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#11
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1 centillion light years away
Sylvia Else wrote:
The theory may break done in areas inaccessible to experiment, but what of it? Until those areas become accessible, there is nothing but speculation available, and no basis for changing the theory. Sylvia. An unverifiable theory can break dance as far as I'm concerned and it still doesn't make it any more than speculative fiction. Or a religion if you prefer. To take a verifiable theory and then stretch it into an unverifiable domain is a risky faith-based business. Ah never mind, just call me a crank.... Dave |
#12
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1 centillion light years away
Sylvia Else wrote:
On 12/07/2010 12:45 PM, David Spain wrote: David Spain wrote: [text that didn't format well] And I get particularly annoyed with Thunderbird's inability to format text properly. Why can't this simple program deal with user input CR's and format around them. Emacs has dealt with this for decades. Thumbderbird only works on keyboards with no Enter key. D a v e I use Thunderbird, and don't understand the problem you're having. Thunderbird wraps on input, so you don't need to use the enter key. If you do press it, then Thunderbird assumes, not unreasonably, that you want it in your posting. Sylvia. I am handicapped by the fact that I learned to touch type in the days when you darned well better hit that 'return' key when you hear the margin bell go off if you don't want a nasty smudge at the end of your line. Eventually, like Pavlov's dog, you get conditioned to anticipating the bell before it goes off and that habit carries forward. I don't understand why Thumbderbird presents text one way in the composition window, with user input CRs seemingly having no effect or worse, a beneficial effect on the text, and then once posted to a slightly different sized window, everything is off. Maybe it's because I have Thumbderbird's margins set at 78 columns because of an old Usenet bias. I wish it worked more truly like a WYSIWIG editor and not appearing one way in the composition window and another way in the viewer. Surely there is a way to make that happen. But Sylvia, you already know I'm a crank by the fact that I prefer Emacs to Thumbderbird and hence unwashed and not worthy of argument... ;-) Dave |
#13
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1 centillion light years away
On 7/11/2010 6:45 PM, David Spain wrote:
David Spain wrote: [text that didn't format well] And I get particularly annoyed with Thunderbird's inability to format text properly. Why can't this simple program deal with user input CR's and format around them. Emacs has dealt with this for decades. Thumbderbird only works on keyboards with no Enter key. I don't have any problem with that, and my keyboard does have a enter key. Are you running Windows or something else? Pat |
#14
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1 centillion light years away
On 7/11/2010 7:26 PM, Sylvia Else wrote:
I use Thunderbird, and don't understand the problem you're having. Thunderbird wraps on input, so you don't need to use the enter key. If you do press it, then Thunderbird assumes, not unreasonably, that you want it in your posting. When I hit the enter key, all it does is make it a new paragraph. Pat |
#15
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1 centillion light years away
Pat Flannery wrote:
On 7/11/2010 6:45 PM, David Spain wrote: David Spain wrote: [text that didn't format well] And I get particularly annoyed with Thunderbird's inability to format text properly. Why can't this simple program deal with user input CR's and format around them. Emacs has dealt with this for decades. Thumbderbird only works on keyboards with no Enter key. I don't have any problem with that, and my keyboard does have a enter key. Are you running Windows or something else? Pat 001 With Thumbderbird, I might as well be submitting these posts via Hollerith 002 punch cardds. Damn! Another copy key overstrike in the deck! 003 004 :-) 005 c Dave |
#16
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1 centillion light years away
Sylvia Else wrote:
David Spain wrote: Doug Freyburger wrote: In comparison locations farther and farther away would get more and more red shifted and at some point the light gets blended with the background radiation and so is unobservable because it's lost in the noise. The cosmic microwave background noise first discovered (accidentally) by Penzias and Wilson. Yes. Red shift can be caused by distant objects receeding or by distant light needed to climb out of a gravity well. There may be no actual difference between the two. I suppose that's where the idea of dark energy comes from - It is supposed to form the reverse gravity well. So has anyone tried the experiment of seeing if there is background noise at a lower freq. than microwave? Or are we so inured of our precious big bang theory to even bother to look? I understand that a number of frequencies have been examined. The background radiation isn't expected to be at a single frequency - it's expected to have a black-body spectrum. I believe that as far as it's been measured, it does, with that temperature being about 3 degrees Kelvin. The spectrum of the background noise peaks in the microwave range. That is *not* the same thing as the background noise appearing in the microwave range. In every range that it can be examined its volume matches the black body curve predicted by quantum mechanics. My question was related to that - If the universe is far larger than can be observed then there should be a cut-off at some very large distance where objects receed faster than local light (I don't get why relativity does not appleal to this). If the universe is bounded by relativity then the farther away the object the more red shifted not just a cut off. Those two models should yield different black body curves at the very bottom of the spectrum. But how to detect photons with such low energies ... Wouldn't it be interesting to observe harmonic noise at precisely Plank interval distances? But maybe no one cares to imagine it. That's at the top end of the electromagnetic spectrum not at the bottom end. Such noise would be flucuations in the quantum vacuum. It's a different topic and one that's interesting in its own right if anyone does ever manage good experiments about the quamtum vacuum that yield postive energy. Look, I'm not proposing an alternative cosmology, but I get a little annoyed with the smugness of it all. As if we really understand it as well as we think we do, esp. when we get into energy domains where the theory becomes impossible to verify through experiment. Dark matter and dark energy my foot.... My objection to dark matter and dark energy is they get into epicycles. They are not observed yet they are proposed to explain problems with edge cases. Relativity solved the edge case problem with classic mechanics. There are plenty of other sciences that originally emerged to explain edge cases. At the moment dark matter and dark energy are in the same type of realm that philostigon was before the discovery of oxygen - Fire was an edge case in chemistry then. Now it's explained as plasma one of the states of matter. The theory may break done in areas inaccessible to experiment, but what of it? Until those areas become accessible, there is nothing but speculation available, and no basis for changing the theory. Dark matter and dark energy are themselves changes in the theory. Until and unless some other edge case explanation is proposed, until or unless they are observed, they remain speculative. Monopoles remain speculative as well. Relativity tells why they have no need to exist but if they do exist relativity works with them anyways. One way to view special relativity is that using Maxwells Equations it solved the problem that monopoles should have been observed but were not observed. One way among many but it is a valid feature of Special Relativity. With a wave of a magic wand I wish for a physicist and mathematician who works out "dark edge case math" based on the fact that dark matter should have been observed but has not been observed ... |
#17
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1 centillion light years away
On 7/12/2010 6:47 AM, David Spain wrote:
001 With Thumbderbird, I might as well be submitting these posts via Hollerith 002 punch cardds. Damn! Another copy key overstrike in the deck! 003 004 :-) 005 c Dave 01001001 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01110000 01100111 01110010 01100001 01100100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110011 01111001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01101101 00101110 01010000 01100001 01110100 |
#18
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1 centillion light years away
On 7/12/2010 10:20 AM, Pat Flannery wrote:
On 7/12/2010 6:47 AM, David Spain wrote: 001 With Thumbderbird, I might as well be submitting these posts via Hollerith 002 punch cardds. Damn! Another copy key overstrike in the deck! 003 004 :-) 005 c Dave 01001001 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01110000 01100111 01110010 01100001 01100100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110011 01111001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01101101 00101110 01010000 01100001 01110100 .... - .. .-.. .-.. / -.-. --- -- -- .- / -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. / -... . / .-- --- .-. ... . / .--. . .-. .. --- -.. ..--. .- - |
#19
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1 centillion light years away
Doug Freyburger wrote:
Sylvia Else wrote: David Spain wrote: Wouldn't it be interesting to observe harmonic noise at precisely Plank interval distances? But maybe no one cares to imagine it. That's at the top end of the electromagnetic spectrum not at the bottom end. Such noise would be flucuations in the quantum vacuum. It's a different topic and one that's interesting in its own right if anyone does ever manage good experiments about the quamtum vacuum that yield postive energy. It's going to take a good imagination to come up with crafty experiments on the quantum vacuum. But the strangest part of all is wouldn't it be true that any 'positive' quantum vacuum energy would manifest itself outside the quantum realm as a 'negative' energy? In other words if the quantum vacuum energy is net positive, we get a quantum basis for the expansion of the universe as well as the direction for the arrow of time AND an explanation for entropy all rolled into one. I've always considered the unification of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics with just about anything about as important a question to resolve as any GUT could provide. And what if we could prove the quantum vacuum energy is periodic? Hello closed Universe... Might it be possible that ordinary matter and energy serve as a pull on the quantum vacuum? We all know the Rabelais quotation that Nature abhors a vacuum, but what if in truth, it's the other way round? Look, I'm not proposing an alternative cosmology, but I get a little annoyed with