Time, death and the universe

I have always found that 'time' is a difficult concept, and yesterday I saw an interesting program about it that kind of made it more complicated ;-)

So what is time? Movements on a watch's face? If you take the watch away, is there not time? Well, there are the seasons, due to the earth's travel around the sun. So, if you have no earth and no sun, is there no time???

You measure it by the movements of stars and planets. So if there aren't any, is there no time?

They say time moves foreward, never backwards, but no one knows why..The example was a gletcher from which ice broke off to land in the sea. It never hops back into the gletcher again - why not? According to Brian Cox, physicist, nothing in the natural laws prevent it.

He talked about how a lot of stuff was brought into motion by the big bang (no one knows how that happended or why, or from what) and that those reactions run along still. Stars collaps and explode. He said the star 'died'. He talked that way about many things, and I do not quite understand, but then I do not understand 'death' either. It is said to mean the end of whatever died, finished, gone. But in reality it always seems to mean change.

The star stops being a star, ok so far, but it does not vanish, what is was does not disappear, rather it is spread over a big area. When we die, we are also spread around. Even before we are spread around - by DNA if we have off spring they have bits of us in them, as we have bits of others in us in a long chain backwards. And when we die, what we are made of does not vanish as such, the combination we were does, but our stuff goes into other stuff. Nothing vanishes, as such. It changes.

That is why the only way I can understand 'death' is as 'change'.

This guy talked about the end of the universe, which I think must be an old theory. Leo9 says the 'heat death' theory dates before the discovery of the the black holes, and I would be grateful if you would say something about that Leo9, please? It does not compute that 'something' becomes 'nothing'. That matter disappear, or energy disappear.

Right. So, does anyone understand what 'time' is, and can tell me more?

Does anyone understand what 'death' is, and can tell me more+ Surely there is more to us that our bodies - where does it go? Join the rest of energy, as our stuff joins other stuff?

And what about the universe? What started it, and from what? Where will it go?

Oh, and happy new year :-)

Wow! Such shallow topics to start off the new year with. Won't hardly even have to think about this one. Much. [/snark]

Okay, I'll start. Time. I guess the simplest way to understand it is that it is tied in with the expansion of space. As the universe expands, so does time. But remember, this is one of the ones that has the scientists blowing their brains out over, too. Does time advance in discrete increments? Does it flow seamlessly? CAN it move backwards? I suppose we can look at it like a drop of water running along a channel. The channel slopes down slightly, so the water moves. You cannot get the water to move backwards, up the channel, without adding energy to it, and right now we don't know of any way to reverse time. Will we? Can't say for sure. Probably not, but there is so much in the universe that's counter-intuitive that there's no way to say for sure.

So, death then. I agree with you, thir. Death simply means change. Stars don't literally die, since they don't have life. But they change, sometimes drastically, and become different. The bigger ones will explode, blowing off a lot of their mass, and collapse into white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes. The 'corpse' remains, but technically it may not be a star. Same with a planet. Is the moon dead? There's very little change going on there, except that which is imposed from outside. Is the Earth alive? It's teeming with life, and there is a lot of geologic activity, which is change as well. Hell, there are some organisms, like viri (viruses) that don't fit comfortably into our definitions of life. But death is definitely a change. On the personal level, our bodies decay, our consciousness fades out with the death of the brain. We gradually melt back into the chemical components of which we are made. But as you say, pieces of us remain through our descendants.

I would disagree that there must be more to us than our bodies. Everything we know (which I will grant is not everything there IS to know) says that when our bodies die, so do our minds. There's no evidence for anything which survives after death that could contain our consciousness, other than the molecules and atoms and energy which made us up to begin with. There is no evidence for a soul, in other words. Only wishful thinking. On the other hand, there are atoms within each of us that have been a part of other people in the past, going all the way back to the first stirrings of life on the planet. Hell, the atoms in our bodies were once part of stars, probably many different stars. As Carl Sagan once said, "We are star stuff." And the atoms which make up our bodies will someday be a part of someone else. So there is a kind of immortality after all. We just won't be aware of it. The 'I' of me, my consciousness, my mind, will end.

