A new phenomena

[James R]

Magical Realist:

There's a law of physics that says objects can't disappear? I'm not familiar with that.

It's called the law of conservation of energy. Also known as the first law of thermodynamics.

How is quantum tunneling possible? Or wormholes for that matter.

Quantum tunneling has to do with the wavefunction of an object having a non-zero value on the other side of the "wall". Wormholes don't exist, as far as we know. And if they did, they wouldn't make things disappear without trace.

As far as cars not being able to disappear, all you can say is you've never seen one do it.

Nobody has ever seen one do it, really. What does that suggest to you? Oh yes, this reliable video of yours may be the first time in history that such a thing has been observed, despite the fact that it looks just like an amateur video edit.

But that doesn't mean there's some law keeping them from doing it. Read Hume.

Been there, done that. Hume also had things to say about miracles. Did you get as far as that part?

The fact that the sun rises everyday doesn't mean there's a law making it do it.

Yes it does. That law is known as conservation of angular momentum.

You are simply in the habit of something happening. Just like cars not disappearing. It seems a logically necessary fact, but it really isn't.

Science is based on regularities in nature. You're correct that such things aren't logically necessary. We can imagine a universe which had no regular laws, perhaps. But we don't seem to live in such a universe.

I think anything is possible given all that has happened in this universe since the Big Bang.

See what I did? I predicted your response before you made it - then you went ahead and made it anyway.

I hate to break it to you, but it is false that anything is possible in our universe.

I'm pretty sure if you dropped a car in a black hole it'd disappear without a trace.

No. It's mass would add to the mass of the black hole, and that mass increase could, in principle, be measured.

Hell if you just dropped a car in a vat of hot lava it disappear too.

Not without a trace. There'd be some molten metal, some hot gases etc.

Try to remember what we're talking about here. We're talking about a car that you think just vanished off a road. It didn't explode. It didn't melt. It was just edited out vanished.

I had my truck disappear one morning. Walked out of my apt to my parking space and low and behold it had disappeared. Did it disappear or was it stolen? Don't know, but it never turned up again.

What do you think is more likely: that somebody stole it, or that it was lifted into an alien spaceship and carried away to Mars? Any ideas? Or do you think both things are equally likely?

In a near infinite quantum vaccuum nearly every thing can fluctate into existence once. Even a grand piano in outer space.

The probability of a grand piano appearing is so minuscule that we can all but guarantee that such a thing has never happened in the lifetime of our universe. I'm guessing you have no idea of the absolute tininess of the probability of such an event. Your chances of winning first prize in the lottery every week for a year are enormous in comparison.

If you can't trust in the regularity of everyday experience, how do you get through your day? When you go to eat your wheaties in the morning, does it worry you that a pink merry-go-round might drop from the sky and kill you as you sit at the table? Are you worried that you car might turn into a turnip at any time? Do you lie awake at night worrying about whether the sun will rise in the morning? Or that spotted pixies might suddenly appear and conduct bizarre sexual experiments on you? It must be truly terrifying to be you. That's if you're for real, of course.

Difference being I don't construe laws preventing things from happening just because I haven't seen those happening. Take the Big Bang for example. Happened once 13 billion years ago. Noone saw it happen, but it did. And nothing like it has happened since. Does that mean there is some law keeping it from happening again?

Actually, probably not a law this time, but an absence of the right conditions for it to occur again. Oh, and by the way, if you're wondering why I believe the big bang - a one-off occurrence - happened, it's because there's plenty of reliable evidence that it did. Unlike for the disappearing car.

Take any of the millions of inhabited planets in the universe. It is very likely there are creatures living on these that you have no clue about.

You assume there are millions of inhabited planets, but on what grounds? Just like the disappearing car, you have nothing to base that assumption on. I, on the other hand, acknowledge the possibility of other inhabited planets, while waiting for some actual evidence to come in. And unlike the disappearing car, there's nothing to prevent alien life, as far as I am aware at present. And let me just add: there's no reliable evidence for any alien life visiting earth in flying saucers.

Heck there may even be dimensions containing entities we are ingnorant of.

Why do you think so? Again, this is just speculation based on ignorance.

Do you seriously think man has discovered all there is to know about the universe?

That's a straw man - something I never said.

Just to be clear: no, I don't think that we have discovered all there is to know about the universe. And like I said before, I think I have a better grasp of what we don't know than you do.

 

[Magical Realist]

Magical Realist:

It's called the law of conservation of energy. Also known as the first law of thermodynamics.

Here's what that law says:

"In physics, the law of conservation of energy states that the totalenergy of an isolated system cannot change—it is said to be conserved over time. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can change form, for instance chemical energy can be converted to kinetic energy in the explosion of a stick of dynamite."

How does that rule out objects disappearing? If a mass is converted into energy it would certainly disappear.

Quantum tunneling has to do with the wavefunction of an object having a non-zero value on the other side of the "wall".

It disappears and reappears on the other side of the wall. Sounds exactly like what you are denying can happen.

Wormholes don't exist, as far as we know. And if they did, they wouldn't make things disappear without trace.

Sure it'd make it disappear from one location without a trace. Then it'd reappear in another location. Theoretically there is nothing in science preventing this from happening. So again you are wrong.

Nobody

has ever seen one do it, really. What does that suggest to you? Oh yes, this reliable video of yours may be the first time in history that such a thing has been observed, despite the fact that it looks just like an amateur video edit.

You don't know that nobody has ever seen one do it. If they said they did they'd be called crazy by people like you. Nobody wants to upset your science applecart afterall.

Been there, done that. Hume also had things to say about miracles. Did you get as far as that part?

Then you know there is no logical basis for positing a law just because you've seen something happen over and over again.

Yes it does. That law is known as conservation of angular momentum.

So I guess when the sun doesn't rise in the arctic every 24 hours, that's a violation of angular momentum? lol!

Science is based on regularities in nature. You're correct that such things aren't logically necessary. We can imagine a universe which had no regular laws, perhaps. But we don't seem to live in such a universe.

Laws only apply to idealized events happening in idealized situations. The universe isn't like that. It's dirty and imprecise and anomalous and full of novelty.

See what I did? I predicted your response before you made it - then you went ahead and made it anyway.

Proving what exactly? That you're psychic?

I hate to break it to you, but it is false that anything is possible in our universe.

How do you know this? How do we know anything is impossible in the universe given we only know about a small fraction of it?

No. It's mass would add to the mass of the black hole, and that mass increase could, in principle, be measured.

Changing the goalposts are we? The car would disappear without a trace. End of story.

Try to remember what we're talking about here. We're talking about a car that you think just vanished off a road. It didn't explode. It didn't melt. It was just edited out vanished.

It disappeared without a trace. That's what the video shows.

What do you think is more likely: that somebody stole it, or that it was lifted into an alien spaceship and carried away to Mars? Any ideas? Or do you think both things are equally likely?

My guess is it was stolen. But I don't know for sure. You need to distinguish between inferences based on probabilities and really knowing something, because they are definitely NOT the same.

The probability of a grand piano appearing is so minuscule that we can all but guarantee that such a thing has never happened in the lifetime of our universe. I'm guessing you have no idea of the absolute tininess of the probability of such an event.

I'm guessing you have no idea how huge the multiverse is and the infinite amount of instances for a piano appearing that would make it well nigh inevitable at some point.

