vanadium-rich.


----------



## Dave

Brian Turner said:


> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel#Verhoeven_and_Pendray:_crucible


Well, exactly, there you go!


----------



## BAYLOR

Dave said:


> I don't know anything about this one either, but you sound like you're quoting this from the same kind of book or website as the one about the Iron Pillar. I'd very much doubt that there is any kind of "lost secret" involved. Someone could easily make Iron with a high Vanadium content if they so wanted but Vanadium is rare, and therefore very expensive. Does anyone care enough about replicating such a process to be able to afford to do it? They accidentally worked out very early how to add high a Carbon content to Iron. The blast furnaces were very primitive fires but worked quite well. I doubt that the process was the key here, but rather the peculiar quality of the Iron ore, which must have been Vanadium-rich.



Apparently and to my chagrin, It's not really a lost secret at all.     I read blurb in a book years  back calling it a lost secret  without considering how accurate.


----------



## Brian G Turner

BAYLOR said:


> Apparently and to my chagrin, It's not really a lost secret at all. I read blurb in a book years back calling it a lost secret without considering how accurate.



IIRC, Erik Von Daniken used the iron pillar as proof of extra-terrestrial involvement...


----------



## BAYLOR

Dave said:


> Well, exactly, there you go!



Indeed.


----------



## BAYLOR

Brian Turner said:


> IIRC, Erik Von Daniken used the iron pillar as proof of extra-terrestrial involvement...



Im not surprised .


----------



## Dave

As I said earlier, there are not things that science cannot explain, but rather science that we don't yet understand.


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Can science understand Erich Von Daniken...?


----------



## Venusian Broon

Stephen Palmer said:


> Can science understand Erich Von Daniken...?



A question neither his publishers or his bank account really care about


----------



## BAYLOR

Stephen Palmer said:


> Can science understand Erich Von Daniken...?



That will always remain a mystery.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

I'm sure I have spanners or a socket set with Chrome and Vanadium alloy steel. 
The making of Damascus steel was "lost" for a while due to the ore source running out.


----------



## tinkerdan

The Inexplicable will exist as long as there are things about physics that we do not understand. This is a condition that I'd almost go out on the limb and say will exist until the end of time-at least for each of us. The more we know the more we realize that there is further more to know. What is inexplicable today may be tomorrow's breakthrough science.

And if that were not enough there are some who take advantage of what is known and render it inexplicable-we often call these people magicians. Sometimes they are just con artists. 

I like the Schrodinger example; because I think that's where a lot of the inexplicable belongs. There is a lot to be said for how much the observer influences the outcome of something; and when observing that which we cannot explain it seems there would be the triggering of several different influences that might cloud the ability to get to the heart of things.

We see that in recent research involving exceeding the speed of light and what was once called spook action at a distance that seem plagued with being tainted by the observer and sometimes by the limitations of the equipment used to measure the phenomenon. Instrument limitations often are closely tied with our limited knowledge of physics; which makes for baby steps as we learn more we can build more to help objectify or observations. These steps oddly create a pattern that screams out intelligent design which means that for answers to a few other questions brought up here we might require more time to understand the physics of the universe.


----------



## BAYLOR

tinkerdan said:


> The Inexplicable will exist as long as there are things about physics that we do not understand. This is a condition that I'd almost go out on the limb and say will exist until the end of time-at least for each of us. The more we know the more we realize that there is further more to know. What is inexplicable today may be tomorrow's breakthrough science.
> 
> And if that were not enough there are some who take advantage of what is known and render it inexplicable-we often call these people magicians. Sometimes they are just con artists.
> 
> I like the Schrodinger example; because I think that's where a lot of the inexplicable belongs. There is a lot to be said for how much the observer influences the outcome of something; and when observing that which we cannot explain it seems there would be the triggering of several different influences that might cloud the ability to get to the heart of things.
> 
> We see that in recent research involving exceeding the speed of light and what was once called spook action at a distance that seem plagued with being tainted by the observer and sometimes by the limitations of the equipment used to measure the phenomenon. Instrument limitations often are closely tied with our limited knowledge of physics; which makes for baby steps as we learn more we can build more to help objectify or observations. These steps oddly create a pattern that screams out intelligent design which means that for answers to a few other questions brought up here we might require more time to understand the physics of the universe.




Well said.


----------



## BAYLOR

How could a planet like Kepler 78B exist the way it does,  Rocky and Earth size and and as close to it's sun as it is?


----------



## mosaix

Stephen Palmer said:


> Can science understand Erich Von Daniken...?



A combination of greed on his part and gullibility on the part of his followers.


----------



## hardsciencefanagain

Add "äs yet" to the title and i might say:

the Cambrian Explosion


----------



## BigBadBob141

On the subject of unexplained photos, there is a famous Solway Firth Spaceman (look it up on Wiki).
Taken in 1964 by Jim Templeton, it show his young daughter on a picnic with what appears to be a space suited figure looming up behind her.
Templeton swears there was no one there behind his daughter when he took the shot.
Kodak examined the negative at the time and state that it had not been tampered with.
Modern analysis suggests it is probable the back of his wife who wandered into the shot, her blue dress is over exposed and looks white.
Also her dark hair forms the helmets visor, but this does not explain what looks like the dome of the helmet above the visor? 
Altogether pretty strange!


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

You can see that the spaceman has its back to the camera by examining the elbow on the right side of the picture. With the shading under the forearm, you can see that the elbow is pointing towards the camera.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Unanswered questions about the Solar System 

http://xkcd.com/1547/


----------



## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> Unanswered questions about the Solar System
> 
> http://xkcd.com/1547/




Hm, Lots' of things we don't know .


----------



## BigBadBob141

REF:Bizmuth
I agree it does look like that with the elbow.
But it still does not explain the dome on top of the apparent visor?


----------



## Venusian Broon

Here's someone's analysis of the photo. I have no idea if the 'false colour proof' is trickery or a valid way of looking at the photo! :




 

The thing is that the 'spaceman' is out of focus and over exposed in strong light. The photographer when he was asked what the 'bizarre tall figure' he stated he hadn't seen it and there was no one else there with them. What we should note though is that he was there with his daughters and wife, and although he claimed at the time he had not taken a photograph with his wife in the background my guess is, like many snaps people take, he wasn't really thinking too hard when he did it and therefore didn't notice his wife, who after all was not out out of place in his mind on a family visit to the countryside!


----------



## Ray McCarthy

I agree. I did massive over-exposure correction (nothing else) in PSP7. The "helmet" then just looks like out of focus hair. The body and arms then look also just like someone in a T-Shirt or short sleeved blouse or Polo shirt, not like a spacesuit. The shoulder blades are obvious.
You can see the depth of field is poor and even the foreground girl is over-exposed on the arms, especially the one facing sun resting on her leg.


----------



## Dave

The way our brain sees colours depending on the brightness of the light is very complicated. There was a huge debate recently on Twitter about a picture of a blue and black Wedding Dress that looked to be gold and white. Even when shown the actually dress people still didn't believe it. It was even on BBC TV News. That is even without factoring in the way colours seen in the sky are affected by both the light intensity, direction, and the size of dust/water/ice particles. That is partly why I am not persuaded by a lot of UFO pictures that are meant to be aliens. And those are just the real pictures, when you consider how many fakes there must also be, there isn't very much left.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Dave said:


> there isn't very much left.


Possibly none!
Add lens artefacts (due to reflections of sun inside it and if there is an iris inside lens) when bright sun off axis at particular angles (It's reproducible on many cameras, especially some Zoom lenses.) and you lose a bunch more.

Actual film is even worse than our eyes or digital sensors when there is over-exposure.
Very long exposures too give ghost effects when someone walks past and stops momentarily.


----------



## J Riff

Meanwhile, aliens studying the Earth are amazed that creatures could make a go of it with so little hard radiation and chlorine in the air.


----------



## BigBadBob141

So another mystery solved!!!


----------



## Venusian Broon

BigBadBob141 said:


> So another mystery solved!!!



Well not quite solved, I'd say it that it was a piccy of his wife was _probably _the correct solution, but then apparently his wife was a slight woman so the back (if that is what it is) looks a bit too big. 

However don't you always feel a little deflated when a juicy mystery seems to be nailed down and solved 

There's a candidate for Jack the Ripper that I saw in a recent TV program that actually seems to be the one - it just seemed right - and all that frenzied world building on god knows how many suspects and theories over the past 100 years just seems to wither away...


----------



## BAYLOR

Zeitious


Venusian Broon said:


> Well not quite solved, I'd say it that it was a piccy of his wife was _probably _the correct solution, but then apparently his wife was a slight woman so the back (if that is what it is) looks a bit too big.
> 
> However don't you always feel a little deflated when a juicy mystery seems to be nailed down and solved
> 
> There's a candidate for Jack the Ripper that I saw in a recent TV program that actually seems to be the one - it just seemed right - and all that frenzied world building on god knows how many suspects and theories over the past 100 years just seems to wither away...




They will never know for sure who Jack the Ripper was  . 


Have you seen the Photo known and *The Ghostly Airman of Goddard's Squadron* ?

also of interest  *Zeitoun Egypt*  1968 to 1973


----------



## Venusian Broon

BAYLOR said:


> They will never know for sure who Jack the Ripper was



yes of course...but this was the by far the best theory I've seen that really explains quite a lot of the case (and believe me I've read lots and living in the East End myself I've been a little obsessed by them - even going on impromptu tours of the main 'sites')


----------



## BAYLOR

Venusian Broon said:


> yes of course...but this was the by far the best theory I've seen that really explains quite a lot of the case (and believe me I've read lots and living in the East End myself I've been a little obsessed by them - even going on impromptu tours of the main 'sites')



Jack also could have been more then one person committing the copycat crimes. It's just a thought and after last official killing wasn't there a addition spree of similar to the Ripper murders  in another city in England at that time?

What do you think on The Ghostly Airman and Zeitoun ?


----------



## BigBadBob141

Another interesting photo(very famous) is The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, Norfolk taken on 19th September 1936.
This shows a ghostly figure on a staircase which was also seen by witnesses at the time.


----------



## BAYLOR

BigBadBob141 said:


> Another interesting photo(very famous) is The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, Norfolk taken on 19th September 1936.
> This shows a ghostly figure on a staircase which was also seen by witnesses at the time.



Interesting image.  How many times has this one been photographed?


----------



## Venusian Broon

BAYLOR said:


> Jack also could have been more then one person committing the copycat crimes. It's just a thought and after last official killing wasn't there a addition spree of similar to the Ripper murders  in another city in England at that time?
> 
> What do you think on The Ghostly Airman and Zeitoun ?



Well, Jack was never caught so therefore he could have gone on to other crimes - there were plenty of gruesome killings afterwards.

As for the ghostly airman - personally I think it is an artefact of the photography process. The pictures of Zeitoun - I've not seen before. They look suspiciously like a few well known fakes but still pretty cool! 

Right, time for me to find my Ghost pics, this one always scared the bejesus out of me (because they were in my beloved Mysteries of the Unknown: Monsters, Ghosts and UFO book which I recieved in Xmas '78 or there abouts when I was about 6) - 

1) the mother-in-law who had just died but somehow appeared in the back of this poor man's car




 
2) the famous brown lady photo:



 

and 3) for good measure it also had the monk photo on the same page:



 


Unfortunately all three have good reason to be either double exposures either taken deliberately (the brown lady one is particularly suspicious because the stairs, which seemingly still exist, are in fact straight and do not have a 'mezzanine' level that the picture implies that it has - which suggest some serious photo manipulation.) The monk looks more like a plastic skeleton wrapped in a few sheets, and the one that always inspired terror in me - the mother-in-law on the back seat, _might_ be some form of double exposure (if you look carefully at the image apparently...)


----------



## Phyrebrat

Giant Balls of Costa Rica & the Yakutia cauldrons. 

pH


----------



## BigBadBob141

Yes I would say there is a whiff of pre-Photo Shop double exposure hanky-panky here.
I have the Brown Lady photo in a book called "Ghosts Caught On Film" by Dr Melvyn Willin.
To be honest half the shots in it look a bit dodgy.


----------



## Vertigo

Having spent many happy pre-photoshop hours working away in my black and white darkroom I would say that I have had many images not dissimilar to those; usually due chemical issues. For example one part of the image surfacing in the tray and so not getting fully developed or maybe an undissolved crystal creating a localised chemical concentration. There are so many innocent mistakes that can create equally spooky effects and that's before you even start trying to manipulate them.


----------



## Brian G Turner

Venusian Broon said:


> the mother-in-law on the back seat, _might_ be some form of double exposure



Or she might really have been in the car - and it was simply forgotten that the shot was taken before she had died.


----------



## Venusian Broon

Brian Turner said:


> Or she might really have been in the car - and it was simply forgotten that the shot was taken before she had died.



Apparently it was definitely taken after her death - hence the reason the couple involved made a big song and dance about it. 

However if it really was a real photograph with the living mother-in-law in the back, what's with the burning laser eyes!!!


----------



## Brian G Turner

Venusian Broon said:


> Apparently it was definitely taken after her death



And apparently no one was around during the spaceman photo. 

Human memory seems to be a fickle thing...


----------



## Venusian Broon

Brian Turner said:


> And apparently no one was around during the spaceman photo.
> 
> Human memory seems to be a fickle thing...



Always, it always is 

But no - seemingly there is a tiny overlap of the image of the scary woman in the back over the top of the frame of the car door - so unless she was actually a real 'ghost' in the picture floating in some sort of semi-visible ectoplasm, the image can't be real and must be some sort of double exposure.


----------



## Vertigo

Everything about that one looks all wrong to me. I don't even think it is a double exposure. You can see the windows at the back and far side of the car through all the windows _except_ the driver's where, other than the 'mother-in-law,' there is only black behind the driver. From the angle you should be able to see the light of both the rear window and the far rear side window. Also the scaling is wrong; the 'mother-in-law' does not appear to be sitting on the back seat at all but in the middle of the driver's seat back.


----------



## Venusian Broon

Vertigo said:


> Everything about that one looks all wrong to me. I don't even think it is a double exposure. You can see the windows at the back and far side of the car through all the windows _except_ the driver's where, other than the 'mother-in-law,' there is only black behind the driver. From the angle you should be able to see the light of both the rear window and the far rear side window. Also the scaling is wrong; the 'mother-in-law' does not appear to be sitting on the back seat at all but in the middle of the driver's seat back.



Here is a more detailed discussion of the whole thing, along with close ups on the anomalies in the photo:

http://www.skeptic.com/insight/double-exposure-in-the-back-seat/

You probably know a lot more about photography then me Vertigo, so you can tell me if the article truly makes sense!


----------



## Vertigo

I would agree with a lot of what is said there (they also make the observation that the mother-in-law's position is too far forward. But I would also say that an accidental double exposure is rather unlikely as almost the entire image area of the 'original' other than the head and shoulders would have had to be completely black to have had no impact on the rest of the second (double) exposure of the car and driver. But it would have been extremely easy to do when printing ie. deliberately.

The doubt about the timing at the end of that article could be problematic, but only if we stick to the _accidental_ double exposure. I'd like to know what has happened to the negative as that would almost certainly clear up the whole thing. I notice no mention of the negative in any of the articles. And people would not normally throw negatives away. Also, frankly, I don't believe anyone can positively identify who the image is of; it is simply not a good enough image. In fact I personally think it looks far more like a man with a moustache.


----------



## BAYLOR

The disappearance  of the ore ship USS Cyclops in 1918 .


----------



## BigBadBob141

REF: Baylor
It's fairly easy to explain as with a lot of the so-called Bermuda Triangle disappearances.
The ship was a bit of a botch up (it's design had been poorly altered) and the cargo it was carrying was highly dangerous.
Nearly all the vanishings can be explained, it's a large area subject to sudden bad weather.
As for all the aircraft, planes are not designed to float, they tend to sink like a stone.
A lot has been made of this area over the years but like UFOs it's all talk and no trousers!


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Yes, the ship losses in BT are no worse per volume of shipping than anywhere else, taking account of weather, There is nothing to explain.
Now also with documented proof of the single giant waves, virtually every unexplained open ocean loss is covered.


----------



## BAYLOR

The Stone Balls of Costa Rica .


----------



## BAYLOR

BigBadBob141 said:


> REF: Baylor
> It's fairly easy to explain as with a lot of the so-called Bermuda Triangle disappearances.
> The ship was a bit of a botch up (it's design had been poorly altered) and the cargo it was carrying was highly dangerous.
> Nearly all the vanishings can be explained, it's a large area subject to sudden bad weather.
> As for all the aircraft, planes are not designed to float, they tend to sink like a stone.
> A lot has been made of this area over the years but like UFOs it's all talk and no trousers!



Upon further reading yes,  the Cyclops was an accident waiting to happen.


----------



## sinister42

Here's my problem with UFOs. 

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."  - Douglas Adams

Question 1: How far away are the aliens?  Are they only a few light years away?  If so, maybe - _maybe -_ they have access to high-powered telescopes that can detect life here on Earth - _if they're even looking in our direction._  And why would they be? 

If they're hundreds of light years away, then when they look into their telescopes, they're seeing the Middle Ages, or earlier.  Why would an advanced space faring civilization want to go visit that era of human history?  Or do they have some way to extrapolate the future of humanity to calculate the probability of where our civilization will be when they finally arrive? 

Question 2: How far away are the aliens?  Yes, same question.  Assuming they saw us through telescopes (or whatever) and liked what they saw, and had a means to get here, then:

If they're only a few light years away, do they get here using some advanced sub light speed propulsion that gets them here in less than a lifespan?  What are the chances of that happening?  Why would they spend the resources to do that?  And if they're that close, then why haven't we definitively detected them yet?

If they're hundreds of light years away, have they developed FTL? If not, are they using slower than light tech?  Generation ships?  Cryosleep?  Why would a civilization spend such a huge amount of resources just to say hello to a random blue green world so very far away? 

If they HAVE developed FTL, then how do they get over the "arriving before the event you're seeing in your telescope" problem?  A civilization that is 100 light years from us looks through their telescopes and sees the year 1916.  They go FTL, and arrive in 50 years - in 1866.  This opens up a problem with FTL generally, but that's for another time.

So the ultimate question is this:

How does an alien civilization ultimately see us now and get to us now?


----------



## Ray McCarthy

sinister42 said:


> How does an alien civilization ultimately see us now and get to us now?


Live on Earth in your jungle base, spy by CCTV and then arrive by aircraft? Even that doesn't work.
Actual beings from offworld, unless it's something Mars or Europa, visiting by stealth is as much fantasy as the Fair Folk and the Fairy Otherworld.


----------



## Venusian Broon

sinister42 said:


> Here's my problem with UFOs.



Here's my problem with your definition of UFOs 

(I agree with your comment as you've set it out, but it's one my pet bugbears when the hoary old UFO = aliens in flying saucers straw-man is brought up )

It's a very narrow and tight definition - little green men coming in to visit mechanical saucers from another planet. It's set up to be dismissed.

It's Unidentified Flying Object, not aliens a bit like us visiting in a mechanical spaceship. Although I'm completely aware there are years of baggage with the term, I personally prefer UAP now - which is coming back - unidentified aerial phenomena.

There are loads of alternative explanations for what are indeed very strange things that are happening. I myself have witnessed two good encounters, that unfortunately will remain unsolved, although I have my own strong suspicions. I fully suspect there is a great number of different effects being interpreted as UFO's - for example, taking Ray's comment, there are some very strong parallels with fairy encounters reported hundreds of years back and current tales of alien abducting or visitation, which suggests some common psychological motif recurring within us as humans. But there are also tentative explanations for real physical sightings, ranging from the mundane (_top secret government projects - at least I'd call that mundane_!) to new physical science/interactions ("_There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."_ )

Personally, I don't think there are any civilisations anywhere near us - I suspect 99.999999% of all life in the universe is bacteria and the closest civilisation 'now' like ours is probably in the Andromeda galaxy, but I'd really like some alien visitors. They'd have to have some really weird science, be inter-dimensional or from another universe (or something similar!) But I fully admit such a possibility has no evidence and is very unlikely .


----------



## REBerg

sinister42 said:


> Here's my problem with UFOs.
> 
> "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."  - Douglas Adams
> 
> Question 1: How far away are the aliens?  Are they only a few light years away?  If so, maybe - _maybe -_ they have access to high-powered telescopes that can detect life here on Earth - _if they're even looking in our direction._  And why would they be?
> 
> If they're hundreds of light years away, then when they look into their telescopes, they're seeing the Middle Ages, or earlier.  Why would an advanced space faring civilization want to go visit that era of human history?  Or do they have some way to extrapolate the future of humanity to calculate the probability of where our civilization will be when they finally arrive?
> 
> Question 2: How far away are the aliens?  Yes, same question.  Assuming they saw us through telescopes (or whatever) and liked what they saw, and had a means to get here, then:
> 
> If they're only a few light years away, do they get here using some advanced sub light speed propulsion that gets them here in less than a lifespan?  What are the chances of that happening?  Why would they spend the resources to do that?  And if they're that close, then why haven't we definitively detected them yet?
> 
> If they're hundreds of light years away, have they developed FTL? If not, are they using slower than light tech?  Generation ships?  Cryosleep?  Why would a civilization spend such a huge amount of resources just to say hello to a random blue green world so very far away?
> 
> If they HAVE developed FTL, then how do they get over the "arriving before the event you're seeing in your telescope" problem?  A civilization that is 100 light years from us looks through their telescopes and sees the year 1916.  They go FTL, and arrive in 50 years - in 1866.  This opens up a problem with FTL generally, but that's for another time.
> 
> So the ultimate question is this:
> 
> How does an alien civilization ultimately see us now and get to us now?


Even aliens could detect us and be motivated to visit, that time lag between what they could observe and what might still exist seems like an insurmountable obstacle to interstellar travel, no matter how that might be accomplished.

I have no doubt that aliens exist. As was twice stated in the surprisingly philosophical film, _Contact_, if Humanity is alone in the Universe, it would be “an awful waste of space.”

Life and the evolutionary process must have taken place on billions of planets. Because chances of success fall within a very narrow band of environmental conditions, the millions of species which eventually rose to dominate their planets, I suspect, look a lot like humans.

I believe that intelligent species share a common form – bilateral symmetry, a brain container at one end, appendages protruding from an organ-housing body, and some sort of locomotive apparatus at the other end. How else could we all perform the Macarena?

I don't think that we have ever been visited by aliens. If any of the other planets orbiting Earth's sun once held intelligent life, they are not showing evidence of it now. Mars does not need moms.

Outside Earth's solar system, many species may have landed expeditions on other planets, but none have ventured beyond their own solar systems. As noted. the vast distances between Earth and other life-supporting planets, pose some serious travel restrictions, regardless of whether visitors would be motivated by mere curiosity or dreams of conquest. Although Humankind is not alone in the Universe, it is on its own here on Earth.

So, the bad news, as I see it, is that no super-intelligent, technologically advanced extraterrestrial beings are likely coming to save Humankind from itself. The good news is aliens are not on their way steal our water or round us up for dinner.


----------



## Cathbad

REBerg, you are presupposing an earth-like timeline where technology is concerned.  There may, indeed, be intelligent life in our galaxy, who even now search the galaxy.  But the galaxy is vast, and we're located on a nondescript, boring portion of it.  We just haven't caught their interest, yet.

Personally, I think we might be one of the more advanced species in the galaxy, and since we haven't made it out there yet, who coud have?


----------



## Vertigo

I want desperately to believe there is other life out there but with our current knowledge the only way I can believe such is with the application of faith exactly the same as in faith in the existence of a god. The thing is that we have precisely _*one*_ verifiable instance of abiogenesis - that is the creation of life from non-living matter. We have _never _found a single second instance of abiogenesis not _one. _If/when we find a second instance I will be convinced that there are billions of life forms out there (intelligence is a whole different question) but so long as we only have one instance of abiogenesis there is nothing except assumption to suggest that it is anything more than a unique occurrence.

So far all evidence to date indicates that _all_ life on Earth is related. In other words _all _life on Earth can theoretically be traced back to one single event; the first time a cell reproduced. It is possible there have been other abiogenesis events that have been out competed by the one of which we are part but no evidence has ever been found for such.

So long as our sample is restricted to one it is pure unsupported assumption to believe that means the universe should be teeming with life.

I want desperately to believe in other life but so far there is no statistical evidence to suggest it is even likely.


----------



## Cathbad

Vertigo said:


> I want desperately to believe in other life but so far there is no statistical evidence to suggest it is even likely.



Actually, the theory of "Chance" is evidence.  If an event happened once, it is liable, over time, to happen again.  The chances of extraterrestrial life are, in fact, so high, that the only way to _dis_believe it exists is an act of extreme faith (again, we're not talking about intelligent life, just life).

Life is not an event that happens on a regular basis, of course.  The chances of such an event are miniscule (except over great periods of time), which makes it highly unlikely we _would_ have found evidence.  And, given our level of research capability on the subject, I'd say it was currently a virtual impossibility to find life out there.


----------



## Vertigo

Liable but not certain. Give me a second example and I'll believe. I simply do not believe *any *assumptions can reasonably be made on the basis of a sample of one.


----------



## Cathbad

It's not likely we'll find a second example in our lifetimes.  The event just isn't that common.


----------



## Vertigo

I agree and it's not just down to statistics there's all the other factors:

Galactic centres are likely too subject to massive levels of radiation.
Outer galactic reaches too young and therefore low in heavier elements
The privileged, stable environment we have on Earth that is very amenable to life - caused by factors such as the stabilising influence of our moon (dampens axial wobble), low axial tilt giving stable climate, protective magnetosphere, atmosphere recycling by plate tectonics and so on. Absence of these factors might not preclude life but they would probably prevent any higher life forms (non microbial).

There is also a time element - there will probably not have been any environments around with sufficient heavier elements for life until quite a long way into the life of the universe. And even once they appeared they would need time to cool down sensibly and acquire sufficient water. I could probably make a good case for the probability of any intelligent life much younger than us (as in more than several million years earlier) being quite unlikely. If we assume that life is common throughout the universe then one of those locations must have been the first. It is conceivable that we are the end result of that first one!!!!


----------



## REBerg

Cathbad said:


> REBerg, you are presupposing an earth-like timeline where technology is concerned.  There may, indeed, be intelligent life in our galaxy, who even now search the galaxy.  But the galaxy is vast, and we're located on a nondescript, boring portion of it.  We just haven't caught their interest, yet.


I don't think our solar system currently holds any surviving intelligent lifeforms (possibly including ours ). The galaxy? Certainly. The Universe? Absolutely.



Cathbad said:


> Personally, I think we might be one of the more advanced species in the galaxy, and since we haven't made it out there yet, who coud have?


That's a frightening thought. We're the best of a bad lot?


----------



## Vertigo

REBerg said:


> I don't think our solar system currently holds any surviving intelligent lifeforms (possibly including ours ). The galaxy? Certainly. The Universe? Absolutely.
> 
> That's a frightening thought. We're the best of a bad lot?