So, on to the universe. What started it? No one knows. Scientists can calculate the actions of the universe from the first milliseconds, even picoseconds, after the 'Big Bang' but there is no way, as yet, to determine what happened to initiate that expansion, or what came before it. Was there a 'before'? We just don't know. Scientists have observed pairs of particles being 'created' out of vacuum, basically popping into existence from nothing. The term, "Nature abhors a vacuum" seems to be quite literally true. As to where it will go, again, we can only speculate. The trend seems to be towards an eventual heat death, where all of the energy in the universe has fallen into its lowest state, and all of the matter has degenerated to the point where there are no more reactions going on. Everything is spread out and hovering at just above absolute zero. But if there are particles constantly popping into existence, perhaps they will renew the universe, keep it fresh, like replacing the air in a sealed room. Or perhaps, in some far, far distant future, all of the matter and energy which makes up our universe will all swirl together again, slowly building up to that massive singularity which will eventually become another big bang. Perhaps this cycle just repeats, over and over again, space literally expanding and contracting, recreating time and stars and galaxies and life all over again.

And that's about as philosophical as I ever want to get!

Why I believe in reincarnation: eventually parts of me that were once other things will be parts of something else.

There is so much we don't know. I just heard that scientists recently spotted neutrinos going faster than the speed of light. Now, since this has always not just been the limit, but the law, and they appear to be breaking the law, what is this going to mean for us? What other things can go faster than the speed of light? If this is not just a mistake in measurement but is real.

What is time? That one I don't even have an answer for, except that it always seems to go forward, our experience of time is relative to our state of mind, thus time flying or time seeming to stand still, or dragging.
And most profoundly:
"Time and tide melt the snowman".

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Originally Posted by thir

I have always found that 'time' is a difficult concept, and yesterday I saw an interesting program about it that kind of made it more complicated ;-)

So what is time? Movements on a watch's face? If you take the watch away, is there not time? Well, there are the seasons, due to the earth's travel around the sun. So, if you have no earth and no sun, is there no time???

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Yes, there is. People living for long periods in deep caves, intentionally not using clocks, still live by regular routines from the passage of time that they feel in themselves.

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They say time moves foreward, never backwards, but no one knows why..The example was a gletcher from which ice broke off to land in the sea. It never hops back into the gletcher again - why not? According to Brian Cox, physicist, nothing in the natural laws prevent it.

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Well, he's stretching the truth there. A massive reversal of entropy like that, by pure chance, is theoretically possible, but you run out of zeroes to say how improbable it is. On average, the arrow of time always points in the direction of increasing entropy.

But to me a much more interesting point is that, theoretically, there is no arrow of time. Physicists model events by space-time diagrams which don't have any points on them marked "Past" "Present" and "Future": those concepts are irrelevant. You cannot find anything in science to tell you why "now" is different from "then," it is something that only happens in our heads. Time as a linear scale is objective, but the passage of time is completely subjective, a shared hallucination of thinking beings. One of the things I mention when atheists argue that subjective experiences like spirituality can't have any serious importance...

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He talked about how a lot of stuff was brought into motion by the big bang (no one knows how that happended or why, or from what) and that those reactions run along still. Stars collaps and explode. He said the star 'died'. He talked that way about many things, and I do not quite understand, but then I do not understand 'death' either. It is said to mean the end of whatever died, finished, gone. But in reality it always seems to mean change.

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When my children were little, when I had to explain to them that something was broken or worn out beyond repair, I would tell them it was dead. I felt that besides giving them a useful conceptual tool for knowing when to give up on things, it would prepare them for the time when they had to encounter a living thing's death. They would already understand that sometimes things are finished and can't be brought back, however we may want them.

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The star stops being a star, ok so far, but it does not vanish, what is was does not disappear, rather it is spread over a big area. When we die, we are also spread around. Even before we are spread around - by DNA if we have off spring they have bits of us in them, as we have bits of others in us in a long chain backwards. And when we die, what we are made of does not vanish as such, the combination we were does, but our stuff goes into other stuff. Nothing vanishes, as such. It changes.

That is why the only way I can understand 'death' is as 'change'.

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That works for me.

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This guy talked about the end of the universe, which I think must be an old theory. Leo9 says the 'heat death' theory dates before the discovery of the the black holes, and I would be grateful if you would say something about that Leo9, please? It does not compute that 'something' becomes 'nothing'. That matter disappear, or energy disappear.

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OK, the old idea of the "heat death of the universe" was a simple extrapolation of thermodynamics. Entropy must always increase (on average), therefore there must come a time when general entropy is so high - energy and matter are so evened out and mixed up - that there are no concentrations of energy or matter left to make anything happen, and the universe will settle into a permanent flat calm.

This was always philosophically awkward, because it left cosmology with a beginning but no end, and people have been thinking up ways round it ever since. One such theory notes that black holes break the rules: however the general entropy level rises, a black hole remains a reservoir of negative entropy. So it's been suggested that, since the flow of matter into black holes is irreversible, eventually they must mop up all the mass in the universe, then draw themselves together, till everything there is is packed into one vast black hole... which might be the seed of a new universe?

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Right. So, does anyone understand what 'time' is, and can tell me more?

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"Time is what stops everything from happening at once."

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Does anyone understand what 'death' is, and can tell me more?

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A boy who worked for a Zen master dropped the master's favourite cup. When the master returned that evening the boy said "Master, why is there death?"

"People die when it is time," said the master. "It is meant to be."

The boy brought the pieces of china from behind his back and said "Master, it was time for your cup to die."

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Surely there is more to us that our bodies - where does it go? Join the rest of energy, as our stuff joins other stuff?

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Mind is not just energy. Like a candle flame or this document on the computer, it is energy in an orderly self-maintaining pattern, and when the pattern breaks down (the mind dies, the candle goes out, the computer closes down or crashes,) the energy is conserved but the order is gone.

In my book on the afterlife, I suggested that the spirit plane - being, according to all the world's mythologies, the place where patterns of order go when they are lost to the material world - balances the material plane's increasing entropy by accumulating order and decreasing entropy. I haven't followed that thought through, but it seems to have possibilities.

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And what about the universe? What started it, and from what? Where will it go?

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{levitates gently to the ceiling chanting OM} It is a cosmic mystery, my child...

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Originally Posted by ksst

Why I believe in reincarnation: eventually parts of me that were once other things will be parts of something else.

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If you believe in homeopathy (I don't, but if...), then matter retains some kind of memory of other forms of matter it was once in contact with. (A similar argument has been advanced to explain hauntings: the materials of the place hold a memory of the thoughts and feelings that occured around them.) So maybe some memory of us could cling to our atoms? If so, it wouldn't be reincarnation in a specific other body, but a mixing with every other spirit and merging into the spiritual atmosphere of the world... which sounds good to me.

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Originally Posted by leo9

People living for long periods in deep caves, intentionally not using clocks, still live by regular routines from the passage of time that they feel in themselves.

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Humans have evolved within a 24 hour diurnal world, and our bodies' clocks retain that timing. However, without outside references, this timing can be changed, stretched to longer periods, or compressed to shorter periods. While they may perform regular routines, without any kind of objective reference there's no way for them to perform them at regular intervals.

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Time as a linear scale is objective, but the passage of time is completely subjective, a shared hallucination of thinking beings.

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I think that the passage of time is less an hallucination and more of a memory. Having had a couple of surgeries, with anesthetic, I experienced no sense of the passage of time until I began to wake up. And even then there were gaps until I was fully awake. The same happens when we sleep. If you wake up during the night, without looking at a clock or some other means of measuring the passage of time, you cannot know how long you've really slept. One hour or four, or only a few minutes?

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One of the things I mention when atheists argue that subjective experiences like spirituality can't have any serious importance...

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Not sure I understand this reference. Subjective experiences of any type can have tremendous importance to the person having them. But without some kind of objective evidence there's no way to tell if they were real or simply a false memory.

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however the general entropy level rises, a black hole remains a reservoir of negative entropy.

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According to Hawking, though, black holes do NOT remain. They eventually evaporate. I don't claim to understand the physics, but there is one thing that does escape a black hole: gravity.

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In my book on the afterlife, I suggested that the spirit plane - being, according to all the world's mythologies, the place where patterns of order go when they are lost to the material world - balances the material plane's increasing entropy by accumulating order and decreasing entropy. I haven't followed that thought through, but it seems to have possibilities.

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Maybe, if you had any objective evidence for the existence of this spirit plane. But we already know that energy cannot be lost to the material world. It can be changed and dispersed, but not lost.

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Originally Posted by leo9

then matter retains some kind of memory of other forms of matter it was once in contact with.

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One of the big problems of homeopathy (as well as other "mystical" explanations) is that they have never been able to demonstrate such memory, nor explain how this memory is retained. They simply state it as fact and expect people to accept it.

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the materials of the place hold a memory of the thoughts and feelings that occured around them.

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I have seen and heard of instances where certain items which were undergoing some kind of stress were able to act similar to a phonograph, recording sounds which occurred around them during that period of stress. I would guess that something similar could happen with electromagnetic impulses. But this is a physical process, not a spiritual one.

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... which sounds good to me.

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This is the best reason in the world to suspect this idea. Without actually having objective, reproducible evidence, you can make up anything that feels or sounds good and claim it to be true. Can you envision a mechanism that allows some kind of memory of our consciousness to cling to atoms? Can you demonstrate it? Or can you at least come up with something that would show it to be false? Without those things, it's just speculation and wishful thinking.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

I have seen and heard of instances where certain items which were undergoing some kind of stress were able to act similar to a phonograph, recording sounds which occurred around them during that period of stress.

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While rereading this I had a somewhat terrifying thought. Steel is a very durable material, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it could, under the right conditions, act as a sound recorder. (I don't know if this is true. I'm merely speculating.) If such a thing were possible, can you imagine what the steel from the WTC might have recorded during it's fall? Then, take all of that steel and transport it to a dump site, piling it up willy-nilly and wait for just the right temperature change, or just the right tremor in the earth. Imagine what a nearby listener might hear if the steel were to suddenly begin screaming!

I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep tonight.

I don't think I like that thought either. screaming steel, the end beginning of the universe and the memory of atoms. I don't see how atoms have actual memory, like we have memory. They probably have some record of some things that happen to them, but not like I could remember being a star, can you?

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Originally Posted by ksst

I don't see how atoms have actual memory, like we have memory. They probably have some record of some things that happen to them, but not like I could remember being a star, can you?

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I don't see how they could have memory either. Atoms are basically made up of protons, neutrons and electrons, and as far as I know there is no way to distinguish between one electron and another, or one proton and another, etc. True, electrons can change energy states, going from a stable condition to an unstable one, but under normal conditions they tend to quickly revert back to the stable state. Not sure if that could be considered memory, though. But then, I'm not sure they know how human memory works yet.

If time and death are fun wait until you get into quantum entanglment lol.

I read about half the book where the guy explains quantum physics to his dog. That was as far as I got. Maybe someday I'll read the other half. I was afraid my brain was going to explode.

http://dogphysics.com/book_info.html


This one

Any science that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.

Why do humans ask answers to the unexplainable?

Why do we need to know why and how this supposedly big bang took place?

Does it really matter that the clocks go forward or backward? Or what about when we pick something out of a line we go left to right? Dates go forward in their count, age does the same thing, and the reason it is done that way is because we want it to. The mortal made the words and the literate people wrote it for prosperity. It is the natural thing to do that is planted in our brains, but when scientists question this normality, I wonder if they have found their correct vocation in life.