If you can't trust in the regularity of everyday experience, how do you get through your day? When you go to eat your wheaties in the morning, does it worry you that a pink merry-go-round might drop from the sky and kill you as you sit at the table? Are you worried that you car might turn into a turnip at any time? Do you lie awake at night worrying about whether the sun will rise in the morning? Or that spotted pixies might suddenly appear and conduct bizarre sexual experiments on you? It must be truly terrifying to be you. That's if you're for real, of course.

No, see it doesn't terrify me or threaten my reality at all that anomolous events can and do happen in the universe. Apparently it only bothers people like you who use science as a false assurance that everything is under your control and prediction at all times. I don't need that see? I'm fine with whatever happens.

Actually, probably not a law this time, but an absence of the right conditions for it to occur again. Oh, and by the way, if you're wondering why I believe the big bang - a one-off occurrence - happened, it's because there's plenty of reliable evidence that it did. Unlike for the disappearing car.

If the whole universe could appear out of nowhere, what's to keep it or any part of it from disappearing into nowhere?

You assume there are millions of inhabited planets, but on what grounds? Just like the disappearing car, you have nothing to base that assumption on.

Given the astronomical amount of stars out there as well as planets that meet the conditions of life, I'm pretty sure there's life out there in abundance. And the existence of ufos, supported by mountains of evidence, certainly supports the possibility that these lifeforms are highly advanced and are surveying us for some reason.

I, on the other hand, acknowledge the possibility of other inhabited planets, while waiting for some actual evidence to come in. And unlike the disappearing car, there's nothing to prevent alien life, as far as I am aware at present. And let me just add: there's no reliable evidence for any alien life visiting earth in flying saucers.

Wrong. The evidence for alien spacecraft is so abundant and ongoing it would take someone very ignorant on the subject to even deny such. Just study the evidence and see for yourself.

Just to be clear: no, I don't think that we have discovered all there is to know about the universe. And like I said before, I think I have a better grasp of what we don't know than you do.

Really? Then tell me what we don't know. I'm all ears..

 

[Russ_Watters]

James, have you considered the possibility that you are being trolled...?

 

[origin]

Science is based on regularities in nature. You're correct that such things aren't logically necessary. We can imagine a universe which had no regular laws, perhaps. But we don't seem to live in such a universe.

That is the problem in a nut shell. Magical Realist WANTS to believe we live in that kind of universe, so he will believe anything that supports that belief no matter how blatantly silly it is. Really strange if you ask me,

 

[Landau Roof]

That is the problem in a nut shell. Magical Realist WANTS to believe we live in that kind of universe, so he will believe anything that supports that belief no matter how blatantly silly it is. Really strange if you ask me,

To me the ironic thing about MR is he believes in anything that is hard to believe precisely because it is hard to believe, and yet the one thing he doesn't believe in is God. He works on the presumption that because a thing is unusual it must be true, and then extrapolates from there that any thing and every thing that is unusual is true... except for the Creator of the Universe, for personal reasons that he has explained, the Christian God is a no go. That would be fine, and his right except that it flies in the face of all the woo he does accept.

 

[Russ_Watters]

To me the ironic thing about MR is he believes in anything that is hard to believe precisely because it is hard to believe, and yet the one thing he doesn't believe in is God. He works on the presumption that because a thing is unusual it must be true, and then extrapolates from there that any thing and every thing that is unusual is true... except for the Creator of the Universe, for personal reasons that he has explained, the Christian God is a no go. That would be fine, and his right except that it flies in the face of all the woo he does accept.

Ironic, yes, but it points to an element of personal choice in his writing and beliefs. Part of the reason he posts undeveloped (a link with no comment) or vague claims or just leading questions is that he does understand how logic works. He knows that when the evidence is thin, no explanation can be proven, which makes it easier to argue against mundane explanations than for his crackpot explanations. And when he does that, he usually gets the logic right.

So while I believe most of his beliefs are sincere, there can certainly be an element of choice in choosing what to believe, just as there is a conscious choice involved in how he argues them.

In other words, whether or not he actually believes cars can disappear into wormholes, his choices on how to argue it are consciously chosen trolls.

 

[Russ_Watters]

That is the problem in a nut shell. Magical Realist WANTS to believe we live in that kind of universe, so he will believe anything that supports that belief no matter how blatantly silly it is. Really strange if you ask me,

Less strange if he understands how irrational he's being and does it anyway. The fact that he can be rational when arguing against mundane explanations implies he's choosing when to be rational and when not to be.

 

[Russ_Watters]

Expanding:
You may have noticed that I provided methods for difinitively proving fakery, which he completely ignored. He's not interested in finding definitive explanations -- this is all about the argument and he needs wiggle room for that.

Now, several people have commented on this, but in light of what I said in my previous post, here's my take:

You have no idea if cars can disappear or not. The only way you'd be able to know they can't is if you have personally viewed every car that ever existed from the moment it was made until it reached the scrap yard. And I doubt that you have. You need to carefully take stock of the things you REALLY know vice the things you don't know.

This post shows CLEARLY, that he understands how logic and burden of proof works. The first sentence is wrong, but he props it up with a correct second sentence -- it's a trick.

See, he knows that in science nothing can ever be 100% proven for exactly the reason he gave. He, of course, also knows that his ideas are not 100% provable for the same reason, which is why he focuses on attacking alternatives instead of proving his. The first sentence is the required logical leap to bridge that gap. He has to take that 0.000000001% uncertainty and widen it to 100% uncertainty ("no idea") in order to fit his black hole into it. It is, of course, wrong, but that trick is EXACTLY what needed to be done to open the door to his idea. That's how we know this is purposeful trolling: someone who is just dumb and gullible would not be capable of getting the logic exactly right (er - wrong).

 

[James R]

Magical Realist:

How does [the law of conservation of energy] rule out objects disappearing? If a mass is converted into energy it would certainly disappear.

No, there'd be some kind of detectable energy left over. What kind of energy do you think your vanished car turned into? And how did it do that?

It disappears and reappears on the other side of the wall. Sounds exactly like what you are denying can happen.

Again, you have no concept of how unlikely the tunneling of a macroscopic object like a car actually is. We can guarantee that if you lived for a billion years, you'll never see a car tunnel through a wall, let alone vanish into thin air off a highway and be found nowhere in the vicinity.

Of course, your video is no evidence that a car vanished. Nobody went looking for a vanished car. There appears to be no eyewitness testimony from any of the drivers who were driving behind the car that supposedly vanished. It didn't make the evening news. All you have a is a badly-edited video. And from that you extrapolate that something that can't happen happened.

Sure [a wormhole would] make it disappear from one location without a trace. Then it'd reappear in another location. Theoretically there is nothing in science preventing this from happening. So again you are wrong.

You think there's nothing theoretically wrong with a wormhole appearing on a highway somewhere at random, just for long enough to swallow a car and then close up without trace?

Tell me: where did the car reappear, and who verified it? Who saw the wormhole? What did the driver of the disappeared car say about the whole thing?

You don't know that nobody has ever seen one do it. If they said they did they'd be called crazy by people like you. Nobody wants to upset your science applecart afterall.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. This video is not extraordinary. It's so very ordinary. And there is nothing that supports it other than your desire to believe in everything weird.

Then you know there is no logical basis for positing a law just because you've seen something happen over and over again.

Nicely ignored. Here's what Hume said about miracles:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.​

So, ask yourself: which is more miraculous? That somebody faked the video, or that the car actually disappeared into thin air?

As for positing laws based on regularities, I hate to break it to you but that's what science is all about. That's how it works.

So I guess when the sun doesn't rise in the arctic every 24 hours, that's a violation of angular momentum? lol!

LOL indeed. Nice try at moving of the goal posts, but I saw through it.

