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Originally posted by occrider Here are some of my favorites (die you 56kers):

Bastard!

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Originally posted by DigiNut I think he considers these to be "deep philosophical questions", like: - Are cucumbers really so different from auto exhaust? - Can you imagine life without a left shoulder? - Why don't badgers wear long pants?

For one, none of these are deep philosophical questions. Stupid ones, but they can at least be answered.

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Originally posted by DigiNut It really doesn't take a genius to ask a question that makes no sense, nor does it take a lot of wit to say that these questions are "deep" because nobody knows the answer. Imagination has no place in scientific discourse. Creativity is a great asset, but "imagine" is a word that you want to use sparingly.

Imagination absolutely has a significant place in scientific discourse. Without it, Christophopher Columbus wouldn't have guessed that the world was round. Galileo wouldn't have shown us that the Earth moved around the sun, instead of the other way around. Neither of them had a scientific reason to make those claims. They were just willing to explore all possibilities. And an explorer would need an imagination to do so. Or you can just except everything that is handed to you. Like sheep.

But when all is said and done, I could oppose the existance of my keyboard, and you still wouldn't be able to prove, 100%, that it, or your own keyboard, exists. Anyway, since you never witnessed a matter-antimatter pair being created from nothing, how can you be sure that its true. Because someone else says they witnessed it. Because they put it in a book. Oh...Then it must be true. Praise Jesus!!! You may have read a lot on the subject, being an engineer and all, but you really have no imagination, do you?

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Originally posted by Ondrayce Imagination absolutely has a significant place in scientific discourse. Without it, Christophopher Columbus wouldn't have guessed that the world was round. Galileo wouldn't have shown us that the Earth moved around the sun, instead of the other way around. Neither of them had a scientific reason to make those claims. They were just willing to explore all possibilities. And an explorer would need an imagination to do so. Or you can just except everything that is handed to you. Like sheep.

Incorrect. Galileo made observations and calculations that were not compatible to modern religious dogma that pervaded into science at that time, and he tested and retested those calculations accordingly which gave him conclusions on the earth's orbital nature.

Hence, no imagination was needed, just good old scientific questioning and observation.

I'm not a very good history buff, but I don't believe Columbus was out on a voyage as a result of his imagination.

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But when all is said and done, I could oppose the existance of my keyboard, and you still wouldn't be able to prove, 100%, that it, or your own keyboard, exists.

Umm, okay. Your point?

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Anyway, since you never witnessed a matter-antimatter pair being created from nothing, how can you be sure that its true. Because someone else says they witnessed it. Because they put it in a book. Oh...Then it must be true. Praise Jesus!!! You may have read a lot on the subject, being an engineer and all, but you really have no imagination, do you?

I was sincerely going to give you the benefit of the doubt, but this is absolute illogical crap. You have a difficult time grasping observed, tested, retested, and falsified phenomena that's written down in primary literature? With all due respect, tough shit. Either learn it or don't comment on it. But showing us your willful ignorance on the subject and your baseless skepticism on the matter because you have troubles understanding what observed and measured phenomena has conclusively shown in the primary literature (and secondary literature which gives overall summaries) gives you little credibility to have a coherent arguement at all, let alone with those like Diginut that actually have a f$cking clue as to what the hell they are talking about.

So in all fairness, it would serve you best to read a little more on the subject before you make idiotic comments like:

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how can you be sure that its true. Because someone else says they witnessed it. Because they put it in a book. Oh...Then it must be true. Praise Jesus!!!

It is not imagination that allows cosmologists to explore, understand, question, test, retest, and observe phenomena. It's just plain old science. Get over it.

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

momento jeebus looks the best

___________________

quote:

Originally posted by MisterOpus1 Incorrect. Galileo made observations and calculations that were not compatible to modern religious dogma that pervaded into science at that time, and he tested and retested those calculations accordingly which gave him conclusions on the earth's orbital nature. Hence, no imagination was needed, just good old scientific questioning and observation. I'm not a very good history buff, but I don't believe Columbus was out on a voyage as a result of his imagination.

Imagination is needed to question what is given to you. For Galileo to assume that thousands of years of religious belief may be wrong, takes an imagination. He made observations and calculations based on that assumption, or theory. A theory is an educated guess. Calculations and testing occur after that is made. He then arrived to the conclusion that Earth is not the center of the universe.

