So, do you question whether your can of beans will still be there when you make supper? I mean, after all, maybe there are gnomes that live in your walls that steal canned food from your cupboard. Do you stay up at night worrying about that possibility?
There’s healthy skepticism, and then there’s needlessly questioning everything. If I go to a mechanic and he tells me what’s wrong with my car, I don’t think it’d be in my best interest to say “Well how do you know that?! What do you know anyway? I think you’re wrong!” and then go home and inevitably ruin my car because I don’t actually know anything about fixing cars. If you’re a mechanic, and another mechanic tells you a method for fixing cars, and you, knowing how cars work, think he’s wrong, then you’re in the right mind to question his “authority”.
I mean, if we can’t trust authority on anything at all, then how can we have any kind of civilization? Pretty much everything you know has come from someone you trust telling it to you. There’s a point where questioning everything becomes an absurd paranoia.
Cite:
“God does not play dice with the Universe.” A. Einstein.
In other words, “because I have never experienced it, and cannot understand what you are saying, it must be false”, unless you can prove to me, despite my ignorance of the subject, that you are right… :rolleyes:
You have a way to go in understanding what “skepticism” means from a scientist’s perspective.
I don’t know you, but I’m pretty sure you aren’t smarter than Albert Einstein. Sorry.
You really don’t have to know nilum to be sure he/she is not smarter than Albert Einstein. All you really need to know can be gotten from reading his/her posts. If the poster demonstrably cannot understand what you are saying, when Einstein would, then you are not dealing with an Einstein. What the person you are dealing with is actually capable of is left as an exercise for the reader… :rolleyes:
I’ve always liked the physics community’s reply:
“Einstein, don’t tell God what to do.”
-Bohr, or possibly Fermi
:D:D:D
(this is a followup to a previous post:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=12533806#post12533806
seeing the direction this thread has taken, I’ll post it here)
My first attempt at a Hieronymous machine ended in something strange happening, and I couldn’t think of an explanation myself. But thanks to The Hamster King’s explanation of quantum entanglement, it occurred to me that the problem might be the result of Radionic energy approaching a causality conflict.
I’m only at the start of trying to understand quantum physics, but an examination of the Hieronymous circuit told me that the machine was based on the refraction of Radionic (also known as Eloptic) energy. Hieronymous and others claimed that quantum entanglement was basis for the machines operation. The problem in my machine occurred after inducing Radionic energy to cohere with laser light passed through a fiber optic coil, which was producing voltage and current in a copper conductor in the center of the coil.
It was only a guess, but it seemed that the conversion of Radionic energy to electricity was dependent on Lorentz forces, which would have caused a quantum state to collapse. Somehow, there had to be an interaction between entangled particles that was in danger of violating the physical rules of causality.
Then, it struck me. By adding a fiber optic coil to the machine that re-refracted Radionic energy, a was in effect, transporting a quantum state. And the nature of the effect on the coil was interesting because it was going to naturally form a feed back condition to the basic Hieronymous circuit. That meant it would be easy for an entangled particle to collapse, after its partner had already affected the operation of the machine. This seemed like an obvious problem I should have avoided in the first place.
The solution seemed incredibly simple. The likely way this happened was leakage of Radions (the quantum transport mechanism of Radionic energy) from the first refraction stage. The Radionic energy entering the quartz crystal prism was optically shielded, but not the output. A short length of ceramic surrounding the electrode would fix it.
So after wiring it all up again, this time just using an electronic breadboard because all the components were contemporary, and obtaining new quartz crystals (still trying to figure out if they were actually the same ones I had used before), I was ready to go. I didn’t even need an incident adjustment for the electrode angle because I had already established that angle for gold (which I suspect as very high Radionic potential). I didn’t need logarithmic potentiometers either because I knew the range of resistance I would be working with.
I took my gold wedding band and placed it near the receptor coil, and there as immediatly voltage in the copper conductor inside the fiber optic coil. It read on the scope, but I wanted to prove it to myself, so I grabbed an incandescent flashlight bulb and alligator clips and connected the bulb to the copper rod. The bulb glowed slightly, then grew brighter and brighter. It seemed to reach a blinding brilliance, when it suddenly popped, and I detect that old familiar scent of fried electronics. I looked towards my wedding ring in front of the receptor coil, and it was gone!
Not only was my rind missing, but the gold leads on components now showed bare metal underneath. It appeared as if the machine had consumed the gold to produce the electrical current apparent in the bulb!
That was at approximately 5:00PM on June 5th. A little over one hour ago. But looking at my cell phone, and now the computer, it seems to be 24 hours later on June 6th!
I’m baffled again. The machine’s components are fried, and my wife is going to hit the roof when I tell her about my missing wedding ring. And after logging into this message board I see posts showing up that I recorded when I was constructing my first version of the machine. On top of all that, I was totally prepared to memorize tonight’s (last night’s?) Powerball numbers, but that drawing is now over!
I don’t think this Hieronymous machine is ever going to work. Next time I’m just going to try sticking to something with more proven research like Orgone energy
I understand the accepted to rules of physics quite well.
How many posts have I made on the subject of physics? Most of my posts have been on the subject of philosophy.
Cheshire Human, I’m glad I encouraged you to read my other posts… I sure haven’t been compelled by any of your posts to read any more from you. :rolleyes:
Go spend a decade studying this stuff (you know, with actual books and classes and such) and then come back and let us know if you still feel that way.
There’s nothing wrong with questioning authority, but acting like you know better than the people who’ve put in the work to really understand it is just egotism. Could Einstein be wrong about something? Sure, no doubt he was wrong about lots of stuff. Is nilum, the guy who by his own admission doesn’t even have the level of training of an undergraduate physics major, likely to have discovered an error of Einstein’s that all the experts missed? That’s unlikely to the point of absurdity.