You said: "The fact that the sun rises everyday doesn't mean there's a law making it do it." And I said that the reason the sun rises every day is due to conservation of angular momentum (i.e. it has to do with the rotation of the Earth).

You started with the assumption that the sun rises every day, but now you're introducing the arctic, where the sun doesn't rise every day. So, you started by claiming that it rises every day, and I told you why. Not liking that answer, you searched around for an exception to your own rule. If you'd like me to explain why the sun doesn't rise everyday in the arctic, I can do that for you, but that's a separate issue to the one you originally raised.

By the way, do you disagree with the rotation of the Earth? Do you have an alternative explanation for why the sun rises anywhere on Earth that it does actually rise? I thought not. So I was right all along, and you've been caught out being tricky. LOL indeed.

Laws only apply to idealized events happening in idealized situations. The universe isn't like that. It's dirty and imprecise and anomalous and full of novelty.

You call yourself "Magical Realist" and this is why. You actually believe that magic can happen at any time, so we can't trust science. At any given time, according to you. the laws of nature can be suspended by various magic-like processes.

Actually it is you who is wrong. The universe isn't the magical place you imagine it to be. Natural follows carefully-observed regularities that science explains. There is no magic. Not really. There are plenty of fakes - like your ghost photos and your UFO videos and your disappearing car video, but no real magic. And it doesn't matter how much you wish that magic existed.

Proving what exactly? That you're psychic?

There you go again. If I can predict your response, I must be psychic. Magical thinking again. In fact, I can predict some of what you'll say because I've read what you've written in the past - enough to know how you think about some things. It's a boring explanation, but it's the true explanation. Psychic powers are magic. Nobody has them.

 

[James R]

(continued...)

How do you know this? How do we know anything is impossible in the universe given we only know about a small fraction of it?

Because certain laws of nature are established beyond all reasonable doubt. They are never observed to be violated, and never have been so observed in the past. Each unbreakable law limits what is possible in the universe. There is no magic. You can't break the unbreakable laws.

It's mass would add to the mass of the black hole, and that mass increase could, in principle, be measured.

Changing the goalposts are we? The car would disappear without a trace. End of story.

The changed mass of the black hole would be a trace. We could trace what happened to the mass. See?

It disappeared without a trace. That's what the video shows.

The video shows a fuzzy blob appearing and a somewhat jerky edit. You extrapolate from that that a car disappeared. It didn't. Somebody clumsily used photoshop (or whatever the equivalent is for videos).

My guess is it was stolen. But I don't know for sure. You need to distinguish between inferences based on probabilities and really knowing something, because they are definitely NOT the same.

So it's possible that your car was taken to Mars by space aliens? Suppose somebody asked you what you think is the most likely explanation for your missing truck, what would you reply? "I have no idea. No clue at all. There's just no way to know. Maybe pixies vanished it. Maybe it turned into a speck of dust. Maybe some dwarves carried it off and buried it in the caverns of Mount Doom. Maybe somebody stole it. All these things are equally likely, as far as I am concerned." ?

I'm guessing you have no idea how huge the multiverse is and the infinite amount of instances for a piano appearing that would make it well nigh inevitable at some point.

There's no solid evidence for a multiverse. None. Magical thinking again. And even if there is a multiverse, it does not follow that in any given universe in the multiverse seeing a car spontaneously vanish off a road is a probable occurrence.

No, see it doesn't terrify me or threaten my reality at all that anomolous events can and do happen in the universe. Apparently it only bothers people like you who use science as a false assurance that everything is under your control and prediction at all times. I don't need that see? I'm fine with whatever happens.

Of course it doesn't threaten your reality that magic occurs, because your belief in magic is the foundation of your reality. The problem is that your reality is a fantasy you've created to make yourself comfortable and/or so you can regard yourself as superior to all us deluded science types who insist that magic isn't real because we know something about how the world actually works, based on careful observation.

You're fine with whatever happens because it means you can be lazy and not have to learn why things happen, or why one thing happens and not another. It's a licence you've given yourself for laziness and sloppiness of thought.

If the whole universe could appear out of nowhere, what's to keep it or any part of it from disappearing into nowhere?

Nothing except those pesky natural laws I keep blathering on about.

Given the astronomical amount of stars out there as well as planets that meet the conditions of life, I'm pretty sure there's life out there in abundance.

Really? Pretty sure, eh? Just like you're pretty sure that cars can vanish off highways?

And the existence of ufos, supported by mountains of evidence, certainly supports the possibility that these lifeforms are highly advanced and are surveying us for some reason.

The evidence for alien spaceships is shoddy and unreliable. A lot of it is simply fake, like the car video. Most UFOs are UFOs in exactly the sense that they are unidentified. It's a huge and unwarranted leap from there to the conclusion that UFOs are mostly alien spacecraft, and another massive and baseless leap to deducing the motives of these unknown alien lifeforms.

Wrong. The evidence for alien spacecraft is so abundant and ongoing it would take someone very ignorant on the subject to even deny such. Just study the evidence and see for yourself.

I'm aware of the kinds of things that are claimed as "evidence". Whenever these things are looked into by scientists (and not UFO groupies) they turn out to be spectacularly unconvincing or fake or mistaken.

Really? Then tell me what we don't know. I'm all ears..

Look at the forefront of research in any area of science (or any area of scholarship, for that matter). The job of researchers is to investigate the unknown. To do that the researchers have to have a very clear idea about what is known and what remains to be discovered or tested, so that they can determine how to proceed in their investigations.

 

[Magical Realist]

Magical Realist:

No, there'd be some kind of detectable energy left over. What kind of energy do you think your vanished car turned into? And how did it do that?

Any energy would quickly dissipate into space, becoming undetectable.

Again, you have no concept of how unlikely the tunneling of a macroscopic object like a car actually is. We can guarantee that if you lived for a billion years, you'll never see a car tunnel through a wall, let alone vanish into thin air off a highway and be found nowhere in the vicinity.

That's only assuming there are not near infinite possible instances for the object to vanish. Considering the number of electrons in the universe, it is thus NOT improbable for some to teleport thru barriers. Considering the number of macro objects in the multiverse, it is likewise NOT improbable that some may teleport to other locations.

Of course, your video is no evidence that a car vanished. Nobody went looking for a vanished car. There appears to be no eyewitness testimony from any of the drivers who were driving behind the car that supposedly vanished. It didn't make the evening news. All you have a is a badly-edited video. And from that you extrapolate that something that can't happen happened.

You have yet to explain what law means this can't have happened. Conservation of energy certainly isn't one. Any others?

You think there's nothing theoretically wrong with a wormhole appearing on a highway somewhere at random, just for long enough to swallow a car and then close up without trace?

Do you know how often wormholes open up in space? You have no idea. Space may be subject to certain random instabilities that result in these happening far more often than we know.

Tell me: where did the car reappear, and who verified it? Who saw the wormhole? What did the driver of the disappeared car say about the whole thing?

Call them and find out..

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. This video is not extraordinary. It's so very ordinary. And there is nothing that supports it other than your desire to believe in everything weird.

Extraordinary things happen all the time. What are the odds that you would be born? And even though the chances of you winning the lottery are incredibly low, the chances of SOMEone winning are well-nigh inevitable. That's what happens when you have an enormous amount of instances for an event to occur. The odds go from highly improbable to highly probable.

Nicely ignored. Here's what Hume said about miracles:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.​

So, ask yourself: which is more miraculous? That somebody faked the video, or that the car actually disappeared into thin air?

We were talking about laws, not miracles. Try to stay on topic.

As for positing laws based on regularities, I hate to break it to you but that's what science is all about. That's how it works.

And yet we still have no law saying objects can't teleport from one point in spacetime to another.

LOL indeed. Nice try at moving of the goal posts, but I saw through it.

You said: "The fact that the sun rises everyday doesn't mean there's a law making it do it." And I said that the reason the sun rises every day is due to conservation of angular momentum (i.e. it has to do with the rotation of the Earth).

You started with the assumption that the sun rises every day, but now you're introducing the arctic, where the sun doesn't rise every day. So, you started by claiming that it rises every day, and I told you why. Not liking that answer, you searched around for an exception to your own rule. If you'd like me to explain why the sun doesn't rise everyday in the arctic, I can do that for you, but that's a separate issue to the one you originally raised.

By the way, do you disagree with the rotation of the Earth? Do you have an alternative explanation for why the sun rises anywhere on Earth that it does actually rise? I thought not. So I was right all along, and you've been caught out being tricky. LOL indeed.

The reason the sun rises everyday in subpolar areas is because the earth is rotating. That's not a law of physics. It's a very specific set of circumstances that could just as well have been different. IE. The planet earth could have had it's axis pointed at the Sun for instance. Or the Sun could explode. Or earth could be hit by a huge asteroid that causes it to stop rotating. Any number of events could alter this situation. So no, there is no "law" saying the Sun HAS to rise tomorrow.

You call yourself "Magical Realist" and this is why. You actually believe that magic can happen at any time, so we can't trust science. At any given time, according to you. the laws of nature can be suspended by various magic-like processes.

You'll note my name is MAGICAL realist, not magic realist. "Magical" in the sense of something being wonderful and fascinating like magic. That means I find reality endlessly full of magical events, events like the Big Bang, and the evolution of life, and consciousness, and black holes, and quantum entanglement, and supernovae, and the flight of the bumblebee. THAT is the true spirit of science. It is the ability to be in awe and wonder at the infinite expressions of Being all around us, things we could never have anticipated in a million years even though we know all the laws of the universe.

Actually it is you who is wrong. The universe isn't the magical place you imagine it to be. Natural follows carefully-observed regularities that science explains. There is no magic. Not really. There are plenty of fakes - like your ghost photos and your UFO videos and your disappearing car video, but no real magic. And it doesn't matter how much you wish that magic existed.

Quite aside from the issue of paranormality, even at the minimum level of everyday events the universe is extremely magical. And just because it is regular doesn't make it less magical. That there is a law for why virtual particles pop in and out of existence doesn't make this any less magical. That there is a law for why light can be both a particle and a wave doesn't make that any less magical. Regularity simply means that the magic--the unexplained--happens more often than not. There doesn't need to be exceptions to the rule for magic to happen.

There you go again. If I can predict your response, I must be psychic. Magical thinking again. In fact, I can predict some of what you'll say because I've read what you've written in the past - enough to know how you think about some things. It's a boring explanation, but it's the true explanation. Psychic powers are magic. Nobody has them.

Hey you're the one strutting around bragging about accurately predicting something. I simply asked why that was so incredible. People accurately predict things every day, and it's no big deal. What does this prove? What does this have to do with the topic at hand?

 

[Magical Realist]

(continued...)
Because certain laws of nature are established beyond all reasonable doubt. They are never observed to be violated, and never have been so observed in the past. Each unbreakable law limits what is possible in the universe. There is no magic. You can't break the unbreakable laws.

Since laws are only based on what human primates observe locally, there is no way to know that they apply universally. For all we know, these laws that seem so unbreakable to us, at our primitive stage of evolution, ARE being broken by alien beings far more advanced that us. For all we know there are conditions elsewhere in the universe when the laws break down, like inside a black hole or right before the big bang.

The changed mass of the black hole would be a trace. We could trace what happened to the mass. See?

How would you measure something like that?

The video shows a fuzzy blob appearing and a somewhat jerky edit. You extrapolate from that that a car disappeared. It didn't. Somebody clumsily used photoshop (or whatever the equivalent is for videos).

Reread the OP. I even admitted the video could be a hoax. But I then said IF the video was genuine then its worth taking note of this. That's when you jumped in spouting claims about laws and impossibilities and the infallibility of science.

So it's possible that your car was taken to Mars by space aliens? Suppose somebody asked you what you think is the most likely explanation for your missing truck, what would you reply? "I have no idea. No clue at all. There's just no way to know. Maybe pixies vanished it. Maybe it turned into a speck of dust. Maybe some dwarves carried it off and buried it in the caverns of Mount Doom. Maybe somebody stole it. All these things are equally likely, as far as I am concerned." ?

What did I say? I said it is likely the car was stolen, but I don't KNOW it didn't disappear. And neither do you.

There's no solid evidence for a multiverse. None. Magical thinking again. And even if there is a multiverse, it does not follow that in any given universe in the multiverse seeing a car spontaneously vanish off a road is a probable occurrence.

Why don't you research a subject before presuming to speak for science? You aren't science. You are just one more person attributing to science more certainty and infallibility than it really has.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ence-multiverse-revealed-time-cosmic-map.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article...glimpse-of-big-bang-ripples.html#.VHDoaYvF-So

Of course it doesn't threaten your reality that magic occurs, because your belief in magic is the foundation of your reality. The problem is that your reality is a fantasy you've created to make yourself comfortable and/or so you can regard yourself as superior to all us deluded science types who insist that magic isn't real because we know something about how the world actually works, based on careful observation.

Ooo..I'm all comfortable about how I view reality. What a horrible person I must be. Fact is you are just as smug and complacent in your claimed "knowledge" of science and what it teaches you is true. That's a belief system if you haven't noticed, and one particularly motivated by an almost fanatical loyalty and reverence. Why do you NEED science to tell you what is real? Don't you think you should be deciding that for yourself?

You're fine with whatever happens because it means you can be lazy and not have to learn why things happen, or why one thing happens and not another. It's a licence you've given yourself for laziness and sloppiness of thought.

Oooo..now I'm lazy and sloppy. lol! You can't even defend your own beliefs without attacking my character. What does this say about the credibility of your position? Not much..

Nothing except those pesky natural laws I keep blathering on about.

Laws being whatever bipedal primates have observed to be the usual case in their own local space and time.

The evidence for alien spaceships is shoddy and unreliable. A lot of it is simply fake, like the car video. Most UFOs are UFOs in exactly the sense that they are unidentified. It's a huge and unwarranted leap from there to the conclusion that UFOs are mostly alien spacecraft, and another massive and baseless leap to deducing the motives of these unknown alien lifeforms.

The accounts of ufos number in the tens of thousands. You have only to look over the evidence for yourself to gain an unbiased view of this matter. But we all know you're not going to do that as that would threaten your sciency worldview that everything is explained and known and controlled by strict laws.

I'm aware of the kinds of things that are claimed as "evidence". Whenever these things are looked into by scientists (and not UFO groupies) they turn out to be spectacularly unconvincing or fake or mistaken.

Not even remotely true. There are hundreds of well-documented cases of unidentified craft that scientists either cannot explain or simply ignore as that would jeopardize their career and reputation. Ofcourse there ARE reputable scientists who DO testify to the reality of ufos:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/20/physicist-eric-davis-mufon-symposium_n_3620126.html

 

[Landau Roof]

@MR's last two post: tl:dr

 

[James R]

Magical Realist:

Considering the number of electrons in the universe, it is thus NOT improbable for some to teleport thru barriers. Considering the number of macro objects in the multiverse, it is likewise NOT improbable that some may teleport to other locations.

