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#231
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On 04/10/2018 07:38, Paul Schlyter wrote:
On Tue, 02 Oct 2018 07:01:20 -0600, Chris L Peterson wrote: You sound like a physicist from the late 1800's. Back then, physics was believed to be understood almost completely. Only a few minor details needed to be clarified. However, those "minor details" soon expanded into relativity and QM, making physics quite different compared to earlier... Back then we lacked the knowledge to know what knowledge we lacked. That doesn't appear to be the case anymore. We have a good understanding of where the holes in our knowledge are, and we have good ideas about the sort of things that are likely to fill them. And then every now and then you still get a surprise like high temperature superconductors (though still pretty cold) and the discovery of several new allotropes of carbon - the latter having been sat waiting to be discovered since the first use of graphite or soot for writing. We don't know what we don't know and is out there waiting to be found. If you would live for another 100-200 years I think you'd become quite surprised about the development in physics more than once. The current situation is really the same as the situation 150 years ago: now, as well as back then, we don't clearly see the holes in our knowledge. In the future, we'll be able to see it more clearly - but of course it is always easier to be wiser after the fact... We are about due for a paradigm shift in the next hundred years or so. It just takes that one clever experiment that refutes present established theory to open an entire new branch of physics. Science is a game of successive approximation to reality with there always being scope for a better more comprehensive theory to come along later that includes all our present knowledge as a weak field limiting case. -- Regards, Martin Brown |
#232
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Thu, 04 Oct 2018 08:38:08 +0200, Paul Schlyter
wrote: On Tue, 02 Oct 2018 07:01:20 -0600, Chris L Peterson wrote: You sound like a physicist from the late 1800's. Back then, physics was believed to be understood almost completely. Only a few minor details needed to be clarified. However, those "minor details" soon expanded into relativity and QM, making physics quite different compared to earlier... Back then we lacked the knowledge to know what knowledge we lacked. That doesn't appear to be the case anymore. We have a good understanding of where the holes in our knowledge are, and we have good ideas about the sort of things that are likely to fill them. If you would live for another 100-200 years I think you'd become quite surprised about the development in physics more than once. We'll see. But I don't think our core understanding of physics is going to look all that different in a couple of centuries. Or ever. |
#233
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 11:19:16 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote: Back then we lacked the knowledge to know what knowledge we lacked. That doesn't appear to be the case anymore. We have a good understanding of where the holes in our knowledge are, and we have good ideas about the sort of things that are likely to fill them. And then every now and then you still get a surprise like high temperature superconductors (though still pretty cold) and the discovery of several new allotropes of carbon - the latter having been sat waiting to be discovered since the first use of graphite or soot for writing. Yeah, but those don't really surprise anybody. We almost immediately understand them in the context of the core physics we already know. In essence, we understand how nature works pretty well. That's unlikely to change. The "surprises" are just our failure to recognize consequences of what we know. |
#234
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On 04/10/2018 14:18, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 11:19:16 +0100, Martin Brown wrote: Back then we lacked the knowledge to know what knowledge we lacked. That doesn't appear to be the case anymore. We have a good understanding of where the holes in our knowledge are, and we have good ideas about the sort of things that are likely to fill them. And then every now and then you still get a surprise like high temperature superconductors (though still pretty cold) and the discovery of several new allotropes of carbon - the latter having been sat waiting to be discovered since the first use of graphite or soot for writing. Yeah, but those don't really surprise anybody. We almost immediately understand them in the context of the core physics we already know. High temperature superconductors did at least for a while and there is still no good theoretical upper bound on how hot a superconductor can work. Apparently simple problems can still be tricky to solve. In essence, we understand how nature works pretty well. That's unlikely to change. The "surprises" are just our failure to recognize consequences of what we know. Fine until we actually detect a dark matter particle and it turns out to be nothing like what any of the theorists have predicted. You are sounding so like a nineteenth century physicist that it is unbelievable. -- Regards, Martin Brown |
#235
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
The question the Pope put to Galileo would have the same difficulties today for those terrified of the question as it did back then. Unlike those who imagine there was some doctrinal necessity of a Sun centered system (although Galileo did try to retrofit observations into Biblical texts), those who are intelligent enough would isolate the main point as technical.