When did not agreeing with something constitute as egotism.
Stop getting so emotional.
Thinking that you don’t have to actually study a highly complex subject before you’re qualified to make a well-informed criticism of expert opinion is egotism.
So just because I haven’t studied something means I can’t make up my OWN mind about it?
I haven’t studied the bible either, guess I should stop being an atheist until I do.
Summary: get over it.
You can’t make up your mind in an informed way, no.
Religion is based on faith, and if you aren’t willing to take it on faith, then that’s your prerogative. But science is based on empirical evidence, mathematics, and logical reasoning. If you don’t understand the evidence, the math, and the logic really well, you aren’t in a strong position to say that that reasoning is flawed.
Moreover, a reasonably humble person ought to acknowledge that maybe they don’t understand those things too well, you know, not having seriously studied the subject at all. Especially since, and this may come as a shock to you, physics is hard.
Or, maybe you’re smarter than Einstein. Yeah, that’s probably it.
And just in case you don’t get what bugs me about your attitude, let me be clear:
If you said “I know people think X, but I think maybe it’s Y. Can anyone explain to me why physicists don’t think it’s Y?” then I’d be more than happy to help.
Instead you’re effectively saying “I know Einstein and thousands of physicists in the century since think it’s X, but screw that, I’m sure it’s Y. After all, what do you guys know? Sure you’ve dedicated your lives to studying an extremely difficult subject that I don’t really know that much about, but who cares? I’ve got an opinion.”
I wish I’d known the power of an uneducated opinion sooner… I wouldn’t have had to waste all that time getting a Ph.D.
Anyway, I’m done. If I’m not getting through to you at this point then I probably won’t.
Well, you CAN make up your own mind about anything you like, whether or not you’ve ever studied it in-depth. But, an uninformed opinion is a worthless opinion.
Maybe your taking the wrong approach. These guys might know a lot about alternate theories, or have more useful explanations for you if you weren’t dissing their expertise and knowledge. They don’t seem to be complaining about you questioning the matter, just your assertion they are wrong somehow without even including a counter argument based on more than an opinion. If that doesn’t matter for you, maybe you’d be interested in my previous post.
I’m not sure if this will help, but here goes…
nilum, imagine you were transported back to a time before anyone discovered the true shape of the planet. You know for a fact that the earth is (to keep it simple) spherical. You meet a local and start a discussion. He’s convinced that the earth is flat. If it’s round, then the shape is a plate. His evidence? Just look at the ground, man! I can’t see any curve that would indicate we’re standing on a ball! He holds up an apple and says, “Look, see how the surface of the apple bends around? The ground doesn’t do that!”
You reply: You’re right, the curvature is on such a scale that you and I standing here can’t detect it. But if we jumped high enough, got far enough away from the ground, the curvature then becomes noticeable.
His intuition says you’re wrong. Nothing in his experience confirms the sphere hypothesis. But does his intuition have any effect on the true shape of the planet?
This is very similar to the existence of a privileged frame of reference. There is simply no evidence that there is a place where true clocks live. Time and space are relative. But travelling at our speeds the curvature of time and space is too small to feel in our gut. If we as a species routinely travelled at speeds closer to the speed of light, we would have no problem seeing that truth - but we don’t. Everything in our experience seems to confirm the notion of a time that true for everyone/everywhere.
The scientist club didn’t just get together and say, “Hey guys, what shit can we pull on the masses?” They live in the same set of speeds as we all do - and the idea of absolute time was very difficult to abandon. It’s only after experiment after experiment confirmed that absolute time does not exist (absolute distance too) that relativity was embraced.
I would dare say that everyone who tries to understand the implications of relativity starts with exactly the same stance as you do, nilum “There’s no way this can be correct, right? Clocks don’t match after such-and-such experiment, but time didn’t change - just some stupid device. Use better devices next time.”
There are many books written for non-scientists that explain relativity very well. You don’t have to spend decades to get a working idea. The truth will wait for you to get your head into it.
Finally, as others have said: It may very well be that Einstein and others got it wrong and relativity is a mistake. But it’s going to take a lot more evidence than “Hey, it feels wrong - look at the ground, it’s flat!” to convice anyone. Einstein is heraled as a genius for a reason. He looked at the ground and didn’t let the illusion of flatness fool him. If he was mistaken and you’re the one to disprove him, then you will rightly take his place as a celebrated genius.
Who would have thought people on this message board would get their feelings hurt over not accepting their ‘expert’ opinions. I’m sorry… are any of you ACTUAL physicists? I’d be surprised if most of you even took physics in college (it was required curriculum for me). So who knows maybe I am more qualified.
An informed judgement is based on what? Knowing information about the issue? What information am I missing? Whenever I state my objection I get another person telling me the same argument as if I didn’t get it the first time, when I make it clear I understand the accepted rule of law. That gravity and velocity effect space-time, and the proof is various tests which show mechanical time running slower/faster at various speeds and different altitudes.
I personally do not think that is evidence. Devices for measuring time are intrinsically imperfect because humans are not capable of seeing time in any finite way. A ruler I have less objection with because it’s much easier to see the correlation between one visible object comparatively to another. When we measure with clock we are comparing what we believe to be rhythmic processes with something invisible. We have yet to even fully understand time and entropy.
I will concede that I am not a physicist and I don’t major in physics (I did that in my original post - but I guess that’s not good enough), but I won’t concede that I don’t have the right to call something ‘bullshit’ regardless of how much more someone may think they know about the subject. As far as I know we have never been able to communicate FTL, and all we have are thought experiments. Until we get something concrete I am not convinced.
But tim… grow some thicker skin.