Wrong. An electron tunneling through a barrier is one thing. A car tunneling is quite a different thing. Do you have any idea how many electrons are in a car? And all of them have to tunnel at the same time for the car to vanish. It never happens for macroscopic objects. A universe full of macroscopic objects won't ever make it happen.

You have yet to explain what law means this can't have happened. Conservation of energy certainly isn't one. Any others?

I'm tempted so say the law of common sense.

If you think that a car can vanish into thin air, perhaps leaving some residual energy behind, then give me a plausible physical explanation for how that could happen. And I don't mean a vague "advanced aliens could have done it somehow using some unknown technology". So far, you've only offered a wormhole as a possible explanation. No wormholes are known to exist, and there's no reason to suppose that they do. So, got anything else?

Do you know how often wormholes open up in space?

They don't, as far as anybody knows. And if a wormhole did somehow open and swallow that car, why didn't it also swallow a chunk of the road? Why just one car? That's a very precisely targeted wormhole. Do you think is was controlled by aliens? I'm sure you'd be more than ready to jump from a badly-edited video to claiming proof of alien technology.

You have no idea. Space may be subject to certain random instabilities that result in these happening far more often than we know.

There are no confirmed disappearances of cars into thin air that I know of. Do you know of any?

Call them and find out..

Er.. no. That's your job. You're the one proposing the miracle here. It's up to you to provide the extraordinary evidence.

Extraordinary things happen all the time. What are the odds that you would be born?

The process of birth is well understood, even by non-scientists. Moreover, countless examples have been confirmed by reliable observers (myself included). Extraordinary as my birth may seem, on a planet of 7 billion human beings it's not that surprising that I, or somebody like me, would be born.

You may object that my particular arrangement of DNA is unique in human history, and you'd be right about that. But then being surprised at my existence is like being surprised by the particular configuration of the gas molecules at a particular moment in the room you're sitting in right now. That has never existed anywhere in the universe before, either, and never will again. Clearly, there's an important difference in saying that a particular configuration of genes or molecules is extraordinary and saying that cars can vanish into thin air through some process whose like has never ever been observed.

And even though the chances of you winning the lottery are incredibly low, the chances of SOMEone winning are well-nigh inevitable. That's what happens when you have an enormous amount of instances for an event to occur. The odds go from highly improbable to highly probable.

The odds of some car disappearing into thin air are utterly negligible, even considering all the cars on Earth.

So, ask yourself: which is more miraculous? That somebody faked the video, or that the car actually disappeared into thin air?

We were talking about laws, not miracles. Try to stay on topic.

Nice try at avoiding the difficult question, once again, but once again you were caught out.

When you talk about a car vanishing into thin air, you're talking about a miracle. So, please try again and answer the question.

And yet we still have no law saying objects can't teleport from one point in spacetime to another.

Depends what you mean by an "object". Photons and electrons can do it, under very special conditions. Cars can't.

The reason the sun rises everyday in subpolar areas is because the earth is rotating. That's not a law of physics. It's a very specific set of circumstances that could just as well have been different. IE. The planet earth could have had it's axis pointed at the Sun for instance. Or the Sun could explode. Or earth could be hit by a huge asteroid that causes it to stop rotating. Any number of events could alter this situation. So no, there is no "law" saying the Sun HAS to rise tomorrow.

Why does the Earth keep rotating? Conservation of angular momentum. That's the initial answer I gave you. [Caveat: it isn't quite true that momentum is conserved, but it changes very very slowly, for reasons we needn't go into here.]

I think we're drifting off topic rapidly with this example. The point is, we understand why the sun is observed to rise (or not). The science on that is solid. If the sun failed to rise tomorrow (on the equator, let's say, to avoid your shifting of the goalposts again), then either something catastrophic (and natural) must have happened (in which case we're unlikely to be there to observe it), or else some magic happened. And since there is no magic, and since catastrophy on the required scale seems unlikely, then we can be confident that the sun will rise tomorrow.

 

[James R]

(continued...)

You'll note my name is MAGICAL realist, not magic realist. "Magical" in the sense of something being wonderful and fascinating like magic. That means I find reality endlessly full of magical events, events like the Big Bang, and the evolution of life, and consciousness, and black holes, and quantum entanglement, and supernovae, and the flight of the bumblebee. THAT is the true spirit of science. It is the ability to be in awe and wonder at the infinite expressions of Being all around us, things we could never have anticipated in a million years even though we know all the laws of the universe.

This is again revealing of your penchant for magical thinking. The big bang, evolution, black holes and so on are not magic, or even "like magic". Science explains all of these things. Moreover, the evidence that these things exist/happen is overwhelming. In contrast, the evidence offered for the existence of ghosts, aliens visiting Earth, disappearing cars, Bigfoot and so on is shoddy, unreliable and usually highly dependent on individual interpretation, anecdote and authority.

Quite aside from the issue of paranormality, even at the minimum level of everyday events the universe is extremely magical. And just because it is regular doesn't make it less magical. That there is a law for why virtual particles pop in and out of existence doesn't make this any less magical. That there is a law for why light can be both a particle and a wave doesn't make that any less magical. Regularity simply means that the magic--the unexplained--happens more often than not. There doesn't need to be exceptions to the rule for magic to happen.

I think your problem is that you don't correctly distinguish the natural from the magical. Magic is supernatural - it occurs apart from nature. It can have no scientific explanation because science is the study of the natural world. In the above quote, you mention virtual particles and light. Both of those are natural phenomena. There are physical theories that describe them. We can do physical, real-world experiments to observe them that are repeatable.

Your vanishing car is magical. You can't reproduce it in the lab (or anywhere else) on demand. It's a one-off. You can, of course, produce fake "evidence" - that's easy, and it should tell you something important about the video. You have no theory to explain how a car could conceivably vanish.

Hey you're the one strutting around bragging about accurately predicting something.

You post two of three threads of pseudoscientifc cut-and-paste a day, and you say I'm strutting around? Interesting.

I merely commented on your jumping to "psychic" when the word "prediction" was mentioned. It's evidence that you look to the supernatural before you consider the mundane. And that means you waste a lot of your time deluding yourself.

Since laws are only based on what human primates observe locally, there is no way to know that they apply universally.

The vanishing car is supposed to have happened locally - right on the same little planet that we came up with those laws of physics. They don't have to apply universally to rule out the vanishing of cars right here.

For all we know, these laws that seem so unbreakable to us, at our primitive stage of evolution, ARE being broken by alien beings far more advanced that us.

Are you saying that aliens vanished the car, then? So, we've gone from a video that could be easily faked to the existence of advanced aliens capable of amazing feats of wormhole control (or whatever), who apparently like kidnapping cars and their occupants. Can't you see that's an unwarranted leap of fantasy?

For all we know there are conditions elsewhere in the universe when the laws break down, like inside a black hole or right before the big bang.

This car wasn't in a black hole or before the big bang, though.

Also, it's not quite right to say that physics "breaks down" under those conditions. What scientists mean when they say that is that our theories are currently not sophisticated enough or complete enough to describe those particular situations. Science isn't finished. It's an ongoing enterprise. We're admitting that we don't know everything.

The changed mass of the black hole would be a trace. We could trace what happened to the mass.

How would you measure something like that?

Rather than just give you the answer, I want you to think about this: how do we know the mass of the Earth?

If you can't find the answer, let me know and I'll tell you.

