Philosophy Discussion Forums

Erribert wrote: ↑May 7th, 2018, 1:25 am Hi Halc,
The theories of relativity are being shot down all the time! What are you talking about. How many journals in physics do you read?

Give me a break! It has become extremely obvious that the universe is not expanding. There was no Big Bang, black holes cannot exist. This is all published in peer reviewed journals. Maybe it just doesn’t make it to NPR, but so what.

This maybe the opinion of some unknown scientists who scarcely exist on the fringes of modern science, however the excepted theory by the broader scientific community clearly provides demonstratable evidence that the Big Bang theory, expansion and black holes definitively exist. If you disagree I will assert that simply you don't understand the science enough to make an educated claim regarding the validity of some of the most researched fields in modern Astrophysics.

Have you ever gone through Einstein’s derivation of his field equations? His first step is to say that gravity has nothing to do with mass. If this were true, how does one weigh apples on a scale? Einstein claims that gravity is not a force, but something else. Really? How does a field travel? Just go through the derivations. They are online.

Ok, so clearly you've misunderstood what relativity has to say about gravity.
First, scales don't measure mass, they measure weight and weight is relative to gravity however mass is not. You have clearly abbreviated and cherry picked bits and pieces of Einsteins theory (this is typically the case when people attempt to debunk theories).
Therefore we can talk about mass or energy without the necessity to speak of gravity.

Next, you have again misrepresented Einsteins position, Einstein explains gravity as the warping and stretching of Spacetime not as a field which simply pulls things. The gravitational field which we speak about in science refers to how gravity interacts between objects and how we measure those interactions.

Einstein’s second postulate (assumption) in his theory of special relativity is that the speed of light is constant. Really? Well that’s easy for him to say. Light slows down when it goes through water, go figure. Einstein thought space was a vacuum. Satellites are now showing us that it is anything but a vacuum. 99.99% of our universe is plasma. It can be measured right outside our atmosphere. Ever heard of solar winds? How can there be a wind in a vacuum.

You are wrong again, the speed of light remains constant to the observer, therefore when calculating equations over great distances we can use the speed of light as a universal constant....meaning our own speed would be irrelevant.
Light slows down at different rates when traveling through all states, it's called the refractive index and has nothing to doing the constant speed described by relativity.

Whitedragon: "If some beings have internalized their technology to be part of their quintessential makeup, it would be hard to classify it."

Not clear what you mean by "internalizing their technology," what would be an example of that?

Half wrote: If you find an obvious contradiction like that, it would have been shot down by the physicists long ago. This is a clue that your understanding of the theory is wrong. So yes, SR says that the laws are the same in each inertial frame, so in the astronaut's outbound frame, the Earth ages slower, not faster, but it doesn't ever come back. In the return frame, the Earth also ages slower, but it never went away. In neither frame does it go out and come back, which is what it takes to compare clocks to one that is stationary in the selected frame. There is not astronaut inertial frame since the astronaut is stationary in no frame for the entire trip.

Erribert: this obvious contradiction has been shown by physicists. I did not make it up. The special theory of relativity is falling apart.

I am not sure of your subsequent statements. Either the astronaut or the earth can be taken as the unmoving frame of reference according to special relativity. So, clock comparison can go either way. Either the earth’s clock goes slower or the astronat’s goes slower. In the literature (and according to Einstein) the astronaut’s clock must go slower. This does not stand up in Einstein’s own theory. That was my point. Again, I did not come up with this. It is a well known criticism of the theory. Not all physicists believe in special relativity. It is only the public that seems to. That belief has been labeled (by others) as Scientism. That being a simple faith in what scientists tell them. It is a religion taught in schools (again, not just my opinion).

Cheers

Whitedragon wrote: ↑April 16th, 2018, 12:11 pm Approaching God from a scientific point of view

I’d like open this thread by asking a question: would atheists be willing to entertain the idea of a god notion if god was scientifically approachable?

To the degree that you can call sociological phenomena "scientific" yes. But most of what I've heard of "god" you might be better off with understanding god through mythology, rather than any other type of "-ology".