lol shut up wiggidy.

i knew people in college who tried to pass differential equations (which isn't close to the most conceptually difficult course any math/physics major will take) 3 or 4 times before giving up. math isn't some sort of hocus pocus that no one can understand, but don't make it out to be simpler than it is.

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"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." --Thomas Paine

would you also say it's "easy" to learn arabic?

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"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." --Thomas Paine

Hey now, I'm not the guy that said it was simple, I did however have no problem with any of the courses involving math I had to take in college.

Calculus
Statistics
Accounting
Chemistry
A couple computer programming classes
Economics

edit: Econ/Poli Sci double major and 20 credits short of a game design degree.

Greetings and Felicitations,

Learning a language is nowhere as hard as learning a new math. Learning languages is simply a matter of memorization but high level math requires actually manipulating the way you think.

Sincerely Yours,
C. David Neely

PS. I speak two languages fluently and speak two others within a reasonable range.

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Tortured, but somewhat interesting at least.

Always does.

On another note, has anyone noticed that I've been questioning the validity of the theory of "the big bang" while that theory is very well liked by many people who are Christian ?

The Whole "God said “Let there be light.” thing.

The reason I've done so is so that we recognize that it is a theory. Yes, it's the theory that best fits our observations, but as we see (if we've spent a lot of time studying this) our observations don't always lead us to correct conclusions on these matters.

We still haven't even figured out gravity and exactly how it operates. We still don't know the value of omega and the "shape" nature of the universe.


But we have this skynet person saying things like:


If head in the clouds "sky" had paid attention, he/she would have made note of a statement I made directly to him/her in another area.

That being that I used to think exactly like him/her.

I've been "conditioned" in no way to beleive in anything. I've come to the conclusions I have on my own.

According to folks like "sky" this means I must be only a step or two above "idiot."

"Many" - rolls eyes -

Some are some aren't.

I've seen no comprehensive survey of "modern scientists" determining what percentage of them identify as atheists, so it tells me nothing other than showing me what you wish to be true.

Dangerously so.

Uh huh.

I'm sure your IQ is much higher than mine too. You hold two or three PhD's too don't you ? T'was you that parted the Red sea wasn't it ?

The wonders you do find on the internet.

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Something wicked this way comes.

Why did they have to take Dif-Eq? Mech-E or physics? (Rumor has it some econ types take it too, but I'd imagine that varies by program) Dif-Eq is an interesting concept, but I can't imagine they were taking it as an elective.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

at my school the only ones who HAD to take diff eq were engineering students. a lot of math kids took it because we tended to do pretty well in it. physics majors often took it if they were adding a concentration in something or another. i took it because i needed an upper level elective in my major and it was being offered during an attractive timeslot with a good professor (turned out to be one of my only A's in my major too so it worked out i guess). to be perfectly honest i'm not really sure why my school had so many people taking it but it was definitely a good course. you're right about the econ types too, i was a double math/econ major.

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"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." --Thomas Paine

Yeah... acceleration affecting velocity and that sort of thing. Definitely gets the brain working a bit, and lends itself well to practical applications. I was always a fan of the pure theoretical coursework and study, but there were some applied areas that could be of interest (though I really didn't like statistics).

As a CS guy, I took courses like that because (1) there was no real need to go to all of the math classes when lecture notes were posted online and (2) my program forced CS majors to get a minor, which I got in math. As I recall, Dif-Eq was a pre-requisite for some 300 and 400 level math courses I had to take. But, there was so much overlap with CS (combinatorics, discrete math, propositional logic, etc) that the math minor was a cinch and and I got to take some random electives that were interesting my last two years.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

As someone fluent in three, with a working knowledge of a 4th and an academic background in linguistics, I would submit to that to really learn (and understand) a langauge, it is also required to manipulating the way one thinks.

Any clown (or DLI student) can memorize, but that's not necessarily 'learning'.

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All things serve The Beam

It's detectable. At least it's influence is detectable. Gravitational lensing works to locate lots of it, even in areas where there is nothing that looks like it should have that much gravity. There has to be something there or the light wouldn't be bent passing it.

It's "old news" really:
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Hubble makes 3D dark matter map

Yes the jury is still most certainly out on what the heck dark matter is and if it isn't dark matter...what the heck is going on?


(yeah I know I'm crazy talking science in a science thread in a science section of a blog, i's better then arguing isn't it?)

Eh hem...

I call b.s. that you read his works. Especially QED, which is one of his more famous works. Heisenberg suggested that we cannot find a better principle than the Uncertainty Principle. Not true. It is technically an "observer effect". One case is "mass behavior". If we can detect the behavior that light is emanating through using mass as a medium (diffraction), then we can predict its "uncertainty" with closer precision. Feynman incoprporated the uncertainty into equations, thus making them not-so uncertain. This is why he stated that Heisenberg was off a bit. All in all, the uncertainty principle is not needed, due to the fact that it does not impact large-scale predictability. It's irrelevant. This was my point and this is the beauty of science - to grow and change its principles in order to better understand.

Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin, 1990, pp. 55-6, and 84:

‘I would like to put the uncertainty principle in its historical place: when the revolutionary ideas of quantum physics were first coming out, people still tried to understand them in terms of old-fashioned ideas … But at a certain point the old fashioned ideas would begin to fail, so a warning was developed that said, in effect, “Your old-fashioned ideas are no damn good when …”. If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures – adding arrows [arrows = phase amplitudes in the path integral] for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle! … on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that there is no main path, no “orbit”; there are all sorts of ways the electron could go, each with an amplitude. The phenomenon of interference [by field quanta] becomes very important …’

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"Today a [wo]man... tomorrow a worm...and the day after - a fly!" - Marquis de Sade

What the fuuuuuuuuuuuck?

Yes, well these things physically exist and are not just fantasy, like God. This doesn't mean anything.


You haven't been paying attention to my explanations... at all.

So this makes you "more" correct, right?

I see that the concept of social influence is still way over your head. You're just not understanding my concepts...

I never stated that. I just don't follow people who would rather be ignorant to everything and state that they don't know anything at all, than to work with what they DO know. I don't tend to enjoy the company of counter-productive self-defeatists.

A study has shown atheism in the west to be particularly prevalent among scientists, a tendency already quite marked at the beginning of the 20th century, developing into a dominant one during the course of the century. In 1914, James H. Leuba found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected U.S. natural scientists expressed "disbelief or doubt in the existence of God" (defined as a personal God which interacts directly with human beings). The same study, repeated in 1996, gave a similar percentage of 60.7%; this number is 93% among the members of the National Academy of Sciences. Expressions of positive disbelief rose from 52% to 72%.[11] (See also Relationship between religion and science.)

Demographics of atheism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have a tendency to overexaggerate. Actually, I have had my IQ tested professionally, but I would never be pompous or insecure enough to share the results. It's not even relevant to this argument.

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"Today a [wo]man... tomorrow a worm...and the day after - a fly!" - Marquis de Sade

That's nice, but sorry, I've read him.That's also nice that you're able to quote from a book, a book whose contents I don't think you actually understand correctly, but it had nothing to do with what I posted.

The HUP is simply not metaphysics.

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All things serve The Beam

First there were Maxwell's equations. And then there was light.

Is God a theory? Or speculation? Is he fact? If he's a theory or fact, where is the evidence for him? What experiments can be done to demonstrate its existence?

There are lots of things science doesn't know the answer to. However, when observations/measurements are made of particular phenomena, a scientific theory must explain them. It must also be able to make accurate and successful predictions. As new facts arise that contradict the theory, then a new theory or revision to the old theory must take place.

For the existence of God, its a ridiculous premise. The theory of God never makes predictions, it never has to adapt to facts beyond "well thats the way God made it", etc. Its completely unfalsifiable, which is the complete opposite of science (which is never 'provable' except through overwhelming evidence in support of ... but never absolutely proving a theory).

God is an invisible friend that makes a lot of people comfortable.

Tell you what. I'll explain what's going on here, and you can tell me that you don't agree or that you've read such and such book by such and such physicist or whatever occurs to you to say by way of "saving face". However, it is my hope that if I explain this in simple terms, you may learn something. I say this not to be condescending, but because I value people taking interest in academic matters - particularly in the understanding of mathematical and physics constructs. Not a lot of people are even interested, so it makes me happy when someone is, regardless of the motivations. But, interested or not, you're delving into territory that requires familiarity with rather sophisticated principles of calculus and formal mathematical language to understand.

There are three "formalisms" that describe what is most famously regarded as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and they are all more or less equivalent, differing in mathematical semantics only. Two of them are bing discussed here (Heisenberg's and Feynman's lesser known one that came later and is, some would argue, needlessly convoluted) and the third one is credited to Schrödinger (which ironically, is the most commonly used). So let's be clear here - the symbols on the papers and the order of operations of the formalisms are different, but the end result is the same.

To put it another way, your argument here is akin to this:

We know that there are 5 green bags containing 1 marble each and that there are 3 red bags containing 2 marbles each. Heisenberg comes along and says that the best way to count the marbles is with the equation (5*1) + (4*2). At the same time, Schrödinger is working on the problem and says, "no, no, that's silly - the best way is with the equation (1*5) + (2*4)". After a decade or so, Feynman dusts off someone's old work, has an epiphany and decides that "both of you are wrong - we should use the formula (2*4) + (1*5) - 6 + 12 - 12 + 6."

What you've really got is three competing salesmen offering you an identical product underneath that looks different on the outside. So of course he would talk about his competitor's formalism being "not needed" - because you should do it his way. Skynet, they're talking about different ways to do the same thing - semantics and mathematical procedure. They're not talking about building on, modifying, or replacing knowledge. Whoever you want to give credit for it is irrelevant - it remains the bedrock of quantum theory regardless and you're calling it "unnecessary" to quantum theory.

Just something to file away for a rainy day.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson