The Emergence of Crackpots from the SciForums Space-Time

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12ofthe19 said:
Your posts, from what I've seen, are generally well thought out, and on topic.
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Thank you. This actually means a lot because I put some time into responding on these forums, even if it means that I neglect my research.

Unfortunately, this place has very weak moderation, which leads to 29 page threads with maybe 15% of the posts on topic and relevant. Despite this fact, some of us still come back here because occassionally a topic of interest pops up, and the members of the forum with genuine interest, and in some cases, professional experience/expertise in science contribute. Those handful of threads probably justify the existence of sciforums, depending on your POV. Most of the time this place is more like a bad yahoo chat room, but if you're patient, and use your filter, you can stumble onto some very interesting posts, and posters.
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I can understand thispoint of view, but I don't think I'd evre filter any comments. Science is what I do, and it is important to me to see what people do with the popular literature.

I would stay away from bringing your actual experience, and working knowledge of a topic into the ring. From my experience, and observations around here for the past four years, the everyday posters seem to have an especially zealous contempt for bringing professional context into a thread.
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I think you are quite correct about this. But this was the point of the thread. Why is it that people feel the need to write off the opinions of experts? And why is it that people ignore the 100 years of physics since Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity?

These things are interesting to me on both a scientific AND a cultural level. Einstein was a genius, no doubt. But he was just in the right place at the right time to interpret some comments that Minkowski made in an earlier paper about differential geometry. There seems to be a society of Einstein worship---that is, if Einstein thought or didn't think it, then it must or must not be true.

My particular area of expertise rarely comes up around here, but in the limited number of times it has, and I have weighed in with working knowledge of the topic, my contributions were disregarded as irrelevant because they couldn't be "googled", or referenced on Wikipedia(possibly the worst thing to happen to science, ever.)
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I think it all happens because of the protection of ananymity. People are free to be whoever they want to be here, and express whatever goofy opinions they have. I think it's probably like a Clark Kent/Superman sort of thing---when the shift is over, the mild mannered coorporate accountant becomes an ultra-conservative, anti-Semitic SciForums poster.

And, to be fair, I use Wikipedia ALL the time. There are a certain type of people who gaurd their Wikipedia entries with extreme vigor. Anyhting on physics (specifically high energy theory) at Wikipedia is generally pretty spot on. I heed this warning in the future though:)
 
Just look at yourself. You talk of argument and logic. Yet there is none from you, just insults. You are a bully. And like all bullies, you're a coward to boot.
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Sigh. You have broken Lorentz Invariance by transforming a time coordinate and not a length coordinate. How is this an insult?
 
And there is no natural/artificial phenomenon that proves that time is a dimension.
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You can assign time a coordinate, ergo it is a dimension. This is how one defines a dimension.

Mathematically, one can also think of the set of Lorentzian manifolds as a subset of the Euclidean manifolds on which GR is formulated. The Lorentzian manifolds have a metric signature (-,+,+,...) where as the Euclidean (or "pseudo-Riemannian") manifols have signature (+,+,...). The reason that time is different lies in the fact that our universe lives on a Lorentzian manifold, but can be parameterized by Euclidean coordinates. If one does this (called a "Wick Rotation"), then one will find that there are no spcae-time translations, just rotations in time.

This all follows from GR and was known by Einstein, if it matters at all. Note it was not discovered by him, but was known to him.
 
Farsight said:
Can we now try to call a halt to all this and get on with civil debate and good-natured conversations about physics please.
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Three things.

One, this was never a thread about physics. It was a thread about physics threads. I continue to respond because you are proving my point everytime you write off my comments as ridiculous. The people who aren't nutcases can see that I know what I am talking about. You can either accept that or you can't.

Two, you're the one tooling up the rhetoric here. You have learned much from the Bush administration.

Three, I have been talking about physics all along.
 
Singularity said:
OrKot ha given this link
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Farsight has proposed a thought experiment whereby two experimenters, at supposedly the same place in the universe, can measure the speed of light to be different. Not only does this specifically ignore the second postulate of special relativity, there is absolutely no evidence for this type of variation in the speed of light.
 
Sorry, Singularity. I was kind of busy.

IMHO:

Yes, I think "curved spacetime" is the wrong concept.

I'm afraid I don't place much store in faster than light travel. One can move say the beam of a searchlight such that a spot of light on the moon travels "faster than light". But it isn't genuine FTL travel. IMHO the link you gave is similar.

I agree with the lack of proof about the time "dimension". The only proof would be a time machine. But it'll never happen, because time is a dimension in that it is a measure of motion as compared to other motion, but you can't literally move through this measure of change, just like you can't literally move to a higher temperature.
 
Singularity said:
So how exactly this theory of space bending was established to be true ?
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I thought you put me on your ignore list?