My final comment was the suggestion that we might be the first intelligent life in the Universe. After all, assuming more than one genesis, someone still has to be the first! And, in the timescales of the evolution of the universe, it is still very very young.


----------



## REBerg

Vertigo said:


> My final comment was the suggestion that we might be the first intelligent life in the Universe. After all, assuming more than one genesis, someone still has to be the first! And, in the timescales of the evolution of the universe, it is still very very young.


If we are the first, we had better get serious about not becoming the last. We don't want to let the Universe down.


----------



## Vertigo

Well of course that's the other question isn't it? If we are typical of intelligent life then it's quite possible that the average lifetime of a technological civilisation (I'm talking at the species level here not the cultural level) might be measurable in hundreds or at most thousands of years. Which then makes the chances simultaneity with other civilisations vanishingly small.


----------



## REBerg

Vertigo said:


> Well of course that's the other question isn't it? If we are typical of intelligent life then it's quite possible that the average lifetime of a technological civilisation (I'm talking at the species level here not the cultural level) might be measurable in hundreds or at most thousands of years. Which then makes the chances simultaneity with other civilisations vanishingly small.


That's what I keep thinking we might eventually discover on Mars -- evidence of an advanced civilization that was wiped out by environmental factors or destroyed itself.
On a more optimistic note, we might find that they were able to escape the environmental destruction of their planet by leaving. Even more optimistically, they left instructions for us to do the same.


----------



## Cathbad

Vertigo said:


> Outer galactic reaches too young and therefore low in heavier elements


I'm sure there are planets as you have described here.  But, I would remind you that we are on a remote spiral, at the "outer galactic reaches" of the Milky Way.


----------



## Cathbad

REBerg said:


> That's what I keep thinking we might eventually discover on Mars -- evidence of an advanced civilization that was wiped out by environmental factors or destroyed itself.
> On a more optimistic note, we might find that they were able to escape the environmental destruction of their planet by leaving. Even more optimistically, they left instructions for us to do the same.



Great basis or a story!  

But leaving would be the best thing we could do for this planet.


----------



## Vertigo

Cathbad said:


> I'm sure there are planets as you have described here.  But, I would remind you that we are on a remote spiral, at the "outer galactic reaches" of the Milky Way.


We're not as far out as you might think check out Galactic habitable zone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'd estimate we are only a little over half way out from the galactic centre.


----------



## REBerg

Cathbad said:


> Great basis or a story!
> 
> But leaving would be the best thing we could do for this planet.


Earth might have a shot at healing itself if we left. Let's all hitch a ride on the next passing Vogon ship.


----------



## Cathbad

REBerg said:


> Earth might have a shot at healing itself if we left. Let's all hitch a ride on the next passing Vogon ship.



I CALL SHOTGUN!!


----------



## tinkerdan

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”


― Arthur C. Clarke


----------



## REBerg

Cathbad said:


> I CALL SHOTGUN!!


Sure, if you want to get all cozy with the pilot, a member of the a sluglike species having having "as much sex appeal as a road accident," I won't stand in your way. I would book first class passage for myself and leave the driving to the pair of you.


----------



## Cathbad

REBerg said:


> Sure, if you want to get all cozy with the pilot, a member of the a sluglike species having having "as much sex appeal as a road accident," I won't stand in your way. I would book first class passage for myself and leave the driving to the pair of you.



Hmmm... lemme rethink this...


----------



## J Riff

The chances that ET_ arrives_ during, say, our lifetime of 100ish years.., is microscopic. They've been around forever, or not at all. Thus, if not visible to us, we hafta ask the hard question - Good ET/bad ET ? Or both. The idea of NO ET is the least likely. All those planets, and Earth is the only place with intelligibility? I want a refund.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Everyone is too far away to notice, except in a few years time for spectroscopic analysis.
Unless less some sort of SF like "Jump Drive" etc is possible, then every civilisation is in quarantine for ever. Even should our galaxy have 100,000 worlds with life, I think statistically one being within 100 light years in a 150,000 light year diameter galaxy is slim, about 1 in 500,000 (due to volume) or less


----------



## Cathbad

"Forever" is a very long time.  Things we cannot even conceive of now, _will_ come into being.


----------



## sinister42

Right, then I want my yoghurt-powered hover spleen.


----------



## BAYLOR

sinister42 said:


> Right, then I want my yoghurt-powered hover spleen.



 I still haven't received my Personal warp drive jet pack .


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> I still haven't received my Personal warp drive jet pack .



It's on back order.


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> It's on back order.



Im very disappointed by this news .


----------



## Cathbad

I blame the Romulans.


----------



## 2DaveWixon

J Riff said:


> The chances that ET_ arrives_ during, say, our lifetime of 100ish years.., is microscopic. They've been around forever, or not at all. Thus, if not visible to us, we hafta ask the hard question - Good ET/bad ET ? Or both. The idea of NO ET is the least likely. All those planets, and Earth is the only place with intelligibility? I want a refund.



Does Earth have "intelligibility"? I find it (except sometimes on Chrons...) largely unintelligible...


----------



## 2DaveWixon

Ray McCarthy said:


> Everyone is too far away to notice, except in a few years time for spectroscopic analysis.
> Unless less some sort of SF like "Jump Drive" etc is possible, then every civilisation is in quarantine for ever. Even should our galaxy have 100,000 worlds with life, I think statistically one being within 100 light years in a 150,000 light year diameter galaxy is slim, about 1 in 500,000 (due to volume) or less



And I cannot decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing...


----------



## 2DaveWixon

Cathbad said:


> "Forever" is a very long time.  Things we cannot even conceive of now, _will_ come into being.



From a statistical point of view (something I both hate and am not good at), anything that is possible, however remotely so, will happen, given enough time...and infinity is enough time.
Dave


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

The problem with all the arguments against ET is that they're all based on current science. Sure, speed of light limitations make it unlikely that a sublight ship will visit us. And yes, our current science says you can't bypass that limit. But if there _is _some form of FTL, then everything changes. And if that scientific breakthrough includes some form of FTL communications, then obviously we're not "detecting" other civilizations because we don't have the equipment.
So, do I believe in flying saucers? Nope. Insufficient supporting evidence. And the old "there's no other explanation" saw just doesn't cut it.

My stance is that I _hope_ there is intelligent life out there, and I'm prepared to be convinced that they're visiting us, but until I see evidence, I see no reason to come down hard on one side or the other.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Zoo hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One issue in that article not considered is HOW would aliens communicate anyway?  Beamed Radio is only feasible up to maybe 100 LY, and leakage of regular broadcast radio would be hard to detect from noise at even 5 LY, our industrial pollution my be detectable at 1000 LY easily, but that's only a "we are here signal" and has only reached about 100 LY distance, obviously.

If no kind of space folding  / jump drive is possible, then all you can do is catalogue the stars that have planets with Industrialisation, via spectroscopic analysis. Actual communication will be impossible.


----------



## Cathbad

You should have a qualifier there.  "Currently impossible".  We cannot predict what will be discovered/invented beyond the next century.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Cathbad said:


> "Currently impossible". We cannot predict what will be discovered/invented beyond the next century.


I'm speaking of light and radio communications, and the fundamental physical limits vs solar noise and cosmic noise.
There are things that are reasonable to assume are inherently impossible, paradoxical etc, such free energy, perpetual motion etc.


----------



## Cathbad

Can you explain, then, why a group of scientists are trying to prove faster than light speeds are possible?  (Don't recall source, but not long ago, they thought they had succeeded, before reviewing the data - which they then backtracked on).


----------



## sinister42

I think FTL is a nut that's going to be impossible to crack until we can at least harness fusion power or some other means of generating tremendous amounts of energy in a stable environment. But even then, and this is the point I was getting at earlier, there's this major problem with FTL: it amounts to time travel.

In Star Trek, the Federation uses "subspace communication" as a means of bypassing the light barrier so they can talk to their ships and outposts all over the galaxy.  Trouble is, by sending messages faster than light, the messages are arriving before they were sent.  Then, when the Enterprise responds, their response is received before it's sent. The show ignores this because it's soft sci fi, but any civilization working with FTL is going to have the same problem.   

Then, let's say the Enterprise crew wants to take a nice vacation to Risa, which let's say is 100 light years from where they've just vaporized a Borg cube.  It'll take them 10 minutes to go that far at warp 9 (or whatever the calculation is).  They'll arrive at Risa 100 years minus 10 minutes before they left.  How do you make hotel reservations on that basis?  How do you have a civilization where everyone is arriving everywhere before they left? 

"Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so."  -Slartibartfast

Relativity asserts that light = time, and that's really why we can't go faster than light - because we can't go beyond the light cone of an event. FTL breaks that rule, so we end up arriving somewhere before the light cone of our departure event has even left where we started from.  I don't know how the hell we get around that problem.  And without a solution, we're not going to see any little green men on Earth anytime soon.


----------



## Cathbad

sinister42 said:


> and this is the point I was getting at earlier, there's this major problem with FTL: it amounts to time travel.



_If_ Einstein is right.    But, isn't that what the buffers on Star Trek are for??


----------



## sinister42

I think I may be wrong about all this, actually, after doing some more reading on it.  This article is confusing but illuminating, for example.


----------



## Cathbad

sinister42 said:


> I think I may be wrong about all this, actually, after doing some more reading on it.  This article is confusing but illuminating, for example.



Very interesting article!


----------



## mosaix

I thought the problem with FTL was that an object approaches the speed of light it gains mass. _At_ the speed of light of attains infinite mass.


----------



## Cathbad

The group I spoke about found they had only "came close" to the speed of light.  There was no mass gain.


----------



## Parson

Cathbad said:


> The group I spoke about found they had only "came close" to the speed of light.  There was no mass gain.


Really? I'd thought that had been confirmed a long time ago. Isn't that what the particle accelerators are proving?


----------



## Cathbad

They sent only a particle, but their report made no mention of mass gain.  And they came so close to light speed, they originally thought they'd surpassed it.


----------



## Cathbad

I believe I've found the article.

Faster Than Light Particles Found


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> I believe I've found the article.
> 
> Faster Than Light Particles Found



Sounds a bit like the film *Interstellar*.


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> Sounds a bit like the film *Interstellar*.



Didn't see it.


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> Didn't see it.



Its an interesting film.


----------



## mosaix

Cathbad said:


> I believe I've found the article.
> 
> Faster Than Light Particles Found



I believe that subsequent measurements found errors in the recording equipment that gave false results.

I seem to remember that it's been discussed elsewhere on Chrons.


----------



## Cathbad

mosaix said:


> I believe that subsequent measurements found errors in the recording equipment that gave false results.


Exactly.  It had only came close to the speed of light.


----------



## mosaix

Cathbad said:


> Exactly.  It had only came close to the speed of light.



Sorry, Cathbad I misunderstood. I'll read more.


----------



## Lew Rockwell Fan

How small objects (eg. pens, nuts, washers) I've set down on some convenient surface tend to vanish the moment I take my eye off of them, never to be seen again. Could I get a grant to study this?


----------



## Cathbad

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> How small objects (eg. pens, nuts, washers) I've set down on some convenient surface tend to vanish the moment I take my eye off of them, never to be seen again. Could I get a grant to study this?



Or teach the cat to stay off the counter.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

There a planet connected by tiny worm holes that only open for a femto second. The pens achieve sentience. I've used all the ink in a ballpoint pen maybe twice in 50 years? It feels like that.


----------



## Lew Rockwell Fan

Cathbad said:


> The group I spoke about found they had only "came close" to the speed of light.  There was no mass gain.


My friend TJ is looking over my shoulder mumbling something about "yankee professors".


----------



## JunkMonkey

REBerg said:


> Sure, if you want to get all cozy with the pilot, a member of the a sluglike species having having "as much sex appeal as a road accident,"




and all I have to say to that is Crash by J G Ballard


----------



## BAYLOR

Our inability to see that Global Warming is not a figment of out imagination.


----------



## dask

I haven't gone through all 10 pages of this thread to check it out but on the off chance no one has mentioned it yet I'd nominate what is called in quantum circles Spooky Action At A Distance.


----------



## J Riff

SAAAD... but true?


----------



## Ray McCarthy

dask said:


> Spooky Action At A Distance


But most of the media reports are wrong


----------



## J Riff

rEALLY?!? Dang, let me open a localized wormhole here... half a tick... dang, I'm out of energy, can anyone lend me a few million ergs?


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

BAYLOR said:


> Our inability to see that Global Warming is not a figment of out imagination.



Sadly, since the people who believe this are generally the same ones who believe the Earth is 6000 years old, there are no fossils, and science is just a bunch of opinions, it's actually quite easy to explain.


----------



## J Riff

Flat Earth, hollow Earth... what else am I forgetting... oh yes, the Earth is an egg, due to hatch soon. And microwave ovens are radioactive.


----------



## BAYLOR

Bizmuth said:


> Sadly, since the people who believe this are generally the same ones who believe the Earth is 6000 years old, there are no fossils, and science is just a bunch of opinions, it's actually quite easy to explain.



It's more a question of greed and willful stupidity.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> And microwave ovens are radioactive.


The truth is a little stranger.


----------



## J Riff

Heats up the water molecules only? I have torn apart at least 50 microwaves... to get at the copper/aluminum and magnets. I don't feel the slightest bit radioactive, not glowing. The dangerous bit is the carcinogenic stuff on the end of the whatsit, there... but it's in solid form. Still, I allus wrap it up and put it in with batteries and other nasty stuff. What is that stuff, cooked onto the end, where the tungsten thingy is...?


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> The dangerous bit is the carcinogenic stuff on the end of the whatsit, there... but it's in solid form. Still, I allus wrap it up and put it in with batteries and other nasty stuff


I know exactly how a microwave oven works, and how the components are made, how they work and what is in them.
I've no idea what you are talking about!


----------



## Cathbad

J Riff said:


> Flat Earth, hollow Earth... what else am I forgetting... oh yes, the Earth is an egg, due to hatch soon. And microwave ovens are radioactive.



Yes.


----------



## J Riff

The stuff Ray... the stuff baked on there, it's usually blue. If it crumbles, or if it got dissolved somehow... argh! I will try to look it up, one moment pliz.
Beryllium oxide. Baked on as insulation? by the tungsten bit... deadly carcinogen if ingested. That's the stuff I avoided when smashing an oven open in a dark alley in the rain. I had it down to less than five min. and I was off with the good bits... and the beryllium I very conscientiously got rid of properly rather than leaving it laying about.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> Beryllium oxide. Baked on as insulation?


No
Beryllium Oxide: It's not crumbly nor dissolves. It's either white, or as a crystal colourless. The only non-metal (electrical insulator) with more heat conduction is diamond. Its dust is carcinogenic, but it's a very hard stable solid. You'd have saw or grind it to get dust, which would be difficult. You'd not get dust by breaking a piece.

I don't think so. *It's only used inside semiconductor devices* as thermal conducting and electrical insulation between silicon chip and heat sink bolt / tab. As a result, I've never actually seen Beryllium Oxide.  I don't break open the RF transistors with it inside.
The filament is tungsten and inside the magnetron (a vacuum thermionic diode), it got a special coating that *MIGHT* be mildly radioactive, barium oxides (maybe other compounds). Any potential radiation can't escape the magnetron casing, and if it exists is probably harmless. You can't get at the filament.

The only Electronics is the on/off controller. The magnetron creates microwaves directly (at 2.4GHz to 2.5GHz band) from a large heavy high voltage AC Mains transformer.

Totally pure water heats badly.

There is no cancer risk, but if you disabled the door interlock and used it open, you'd get get cataracts if you didn't just get heating burns. The metal mesh in the window of the door blocks microwaves.


----------



## J Riff

Barium, then. Thing is, it can get powdered, so I was careful. Better safe than sorry. Who knew.
What I DO have laying around, is a bunch of liquid mercury capsules... from old smoke detectors?
I bet Mercury is waaay more dangerous than B. Oxide.... which is usually blue on the ovens here, whatever it actually is. 
These ovens are everywere, sitting on the street, so good thing they can't radiate passersby or leech into the water system.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> Barium, then. Thing is, it can get powdered,


Barium oxide and it's inaccessible on the filament. Very little of it too. Extremely thin coating and quite safe. You'd need a saw or grinder to open the magnetron and get the filament out anyway.

Smoke detectors don't have mercury. They often* have a man-made element that doesn't exist in nature: Americium.
The smoke detector has about 0.28 micrograms (0.000,000,000,28 Kg or about 0.000,000,000,57 pounds!). So though it might be more dangerous than Plutonium for radioactivity, you'd need millions of smoke detectors to be an evil villain. Even using a smoke detector as a pillow is probably safe (I'm not sure what chemicals might leach out of the plastic). Plastics often have a bromine based fire retardant. Bromine is nasty stuff. That's why usually  white plastic goes yellow in daylight. The UV is breaking down the fire retardant.

Similarly the mantles for gas lamps are radioactive too, they use thorium. You can make a safer nuclear power station with thorium, but not starting with gas lamp mantles.

Household bleach and cleaning chemicals are dangerous. One kind is chlorine based. It can react violently with the other kind and give off the sort of chlorine gas compounds that remind one of WWI. Don't mix cleaning / bleaching / disinfection products. Some will give off Phenol compounds if they react.


[*There are smoke detectors that use an optical chamber. They are more expensive and less reliable!]


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Ray McCarthy said:


> Similarly the mantles for gas lamps are radioactive too, they use thorium. You can make a safer nuclear power station with thorium, but not starting with gas lamp mantles.



Used in schools and colleges for radioactive decay experiments.


----------



## J Riff

Well, I came across a dumpster full of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors this week. Hundreds of them; an entire apt. complex had replaced all the detectors, and dumped them into the gobbidge.
Those little glass Americium bubbles look exactly like liquid mercury? The blue barium stuff... well, when you tear out the magnetron and gouge off the metal flange bits, and rip out the magnets, that stuff can be crunched and almost powdered, easily. In the dark, in the rain. Nice to know t'isnt fatalistic.
Anyway, I don't scrap out microwaves anymore... I'm past that now and feel fine (coffff) really, even though there's a buck or 3 copper/aluminum in there, the real danger is hacking heck out of your hands in the process of dismantlement. This is becos of those stupid screws used to make sure people with only normal screwdrivers can't open them. In such a case, a chisel and hammer work fine, but accidents do happen. Of course I have the stupid weird screwdriver set but who can carry such a thing around everywbere? Scrapping some of the zillions free electronics laying about was educational but not very profitable otherwise.
 Edit: waitatic... Americium is in those little... cages, metal huts inside a smoke detector... so where did I get these liquid mercury tubes... thermostats? Can't remember!


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> The blue barium stuff... well, when you tear out the magnetron and gouge off the metal flange bits, and rip out the magnets, that stuff can be crunched and almost powdered, easily. In the dark, in the rain. Nice to know t'isnt fatalistic.


Not barium, just some sort of insulation.

Liquid mercury is only in tilt switches, ultra fast relays (up till 1970s), old glass thermometers. There is a very small amount in CFLs, Fluorescent lamps (regular or sun bed or high pressure warehouse / street lights. The electric arc in mercury vapour gives of UVB and UVB, a phosphor mix converts that to visible light. No mercury in Thermostats, mechanical ones use bimetallic strips, electronic ones use a thermistor, diode, semiconductor IC sensor  or thermocouple.


----------



## J Riff

Okay... time to attempt an intelligble question. What, if anything, would you consider worth salvaging, from all sorts of electronics/tech, that is out there?
Not scrap value - re-purposing or future worth of some kind. Or, is it all reduced to the level of planned obsolescence, like cellphones; older ones are already unuseable. There's gold in them hills, yeah, but I hate throwing away cameras, gadgets, endless circuit boards, gimcracks and bits n pieces of this and that.
 Little electric motors? I have a box of over a hundred, but may as well chuck 'em for all the good they are. Would have been thrilled to have cool little electric motors as a kid - now you can't give them away.


----------



## Cathbad

I'd like to see an end to "social media".  Nothing has been worse for the advancement of human civilization.


----------



## J Riff

An experiment going wronger by the day. Soon the phones will be calling the people and telling them what to do, where to go, what to believe. Someone (maybe me) called them: BS (brain substitute) Boxes.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> What, if anything, would you consider worth salvaging, from all sorts of electronics/tech, that is out there?


Anything older than 1990s might be worth repairing / restoring.
Hardly any reusable parts in anything new.

No decent speakers built in TVs now, you need 1980s -1990s wooden box speakers + HiFi. The sound bars, "phone docks" and "home theatre" plastic podules are all sound quality of a  1965 Hong Kong pocket set with 3" speaker. Dreadful.

Nearly impossible to buy a decent radio. Even car Radios now are worse than 10 years ago, they were last decent radios. You need a restored 1950s to 1990s radio to have decent radio.

I buy old phone chargers at 50cents in charity shop when I need a project power supply or replacement psu. I just change the plug on the DC cord.

Little motors are good to use in parts for  DIY kits for kids or servos of older people's projects.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> Little electric motors? I have a box of over a hundred, but may as well chuck 'em for all the good they are.


You could add motor to this
30 Notes DIY Hand Crank Music Box Movement+Puncher+ 3 Strips for Your Songs Gift
Or even make one out of junk

They do actually have a model that has a built in motor. Oddly I can't find a wind up version like the regular cylinder & peg music box mechanisms which are from about $4 inc postage.


----------



## J Riff

As I thought! I do the ph. charger trick too, there are so many discarded pre-90s phones it's ridiculous.
How many magnets does one guy need anyway? I stopped after three bags full. Neodymbulbium magnets can be finger pinchers, be careful when dismembering hardrives. I wonder about the effect of 3,075 magnets under the bed at night.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> Neodymbulbium magnets


Dangerous if a child swallows one.
I salvage them from broken "ear bud" earphones.


----------



## BAYLOR

Why can't science come up with The Theory of Everything ?


----------



## J Riff

Mostly I yam glommed neodymiums from old tower HDs, so they are plenty strong. Hard to separate from each other, a real danger to guitarists or other finger workers. SnAp!! I really do have hundreds and hundreds of them... but still can't attract much worthwhile.
Obviously, the best use is to attach a few dozen to a hook and troll the lake or river, hoping for metal treasure.


----------



## BAYLOR

Why we have found no evidence of intelligent lie in the universe . No Radio signals.


----------



## Cathbad

My radio has no intelligent life broadcasting on it either!!


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> My radio has no intelligent life broadcasting on it either!!



Thats because talk radio is inhospitable to intelligent life.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

BAYLOR said:


> no evidence of intelligent lie in the universe . No Radio signals.


Too far for Radio


----------



## Vertigo

Our omnidirectional radio signals that have been broadcast for the last hundred years odd are maybe just about detectable a few light days out from the solar system after that the inverse square law makes them virtually undetectable. Also, based on our own behaviour, omnidirectional broadcasting is something a technological civilisation will only do for a very short span of time. It won't be long before all our radio transmissions are much more tightly focused and less wasteful. Only a very tightly focused beam stands any chance of being detected at any greater distances (think military grade pulsed radar) and by it's nature any such alien signal would have to be pointed directly at us and for long enough for us to happen to look in the right direction to detect it. Why would they do that? Seti is, sadly, and in my view, a complete waste of time. Even if they are out there we're never going to pick up their radio signals.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Vertigo said:


> Only a very tightly focused beam stands any chance of being detected at any greater distances (think military grade pulsed radar) and by it's nature any such alien signal would have to be pointed directly at us and for long enough for us to happen to look in the right direction to detect it. Why would they do that? Seti is, sadly, and in my view, a complete waste of time.


Even then the range is likely less than 100 LY, which is just the end of the street and probably not much more than half a dozen neighbours.

SETI via radio is pointless.
SETI via spectroscopic analysis using space telescopes is feasible.


----------



## Parson

Vertigo said:


> Our omnidirectional radio signals that have been broadcast for the last hundred years odd are maybe just about detectable a few light days out from the solar system after that the inverse square law makes them virtually undetectable.


@Vertigo I don't doubt the science behind this statement, but how much of it could be compensated for with very sensitive receivers? I'm thinking the Pluto probe now, of course it is a very directional beam, but it is also a very low powered beam relying on very, very, good receivers. How much of an increase do we get the better equipment. --- I know that this is just speculation, but you or someone else might have a somewhat educated guess about this.


----------



## Vertigo

The big difference is between a coherent* radio beam and an omnidirectional beam. The inverse square law is purely down to the spread of an omnidirectional source (like the sun) where the light/radio waves are being spread over an ever larger sphere as they move farther away from the source. Therefore the original power is being spread ever thinner. Hence the inverse square law. There's no real way to get around that unless your omnidirectional source is incredibly powerful like a star and even the less strong examples of stars become difficult to detect over very long distances. Very little power is lost to attenuation as there is so little stuff in space to block the signal, though of course there is some, so over very long distances some signal will also be lost to dust in space (very hard to detect stars in or behind significant dust clouds). The problem is that combine the inverse square law with that little bit of attenuation and then add in trying to separate such a tiny signal from the signal coming from the star whose system it originates in and frankly no matter how sensitive your receiver the chances of detecting anything are rapidly falling to impossible.

On the other hand take even a low power coherent signal in a tight beam (and over interstellar distances that beam needs to be incredibly tight) and it will hardly diminish at all. if the Pluto Horizon probe signal is sufficiently tight then the signal coming from it today will be hardly less than when it was say around the orbit of the moon _so long as it is pointing in exactly the right place_ which of course it is. However we can't make radio beams all that tight so over interstellar distances even they are likely to disperse too much to be detectable. As I said earlier I believe it is thought that military strength radar _might_ be detectable at some of our nearer starts but it must be pointed exactly at the target star. And then hope that some alien living at the target star just happens to be looking at you at just the right time to see it.

So you first have to decide on what star you want to send a signal to then point an incredibly tight, powerful (and probably very expensive) transmitter at that star and start transmitting and keep transmitting for oh say a century or two in the hope that they happen to look our way. Consider SETI; I don't know how many stars it scans every night but even if it's hundreds there are billions out there and it doesn't/can't watch them for a decade it only watches them briefly and then moves on to another one. So really the chances of detecting a signal are, sadly (very sadly), vanishingly small.

As Ray says the best real possibility of detecting life is to detect the signs of that life in exo-planet atmospheres. Note that what you are doing there is using the incredibly powerful transmission of a star and then applying spectroscopy to the light from that star that is passing through or reflecting from the planet's atmosphere. Then just suppose you have detected chemicals indicative of a technological civilisation and so decide to transmit a signal at them. First that signal must be tight enough, then you have to wait however many years for the signal to reach them and then hope that they're looking our way... 

Oops sorry for the excessively long post. It is an area I am fascinated in (despite how pessimistic I may seem about our chances....).

This page here - How Far Have Our Radio Signals Traveled From Earth? - gives a fairly nice simple explanation, though it suggests detection is possible out to few light years which from what I've read elsewhere is extremely optimistic.

* I think coherent is the right word here (I'm sure Ray will be able to confirm/correct). But it means as tightly parallel as possible so no spread at all. Lasers and radars are good examples.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Parson said:


> but how much of it could be compensated for with very sensitive receivers?


We have been at the physical receiver limit for years. Even a room temperature receiver is pretty marvellous, about 0.3dB NF. Professional gear can be liquid nitrogen cooled. You can now only have bigger dishes and more off them. My rough figures are based on both ends pointing at each other with crazy big arrays of crazy big dishes.
The limit is Cosmic background noise. I can have good enough gear here that out performs that at room temperature!

The Pluto probe is really very close, very low data rate and VERY big dishes this end. The New Horizons or ANY probe / satellite has to point its dish exactly at us or we can't communicate at all.

Even a big dish still has a an inverse square law, it's just collecting more signal (aperture), gain.  So with a 46dB dish gain my signal is that much stronger, but 10 times distance is still 100 times weaker  (20dB).

Pretty much even if both ends of 100 light years away planet pointed giant dishes, it's still dubious. Maybe at 10 LY.
Round trip time is Light Years distance x2 as years.

Both beamed and omni radio is coherent, like a laser is. Gain goes up with cube of frequency for a dish, so optical laser and dish has more range than radio for same dish size and power. That needs to be in space as atmosphere is a problem. Also inherently easier to do 1000x power of radio than optical.  SETI mostly just listens, unless someone is less than 10 to 100LY AND pointing at us, we can hear them.

With Spectroscopic Analysis the "transmitter" is an entire star! Any molecules in the atmosphere of planet cause dips in the star's spectrum as the planet transits the star. We KNOW this works and HAVE used to to discover what gases are in atmosphere of distant planets. The next Space Telescope (James Web?) will be far better than ground based or Hubble doing this.
A Star is billions of times more powerful than any planetary based laser or radio transmitter!



Vertigo said:


> So really the chances of detecting a signal are, sadly (very sadly), vanishingly small.


Zero I would say!



Vertigo said:


> Then just suppose you have detected chemicals indicative of a technological civilisation and so decide to transmit a signal at them.


I think we can't transmit anything by radio or laser. 
1) They'd have to be looking at us
2) You'd need about a hundredth of the power of the sun for any likely destination, and they need to be looking at us.
3) It's not possible with any known practical or theoretical technology to reach more than maybe 5LY to 20LY, at a very slow data rate, AND they would need to be pointing a massive array of dishes straight at us!
Oddly sending a physical probe is possible. It would take a very very long time. But is more likely to work!


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Omnidirectional vs "beam"
Coherent isn't the issue, that's easy for Radio compared to Light.

*Omni* is a sphere expanding. Twice the distance and you have a quarter of the signal hitting the same destination area, because area is proportional to diameter of area squared.

A "*beam*" is actually a cone "cut" out of a sphere expanding. So the narrower it is the more gain. The bigger the dish, the narrower the beam. Even a laser beam is a collection of cones the width of the laser exit. It's just a much narrower cone than a big dish gives.
If the distance is doubled, then the diameter of the patch of laser or radio illuminating the destination is doubled. Thus area is times four, so the SAME area of destination (the receiver or transmitter) gets one quarter signal. That's where the inverse square law comes from. It's not something mysterious to do with light, radio, xrays, heat or even gravity. *Simple geometry. *

There are no parallel beams. All transmission or reception of ANY kind of signal is simply a geometrical 3D fractional cone (or a collection of cones) of an expanding sphere.

*Virtual Dish for Resolution made from many dishes far apart.*
If you have 100 dishes for radio (or in theory light), that's about the same signal as one dish ten times diameter. They have to be carefully pointed. If they are moved far apart you get no extra signal AT ALL. However you do get more resolution as if you had a very much larger dish. This means if the signal (light or radio) is above the background noise (like a star), you can perhaps separate out the signal of two separate stars tens of thousands of light years away or even in another galaxy.  It's no help for artificial signals as they are billions of billions of times weaker than a star!


----------



## J Riff

Nice explanation for us lay types Ray. Meanwhile... I just found a cleaning bot - a 'Roomba' vacuum, outside, and have it on the table here wondering what is what. There's a sensor, and a remote, motors, what not...  This mangled bot is worth 17cents/lb.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> a 'Roomba' vacuum,


A woman was asleep on the floor ...
Yes fire brigade had to disentangle her hair from it. They are "dumber" than an earthworm or earwig.


----------



## J Riff

Okay, I'll smash it up and report back. *
mmm... nice white circuit board... a zillion screws to take out... looks like the usual components, not worth the time. The little sensor box and the remote... nah it's junk.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

We are safe on Chrons from the Skynet, Matrix, "The Singularity"  and "The Rise of the Machines", if @J Riff  can't unplug it (usually works, eventually), he'll smash them up,


----------



## J Riff

Hey,I do this while at the coffeeshop, and some guy just grabbed up a nice power amp and two wooden speaker enclosures. There's about a hundred forks and spoons... unused, new... all from a dollarstore, who dumps stuff in the dumpster even tho there's a donor box a few yards away. So we shift some of it over, good deed for the day.


----------



## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> Too far for Radio



Because of signal washout?


----------



## Cathbad

Something else science can't explain:  Why, if I lay one wire/cord on top of another, ten minutes later, they are totally entwined/tangled!!

I blame gremlins.

~brooding~


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> Something else science can't explain:  Why, if I lay one wire/cord on top of another, ten minutes later, they are totally entwined/tangled!!
> 
> I blame gremlins.
> 
> ~brooding~




That's because the wires are secretly plotting against you.


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> That's because the wires are secretly plotting against you.



I KNEW it!!!


----------



## Ray McCarthy

BAYLOR said:


> signal washout?


No idea what that is.
Inverse Square law, possible transmitter power, dish sizes, background cosmic and star noise.
Shannon's law (1948) identified the limits for any communication.

Some basic graphs about radio communication I've collected over the years
*
1) Shannon Limit*




Basically every time you double the distance on a radio system that only just works very slowly you need four times the power.
You need more power the more data you want to transmit per second.
The fixed parameters most limiting are the channel noise and distance.
Eventually your aerial /dishes uses half your planet and transmitter the entire energy the planet has. Any realistic Civilisation has much less power and a much smaller aerial/dishes than that.

*2) Background noise versus Radio frequency (ground level)*







*
3) Attenuation of signal at ground level*
Much easier to do giant dish arrays on the ground than in space





It's a complicated subject. Basically there are practical limits as to how far you can send an artificial signal. Power and dish size.
The limits for reception are background noise and dish size. We can essentially make receivers quieter than any background noise quite easily, so receiver technology hasn't been a problem for maybe 20 years.

Telescopes and radio telescopes work better in space. One big system of each on the far side of the moon would be good for half the month as at least the moon would shield from our man-made interference and atmospheric attenuation. When the far side is facing the sun, isn't much good!

Any interesting places are very far away.

Any aliens would have to be EXACTLY pointing their giant high power transmitters and dishes  at our dishes pointing exactly at them, AND the link would have to be within the Shannon Limit.

*Not likely.*
Our sun isn't especially powerful, it's power is about 386 billion billion mega Watts
386,000,000,000,000,000,000 MW
When you hear about a 1 MW TV transmitter, that's ERP, the effect of aerial gain. The real power might be 200kW.
But let's say we had 100 of the giant Chinese 500m dishes (Arecibo is 2nd largest at about 320m I think) and had a 1000 MW transmitter on each. That's still 1/3,860,000,000,000,000,000 th of the sun's power!
The 100 giant dishes is a gain of about 5,000,000,000 so total ERP at 100% efficieny (unlikely) is still about 1,000,000,000 times less than the sun.
We are not about to build a receiver with 100 dishes that size.
Who would build the transmitter?
Remember it has to be pointed EXACTLY at us.
We have to notice.
if 20 Light Years away, then if we build a transmitter to reply that is 40 years later the aliens hear the signal. They have to be STILL pointing at us!
With that power you have to alternate listening and transmitting, not a big problem.

With Radio it takes massive resources for lifetimes for EACH potential target. Takes two to Tango.

With Spectroscopic analysis you use a moderate size dish (mirror). The James Webb Space Telescope has a single 6.9m mirror (equivalent exactly to dish on radio telescope). You are using maybe a 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000 MW transmitter (the remote star) modulated by the atmosphere of the planet of interest. You'll know in maybe a year if it's likely got life and even industry.  You can then feel "not alone". You could send a probe (maybe take 100s of years or 1000s years to get there). Building a giant transmitter is unlikely idea as it's likely they will be too far away and why would they be pointing a giant array of dishes at us to hear us?

Anyway, that's why radio based SETI is probably pointless.


----------



## BAYLOR

I had no idea it was that complicated , wow.


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## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> I had no idea it was that complicated , wow.



he do put da facts in!


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## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> he do put da facts in!



He really does know his stuff.


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## Ray McCarthy

BAYLOR said:


> was that complicated


It's not really complicated.
It's like walkie talkies*. (CB, FRS, or whatever). Doing 200m (200 yards in America) is easy. Doing 2km is hard to impossible in a city, easy on a pair of hills, doing 200Km is really hard and involves bouncing signal off the Ionosphere.

Space is REALLY big. Talking to Voyagers and New Horisons is really really hard. They haven't even got out of the hallway yet!
Milky way is maybe 180,000 LY across.
Nearest stars are 4.5 to 10 LY.
Best guess is that "life" could easily be 100 LY away minimum.
We can maybe reliably communicate about 0.1 LY, today (35 light days). New Horizons and the Voyagers are much closer!

My SF has real science in it. The Aliens in my stories only use radio and laser links up to about 16 Light Days distance. They monitor radio transmissions  of new worlds from about that distance in their starships (don't ask me how the starship works for Interstellar distances, if I knew that I'd be working in ESA or NASA or RosCosmos!)

[* I can explain why Police /ambulance/taxi mobile radio works better and why cell phones work often at 1/10th power of a walkie talkie, but that's a subject for another thread]


----------



## Ray McCarthy

*Another thought ...*
You can see the cosmic noise and terrestrial and solar noise are all worse at lower frequencies on the graphs above.
*Redshift*
A blueish star moving away from us fast enough (very far away) will have that blue light shifted to radio frequencies. That and background noise from "big bang" and all the radio noise for all the visible stars is what some aspects of the cosmic noise is. The observable radio limit of the universe is much larger than optical size (maybe due to Red Shift), but eventually the red shift of the star's signal is into the background noise. Hence even should we fill the entire far side of the moon with radio telescopes, there is still a limit to the observable universe due to "cosmic noise".


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Forum posts with graphs!  
Respect is due Ray.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Stephen Palmer said:


> posts with graphs


Really old ones prior to Excel etc!
Shannon / Nyquist's work in 1948 was originally called Shannon's Theory, but actually the whole thing about definition of communication, how far it can go, the percentage of errors and the speed of it, all relating to channel size, channel noise, speed and transmission power turns out to be based PURELY on the laws of Thermodynamics, it's that fundamental and basic. So there are no magic recipes, no technology waiting to be discovered (the communication medium and modulations etc can't solve the issues, we can work to a few percent of the Shannon Limit today).

So in recognition of the totally definitive mathematics and the underpinning of Thermodynamics, it's called Shannon's Law now. The Shannon limit is the region beyond 100% channel efficiency, no communication at all is possible in that greyed out region of the complex graph. The various points are examples of where various real world systems existed maybe 20 years ago.

Most Mobile Internet speed claims and claims for MIMO, new techniques for more speed or range (you can have one at the expense of the other) are misleading or out right lies, or only apply a few metres apart in a noise free lab.
So called "White Space" or other claims of spectrum sharing are lies. Share spectrum and the noise/interference  increases, errors rise, TV pictures may pixellate or freeze, data connections or voice calls drop etc.


----------



## Stephen Palmer

I remember doing Shannon's Law at university... many years ago...


----------



## Parson

@Vertigo and @Ray McCarthy ---- Thanks so much for clearing that up for me. It does beg the question that if this was so well known in mid-1900's or before how on earth did radio SETI get started? Didn't the scientists know that this project was doomed before they started?


----------



## Cathbad

Parson said:


> Didn't the scientists know that this project was doomed before they started?


.Hope springs eternal.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Parson said:


> mid-1900's or before how on earth did radio SETI get started? Didn't the scientists know that this project was doomed before they started?


I think SF is the reason*.
It's an unwarranted belief in the the Karashev Scale, which likely has no basis in reality, it's purely speculation.
(Nothing to do with Aliens in DS9, or those scantily clad women that are famous for being famous).
A Karashev Type II Civilisation, "A civilization capable of harnessing the energy radiated by its own star", is supposed to be able to build a powerful enough transmitter or "modulate" a star with a simple signal. We could pick that up.
Except there is zero evidence that a civilisation can be as advanced as that, or would want to make a Niven ring (easier) or Dyson sphere, or that such structures are even possible (no known materials are strong enough), or want to build massive transmitters or modulate a star and why would they advertise their existence?

As I and others have said, SETI is a reasonable idea using spectroscopic analysis, SETI using radio reception (or worse transmitting a signal) may turn up interesting natural signals. There is no reason,  even if there are 10,000 technologically advanced civilisations in our galaxy, all wasting a vast amount of energy on beacons that we could receive any of it, even if their dishes were pointed at us. The power would be too low and distance too great. Also why would they expend such resources building 100s or 1000s of dishes and transmitters and waste all the power simply to advertise their existence?

[* It's also the reason for a lot stupid gadgets where the real plan isn't making money selling you the Internet connected coffee maker, but reselling your personal information and selling subscriptions]


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Parson said:


> Didn't the scientists know that this project was doomed before they started?


a) How many of the scientists or SETI organisers consulted or listened to Communications Engineers? Scientists are specialised.
b) How many SETI radio enthusiasts are scientists and how many are employees?
c) How many dishs are actually 100% dedicated to SETI or are really doing radio astronomy, with the the recorded signals merely being analysed by SETI enthusiasts off site? See SETI at Home.
d) All of the SETI Radio organisation stuff seems to be one small university group.
e) How many SETI radio scientists have a day job and are just "interested" and supportive, because "why not".

If I was doing Radio Astronomy as the day job I'd certainly keep a look out. For a start, all of the supposed alien signals definitely found have turned out to be extremely interesting natural phenomena.

*It seems the current SETI Radio project is based in Berkeley Space Science Lab, it's using only a copy of data received by Arecibo for other purposes and basically has almost no funding.*



> possible evidence of radio transmissions from extraterrestrial intelligence using observational data from the Arecibo radio telescope. The data are taken "piggyback" or "passively" while the telescope is used for other scientific programs. The data are digitized, stored, and sent to



SETI radio is mostly harmless, I don't think it's using up much Radio astronomy resources. The real SETI work is already spectroscopic observations by scientists trained to understand the signals captured.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

*Something science doesn't understand:*
Fast Radio Bursts
There are weird bursts of energy coming from deep space

However we didn't understand Pulsars (light and radio bursts) for a long time. We already can use them to navigate in the Solar system and if we had starships we can use them as a "Galactic Navigation System", even the degree of mapping we have to today would be good enough if we had "jump drive" type starships tomorrow.


----------



## Mirannan

A couple of points:

First of all, I disagree with our radio output not being detectable. The issue is that our output is in a number of sharply defined wavebands, and this means less competition _in those wavebands _from Sol. Also, there are peculiar things about it such as being pulsed, modulated and polarised.

In addition, Sol is not particularly powerful. I seem to have read somewhere (can't find the reference) that in certain wavebands Earth actually emits more power than Sol.


----------



## Vertigo

Mirannan said:


> A couple of points:
> 
> First of all, I disagree with our radio output not being detectable. The issue is that our output is in a number of sharply defined wavebands, and this means less competition _in those wavebands _from Sol. Also, there are peculiar things about it such as being pulsed, modulated and polarised.
> 
> In addition, Sol is not particularly powerful. I seem to have read somewhere (can't find the reference) that in certain wavebands Earth actually emits more power than Sol.


Interference from the sun is only one aspect, the inverse square law is by far the bigger influence on the range of our radio signals and there's just no getting away from that.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Mirannan said:


> I disagree with our radio output not being detectable.


Only up to a few light years at best, it's basic physics. It doesn't matter HOW good the dishes and receivers are on a 100 LY away planet, *it's impossible.*
It was my day job to do  these sorts of sums.



Mirannan said:


> I seem to have read somewhere (can't find the reference) that in certain wavebands Earth actually emits more power than Sol.


No. Look at the graphs.

Note that only higher frequencies are any use at all over any distance. The lower frequencies where most of the power used to be (AM Radio) are completely useless. TV transmissions are the only significant band for space, they are quite directional and now lower power and the "better" higher frequencies replaced by mobile. Mobile phone bases are a cell based system with very directional aerials,  about 10,000th of power of TV.

AM Radio is 0.06MHz to 26MHz, very little above 14MHz and hardly anything under 0.5MHz. Very many transmitters have closed, more than half. Completely swamped by Cosmic noise even at our nearest neighbour.
FM Radio is 64MHz to 108MHz depending on country, More directional aerials to save power. This might be detected at a few LY, but it's dubious due to directional nature. Longer distances swamped by cosmic noise.
DAB is about 175MHz to 220MHz, not much of it, more directional and lower power. Few countries have it.
Band I TV is gone (40MHz to 60MHz band)
Band III TV is gone (175 MHZ to 275 MHZ)
Other transmissions in 26MHz to 450MHz; such as CB, Aircraft, Marine, Amateur/Ham, FRS, mobile radio, security etc are all very low power less than 1/1000th of TV.
UHF TV used to be 470MHz up to 870MHz, Now only up to 600, 700 or 790MHz depending on country and lower power and more directional.

Satellite TV is very low power, about 10,000th of UHF TV and *very* directional. Only the uplinks can be received in space (3GHz, 11GHz and 20GHz bands approximately). The power is too low to be above cosmic noise even 4LY away as the destination satellites are only 22,500 miles away.

Radar is terrestrial and very directional. Admittedly it's a very high peak power (very narrow pulses), but very little signal reaches space. Again basic physics and cosmic noise, never mind solar noise means that even at 5LY (approx the nearest star) would be dubious.

There is nothing else. 
A hypothetical starship with a very large array of dishes between the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud could monitor a lot, but not aliens on another star. A probe at that distance would only receive signals specifically aimed using our big tracking radio telescopes


----------



## Mirannan

Incidentally, even Dyson himself never suggested that a Dyson sphere would be a solid object; that's been added on by various SF writers who don't mind postulating unobtainium to make it out of. But a dense swarm of smaller objects (kilometres, maybe?) could accomplish the same. Admittedly, the problem of controlling quadrillions of orbiting habitats, power stations and factories to stop them colliding would be horrific and probably require strong AI to accomplish it.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Mirannan said:


> even Dyson himself never suggested that a Dyson sphere *wouldn'*t be a solid object


Yes, I know. I suspect more a "thought" experiment than a serious suggestion?

AI isn't needed for "positioning", that's quite simple "rocket science". You need "engines" and "reaction mass".

Niven also realised the "ring" was more complicated than he had thought(and people wrote), so on book II he added some complexity.

The fact is there is no compelling reason to capture all of the energy from a star with such a feat of engineering.

Just as the most unlikely thing to fight an Interstellar war over is resource.  The motivation of the immotile in Pandora's star for fighting an interstellar war is an interesting idea. Hopefully such a creature is pure fantasy.


----------



## Mirannan

Ray - The problem isn't with positioning any individual object or small set of objects - it's with predicting the orbits of what would probably be something like a trillion to a quadrillion objects far enough in advance to be useful - bearing in mind that they would be big enough to have significant gravity of their own, and economising on reaction mass would also be necessary.

As for not needing all the energy of a star - well, one thing about space colonisation is that (to some extent, anyway) it removes the resource and space limits on population growth - but people need food and somewhere to live and both need energy.

Assume for a moment that population growth is stabilised at 1% per year. We are at 7 billion (or is it 8 by now?) already. 1% growth for 500 years with a starting population of 7E9 gives a population in 2516 of just over 1 trillion; I just did the maths. And if the growth rate is 2% (not unreasonable with lots of room to expand) the figure is 140 trillion.

Needless to say, we have a lot more than 500 years. I hope.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Mirannan said:


> space colonisation is that (to some extent, anyway) it removes the resource and space limits on population growth


It just changes them, and in this case adds a fantasy level of engineering, if you can make these objects, then positioning is the least of the problems.

The problem as people get better off is actually having positive population growth! Attitudes, not solar engineering is the issue.


----------



## BAYLOR

How event one could have happened at all given that time didn't exist at the time of the Big Bang.


----------



## Vertigo

BAYLOR said:


> How event one could have happened at all given that time didn't exist at the time of the Big Bang.


I've always thought that's where religious folk should be pointing the finger for evidence of a divine being rather than at stuff like intelligent design. It has to be the biggest single unexplained fact in our knowledge of the universe and is, frankly, unlikely to ever be explained. I'm not saying it makes me religious but it sure as heck turns my mind inside out and leaves me scratching my head.


----------



## BAYLOR

Vertigo said:


> I've always thought that's where religious folk should be pointing the finger for evidence of a divine being rather than at stuff like intelligent design. It has to be the biggest single unexplained fact in our knowledge of the universe and is, frankly, unlikely to ever be explained. I'm not saying it makes me religious but it sure as heck turns my mind inside out and leaves me scratching my head.



Our assumptions about when time began could be wrong.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Vertigo said:


> that's where religious folk should be pointing the finger for evidence of a divine being rather than at stuff like intelligent design.


Well, there are many views on ID, and it's a minority of religions and people in the religions. The Media paints a very American and narrow view of what religious people believe. The whole issue of "Creation" or "Origins" isn't even a central issue for many.


----------



## Mirannan

My view, for what it's worth: The entire universe could be said to have started with a random quantum fluctuation of the sort that happen (it's thought) at the Planck scale all the time. After all, considering the mass/energy of the contents of the universe and the (negative) gravitational potential energy of the universe, the two may balance leaving the total energy of the Universe as zero.

That neatly disposes of the "where did it all come from" argument. But there remain two, more fundamental (IMHO, natch) questions; where did the self-consistent mathematical formulation that constitutes the laws of the Universe come from - and how did that abstract object translate from the Platonic realm to actual existence? ("Who breathed fire into the equations?" - Hawking)

In any case, all reasonably modern concepts of God assume that She is outside time and space, or at any rate omnipresent both in time and space. If God perceives time, His/Her time may be orthogonal to ours.


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

Vertigo said:


> I've always thought that's where religious folk should be pointing the finger for evidence of a divine being rather than at stuff like intelligent design. It has to be the biggest single unexplained fact in our knowledge of the universe and is, frankly, unlikely to ever be explained. I'm not saying it makes me religious but it sure as heck turns my mind inside out and leaves me scratching my head.



That doesn't get as much traction as it could because Christian creationists (who, IMO, make up the bulk of ID proponents) want a literal interpretation of Genesis. Accepting the Big Bang and a 13+ billion-year-old universe is Just Not Acceptable (tm).

In any case, it isn't an improvement. The ID proponents are always arguing that life (and intelligence) are spectacularly unlikely spontaneous developments (when they're not arguing that they're _impossible_), but an argument for a god or gods to kick-start the universe is essentially positing that having an intelligence around to do the deed is more likely than having a natural occurrence do the deed. Which flies in the face of their other, more important (to them) argument.


----------



## Cathbad

Bizmuth said:


> Accepting the Big Bang and a 13+ billion-year-old universe is Just Not Acceptable (tm).



This is sad, because truth is, _there is nothing incompatible_ between what the Bible says, and the Theory of Evolution. 

The Bible does nor purport to explain in detail how God created the universe, nor the time it took him.  Yes, it days say "on the first day", etc., but in the same book, it says "a day unto God is as 10,000 years".  (Not meaning exactly 10k, but a "long time".)  Also. logic dictates that, before the earth is created, the length of  "day" could not be determined.  All the things created, however, are created in the same order as Evolution teaches.

In fact, if Darwin was not such a hard-nosed Christian-Hater, Evolutionary theory would probably have been accepted as a "possible theory" of the creation by the learned monks of the time.


----------



## Brian G Turner

Skirting close to religion, folks - would be good to veer back into science.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Cathbad said:


> The Bible does nor purport to explain in detail how God created the universe, nor the time it took him


Exactly, it's not a history book or a science textbook. Before Abraham comes out of Ur, there is nothing that can be dated and much that is obviously not literal, that and many later events can be approximately dated by external evidence. The "young Earth idea" is purely a theory based on the shaky idea that Genealogies can be used to estimate passage of time.
Very much in the bible (and other religious texts) isn't literal. The non-literal aspects are not always allegorical. There was a fashion for a long time to regard almost everything as allegorical.

Science and Religion are examining different things, and when they look for answers, it's different kinds of answers:
Like what happens when you mix this and this, vs which actions are moral or immoral, or even what is morality. There is an overlap of philosophy and religion or Theism, but not between Theism and Science.


----------



## Cathbad

Brian Turner said:


> Skirting close to religion, folks - would be good to veer back into science.



~_whew~_ Thanks, Brian, almost crashed there!


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Engaging Warp ...


----------



## J Riff

All heading for a real encounter with ancient ETS who will ideally dispose of a lot of the rubbish thinking. Like creatures with an IQ around a hundred who are able to postulate, nay insist, that they are aware of what an entity like 'God' might be up to.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> Like creatures with an IQ around a hundred


IQ isn't intelligence. 
It's a culturally and time biased measurement of numerical and textual analytical skills.
The concept of God is at a meta level beyond the thread of talking about things Science can't explain (today).


----------



## J Riff

No, but IQ ( not MY term) is used to separate and use people, by people who know what to do with them. Reality doesn't run on speculation, unfortunately, and there are lots of 'your term for low IQ here' people who have been used to do a lot of the dirty work, so maybe time for a realistic definition of 'intelligence' ?
Belief in an imaginary entity, using same as an excuse, is uh... 'not bright' "dim' 'stupid' ... etc. Or are we all equal? Duh, okaayyyyyyy what's on the mindcontrol box..? Oh boy, a special on 'God' and how he made us alla same even though we are all unique and different. Denial of dimness leads to a dim place. Go, intelligence!


----------



## Parson

J Riff said:


> No, but IQ ( not MY term) is used to separate and use people, by people who know what to do with them. Reality doesn't run on speculation, unfortunately, and there are lots of 'your term for low IQ here' people who have been used to do a lot of the dirty work, so maybe time for a realistic definition of 'intelligence' ?
> Belief in an imaginary entity, using same as an excuse, is uh... 'not bright' "dim' 'stupid' ... etc. Or are we all equal? Duh, okaayyyyyyy what's on the mindcontrol box..? Oh boy, a special on 'God' and how he made us alla same even though we are all unique and different. Denial of dimness leads to a dim place. Go, intelligence!



This post leaves me uneasy. No one who's thought about it all would postulate that we all have the same abilities; mental or otherwise. On the other hand a different sort of ability doesn't make that person somehow inferior to another. The truth is that we all need each other. I would make the comparison with my wife. I clearly rate higher on the ability to do book work in an approved manner, but about the things that really count she is much more often right than I, and together we are fairly formidable. I think that's how its planned to be.


----------



## Cathbad

Parson said:


> The truth is that we all need each other.



Hmm... very Druidic.


----------



## J Riff

O yeah, but you need to get closer to the power structure to see how this stuff actually works. It's not an intellectual issue any longer, where the rubber meets the road. I have to talk about this kind of thing, publically, and it is absolutely no fun at all, and neither is diplomatic speech either - after a certain point. Again, not my ideas, just what people have enforced over the ages - and the wordGame that it creates  - continuing on. Slavery abolished ? No.
Intellectually, I agree with all us sensible types.
 Heck Parson, I have to talk about God too, and I'm not there by choice believe me. People get crazy, whattayagonna do?


----------



## BAYLOR

Imagine a tiny mite crawling up a Giant Redwood tree. To the mite the tree goes on seemingly forever, it sees and senses a tiny fraction of what going on around it. When it comes to understanding  the universe around us, we have a similar problem to mite in that  we see only a very small  fraction of the universe.


----------



## BAYLOR

Bizmuth said:


> That doesn't get as much traction as it could because Christian creationists (who, IMO, make up the bulk of ID proponents) want a literal interpretation of Genesis. Accepting the Big Bang and a 13+ billion-year-old universe is Just Not Acceptable (tm).
> 
> In any case, it isn't an improvement. The ID proponents are always arguing that life (and intelligence) are spectacularly unlikely spontaneous developments (when they're not arguing that they're _impossible_), but an argument for a god or gods to kick-start the universe is essentially positing that having an intelligence around to do the deed is more likely than having a natural occurrence do the deed. Which flies in the face of their other, more important (to them) argument.



Bizmuth , for all of our scientific knowledge, there is very obviously  a vast amount that we don't know and will probably never know. As to the existence of an afterlife or a supreme being, science cannot answer that question one way the other .


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

BAYLOR said:


> Bizmuth , for all of our scientific knowledge, there is very obviously  a vast amount that we don't know and will probably never know. As to the existence of an afterlife or a supreme being, science cannot answer that question one way the other .



Well, see, that's the thing. Science doesn't try to. Science doesn't give a crap one way or the other. Science studies what is observable and reproducible. So far, science hasn't found anything that requires that particular hypothesis.

The problem isn't that science is anti-religion. The problem is that science is _indifferent_ to religion, until and unless the theists can come up with a falsifiable test. So far, the theists have failed to do so, but continue to insist that we believe anyway, Or Else.


----------



## BAYLOR

Bizmuth said:


> Well, see, that's the thing. Science doesn't try to. Science doesn't give a crap one way or the other. Science studies what is observable and reproducible. So far, science hasn't found anything that requires that particular hypothesis.
> 
> The problem isn't that science is anti-religion. The problem is that science is _indifferent_ to religion, until and unless the theists can come up with a falsifiable test. So far, the theists have failed to do so, but continue to insist that we believe anyway, Or Else.




Science deals in facts not truth.  In my case I do believe in a god and a hereafter. I can't give you any kind of of an explanation as to why I do , other then faith and a basic gut feeling that there is more to our existence then this one life and it's observable facts.  But I do accept evolution as a given  and the fact the earth 4.5 Billion Years old and the Sun 5 Billion and universe being far older then that . I can encompass both science and belief .


----------



## Stephen Palmer

If I was to proffer a collective noun for a group of facts, it would be a truth.


----------



## Cathbad

Stephen Palmer said:


> If I was to proffer a collective noun for a group of facts, it would be a truth.



Facts most often require interpretation.  They also might not be all the facts available. They may also be misstate.  So I personally don't feel comfortable equating facts with truth.  That's my illogical opinion.


----------



## Parson

J Riff said:


> O yeah, but you need to get closer to the power structure to see how this stuff actually works. It's not an intellectual issue any longer, where the rubber meets the road. I have to talk about this kind of thing, publically, and it is absolutely no fun at all, and neither is diplomatic speech either - after a certain point. Again, not my ideas, just what people have enforced over the ages - and the wordGame that it creates  - continuing on. Slavery abolished ? No.
> Intellectually, I agree with all us sensible types.
> Heck Parson, I have to talk about God too, and I'm not there by choice believe me. People get crazy, whattayagonna do?



I must be dense because I cannot understand what you are saying here. ---- As nearly as I can discern, you feel like you are a slave because you have to address issues that the power structure of society mandates you speak about including God, in spite of the fact that you have no desire to consider these things? ---- I must be missing something can you restate this for me?


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

Cathbad said:


> Facts most often require interpretation.  They also might not be all the facts available. They may also be misstate.  So I personally don't feel comfortable equating facts with truth.  That's my illogical opinion.



This direction of discussion tends to devolve into an argument about definitions. Different people use different definitions of "truth", either with or without a capital T, to bolster their own POV. Trouble is, if you're all using a different definition, you're just talking past each other.

There are "facts", but they tend to be basic. FACT: things fall down. Because, FACT: massive objects attract other objects. Everything after than, in science, is theory. Theories may be so well-established that they might as well be fact, but they're still theories, not facts. Truth: Relativity seems to explain observations pretty well. Not Truth: Relativity is _the_ truth. And no scientist worth a damn would make the latter statement. It's only those who rail against science who put those words in science's mouth (metaphorically speaking) so that they can knock down the straw person.

Scientists observe things, and say to themselves, "Why is that?", then try to come up with an explanation. The difference between science and non-science is that they then attempt to prove or disprove their theory. Any theory that doesn't survive the test either gets modified or chucked out entirely.

Baylor, I appreciate that you have your faith, and I'd never gainsay it. The difference between you and the types of fundamentalists that drive me buggy is that you clearly label it as _faith._ Faith is okay. It doesn't fall under the rubric of science because it doesn't operate under the rules of science.


----------



## J Riff

Noooo... I have to speak about stupidity... Nevermind.


----------



## galanx

BAYLOR said:


> Imagine a tiny mite crawling up a Giant Redwood tree. To the mite the tree goes on seemingly forever, it sees and senses a tiny fraction of what going on around it. When it comes to understanding  the universe around us, we have a similar problem to mite in that  we see only a very small  fraction of the universe.



Nonsense. We know the Supreme Mite created us in Its likeness, and the Tree was created to support us. 
Did It not create lichen for us to feed on, and crevices in the bark which are exactly the right size for us to take refuge in?


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Cathbad said:


> Facts most often require interpretation.  They also might not be all the facts available. They may also be misstate.  So I personally don't feel comfortable equating facts with truth.  That's my illogical opinion.



Luckily science has the habit of checking the real world…


----------



## Parson

galanx said:


> Nonsense. We know the Supreme Mite created us in Its likeness, and the Tree was created to support us.
> Did It not create lichen for us to feed on, and crevices in the bark which are exactly the right size for us to take refuge in?



Clever, very clever!


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Stephen Palmer said:


> If I was to proffer a collective noun for a group of facts, it would be a truth.



I just stumbled across this quote from the great independent scientist James Lovelock, which pretty much encapsulates my own thoughts:

"One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth."


----------



## Cathbad

Stephen Palmer said:


> "One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth."



Now, that's something I can agree with!


----------



## J Riff

Iterate, iterate.... wait, I see something... up ahead... in the fog... it's ...(del by Govt. agency) Oh, its an explainable natural phenomenon, after all.
That I can believe in.


----------



## galanx

Parson said:


> Clever, very clever!



Just a riff on Douglas Adams' Parable of the Puddle:


> “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'


----------



## Ray McCarthy

It seems we don't understand brown dwarfs
Sneaky brown dwarf gives us a bright flash and astroboffins are confused


> Astronomers have discovered a brown dwarf star emitting flashes of light brighter than the Sun – even though it's not supposed to be able to do that.


Sort of solar acne.
Fortunately our sun's spots flares are better behaved. It is known that you'd not like a star much smaller than ours, because with less mass, the stellar flares are worse, thus a planet in the "goldilocks" zone of  a red dwarf might get sterilised every million years or so.

Edit:
So perhaps it's not surprising the flares are severe, but the question is what is the underlying mechanism if a brown dwarf isn't having fusion? Jupiter is nearly big enough to be a brown dwarf, in the sense that the smallest found isn't a huge lot bigger.


----------



## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> It seems we don't understand brown dwarfs
> Sneaky brown dwarf gives us a bright flash and astroboffins are confused
> 
> Sort of solar acne.
> Fortunately our sun's spots flares are better behaved. It is known that you'd not like a star much smaller than ours, because with less mass, the stellar flares are worse, thus a planet in the "goldilocks" zone of  a red dwarf might get sterilised every million years or so.
> 
> Edit:
> So perhaps it's not surprising the flares are severe, but the question is what is the underlying mechanism if a brown dwarf isn't having fusion? Jupiter is nearly big enough to be a brown dwarf, in the sense that the smallest found isn't a huge lot bigger.



Jupiters been described as a failed star. If it had about twice its current mass, it would have become a star?


----------



## Ray McCarthy

BAYLOR said:


> If it had about twice its current mass, it would have become a star?


Maybe only a brown dwarf, possibly still a gas giant. They are described as "failed stars", Jupiter isn't a failed star, it's a gas giant. A common thing.


----------



## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> Maybe only a brown dwarf, possibly still a gas giant. They are described as "failed stars", Jupiter isn't a failed star, it's a gas giant. A common thing.



Im trying imagine what life her would be like if Jupiter had been a star instead of gas Giant.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Warmer.


----------



## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> Warmer.



To the point of being uninhabitable?


----------



## Ray McCarthy

BAYLOR said:


> o the point of being uninhabitable?


No idea. Sorry


----------



## J Riff

Emitting flashes brighter than the sun, this I gotta see..... aaah! my eyes!
I have no idea how that happens, let's think. It's trying to explode, and just shooting out parts of its core? How could that be especially bright. No idea. What a great time to be alive.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> this I gotta see..... aaah! my eyes!


Do NOT stare into laser with the remaining eye.


----------



## Vertigo

BAYLOR said:


> Im trying imagine what life her would be like if Jupiter had been a star instead of gas Giant.


This is only my suspicion, I certainly have no great knowledge here but...

If Jupiter was say double it's current mass then it might have made it to sun status but it would be a pretty small sun and we're four times farther from Jupiter as from the sun at our closest approach (our orbit 1AU Jupiter's orbit 5.2AU). Now I _believe _the heat received from the sun at Jupiter's orbit is tiny compared with at our orbit so, bearing in mind the distances involved and probable output of a Jupiter star, I don't think you would notice a much difference other than a particularly bright star in the sky.

I suspect the most noticeable effect would be gravitational. Jupiter's gravitation already has a significant impact on the organisation of the solar system; if it was double the mass I guess that effect would be double?


----------



## Mirannan

Vertigo said:


> This is only my suspicion, I certainly have no great knowledge here but...
> 
> If Jupiter was say double it's current mass then it might have made it to sun status but it would be a pretty small sun and we're four times farther from Jupiter as from the sun at our closest approach (our orbit 1AU Jupiter's orbit 5.2AU). Now I _believe _the heat received from the sun at Jupiter's orbit is tiny compared with at our orbit so, bearing in mind the distances involved and probable output of a Jupiter star, I don't think you would notice a much difference other than a particularly bright star in the sky.
> 
> I suspect the most noticeable effect would be gravitational. Jupiter's gravitation already has a significant impact on the organisation of the solar system; if it was double the mass I guess that effect would be double?



AFAIK anything up to maybe 10x Jupiter's mass is regarded as a planet; between 10 and approx. 75Mj is regarded as a brown dwarf. As already said, the main effect of a much bigger Jupiter would be gravitational; the heat from even a minimum-mass red dwarf in Jupiter orbit would be trivial. The light might not be, compared to moonlight for example.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Vertigo said:


> if it was double the mass I guess that effect would be double?



I would have thought at least squared.  Possibly cubed.


----------



## REBerg

Stephen Palmer said:


> I just stumbled across this quote from the great independent scientist James Lovelock, which pretty much encapsulates my own thoughts:
> 
> "One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth."


I had a protracted exchange on another site comparing religion and science.

My argument was that all experimental verification of a scientific theory eventually reaches the unknown and takes a leap of faith. Thus, science is really just another religion.

I was severely beaten about the head and shoulders for that theory.


----------



## Parson

REBerg said:


> I was severely beaten about the head and shoulders for that theory.



As they always say, "The truth hurts."


----------



## REBerg

Parson said:


> As they always say, "The truth hurts."


"Truth"? Uh-oh.


----------



## Stephen Palmer

REBerg said:


> I had a protracted exchange on another site comparing religion and science.
> 
> My argument was that all experimental verification of a scientific theory eventually reaches the unknown and takes a leap of faith. Thus, science is really just another religion.
> 
> I was severely beaten about the head and shoulders for that theory.



It depends what level of veracity you want. If you want to include the microscopic scale (ie quantum mechanics) then fair enough. But that to me, and to the overwhelming majority of scientists, seems rather pointless, if not meaningless, since we don't live on the microscopic scale. Newton's three laws of motion - the macroscopic scale, where we live - count as a truth in my book.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Stephen Palmer said:


> It depends what level of veracity you want. If you want to include the microscopic scale (ie quantum mechanics) then fair enough. But that to me, and to the overwhelming majority of scientists, seems rather pointless, if not meaningless, since we don't live on the microscopic scale. Newton's three laws of motion - the macroscopic scale, where we live - count as a truth in my book.



Good point.  

How many quarks _can_ dance on the head of a pin?


----------



## Stephen Palmer

JunkMonkey said:


> Good point.
> 
> How many quarks _can_ dance on the head of a pin?



iirc they're not allowed to exist in isolation. So... none!


----------



## JunkMonkey

ok then, 'sets of quarks' - I suppose they would have to do some sort of organised formal dance: Strip the Willow or a quadrille, or something.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Parson said:


> As they always say, "The truth hurts."


The Truth shall make you Fret.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

JunkMonkey said:


> some sort of organised formal dance


I had thought more like some sort of Morris Dance.


----------



## BAYLOR

JunkMonkey said:


> Good point.
> 
> How many quarks _can_ dance on the head of a pin?



42?

Im guessing.


----------



## J Riff

I dunno. But, these giant structures made by animals are probably only fully explainable by the aminals themselves. Who knew that beavers were visible from space?
Biggest Animal-Made Structures In The World - Odd Culture


----------



## Ray McCarthy

After the evils of the Brexit debate, that's a refreshing article


J Riff said:


> Who knew that beavers were visible from space?



Tim Peake?


----------



## BAYLOR

Dark Matter and dark energy their very nature and why they behave the way they do.


----------



## galanx

BAYLOR said:


> Im trying imagine what life here would be like if Jupiter had been a star instead of gas Giant.



Hmmm... since that's the conclusion of 2010, did Arthur C. chip in on this?


----------



## galanx

J Riff said:


> I dunno. But, these giant structures made by animals are probably only fully explainable by the aminals themselves. Who knew that beavers were visible from space?
> Biggest Animal-Made Structures In The World - Odd Culture



As a former member of the British Columbia Railway's elite Anti-Beaver Squadron, I say, "Take off and nuke it from space. It's the only way to be sure."

These vicious pestilential over-grown water rats cannot be trusted. Today, northern Alberta, tomorrow the world!

Okay, maybe they're not that bad, but they can be total pains in the butt. 

When you're building a road or railroad, when you come to a stream that's small enough, instead of building a bridge, you just fill it with a crossing of dirt and gravel and put a culvert in the bottom to carry the water through.

Then a beaver comes along and thinks "How nice- someone built a dam for me, but the silly fool left a hole in the bottom." So Mr. and Mrs. Beaver get to work plugging the hole and soon have a lovely pond for all the little Beavers. But of course the water pressure against the fill causes erosion, buckling, and sometimes collapse.

Since the beavers have plugged the upstream end, that means someone has to crawl up the culvert, pull away all the mud, sticks, and other debris,  hook chains onto the solid wood of the plug,  andthen crawl out backwards (all in varying degrees of  darkness). Then the crew gives  the old heave-ho on the chains. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

If it doesn't work, or only partially, this means you have to crawl back up the pipe and do it again, now often with a flow of freezing (this is up near the Yukon border) muddy, filthy, beaver-feces-ridden[1]   water in your face, all the while hoping the plug doesn't suddenly give way, giving you the full flood.

[1]"Beaver fever", the popular name for "Giardia: Symptoms vary from none to severe diarrhea with poor absorption of nutrients.[3] It can result in weakness, loss of appetite, stomach cramps, vomiting, bloating, excessive gas, and burping.

"Aw, they're so cute" Ha!

Though I do think an Alternate History with a race of intelligent beavers would be cool.


----------



## galanx

galanx said:


> Hmmm... since that's the conclusion of 2010, did Arthur C. chip in on this?



Oooops, always read downthread before posting.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

galanx said:


> "How nice- someone built a dam for me, but the silly fool left a hole in the bottom." So Mr. and Mrs. Beaver get to work plugging the hole and soon have a lovely pond for all the little Beavers.


Obviously you ought to build bridges, various places in Europe are re-introducing beavers because they are so good for ecosystem. Also wolves as the existence of them dramatically reduces deer destroying the trees. It only makes a small difference to deer population which usually has to be reduced periodically anyway.



galanx said:


> Alternate History with a race of intelligent beavers would be cool.


The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe?


----------



## J Riff

On an animal note - I joined the EOL yesterday. It's going to be quite the database... apparently there are still more undiscovered than discovered species... most life is invisible to our eyes, and the bulk of it below where there's light in the ocean.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Get a bucket of pond water and there is a good chance of discovering "new" species of Algae. You can then name them.


----------



## BAYLOR

But the whole Dark matter and Dark energy thing is rather perplexing.


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> But the whole Dark matter and Dark energy thing is rather perplexing.



Dark Energy is the eldest.  He was born a millennia before his sibling, Dark Matter.

The two quarrel over even the most trivial of matters.  It is quite the challenge to remain in the same quadrant with the two!


----------



## Ray Pullar

Re: naming new algae.  Science is either physics or rock-pooling.


----------



## Vertigo

BAYLOR said:


> But the whole Dark matter and Dark energy thing is rather perplexing.


I meant to reply to your earlier post on Dark Matter and Energy but clearly got distracted.

What I was going to say is that I'm staggered it's taken this long for it to appear in this thread. I actually had to do a search of the thread as I was sure it must have already been discussed but no! Wow. Two of the biggest head scratching issues in modern astrophysics and it's only just come up. Oh well.

Anyway. I agree these are certainly two pretty darn big subjects that science cannot explain. And I can't help thinking that when/if we do find an answer it might just turn our understanding of the universe on its head.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Vertigo said:


> I'm staggered it's taken this long for it to appear in this thread.


We discussed them on some other thread.
The existence of either is a little tenuous and more to do with trying to make  observations (that we don't quite understand) fit theories (that don't explain everything, don't connect with each other and are not fully understood).


Vertigo said:


> And I can't help thinking that when/if we do find an answer it might just turn our understanding of the universe on its head.


Yes.


----------



## J Riff

There has to be space-dust, at least a few molecules, everywhere. Pockets of radiation, warmer bits, and mystery stuff, in space. Looking through it, to the next galaxy or two, why it must be dark matter, being dark and mysterious.
 Grab some moss and soak it, then get out the microscope and look for Tardigrades/Water Bears - the toughest critters in the world. They could survive space flight in their tiny tiny ship... or they could survive an atomic blast what would deeestroy us all on this planet.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> There has to be space-dust, at least a few molecules, everywhere.


There is.
Part of red-shift is now thought to be due to it. 
However it's not enough to account for discrepancies:
1)The Universe is expanding at wrong speed.
2)The stars rotating around the galaxy should behave like planets around the sun, Kepler's equations of motion. They don't, the Milky way behaves more like a record player disc (not exactly). Rotation near the edge should take very much longer and near the galactic core a lot shorter.
Dark Energy and Dark Matter allow these two observations to fit known models and and theories


----------



## Parson

Ray McCarthy said:


> the Milky way behaves more like a record player disc (not exactly).


Ray, could you explain this a little more? Remember you are talking to a social science major, not someone with much in the way of advanced maths etc. 

I believe I understand what you mean when you talk about the difference in the way a record player spins and the orbits of the planets. It's the "not exactly" part that befuddles me.


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

If you draw radial lines straight out from the center of the galaxy, then let it spin, the lines will fall behind at the outer edges, because the outer edges revolve slower. That's the "solar system" model, and it's what we expect based on normal orbital mechanics. In the "platter" model, the line will continue to be straight through subsequent rotations. This would require the outer edges to actually be travelling faster than the inner stuff, since they have a longer way around.
The reality is somewhere between those. The speed of objects revolving around the center of the galaxy doesn't drop off with distance from the center as fast as we expect it to, if we use normal orbital mechanics calculations. The calculations work out, though, if we assume that the galaxy is sitting in a cloud of matter-- one which we can't see and which doesn't interact with normal matter other than through gravity.


----------



## Parson

@Bizmuth -- Well done, that I do understand. (I mean I understand the concept!) I doubt that anyone can really understand it. I now have a clue as to why dark matter is so needed, and yet seems impossible to discover.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Parson said:


> way a record player spins and the orbits of the planets. It's the "not exactly" part that befuddles me.


Kepler's laws of planetary motion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Basically the 3rd law
The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
This is due to sum of masses of the two objects (applies to stars) and the inverse square law of gravity, Newton's second law
Newton's laws of motion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A record player disc, or any disc, all the parts rotate at same angular speed. So a dot on label is 78 rpm and a dot on outer edge is also 78 rpm (Think of it as an orbit 78 times a minute)

Sun's Galactic rotation period 240 Million years
*Spiral pattern rotation period* 220–360 Million years
*Bar pattern rotation period* 100–120 Million years

There is not enough difference! Only a 2:1 ratio on a structure over 150 million light years across. It's behaving more solidly that it should.
Milky Way - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


> Stars and gases at a wide range of distances from the Galactic Center orbit at approximately 220 kilometers per second. The constant rotation speed contradicts the laws of Keplerian dynamics and suggests that much of the mass of the Milky Way does not emit or absorb electromagnetic radiation. This mass has been termed "dark matter".[34]


We can see that other disc or spiral galaxies have this same strange rotational property,

Cf. variation in Solar system
Mercury: 87.97 days (0.2 years)
Venus : 224.70 days (0.6 years)
Earth: 365.26 days(1 year)
Mars: 686.98 days(1.9 years)
Jupiter: 4,332.82 days (11.9 years)
Saturn: 10,755.70 days (29.5 years)
Uranus: 30,687.15 days (84 years)
Neptune: 60,190.03 days (164.8 years)

Note that a planet further from the centre MUST have a much longer orbital period:
Orbital period - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Due to masses and gravity. Thus Mars can ONLY be 1.9 yr and Jupiter ONLY 11.9 yrs due to Sun's mass + planet's mass and the distance

In celestial mechanics, when both orbiting bodies' masses have to be taken into account, the *orbital period* _T_ can be calculated as follows:[3]

T = 2 π a 3 G ( M 1 + M 2 ) {\displaystyle T=2\pi {\sqrt {\frac {a^{3}}{G\left(M_{1}+M_{2}\right)}}}} 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			




where:


_a_ is the sum of the semi-major axes of the ellipses in which the centers of the bodies move, or equivalently, the semi-major axis of the ellipse in which one body moves, in the frame of reference with the other body at the origin (which is equal to their constant separation for circular orbits),
_M_1 + _M_2 is the sum of the masses of the two bodies,
_G_ is the gravitational constant.
Note that the orbital period is independent of size: for a scale model it would be the same, when densities are the same (see also Orbit#Scaling in gravity).[_citation needed_]

In a parabolic or hyperbolic trajectory, the motion is not periodic, and the duration of the full trajectory is infinite

The explanation for the "wrong" expansion rate of the Universe is Dark Energy.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Also related to "Lets Talk About Things Science Cannot Explain":
Why bad ideas refuse to die
(The Flat Earth is mentioned, see myth of the Flat Earth)


----------



## mosaix

Ray McCarthy said:


> Also related to "Lets Talk About Things Science Cannot Explain":
> Why bad ideas refuse to die
> (The Flat Earth is mentioned, see myth of the Flat Earth)


That's an excellent article, Ray. Thanks for the link.


----------



## Parson

Ray McCarthy said:


> Kepler's laws of planetary motion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> Basically the 3rd law
> The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
> This is due to sum of masses of the two objects (applies to stars) and the inverse square law of gravity, Newton's second law
> Newton's laws of motion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> 
> A record player disc, or any disc, all the parts rotate at same angular speed. So a dot on label is 78 rpm and a dot on outer edge is also 78 rpm (Think of it as an orbit 78 times a minute)
> 
> Sun's Galactic rotation period 240 Million years
> *Spiral pattern rotation period* 220–360 Million years
> *Bar pattern rotation period* 100–120 Million years
> 
> There is not enough difference! Only a 2:1 ratio on a structure over 150 million light years across. It's behaving more solidly that it should.
> Milky Way - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> 
> We can see that other disc or spiral galaxies have this same strange rotational property,
> 
> Cf. variation in Solar system
> Mercury: 87.97 days (0.2 years)
> Venus : 224.70 days (0.6 years)
> Earth: 365.26 days(1 year)
> Mars: 686.98 days(1.9 years)
> Jupiter: 4,332.82 days (11.9 years)
> Saturn: 10,755.70 days (29.5 years)
> Uranus: 30,687.15 days (84 years)
> Neptune: 60,190.03 days (164.8 years)
> 
> Note that a planet further from the centre MUST have a much longer orbital period:
> Orbital period - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> Due to masses and gravity. Thus Mars can ONLY be 1.9 yr and Jupiter ONLY 11.9 yrs due to Sun's mass + planet's mass and the distance
> 
> In celestial mechanics, when both orbiting bodies' masses have to be taken into account, the *orbital period* _T_ can be calculated as follows:[3]
> 
> T = 2 π a 3 G ( M 1 + M 2 ) {\displaystyle T=2\pi {\sqrt {\frac {a^{3}}{G\left(M_{1}+M_{2}\right)}}}}
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> where:
> 
> 
> _a_ is the sum of the semi-major axes of the ellipses in which the centers of the bodies move, or equivalently, the semi-major axis of the ellipse in which one body moves, in the frame of reference with the other body at the origin (which is equal to their constant separation for circular orbits),
> _M_1 + _M_2 is the sum of the masses of the two bodies,
> _G_ is the gravitational constant.
> Note that the orbital period is independent of size: for a scale model it would be the same, when densities are the same (see also Orbit#Scaling in gravity).[_citation needed_]
> 
> In a parabolic or hyperbolic trajectory, the motion is not periodic, and the duration of the full trajectory is infinite
> 
> The explanation for the "wrong" expansion rate of the Universe is Dark Energy.



Wow! There's my advanced math answer. Thanks for the hard work Ray!


----------



## J Riff

Mercy, thank you Ray. A record disc is one solid object. The Milky Way should not behave like this, since it is billions of bits of separate matter..? (just trying to laymanize it all amap) - but it more-or-less does. Do we have sub-orbits, where things are orbiting, say, this part of the western spiral arm, or its densest regions? I realize there is no escape from the magnetic/gravity core of the galaxy, but... (sorry no coffee yet, brain hurts, must go read many large tomes full of numbers and diagrams)


----------



## Ray McCarthy

J Riff said:


> The Milky Way should not behave like this, since it is billions of bits of separate matter..?


It should be more like a giant version of the Solar system.

There are "wibbly bits"


----------



## Brian G Turner

Parson said:


> There's my advanced math answer.



In short, the stars nearest the centre of a galaxy should be moving much faster than those on the outside.

But they don't - they all move at pretty much the same pace.

And no one knows why, because this should be basic physics. Which means we don't understand some fundamental property of the universe - we just don't know which.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Brian Turner said:


> should be moving much faster than those


rotating around the core faster, "moving" is bit vague.

Since the rotational speed is similar for outer ones, the actual speed along their path is incredibly higher than it ought to be on the outer parts.

There is something we don't understand. Adding "dark matter", stuff that's invisible but has mass, makes the equations work. That's why on the other thread I said Dark Matter and Dark Energy are fudges
Dark Fudge


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

Mmmmmm, fudge.....


----------



## Cathbad

Science can't explain fudge?


----------



## Ray McCarthy

More hard questions (old so some HAVE been answered)
xkcd: Solar System Questions
Hover mouse.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Bizmuth said:


> Mmmmmm, fudge...





Cathbad said:


> Science can't explain fudge?


perhaps fudge has more meanings this side of the pond?
I can think of three common ones here.


----------



## J Riff

So it isss... wibbly. (a word first used on Dr. Who?) A bit. Like stars poured into a glass of something, nail polish remover or treacle. It's all swirly, and science just doesn't get it yet? Imagine the lifeforms on a Fudge planet. No teeth left to repel invaders.


----------



## J Riff

I watched_ Les Brown - The Physics of Crystals_, and he puts a bunch of basics in a nice clear way.... everything is magnetism/light.


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> Science can't explain fudge?



No,  but experts in the mysterious field of confectionaries can.


----------



## Brian G Turner

Regarding "dark matter" - there was a telling paragraph in this piece at New Scientist:

Doomed Japanese satellite glimpsed galactic wind before it died

"We have long known that superheated plasma fills the spaces between galaxies in a cluster. This swirling material outweighs stars and other normal matter – that is, not dark matter made from exotic, unknown particles – by a factor of about five, making it a key part of the universe. But it is difficult to detect except in the X-ray wavelengths Hitomi was sensitive to, where it gives off a faint glow."

In other words, it may simply be the case that we have underestimated the amount of matter in the universe, simply because much of it is not easily observable. I also wonder how much of this "missing mass" will be contained in cold but massive dust clouds that, for all intents and purposes, are effectively invisible.


----------



## J Riff

Time for a new unified field theory? Dust to dust... plasma to plasma.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Big Bang or a Quantum Bounce?
Discredited 1922 theory may be resurrected.
Big bounce theory of universe makes a comeback


----------



## Parson

Hm! just goes to prove that we still have a lot to learn.


----------



## BAYLOR

Ray McCarthy said:


> Big Bang or a Quantum Bounce?
> Discredited 1922 theory may be resurrected.
> Big bounce theory of universe makes a comeback




I do wish science  would make up its mind.


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Don't confuse me with facts, my faith is made up.


----------



## J Riff

Hey, I like the '20 triangles' theory .. actually 20 pyramids, giant crystalline shapes... that make up the Earth like a perfect jigsaw puzzle. They each have a flat side near the surface... and that mite be the flat bits that people are measuring and assuming make up the flat, paper-thin Earth.
And, what about the piezo-electricity that would be generated by monster crystals being compressed inside the orb all these millenia.. We could blame that for creating life here, not lightning hitting water and jolting amino acids into existence.


----------



## BAYLOR

Brian Turner said:


> Regarding "dark matter" - there was a telling paragraph in this piece at New Scientist:
> 
> Doomed Japanese satellite glimpsed galactic wind before it died
> 
> "We have long known that superheated plasma fills the spaces between galaxies in a cluster. This swirling material outweighs stars and other normal matter – that is, not dark matter made from exotic, unknown particles – by a factor of about five, making it a key part of the universe. But it is difficult to detect except in the X-ray wavelengths Hitomi was sensitive to, where it gives off a faint glow."
> 
> In other words, it may simply be the case that we have underestimated the amount of matter in the universe, simply because much of it is not easily observable. I also wonder how much of this "missing mass" will be contained in cold but massive dust clouds that, for all intents and purposes, are effectively invisible.



Dark matter is pulling the universe together and Dark energy is pushing it apart. It make me wonder more then ever what the nature of the universe is? With all the moving and contracting and pushing pulling . Perhaps our universe is a small part of an amoeba?


----------



## Ray McCarthy

Time is something Science can't explain.

This article is a bit simplistic and amusing.
The quantum origin of time
In some respects misleading, but the BBC doesn't really do science as well as it did 30 years ago.


> "Post-selection is like a parlour trick that makes it seem like there is backwards causation where there actually is none," says Todd Brun of the University of Southern California. "It's like the guy who shoots at the side of a barn and then goes and draws a target around the bullet hole."


Yes!


----------



## J Riff

Isn't it something how the best science documentaries are decades old?
I can't stand history documentaries, or biographies... but the basic stuff, nature, science-based, geology, biology and wot-not... all the basics are there, and new intel plugs in but doesn't change much.
 The world's largest 'lake',  under the Kalahari for ex: (29 mi. NW of Grootfontein) - who knew? That's one newish documentary that is worth a look.


----------



## BAYLOR

J Riff said:


> Isn't it something how the best science documentaries are decades old?
> I can't stand history documentaries, or biographies... but the basic stuff, nature, science-based, geology, biology and wot-not... all the basics are there, and new intel plugs in but doesn't change much.
> The world's largest 'lake',  under the Kalahari for ex: (29 mi. NW of Grootfontein) - who knew? That's one newish documentary that is worth a look.



A lake under the Kalahari Desert? Interesting.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Ray McCarthy said:


> In some respects misleading, but the BBC doesn't really do science as well as it did 30 years ago.



It doesn't does it?  I tried to watch an episode of Horizon on iPlayer a couple of months ago and quit in disgust after 10 minutes.  It was moronic.


----------



## Cathbad

JunkMonkey said:


> It doesn't does it?  I tried to watch an episode of Horizon on iPlayer a couple of months ago and quit in disgust after 10 minutes.  It was moronic.



They have to "dumb down" things nowadays.  That's apparently more cost effective than improving education.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Oh!  Not quite on topic but this is the funniest thing I have seen for ages:  Stick with it, starts slow but builds. And don't have anything in your mouth at the 4 minute mark:


----------



## Raven2037

You're right, cathbad. It's a shame that it is dumbed down.


----------



## J Riff

Yes, now it's like they are explaining the things that science can't talk about... * ?
Still, 20 amazing uses for WD40 is better than nothing..


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> They have to "dumb down" things nowadays.  That's apparently more cost effective than improving education.



That's not the way to improve education .


----------



## mosaix

JunkMonkey said:


> It doesn't does it?  I tried to watch an episode of Horizon on iPlayer a couple of months ago and quit in disgust after 10 minutes.  It was moronic.



The most irritating thing about Horizon are the two standard time wasting scenes. First, the 'scientist driving to work' scene. Usually takes about five minutes, or longer if said scientist drives a motor bike when an extra half minute can be wasted putting on a crash helmet. If said scientist drives a motor bike and is also a woman then additional time can be wasted with her driving around aimlessly as well as driving to work. 

The second time waster is the scientist 'just standing looking either into the mid-distance or at the horizon' for no apparent reason.


----------



## JunkMonkey

And then there's the metronomicly regular restating of the 'mystery' confronting the scientists, followed by an open-ended question, followed by a restating of the problem - carefully constructed to fall either side of commercial breaks on US television...


----------



## Parson

Ah! Now there we have a true scientific unexplainable. "How can science be done in six eight minute segments with a rock solid conclusion expressed in language and symbols that a ten year old understands?"


----------



## BigBadBob141

Horizon can be quite good, but over the years I think it has been dumbed down a lot.
Also I find a lot of the flashy over clever way it is shot some times a bit annoying.


----------



## mosaix

BigBadBob141 said:


> Also I find a lot of the flashy over clever way it is shot some times a bit annoying.



Only a *bit* annoying, Bob?


----------



## Vertigo

BigBadBob141 said:


> Horizon can be quite good, but over the years I think it has been dumbed down a lot.
> Also I find a lot of the flashy over clever way it is shot some times a bit annoying.


To be fair a lot of the subjects they tackle are very theoretical and don't necessarily lend themselves very well to the (modern) documentary format. But I agree it is very annoying. I think the problem is the producers probably think it's too old fashioned to rely on too many nice simple explanatory diagrams and such like rather than flashy eye catching visuals.

Also, in fairness, they do still come up with some good 'uns. And I'm afraid I struggle to find any alternatives that reliably produce better.


----------



## Stephen Palmer

mosaix said:


> The second time waster is the scientist 'just standing looking either into the mid-distance or at the horizon' for no apparent reason.



aka Coxing.


----------



## JunkMonkey

...as in 'coxing it up'?

jump to 3.25 seconds:
All Over the Place, USA: Episode 6


----------



## Parson

@JunkMonkey it seems your link only works in the UK, or so I'm told by my computer.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Nuts.  Sorry about that I have tried to find it elsewhere but can't.  Basically it's from a BBC kids programme called "All Over The Place" where both presenters do a faultless imitation of Brian Cox talking in part about men walking on the surface of "that White discy thing we call - 'the moon'... but don't look at that...  Look at _me_...  amazing!"


----------



## Parson

JunkMonkey said:


> Nuts.  Sorry about that I have tried to find it elsewhere but can't.  Basically it's from a BBC kids programme called "All Over The Place" where both presenters do a faultless imitation of Brian Cox talking in part about men walking on the surface of "that White discy thing we call - 'the moon'... but don't look at that...  Look at _me_...  amazing!"



No problems. Thanks for the description.


----------



## JunkMonkey

re _Horizon_.  I just came across a reference to it in the appendix in Dawkins' _The Greatest Show on Earth._  He describes _Horizon_ as 'the BBC's (comparatively) up-market science documentary series'.  I love the '(comparatively)' - and he was writing ten years ago - there's been a lot of dumbing down has flowed under the bridge  since then.


----------



## Ray Pullar

Richard Dawkins had issues with Horizon reporting on supposed evolutionary controversies in 1982 (see The extended phenotype - Gould's punctuated equilibria theory).  He disliked their journalistic eagerness to exaggerate disputes between biologists.


----------



## BigBadBob141

REF: Mosaix.
LOL!!!


----------



## BAYLOR

JunkMonkey said:


> re _Horizon_.  I just came across a reference to it in the appendix in Dawkins' _The Greatest Show on Earth._  He describes _Horizon_ as 'the BBC's (comparatively) up-market science documentary series'.  I love the '(comparatively)' - and he was writing ten years ago - there's been a lot of dumbing down has flowed under the bridge  since then.



*The God Delusion* made him a household name.


----------



## JunkMonkey

He was pretty famous in our house for for having married Romana from _Doctor Who._


----------



## Ray Pullar

Spouse of a minor tv actress once married to Dr. Who is not how Mr. D wants to be remembered. He would even prefer the evil atheist monicker like his hero Huxley.


----------



## BAYLOR

JunkMonkey said:


> He was pretty famous in our house for for having married Romana from _Doctor Who._



He did have a cameo on Dr Who.


----------



## Stephen Palmer

He was a good friend of Douglas Adams too!


----------



## JunkMonkey

So we all like Richard Dawkins then .  He writes well too.


----------



## BAYLOR

Stephen Palmer said:


> He was a good friend of Douglas Adams too!



I liked Douglas Adams alot. It's hard to believe that he and Terry Pratchett are both gone.

It's just not fair , at all.


----------



## Cathbad

Adams was wild!  Definitely an extrovert.  Chatted with him at a Writer's Forum in Gainesville, Florida several years ago.  He was the liveliest of the bunch!  Piers Anthony was the most reserved panelist.


----------



## J Riff

Science cannot talk about hitchhiking round the galaxy. Everyone would do it and mess up the spaceways, which must be kept clear because..because of things science can't talk about.


----------



## BAYLOR

J Riff said:


> Science cannot talk about hitchhiking round the galaxy. Everyone would do it and mess up the spaceways, which must be kept clear because..because of things science can't talk about.




Then there's the whole Interstellar bypass issue.


----------



## BAYLOR

JunkMonkey said:


> So we all like Richard Dawkins then .  He writes well too.



His books are interesting.


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> Then there's the whole Interstellar bypass issue.



The Bypass construction continues to move slowly, and the cost overruns are bankrupting some of the smaller planets!


----------



## Stephen Palmer

JunkMonkey said:


> So we all like Richard Dawkins then .  He writes well too.



His biology/evolution books are brilliant, but he's become a media caricature of himself regarding atheism (something I strongly support), which is rather a shame.


----------



## Parson

Richard Dawkins' radical atheism makes it hard for me to hear his insights on biology and evolution.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Why?  Because if he's right about evolution he may just be right about god/s too?


----------



## BAYLOR

Stephen Palmer said:


> His biology/evolution books are brilliant, but he's become a media caricature of himself regarding atheism (something I strongly support), which is rather a shame.



In my case, I accept evolution but I also believe in  God.  There is room for both.




JunkMonkey said:


> Why?  Because if he's right about evolution he may just be right about god/s too?



It's a big universe and is lots that we still don't know.


----------



## BAYLOR

Parson said:


> Richard Dawkins' radical atheism makes it hard for me to hear his insights on biology and evolution.



He's an expert on biology and evolution . But I find his insights on the topic of religion to be lacking.


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> In my case, I accept evolution but I also believe in God. There is room for both.



Having studied both, I agree.  It's too bad Darwin was so personally anti-Christian.


----------



## JunkMonkey

BAYLOR said:


> In my case, I accept evolution but I also believe in  God.  There is room for both.



Yep. But there's only evidence for one.


----------



## Cathbad

JunkMonkey said:


> Yep. But there's only evidence for one.



Untrue.  There is "evidence" for both.  It's just that many on both sides discount the evidence of the other.


----------



## Old_Man_Steve2016

The Christian Post had an interesting article on Dawkins recently. 
Dear News Media, These Richard Dawkins Stories Aren’t Stories

Well, interesting for them. But to atheists, it's nothing surprising. Why would an atheist pray? An atheist doesn't believe in god.


----------



## JunkMonkey

So where is it, Cathbad?  And shoving evidence in quote marks is not acceptable.   I'm talking about real evidence. Opinions and beliefs aren't evidence, nor are the opinions and beliefs of people long dead.  Heresay is not evidence. Where is the quantifiable and testable and falsifiable evidence for the existence of god?

There is no evidence for the existence of *any *supernatural beings. (For one thing if there were they would no longer be 'supernatural').


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Science is not a belief system - it is a method of grasping the real world.
Religion is a belief system.
One assumes the independence from human imagination of the real world, the other doesn't.


----------



## Brian G Turner

JunkMonkey said:


> So where is it, Cathbad? And shoving evidence in quote marks is not acceptable.



Er, we're not discussing belief on chrons, and definitely not challenging any other member's, thanks. Everyone here has their own personal belief system, and that's all we need to know.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Han blasts the comlink and it explodes.

*                                     HAN*
                         Boring conversation anyway.​


----------



## Tracy

Just my two cents on Dawkins. He's annoying. I've got a feeling that ever since he came along the meaning of "atheist" has changed from "someone who doesn't believe in God" to "someone who believes God doesn't exist". While I am the furthest possible thing from a believer and, unlike Dawkins, I won't even state that I'll change my mind if evidence of God's existence surfaces (I'm simply convinced that it won't, because the entire premise of "God" as is the popular definition is a lot like the multiverse - completely untestable) I have no problem with people believing in God, I don't give a heck, really, unless they try to preach unto me. Dawkins' behaviour seems very similar to preaching to me and, judging by my own experience, this has the exact opposite effect of convincing religious people that there is no God, i.e. those who believe in God get pissed off and believe harder and those who don't nod their heads and scream "Yeah!". Either way, the only way I would attend a discussion on the issue would be if it were done online and the voices of the debatees were delivered in a mechanized robot voice that wouldn't trigger either side's amygdalas, because people just seem to care too much about this for some reason.


----------



## BAYLOR

JunkMonkey said:


> So where is it, Cathbad?  And shoving evidence in quote marks is not acceptable.   I'm talking about real evidence. Opinions and beliefs aren't evidence, nor are the opinions and beliefs of people long dead.  Heresay is not evidence. Where is the quantifiable and testable and falsifiable evidence for the existence of god?
> 
> There is no evidence for the existence of *any *supernatural beings. (For one thing if there were they would no longer be 'supernatural').



Unfortunately , our science and understanding the of universe around us is rather limited. There is so much we don't know and we may not live long enough as species to know.

I remember a certain fantasy story , I cannot remember the title , but suspect it was by Lord Dunsany. In this story a man  in searches of gods more powerful then his.His goal is to find the most powerful of all Gods .  He travels to different places and each local ,he  keeps finding even more powerful deities and just when you think he going to find the most powerful of all, He ends up  back to where he began with the first set of Gods that he started out with.


----------



## BAYLOR

JunkMonkey said:


> Han blasts the comlink and it explodes.
> 
> *                                     HAN*
> Boring conversation anyway.​




But it fails to answer two important questions.

1. How can you have a reactor leak in the Detention center ?  

2. Was Luke Skywalker really the brains here ? 


And while we're on the subject , What is a Nerf herder and are they all in fact scruffy looking ?  And did Lea really have a preference of being kissed by a Wookie rather then Han Solo?


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> But it fails to answer two important questions.



1.  It was maintained by unpaid inmates, duh.   

2.  It was his sister, giver of his first kiss.

The other questions you raise are absurd.


----------



## BAYLOR

Thing that science has a hard time explaining ? Human greed and stupidity.


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> Thing that science has a hard time explaining ? Human greed and stupidity.



AMEN!!


----------



## Mirannan

BAYLOR said:


> Thing that science has a hard time explaining ? Human greed and stupidity.


 I disagree, actually - at least in the case of greed. Wanting to gather resources is an obvious evolutionary adaptation to hard times - which were all tthe time, for 99.9% of human history and we haven't had time to adapt.

Also, what looks like stupidity isn't, much of the time. Take the recent financial problems, caused by greedy and irresponsible bankers and the like. Simple: If there is a huge reward for success and no significant penalty for failure, then it's perfectly rational to take grossly irresponsible risks. And that is precisely the situation that the City traders were (and still are!) in. Similar remarks apply to creating pollution you won't be personally affected by.

The stupid ones are the rest of us, for letting them get away with it. Personally, I think the top two or three levels of the management of every City bank ought to have been hanged in 2008-9.


----------



## Cathbad

Oh, I agree... we are al personally responsible for letting this bull go on.


----------



## Andrew Lambert

If it exists in my head, then it must be true.


----------



## Parson

JunkMonkey said:


> Why?  Because if he's right about evolution he may just be right about god/s too?


Was this aimed at me? I'm an evolutionary deist. This means that God worked through evolution to bring the earth to exactly this point at this time. So Dawkins being right about the evolutionary process has no bearing on my theology.


----------



## Stephen Palmer

BAYLOR said:


> Thing that science has a hard time explaining ? Human greed and stupidity.



We've only had 120 years of grasping the basics of the human condition, since Freud's game-changing work on the unconscious. Before then, no human being had any idea that 99% of their self was beneath their conscious perception.

A scientific description of the human condition is absolutely essential before any major changes in how humanity culturally evolves, and we're only 30 year since we started to understand consciousness. There's still a very very long away to go… But we are on the right road, I think. At last.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Parson said:


> Was this aimed at me? I'm an evolutionary deist. This means that God worked through evolution to bring the earth to exactly this point at this time. So Dawkins being right about the evolutionary process has no bearing on my theology.




I really am going to have to walk away from this... but - god is a _eugenicist_?  God has been manipulating evolution?  We *are* just cattle? (or 'sheep' if you prefer).


----------



## Mirannan

Parson said:


> Was this aimed at me? I'm an evolutionary deist. This means that God worked through evolution to bring the earth to exactly this point at this time. So Dawkins being right about the evolutionary process has no bearing on my theology.



I think some of the more rabid Bible-literalists are missing the point by a country mile. Their prevailing view seems to be that God made everything, not very long ago, "by hand". Although the Abrahamic religions' God can do anything, virtually by definition, this seems inelegant at the very least.

A more elegant solution: Set up an array of laws, in precise mathematical and logical order, designed in the fullness of time (a heck of a lot of time, of the order of 10E10 years) to inevitably lead to the emergence of an intelligence able to have at least some comprehension of God. And then apply the spark ("breathe fire into the equations") and let it run. And interfere as little as possible to keep it all running according to the Plan. (It would appear that God has found it necessary to apply corrections at least once, quite recently in relation to the timespan just mentioned.)


----------



## JunkMonkey

Stephen Palmer said:


> A scientific description of the human condition is absolutely essential before any major changes in how humanity culturally evolves, and we're only 30 year since we started to understand consciousness. There's still a very very long away to go… But we are on the right road, I think. At last.



One of the major things that needs explaining/researching is why we (as a species) can be so incredibly self-contradictory.  We are both incredibly curious, exploratory, and inventive - and yet so amazingly risk-averse, and scared of the unknown at the same time.  We waste so much of our time trying to cling onto obviously outmoded concepts, entrenched views, and fears while embracing (seemingly without thinking) new and potentially dangerous methods of dealing with them.    The human ability to hold as valid two mutually contradictory concepts is what I need explaining.

I suspect this ability comes about because most people are not as smart as they think they are - apart from me. I'm not included.  I _know_ I'm not as smart as I think I am.


----------



## Vertigo

JunkMonkey said:


> One of the major things that needs explaining/researching is why we (as a species) can be so incredibly self-contradictory.  We are both incredibly curious, exploratory, and inventive - and yet so amazingly risk-averse, and scared of the unknown at the same time.  We waste so much of our time trying to cling onto obviously outmoded concepts, entrenched views, and fears while embracing (seemingly without thinking) new and potentially dangerous methods of dealing with them.    The human ability to hold as valid two mutually contradictory concepts is what I need explaining.
> 
> I suspect this ability comes about because most people are not as smart as they think they are - apart from me. I'm not included.  I _know_ I'm not as smart as I think I am.


I don't have a problem with that contradiction. I think all creatures have it to a certain extent. But... too much curiosity killed the cat and too little means stagnation and no development (beyond evolutionary development) and that latter is the 'safe' road that most species walk. Too much of the curiosity and the species is unlikely to survive. But get the balance just right and you end up with us. Or at least I hope we have the balance just right; it's still perfectly possible we will be killed by our curiosity.


----------



## Tracy

Stephen Palmer said:


> We've only had 120 years of grasping the basics of the human condition, since Freud's game-changing work on the unconscious. Before then, no human being had any idea that 99% of their self was beneath their conscious perception.
> 
> A scientific description of the human condition is absolutely essential before any major changes in how humanity culturally evolves, and we're only 30 year since we started to understand consciousness. There's still a very very long away to go… But we are on the right road, I think. At last.



Frankly, I'd rather we not understand too well how the human mind works. Understanding something usually allows you to manipulate it and I'd rather that opportunity not exist. While I'd like to believe most people wouldn't abuse this (or only use their understanding for minor purposes) all you really need are a few who are willing to exploit it (be it in favor of greed or idealism) for it to be really catastrophical (and this is coming from a guy who hates reading dystopias). On the plus side our understanding of the human mind is tenuous at best, seeing as how psychological studies have a hard time replicating studies successfully (The Crusade Against Multiple Regression Analysis | Edge.org - for anyone who's interested) so I wouldn't be expecting any significant evolutions in human thinking anytime soon. Then again I wouldn't not be expecting them either, since you just never know.


----------



## Stephen Palmer

JunkMonkey said:


> The human ability to hold as valid two mutually contradictory concepts is what I need explaining.



I take your point, but I was thinking on rather larger themes - like, What is love? Why do we have emotions? What is humour? 

And so forth…


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Tracy said:


> Frankly, I'd rather we not understand too well how the human mind works. Understanding something usually allows you to manipulate it and I'd rather that opportunity not exist.



Wow. That's an extraordinarily, erm… pessimistic viewpoint. 

Do you think though that it might be easier to manipulate stupid people than intelligent people?


----------



## Tracy

Stephen Palmer said:


> Wow. That's an extraordinarily, erm… pessimistic viewpoint.
> 
> Do you think though that it might be easier to manipulate stupid people than intelligent people?



First of all, intelligence is not a concept that we have a quantified definition of. Our current methods of measuring intelligence (including personal intuition etc.) are rarely on point and the concept itself requires that you state what the goal of intelligence is (i.e. is intelligence the ability to divine patterns within natural phenomena or the ability to make sure that your life is more conductive to spreading your genes, or both or none of these and something else - well, we just don't know. But to answer your question - if our level of understanding of the mind ever reaches levels comparable to our understanding of physics (if this is even possible in such a complex system as the human brain and the mind is truly ruled by deterministic principles) then it wouldn't matter who you are as you would be much like an atom or a planet - to one who possesses the laws of thought your actions would be predictable and therefore such a person could manipulate the conditions around you in a precise way to meet their own goals. My viewpoint is not pessimistic - it's realistic and I'm simply taking into account the inherent risks of any knowledge. Knowledge of particle physics gave us a new way to generate energy and a new understanding of the universe, along with a host of inventions, but it also led to the creation of nuclear weapons and incidents such as Chernobyl. Same goes for biology. A deeper understanding of viruses and how to cure them led to the creation of biological weapons and GMO foods whose risks are yet to be seen. I don't see why things should be any different in the case of the mind. My opinion is a simple risk assessment - I'd rather not bet that people won't use this knowledge in a destructive way since history has shown us that individuals who will do this exist in any period.


----------



## Parson

JunkMonkey said:


> I really am going to have to walk away from this... but - god is a _eugenicist_?  God has been manipulating evolution?  We *are* just cattle? (or 'sheep' if you prefer).


_Eugenicist?_ in the sense that he has let species die out? ---- Yes, (if that's your meaning)but I had in mind much more what @Mirannan said. I see God (in the sense of creator) as more as the setter of the equation than a micro-manager.