the smugness of it all. As if we really understand it as well as we think we do, esp. when we get into energy domains where the theory becomes impossible to verify through experiment. Dark matter and dark energy my foot.... My objection to dark matter and dark energy is they get into epicycles. They are not observed yet they are proposed to explain problems with edge cases. Relativity solved the edge case problem with classic mechanics. There are plenty of other sciences that originally emerged to explain edge cases. At the moment dark matter and dark energy are in the same type of realm that philostigon was before the discovery of oxygen - Fire was an edge case in chemistry then. Now it's explained as plasma one of the states of matter. Let us also not forget the "luminiferous aether". We needed a medium for electromagnetic radiation to propagate through, or so we thought in the 1800s. The theory may break done in areas inaccessible to experiment, but what of it? Until those areas become accessible, there is nothing but speculation available, and no basis for changing the theory. Dark matter and dark energy are themselves changes in the theory. Until and unless some other edge case explanation is proposed, until or unless they are observed, they remain speculative. IMO weak conjectures to explain what theory cannot explain as of today. Monopoles remain speculative as well. Relativity tells why they have no need to exist but if they do exist relativity works with them anyways. One way to view special relativity is that using Maxwells Equations it solved the problem that monopoles should have been observed but were not observed. One way among many but it is a valid feature of Special Relativity. With a wave of a magic wand I wish for a physicist and mathematician who works out "dark edge case math" based on the fact that dark matter should have been observed but has not been observed ... I too take issue with items that are supposed to exist, but for some unexplained reason, don't seem to want to in our local region of space-time. Dave |
#20
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1 centillion light years away
On 13/07/2010 1:46 AM, Doug Freyburger wrote:
Sylvia Else wrote: David Spain wrote: Doug Freyburger wrote: In comparison locations farther and farther away would get more and more red shifted and at some point the light gets blended with the background radiation and so is unobservable because it's lost in the noise. The cosmic microwave background noise first discovered (accidentally) by Penzias and Wilson. Yes. Red shift can be caused by distant objects receeding or by distant light needed to climb out of a gravity well. There may be no actual difference between the two. I suppose that's where the idea of dark energy comes from - It is supposed to form the reverse gravity well. So has anyone tried the experiment of seeing if there is background noise at a lower freq. than microwave? Or are we so inured of our precious big bang theory to even bother to look? I understand that a number of frequencies have been examined. The background radiation isn't expected to be at a single frequency - it's expected to have a black-body spectrum. I believe that as far as it's been measured, it does, with that temperature being about 3 degrees Kelvin. The spectrum of the background noise peaks in the microwave range. That is *not* the same thing as the background noise appearing in the microwave range. In every range that it can be examined its volume matches the black body curve predicted by quantum mechanics. My question was related to that - If the universe is far larger than can be observed then there should be a cut-off at some very large distance where objects receed faster than local light (I don't get why relativity does not appleal to this). The Universe can be sufficiently large that light from the more distant parts has not had time to reach us *yet*. That is not the same as saying that there are parts that are receding from us at more than the speed of light. I don't believe that the latter is the case. If the universe is bounded by relativity then the farther away the object the more red shifted not just a cut off. Those two models should yield different black body curves at the very bottom of the spectrum. But how to detect photons with such low energies ... Wouldn't it be interesting to observe harmonic noise at precisely Plank interval distances? But maybe no one cares to imagine it. That's at the top end of the electromagnetic spectrum not at the bottom end. Such noise would be flucuations in the quantum vacuum. It's a different topic and one that's interesting in its own right if anyone does ever manage good experiments about the quamtum vacuum that yield postive energy. Look, I'm not proposing an alternative cosmology, but I get a little annoyed with the smugness of it all. As if we really understand it as well as we think we do, esp. when we get into energy domains where the theory becomes impossible to verify through experiment. Dark matter and dark energy my foot.... My objection to dark matter and dark energy is they get into epicycles. They are not observed yet they are proposed to explain problems with edge cases. Our galaxy is rotating at a rate that should cause it to come apart given the mass that we can see. This is hardly an edge case. We need to be able to explain either how the galaxy stays together despite its mass being too low, or find a way to allow its mass to be high enough without the matter getting in the way of the things we can see. Sylvia |
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