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[i][b]I was sincerely going to give you the benefit of the doubt, but this is absolute illogical crap. You have a difficult time grasping observed, tested, retested, and falsified phenomena that's written down in primary literature? With all due respect, tough shit. Either learn it or don't comment on it. But showing us your willful ignorance on the subject and your baseless skepticism on the matter because you have troubles understanding what observed and measured phenomena has conclusively shown in the primary literature (and secondary literature which gives overall summaries) gives you little credibility to have a coherent arguement at all, let alone with those like Diginut that actually have a f$cking clue as to what the hell they are talking about.

Observed phenomena. Observed by who? You? Then if you have all the answers, why can't you prove me wrong? Only a thousand years ago, the Bible was considered primary literature. But keep reading, I'm sure we humans have found all of the answers.

Okay, let's clarify a few things:

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Originally posted by Ondrayce Imagination is needed to question what is given to you.

Why? Why do I need to have an imagination in order to understand, observe, and question anything around me? Why can I not use reason and logic to create a hypothetical and then attempt to test that hypothesis via observation and/or repeatable tests?

Again, I assert that there is no imagination needed in science whatsoever. I have yet to run across the word "imagination" when I read about methodological naturalism philosophy, which is what the scientific method is based upon.

Outside the realm of science, well, you can use your imagination at will. I certainly do, and look at all of my followers for the Great Cookie Monster!

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For Galileo to assume that thousands of years of religious belief may be wrong, takes an imagination.

Incorrect, he did not go under this assumption to begin with, and hence no imagination was necessary from the start.

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He made observations and calculations based on that assumption, or theory.

Incorrect again. No assumption on the illogical religious dogmas were originally created by Galileo. In fact, he very much believed the vast majority of those dogmas prior to and throughout his life. It was through mere observation of the planets and the movement of the stars (including the sun) where he concluded that those dogmas were incorrect.

Again, no imagination needed here.

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A theory is an educated guess. Calculations and testing occur after that is made. He then arrived to the conclusion that Earth is not the center of the universe.

Do you, by chance, have "theory" confused with "hypothesis"?

A theory is supported by evidence, and is also supported by repeatable tests and observation. I believe you were shooting for "hypothesis" in your statement.

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Observed phenomena. Observed by who? You? Then if you have all the answers, why can't you prove me wrong? Only a thousand years ago, the Bible was considered primary literature. But keep reading, I'm sure we humans have found all of the answers.

Eh? What the hell are you talking about? It's observed by SCIENTISTS dumbass! Who the f$ck do you think it's observed by?!? Are you by chance suggesting that scientists are making all this shit up? That thousands of PhD scientists with the most brilliant minds this planet has ever known around the world are working on billions of dollars of equipment (much of which is financed by our government, I guess they're in on this conspiracy too!), only to come up with bogus data that, according to you, must be made up because YOU YOURSELF hasn't seen it?

Give me a f$cking break. Your personal incredulity is simply too ridiculous, even for me. This is idiocy commentary in it's true form. You want cute little pictures? Fine, here ya go, a nice little picture from a comet. Amazing what Google can do for you:

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The picture of Halley's comet (center) shows dust particles blasting antimatter off the comet's surface. As comets approach the sun, comets develop a coma around the nucleus and tails that bend in the direction of the solar wind. The coma and tails are a plasma of matter and antimatter ions and dust particles. The matter and antimatter annihilations on the comet's surface, and in the plasma coma and tails produce light, x-rays and gamma-rays from rather than reflecting light from the sun. Scientists have discovered that comets are natural sources of antimatter. The announcement was made at April 2002 joint meeting of American Physical Society and American Astronomical Society. Antimatter is a mirror image of matter. The update Periodic Table Elements has 109 matter and 109 antimatter elements. Each antimatter element’s nuclear, physical, and chemical properties have been defined to such an extent that people know almost as much about antimatter as matter. The discovery is as important as man's discovered and used of fire thousands of years ago. Antimatter from comets has collided with the Earth, Jupiter and Sun. On June 30, 1908, a comet fragment collided with Earth's atmosphere over Russian Siberia and produced an explosion equal to a 30 Megaton of TNT. In July 1994, Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet broke into fragments that collided with Jupiter. The 21 explosions were equivalent to over 200 million Megatons of TNT. On July 23, 2002, an antimatter sungrazer comet collided with the Sun and released enough energy to supply the world's energy needs for 10,000 years. Energy equals mass time speed of light squared or E = mc2. http://www.matter-antimatter.com/

Here's some more for your reading:

http://www.fnal.gov/
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020722/020722-7.html

Aww f$ck it. Do your own damn Google searching for more stuff. I'm really trying to figure out just what the hell you are arguing. If you are, by chance, attempting to argue that because YOU have not seen antimatter, then it therefore must not exist, then I really don't have much else to say.