Is it going to change things? Does anyone other than these people getting paid by tax payers really give a damn when the big bang was? The answers when found out might just be more frightening that the not knowing. However, it will be too late then because these same pratts will have published in the Scientific Journal for all to read that infinity is a myth and the end really is just around the corner. [Good on them]

Then you have the fools that are sending atoms round in circles so that collide just to see what takes place. What’s the reason for this? Answer knowledge. Yea right, so it causes a black hole or the world as we know it implodes very clever but dangerous people. They are playing with the world of the unknown with the world that does not belong solely to them. Is this experiment going to help the world, no I doubt it? It is most probably being done because they have x amount of £/$ to spend and damn all else to do with their sad lives. They have spent more on that damn machine than the UK borrowed a few months back, and all they have achieved is a few pretty colours on a plasma screen that they all probably went home to jerk off over. I now do mean... “God help the human race, because they surely do need it.”

Is there a life after death? Well I really do hope so because there are a few people about that I must come back and haunt. I would hate to know that there really is a hell and that’s where we are all bound. Just think, last week ignorant and this week we have the knowledge that when we die we are going to be whipped until infinity [that we still have] while feeding the fires of hell. Just think of the anarchy and noise of the knowing screams, when twenty thousand old people[Of the Vanilla population] are about to die worldwide every day as they plead for a few more years. Then on the other extreme there is [the BDSM family standing naked at the end of the bed shouting, "Bring it on"]. No I believe in certain circumstances ignorance is a blessing, and this whole thread is far too spooky.

Be well IAN 2411

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Originally Posted by IAN 2411

Why do humans ask answers to the unexplainable?

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So we can explain them, of course!

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Why do we need to know why and how this supposedly big bang took place?

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Why not? Don't you know where and when you were born? If you're one of those who does not, wouldn't you like to know?

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Does it really matter that the clocks go forward or backward? Or what about when we pick something out of a line we go left to right? Dates go forward in their count, age does the same thing, and the reason it is done that way is because we want it to. The mortal made the words and the literate people wrote it for prosperity.

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Yes, these are all cultural phenomena, and have nothing to do with the NATURE of time, only in how we perform the record keeping. But why do all the planets revolve around the sun in the same direction? Why does the sun keep burning, keeping us alive? Don't you think this kind of question is important? Or at least, interesting?

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Is it going to change things? Does anyone other than these people getting paid by tax payers really give a damn when the big bang was?

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I imagine there were those who questioned Pasteur's experiments, especially when he infected milk maids with cow pox. Yet without that kind of experiment we would not have a better understanding of germ theory, and we would still be dying of vaccine-preventable diseases. Just because we may not be able to define a tangible purpose for gaining knowledge doesn't mean we won't develop some purpose.

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The answers when found out might just be more frightening that the not knowing.

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Unquestionably! The answers are almost ALWAYS more frightening than not knowing. That's why people make up feel-good explanations for things rather than try to find out the truth. Personally I'd rather KNOW the truth than carry on mumbling into my soup about how wonderful it all is, only to have it smack me in the face later on.

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However, it will be too late then because these same pratts will have published in the Scientific Journal for all to read that infinity is a myth and the end really is just around the corner. [Good on them]

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Does that idea scare you? Why? Again, I'd rather know that the end was coming, so I could prepare myself for it.

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Then you have the fools that are sending atoms round in circles so that collide just to see what takes place. What’s the reason for this? Answer knowledge.

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But without this kind of knowledge, understanding the basic forces that make the universe work, we wouldn't be having this conversation on computers, or cell phones. Without the search for knowledge we would still be sitting around the fire in our caves, trembling at the howling of the wind, living out our short but violent lives in fear and ignorance.

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Yea right, so it causes a black hole or the world as we know it implodes very clever but dangerous people. They are playing with the world of the unknown with the world that does not belong solely to them.

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Yeah, yeah. And television was going to corrupt our children. And pornography turns men into rapists. Fairy stories to frighten the gullible.