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Tracy said:


> But to answer your question - if our level of understanding of the mind ever reaches levels comparable to our understanding of physics (if this is even possible in such a complex system as the human brain and the mind is truly ruled by deterministic principles) then it wouldn't matter who you are as you would be much like an atom or a planet - to one who possesses the laws of thought your actions would be predictable and therefore such a person could manipulate the conditions around you in a precise way to meet their own goals.



I think determinism went out about a century ago…


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Tracy said:


> My viewpoint is not pessimistic - it's realistic and I'm simply taking into account the inherent risks of any knowledge. Knowledge of particle physics gave us a new way to generate energy and a new understanding of the universe, along with a host of inventions, but it also led to the creation of nuclear weapons and incidents such as Chernobyl.



I see what you mean, but you do perhaps assume that human nature is the same as the human condition?  imo human nature is historical-period-specific, whereas the human condition is constant and derived entirely from our evolutionary history. _i.e. -_ human nature derives from the human condition, with the former being variable and the latter not. If human cultural evolution is, as I was suggesting, a one-way process, then the former converges on the latter. Or at least, that's the hope…


----------



## Tracy

Stephen Palmer said:


> I think determinism went out about a century ago…



First of all - that's not even a little true. It's an undecided question. There are many different interpretations of quantum mechanics and a lot of them do suppose that the universe is indeed random, but there are also a number that suggest that we simply don't have the capabilities to see the principles below them. Either side's arguments are inconclusive, but there is one pretty definite and irrefutable fact - the world that we inhabit and understand (the one above the planck constant) IS completely deterministic, so far as we know. Seeing as how we are a part of this world it is very likely that our minds are also based on deterministic processes. 

But leaving this aside - if you think determinism is out, how do you suppose that we would be able to figure out the mind? If randomness underlies reality then the possibility of understanding is nonexistent as causality will be nonexistent and having knowledge will be impossible - you cannot predict randomness... I believe that would be even worse for your theory.


----------



## Tracy

Stephen Palmer said:


> I see what you mean, but you do perhaps assume that human nature is the same as the human condition?  imo human nature is historical-period-specific, whereas the human condition is constant and derived entirely from our evolutionary history. _i.e. -_ human nature derives from the human condition, with the former being variable and the latter not. If human cultural evolution is, as I was suggesting, a one-way process, then the former converges on the latter. Or at least, that's the hope…



Can you please define specifically the difference between the human condition and human nature. I suspect our definitions of the two are kind of different, so I'm not sure if I got your argument


----------



## J Riff

Meanwhile, science just goes on unexplaining how I can put my keys down and they disappear.


----------



## Cathbad

J Riff said:


> Meanwhile, science just goes on unexplaining how I can put my keys down and they disappear.



Here Here!

With me, it's pens.  Anyone know where mine went?


----------



## J Riff

I now use a magnet, a strong one, and hurl the keys at it when I come in. So far they have stuck around.


----------



## BAYLOR

J Riff said:


> Meanwhile, science just goes on unexplaining how I can put my keys down and they disappear.



The Hadron Super collider  could be causing a wormhole to form near your keys. The keys get sucked into the wormhole and deposited somewhere else in your home.


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Tracy said:


> Either side's arguments are inconclusive, but there is one pretty definite and irrefutable fact - the world that we inhabit and understand (the one above the planck constant) IS completely deterministic, so far as we know. Seeing as how we are a part of this world it is very likely that our minds are also based on deterministic processes.



I can assure you, that's exactly what I think. There's not much that annoys me more than New Age mystical nonsense about "quantum consciousness"…


----------



## JoanDrake

What about the fact that the Universe's rate of expansion is speeding up? This is something that makes no sense at all


----------



## Vertigo

JoanDrake said:


> What about the fact that the Universe's rate of expansion is speeding up? This is something that makes no sense at all


That sort of came up early in the thread. Dark energy was invented to provide a plausible cause/mechanism for the acceleration; we just don't understand what it is yet!


----------



## BAYLOR

Vertigo said:


> That sort of came up early in the thread. Dark energy was invented to provide a plausible cause/mechanism for the acceleration; we just don't understand what it is yet!



Does dark energy actually exist?


----------



## mosaix

BAYLOR said:


> Does dark energy actually exist?



In order to research a phenomena, in order to discuss it, it has to have a name. Short hand if you like. In this instance 'dark energy' has been chosen. The phenomena, apparently, exists. So yes, dark energy exists.


----------



## JunkMonkey

JoanDrake said:


> What about the fact that the Universe's rate of expansion is speeding up? This is something that makes no sense at all



Time is slowing down?


----------



## Vertigo

mosaix said:


> In order to research a phenomena, in order to discuss it, it has to have a name. Short hand if you like. In this instance 'dark energy' has been chosen. The phenomena, apparently, exists. So yes, dark energy exists.


As @mosaix  says it exists but we don't know what it is. Whether it is even energy or some other effect we don't yet understand is to a certain extent irrelevant; it's just a place holder until we can fully explain the observations.


----------



## BAYLOR

We can't go out into space and collect a sample of Dark Energy for analysis .


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> We can't go out into space and collect a sample of Dark Energy for analysis .



If it exists, shouldn't there be a way to collect - or at least see (itself or evidence of) - it?


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> If it exists, shouldn't there be a way to collect - or at least see (itself or evidence of) - it?



 It might not be in a form we can even collect.


----------



## JunkMonkey

BAYLOR said:


> It might not be in a form we can even collect.



Yet.


----------



## Vertigo

JunkMonkey said:


> Yet.


Precisely - once/if we understand we might be able to figure out how to collect it.

Once upon a time we didn't have the technology to collect a sample of oxygen from the air but it didn't mean it didn't exist. We had seen it's effect - fire - but didn't understand it and came up with some wildly incorrect theories about that effect, such as phlogiston. I see dark matter and dark energy in much the same light. They may just be the modern equivalent of phlogiston, but they serve as place holders until we understand the observed effects better.


----------



## Cathbad

Now if only someone could explain human behavior!  It certainly baffles me!!


----------



## Dulahan

Cathbad said:


> Now if only someone could explain human behavior!  It certainly baffles me!!



The pursuit of the opposite sex and the aquisition of things. You could probably break down any behavior done into the search for one of those two things. 

"I need more stuff or I need more **expletive**"


----------



## JunkMonkey

Dulahan said:


> The pursuit of the opposite sex



Or just sex.  Some of us aren't fussy.


----------



## Dulahan

I am trying to keep a bit of PG class to my posts. But that is basically what so meant, yeah.

Edit: Ah, I get what youre saying. "Pursuit of a Significant Other" then


----------



## JunkMonkey

Dulahan said:


> I am trying to keep a bit of PG class to my posts. But that is basically what so meant, yeah.
> 
> Edit: Ah, I get what youre saying. "Pursuit of a Significant Other" then



That'll do.


----------



## BAYLOR

What's outside the universe?


----------



## Stephen Palmer

BAYLOR said:


> What's outside the universe?



Imagine a 2-D world in a sheet of paper. Finite, and has an edge.

Now imagine that world curved around the surface of a football...


----------



## Phyrebrat

Psychism. Mediumship and clairvoyance. 

Altho science has definitely explained EVP: desperate believers who can hear the most specific phrases in white noise because they want to...



pH


----------



## JunkMonkey

Phyrebrat said:


> Psychism. Mediumship and clairvoyance.



Science can't explain made up sh*t.  It's like asking "can science explain Narnia?", or "can science explain Hobbits?".


----------



## Cathbad

JunkMonkey said:


> Science can't explain made up sh*t.  It's like asking "can science explain Narnia?", or "can science explain Hobbits?".



Hobbits??  Made up??


----------



## Justin Swanton

A slight shift of subject. I'm rather surprised this hasn't been brought up:





The Shroud of Turin - natural colour on left, image with colours reversed on right. It is the most scientifically studied object in history, but after 38 years beginning with the STuRP investigation in 1978, there is no scientific explanation for how the image was created.

The image lies only on the top couple of micrometres of the upper cloth fibrils. There is no pigment in the image - the cellulose in the image area has been degraded, as if slightly charred. The nearest scientific experimentation can get to this is an outfit in Switzerland who fire very short and powerful laser bursts at linen cloth. But the head of their research team affirms that he would need lasers of several billion watts power firing for only a billionth of a second or so to darken the cloth so superficially without destroying it. And he can't create an impression of a human figure. In the case of the shroud the energy would have had to come from the body.

Plus the fact that the Shroud image is the only picture in existence with 3D coding - i.e. it contains instructions to build a 3D model. *Here's* how it was done.

The C14 test - we all know about that - is under *fresh investigation*.


----------



## Vertigo

As far as I'm aware on the Shroud of Turin for every 'expert' that says it is unexplained another ten 'experts' say it is. There's so much noise surrounding that particular piece of cloth I don't think anyone can really say either way. And probably never will; the Church is extremely careful about who they allow to look at in any detail. And remember there is no record of it - none - before about 1350. A period when the production of false relics was probably one of the biggest money making industries in Europe.

Also remember that just because we can't replicate it now doesn't mean it couldn't be done back then. Just because we can't fit huge blocks of stone together as well as the Incas did doesn't mean it was done for them by aliens. We just don't know what techniques they used any longer.


----------



## dask

BAYLOR said:


> What's outside the universe?


Sounds like a fair question. If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?


----------



## Vertigo

dask said:


> Sounds like a fair question. If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?


The universe is all of space time so there is nothing for it to expand into. I refer you to @Stephen Palmer succinct explanation.


Stephen Palmer said:


> Imagine a 2-D world in a sheet of paper. Finite, and has an edge.
> 
> Now imagine that world curved around the surface of a football...



The problem with it is that to understand the two dimensional model you must look at it in 3 dimensions so to understand the 3 dimensional equivalent you have to think of it in 4 dimensions which is something that we are not very good at. Or certainly I'm not. But what it means is space eventually comes back on itself; there is no edge. Another way to think of it is that it is not the edges of space that are expanding into something but space time itself that is expanding.

It's one of those horrible things a bit like Quantum Theory where they tend to say: "if you think you understand it then you don't!"


----------



## Phyrebrat

JunkMonkey said:


> Science can't explain made up sh*t.  It's like asking "can science explain Narnia?", or "can science explain Hobbits?".



Okay, so how can science disprove it? 

pH


----------



## Vertigo

Unfortunately that one takes you back to the fact that you can't prove a negative. So for example it is conceivable that evidence might be found that proves Bigfoot exists but it is physically impossible to prove that Bigfoot does _not_ exist.


----------



## Phyrebrat

That's my point ... Skeptical POV always takes the moral high ground without realising its thesis is just as onerous as those trying to prove something on faith alone. 

pH


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

Vertigo said:


> Unfortunately that one takes you back to the fact that you can't prove a negative. So for example it is conceivable that evidence might be found that proves Bigfoot exists but it is physically impossible to prove that Bigfoot does _not_ exist.



Plus there's "burden of proof." The argument "You can't explain it away, so you have to believe" doesn't hold water. If you want me to believe in X, then you must provide proof of X. I have no obligation to do diddly.


----------



## Vertigo

Exactly if any of those things do exist then they should be provable and so far no one has managed to claim James Randi's one million dollar challenge (now terminated after 50 years) and plenty have tried.


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

Phyrebrat said:


> That's my point ... Skeptical POV always takes the moral high ground without realising its thesis is just as onerous as those trying to prove something on faith alone.
> 
> pH



Nope. Skeptical POV has a series of clearly explained, obvious, logical rules. "Proof by faith" and other such tactics try to dodge the rules, then complain when skeptical POV declines to accept it. There's no morality involved.


----------



## Vertigo

We've actually had a very good example of this earlier in the thread. It has been proven that dark matter exists; we have observed it's effects. It is now up to science to explain what it is. So far we have failed at that. It is something science cannot explain. But you cannot ask science to explain something that has not been proven to exist. Once clairvoyance has been proven to exist it will then, and only then, be up to science to explain what it is and how it works.

It is also one of the problems I have with SETI; it is trying to prove the existence of something for which we have absolutely no evidence of its existence. Although to be fair what they are really trying to do is find that evidence. However I suspect that it is probably the most expensive example of scientific research into something that is not backed by any theory or observable evidence. Just some rather wobbly probability ideas and a lot of faith.


----------



## Justin Swanton

Vertigo said:


> As far as I'm aware on the Shroud of Turin for every 'expert' that says it is unexplained another ten 'experts' say it is.



There's a big difference between experts quoting their peers who affirm it is explained, and experts who actually prove how it could have been made. Taking into account everything currently known about the shroud from several scientific disciplines, there is no known natural or human explanation for the image.



Vertigo said:


> There's so much noise surrounding that particular piece of cloth I don't think anyone can really say either way. And probably never will;



Sure, there is a lot of opposition to the idea that the shroud might be genuine - there are ramifications from that idea - so one is obliged not to listen to this or that prestigious authority but to examine the evidence itself, and the evidence tells a very interesting story.



Vertigo said:


> the Church is extremely careful about who they allow to look at in any detail.



No. The Church is just concerned about it being examined by competent experts and properly handled during the examination. The STuRP team were not devout and loyal Catholics, just qualified scientists.



Vertigo said:


> And remember there is no record of it - none - before about 1350. A period when the production of false relics was probably one of the biggest money making industries in Europe.



Besides the mentions in the historical record of Christ's burial cloth in Edessa, Constantinople, Athens and France, there is *this*: the Hungarian Pray manuscript from 1192 that has a picture of the shroud with details that would be inexplicable unless the artist had seen the shroud itself.



Vertigo said:


> Also remember that just because we can't replicate it now doesn't mean it couldn't be done back then. Just because we can't fit huge blocks of stone together as well as the Incas did doesn't mean it was done for them by aliens. We just don't know what techniques they used any longer.



Charring a linen cloth using a 5 gigawatt laser that fires for a billionth of a second - in the Middle Ages? Personally I have a problem with that.


----------



## Vertigo

Justin Swanton said:


> There's a big difference between experts quoting their peers who affirm it is explained, and experts who actually prove how it could have been made. Taking into account everything *currently* known about the shroud from several scientific disciplines, there is no known natural or human explanation for the image..


Currently is the key word there.



Justin Swanton said:


> Besides the mentions in the historical record of Christ's burial cloth in Edessa, Constantinople, Athens and France, there is *this*: the Hungarian Pray manuscript from 1192 that has a picture of the shroud with details that would be inexplicable unless the artist had seen the shroud itself..


Of course there are mentions of a shroud. It was the normal practice. But it seems strange that the shroud we have today only put an appearance in (to use your possible date) a thousand years later.




Justin Swanton said:


> Charring a linen cloth using a 5 gigawatt laser that fires for a billionth of a second - in the Middle Ages? Personally I have a problem with that.


I never said that what I said is that we don't know how it was done. Which doesn't mean I'm saying it was done by lasers in the middle ages.

However I'm not a scientist I can only go on the data I find on our favourite internet and I find nothing conclusive there. And so I'm not really keen on a battle of links. I'd just say that, just like some of the other stuff, it hasn't yet been proven to be a two thousand years old relic that requires scientific explanation.

However I will concede that at the moment science has failed to explain the shroud.


----------



## Cathbad

Vertigo said:


> I'd just say that, just like some of the other stuff, it hasn't yet been proven to be a two thousand years old relic that requires scientific explanation.



Didn't I read that the 1978 team determined the shroud to date from the 12th or 13th century?


----------



## BAYLOR

Stephen Palmer said:


> Imagine a 2-D world in a sheet of paper. Finite, and has an edge.
> 
> Now imagine that world curved around the surface of a football...



Sounds a bit like  Abbot's book *Flatland*.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Cathbad said:


> Didn't I read that the 1978 team determined the shroud to date from the 12th or 13th century?





			
				wikipedia said:
			
		

> three separate laboratories dated samples from the Shroud to a range of AD 1260–1390, which coincides with the first certain appearance of the shroud in the 1350s



Which makes it 13th /14th century.  Wikipedia also points out that the first time it appeared in the records (in 1390) it was denounced by the local bishop as a forgery with the forger having confessed to making it.




Justin Swanton said:


> the Hungarian Pray manuscript from 1192 that has a picture of the shroud with details that would be inexplicable unless the artist had seen the shroud itself.



Hogwash!  How many thousands of times has that scene been represented in art over the centuries and there is only ONE picture that looks a bit like a much later picture?  Monkeys. Typewriters.  Cherry picked evidence. 

Even more inexplicable is that the 'Hungarian Pray Manuscript' shows Jesus didn't have any thumbs, only fingers.  Everyone else in the picture has four fingers and a thumb, even the angel, but not poor old Jesus.


----------



## Cathbad

JunkMonkey said:


> How many thousands of times has that scene been represented in art over the centuries and there is only ONE picture that looks a bit like a much later picture?



The shroud, though certainly not Jesus' image, is still an extremely interesting piece of work!  I'd love to know how it was made!


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> The shroud, though certainly not Jesus' image, is still an extremely interesting piece of work!  I'd love to know how it was made!



It looks almost three dimensional.


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> It looks almost three dimensional.



Where did we lose all these secrets?  The shroud... the pyramids... dang it if we haven't lost a lot of knowledge!


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> Where did we lose all these secrets?  The shroud... the pyramids... dang it if we haven't lost a lot of knowledge!



We try to understand the universe and yet there is alot about the world around us that we still don't know.


----------



## Justin Swanton

Cathbad said:


> Didn't I read that the 1978 team determined the shroud to date from the 12th or 13th century?



They examined the shroud and ruled any kind of pigment as the cause of the image. Their purpose was to determine how the shroud had been made. In the end they could not.

Re the C14 test done later in 1988 it has now been established - I mean, proponents and opponents of the shroud concede the fact - that the sample for the testing was taken from a corner of the cloth that had been repaired using cotton threads dyed to match the aged linen. This, by all scientific standards, disqualifies the tests. See *here*.


----------



## Justin Swanton

JunkMonkey said:


> Which makes it 13th /14th century.  Wikipedia also points out that the first time it appeared in the records (in 1390) it was denounced by the local bishop as a forgery with the forger having confessed to making it.



There were plenty of fake relics at that time, and the appearance of the shroud in an obscure town in France without a documented past would have got the local bishop's back up immediately. The forger who confessed - well, one thing that has been established is that the shroud could not have been produced by any known human means, or even any conceivable human means (barring a 5 GW laser), certainly not by the technology or skills of the Middle Ages.



JunkMonkey said:


> Hogwash!  How many thousands of times has that scene been represented in art over the centuries and there is only ONE picture that looks a bit like a much later picture?  Monkeys. Typewriters.  Cherry picked evidence



There's a whole study on resemblances in detail between different religious depictions of Christ from early Byzantine times onwards. But the point of the Pray manuscript is that the artist - unlike others - clearly saw the shroud himself (probably in Constantinople until 1204) as evidenced by the herringbone weave and the four burn holes from an earlier fire he depicts in his image. Otherwise why put them there?



JunkMonkey said:


> Even more inexplicable is that the 'Hungarian Pray Manuscript' shows Jesus didn't have any thumbs, only fingers.  Everyone else in the picture has four fingers and a thumb, even the angel, but not poor old Jesus.



There are no thumbs in the shroud image either. The reason for this is the location of the nail wounds. They don't go through the palms as traditionally depicted in paintings, but through the wrists. It has been demonstrated that only the wrist bones, not the palm tissue, have enough strength to support a body. But when hammering a nail through the wrist, the median nerve is damaged. This causes the thumb to flex inwards, hiding it from view.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Justin Swanton said:


> There's a whole study on resemblances in detail between different religious depictions of Christ from early Byzantine times onwards. But the point of the Pray manuscript is that the artist - unlike others - clearly saw the shroud himself (probably in Constantinople until 1204) as evidenced by the herringbone weave and the four burn holes from an earlier fire he depicts in his image. Otherwise why put them there?



This is called 'Cherry Picking'.  Stumbling across ONE piece of evince out of thousands that confirms your hypothesis and holding up as clear undeniable incontrovertible proof (usually accompanied by Dänikenesque stating of 'obvious facts' which are no more than feedback.  "The artist - unlike others - clearly saw the shroud himself" is based on nothing more than the fact that the thing in the drawing looks, to some people, like the thing they want it to look like.)

There is no evidence that the Clay artist who "unlike others - clearly saw the shroud himself" saw anything that could have been the shroud.  There is no evidence that he actually drew a shroud.  Lots of people seem to think its a drawing of a tomb cover.  It could be a coffee table, I don't know.  I do know that searching through historical records finding Rorschach blotches that resemble things you want them to look like is not 'evidence'.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Cathbad said:


> Where did we lose all these secrets?  The shroud... the pyramids... dang it if we haven't lost a lot of knowledge!



I know and all those lost civilisations that took their secrets with them:  Lemuria, Mu, Atlantis all that lot.


----------



## Venusian Broon

Cathbad said:


> The shroud, though certainly not Jesus' image, is still an extremely interesting piece of work!  I'd love to know how it was made!


I love the theory that the shroud was created by Leonardo da Vinci in a very early experiment in photography (by some means not known). A lot of this theory goes into positing that the figure on the shroud shares a great deal of similarities with what is known about da Vinci - i.e. he used himself as the model/experiment and also how he (and whatever organisation he was heading at the time - see below) might revel in blaspheming, by making himself Jesus!

It unfortunately still can't explain how he did it, but hey, as he was _maybe _a member of the Priory of Sion/Templar/Mason/Rosycrucian/Illuminati all of his major secrets were hushed up or never published...

...Okay, probably not true at all, but as theories go, it's a great ride to go along


----------



## Cathbad

~reports @Venusian Broon to the Priory~


----------



## Venusian Broon

Cathbad said:


> ~reports @Venusian Broon to the Priory~



That's okay, I do part-time work in the cafeteria there on Sundays...


----------



## Vertigo

One of the things that appeals about the Da Vinci theory is it may have involved chemicals of which, after so long, there are no remaining traces.


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor

The real problem with the shroud issue is this: claiming that science can't explain it proves nothing except that science can't explain it. Yet. If you want us to believe that it is of supernatural origin, you have to provide _positive proof_ of that. After all, science can't explain ball lightning yet; we haven't come up with an integrated TOE; science can't explain Trump's hair; we don't know what dark matter is. None of this means that it's pixies.
This is what creates the "God of the Gaps" process. Believers proclaim, "You can't explain it, therefore God!". Science, sooner or later, explains it. Believers chant, "Okay, but you can't explain _this_!" Science eventually explains it. Rinse, repeat. With each iteration, the realm that can be explained by God, the gaps in knowledge, shrinks.
To paraphrase a probably apocryphal conversation, "We have no need of that hypothesis."


----------



## Justin Swanton

Vertigo said:


> One of the things that appeals about the Da Vinci theory is it may have involved chemicals of which, after so long, there are no remaining traces.



One thing which scientific investigation has precisely ruled out is any use of chemicals in the creation of the image. The image is incredibly superficial, a discolouration - more precisely a degradation of the cellulose - of the top few nanometres of the upper fibrils. Any use of chemicals would have meant the discolouration penetrating much deeper into the cloth, and if the discolouration is caused by a chemical, then by definition the chemical must still be there.


----------



## Justin Swanton

JunkMonkey said:


> This is called 'Cherry Picking'. Stumbling across ONE piece of evince out of thousands that confirms your hypothesis and holding up as clear undeniable incontrovertible proof (usually accompanied by Dänikenesque stating of 'obvious facts' which are no more than feedback. "The artist - unlike others - clearly saw the shroud himself" is based on nothing more than the fact that the thing in the drawing looks, to some people, like the thing they want it to look like.)



Not quite. I singled out the Pray manuscript because it reproduces three peculiar details that only an eyewitness of the shroud would think of including: the L-shaped pattern of four holes, the herringbone weave of the cloth, and the absence of thumbs. I also chose it because its date is established - 1192 - which predates the date assigned to the shroud by the C14 test. I could point to plenty of other depictions of Christ that have details peculiar to the shroud, but experts in iconography have already done that - I can dig up some references if you like.

What's interesting about reactions to the shroud is the position that it *has *to be a fake. Just has to be. Can't be anything else. If science can't prove it a fake now, it will prove it so in the future. There's nothing to consider.

Personally, making abstraction of whether I believe it genuine or not, I find the shroud fascinating as a *scientific enigma*. Take its three dimensionality. The shroud is the only picture in existence - out of any painting, drawing or photograph - that will produce a recognizable 3D shape when put under a VP8 image analyer. The VP8 interprets the light parts of an image as high elevation, and the dark parts as low elevation. Any normal picture seen in a VP8 becomes unrecognisable, some parts going up and some going down without any kind of relief that corresponds to the true shape of the object in the picture. The shroud is the only exception. You can't do that with camera taking a photo. Cheerio Da Vinci.


----------



## Cathbad

I don't know why the argument is "science" and "act of God".  Doesn't this God use natural means for his miracles?


----------



## Justin Swanton

Cathbad said:


> I don't know why the argument is "science" and "act of God".  Doesn't this God use natural means for his miracles?



Sorry, don't follow you?


----------



## JunkMonkey

Justin Swanton said:


> The VP8 interprets the light parts of an image as high elevation, and the dark parts as low elevation. Any normal picture seen in a VP8 becomes unrecognisable, some parts going up and some going down without any kind of relief that corresponds to the true shape of the object in the picture. The shroud is the only exception.



But let's look at the face 3D scanned.







Oh I am _so_ convinced.

EDIT: Especially as this image is the result of scanning a _reversed image_ of the shroud.  If it was scanned as it is really with "the light parts of an image as high elevation, and the dark parts as low elevation" then the figure's face would be inside out.  The dark pigment on high areas is exactly the sort of effect you get when you do something like a brass rubbing: highlights dark, recessed areas light. (With a dark pigment and a light cloth obviously.  Use light medium on a black fabric and you'd get the reverse. )


----------



## Justin Swanton

Let's do this properly. *This site* gives details on the VP8 analysis of the shroud.

Here is the VP8 image of the shroud:






Notice the 3D relief. You can make out the features of the head, chest and arms. Sure it's not smooth and flawless like a Renaissance statue. That comes from the fact that the image is very faint and has noise interference from the damage to the cloth and the weave of the cloth itself. Point is you will get nothing like this from any regular painting, drawing or photo. Try it. You can download *this software* to imitate the effect of a VP8 (which admittedly is rather old technology by now).

There is actually one way you can replicate this three dimensional quality: putting a solid object on a scanner. The scanner will create a picture with the parts of the object nearer the glass lighter, and the parts further away darker. Put the picture under a VP8 and you will get an accurate 3D relief. So if Leonardo had a 7 foot scanner then we're halfway there. The problem then is to transfer that scanned image to the linen cloth...

Re the reversed image: that's another reason to discount forgery. The image on the shroud only 'works' if its colours are reversed, i.e. if it is treated as a photographic negative. Why would a mediaeval forger bother with that?


----------



## dask

Interesting but starting to get ugly.


----------



## Brian G Turner

Justin Swanton said:


> I find the shroud fascinating as a *scientific enigma*



Which, indeed, it is. While radiocarbon analysis dates the cloth to around the 11th-12th centuries, the actual process that formed the image remains uncertain.