I guess since YOU did not witness your birth, you must simply not exist either. Strange that.

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

See MisterOpus, I knew it was coming. I know that giving people the benefit of the doubt is the *right* thing to do, but eternal cynicism has led me in the right direction far more often.

Overall I'd say your explanation a few posts up was a pretty good one, couldn't have put it much better myself.

Let's play with a little analogy (my favourite teaching tool):

Picture one of the old-style balances, you know, the ones with a bin on the right and a bin on the left that tips to one side if it's unbalanced. And for simplicity's sake, let's say we put only blue marbles in the left bin and red marbles in the right bin, and that all marbles - red or blue - weigh exactly the same.

Now let's make just a few small changes. Let's say this balance has a digital display in the middle that will tell you exactly how many more marbles are on one side than on the other. And let's say that you can't see what's in these bins - you can press a button to either add one to the left and one to the right, or drop one from the left and one from the right (always done in pairs), but you can't see what's inside.

Now, the blue marbles on the left and the red marbles on the right are analogous to matter and anti-matter. And the display in the middle is analogous to the mass (or energy) of our universe. It's obvious that for an equal number of red and blue marbles, the display in the middle will be zero. This is true of the physical world; we say that the mass and energy of the universe is constant and that neither can be created or destroyed (although they can be converted from one form to another). Moreover, on the quantum level, the net mass and energy of a "vacuum" is always zero.

So if we look at this system, when we're measuring the mass of empty space, we're measuring the difference between these red and blue marbles. We can add a pair or take away a pair, but that display in the middle is always going to say zero. That is what we know about the space - it has zero net mass. We don't know how many red marbles or blue marbles there are, and in fact it really doesn't matter. They could have 10 marbles each. Maybe 100 marbles. Maybe an infinite number.

Maybe they were even empty at one point; does it matter? Do we care? We can press a button to drop a pair, so we know they're not empty now, something is in there. Theoretically we could probably keep pressing the button until we run out, but it might take forever. The exact number of marbles - or the exact mass of JUST the positive energy in the universe - simply isn't relevant to us, it might have been zero at some point but who cares? It's not "significant" in terms of the universe. We can add new marbles or take them away at any point and it won't affect the balance - the structural integrity of the universe we live in, as long as we're restricted to adding and taking away pairs.

Okay, now let's say we drop about 1000 pairs of marbles, and let them roll around on the floor. They may or may not stick together in those pairs after they've been "ejected". It's entirely possibly that a big group of blue marbles will end up in a cluster and a big group of red marbles will end up in a cluster somewhere else. And if we find a cluster somewhere, which has maybe lots of blue ones and only a few red ones, and we put it into a different scale, next to our first one, we're going to get a reading on that digital display that isn't zero. It's not empty space. There is net mass. This is fine - somewhere else, on the floor, or in another scale, the "opposite" mass is around. We don't have to know or care exactly where it is to know that it exists. And we can still eject more marble pairs out of the "main" device and add mass to our "unbalanced" one by just throwing in the blue marbles or take mass away by just throwing in the red ones. All of this isn't breaking any laws scientifically, because if you took all the marbles you could find and threw them all back into the bins on the "main" scale, you'd get zero.

Is anybody getting this here? If there was ever a time when the universe had no mass or no energy, we don't care about it. Quantum fluctuations allow for matter and antimatter to appear and disappear at any given moment, totally at random. Those fluctuations - or oscillations - may have started somewhere, but who really knows? Maybe it was always oscillating. The point is, we can't prove that there was ever a time for which those bins were empty, because we don't have data on how much is in each one. We might have data on how many are on the floor, or how many are in separate scales, but we really don't know how many are in the "big" one.

And if we can't prove that it was ever empty, then why speculate about how it got filled up?

That's the basis for oscillation. And those oscillations don't necessarily have to be caused, unless you are very narrow-minded. They may have just always been happening.

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Originally posted by Ondrayce Imagination absolutely has a significant place in scientific discourse. Without it, Christophopher Columbus wouldn't have guessed that the world was round. Galileo wouldn't have shown us that the Earth moved around the sun, instead of the other way around. Neither of them had a scientific reason to make those claims. They were just willing to explore all possibilities. And an explorer would need an imagination to do so. Or you can just except everything that is handed to you. Like sheep.

