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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 1, 2010 18:25:09 GMT 1
I think Feynman had the intellectual honesty to admit that QM is not comprehensible in any 'human' terms and did not pretend that mathematical abstractions made it any clearer. Many nocturnal animals come out at night but they have no idea why they do and do not seek to question why. They are driven by instinct and that's all they need to know about darkness and in a similar way, we humans too are driven by our instincts to satisfy our curiosity but we too are limited in our ability to understand things. Gravity has never been explained by Einstein's equations - all they do is show gravity's effects, not why gravity does what it does. For that, more subtle ideas are required which take us into the realms of the bizarre and something completely out of the experience of human beings. Perhaps some people do have the ability to experience things which are real but not so far recognized by science. Perhaps some paranormal experiences are glimpses into some of the more mysterious aspects of the universe that one day science will be forced to confront.
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Post by carnyx on Oct 3, 2010 20:58:32 GMT 1
My take on 'inflation' is that it is an elegant explanation of the red-shift problem where stellar objects that are further away would seem to be retreating all the faster. The classic analogy is of the surface of a balloon, where a set of dots marked on the skin of a deflated balloon will appear to exhibit the same kind of 'increasing velocity with incresaing distance' behaviour, when the balloon is steadily inflated.
But there may be another physical reason for this redshift that does not involve ever increasing velocity with distance. At this point, cosmology will change, and the concept of a big bang will be as dead a duck as the concept of a flat earth.
So, maybe the expanding universe, and the idea of a 'big -bang' is actually metaphysics. Interesting, speculative, recreational, necessary, but nothing to get 'religious' about.
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Post by speakertoanimals on Oct 4, 2010 12:40:45 GMT 1
As I said before, you don't know much maths then, if you think it is based on practical experiences.............
To those who don't like being told repeatedly that they are wrong (and why, in detail, they are wrong), that is why they never learn -- because before you can learn, you have to be able to accept when someone points out that you are wrong.
Which just shows someone else with little knowledge of cosmology. The point about the Big Bang is that there is a lot more to support it than just the simplistic -- it looks as if everything is rushing away from us.
The CMB for starters, the flash of the Big Bang in effect. The fact that it is the best black body spectrum we have measured. The fact that it is surprisingly uniform across the entire sky, even from regions that cannot have communicated with each other. There have been various attempts to explain the redshift and CMB (tired light, scattered starlight), except these have been found to not be in agreement with observations.
Then we have the primordial abundance of the light elements, which fits the Big Bang scenario.
Those who seem to think it might be easily replaced usually have a misunderstood idea of the progress of science, and view the replacement of existing theories with new theories as some sort of -- scientists are never sure, and keep changing their damn minds, so why pay any special attention to current theories, they'll probably get changed again in the future..........
In fact, what is interesting about science is what current explanations do explain, even if they may later be superceded. SO, Newtonian gravity was useful (even if ultimately wrong), because it unified processes here on earth (rocks fall to the ground), with processes off earth (why planets orbit the sun as they do, and why tides). Those links still remain, even if exact form of the physical laws has been updated.
Similarly, the links cosmology has made between particle physics and the early universe, the early universe and current structure, and the simple fact that distance gaklaxies are not quite like current galaxies (the universe has evolved) are still going to be there and still important, even if the exact details of the physics may change.
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