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Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?



 
 
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  #251  
Old October 7th 18, 09:45 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Chris L Peterson
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Posts: 10,007
Default 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  
Old October 7th 18, 11:35 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gary Harnagel
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Posts: 659
Default 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  
Old October 9th 18, 09:40 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Martin Brown[_3_]
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Posts: 189
Default 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  
Old October 9th 18, 09:43 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Martin Brown[_3_]
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Default 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  
Old October 9th 18, 01:21 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Paul Schlyter[_3_]
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Posts: 1,344
Default 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  
Old October 9th 18, 01:28 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Paul Schlyter[_3_]
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Posts: 1,344
Default 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  
Old October 9th 18, 01:50 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gerald Kelleher
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Posts: 1,551
Default 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  
Old October 9th 18, 01:58 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Chris L Peterson
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Posts: 10,007
Default 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  
Old October 9th 18, 02:05 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Paul Schlyter[_3_]
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Posts: 1,344
Default 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  
Old October 9th 18, 02:06 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Chris L Peterson
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Posts: 10,007
Default 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.
 




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