Which IMO qualifies the turin Shroud as something "Science cannot explain" without necessitating a polar argument of science vs faith.

The world is full of mystery - we are far from the pinnacle of scientific understanding in all things. 


In the meantime, a friendly reminder to everyone in this thread to keep things civil.


----------



## JunkMonkey

I apologise for using the word which the mod removed. 

I'm not arguing a science vs faith thing here.  I'm arguing a science vs bad science thing.

My (badly made) point was that it is absurd to state that the shroud is the only image in the history of human image-making that will produce anything recognisable when shoved in a 3D scanner.  Anyone can make an image that will do this with a coin, a piece of paper and a pencil.


----------



## Justin Swanton

JunkMonkey said:


> My (badly made) point was that it is absurd to state that the shroud is the only image in the history of human image-making that will produce anything recognisable when shoved in a 3D scanner.  Anyone can make an image that will do this with a coin, a piece of paper and a pencil.



True. If you put that image under a VP8 you'll get some recognisable relief. But notice that it's a flat object with a little bas-relief on it, i.e there's not much difference between the uppermost and lowermost parts. The image on the shroud has real depth. How would one take a statue, say, and get an image like the one above?

My original point was that an artist - especially a mediaeval artist - who draws or paints an image cannot create something that looks like a 2D representation of a human figure but still has the 3D characteristic that can be picked up by a VP8. You cannot do it with a camera either - lighting doesn't work that way.


----------



## mosaix

Justin Swanton said:


> My original point was that an artist - especially a mediaeval artist - who draws or paints an image cannot create something that looks like a 2D representation of a human figure but still has the 3D characteristic that can be picked up by a VP8.



Yes they could. They obviously did. The shroud is the evidence. 

The question is - how? 

And the question will be answered - in time. And, no doubt, the answer will be refuted. Just as has the carbon dating because in the face of the evidence people will still want to believe something else.


----------



## Venusian Broon

mosaix said:


> Yes they could. They obviously did. The shroud is the evidence.
> 
> The question is - how?
> 
> And the question will be answered - in time. And, no doubt, the answer will be refuted. Just as has the carbon dating because in the face of the evidence people will still want to believe something else.



I got rather absorbed in looking at Turin Shroud blogs last night, and one in particular seemed quite interesting - namely that it was created by heating a metal statue of Jesus and then scorching it in a linen in a sand or snow box. i.e. they pressed the cold statue into a box of sand covered by a linen, then heated it up and pressed it down in the indentation. Repeat procedure on other side and at some point add real blood to make Christ's 'wounds'. 

Some proponents of the theory have tried it out with smaller objects and they seem to get similar-esque results (in reference to the '3-D' effect - although I'm not really in a place to fully judge right now). Although the method sounds simple, in practice to get something like the Turin Shroud would take a lot of practical skill - but this should just take time - and the technology and knowhow is well within medieval artisans comfort zone.

I'll leave out all the details - if you are interested I can try and dig out the guys blog, but I don't want to get involved in a kerfuffle that, to be frank, I've not got time to read up on!


----------



## Justin Swanton

Venusian Broon said:


> I got rather absorbed in looking at Turin Shroud blogs last night, and one in particular seemed quite interesting - namely that it was created by heating a metal statue of Jesus and then scorching it in a linen in a sand or snow box. i.e. they pressed the cold statue into a box of sand covered by a linen, then heated it up and pressed it down in the indentation. Repeat procedure on other side and at some point add real blood to make Christ's 'wounds'.



I've come across this theory. The big problem with it is the superficial nature of the discolouration on shroud cloth. The image is created by a degradation of the cellulose of the first few nanometres of the upper fibrils of the linen fibres. If a cloth was heated up as described, the heat would penetrate into the cloth, creating a charred effect much deeper than what we observe.

Charring of some kind is the best explanation for the degradation of the cellulose. But it would require a heat source equivalent to a laser firing a light beam of several billion watts power for only a billionth of a second or so. This would be enough to discolour the cloth *without *the heat penetrating deeper into the fibres.

To put the power requirements for such a laser into perspective, the city of San Francisco uses 6,5 gigawatts/hour of electricity, roughly equivalent to what the shroud laser would need. Another comparison is the power of the Hiroshima bomb: 17 gigawats, about three to four times the energy output needed to produce the shroud image.


----------



## mosaix

Thanks but not really interested, VB. 

I put shroud belief in the same category as the moon landing 'hoax' - some people will never be convinced and I've got better things to do with my time than convince them otherwise. Most of the time anyway. 

Although, on second thoughts, the science behind its creation may be interesting - No. Must resist, must resist.


----------



## Justin Swanton

You mean....people still think the moon is real?


mosaix said:


> I put shroud belief in the same category as the moon landing 'hoax' - some people will never be convinced and I've got better things to do with my time than convince them otherwise. Most of the time anyway.



What moon landing?


----------



## Cathbad

mosaix said:


> I put shroud belief in the same category as the moon landing 'hoax' - some people will never be convinced and I've got better things to do with my time than convince them otherwise.



You know, I'd always put "moon landing hoax" theorists in a lump with most conspiracy theories - Crazy.

And then NASA rocked my belief - I think about 5 or 6 years ago.  They were talking about going back to the moon.  The NASA Scientist doing the talking made a very odd statement - he said, "First, we'll have to develop the technology."

WTH?


----------



## Justin Swanton

Cathbad said:


> And then NASA rocked my belief - I think about 5 or 6 years ago. They were talking about going back to the moon. The NASA Scientist doing the talking made a very odd statement - he said, "First, we'll have to develop the technology."



I remember seeing that. I think he means supplying sufficient protection against Cosmic radiation and solar flares for people who spend a long time on the lunar surface. The astronauts who went to the moon actually took a pretty big risk: a single major solar flare coming their way could have killed them. Crews in low Earth orbit are protected by the Earth's magnetic field so don't have this problem. Sure as heck you don't want to spend any appreciable time in the Van Allen belts.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Justin Swanton said:


> True. If you put that image under a VP8 you'll get some recognisable relief. But notice that it's a flat object with a little bas-relief on it, i.e there's not much difference between the uppermost and lowermost parts. The image on the shroud has real depth. How would one take a statue, say, and get an image like the one above?
> 
> My original point was that an artist - especially a mediaeval artist - who draws or paints an image cannot create something that looks like a 2D representation of a human figure but still has the 3D characteristic that can be picked up by a VP8. You cannot do it with a camera either - lighting doesn't work that way.



Sorry but to me the image you posted (the 'VP8  image of the shroud') shows very little real depth.  It looks just like my coin would.  A relief. And I suspect - but have no proof - it is an image which is a compromise.  The hight/depth to light/dark values being adjusted to reach maximum readability before gross distortions come in.   Nothing wrong with that.  If you want to get the maximum readability out of an object you have to make decisions and filter the data.

And don't go dissing medieval artists.  They were many amazingly beautiful things made by skilled intelligent craftsmen and artists during the middle ages. The Hollywood/Monty Python image that presents medieval Europe populated by mud-bedraggled louts is far from accurate. They were as smart, and skilled, and infinitely curious, and driven by the same weird desires as we are.  They were people.


----------



## Venusian Broon

Justin Swanton said:


> I've come across this theory. The big problem with it is the superficial nature of the discolouration on shroud cloth. The image is created by a degradation of the cellulose of the first few nanometres of the upper fibrils of the linen fibres. If a cloth was heated up as described, the heat would penetrate into the cloth, creating a charred effect much deeper than what we observe.
> 
> Charring of some kind is the best explanation for the degradation of the cellulose. But it would require a heat source equivalent to a laser firing a light beam of several billion watts power for only a billionth of a second or so. This would be enough to discolour the cloth *without *the heat penetrating deeper into the fibres.
> 
> To put the power requirements for such a laser into perspective, the city of San Francisco uses 6,5 gigawatts/hour of electricity, roughly equivalent to what the shroud laser would need.



Firstly you're being a bit disingenuous , 'a few nanometres' of discolouration you mention is by all the literature that I've come across actually 200 nanometres (approximately the size of the primary wall of a linen fibres I believe - although I must point out it can't be known that it is always 200 nanometres across the whole shroud - it may be shallower in some places, deeper in others). That number is actually a factor of a hundred more than you've stated. Believe me - as a physicist - that's a significant difference .

I think also I have a slight problem with your analogy. Using the numbers you've given it seems to me that your saying that only a few Joules of energy (i.e. several billion watts times a billionth of a second) are required to be transferred in the process. Now if these are your assumptions - yes, the laser analogy seems reasonable. But wait, why does the charring process have to take a billionth of a second? If the charring process took a second, say, then the power of the heat source becomes a mere 2-3 Watts! Clearly something a heated statue could emit. And no need to take the power output of San Francisco.

Here's an easy experiment - take an clothes iron and turn it on full, tap it on a piece of linen . Does it instantly char - even if you hold it there for a second? No (or probably not!). Repeat but press the iron down for longer moments of time. At some point a prolonged pressing will start to scorch the linen. Remember there are all sort of things happening - chiefly I would imagine volatile elements, such as water in the material, beginning the process of evaporating when the iron is pressed (and taking away heat energy that might have gone into damaging the fibres). Note also that a layer of steam could act as a barrier for further penetration of heat deeper into the material. (But I am no scorch scientist so that is purely a guess )

So it seems to me  - given that you can easily control all elements of the press, the temperature of the statue, the time and strength of the press, it is possible to get a light scorching that does get to the 'required depth'. Further experiments do seem to back up that it is quite possible to just scorch a single cell layer _leaving linen untouched by the heat below this layer. _That it can be done in a relatively simple homemade experiment suggests to me it _might_ be done, albeit with more skill - with a bigger statue. 

So if this really was the way that the shroud was created, either there was a great deal of experimentation to get the 'right' temperature, or perhaps artisans could, as one of the proponents argued, arranged a series of sand boxes beforehand and just press the statue 'along the line' - every press would mean that the statue would be getting cooler all the time. The scorching would therefore get fainter along the line - with the added bonus that they would get a series of relics at the same time! Perhaps the first presses were so obviously scorched linen so they were not used, and when the scorch became too faint the image of Christ would of course not be seen...

Anyway I am not fanatically arguing for this - other than it seems a neat and doable method that explains a great deal about the shroud.


----------



## Venusian Broon

mosaix said:


> I put shroud belief in the same category as the moon landing 'hoax' - some people will never be convinced and I've got better things to do with my time than convince them otherwise. Most of the time anyway.



By far the best 'fruit loop' book I ever bought on the subject of the moon was the marvellously titled _Who built the Moon? (_If you don't believe me, it's on Amazon)

Their answer is...interesting


----------



## Justin Swanton

Venusian Broon said:


> By far the best 'fruit loop' book I ever bought on the subject of the moon was the marvellously titled _Who built the Moon? (_If you don't believe me, it's on Amazon)
> 
> Their answer is...interesting



Humans from the future so life could evolve, humans develop and create time machines to go back in the past and make the moon so life could evolve....

Now why didn't Clarke think of that?


----------



## Brian G Turner

For more on the Turin Shroud, the Wikipedia page has a good deal of info, not least the various scientific theories - none of which yet have a general consensus:

Shroud of Turin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


----------



## BAYLOR

Justin Swanton said:


> Humans from the future so life could evolve, humans develop and create time machines to go back in the past and make the moon so life could evolve....
> 
> Now why didn't Clarke think of that?



Because writers no matter how talented, can't think of everything .


----------



## Justin Swanton

Venusian Broon said:


> Firstly you're being a bit disingenuous , 'a few nanometres' of discolouration you mention is by all the literature that I've come across actually 200 nanometres (approximately the size of the primary wall of a linen fibres I believe - although I must point out it can't be known that it is always 200 nanometres across the whole shroud - it may be shallower in some places, deeper in others). That number is actually a factor of a hundred more than you've stated. Believe me - as a physicist - that's a significant difference .
> 
> I think also I have a slight problem with your analogy. Using the numbers you've given it seems to me that your saying that only a few Joules of energy (i.e. several billion watts times a billionth of a second) are required to be transferred in the process. Now if these are your assumptions - yes, the laser analogy seems reasonable. But wait, why does the charring process have to take a billionth of a second? If the charring process took a second, say, then the power of the heat source becomes a mere 2-3 Watts! Clearly something a heated statue could emit. And no need to take the power output of San Francisco.
> 
> Here's an easy experiment - take an clothes iron and turn it on full, tap it on a piece of linen . Does it instantly char - even if you hold it there for a second? No (or probably not!). Repeat but press the iron down for longer moments of time. At some point a prolonged pressing will start to scorch the linen. Remember there are all sort of things happening - chiefly I would imagine volatile elements, such as water in the material, beginning the process of evaporating when the iron is pressed (and taking away heat energy that might have gone into damaging the fibres). Note also that a layer of steam could act as a barrier for further penetration of heat deeper into the material. (But I am no scorch scientist so that is purely a guess )
> 
> So it seems to me  - given that you can easily control all elements of the press, the temperature of the statue, the time and strength of the press, it is possible to get a light scorching that does get to the 'required depth'. Further experiments do seem to back up that it is quite possible to just scorch a single cell layer _leaving linen untouched by the heat below this layer. _That it can be done in a relatively simple homemade experiment suggests to me it _might_ be done, albeit with more skill - with a bigger statue.
> 
> So if this really was the way that the shroud was created, either there was a great deal of experimentation to get the 'right' temperature, or perhaps artisans could, as one of the proponents argued, arranged a series of sand boxes beforehand and just press the statue 'along the line' - every press would mean that the statue would be getting cooler all the time. The scorching would therefore get fainter along the line - with the added bonus that they would get a series of relics at the same time! Perhaps the first presses were so obviously scorched linen so they were not used, and when the scorch became too faint the image of Christ would of course not be seen...
> 
> Anyway I am not fanatically arguing for this - other than it seems a neat and doable method that explains a great deal about the shroud.




OK, I broke my own rule and repeated the findings of an authority I trusted (that Swiss outfit doing laser tests) without first reading up on the background data that led to his conclusion. Give me a little time - I get back on the hot statue theory (just obliged to earn a living which eats into time and energy).

The Wiki entry on the topic is interesting:

Another hypothesis suggests that the Shroud may have been formed using a bas-relief sculpture. Researcher Jacques di Costanzo, noting that the Shroud image seems to have a three-dimensional quality, suggested that perhaps the image was formed using an actual three-dimensional object, such as a sculpture. While wrapping a cloth around a life-sized statue would result in a distorted image, placing a cloth over a bas-relief would result in an image like the one seen on the shroud. To demonstrate the plausibility of his hypothesis, Costanzo constructed a bas-relief of a Jesus-like face and draped wet linen over the bas-relief. After the linen dried, he dabbed it with a mixture of ferric oxide and gelatine. The result was an image similar to that of the Shroud. The imprinted image turned out to be wash-resistant, impervious to temperatures of 250 °C (482 °F) and was undamaged by exposure to a range of harsh chemicals, including bisulphite which, without the gelatine, would normally have degraded ferric oxide to the compound ferrous oxide.[176] Similar results have been obtained by Nickell.​[problem - no trace of ferric oxide or any chemical cause for the image has been found on the image area of the shroud]

Instead of painting, it has been suggested that the bas-relief could also be heated and used to scorch an image onto the cloth. However researcher Thibault Heimburger performed some experiments with the scorching of linen, and found that a scorch mark is only produced by direct contact with the hot object – thus producing an all-or-nothing discoloration with no graduation of color as is found in the shroud.[177]

According to Fanti and Moroni, after comparing the histograms of 256 different grey levels, it was found that the image obtained with a bas-relief has grey values included between 60 and 256 levels, but it is much contrasted with wide areas of white saturation (levels included between 245 and 256) and lacks of intermediate grey levels (levels included between 160 and 200). The face image on the Shroud instead has grey tonalities that vary in the same values field (between 60 and 256), but the white saturation is much less marked and the histogram is practically flat in correspondence of the intermediate grey levels (levels included between 160 and 200).[175]​


----------



## Venusian Broon

Justin Swanton said:


> Give me a little time - I get back on the hot statue theory (just obliged to earn a living which eats into time and energy).



Don't worry about it - I need to spend a lot of my time on draft 5 as well as a number of other projects 

You got me interested for a few hours, but I'm not in any position to really work out from the internet and the clamour of many voices, saying many things, the mystery of the Turin Shroud!!!

What is your favoured hypothesis for it?


----------



## JunkMonkey

Justin Swanton said:


> Instead of painting, it has been suggested that the bas-relief could also be heated and used to scorch an image onto the cloth.​



Which is exactly what it looks like.



Justin Swanton said:


> However researcher Thibault Heimburger performed some experiments with the scorching of linen, and found that a scorch mark is only produced by direct contact with the hot object – thus producing an all-or-nothing discoloration with no graduation of color as is found in the shroud.[177]
> 
> According to Fanti and Moroni, after comparing the histograms of 256 different grey levels, it was found that the image obtained with a bas-relief has grey values included between 60 and 256 levels, but it is much contrasted with wide areas of white saturation (levels included between 245 and 256) and lacks of intermediate grey levels (levels included between 160 and 200). The face image on the Shroud instead has grey tonalities that vary in the same values field (between 60 and 256), but the white saturation is much less marked and the histogram is practically flat in correspondence of the intermediate grey levels (levels included between 160 and 200).[175]



A.  (I presume) Thibault Heimburger is a 'researcher'* , not a creative artist with years of experience at forging religious iconography  (though the two are not incompatible.)
B. His attempt at making a figurative representation is very new.  Leave it 300 years and see how it looks.  Artefacts age.  Anyone who has ever worked in the antiques business will tell you that age is a great modifier.



*Whatever that means. An, albeit, brief Google search for "Thibault Heimburger"  brings up a lot of links to Turin Shroud related sites - and not a lot else.  And adding the filter "-turin" brings up a lot of Turin Shroud related sites - and links to a (General Practitioner) doctor who may or may not be the same person...


----------



## Justin Swanton

Venusian Broon said:


> Don't worry about it - I need to spend a lot of my time on draft 5 as well as a number of other projects
> 
> You got me interested for a few hours, but I'm not in any position to really work out from the internet and the clamour of many voices, saying many things, the mystery of the Turin Shroud!!!
> 
> What is your favoured hypothesis for it?



Taking everything into account: the anatomical perfection, impossible for a statue from the middle ages, the details of the wounds - scourge marks that correspond to a Roman flagrum, the pollen grains that show the shroud spent considerable time in Anatolia and Palestine, the details that correspond to an authentic crucifixion (how would a mediaeval forger have known about that?), and so on, I'm personally convinced of its authenticity, i.e. it is the cloth that wrapped Christ's body in the tomb.

But how exactly was the image was formed? The nearest approach seems to be a burst of radiation from the body, but it's not as simple as that. Light travelling radially from a human body (like a light bulb) or unidirectionally (like a laser) would not form an image, just a darker blur or at best a silhouette. Furthermore, there is not actually an even gradation from dark to light in the image (I'm trusting an authority on this - can check up), just a lot of tiny dots of darkened fibril which are more numerous in darker areas and more spread out in lighter ones. A bit like halftone screens used in printing to give the illusion of different shades of grey. Presuming light or some kind of radiation formed the image, it was behaving in a very peculiar way. *Why *it behaved in that way? No idea.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Justin Swanton said:


> Taking everything into account: the anatomical perfection, impossible for a statue from the middle ages,



Have you ever looked at any sculptures from the medieval era?  Not all of them were stylised lumps.  People have been making anatomically perfect sculptures since before Christ.  Any decent forger would have known not to base his fake on a rubbish image.  Again the implication that people of the medieval period were untutored simpletons.  They may have been ignorant but they were not stupid.



Justin Swanton said:


> ...the details that correspond to an authentic crucifixion (how would a mediaeval forger have known about that?),



How do *you* know about that?  You read it somewhere.  So did he.



Justin Swanton said:


> and so on, I'm personally convinced of its authenticity, i.e. it is the cloth that wrapped Christ's body in the tomb.



No I don't think you are convinced at all - I think you have faith it is.  And there's no point in gainsaying faith.  It's a total waste of time. So I concede.  The Shroud of Turin is one of those thing science cannot explain.  Science can explain all sorts of things but if no-one listens to the explanation or possible alternative explanations, then there's no point is there?  Faith wins every time.


----------



## Cathbad

JunkMonkey said:


> Science can explain all sorts of things but if no-one listens to the explanation or possible alternative explanations, then there's no point is there? Faith wins every time.



That's the problem - not with religion, but with its practitioners.

The Christin religion can survive truth, even when that truth is discovered by science.  Which is why I've always been baffled by many Christian's resistance to science.


----------



## Brian G Turner

And...a friendly reminder that we don't discuss religion on chrons. Time for this discussion to move on, I think.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Fine by me. I know when I'm flogging a dead horse.


----------



## Cathbad

Brian Turner said:


> And...a friendly reminder that we don't discuss religion on chrons. Time for this discussion to move on, I think.



oops.  sowwy.


----------



## Cathbad

JunkMonkey said:


> Fine by me. I know when I'm flogging a dead horse.



That visual is... disturbing.


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> That visual is... disturbing.



I find the thought that we're getting a new Transformer film to be even more visually disturbing.


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> I find the thought that we're getting a new Transformer film to be even more visually disturbing.



WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?



Co-staring Rom The Space Knight .


----------



## JunkMonkey

Cathbad said:


> That visual is... disturbing.


 
Not as  disturbing as this, which I discovered on Wikipedia when I went to look up the origin of the phrase.:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Man_sitting_on_a_dead_horse_(1876_-_1884).jpg

A man sitting on a dead horse in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

WTPH?


----------



## JunkMonkey

Cathbad said:


> WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?




I don't know.  Maybe we should employ some scientists to explain:


----------



## Cathbad

JunkMonkey said:


> A man sitting on a dead horse in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.



~smh~

Worse thing about the pic, he looks like it's perfectly natural to take a rest sitting on the dead horse.


----------



## J Riff

I have some N. American 'medaeval' stuff here, and the talent was equal to anything today. Better. Even the kids could carve, because what else ya gonna do?? They had rock in hand more than people have cellphones today.


----------



## Venusian Broon

Cathbad said:


> oops.  sowwy.


Don't worry, I've been slapped down gently by a cassock in the past...should really be in the T&C for Chrons (@Brian Turner is it?????) but, hey, we rarely get all religious here..


----------



## tinkerdan

I think eventually science will enable us to explain everything.

I'm just not too sure that everyone will be on-board with that. We do love our mysteries and often the explanation sours the whole thing.

So I think that there will be things science won't explain [not that it can't(just won't)].

Re, I don't think science will go out of its way to explain why some clowns wear big red noses.


----------



## Cathbad

tinkerdan said:


> Re, I don't think science will go out of its way to explain why some clowns wear big red noses.



Dang it!  I WANNA KNOW!!!


----------



## Justin Swanton

tinkerdan said:


> Re, I don't think science will go out of its way to explain why some clowns wear big red noses.



That one's easy. I read a fascinating paper by Prof. J. J. Bruckenbach, Antiquities Department of the University of Toronto, on the subject. In Antiquity drunkeness was equated with jocularity. Starting with Cicero: _Inebriosus semper videtur ioculosus esse_, he analysed the Greco-roman attitude towards inebriation, namely that a drunken man is momentarily free of the cares of the world and hence is happy.

This outlook was remarked on by the early Christians. Augustine: _Quando inebriosus video homo iucundus video_. "When I see a drunk man I see a happy man." The Church's prohibition against overindulgence of alcohol eventually erased this admiration for inebriation from the popular imagination, but the clown - a comic and well-loved character - preserved the old mentality in the form of his red nose.



Spoiler



and BTW I made all that up.


----------



## Cathbad

Justin Swanton said:


> Spoiler


----------



## BAYLOR

Spoiler



and BTW I made all that up. 


[/QUOTE]


At some point Im going to have to do my Jakalope story.


----------



## dask

Vertigo said:


> The universe is all of space time so there is nothing for it to expand into. I refer you to @Stephen Palmer succinct explanation.
> 
> 
> The problem with it is that to understand the two dimensional model you must look at it in 3 dimensions so to understand the 3 dimensional equivalent you have to think of it in 4 dimensions which is something that we are not very good at. Or certainly I'm not. But what it means is space eventually comes back on itself; there is no edge. Another way to think of it is that it is not the edges of space that are expanding into something but space time itself that is expanding.
> 
> It's one of those horrible things a bit like Quantum Theory where they tend to say: "if you think you understand it then you don't!"



My problem is that Mr. Palmer's explanation may be a little too succinct. Is there a book for the layman that deals with this subject, what Charles Lamb calls the "shadowland of pre-existence"?


----------



## Ajid

It may be more accurate to say that space time is a property of the universe. But the post you're quoting is the best example. It is impossible for any of us to accurately visualise it and that's just something we have to accept.

If you were a 2d being on a sheet of paper and that paper was being folded in half you would't have any concept of what was happening as you survived only in 2 dimensions (well 3 if you include time which we never do for some strange reason, imagine a 3d tv that didn't exist in time. Maybe That's the ultimate con. I would have sold what I described, a tv that only exists in 3 dimensions. anyway i digress.)

There may be a book that gently introduces the concept but really once you get to the point where you know you'll never picture it correctly and you understand why you've got.


----------



## dask

"The universe is all of space and time so there is nothing for it to expand into." Okay, we can give an example to help illustrate it, but how do we know it's true? Is this a scientific fact accepted by the majority of theoretical physicists? Not arguing, just curious. The idea is not only hard to visualize but mind numbing if lingered over for too long. If you can't get something out of nothing, where did the post big bang nugget of all matter come from if nothing was surrounding it? Heck, how long was there nothing before the big bang occurred?


----------



## Cathbad

dask said:


> Heck, how long was there nothing before the big bang occurred?



And how many Big Bangs have there been?


----------



## dask

Cathbad said:


> And how many Big Bangs have there been?


I remember reading something just like this by Isaac Asimov in one of his F&SF essays. The idea kind of blew me away. Thought something like, why didn't I think of this before?


----------



## Ajid

dask said:


> "The universe is all of space and time so there is nothing for it to expand into." Okay, we can give an example to help illustrate it, but how do we know it's true? Is this a scientific fact accepted by the majority of theoretical physicists? Not arguing, just curious. The idea is not only hard to visualize but mind numbing if lingered over for too long. If you can't get something out of nothing, where did the post big bang nugget of all matter come from if nothing was surrounding it? Heck, how long was there nothing before the big bang occurred?



If I get some time later I will try to write up a more complete answer but for now it is probably easiesy to say it is the theory of best fit at the moment. A fair few observable facts fit into the theory Nicely. The red shift of distant galaxies for example. The issue comes as we know little of what happened prior to the universe being around the size of the planck length. In terms of somethig from nothing, the universe is most likely to have begun as an infinitesimally small singularity. By that really we mean that there was no size to it at all, size simply didn't exist as there was no x, y, or z axis to measure it upon. The sudden rate of expansion I'm sure you are aware was rqpid in the extreme.

In regards to the how long part. Well there was no time so that's another axis along which there would be no measurement.

A couple of things to think about.

All theoretical but based on good solid observations. The closest conditions to the beginning of the universe we believe to exist today are found at the centre of super massive black holes.

The transformation of energy into fundamental particles and quanta, the wave particles that effectivley make the Strong Weak and Electromagnetic forces
work is something we try to achieve with the LHC. Understanding these processes helps us understand a great deal more about the expansion of the early universe.

The Planck length is about about 1.6 *10^-35 m. Or a zero followed by a decimal point and another 34 zeros beforeyou get to the 16.


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> And how many Big Bangs have there been?



This is like that question of  how many licks does it the to get to the center of Tootsie Pop.  Answer:  The World may never know.


----------



## Ajid

It's turtles all the way down.


----------



## dask

The pre-big bang "infinitesimally small singularity" may be the ultimate multum in parvo but as it contains all the matter in creation (I guess) it at least has the superficial appearance of having to come from somewhere and since it was surrounded by nothing to begin with I'm still stuck on where did it come from? I just can't believe (but don't have the training to deny) it came from nothing. My head hurts, I'm going to Name The Film thread now.


----------



## Venusian Broon

dask said:


> The pre-big bang "infinitesimally small singularity" may be the ultimate multum in parvo but as it contains all the matter in creation (I guess) it at least has the superficial appearance of having to come from somewhere and since it was surrounded by nothing to begin with I'm still stuck on where did it come from? I just can't believe (but don't have the training to deny) it came from nothing. My head hurts, I'm going to Name The Film thread now.



That's not really the issue - I mean we know, or at least hypothesis and use in loads of theories, that particles pop in and out of existence in the froth that is that the quantum vacuum. That's 'something for nothing' (Actually it's energy converting into matter - but if you can believe that, then just imagine that the universe was created by a huge instability of energy that then found a way of converting itself into a bit of matter too...)

No the issue is really that right now we can only speculate, angels on the heads of pins style, on what might have occurred before the big bang. We have no idea - so unless evidence of some sort can be found for events before the big bang (whatever that means, because spacetime should have come into existence at that moment, so really there was no 'before' in the sense of our understanding.)

 So saying that the universe 'came from nothing' is purely your belief. Remember too that this belief based on what happens in our universe - law of conservation of energy, momentum, charge etc.... So we assume that it _might_ be the same for the totality of everything...yet, the creation of the whole lot took place in a larger arena - who knows what on earth laws and conditions existed at that point?


----------



## dask

Venusian Broon said:


> That's not really the issue - I mean we know, or at least hypothesis and use in loads of theories, that particles pop in and out of existence in the froth that is that the quantum vacuum. That's 'something for nothing' (Actually it's energy converting into matter - but if you can believe that, then just imagine that the universe was created by a huge instability of energy that then found a way of converting itself into a bit of matter too...)
> 
> No the issue is really that right now we can only speculate, angels on the heads of pins style, on what might have occurred before the big bang. We have no idea - so unless evidence of some sort can be found for events before the big bang (whatever that means, because spacetime should have come into existence at that moment, so really there was no 'before' in the sense of our understanding.)
> 
> So saying that the universe 'came from nothing' is purely your belief. Remember too that this belief based on what happens in our universe - law of conservation of energy, momentum, charge etc.... So we assume that it _might_ be the same for the totality of everything...yet, the creation of the whole lot took place in a larger arena - who knows what on earth laws and conditions existed at that point?


Extremely interesting, especially the quantum froth. Thank you. Of course I'm wondering if the big bang was the result of an "instability of energy" where did the energy come from and what caused it to  be unstable?

Just to be clear: "So saying that the universe 'came from nothing' is purely your belief" is not my belief and I do not recall ever saying it was.


----------



## Cathbad

dask said:


> Just to be clear: "So saying that the universe 'came from nothing' is purely your belief" is not my belief and I do not recall ever saying it was.



But, there had to be a beginning.  Ergo, it did have to "come from nothing".  (?)

Mind boggling.


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> But, there had to be a beginning.  Ergo, it did have to "come from nothing".  (?)
> 
> Mind boggling.



It may be that all of this has happened before for all we know.


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> It may be that all of this has happened before for all we know.



Hmmm.... ~deja vu~ ...have you said that before??


----------



## Ajid

We are talking of a point in time when the universe was a minute fraction of a second old and energy levels were such that we can only assume that at this point superunification was in place.

The truth is we have no idea. I think the idea of an instability of energy is probably the closest we can come at this point to presenting an answer. Anything from there on out is highly theoretical.

At this point the where did the energy come from question does not have a simple answer.

As venusian broon has said this is all speculation. At this point your mind is really free to wonder.

Maybe it was an effect of something occuring in dimensions we are not aware of. In that case the term effect maybe a little confusing. Our understanding of time and space in this universe means we tend to think of things as cause and effect but this may not be the case. Even within the dimensions we do observe the order in which things happen depends on where you're observing from.

But that theory is as valid as anyother at this point.

An equally valid theory maybe that the universe is the result of an accounting error by a very tired accountat at month end on some other plain of existence.

Edit: Did I say at this point enough?


----------



## Venusian Broon

dask said:


> Just to be clear: "So saying that the universe 'came from nothing' is purely your belief" is not my belief and I do not recall ever saying it was.



Sorry, I dashed off the reply quickly - but just meant it in the general sense of anyone who believes that, not that you specifically believe that. In fact you said the opposite, that you _can't _believe it.


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> Hmmm.... ~deja vu~ ...have you said that before??



Living again this same life ?  A pretty unsettling possibility isn't it?


----------



## BAYLOR

Thats just it , I don' want to live this exact exact life over again.

I have many regret and things I wish I could have done differently.  One moment in particular that I wish I could have back   I walked away from the woman who was I think was the one for me . How do  know?  I just know that's all. If all of this repeat, I won't get to change that one.


----------



## Cathbad

BAYLOR said:


> Thats just it , I don' want to live this exact exact life over again.
> 
> I have many regret and things I wish I could do differently.  One moment in particular that I wish I could have back   I walked away from the woman who was I think was the one for me . How do  know?  I just know that's all. If all of this repast I won't get to change that one.



Ditto, my friend.


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> Ditto, my friend.



If  only we could be granted a split second or more to see the alternative and act on them, That at least would be solace . Who knows? maybe we can actually change certain things the next time around.


----------



## dask

Venusian Broon said:


> Sorry, I dashed off the reply quickly - but just meant it in the general sense of anyone who believes that, not that you specifically believe that. In fact you said the opposite, that you _can't _believe it.


I thought you might have been using the editorial "you" but my wife was nagging me to hurry up so the way I had my response worded in my head didn't make its way onto the keyboard. Sorry about that but when you gotta go you gotta go.


----------



## LordOfWizards

Dave said:


> Okay, when you accidentally drop a piece of toast why does it always fall with the buttered side down?



I am fascinated by this thread so far. I'd like you all to know about my Anti-Gravity device: Toast always lands buttered side down, and cats always land on their feet, so strap a piece of toast buttered side up to the bottom of a cat, and there you have it! Anti-Gravity! (or maybe the cat would just keep spinning in the air?)


----------



## Cathbad

I'd test it...

...but I'm afraid of Mr. Whiskers.


----------



## JunkMonkey

No need for cats as discussed in this ancient article I wrote in the early Cretaceous era of the Internet:

Double Butter Theory


----------



## Dave

Does it work with margarine? 

Even if it is "I can't tell it's not butter?"


----------



## Cathbad

JunkMonkey said:


> Double Butter Theory


----------



## BAYLOR

LordOfWizards said:


> I am fascinated by this thread so far. I'd like you all to know about my Anti-Gravity device: Toast always lands buttered side down, and cats always land on their feet, so strap a piece of toast buttered side up to the bottom of a cat, and there you have it! Anti-Gravity! (or maybe the cat would just keep spinning in the air?)



You should patent it, you'd  make millions. it would be very at popular parties .


----------



## Cathbad

Scientists claim to have discover what existed BEFORE the beginning of the universe | Physics-Astronomy​


----------



## Parson

Interesting idea, might be right but it's a deduction not a true discovery.


----------



## Cathbad

Yeah, I think it sounded ...odd.


----------



## Stewart Hotston

I'd like to know where the spare earbuds for my earphones go. I'd like to know why it's apparently so easy to understand the universe - as in, why is any of it explicable at all?

I'd also like to know why, when I don't eat Chocolate I don't lose weight but when I just look at it, my hips expand at the speed of sound. I'd also like to know why my mate ned can eat as much as he likes without getting all fat, the git.

Finally, I'd like to know why gravity and QM can't be unified when both give uncannily accurate descriptions of the universe.


----------



## LordOfWizards

Cathbad said:


> Scientists claim to have discover what existed BEFORE the beginning of the universe | Physics-Astronomy​



Camelot! .......... Camelot! ............Camelot(s)!  
~Shrugs~ "It's only a model."

There's a paragraph in there when he starts to talk about "quantum gravity" (a dubious concept in itself). Then he claims from the same source  "there is a minimum length below which space does not exist." What he's left out is that we cannot possibly hope to measure such things (I believe he is alluding to the Planck scale) with our current technology, and not likely anything in the near future, and in fact Science does not know why gravity exists. (Another thing science can not explain, but only measure).


----------



## LordOfWizards

Stewart Hotston said:


> I'd like to know where the spare earbuds for my earphones go.


 Isn't that why they invented black holes??  


Incidentally, if you find a way in, Could you grab all the keys I've lost, and my old cellphones?


----------



## Stewart Hotston

@LordOfWizards there is definitely a theory beyond QM AND General Relativity. We just don't have a decent candidate for it right now. As it stands, most physicists in the right part of the field agree that there is 'nothing' that exists in a discrete fashion at lengths shorter than the Planck length. It's not so much that there's nothing, there's just nothing discrete. Or so our best mathematical models imply at this point. I think the paper is a nice attempt to seek out an alternative to a system that requires a singularity (and nature abhors singularities) in order for it to work but it is likely to pass by as little more than a footnote in our overall explorations of this part of physics.

As for your old cellphones...I suspect they're hiding out inside my lost socks.


----------



## J Riff

There are infinite universes much, much, smaller than this one. So far they are too small to find, that's all, but science should keep looking.
There are many strange unexplainable laws. If you swipe a big handful of napkins at McDonalds - you WILL spill more stuff that needs wiping up.


----------



## BAYLOR

Cathbad said:


> Scientists claim to have discover what existed BEFORE the beginning of the universe | Physics-Astronomy​



An echo of a previous universe?


----------



## Parson

J Riff said:


> There are many strange unexplainable laws. If you swipe a big handful of napkins at McDonalds - you WILL spill more stuff that needs wiping up.



This is not unexplainable if you go to McDonalds with a car full of grandkids.


----------



## LordOfWizards

Stewart Hotston said:


> @LordOfWizards there is definitely a theory beyond QM AND General Relativity.


 Sure! I only said that Quantum gravity was a "dubious concept" (meaning hard to prove). And I Definitely never said anything to refute* General relativity. *Einstein is one of my all time heroes. Relativity is a (very accurate) mathematical model of how gravity behaves. It doesn't explain_ why_ gravity exists.


----------



## Stewart Hotston

I think we have reasonable grounds for why each of the four forces exist in a proximate sense (i.e. gravity is how the fabric of spacetime relates to itself, hence why it's the weakest force when it comes to component elements but, at the scale of the visible universe is the dominating force).

However, why in an ultimate sense? Not at all, but then I don't think good science asks for the 'meaning' of why things are, it's simply trying to describe what it encounters and explain how the mechanisms of those experiences function. It's a small t truth rather than a big t truth.

For both QM and GR, they are incomplete theories. It used to be dismissed that they covered different areas or that their influence wasn't meaningful at the human scale (a lazy way to say, I'm frying eggs over here, so stop bothering me unless it means I can't fry eggs anymore). However the fact that we can point to an increasingly large set of macro-quantum effects (such as birds navigational systems, human smell to name my favourite two) and that we now know that mass is 'communicated' via fundamental particles means that the systems must, eventually, give way to a more complete theory that can account for the phenomena that both of these describe in their individual spheres.

as for things science can't explain - see this as to just one thing science will never explain:


----------



## Cathbad

Stewart Hotston said:


> as for things science can't explain - see this as to just one thing science will never explain:



I remember seeing this when it was first shown, many years ago!  (Yeah, I'm old...)


----------



## LordOfWizards

Cathbad said:


> I remember seeing this when it was first shown, many years ago!  (Yeah, I'm old...)


Yes, but are you your own Grandpa? 

As to whether science can explain why things happen, there are I'm quite sure, hundreds if not thousands of examples. Here's one: Sorry, um, 4:
Why is the sky blue?

Why do cats purr? 

Why are most trees green?

And here's one I've often wondered: Why do the planets rotate in the same plane?
answer from here:



> Rings and disks are common in astronomy. When a cloud collapses, the conservation of angular momentum amplifies any initial tiny spin of the cloud. As the cloud spins faster and faster, it collapses into a disk, which is the maximal balance between gravitational collapse and centrifugal force created by rapid spin. The result is the coplanar planets, the thin disks of spiral galaxies, and the accretion disks around black holes


----------



## Brian G Turner

Speaking of things science can't explain, there are various energy bursts in the universe we cannot yet explain. Here's a recent article about some of them: Mystery cosmic objects light up in X-ray then go dim in an hour


----------



## LordOfWizards

And speaking of things we're trying to explain, He is some recent new research (including apparatus) that is looking into Dark Matter:

World's Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector Moves Forward


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Stewart Hotston said:


> However the fact that we can point to an increasingly large set of macro-quantum effects (such as birds navigational systems, human smell to name my favourite two)



Do you think maybe that "an increasingly large set of macroscopic world effects that have their source in quantum, i.e. microscopic world effects" might be a better way of putting it? Just a thought.


----------



## LordOfWizards

Stephen Palmer said:


> Do you think maybe that "an increasingly large set of macroscopic world effects that have their source in quantum, i.e. microscopic world effects" might be a better way of putting it? Just a thought.



From here:
"At the top of your nasal passages behind your nose, there is a patch of special neurons about the size of a postage stamp. These neurons are unique in that they are out in the open where they can come into contact with the air. They have hair-like projections called cilia that increase their surface area. An odor molecule binds to these cilia to trigger the neuron and cause you to perceive a smell."

Could someone explain to me how human's sense of smell is due to anything in the Quantum science world? (It seems to me it is all about molecules interacting with neurons), and with the birds, I'm not clear as to which you are referring: either migratory or sensory (i.e why do they migrate, why do they fly in formations or flocks, or some internal directional sensory capability). Again, I would be very interested to hear about how Quantum theory explains any of those things.

Please don't get me wrong, I LOVE science, and I love learning new things and the constant sense of wonder and awe I get from studying the world and the cosmos. I just don't want to miss anything and not have a complete picture of what science agrees upon.


----------



## Stephen Palmer

Well, I was just curious as what the reply would be - no offence intended. My experience (as a physicist and skeptic) is that far too many people, mostly hippies and assorted sundries, use "quantum" to explain stuff that either they don't understand or isn't yet understood. (I don't put you in that bracket.) The other reason I replied was that when I was researching for _No Grave For A Fox_ I stumbled upon some fascinating recent discoveries about magneto-reception, one explanation of which relates to the spin on an electron. But, anyway… quantum microscopic, causal macroscopic


----------



## Stewart Hotston

@Stephen Palmer maybe. The choice of words was because it is a quantum effect at the macro-level. i.e. while still far away from an actual cat in a box, they are effects that are genuinely macroscale (in the sense that they aren't microscale effects that can't be observed to have an impact at scales larger than we would commonly say was the barrier at which quantum effects are drowned by noise).

@LordOfWizards - see here for a layman's explanation of how QM is involved in something as basic as smell: 

How do you smell? | Latest Features | physics.org

for birds, this isn't a layman's paper but there you go: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.3725.pdf


----------



## Stephen Palmer

You can see quantum effects on the macroscopic scale, but at temperatures slightly above absolute zero.


----------



## Stewart Hotston

true enough


----------



## LordOfWizards

Stewart Hotston said:


> @LordOfWizards - see here for a layman's explanation of how QM is involved in something as basic as smell:
> 
> How do you smell? | Latest Features | physics.org
> 
> for birds, this isn't a layman's paper but there you go: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.3725.pdf



I don't necessarily need "layman's" papers. I have taken several post graduate level Physics classes, but thank you. The "How do you smell" article was quite adequate. Really, what it appears like to me, is that Quantum Science is involved in each of these cases. In the Olfactory category, it has to do with electron tunneling and the ability of molecular frequencies to alter the path of the "normal" tunneling that goes on. Essentially turning the olfactory mechanism into a "spectroscope" (good explanation).

In the case of the birds, we are talking about a kind of "Magnetoreception" that your link suggests the bird's "receptors" are managing to maintain a quantum coherence by a "Radical Pair" (spatially-separated pair of electron spins) which then allows them to detect relatively minute magnetic field lines such as are found in Earth's atmosphere. Interesting. What the paper did not say, which I found in another place was "According to one model, cryptochrome, (an animal protein molecule that is light sensitive) when exposed to _blue light_, becomes activated to form a pair of radicals (molecules with a single unpaired electron) where the spins of the two unpaired electrons are correlated". So, it seems (perhaps not in all cases) that the mechanism is located very near the bird's eye, and is stimulated by light of a specific frequency.

Note: I was not in the least offended by anything either Stephen or Stewart has said. Perhaps I should not have quoted your post Stephen, as I actually meant to speak with Stewart. Sorry for any confusion.


----------



## Stewart Hotston

No worries about the layman stuff - never quite sure of people's technical background


----------



## Stephen Palmer

The new research on magneto-reception and bird migration, foxes abilities to hunt (they nearly always pounce in a N-S direction iirc) etc is fascinating. Recommended even if you're not researching a novel.


----------



## JunkMonkey

I just want to know why wet carpets smell SO AWFUL!  How can something wet and at floor level stink out a whole room?  There has to be research grant in this...


----------



## BAYLOR

JunkMonkey said:


> I just want to know why wet carpets smell SO AWFUL!  How can something wet and at floor level stink out a whole room?  There has to be research grant in this...



I agree ,   a scientific study of why wet carpets smell is worthy of a research grant.


----------



## Parson

Just count me out of actually nosing into the research.


----------



## Dave

Wet dogs smell worse than carpets!

As an answer, maybe the chemicals that cause the smells need to be in a hydrated form to be detected.


----------



## JunkMonkey

Dave said:


> Wet dogs smell worse than carpets!
> 
> As an answer, maybe the chemicals that cause the smells need to be in a hydrated form to be detected.



Wet carpets are usually cold.  A hot cup of coffee will fill the room with coffee smell.  A cold cup of coffee doesn't.  So why does cold wet carpet's noxious punge become so pervasive? so quickly? 

I'd hate to think what a_ hot_ wet carpet smells like.


----------



## LordOfWizards

JunkMonkey said:


> Wet carpets are usually cold.  A hot cup of coffee will fill the room with coffee smell.  A cold cup of coffee doesn't.  So why does cold wet carpet's noxious punge become so pervasive? so quickly?
> 
> I'd hate to think what a_ hot_ wet carpet smells like.



JM, I think you've solved the mystery of _dark matter_. A carpet in space has no smell, but it can take on mass from all of the smelly gases out there. So this is where all of the rotational inertia within galaxies comes from. There are trillions of wet carpets out there, and because they are cold, we can't detect them with our radio telescopes. _Viola! Eureka! Long live the law of conversation!_


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## JunkMonkey

Actually (in the interests of science) I have found out what a hot wet carpet smells like after I dragged the offending article into my drying room turned up the heat, put the dehumidifier to maximum, and locked the door.

The smell can only be described as 'Worse'.

But luckily with a short half life.


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## LordOfWizards

Stephen Palmer said:


> The new research on magneto-reception and bird migration, foxes abilities to hunt (they nearly always pounce in a N-S direction iirc) etc is fascinating. Recommended even if you're not researching a novel.



Hey Stephen, I was thinking about this a bit (the fox part), and I'm wondering if there could be a 'macroscopic' explanation, such as the fox has found to have more luck by pouncing in this way because his shadow does not betray his presence to the prey when it aligns itself with the N-S direction? Just a thought.


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## LordOfWizards

JunkMonkey said:


> Actually (in the interests of science) I have found out what a hot wet carpet smells like after I dragged the offending article into my drying room turned up the heat, put the dehumidifier to maximum, and locked the door.
> 
> The smell can only be described as 'Worse'.



Perhaps you could try soaking the carpet in hot Coffee??


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## Cathbad

LordOfWizards said:


> Perhaps you could try soaking the carpet in hot Coffee??



I do that quite regularly!


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## Mirannan

Stephen Palmer said:


> You can see quantum effects on the macroscopic scale, but at temperatures slightly above absolute zero.



I disagree about the second part of your statement. Superconductivity is a quantum effect, and the record temperature for that is currently 258K. Which is occasionally experienced outdoors in the UK, and is certainly achievable in a domestic freezer.

Web reference:

A Short-Lived Superconductivity Record of 258K


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## Stephen Palmer

LordOfWizards said:


> Hey Stephen, I was thinking about this a bit (the fox part), and I'm wondering if there could be a 'macroscopic' explanation, such as the fox has found to have more luck by pouncing in this way because his shadow does not betray his presence to the prey when it aligns itself with the N-S direction? Just a thought.



mmm… not sure that would work in the morning or evening. The film I saw was of foxes finding prey beneath snow. But anyway, the magneto-reception explanation is a hypothesis, and not yet proven. Fascinating area though.


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## JunkMonkey

Stephen Palmer said:


> mmm… not sure that would work in the morning or evening.



It would if their prey had terrible peripheral vision but (in the Northern Hemisphere) it would be a disadvantage to sneak up behind something from the south in winter.  The sun would be behind you, and at a high latitudes in winter, very long.  Sneaking from the north however would reduce the risk of your shadow giving the game away as your shadow would be behind you and less likely to spook the meal.

Even up here (half way up Scotland) the days get short in winter.  Anything that increases the chances of maximising daytime hunting would, I suspect, bestow a very rapidly spread evolutionary advantage.


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## mosaix

JunkMonkey said:


> It would if their prey had terrible peripheral vision but (in the Northern Hemisphere) it would be a disadvantage to sneak up behind something from the south in winter.  The sun would be behind you, and at a high latitudes in winter, very long.  Sneaking from the north however would reduce the risk of your shadow giving the game away as your shadow would be behind you and less likely to spook the meal.
> 
> Even up here (half way up Scotland) the days get short in winter.  Anything that increases the chances of maximising daytime hunting would, I suspect, bestow a very rapidly spread evolutionary advantage.



Every example I've seen of this shows the fox seeking prey that is hidden under deep snow.


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## JunkMonkey

Snow isn't opaque.


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## JunkMonkey

Been thinking about this.  

I'm assuming that the fox is hunting by sight, so it looking for movement beneath the snow - for small moving shadows cast in a raking light.  If the fox was facing side-on to the sun, any shadows caused by movement beneath the snow would appear as horizontal lines on the bright snow's surface.  This would tell the fox the angle (in relation to it's line of sight) of the thing casting the shadow but _not how far away it was_.  Having spotted a potential prey like this, it would make sense for the fox to circle round till it is facing into the sun. with the prey in front of it. Facing south, the shadows of prey would appear shorter, but, with the sun in sight and other shadows as a guide, it would be easier to triangulate its distance away for the final jump.

In the Antarctic the fox would, obviously, be better off facing north for its final attack.


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## LordOfWizards

JunkMonkey said:


> Snow isn't opaque.


 Wouldn't that depend on the depth/and or other snow conditions? If it were fresh fallen snow it could be very thick and completely cover the prey's dwelling entrance. On the other hand, tracks in the snow would make the fox's work much easier. @Stephen Palmer , @mosaix is there a link you could share to this information? Is it all written in books only?


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## LordOfWizards

Sorry for being lazy. I found it: Foxes use the Earth’s magnetic field as a targeting system - Not Exactly Rocket Science

The article says the fox is using it's ears along with the hypothesized targeting system.


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## LordOfWizards




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## BAYLOR

LordOfWizards said:


> Sorry for being lazy. I found it: Foxes use the Earth’s magnetic field as a targeting system - Not Exactly Rocket Science
> 
> The article says the fox is using it's ears along with the hypothesized targeting system.



Unlike humans, animals are in tune with the earth around them. If we were as in tune and  aware, perhaps we might treat this world alot better then we do?


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## Stewart Hotston

As with many things I guess, it's not all one thing nor another but a more nuanced, complex, system


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## Stephen Palmer

I suspect it very likely is a combination of factors. The fox thing is debatable, for sure. More defined is birds' use during migration, which still has much to be explained.


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## BAYLOR

That which is  below the subatomic level.


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## BAYLOR

Unexpected  election results?


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## RJM Corbet

Science can only explain 4 per cent


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## BAYLOR

RJM Corbet said:


> Science can only explain 4 per cent



That much?


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## RJM Corbet

Let's say: 96 per cent of 'reality' cannot be explained by the standard model


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## BAYLOR

RJM Corbet said:


> Let's say: 96 per cent of 'reality' cannot be explained by the standard model



That, I can agree with.


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## BAYLOR

What beyond the universe we know?


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## BAYLOR

Whats at the exact center of a black hole?


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## Mirannan

BAYLOR said:


> Whats at the exact center of a black hole?



The real answer, by current physics? Unknown and unknowable. Theoretical predictions can't be tested, because observing it is impossible. IIRC, one can't even observe the central region from inside the hole, because the light that would carry the information can't get to you; space is one-way.

However, what (again, according to theory) can be said is that physics breaks down sufficiently near the centre; meaning something close to a Planck length from the absolute centre, because (among other phenomena) space breaks down into a random foam because of Heisenberg uncertainty.


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## RJM Corbet

Yes. It breaks down at singularity: speed-of-light = infinite mass/time? Speed of MIND is instant. Imo. But that's just me. Better not start


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## J Riff

Next up: White holes..*


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## BAYLOR

J Riff said:


> Next up: White holes..*



But do they actually exist?


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## J Riff

No idea. Probably, one would assume.... and blue. And nice, sort of greenish holes. And what about a lovely rainbow hole or is that asking too much? )


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## BAYLOR

J Riff said:


> No idea. Probably, one would assume.... and blue. And nice, sort of greenish holes. And what about a lovely rainbow hole or is that asking too much? )



Okay,  lets suppose that it does exist and it's a probable  exit point from a Blackhole . Would it be to  another universe perhaps?  Maybe into an antimatter universe …. oh,  now there's a unpleasant  thought. You travel down Blackhole and emerge from a White Hole into an antimatter universe and the end result,  instant annihilation .


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## BAYLOR

Wandering Black holes.


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