Reread the OP. I even admitted the video could be a hoax. But I then said IF the video was genuine then its worth taking note of this. That's when you jumped in spouting claims about laws and impossibilities and the infallibility of science.

You actually started with "Seems like a new phenomena. Is it a hoax? Maybe, but on the off chance that it's real, it's definitely worth noting..."

Seems like a new phenomena. Hmmm.... [By the way, "phenomenon" is singular, "phenomena" is plural.]

You didn't really consider the possibility that the video was faked. You still haven't really considered that possibility. You'd rather that it was "a new phenomena".

And why is this video so worth noting? Because it's so reliable and verified? Because there's so much supporting evidence? No, you think it's worth noting because it fits the pattern of all the other magic you so wish was real. Probably you think you're one-up on the scientists because you know about all these "unexplained phenomena", while they're in denial, poor fools. But you've never properly investigated any of this stuff. You just dredge from your favorite crank sites and recycle without questioning.

What did I say? I said it is likely the car was stolen, but I don't KNOW it didn't disappear. And neither do you.

So give me your estimated percentages. What do you think: 50% your truck was stolen, 50% it vanished into thin air? Or 80-20? Or 20-80? What? Actually, let's widen the possibilities a bit. Give me your estimate of mundane explanation vs. explanation beyond the realm of known science. What then? 50-50?

Why don't you research a subject before presuming to speak for science? You aren't science. You are just one more person attributing to science more certainty and infallibility than it really has.

*chuckle*. How do you know I'm not science? Look at the topics I post on. Perhaps they'll give you a clue to how much science I know. If you're qualified to judge, that is, which I doubt. I won't list my formal qualifications, because there'd be no point. Any anonymous person on the internet can claim to have multiple doctorates in advanced cosmology or whatever (and just to be clear I'm not making that claim).

I've already claimed that I have a better idea than you do about what science does and doesn't know. Actually, as we will see below, it is actually you who is claiming too much for science when it comes to multiverses etc. All I have done is to tell you what I know that science says about the possibility of cars quantum tunneling etc. You were the one who suggested tunneling as a possible explanation, not me. I've just explained to you that it's a lousy explanation and you'll need to try something else. The same goes for wormholes. What you're left with is magic. Or the obvious - the video was faked.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ence-multiverse-revealed-time-cosmic-map.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article...glimpse-of-big-bang-ripples.html#.VHDoaYvF-So

http://www.newscientist.com/article...glimpse-of-big-bang-ripples.html#.VHDoaYvF-So
Like I said, there's no solid evidence for the multiverse. These articles you linked are speculative. It doesn't mean that cosmologists don't take the idea of the multiverse seriously. It's just that the evidence isn't in yet. It's the subject of ongoing research.

 

[James R]

(continued...)

Ooo..I'm all comfortable about how I view reality. What a horrible person I must be. Fact is you are just as smug and complacent in your claimed "knowledge" of science and what it teaches you is true. That's a belief system if you haven't noticed, and one particularly motivated by an almost fanatical loyalty and reverence. Why do you NEED science to tell you what is real? Don't you think you should be deciding that for yourself?

Science is a cumulative body of knowledge and method that is at least 500 years old, and arguably much older than that. What science has given us is the best method we have for generating new knowledge about the world. It demands rigorous standards of investigation and confirmation. Every good scientist in proposing an explanation for a set of observations goes through a process of considering all of the reasons why his or her explanation might be wrong, because if he or she doesn't do that, some other scientist will.

You never ask yourself questions like "What if this video is faked?" or "What if this person who told the story about the UFO is lying? What if they're mistaken?" or "What other explanations could their be for this phenomenon that I find so surprising at first glance? What have the experts said about this? How can I find out more? What independent sources confirm this?" Those are the kinds of questions that every scientist asks.

Science is not a belief system. It's first and foremost a method, though it does have some philosophical assumptions.

I'm not sure why it surprises you that some people have a degree of "reverence" for science. You should have a healthy respect for it, because demonstrably science works in a way that all your pseudoscientific crap does not. Science continues to constantly produce tangible improvements in the quality and quantity of human life. On the other hand, what have ghosts and astrology and UFOs and disappearing cars ever done for us?

Do I need science to tell me what's real? It depends what you're talking about. There's no way I could know that electrons are real, for example, without science. Science gives me insights into the world that could not be obtained in any other way. Moreover, science (or the scientific method) is an invaluable innoculation against being sucked in by a whole lot of stuff that isn't real. It helps to cut through the crap.

Would I be better off left to my own devices to decide what's real and what isn't? I don't think so. Human beings are quite susceptible to believing things that aren't true. We are prone to deluding ourselves and to being deluded by others. It's good to have a baloney detection kit readily available when you need it. You should get one for yourself.

Oooo..now I'm lazy and sloppy. lol! You can't even defend your own beliefs without attacking my character. What does this say about the credibility of your position? Not much..

What makes you think I'm on the defensive here? It looks to me like you're the one who doesn't like having his beliefs challenged. Why is that?

The accounts of ufos number in the tens of thousands. You have only to look over the evidence for yourself to gain an unbiased view of this matter. But we all know you're not going to do that as that would threaten your sciency worldview that everything is explained and known and controlled by strict laws.

I have looked into it - enough to tell that it's not worth spending a lot more time on. When I was a kid, I though the idea of aliens visiting Earth was neat, and I wondered whether it could be real. Then I read what some real scientists think about that, and why. Since then, I've learned a lot more. I'm still moderately interested in aliens visiting Earth, though now more as a study of why some people believe that stuff - the study of why people want to believe, what they get out of it etc.

If aliens were visiting Earth, I don't see how that would threaten my sciency worldview. Aliens would share the same science as the rest of us, because we share the same universe. And they would have had to have used science to get here in the first place. I'd probably have more in common with those aliens than I do with you in terms of respect for science.

Not even remotely true. There are hundreds of well-documented cases of unidentified craft that scientists either cannot explain or simply ignore as that would jeopardize their career and reputation.

Why don't start a new thread and present for me what you consider to be the best such case you know of? Seeing as you're so into this stuff, you must have a few good ones. Generally, all I see you post is fuzzy videos from youtube.

Ofcourse there ARE reputable scientists who DO testify to the reality of ufos:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/20/physicist-eric-davis-mufon-symposium_n_3620126.html

According to this Eric Davis guy "UFOs are real phenomena. They are artificial objects under intelligent control. They're definitely the craft of a supremely advanced technology." I didn't watch the video. Does he explain anywhere how he reached these conclusions?

I'm not aware of Davis's reputation. My impression is that he is a scientists or engineer (I'm not sure which, from what I've seen) with some fringe ideas. He's not the only one of those. And he's definitely in the minority among those who are best qualified to judge the "reality" of UFOs. I also notice that some of his comments have been misconstrued by some of the UFO crowd to seem to say more than they actually do.

 

[Magical Realist]

Magical Realist:

Wrong. An electron tunneling through a barrier is one thing. A car tunneling is quite a different thing. Do you have any idea how many electrons are in a car? And all of them have to tunnel at the same time for the car to vanish. It never happens for macroscopic objects. A universe full of macroscopic objects won't ever make it happen.

You don't know it doesn't happen with macroscopic objects. All you can say is that you have never seen one do it. That's not evidence it can't happen. And since there is no law of science preventing such from happening, it certainly could happen.

I'm tempted so say the law of common sense.

I'm not familiar with that law of physics. What does it say? Here's what Einstein said about common sense: "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

If you think that a car can vanish into thin air, perhaps leaving some residual energy behind, then give me a plausible physical explanation for how that could happen. And I don't mean a vague "advanced aliens could have done it somehow using some unknown technology". So far, you've only offered a wormhole as a possible explanation. No wormholes are known to exist, and there's no reason to suppose that they do. So, got anything else?

I already gave you the scenario of wormholes. These very well COULD exist, and since we have no estimate on how often they open up, they would provide an explanation for why the car disappeared. Here's a recent proof backed by hard science on how wormholes might exist:

http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/cambridge-physicists-find-wormhole-proof

They don't, as far as anybody knows. And if a wormhole did somehow open and swallow that car, why didn't it also swallow a chunk of the road? Why just one car? That's a very precisely targeted wormhole. Do you think is was controlled by aliens? I'm sure you'd be more than ready to jump from a badly-edited video to claiming proof of alien technology.

For all we know that's how wormholes work. They appear randomly and suck in loose objects depositing them somewhere else in space. The possibilities are endless.

There are no confirmed disappearances of cars into thin air that I know of. Do you know of any?

I posted two, one which you admitted you didn't even look at.

Er.. no. That's your job. You're the one proposing the miracle here. It's up to you to provide the extraordinary evidence.

Er yes. If you have questions answer them yourself. I'm not about to jump thru hoops for you or anybody else. And for the record, nobody mentioned miracles but you. A miracle is a God intervening into natural events and causing something to happen. I never proposed that as an explanation.

The process of birth is well understood, even by non-scientists. Moreover, countless examples have been confirmed by reliable observers (myself included). Extraordinary as my birth may seem, on a planet of 7 billion human beings it's not that surprising that I, or somebody like me, would be born.

You may object that my particular arrangement of DNA is unique in human history, and you'd be right about that. But then being surprised at my existence is like being surprised by the particular configuration of the gas molecules at a particular moment in the room you're sitting in right now. That has never existed anywhere in the universe before, either, and never will again. Clearly, there's an important difference in saying that a particular configuration of genes or molecules is extraordinary and saying that cars can vanish into thin air through some process whose like has never ever been observed.

I think the odds of you of all people getting born are so slight that we can definitely call it an extraordinary event. Objects vanishing thru wormholes? We have no idea how common or uncommon that is. It might be a usual thing for all we know. It's just most people assume the things are stolen or lost.

The odds of some car disappearing into thin air are utterly negligible, even considering all the cars on Earth.

We don't know the odds given we can't rule out wormholes causing it to happen.

Nice try at avoiding the difficult question, once again, but once again you were caught out.

When you talk about a car vanishing into thin air, you're talking about a miracle. So, please try again and answer the question.

I'd have to believe that the car vanishing was a divine act of intervention to believe it was a miracle. I don't, so you bringing up miracles is a huge straw man.

Depends what you mean by an "object". Photons and electrons can do it, under very special conditions. Cars can't.

"Object" as in any physical object. And once again, you have no idea cars can't do this because you don't watch all cars on earth 24/7 making sure they don't. You can't even cite a law of physics constraining cars from ever disappearing. You have yet to back your claim on anything more substantial than that you haven't seen one do it. And that's pretty flimsy. I've never seen two planets collide either. Is it therefore impossible? No..

Why does the Earth keep rotating? Conservation of angular momentum. That's the initial answer I gave you. [Caveat: it isn't quite true that momentum is conserved, but it changes very very slowly, for reasons we needn't go into here.]

So it's violating the very law you stated governing its rotation? That's interesting..

I think we're drifting off topic rapidly with this example. The point is, we understand why the sun is observed to rise (or not). The science on that is solid. If the sun failed to rise tomorrow (on the equator, let's say, to avoid your shifting of the goalposts again), then either something catastrophic (and natural) must have happened (in which case we're unlikely to be there to observe it), or else some magic happened. And since there is no magic, and since catastrophy on the required scale seems unlikely, then we can be confident that the sun will rise tomorrow.

Once again, no inviolable law here that earth and the solar system MUST obey perfectly. Just something occurring regularly due to the regular conditions of earth's orientation and rotation. Regularity does not necessarily entail nomological constraint. My heart beats regularly all my life, yet there is no law saying it must.

 

[Magical Realist]

(continued...)

This is again revealing of your penchant for magical thinking. The big bang, evolution, black holes and so on are not magic, or even "like magic". Science explains all of these things. Moreover, the evidence that these things exist/happen is overwhelming. In contrast, the evidence offered for the existence of ghosts, aliens visiting Earth, disappearing cars, Bigfoot and so on is shoddy, unreliable and usually highly dependent on individual interpretation, anecdote and authority.

It doesn't require magic for an alien to exist. It doesn't require magic for Bigfoot to exist. It doesn't even require magic for a car to disappear, assuming there is an actual physical mechanism for its disappearance.

I think your problem is that you don't correctly distinguish the natural from the magical. Magic is supernatural - it occurs apart from nature. It can have no scientific explanation because science is the study of the natural world. In the above quote, you mention virtual particles and light. Both of those are natural phenomena. There are physical theories that describe them. We can do physical, real-world experiments to observe them that are repeatable.

I am uncomfortable limiting phenomena to only natural or supernatural. I don't think that dichotomy does justice to all that can happen out there. For instance, is anti-matter natural? Doesn't seem like it. Is dark matter natural? Maybe not. Is what happened prior to the Big Bang or whatever happens inside black holes natural. No, not in the since of abiding by the known laws of physics.

Your vanishing car is magical. You can't reproduce it in the lab (or anywhere else) on demand. It's a one-off. You can, of course, produce fake "evidence" - that's easy, and it should tell you something important about the video. You have no theory to explain how a car could conceivably vanish.

No magic necessary. Just a quick rupture in spacetime, a wormhole, and zap!..the car is gone.

You post two of three threads of pseudoscientifc cut-and-paste a day, and you say I'm strutting around? Interesting.

I merely commented on your jumping to "psychic" when the word "prediction" was mentioned. It's evidence that you look to the supernatural before you consider the mundane. And that means you waste a lot of your time deluding yourself.

No it isn't evidence of anything. It was a simple question as to why you think predicting my position was so amazing. You seemed to be implying you were psychic or something. I can't imagine any other reason for boasting about it.

The vanishing car is supposed to have happened locally - right on the same little planet that we came up with those laws of physics. They don't have to apply universally to rule out the vanishing of cars right here.

Good. Then you admit there is no law preventing it from happening. Right?

Are you saying that aliens vanished the car, then? So, we've gone from a video that could be easily faked to the existence of advanced aliens capable of amazing feats of wormhole control (or whatever), who apparently like kidnapping cars and their occupants. Can't you see that's an unwarranted leap of fantasy?

I never said aliens did it. I merely mentioned their probable existence. At this point I'm leaning towards the wormhole theory. But as I said in the OP, I might be wrong.

This car wasn't in a black hole or before the big bang, though.

Also, it's not quite right to say that physics "breaks down" under those conditions. What scientists mean when they say that is that our theories are currently not sophisticated enough or complete enough to describe those particular situations. Science isn't finished. It's an ongoing enterprise. We're admitting that we don't know everything.

Then you admit the laws of physics as we currently construe them are not always adequate for understanding certain phenomena. That you don't know everything. That's good. So you agree a vanishing car could be operating according to some law or process we have yet to discover.

Rather than just give you the answer, I want you to think about this: how do we know the mass of the Earth?

If you can't find the answer, let me know and I'll tell you.

I don't know how we measure the mass of earth or a black hole. With the black hole, I assume its mass correlates to its gravity. So it we can measure the gravity, we can determine the mass. Right?