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Is this experiment going to help the world, no I doubt it?

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Who knows? One thing for sure, if you DON'T do the experiment it definitely WON'T help the world.

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“God help the human race, because they surely do need it.”

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If there were a god he could just instill all this knowledge into us, and we wouldn't have to do the experiments. But your God wasn't even bright enough to inform his chosen people that it might be a good idea to wash their fucking hands before they ate!

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I would hate to know that there really is a hell and that’s where we are all bound. Just think, last week ignorant and this week we have the knowledge that when we die we are going to be whipped until infinity [that we still have] while feeding the fires of hell.

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But wouldn't it be nice to actually KNOW that there is no hell? That it was all a lie told by evil people to control the ignorant? Do you know how many people actually live out their lives in terror of doing something stupidly silly that will send them off to hell, because it might offend their "loving" god?

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No I believe in certain circumstances ignorance is a blessing, and this whole thread is far too spooky.

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I have to disagree. Ignorance is NEVER a blessing. And this is far from spooky.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

Why not? Don't you know where and when you were born? If you're one of those who does not, wouldn't you like to know?

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The date I was born was 1947 ad JC. That is undeniable. Now if I was born in 1973 ad JFK recognised worldwide, then I might be younger but it would still be undeniable. I know I am this age because it is an Earth measurement of age and time [“Note” not a universal measurement]. A universal measurement that is most than likely worked out in a word that has never been invented yet, because the scientists have no idea whether the one is correct that they are using on earth.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

But why do all the planets revolve around the sun in the same direction? Why does the sun keep burning, keeping us alive? Don't you think this kind of question is important? Or at least, interesting?

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I was always under the impression that the magnetic pull of the sun held them where they where and moved them at different speeds in a clockwise rotation, or if you are looking at it from underneath anti-clockwise. If the planets were travelling the other way at the start [Big Bang] we would still, be going forward but in a different direction. Yes, you are corect, the same question, why?

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Originally Posted by Thorne

Does that idea scare you? Why? Again, I'd rather know that the end was coming, so I could prepare myself for it.

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No it doesn’t scare me, but neither do I want to know the day when I stick my head between my legs and kiss my ass goodbye.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

But without this kind of knowledge, understanding the basic forces that make the universe work, we wouldn't be having this conversation on computers, or cell phones. Without the search for knowledge we would still be sitting around the fire in our caves, trembling at the howling of the wind, living out our short but violent lives in fear and ignorance.

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Communications has nothing to do with trying to unravel what happened so many whatever, when the Big Bang took place. Finding the source or the why the Big Bang took place has no possible use to mankind, it is a useless bit of information that the minority want to know, for whatever reason if it is only to satisfy their sad mind.

No doubt there is another planet somewhere that is closer to the eye where the Big Bang took place, and a trillions years ahead of Earths technology, and with their own sad cases looking for the same answer.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

Who knows? One thing for sure, if you DON'T do the experiment it definitely WON'T help the world.

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Neither is there the chance of it messing it up.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

If there were a god he could just instill all this knowledge into us, and we wouldn't have to do the experiments. But your God wasn't even bright enough to inform his chosen people that it might be a good idea to wash their fucking hands before they ate!

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My God!!! You have no idea who or what my god is...for all you know it was your god that fucked up...whatever or whoever that is...? Don’t make assumptions based on your own beliefs.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

But wouldn't it be nice to actually KNOW that there is no hell? That it was all a lie told by evil people to control the ignorant? Do you know how many people actually live out their lives in terror of doing something stupidly silly that will send them off to hell, because it might offend their "loving" god?

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It is their belief and if that is the way they want to live then so be it, it does not bother me and neither do they. Why is it right for a person that has no beliefs to prove disbelief to another? I think that the only persons that wish to find out if there really is a hell or a heaven to disprove the theory are the ones that truly believe in their existence, but are hoping they are wrong.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

I have to disagree. Ignorance is NEVER a blessing. And this is far from spooky.

