81–90 of 242 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm engaging in dialectic, not rhetoric. I don't believe rhetoric has a place on this site, at least not from me. Since this is a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity, why don't you please present me with both?
It is important to note that you did not answer the question.
One thing that really frustrates me about cosmology, or at least popular science reporting and books, is a particular kind of lack of intellectual rigor. Specifically, even as a layman, it's clear that observation and model are being conflated. Cosmology is a science in the broadest sense of being a field of human knowledge, but it isn't a science the way that, for example, physics is. It would better be described as…
Wasn't there a time, not so long ago in fact (pre-1920's), where almost all your beloved physics models, beside Netwonian gravities, were wrong as well? So Astronomy, as a "hard science", is around 100 years behind...what's the big deal with that?
When this article talked about the ladder of standard candles, I started to wonder: when using the brightness of supernovae between near and far galaxies, what about intergalactic dust absorbing some of the light? Wouldn't that mess up the ability to just straighforwardly determine the distance from the brightness in a 1/r^2 way?
research "tired light". There are many competing theories.
Maybe read "Seeing Red" by Halton Arp, or anything by Tom Van Flandern. Or the book "Pushing Gravity". Or the electric universe guys, or subquantum kinetics, or modern mechanics, or plasma cosmology, or weber dynamics, or infinite universe, pretty much anything but the standard model actually.
be careful though, you might find yourself exposed to ideas that establishment status quo "science" tries hard to ignore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think observation and model almost necessarily have to be conflated. What we really see is light hitting our retina, or if you want to go one layer further, nerve impulses in our visual cortex. Everything else is model. So if we accept that everything is model, then what you are really advocating is using verbose descriptions in terms of a fairly established model rather than succinct descriptions in a more specula…
Thank you for helping clarify what I'm saying. You've definitely got it right. To elaborate, consider the difference between calculating the distance to a star in the Milky Way using parallax where the model is basically just assume your eyes work plus trigonometry and calculating the distance to other galaxies where far more assumptions are required. Edit: response from cygx is completely missing the point about con…
Because your comment I responded to was arguing something different - namely, the number of required assumptions.
Due to confinement, the existence of quarks rests on quite a lot of them.
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I appreciate your optimism. I tend to be optimistic about the future myself. But there is no law of the universe that everything will work out ok. Only if we make the right decisions as a species and we don't get unlucky. I'm quite apprehensive that the great filter lies ahead - that technology accelerates too rapidly compared to our wisdom and we end up nearly destroying ourselves. We're getting the ability to progr…
What does it mean to not pass the great filter? Humanity or their successor stop existing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciate your optimism. I tend to be optimistic about the future myself. But there is no law of the universe that everything will work out ok. Only if we make the right decisions as a species and we don't get unlucky. I'm quite apprehensive that the great filter lies ahead - that technology accelerates too rapidly compared to our wisdom and we end up nearly destroying ourselves. We're getting the ability to progr…
> I appreciate your optimism. I tend to be optimistic about the future myself. But there is no law of the universe that everything will work out ok. Isn't there some QM law that says that with infinitesimal probability anything can materialize at any point in space? Meaning that after everything has collapsed, you can (will!) still re-materialize somewhere in space. An infinite number of times!
One thing that really frustrates me about cosmology, or at least popular science reporting and books, is a particular kind of lack of intellectual rigor. Specifically, even as a layman, it's clear that observation and model are being conflated. Cosmology is a science in the broadest sense of being a field of human knowledge, but it isn't a science the way that, for example, physics is. It would better be described as…
I agree with you here. A phrase that always echoes in my mind when discussing cosmology is "All models are wrong - some models are useful" The farther you venture from the verified useful section of a model (by which I mean - the farther you are from model predications that have been validated with observational evidence), the less you should trust it - ALL MODELS ARE WRONG! And for most sciences - this isn't a huge…
I always get a feeling of existential dread when I read these kind of news.
Don't worry too much about it. In the end, everything will be nearly 0k.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you here. A phrase that always echoes in my mind when discussing cosmology is "All models are wrong - some models are useful" The farther you venture from the verified useful section of a model (by which I mean - the farther you are from model predications that have been validated with observational evidence), the less you should trust it - ALL MODELS ARE WRONG! And for most sciences - this isn't a huge…
Note that the most distant astronomical object we've observed has a redshift of 11, corresponding to a light travel distance of 13.4Gly. This means that if our models are correct and the universe is indeed about 13.8 billion years old, then we've seen 97% of the universe's history. Including the microwave background in that pushes the number to 99.997%.
You might as well be looking at a single frame of a movie and telling me you know the whole plotline because it happens to have the same pixels on screen for the whole shebang.