The system for astronomical predictions was based on Ptolemy's system where the Sun moved through the Zodiac so that the resolution of direct/retrogrades was meant to fit with this system of reckoning - ". . . the ancient hypotheses clearly fail to account for certain important matters. For example, they do not comprehend the causes of the numbers, extents and durations of the retrogradations and of their agreeing so well with the position and mean motion of the sun. Copernicus alone gives an explanation to those things that provoke astonishment among other astronomers, thus destroying the source of astonishment, which lies in the ignorance of the causes." 1596, Mysterium Cosmographicum, Kepler The empiricists having been living off the anti-denominational Christian sentiment when only now, using contemporary imaging, can the stand-off be resolved . The answer is no, predictive astronomy does not mesh with proof of the Earth's daily and annual motions insofar as the resolution of direct/retrogrades for Mercury and Venus require a stationary and central Sun for that purpose - https://www.popastro.com/images/plan...ary%202012.jpg Unlike the late 16th and early 17th century, few would have understood the quandary and even less people today. For my part the illusory loops of the slower moving planets further from the Sun than the Earth contrasted with the actual loops (shown above) would be at the heart of astronomy. |
#236
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Thursday, October 4, 2018 at 3:55:31 AM UTC-6, Martin Brown wrote:
On 04/10/2018 07:24, Paul Schlyter wrote: On Tue, 2 Oct 2018 14:09:34 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel wrote: Less, but not zero.Â* You have NO idea how much less prevents life and neither do I, so this is just yammering. Neither do you have any idea about it. Actually, I do. The fraction of heavy elements in the human body are in parts per million, so a star's metallicity of 20% present value is QUITE sufficient. So you have no basis whatsoever to claim it is "almost certain" such civilization will form So you are dead wrong ... again. and succeed in interstellar travel. So you believe that, given a thousand years or so, we won't? How pessimistic of you! It is just fantasies and wishful thinking from you. Nope. It is your pessimism and refusal to really THINK about what we now know about the universe that clouds your judgment, The "law of big numbers" doesn't help you here since there are too many unknown and possibly extremely small numbers involved. But WE ARE HERE. No Law og Large NUMBERS needed to project our future, provided one isn't an abject pessimist with zero hope of any future at all. Since the biggest stars burn out the fastest I think that locally a few places may have been favoured with high metallicity very early on and you only need enough to make a few planets here and there to get going. Indeed. The question is did they create heavy elements like Type Ia supernovae do in our era. But finding a galaxy 11 billion years old with 20% the metallicity of our sun is promising. We don't need all that much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compos...ositio n_list But the early universe was a much more violent place than today and things closer together so any developing life would be more likely to get zapped and reset by a close supernova or merging black hole pair. But they were all gone in less than a billion years. There were big galaxies with metals 11 billion years ago. Give them 5 billion years to develop to our level, that means any such civilization would be 6 billion years ahead of ours. So you believe only scientists can have new ideas?Â* You DO realize that some SF authors ARE scientists, don't you? These are by now quite old ideas. Yes, SF ages too as time passes. Some of it ages quite well. When Kubrick flat imaging tablet devices for watching TV in 2001 the idea was ridiculous but today they are everywhere likewise for "communicators" in Star Trek. Partly I think because the engineers and scientists who grew up watching these programs thought they were cool ideas and tried to make them in reality. However, wild hypotheses are definitely "almost certain" to be true. Dream on, and get back if and when solid evidence for the existence of these phenomena appears. And note that science fiction is not science fact. Nobody but you is trying to bring the topic to actual fact. That is a straw-man argument, which you regularly try to do. Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." However much you wish to make a wormhole it isn't going to happen without a heck of a lot of energy Maybe, maybe not. The Alcubierre metric requires humongus energy, but other metrics (e.g., the Natario metric) require much, much less. and some very exotic matter. True. However, there is some hope that "negative energy" can be achieved in a relative manner, e.g., via the Casimir effect. And even if you could make one its stability and unwelcome tendency to spagettify things near it is an open question. Having vision is easy, you just fantasize. Making it actually happen is much much harder. Again you are trying to foist another straw-man argument on me :-) Chances are that any civilisation that has been around for so long will be unrecognisable to us - we could even be living inside one of their computer simulations of universes. Computer, end program? Believing doesn't make it true. It just means that believers will stick to what they think they know in the face of all evidence to the contrary That's YOUR definition of believing. Mine is that which is not refuted by solid evidence. (even to the extent of being burnt at the stake as a heretic - popular with the two most prominent brands of Christianity in the middle ages). Jan Hus, a Catholic priest, was burned at the stake for heresy. A hundred years later Martin Luther found out about him and said, "We were all Husians and didn't know it. It comes down to how much vision you have vs. how big a pessimist you are. And in what way could VISION alone give us knowledge? It gives us possibilities, and statistics gives us probabilities. Show me a hyper