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Bullshit; Do you, really think that if my wife knew 12 years before she died, that if her suffering in immense pain every day for 12 years would still end in death no matter what? Do you honestly think in your mind that she would have fought so hard to live?

Be well IAN 2411

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Originally Posted by IAN 2411

I know I am this age because it is an Earth measurement of age and time.

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We agree on this, certainly.The way we measure time is an artificial construct of humanity. It has no meaning anywhere else in the universe.

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I was always under the impression that the magnetic pull of the sun held them where they where and moved them at different speeds in a clockwise rotation, or if you are looking at it from underneath anti-clockwise. If the planets were travelling the other way at the start [Big Bang] we would still, be going forward but in a different direction.

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Gravity, not magnetism, and the Sun and planets came long after the Big Bang, but otherwise correct. Again, many of these concepts are man-made, to help us understand and communicate ideas better.

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Communications has nothing to do with trying to unravel what happened so many whatever, when the Big Bang took place.

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No, but it has a lot to do with quantum physics and subatomic particles. And even before that, it had to do with learning new things, new ways to communicate. Many of those ideas were wrong, and many had unexpected benefits. But if you don't try to learn, you don't find any of those benefits.

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Finding the source or the why the Big Bang took place has no possible use to mankind, it is a useless bit of information that the minority want to know, for whatever reason if it is only to satisfy their sad mind.

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Something you cannot possibly know. A valid opinion, yes, but without knowing what we might learn along the way, failing to even try is guaranteeing that we'll never know.

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My God!!! You have no idea who or what my god is...for all you know it was your god that fucked up...whatever or whoever that is...? Don’t make assumptions based on your own beliefs.

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You're right, I made an assumption. My apologies. But you also are assuming that I have a god. I do not.

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Why is it right for a person that has no beliefs to prove disbelief to another?

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Questioning belief is not the same as trying to prove disbelief, whatever that means.

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Bullshit; Do you, really think that if my wife knew 12 years before she died, that if her suffering in immense pain every day for 12 years would still end in death no matter what? Do you honestly think in your mind that she would have fought so hard to live?

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I didn't know your wife, and I'm sorry to have brought such tender memories to the surface. I can only guess that, since she spent those 12 years fighting, she must have felt there was something worth fighting for.

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Originally Posted by IAN 2411

Is this experiment going to help the world, no I doubt it? It is most probably being done because they have x amount of £/$ to spend and damn all else to do with their sad lives. They have spent more on that damn machine than the UK borrowed a few months back, and all they have achieved is a few pretty colours on a plasma screen that they all probably went home to jerk off over. I now do mean... “God help the human race, because they surely do need it.”

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The last major breakthrough in quantum physics led to transistors, microchips, solar electric panels, LEDs and a great many other things you probably imagine were the work of some hard-headed engineer working for some corporate research lab. And nobody knew in advance that any of this would come from what looked like blue-sky pure research (or as you might have put it, throwing money down the drain.)

Will CERN produce some breakthrough that will save the world (e.g. a practical recipe for microfusion)? Probably not, but the one thing that's certain is that if we don't do the research we'll never know.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

One of the big problems of homeopathy (as well as other "mystical" explanations) is that they have never been able to demonstrate such memory, nor explain how this memory is retained. They simply state it as fact and expect people to accept it.

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I agree, which is one of the reasons I don't believe it.

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I have seen and heard of instances where certain items which were undergoing some kind of stress were able to act similar to a phonograph, recording sounds which occurred around them during that period of stress. I would guess that something similar could happen with electromagnetic impulses. But this is a physical process, not a spiritual one.

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Leaving aside the fact that all attempts to explain telepathy and related effects elecromagnetically have failed, it's a moot point whether finding a physical explanation for hauntings would remove it from the realm of the spiritual.

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This is the best reason in the world to suspect this idea. Without actually having objective, reproducible evidence, you can make up anything that feels or sounds good and claim it to be true. Can you envision a mechanism that allows some kind of memory of our consciousness to cling to atoms? Can you demonstrate it? Or can you at least come up with something that would show it to be false? Without those things, it's just speculation and wishful thinking.

