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Wipe your screen people: Join the folding at home "stickam.com folders" team, enter 166658 as your team number in the folding at home application. Saying you can have morality without God deciding what's right and wrong is like saying you can have a sense of humour without God telling you what is and isn't funny. - IJR EUROPAN PHYSICS Consider the Europans: inhabiting the oceans deep beneath the icy crust of Jupiter's sixth moon there's little light and so their only 'visual' sense is sonar.Taking the form of diaphanous sheets, swirling, drifting and interacting with the environment and each other, Europans are entirely 'cold blooded'. Their metabolism and (as a result) the rate at which they perceive the world depends almost entirely on the temperature of the liquid around them. They're way behind us scientifically but, living for hundreds of years, they are advanced in the arts of science and philosophy. The Europans have developed a theory of relativity, based around the speed of sound, rather than that of light. None of them have ever come close to travelling at this velocity but experimentation has proved that as objects approach it their rate of acceleration (when viewed with sonar) slows down and they appear to gain mass. They've also witnessed changes in the pitch of sounds and the shortening/elongation of objects at speed (due to Doppler effects). To Europans, the rate at which time passes and heat energy/temperature are more or less synonymous. Never mind experimentation, they have direct experience of this every day through their own perceptions. Drop a Europan in to a pool of cold liquid and the world around it appears to speed up and to external observers the Europan slows down. Europan hunting strategies and arts of war utilize this fact to gain the advantage on unsuspecting enemies. Europans know that the universe is bounded by a thick icy crust, beyond which there is nothing. Since Europa has no atmosphere to speak of there's no medium through which sound can propagate. Hence there's nothing to detect. Indeed the near instantaneous freezing effect of the vacuum outside shows them time itself comes to a halt beyond the crust. That said, recent experimentation has produced some interesting results: with fairly predictable regularity, time seems to flow faster in the brief holes the Europans poke in the surface during some periods (the heating effect of the Sun); and there are mysterious, moving, cyclical forces that speed time up in various parts of the deep ocean (the heating effect of tidal forces from Jupiter and it's other moons). These are just small details, however, and the Europans are sure they are close to a working model of the universe. The science fits the facts pretty much given a few of unanswered questions. It even holds out when one of them is almost killed with a special hydrodynamic bullet travelling at supersonic speeds (fired by a human explorer). The first thing the Europan senses is the bullet thudding in to the ice just past it's ventricular ocular quadrant, then come the sound waves from the bullet's passage through the water, each from a point progressively further away from the target until the sound of the gun being fired is sensed and, to the Europan, the bullet literally travels backwards through time (as Europan relativity predicts). So ... there you have it. Nice theories the Europeans have, backed up by plenty of evidence but, ffs, how wrong are they? The Europans are trapped by the way they perceive the universe (as are we) and as a result, are getting it all wrong (as we might be). The moral of this tale? "Beware the claim that Science's understanding of the universe is 'almost there'. Our science might, in its own way, be just as blind to the true nature of the universe as that of the Europans. The answers to those 'few unanswered questions' might change everything.". - IJR http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-theories-dark-matter Watch, "The Century of Self". the first of four parts, here: Choice quotes on Quantum Mechanics: Niels Bohr, Nobel Laυreate for Physics (1922), "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. " Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel Laureate for Physics (1933), on QM as a representation of reality "I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it. ". If you're confused by the story of Schrodinger's cat, it's Schrodinger screaming "Look people! What you're saying is ridiculous! Of course the cat is either alive or dead, we just treat it as both mathematically because of the limits of the observations we can take!" Reading the bible and saying "God is Love", ignoring the rape, murder, baby killings and the 'final solution' He has in store for non-believers is like saying "when look back on the life Hitler I think only of the good things, he was a really great guy!". - IJR Of course my conviction that there is no god is just a belief, similar to the belief that there isn't $1 billion buried beneath the foundations of my house. I am not about to start digging just because I don't have proof it's not there. - IJR Sometimes Sometimes things don't go, after all, A people sometimes will step back from war, Sometimes our best intentions do not go - Sheenagh Pugh Storm by Tim Minchin |