advanced space faring civilisation or a signal from one and I will be the first to agree that they exist. Until that time they are at best a figment of your imagination. I am inclined to think that the energetics and timescales for interstellar travel are so great that very few if any civilisations ever expand beyond the confines of their own solar system. Space is big - really really big. HHGG http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/33085.html All we need is an Infinite Improbability Drive :-) Without any solid base, you are. It is easy to get caught up in wishful thinking. But even a visionary must distinguish what we know from what we merely believe, or else his visions will at some stage fall flat to the ground. No they can persist in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. I'll be the first to recant if you present solid evidence that no advanced civilization exists or that travel from one place to another faster than light can get there is impossible. Why not?Â* Dreamers make reality happen.Â* Pessimists just sit around moping. Nope. Realists are those who make reality happen. Dreamers just dream, and when one dream fails they switch to another dream. To make things happen you must be careful about distinguish speculation from knowledge.. Dreamers and creative people can think of things but it takes engineers and scientists to make something that will actually work. As YOU pointed out above, those who believed the dreamers made cell phones happen. Of course, railroads don't happen until it's time to railroad. But regarding extraterrestrial civilizations we humans cannot make that happen. It either has happened or has not happened and we cannot do anything about that. Your dreams can never create extraterrestrial civilizations billions of years into the past. If there was one they would probably be so abstract by now that we wouldn't recognise them anyway. They would almost certainly have made the transition to being a self improving AI singularity. Would they? With billions of years of self-improvement, wouldn't that include a highly-developed sense of responsibility to less developed civilizations? Particularly, if developing civilizations have a tendency toward self-destruction as some here have asserted. Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." When you talk about extraterrestrial life, don't you mean real life in the real universe and not just your fantasies and wishes? I believe in ET.Â* Why wouldn't you? I consider it possible that they exist. But I'm not expecting to see LGMs shopping in Tesco's any time soon. Neither am I. No, I'm a realist. No, you're a mope-around.Â* And you cannot possibly be a "realist" since you admit that we don't know. The reality **is** that we don't know... I think the evidence is tilting towards the idea that simple life might be more common than we thought but unless and until we find an independent occurrence on Mars, Enceledus or Europa there is no evidence one way or the other. It is all about belief in the absence of evidence. Yes, but it is MUCH more desirable to be an optimist rather than a pessimist. So you admit that calling yourself a realist is just as nonsensical as my calling myself a visionary :-)) Calling yourself a visionary is clarifying, since it says you are talking about your visions, not about reality. And, no, your visions will never be able to create extraterrestrial civilizations billions of years into the past. I never said anything about creating ET. You're blathering straw-man nonsense again. Chances are they died with their star anyway. Interstellar travel for life forms is in the seriously too difficult category. Interplanetary travel for humans is still very very tough with only the moon having ever been visited (and that was done 50 years ago). Says a pessimist. Indeed.Â* As a human being, however, I want to have a "world view.." It's important to me.Â* I have developed mine over many years and I'll hold it until and if the evidence refutes it. That's fine, however you should admit that it's just a vision. Reality itself can be very different. Could be. Probably is. Even with 99% probability, that 1% can bite. But, if you remember, I began this, um, treatise to demonstrate the abject failure of atheism. I maintain that anyone who calls himself an atheist is either ignorant of cosmology, incapable of critical reasoning (i.e., stupid) or dishonest. One cannot rule out the existence of a godlike race of beings. I find it interesting how many fight against this very simple idea. |
#237
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 15:40:53 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote: Yeah, but those don't really surprise anybody. We almost immediately understand them in the context of the core physics we already know. High temperature superconductors did at least for a while and there is still no good theoretical upper bound on how hot a superconductor can work. Apparently simple problems can still be tricky to solve. Again, none of this is changing physics in a significant way. None is changing our core understanding of things. Important theories are not being discarded. Sure, lots of problems are hard to solve. Lots of implications of physical law are hard to see. But that's not the same at all as what was happening 100 years ago or more. In essence, we understand how nature works pretty well. That's unlikely to change. The "surprises" are just our failure to recognize consequences of what we know. Fine until we actually detect a dark matter particle and it turns out to be nothing like what any of the theorists have predicted. You are sounding so like a nineteenth century physicist that it is unbelievable. It's possible. But I predict that it will simply fill in a previously uncertain square in the Standard Model. No theories will be overturned. |
#238
