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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 18, 2010 18:12:14 GMT 1
STA, once again, I seem to have to remind you that it is the needs of the individual that have to be considered. Nobody expects to gain the understanding of a university undergraduate from the information gained on here, of course not, but people do expect to discover new information that they had not been aware of before, even if such information is not as exhaustive as it would be for a specialist, like you. What is the point of visiting this MB if one is not going to be educated to any extent and what is the point of people like you posting stuff here if it so innacurate as to be worthless? I don't think you've really thought this through, have you STA?
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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 18, 2010 18:18:26 GMT 1
Why does he bother to appear in such programmes then? It seems a bit presumptuous to suggest Brian Cox is wasting his time, and I don't think he would appreciate the suggestion.
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Post by Progenitor A on Oct 18, 2010 20:42:27 GMT 1
STA, once again, I seem to have to remind you that it is the needs of the individual that have to be considered. Nobody expects to gain the understanding of a university undergraduate from the information gained on here, of course not, but people do expect to discover new information that they had not been aware of before, even if such information is not as exhaustive as it would be for a specialist, like you. What is the point of visiting this MB if one is not going to be educated to any extent and what is the point of people like you posting stuff here if it so innacurate as to be worthless? I don't think you've really thought this through, have you STA? STA and Olmy are simply ego-tripping here, hoping to ridicule and belittle anyone that posts. Unfortunately for them, their own inadequacies are exposed by the abuse that they shower upon others and their blind insistence that they are right and their vain hope that they will browbeat others into silence Unfortunately neither of them is bright enough to sustain their displayed arrogance; were they cleverer ther would be no necessity for such pig-headedness
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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 18, 2010 20:55:56 GMT 1
If that's true then it's a pity naymissus because forums such as this provide an invaluable opportunity for ordinary people interested in science to learn from experts. I have to say though that there seems to have been precious little real effort on the part of STA, in particular, to convey her knowledge to the rest of us in a way that can be readily digested and assimilated. All she seems intent on doing is to belittle non-experts as too thick to really grasp academic subjects. I think this is a very negative approach in trying to educate people who, despite possessing an enquiring mind, need guidance from people who are knowledgeable. What is the point of making posts here if she thinks we're all too stupid to grasp subject like physics or cosmology etc?
I'm not so sure about Olmy, because at least you can get a straight answer from him, providing you are serious in your enquiries.
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Post by Progenitor A on Oct 19, 2010 7:19:42 GMT 1
I'm not so sure about Olmy, because at least you can get a straight answer from him, providing you are serious in your enquiries. I am sure about Olmy. Certainly if you massage his ego he will be civil, but his metier is to belittle and insult - I feel sure that if his postings were examined then only a handful would be free of belittlement. He is, in fact, quite dim, as has become evident over the last few weeks. Perhaps that is why he is so belligerent - attempting to hide that fact that he is not clever. But who really cares about cleverness on these boards? Ordinary inquisitive intelligence is more than enough.
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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 19, 2010 10:48:56 GMT 1
I have often formed the impression, both on the now defunct BBC science MB and this one, that some posters simply want to present information as if 'set in stone' and the final word, and that any hint of dissention from any quarter it treated almost as heresy. Surely, for any scientific theory to be robust it must be subjected to the severest of examination and those in a position to know about such things should be prepared to defend established theories via keen discussion. Unfortunately, what usually seems to happen is that any sign of criticism is regarded as making trouble and the person making the criticism is labelled as a 'troll.' There do exist genuine trouble-makers who are just out to create discord and have no real interest in science, but there is a difference between these and those who genuinely seek to understand scientific ideas. I have found that this is particulary true of STA's 'home' MB, The Science Forums, where the general atmosphere is one of fear due to the constant monitoring of whether someone has exceeded the bounds of 'acceptable behaviour', i.e., become too controversial.
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Post by speakertoanimals on Oct 19, 2010 13:29:21 GMT 1
You misunderstand. I'm saying that the fault (inverted commas) lies with the public, who after listening to such programs, have an inflated idea of how much they actually understand (remember the 'working understanding' someone referred to earlier).