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The fact that I started the post by invoking a theory which I stated I didn't believe in, and then referenced an idea I put forward in a work of fiction, should have made it clear that I was playing with ideas and not putting forward hard theories.

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Originally Posted by leo9

Leaving aside the fact that all attempts to explain telepathy and related effects elecromagnetically have failed, it's a moot point whether finding a physical explanation for hauntings would remove it from the realm of the spiritual.

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All efforts to show that telepathy actually exists have also failed. Some people still believe in it. But developing a physical, measurable, reproducible explanation for anything automatically removes it from the spiritual or supernatural. By definition.

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Originally Posted by Thorne

According to Hawking, though, black holes do NOT remain. They eventually evaporate. I don't claim to understand the physics, but there is one thing that does escape a black hole: gravity.

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The biggest known concentration of stuff just evaporates?

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But we already know that energy cannot be lost to the material world. It can be changed and dispersed, but not lost.

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And so I cannot understand how the universe (or anything else) ran 'run down' ?

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Originally Posted by Thorne

One of the big problems of homeopathy (as well as other "mystical" explanations) is that they have never been able to demonstrate such memory, nor explain how this memory is retained. They simply state it as fact and expect people to accept it.

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Not quite that simple. I, for one, do not believe in it. I was talked into trying it, which seemed a huge waste of time, but for the sake of argument I did. And it had a violent impact, and I felt like a fool, and still do, being influenced by something I am sure is nonsense!

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Originally Posted by denuseri

If time and death are fun wait until you get into quantum entanglment lol.

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And string theory..

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Originally Posted by Thorne

All efforts to show that telepathy actually exists have also failed. Some people still believe in it. But developing a physical, measurable, reproducible explanation for anything automatically removes it from the spiritual or supernatural. By definition.

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Ehm, I don't think so. What about the creationists?

[QUOTE=thir;960215]The biggest known concentration of stuff just evaporates?
Try this.
Still pretty hypothetical, but Hawking radiation has been observed.

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And so I cannot understand how the universe (or anything else) ran 'run down' ?

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Imagine striking a match in a large room. The heat around that match is pretty high, enough to burn you. As the match burns out the heat dissipates. Eventually, the infrared radiation will spread throughout the room, leaving the same amount of energy, but spread over a far larger volume. Pretty much the same as the universe. The energy remains, just much more spread out.

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Originally Posted by thir

Not quite that simple. I, for one, do not believe in it. I was talked into trying it, which seemed a huge waste of time, but for the sake of argument I did. And it had a violent impact, and I felt like a fool, and still do, being influenced by something I am sure is nonsense!

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Not sure what kind of impact you're talking about here. Basically, homeopathic medicines consist of water and sugar. Unless you're a diabetic, there should be no impact at all. There's a group in England, the 10:23 group or campaign, which periodically performs a mass "suicide", in public, by overdosing on homeopathic poisons/sleeping pills. To date, every attempt has resulted in failure to suicide.

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Originally Posted by thir

Ehm, I don't think so. What about the creationists?

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What about them? They have no physical, measurable, reproducible evidence for creation. Only their holy books and wishful thinking. And even their books are contradictory and completely at odds with observable evidence. They rely on the supernatural explanation, without evidence.

Homeopathic suicide? It seems like it ought to work sometimes, if only from the placebo effect. LOL

[QUOTE=Thorne;960231]

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Originally Posted by thir

The biggest known concentration of stuff just evaporates?
Try this.
Still pretty hypothetical, but Hawking radiation has been observed.


Imagine striking a match in a large room. The heat around that match is pretty high, enough to burn you. As the match burns out the heat dissipates. Eventually, the infrared radiation will spread throughout the room, leaving the same amount of energy, but spread over a far larger volume. Pretty much the same as the universe. The energy remains, just much more spread out.

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As I understood the theory, they meant no energy left. This is what is so weird.