You actually started with "Seems like a new phenomena. Is it a hoax? Maybe, but on the off chance that it's real, it's definitely worth noting..."

Seems like a new phenomena. Hmmm.... [By the way, "phenomenon" is singular, "phenomena" is plural.]

Videos of cars disappearing IS a new phenomena. At least it is to me.

You didn't really consider the possibility that the video was faked. You still haven't really considered that possibility. You'd rather that it was "a new phenomena".

I admitted it could be hoax. What else was I supposed to say?

And why is this video so worth noting? Because it's so reliable and verified? Because there's so much supporting evidence? No, you think it's worth noting because it fits the pattern of all the other magic you so wish was real. Probably you think you're one-up on the scientists because you know about all these "unexplained phenomena", while they're in denial, poor fools. But you've never properly investigated any of this stuff. You just dredge from your favorite crank sites and recycle without questioning.

Yeah..I'm posting material that entirely fits the title of this subforum: "Ghost, monsters, ufos...they are amongst us." If you didn't want stuff like this posted, then why did you provide a place for it to be posted in?

So give me your estimated percentages. What do you think: 50% your truck was stolen, 50% it vanished into thin air? Or 80-20? Or 20-80? What? Actually, let's widen the possibilities a bit. Give me your estimate of mundane explanation vs. explanation beyond the realm of known science. What then? 50-50?

LOL! I have no idea...

*chuckle*. How do you know I'm not science? Look at the topics I post on. Perhaps they'll give you a clue to how much science I know. If you're qualified to judge, that is, which I doubt. I won't list my formal qualifications, because there'd be no point. Any anonymous person on the internet can claim to have multiple doctorates in advanced cosmology or whatever (and just to be clear I'm not making that claim).

I assure you you aren't science. You are just a fallible human being marching under the banner of science in order to rid the world of unscientific claims. You are an adherent of scientism, the claim that science is the only true arbiter of what is true and real.

I've already claimed that I have a better idea than you do about what science does and doesn't know. Actually, as we will see below, it is actually you who is claiming too much for science when it comes to multiverses etc. All I have done is to tell you what I know that science says about the possibility of cars quantum tunneling etc. You were the one who suggested tunneling as a possible explanation, not me. I've just explained to you that it's a lousy explanation and you'll need to try something else. The same goes for wormholes. What you're left with is magic. Or the obvious - the video was faked.

Nope..consult article on the proof for wormholes again.

Like I said, there's no solid evidence for the multiverse. These articles you linked are speculative. It doesn't mean that cosmologists don't take the idea of the multiverse seriously. It's just that the evidence isn't in yet. It's the subject of ongoing research.

Evidence is evidence. And these two articles presented just that.

 

[Magical Realist]

(continued...)

Science is a cumulative body of knowledge and method that is at least 500 years old, and arguably much older than that. What science has given us is the best method we have for generating new knowledge about the world. It demands rigorous standards of investigation and confirmation. Every good scientist in proposing an explanation for a set of observations goes through a process of considering all of the reasons why his or her explanation might be wrong, because if he or she doesn't do that, some other scientist will.

You never ask yourself questions like "What if this video is faked?" or "What if this person who told the story about the UFO is lying? What if they're mistaken?" or "What other explanations could their be for this phenomenon that I find so surprising at first glance? What have the experts said about this? How can I find out more? What independent sources confirm this?" Those are the kinds of questions that every scientist asks.

Are you a scientist? Do you ask these questions on a daily basis? When you see a news segment on TV you you ask "What if this video is faked." or "What if this person is lying?" I find that hard to believe.

Science is not a belief system. It's first and foremost a method, though it does have some philosophical assumptions.

Your assumption that science has some sort of priveleged epistemic access to reality is a belief. You make that assumption because it supports your worldview that all of reality is physical and controlled by strict predictable laws. Science gives you an authority on which to base your beliefs, no less than religion does with God. It bolsters your self-confidence and ego to think you yourself are an authority that should not be questioned or defied. It smacks of a sort psychological defense mechanism to compensate for some inner sense of uncertainty. Is your life uncertain James? Does science give you a sense of being more in charge of your future than you really are?

I'm not sure why it surprises you that some people have a degree of "reverence" for science. You should have a healthy respect for it, because demonstrably science works in a way that all your pseudoscientific crap does not. Science continues to constantly produce tangible improvements in the quality and quantity of human life. On the other hand, what have ghosts and astrology and UFOs and disappearing cars ever done for us?

The only reason science works is because it keeps asking questions, even about the theories it has proposed in the past. It is constantly updating itself based on empiricle evidence. That I DO admire. The relentless penchant for questioning everything, even when we think we know all the answers.

Do I need science to tell me what's real? It depends what you're talking about. There's no way I could know that electrons are real, for example, without science. Science gives me insights into the world that could not be obtained in any other way. Moreover, science (or the scientific method) is an invaluable innoculation against being sucked in by a whole lot of stuff that isn't real. It helps to cut through the crap.

Would I be better off left to my own devices to decide what's real and what isn't? I don't think so. Human beings are quite susceptible to believing things that aren't true. We are prone to deluding ourselves and to being deluded by others. It's good to have a baloney detection kit readily available when you need it. You should get one for yourself.

That's what science is for you? A baloney detection kit? A defense mechanism from being fooled by someone? I should hope it is more than that for you.

What makes you think I'm on the defensive here? It looks to me like you're the one who doesn't like having his beliefs challenged. Why is that?

People attack other people's character as a defense against a challenging position. It's like, "Well, I can't refute his arguments, so I'll discredit him as an honest and intelligent human being."

I have looked into it - enough to tell that it's not worth spending a lot more time on. When I was a kid, I though the idea of aliens visiting Earth was neat, and I wondered whether it could be real. Then I read what some real scientists think about that, and why. Since then, I've learned a lot more. I'm still moderately interested in aliens visiting Earth, though now more as a study of why some people believe that stuff - the study of why people want to believe, what they get out of it etc.

If aliens were visiting Earth, I don't see how that would threaten my sciency worldview. Aliens would share the same science as the rest of us, because we share the same universe. And they would have had to have used science to get here in the first place. I'd probably have more in common with those aliens than I do with you in terms of respect for science.

Then you know there is really quite abit of evidence for alien spacecraft visiting earth. Why you would want to deny it is a mystery to me.

Why don't start a new thread and present for me what you consider to be the best such case you know of? Seeing as you're so into this stuff, you must have a few good ones. Generally, all I see you post is fuzzy videos from youtube.

I have a very convincing video of some of the best cases for ufos every made. Its about an hour and 47 minutes long though. But if you really want to objectively weigh the GOOD evidence, you can start there:

"Out Of The Blue"

According to this Eric Davis guy "UFOs are real phenomena. They are artificial objects under intelligent control. They're definitely the craft of a supremely advanced technology." I didn't watch the video. Does he explain anywhere how he reached these conclusions?

I'm not aware of Davis's reputation. My impression is that he is a scientists or engineer (I'm not sure which, from what I've seen) with some fringe ideas. He's not the only one of those. And he's definitely in the minority among those who are best qualified to judge the "reality" of UFOs. I also notice that some of his comments have been misconstrued by some of the UFO crowd to seem to say more than they actually do.

Davis is physicist who has won many awards for his work in science. I'm sure he knows science as well if not better than you do. So the blanket claim that scientists unilaterally reject all evidence of ufos is just plain wrong. There is a whole community all around the world of scientists and military experts who agree on the validity of ufos.

 

[Enmos]

Don't be an idiot...