You're a fool if you think that you can gain a working understanding from such progs, no matter how brilliant the presenter. The most that you can reasonably expect an intelligent pay-person to gain from such programs is a very rough idea of what the issues are, what the questions are, why those questions, what the data is that is being used. Which isn't a working UNDERSTANDING of the cosmology at all.
This is not saying that such programs are a waste of time - not at all, it was such progs that got me into science when I was a kid, but I wasn't daft enough to think that watching such programs gave me a 'working understanding' of the actual science.
We all know how you can get a 'working understanding' of the actual science, and that is by going off and doing some OU courses on the subject, but not everyone is capable of that, or of doing the maths required.
And the same old boring tosh! The point about many of the subjects being discussed here is that the questioning going on isn't in the vein required for actual advance, but just the same ole nonsense such as doubting that the idea of curved space makes sense, doubting whether Newtons laws actually explain rotary motion, doubting whether uncaused events makes sense, despite the evidence to the contrary from quantum theory. These are supposed doubts actually based on half-baked philosophy and misunderstood analogies, not on actual science.
Give away is the use of the word heresy.
So, just to try and illustrate the difference.
Proper doubt: we have relativity saying that the Big Bang was a singularity, but that is based on classical physics and spacetime as a continuum. Hence given that we may have to modify both of those to do quantum gravity, there may not be a Big Bang singularity.
Improper doubt: this infinite singularity stuff is just nonsense innit, and how do these daft people think they know anything about what happened back then anyhow, it's all just made-up stuff, so my made-up stuff is just as valid as anything they come up with............
Well, given that no one is paying me for this, I don't have to consider anyone elses needs other than my own...............
You know why I post here (and why I keep posting) -- its to stop others thinking that this incorrect nonsense that some keep posting is correct. Such as the statements about gravitational time dilation, such as the statements about cosmology.............Which of course why some people get upset, that they aren't allowed to propagate their ignorance without being challenged.
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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 19, 2010 19:06:46 GMT 1
Once again you miss the point.
Not everyone wants to become or, indeed, has the ability to become a professional physicist or cosmologist. That doesn't mean people haven't got the curiosity to want to at least have a basic idea of what things are about - that is how human beings are. People have a right to be told by people like you what the scientific evidence is in regard to reality and the universe, since we are all members of it and many of us wonder what it's all about. How dare you decry the efforts of people like Brian Cox or Michio Kaku, for example, in trying to bring scientific discoveries to the level of ordinary people who's humdrum lives, in many cases, are made that more brighter by having knowledge shared with them in an engaging and comprehensible way. You seem to think that because most people aren't academically gifted they should just remain in ignorance all their lives, which is a very silly idea. If you can provide people with enough information to make them feel they have a working conceptual framework of difficult subjects then you have endowed them with a sense of worth and confidence, something you seem to continually wish to avoid. About time you talked to some real people in the real world STA and took a break from that cosseted, ivory tower academic world you have insulated yourself in - you are out of touch, which is why your condescending attempts at educating the 'great unwashed' have repeatedly failed.
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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 19, 2010 19:13:06 GMT 1
Yes, but no doubt people like you were once insisting that the Big Bang was the only possible paradigm before the discovery of QM. Get my drift?
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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 19, 2010 19:16:42 GMT 1
Problem is STA that very often your needs to not correspond with other people's needs. Isn't that a bit selfish and inconsiderate? Perhaps if we offered to pay you....
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Post by carnyx on Oct 19, 2010 19:31:39 GMT 1
@sta
You mean to say there might be room for an alternative explanation?
That the current spacetime continuum-based explanation of e.g. Apparent Time Dilation might have to be 'modified'?
And that an alternative explanation might be found at the atomic level?
All this sounds a bit familiar to me .. see my Post 1 et seq. on the 'On Time' thread.
(PS; oughtn't you let Olmy know?)
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Post by speakertoanimals on Oct 20, 2010 12:15:25 GMT 1
No, probably not, because our current classical theories or relativity work as far as we have been able to test. And so whatever quantum gravity looks like on the smallest scales, it will end up looking like relativity on larger scales, just as general relativity ends up looking like Newtonian gravity in the weak field limit.
And your post of course will always suffer from the fatal flaw that gravitational time dilation depends on differences in gravitational potential NOT on differences in the strength of gravity. Hence even in a constant gravitational field (where forces are the SAME on all clocks, wherever they are), general relativity predicts time dilation, whereas your nonsense won't. And all measurements so far on gravitataional time dilation, right down to over a height difference of 30cm in the lab, agree with general relativity.
We don't know everything yet isn't the same as -- so any mad idea goes. That is why research is hard, because it has to fit in with what is already known (what gravitational time dilation is measured to be, for example).
O, plus I ought to add that at atomic scales is still much larger than quantum gravity length scales. We already have to include relativistic corrections to atomic structure calculations. And tests of gravitational time dilation (such as the over the height of a tower tests) use energy levels of atoms for the test.
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Post by speakertoanimals on Oct 20, 2010 12:43:34 GMT 1
You miss the point. Some people on here have already stated they think they can gain a 'working knowledge' of cosmology from such sources.
It's not a case of not being exhaustive, it's simple the case that the information that can be gained (without maths) is in many cases either just plain wrong, or misleading. Far short of the 'working knowledge' some people seem to think they can have.
This isn't the fault of celebrity scientists (although why shouldn't I criticise such, or is that some sort of heresy?), but just the nature of the subject, and the severe limitations as to what can ever be conveyed to a non-specialist audience. And it is quite obvious from the discussion on these boards that many people are unwilling to accept that the limitations are that severe, or blame it on the would-be educator when it is pointed out how far wrong they are.
What IS stupid is overestimating what you think you understand based on popular science, or refusing to accept it when it is explained to you what you have got wrong (and why). It's not that people get it wrong because they are necessarily stupid, it's an innate limitation. But those people can then display their stupidity if they refuse to accept those limitations, or refuse to accept when they have got it wrong.
FOr example:
Except that quantum theory was developed in the first few decades of the last century, whereas it wasn't until 1922 we had the cosmological solutions of the einstein equations, with the 'primordial atom' idea suggested in 1931. Hence there was no 'Big Bang' paradigm before quantum theory -- if anything (as Einstein did when he added the cosmological constant to his equations), the prevailing paradigm was that the universe was static, rather than expanding.
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Post by carnyx on Oct 20, 2010 13:56:33 GMT 1
@sta#26
Now at the risk of more of your witless sarcasms:
a) Take two objects near to the surface of a planet (that is not spinning), separated by one foot in altitude. One will weight slightly less than the other, as a function of the inverse square of the new distance from the centre of the planet. That is the ONLY physically determinable difference between the two objects.
b) The invention of time-as-a-rate 't' that can be manipulated mathematically, is a product of the human mind, and is not an independent universal physical quantity.
c) It follows that explanations based on the 't' of the equations are artefacts, and are a function of the way that Homo Sapiens's brain works.
d) Therefore, explanations of new observations in terms of modification to terms of this imaginary quantity, are more an indication of the provisional nature of this invention, than the physical reality.
d) It follows that your field of cosmology is bounded within the constraints imposed by the function of the human mind itself, and therefore cosmologists cannot make claim to; let alone lay down, 'Laws of the Universe'.
e) Cosmology is therefore a speculative occupation; it follows in the footsteps of astrology, alchemy, and religious dogmatics.
I conclude from this line of reasoning that you and you colleagues are as trapped in your mental world as any of those mediaeval religionists of old. And, you share the same human motivation.
Whilst you may find this post offensive, it was not designed for that. Merely, that this is the truth of it.
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Post by olmy on Oct 20, 2010 14:20:50 GMT 1
I conclude from this line of reasoning..... I think you forgot to post the reasoning. I see some articles of blind faith and some thought-free waffle but no reasoning....
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