Actually, Galileo was only a supporter of Copernicus' theory about a heliocentric universe. Copernicus arrived at his conclusions after examining and completing a record of planetary movements, a project originally started by Tycho Brahe. He realized that when the planetary positions were plotted, the paths of the inner planets clearly showed that they orbited the sun. For a while there was a theory that inner planets orbit the sun, while the sun together with outer planets orbits the earth, but that theory didn't stand up too long either, mostly because of evidence provided by other astronomers, including Galileo. You're mixing up cause and effect here. It's not like they imagined a heliocentric universe and then went on searching for evidence to prove their claims. They were pretty certain that the universe was geocentric until they were confronted with the evidence that showed the opposite. Only then did they start to believe the opposite.

Columbus, on the other hand, was definitely not the first one who came up with the idea of a spherical earth. Early greeks and romans had pretty strong suspicions about earth being round. The round shadow of earth during a lunar eclipse, the positions of the stars viewed from different parts of the earth, as well as the effects of ships seeming to sink slowly as they get farther and farther away. Columbus, as a sailor, was definitely familiar with the last effect mentioned. Even the diameter of the earth was calculated by early greeks, and it was actually pretty close to the exact value. Columbus, however, used an erroneous estimate, which caused him to believe that India was much closer than it was. Scientists of the time, however, did have a pretty good idea of how far a person should sail to the west to reach India. So it's not like all those people got the idea out of their asses. There was much existing evidence that pointed towards that hypothesis. Here's the nice article about it:http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Scolumb.htm

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But when all is said and done, I could oppose the existance of my keyboard, and you still wouldn't be able to prove, 100%, that it, or your own keyboard, exists.

Yes, you could. A typical high school quasiphilosophical problem.

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Anyway, since you never witnessed a matter-antimatter pair being created from nothing, how can you be sure that its true. Because someone else says they witnessed it. Because they put it in a book. Oh...Then it must be true. Praise Jesus!!! You may have read a lot on the subject, being an engineer and all, but you really have no imagination, do you?

Well, there does exist something called a Casimir effect, and it's not that difficult to recreate. If you want to take your time, feel free to construct a similar aparatus and see if your results match those obtained by scientists. If you prove them wrong, you'll surely be a candidate for winning a Nobel prize.

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Imagination is needed to question what is given to you. For Galileo to assume that thousands of years of religious belief may be wrong, takes an imagination. He made observations and calculations based on that assumption, or theory. A theory is an educated guess. Calculations and testing occur after that is made. He then arrived to the conclusion that Earth is not the center of the universe.

Again, you switched the cause and effect. Copernicus, not Galileo, made observations which failed to fit into the existing theory. So he created a new one that managed to explain the issue better. It wasn't like he thought up a picture of a heliocentric universe simply based on a hunch, and then made observations which happened to fit into his idea. That's pretty much how all science works. People don't create theories and then make observations to see if their theories hold up. It's vice-versa. People first make observations, and if those observations don't fit into existing theory, they create a new theory that is better able to describe the existing phenomena.

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Observed phenomena. Observed by who? You? Then if you have all the answers, why can't you prove me wrong? Only a thousand years ago, the Bible was considered primary literature. But keep reading, I'm sure we humans have found all of the answers.

Observed by thousands of scientists. It's not like they keep the knowledge secret. Read a science book, and if you manage to find any errors and fallacious arguments, I'm certain that the scientific community will be glad to stand corrected. Lay off the adrenaline for a while and read what people say here. Nobody said that they know all the answers. Infact, nobody even said that your theory is impossible. It was you who said that the repetitive universe theory (which is not what the article proposed in the first place) is impossible based on your lacking knowledge of nature and physics. There is a big difference between the bible and the primary scientific literature. The bible is dogmatic and unable to change. Scientific data is always susceptable to change based on given evidence. So try to think a little about what you're saying and what you're presented with instead of applying a weak sort of moral relativism and misreading what we have stated.

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1+1=10

You guys get so into this stuff. Its a good thing you're all just figments of my imagination.


Realistally, I'm completly aware of the ass kicking I've recieved. It's just funny to see you guys reply so passionatley to nonsense. Good for you.

all thats needed is someone to read it all.

PS. is it just me that skips huge posts?

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Originally posted by ProDiGaL all thats needed is someone to read it all. PS. is it just me that skips huge posts?

In the political forum? Yes, I'd say you're in the minority. Since this is officially a forum for debate, expect long posts. If you don't like that, try chillout room, and don't whine here.

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2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
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2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here