|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#251
|
|||
|
|||
Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Sun, 7 Oct 2018 13:21:13 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
wrote: On Sunday, October 7, 2018 at 7:58:08 AM UTC-6, Chris L Peterson wrote: GR is easy to understand. For a certain value of "understand". Tensor calculus isn't easy. Sure. The techniques for manipulating the numbers can be tricky (although trivially handled by software tools these days). But the underlying concepts are accessible to anyone with a reasonably normal level of intelligence. |
#252
|
|||
|
|||
Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Saturday, October 6, 2018 at 3:54:45 AM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter wrote:
? On Fri, 5 Oct 2018 11:03:12 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel wrote: We are here but that says nothing about how many more Earth like planets there are in the rest of the universe. The number is not important. All that's needed is ONE in hundreds of trillions FEW BILLION YEARS AGO. Which makes the number important: you want it to be greater than zero. But if you drop the requirement of a few billion years ago, we already have one - that's us. Which is proof of principle. If a process can happen once, it can already have happened given billions of years. You claim to be an agnostic, but you are behaving like a dedicated atheist in agnostic's clothing :-) Yep, if you think one single advanced civilization is enough, why not choose the single one we already know? Ummm, we're NOT that advanced. If you think we are, that's hubris. |
#253
|
|||
|
|||
Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On 05/10/2018 13:56, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Fri, 05 Oct 2018 08:16:29 +0200, Paul Schlyter wrote: 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. I'm not sure what that's supposed to demonstrate, though. Times change. Our understanding of nature, and of how to understand nature, is radically different now. Do you think that nature will never be understood? That there's an infinite depth to the fundamental laws, and we can never reach the end? Pretty much like peeling an onion. When you gain access to ever higher energy collisions and rarer events you may see some new fine detail that was not previously detectable. Likewise with bigger telescopes and multispectral imaging - the first view of the universe at really high resolution in the terahertz band will be significant for example. You simply don't know what you don't know when you cannot look there. Everytime we have gained the ability to see fine details a few orders of magnitude finer than before there has been something new to see. I don't see any compelling reason why that should not follow at least down to the Plank scale (and possibly still further). Dark matter could well prove very interesting when and iff we ever manage to detect it. I see the Universe as a simple place, with simple laws. Indeed, that's the general view of modern physics, and all the available evidence supports that view. A view which had not developed 150 years ago. At some point, it appears we'll know everything. And we are arguably much farther along that path now than we were 150 years ago. Our big theories are highly stable. They continue to hold up, and new observations continue to support them. 150 years ago new observations were overturning the (rather weak) theories of the time. Even the simplest canonical game of life with Conway's original rules turns out to have extremely complex behaviour and is Turing complete. No, I think that our understanding of nature has changed radically in 150 years, and we are indeed looking at an accurate view of the big picture now, and mostly just filling in details. That *IS* exactly what those guys who predicted physics would be completely solved in another couple of decades thought too. We know that we know everything now and it is simply a case now of dotting i's and crossing t's. Such pronouncements are usually met with a novel experiment that does something curious and not what the prevailing theories of the day predict. We are about due a paradigm shift in physics this century. Average is about one every couple of centuries. -- Regards, Martin Brown |
#254
|
|||
|
|||
Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On 07/10/2018 14:58, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Sun, 07 Oct 2018 06:58:35 +0200, Paul Schlyter wrote: I see it as shallow. Very shallow. The Universe is simple and easy to understand. If so, please present your Grand Unified Theory of the universe. If the universe is so easy to understand, you should be able to do so quite quickly. Why? That's a fallacy. GR is easy to understand. QM is easy to understand. That doesn't make either of them obvious. We can puzzle The snag comes when you try to unify these two excellent theories which work perfectly well in their own domains of the very large and very small respectively. So far no theorist has come up with the one grand unified theory that contains both of them as a limiting case. It is generally said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you probably do not. Even Einstein struggled with it - hence his famous quote about God not playing dice with the universe. for a long time over a tricky problem that ends up having an extremely simple and easy to understand solution. Simple != obvious. The rules may be simple but the resulting behaviour is not. Experiment is always the ultimate arbiter of scientific theories and science is always going to be an approximate mathematical model of reality which gets ever closer to the ideal with time. -- Regards, Martin Brown |
#255
|
|||
|
|||
Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 09:40:32 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote: Likewise with bigger telescopes and multispectral imaging - the first view of the universe at really high resolution in the terahertz band will be significant for example. We've already done that. Visible light has a frequency of about 500 THz. theories of the day predict. We are about due a paradigm shift in physics this century. Average is about one every couple of centuries. Only during the last half millennium or so. Before that, physical theories prevailed for millennia. |
#256
|
|||
|
|||
Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Sun, 07 Oct 2018 14:45:11 -0600, Chris L Peterson
wrote: On Sun, 7 Oct 2018 13:21:13 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc wrote: On Sunday, October 7, 2018 at 7:58:08 AM UTC-6, Chris L Peterson wrote: GR is easy to understand. For a certain value of "understand". Tensor calculus isn't easy. Sure. The techniques for manipulating the numbers can be tricky (although trivially handled by software tools these days). But the underlying concepts are accessible to anyone with a reasonably normal level of intelligence. You need much more than just the fundamental concepts to successfully build a theory. The fundamental concept of Newtonian gravity, for instance, is trivially simple. Yet, even the three-body problem turned out to be hairy and difficult, not to mention the N-body problem. Numerical integration handles them all of course, but numerical integration does not answer the question about the extreme long-term stability of the system. |
#257
|
|||
|
|||
Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
An astronomer has to descend to a political level to deal with what is called Newton's 'gravity'. It is not an academic principle and never was so what is left is not simple but basically crude, two different things.
