Bazza Posted December 2, 2009 Author Report Share Posted December 2, 2009 Re: The Last Word What is called the Copernican Principle, that Earth is not at the center of the Solar System/Galaxy/Universe. A workable picture of the Solar System came when we understood that Earth is a moving platform, obeying the same laws as the other planets. The structure of the Galaxy wasn't even remotely understood until we realized that there was obscuring material in interstellar space, so that the "Kapteyn universe" with us at the center was a construct of the limitations of our viewpoint. Allied with that was the realization that the "spiral nebulae" were things comparable to our own Galaxy in scale and in shape, and that they were much more distant than anyone had ever imagined. Then came the discovery of the "Hubble flow", which fit in stunningly well with the Einstein - de Sitter general relativistic models of the Universe; and relativity is the assumption that absolute motion cannot be detected and that uniform acceleration is indistinguishable from gravity, which implies that the Universe is, when viewed on large scales, the same at all points, modulo apparent evolutionary effects due to look-back time; this is the Cosmological Priniciple. The discovery of the microwave background refuted the Perfect Cosmological Principle (that the Universe looks the same from all points at all times) because it brilliantly confirmed that the physical Universe had a distinct beginning, from which it has evolved. The early parts of that evolution are hot topics of investigation now. That said, the evolution of our own galaxy has been pretty quiet over the last 10 Gyr or so. Yes, ours has eaten/accreted a few neighboring dwarf galaxies, but its overall disk shape is stable. Our sun is about 4.5 Gyr old, so it was formed well after the beginnings of the Disk, and the Disk will continue in more or less its current state for several Gyr or so into the future. Given that disk galaxies are fragile things and easy to mangle into spheroidal galaxies, that isn't particularly remarkable. 1) a small quibble: didn't Copernicus only say that Earth wasn't the centre on the Solar System, and was others who said "...that the Universe looks the same from all points at all time". Being a fan of Giordano Bruno I've read that he was one of those people (and how can you not love a fellow whose last words before being burned to death were: "It is with far greater fear that you pronounce, than I receive, this sentence." ) 2) I like what you have written and get a lot out of it (don't get me wrong on that score) and feel that it is represents the science point-of-view in a concise manner; but feel it is incomplete. To it I'd add the Hindu concept of Maya (first two paragraphs describe it well), and the Ashtavakra Gita. There may be a similarity between the Ashtavakra Gita and the Poimandres but I'll leave that to more qualified scholars. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 3, 2009 Report Share Posted December 3, 2009 Re: The Last Word Actually, I mention Bruno in my 101 class. The heresy for which he was actually burned was the suggestion that the Passion of Christ had also occurred on worlds other than Earth (since he accepted the suggestion that the stars were other suns, which had other inhabited worlds around them, and it seemed to him that a beneficent God would not withhold the chance of salvation from other peoples whose beginnings were likely to be much the same as ours, since he accepted that after the Fall salvation could come only via Christ). It seems like a relevant point in a course discussing the search for life elsewhere in the Universe. I think we'll never reach a meeting of minds on consciousness/spirituality/etc. Physical scientists have it beat into them from the beginning of their training that you must not overinterpret your data, that data consists of experiments and observations of the best quality you can manage, and that an unverifiable observation or experiment is necessarily an invalid one. Speculation is permitted, even encouraged, but to be scientific those speculations have to be in the form where measurements of the generally accepted style can, at least in principle, test those speculations. We don't agree on the meanings of the words "proof" and "evidence"; I suspect what I consider those things to be are proper subsets of what you consider them to be. Such is the nature of the physical science racket, and in no small way its successes have come because of that rigidity of standards of data and evidence. That being the case, a voice asserting that long-standing strength must be abandoned in the context of a particular arena of speculation certainly can be suspected to seeking the trappings of science's success without paying the price in rigor, honesty, and brutal skepticism. Enough cases of outright fraud have happened in history where a feature of those involved in the cases is making very similar assertions about unfairness, close-mindedness, and short-sightedness, that such claims are taken as being definitive diagnostic symptoms of delusion (at best) or fraud (at worst). There are scientists who have written about consciousness, but except for very restricted cases, those writings are considered (by the larger science community, if not those writers themselves) to be nonscientific writings by someone who is or has been a scientist, and the qualifications of science do not apply to those nonscientific writings despite the writer's other credentials. (I know several colleagues in astronomy who have published science fiction stories, either under their own names or under pen names. No one thinks the less of them as scientists for having published things that have no pretentions of being anything but fiction.) Yes, Newton (and others) had strong mystical/spiritual streaks to him, but one can accept Newton's scientific contributions because they can stand by themselves independent of his religious writings and the subordinate context in which he placed his natural philosophy to his spiritual one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted December 3, 2009 Author Report Share Posted December 3, 2009 Re: The Last Word Hey Cancer. I agree with most (if not all with what you have posted). I'm leaving town tomorrow to go see my favourite band Cold Chisel perform (see sig) on Saturday Night so may not get time tonight or tomorrow morning to post a reply. To get there I only have to fly 2 or 3 thousand km from Darwin to Sydney (4.5 hour plane trip). I hope to continue this discussion (well series of posts) when I get back, so keep the keyboard warm for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 3, 2009 Report Share Posted December 3, 2009 Re: The Last Word S'OK. With the end of the term here, I am going to be swamped in a frenzy of grading for the next eight to ten days. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DocMan Posted December 4, 2009 Report Share Posted December 4, 2009 Re: The Last Word It seems to me that we ARE in a special point in space and time. But what makes it special is the fact that we are here to observe it. The cosmos may ignore us as insignificant, but we create our own meaning. Doc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 4, 2009 Report Share Posted December 4, 2009 Re: The Last Word Nothing excludes that, of course. What is meant by "special place and time" is that it is a clear error if, in order to explain a certain phenomenon or class of object, we have to exist at or near a unique place or time. Back when quasars (first noted in the radio) were first correlated with optical counterparts, their brightness and radio emission were noted before Schmidt figured out that the quasars all had substantial redshifts. If interpreted as cosmological, those redshifts required extremely large luminosities for objects that (in the images then available) looked like faint stars, so there was resistance to that from some. The problem was that in order to have the quasars be things whose redshifts where not cosmological ... that is, they were local objects within or around our galaxy, moving at large velocities ... then you more or less had to have Earth be near the source of the quasars, because all of them are moving away from us. (If we aren't close to something expelling things at high velocities, then at least a few of those things will be coming at us and thus would have blueshifts. Only if the source is very close to us do you expect to see only objects moving away, especially since relativistic beaming tends to focus light in the forward direction, that is, blueshifted quasars ought to be rather brighter than redshifted ones, so you have a hard time arguing that such things exist but haven't been detected yet.) That logical consequence, that we would have to be living near the only unique point in space (right next to the "quasar gun", whatever it might be) in order to explain the quasars with this hypothesis, is almost by itself enough to dismiss the local quasar hypothesis. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Posted December 5, 2009 Report Share Posted December 5, 2009 Re: The Last Word Red shifts? Quasars have gone Communist? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted December 5, 2009 Report Share Posted December 5, 2009 Re: The Last Word We're the last bastion of Capitalism in the Universe! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Re: The Last Word Not true. This is clearly an anti-capitalist site. If you try entering posts in ALL CAPITALS here, the software smashes it to all lower case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Re: The Last Word ... DoJ, Inc is with Them! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Re: The Last Word Of course, even hard-core capitalists agree that there's good money to be made in lower case these days. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Re: The Last Word lower caste Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Re: The Last Word Sorry, we had to sell the lower castle and let go all the staff. Bad economic times, you know. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Re: The Last Word A Wizard's Staff's Got A Knob On The End Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Re: The Last Word Unless it's a female wizard. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Re: The Last Word A female wizard is a witch. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Re: The Last Word If she says so. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Re: The Last Word If Granny Weatherwax says so, that's the way it is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted December 8, 2009 Author Report Share Posted December 8, 2009 Re: The Last Word It seems to me that we ARE in a special point in space and time. But what makes it special is the fact that we are here to observe it. The cosmos may ignore us as insignificant, but we create our own meaning. Doc You have no idea how prescient the first sentence is. The last sentence however... Of course it based on the assumptions of "time " and "space"... A few scientists who have an expanded perspective of science, not limited by the Cartesian materialism paradigm, have published/produced scientific evidence (particularly in the fields of psychology/medicine) that the biological quantum macrocosmic system we call "our body" (and "our mind") is not limited by time and/or space. Maybe then, the ball and chain (alluded to above) that has shackled Western Civilization can be liberated and a renewed and reinvigorated science can take is place. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted December 8, 2009 Author Report Share Posted December 8, 2009 Re: The Last Word A female wizard warlock is a witch. fixed your typo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 8, 2009 Report Share Posted December 8, 2009 Re: The Last Word I am reminded of an old cartoon in Playboy, with 4 stereotype witches (black robes, black pointed hats) in a picket line with signs that say "Witches Do Not Have Cold Breasts". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted December 8, 2009 Report Share Posted December 8, 2009 Re: The Last Word I'd like to make a survey of that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 8, 2009 Report Share Posted December 8, 2009 Re: The Last Word You could do the pencil testing, too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted December 8, 2009 Report Share Posted December 8, 2009 Re: The Last Word ... Won't they take offens at that? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted December 8, 2009 Report Share Posted December 8, 2009 Re: The Last Word Seems no more invasive than the temperature testing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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