No matter. Presumably you're talking about GR. Well
-The precession of the perhelion of Mercury
-Gravitational Lensing
-Gravitational Radiation by binary pulsars
-Gravitational Redshift

But by all means. Don't take my word for it. Go to your local library and find this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Experi...4956138?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174404530&sr=8-2
 
Seuq said:
My own view says that it is time that moves forward and not us going backwards.. correct me if i am wrong.. ^^
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I just realized I forgot to respond to this.

I am a bit confused by this. There certainly is an arrow of time---i.e. at a classical level it always points forward. This is (perhaps) deeply related to the origin of the second law of thermodynamics....perhaps it is that one implies the other, or vice versa.

Maybe you'd clarify this position?
 
Singularity said:
Are u sure that its not the light thats bending ?
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Bending how?. Through Newtonian gravitational interaction? While the deflection of light by gravity can be predicted through Newtonian Physics, it predicts half the value predicted by spacial curvature and that actually measured.

Via interaction with a medium due to its index of refraction? This would result in chromatic aberration, since different frequencies of light have different indices of refraction for any given material, and thus bend different degrees when passing through it. (You can see this effect with cheap optical equipment; it shows up as a rainbow fringe.)
No chromatic aberration shows up with gravitational lensing.
 
Janus58 said:
Bending how?. Through Newtonian gravitational interaction? While the deflection of light by gravity can be predicted through Newtonian Physics, it predicts half the value predicted by spacial curvature and that actually measured.....
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Why should it be predicted by "Spacial Curvature" when its clearly visible out there ?
 
BenTheMan said:
Farsight has proposed a thought experiment whereby two experimenters, at supposedly the same place in the universe, can measure the speed of light to be different. Not only does this specifically ignore the second postulate of special relativity, there is absolutely no evidence for this type of variation in the speed of light.
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I didn't say the two experimenters remained in the same place in the Universe. I made sure one experimenter didn't know what the other experimenter did to avoid confusion regarding frames. Read what I said:

http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1328970&postcount=59

Imagine you and I are standing in a lab, each with a transverse metre rule and a light clock. I also have a helmet-mounted video-camera. I go out of the door, and you stand there for seven years counting traverses. You count seven trillion traverses. Then I walk back in.

You know something is up because my hair is still brown whilst yours is speckled with white. I don't have the extra wrinkles, and my beard is only down to my chest. You wonder if I've been somehow frozen, but then I show you my tape recording.

You see us both on the tape at the beginning of the recording. The running time is shown thoughout in the bottom corner. Then you see my departure whereafter you see me enter some other laboratory. This might be some kind of capsule, but you can't tell. The bulk of the tape consists of me standing in my laboratory counting traverses. Then I leave my laboratory, and the closing frames show me entering the original laboratory - and your beard down to your knees.

You have no direct evidence of relativistic travel or high gravity. This is deliberate, to avoid mixing frames. And you are satisfied that whilst time dilation has occured, length contraction has not occured to my transverse metre ruler.

Now, I counted only one trillion traverses, far less than your seven trillion traverses. My traverses add up to one light year, whilst yours add up to seven. So depite the speed of light being the same notional value of 300,000km/s for both of us, it was in some respect different. The crucial factor is that light defines time. My seconds were different to yours for the duration of the experiment. Hence my c was different to yours. And time dilation is a change in c.
 
I didn't say the two experimenters remained in the same place in the Universe. I made sure one experimenter didn't know what the other experimenter did to avoid confusion regarding frames.
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But you implied that the two were in each other's Hubble Volume---i.e. they can ever hope to communicate their results to each other. If this is true, then there must be places in this universe where one can go to preform these experiments.

In turn, if THIS is true, then the speed of light cannot be called a "universal constant", as it is not constant in this universe. But this has experimentally been shown to be false, because the speed of light is a "universal constant", to quote the second postulate of SR. And SR is confirmed beyond any doubt.
 
BenTheMan said:
But you implied that the two were in each other's Hubble Volume---i.e. they can ever hope to communicate their results to each other. If this is true, then there must be places in this universe where one can go to preform these experiments.

In turn, if THIS is true, then the speed of light cannot be called a "universal constant", as it is not constant in this universe. But this has experimentally been shown to be false, because the speed of light is a "universal constant", to quote the second postulate of SR. And SR is confirmed beyond any doubt.
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Oh yes, I am sure that the contradictory results that were observed from the GPS satellites have proven Special Relativity beyond any doubt.

Ben, you would HAVE to be one of the people who believes in the AIDS theories because you believe in the establishment of a scientific consensus by heaping scorn on those people who don't share that consensus.
 
it's the only one required for abiogenesis isn't it?
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I am not familiar with the definitions. Does it matter if it is carbon based? I mean, what if we can create "life" in the lab and it doesn't resemble DNA or RNA or anything we know about? Would you still consider this proof of Evolution?
 
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