The empirical agenda is scaling up without limits so that the limits of analogies applied to large scale celestial phenomena are removed and in its place is a experimental/universal concept that robs both of their effectiveness. For Newton, the Earth attracts the apple, the moon attracts the tides, the Earth attracts the moon and finally the Sun attracts the Earth hence his overreaching notion that his followers exploited but never really understood - "Rule III. The qualities of bodies, which admit neither [intensification] nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever." Newton It is all downhill from there as the fudge to fit it into the astronomy of Copernicus and Kepler is wickety,wackety,woo even though that route can be traced also. To be fair, I thought that at least a few people, not necessarily theorists, would be brave enough to tackle the issue instead of wanting to appear the best boy in the class but unfortunately no such courageous individual has come forward. That leaves only the usual slogan chanters who have long since lost their effectiveness as contributors to this newsgroup. |
#258
|
|||
|
|||
Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Tue, 09 Oct 2018 14:28:51 +0200, Paul Schlyter
wrote: On Sun, 07 Oct 2018 14:45:11 -0600, Chris L Peterson wrote: On Sun, 7 Oct 2018 13:21:13 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc wrote: On Sunday, October 7, 2018 at 7:58:08 AM UTC-6, Chris L Peterson wrote: GR is easy to understand. For a certain value of "understand". Tensor calculus isn't easy. Sure. The techniques for manipulating the numbers can be tricky (although trivially handled by software tools these days). But the underlying concepts are accessible to anyone with a reasonably normal level of intelligence. You need much more than just the fundamental concepts to successfully build a theory. The fundamental concept of Newtonian gravity, for instance, is trivially simple. Yet, even the three-body problem turned out to be hairy and difficult, not to mention the N-body problem. Numerical integration handles them all of course, but numerical integration does not answer the question about the extreme long-term stability of the system. I'm not sure of your point here. It certainly doesn't argue against anything I've said. |
#259
|
|||
|
|||
Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Sun, 7 Oct 2018 15:35:30 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel
wrote: On Saturday, October 6, 2018 at 3:54:45 AM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter wrote: ? On Fri, 5 Oct 2018 11:03:12 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel wrote: We are here but that says nothing about how many more Earth like planets there are in the rest of the universe. The number is not important. All that's needed is ONE in hundreds of trillions FEW BILLION YEARS AGO. Which makes the number important: you want it to be greater than zero. But if you drop the requirement of a few billion years ago, we already have one - that's us. Which is proof of principle. If a process can happen once, it can already have happened given billions of years. You claim to be an agnostic, but you are behaving like a dedicated atheist in agnostic's clothing :-) I'm not saying it cannot have happened. I'm merely objecting when you claim we can be certain it has happened. We can **not** be certain about that! There are just too many unknowns involved... Yep, if you think one single advanced civilization is enough, why not choose the single one we already know? Ummm, we're NOT that advanced. If you think we are, that's hubris. At the moment we aren't, that's true. But what about our descendants in a million years? |
#260
|
|||
|
|||
Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?
On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 09:43:30 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote: On 07/10/2018 14:58, Chris L Peterson wrote: On Sun, 07 Oct 2018 06:58:35 +0200, Paul Schlyter wrote: I see it as shallow. Very shallow. The Universe is simple and easy to understand. If so, please present your Grand Unified Theory of the universe. If the universe is so easy to understand, you should be able to do so quite quickly. Why? That's a fallacy. GR is easy to understand. QM is easy to understand. That doesn't make either of them obvious. We can puzzle The snag comes when you try to unify these two excellent theories which work perfectly well in their own domains of the very large and very small respectively. So far no theorist has come up with the one grand unified theory that contains both of them as a limiting case. Indeed. That is one of the missing pieces of the puzzle, no doubt. It is generally said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you probably do not. Even Einstein struggled with it - hence his famous quote about God not playing dice with the universe. That depends on what you mean by "understand". The theory is simple enough. The intellectual hurdle- as is true with all that we understand about nature- is seeing the implications. for a long time over a tricky problem that ends up having an extremely simple and easy to understand solution. Simple != obvious. The rules may be simple but the resulting behaviour is not. Certainly true. And we see that in science today. Because our theory is nearly complete, there is little new emerging in that area. Science today centers around models and simulations, not theories. Science today is about combining theories and studying their interactions. Cosmology, biology, climate and Earth science- most of the big questions in these are now explored by complex models, not simple theories. Experiment is always the ultimate arbiter of scientific theories and science is always going to be an approximate mathematical model of reality which gets ever closer to the ideal with time. That's a philosophical question, and I don't necessarily come to the same conclusion as you. |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Denial of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Science | Pentcho Valev | Astronomy Misc | 3 | April 24th 17 06:58 PM |
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON DISHONEST OR JUST SILLY? | Pentcho Valev | Astronomy Misc | 3 | August 6th 15 12:14 PM |
Neil (EGO) Degrasse Tyson STEALS directly from Sagan | RichA[_6_] | Amateur Astronomy | 4 | April 17th 15 09:38 AM |
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON : CONSPIRACY OF THE HIGHEST ORDER | Pentcho Valev | Astronomy Misc | 2 | July 14th 14 04:32 PM |
'My Favorite Universe' (Neil deGrasse Tyson) | M Dombek | UK Astronomy | 1 | December 29th 05 12:01 AM |