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 10:55:27 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote: These are by now quite old ideas. Yes, SF ages too as time passes. Some of it ages quite well. When Kubrick flat imaging tablet devices for watching TV in 2001 the idea was ridiculous but today they are everywhere likewise for "communicators" in Star Trek. One thing that Kubrick missed in his vision were small decentralized computers distributed more or less everywhere. In Kubricks vision there was one single super-powerful computer - HAL. Much like the big iron computers that we had in the 1960's. I believe in ET.* Why wouldn't you? I consider it possible that they exist. But I'm not expecting to see LGMs shopping in Tesco's any time soon. Even if ET's existed, expecting to see them frequently visit the Earth is like expecting to see celebrities like the Pope, Madonna, and others, frequently visiting the block where you happen to live. I don't think you can alter the world view of a true believer they have proved willing to be burnt at the stake for their beliefs in the past. (often by a rival group of believers in the same "One True God") Now Mr Galileo do you believe that the Sun goes around the Earth or would you like more house arrest and a molten lead ear wash? An excellent summary! :-) |
#239
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 09:39:27 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel
wrote: Less, but not zero.* You have NO idea how much less prevents lif= e and neither do I, so this is just yammering. Neither do you have any idea about it. Actually, I do. The fraction of heavy elements in the human body are in parts per million, so a star's metallicity of 20% present value is QUITE sufficient. Note that "heavy elements" here means elements heavier than helium. So here you just claimed that the human body consists of 99.9999% hydrogen and helium only. This is blatantly false, and you should know that! What about the carbon, oxygen and nitrogen? Elements essential to life, but you just said our body has virtually nothing of them... The "law of big numbers" doesn't help you here since there are too many unknown and possibly extremely small numbers involved. But WE ARE HERE. No Law og Large NUMBERS needed to project our future, provided one isn't an abject pessimist with zero hope of any future at all. Nobody argues the fact that we are here. The question is if we are common, or if we are very rare, perhaps unique. Dream on, and get back if and when solid evidence for the existence of= these phenomena appears. And note that science fiction is not science fact. Nobody but you is trying to bring the topic to actual fact. That is a straw-man argument, which you regularly try to do. Why would the actual fact be so uninteresting to you? And if it is, why don't you move your discussion to alt.fantasies instead? Obviously, that is where it belongs. Having vision is easy, you just fantasize. Making it actually happen is= much much harder. Again you are trying to foist another straw-man argument on me :-) Do you disagree with this? Believing doesn't make it true. It just means that believers will stick to what they think they know in the face of all evidence to the contrary That's YOUR definition of believing. Mine is that which is not refuted by solid evidence. Then your collection of beliefs must be a chaotic collection of mutually contradiction of beliefs. You believe in ET because that has not been refuted by solid evidence. But at the same time you also believe in the non-existence of ET because that too has not been refuted by solid evidence. In any area where we don't know how it is, you have two or more mutually contradicting beliefs because all these beliefs have not been refuted by solid evidence. How can you have such a belief system without going insane? And in what way could VISION alone give us knowledge? It gives us possibilities, and statistics gives us probabilities. Statistics require solid evidence, or else you'll have no data to do your statistics on. I'll be the first to recant if you present solid evidence that no advanced civilization exists or that travel from one place to another faster than light can get there is impossible. The latter has already been proved impossible with ordinary matter by Einstein's theory of relativity. FTL travel would require exotic matter with imaginary rest mass. Such matter has never been observed, and in particular our bodies are not made of such matter. FTL travel would at least require infinite amounts of energy, and there isn't that much energy in the universe. Dreamers and creative people can think of things but it takes engineers and scientists to make something that will actually work. As YOU pointed out above, those who believed the dreamers made cell phones Yep, engineers did that, and scientists provided the engineers with the information they needed to do that. But without scientists and engineers and with only the visionaries, there would be no cell phones. Yes, but it is MUCH more desirable to be an optimist rather than a pessimist. This comment shows what is driving you. You want what is pleasant, and you are not interested in reality. Becoming a drug addict would probably be the ideal solution for you. But, if you remember, I began this, um, treatise to demonstrate the abject failure of atheism. I maintain that anyone who calls himself an atheist is either ignorant of cosmology, incapable of critical reasoning (i.e., stupid) or dishonest. One cannot rule out the existence of a godlike race of beings. I find it interesting how many fight against this very simple idea. Perhaps you noticed that many who call themselves atheists merely lack a belief in deities? They don't think that the non-existence of deities has been rigorously proved beyond doubt. But, as opposed to you, they don't naively believe in anything which hasn't been rigorously disproved. |
#240
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Thu, 04 Oct 2018 07:16:42 -0600, Chris L Peterson
wrote: If you would live for another 100-200 years I think you'd become quite surprised about the development in physics more than once. We'll see. But I don't think our core understanding of physics is going to look all that different in a couple of centuries. Or ever. The physicists of some 150 years ago had the same belief about their physical worldview. |
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