Re: UFOs, Aliens, Time Travel and more...
@yamraj: You're obviously only here to argue, without basis. Please either take the trouble to read a person's post before commenting, or just don't comment at all...
yamraj said:
Sorry, I didn't read after the first line of the quoted paragraph. There simply exists nothing as a straight line or a plane in the space-time continuum.
If you had bothered to read that paragraph, you'd realise that it was a way of simplifying the understanding of higher dimensions. Since no human can imagine a higher dimension, it's a very common practise, used by many scientists to explain to us lay people, to try and get us to imagine ourselves living in a dimension lower that what we actually are... even two dimensions lower... this makes it easier to understand what a higher dimension person could do to wreak havoc in our world, and stupify us...
You've made it very clear that you just don't like to read anything that goes against your pre-conceived notions of what you "think" is the right explanation for the universe around you... why do you even bother trying to come here and post?
yamraj said:
It's rather interesting to see how my fellow "ametuer" scientists are trying to define "Time", which has been described as "one of the concepts that is profoundly resistant to a simple definition" by Carl Sagan. Similar explanations were given by Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking.
And this just stops you from trying to understand it yourself?
yamraj said:
Your "explanation" is more suitable for the title of a "believer".
So then you're a believer?
yamraj said:
First of all - why prefer Christianity/Bible/Church to seemingly more tolerant religions that embrace scientific discoveries quite well and often end up having different branches and spin-offs dealing with these issues? Semitic "religions" are only cults with huge follower-base. You seem to ignore the fact that Hinduism was/is quite open to scientific ideas.
No, I didn't get the drift, for it presented a very biased view to me.
I used the example of the "Bible" and "Christianity" because I happen to belong to that community. You can substitute whatever religion you like here... Before you start a "X religion is better than Y religion" war here, you should go read the newspapers a little more often... look at all the bloodshed happening over a few stupid brick and stone buildings... preachers getting slaughtered for conversions, sects within the same religion killing each other over stupid differences in the middle east, people still being treated as lower castes in the 21st century...
Now to address the part of your quote marked bold by me... remember when all of a sudden statues across India seemingly started to drink milk? Scientists were quick to disregard it as porus materials used to create the statues... even showed it being done with a brick... but did the religious leaders accept it? Did the majority of the public accept it? Let's not fool ourselves into believing that ANY religion is open to scientific explanations... the most obvious ones that are taught to every 5th grader sure, but anything that the common man "might" be unsure about, hell no!
yamraj said:
Not quite! If you were familiar with the inherent politics of scientific community, you wouldn't have said that. Your "proof" could outright be ignored and laughed at, depending on the mood and affliation of the scientific community members. History is full of such examples.
Besides, you couldn't prove/reproduce the same miracles with the help of science when these religions flourished some 2000 years ago, could you?
History? Did my example assume that I was from a time 2000 years ago? There is always resistence to change, there is always dissent; that's the very nature of science. The little word "proof" that you scorn is the very basis of science. No I'm not talking about theoretical physics, I'm talking hardcore, down and dirty science. From "history" we learn that science and its beliefs have changed a lot more drastically than religion has. The world was flat once, and isn't now. The final "proof" of it was delivered by the first pictures of our planet shot from space... Science has always
had to accept the truth.
Even in grey areas such as when dealing with space-time, there is no belief. They're called theories in science, and every such theory has a basis. There are complex formulae, that neither you nor I can fully comprehend, but a scientists peers can. There's a reason for a theory being more popular than a contradicting one; it's called logic and understanding, and if 90% of the greatest minds in the world agree that one theory makes more sense than another, that's the one that's accepted... still as a theory, or a possibility, but accepted, until another comes along and dethrones it by making more sense...
yamraj said:
And, science is based on observations, which are in turn dependent on our senses and limitations of human understanding. Just like we don't expect rats to build rockets and fly great distances, we also cannot claim to have enough brainpower to know-it-all.
Who says we know it all? I certainly do not. No body on the face of this Earth, past or present does. I dare say that perhaps even in the future, no one will ever know it
all. However, I will try and figure it out. I will accept the explanations given by intelligent individuals, consider them, apply logic to them and gain an understanding... as any thinking human would... or should... I will not just discount something because i'm an "unbeliever", or even a "believer". If everyone were like that, we'd be wiped out by disease, still thinking the earth was flat and perhaps the rats
really would be building the spaceships of today!
yamraj said:
While it may not be as apparant to the "common man", there is a lot of faith and belief going on within the scientific community. There are theories without any proof, and even many theoretical physicists disagree with them. Yet, most of the populations takes theories like Big Bang and String theory for granted. In fact, theoretical physics is closer to fiction/religion than it is to the "traditional" scientific ways. Do you know that the Dark Matter accounts for more than 96% of the whole Universe(which is a very misleading term itself)? Yet, it cannot be proved to exist as it doesn't consist of atoms, but still has mass. Do you understand that traditional geometry fails to explain the time-space curvature? Yet, it *seemingly* solves most of the "Earthly" problems. Do you know that many biologists disagree with the Darwinian logic? And that, we've not yet found the sources of 223 genes in the Human Genome? And that, scientists claim to know all about the elements, atoms, molecules ...but still the very Particle Physics is proved to be wrong by the String or M-theory? That, we may be living in a simulation? Or that, there exist parellel universes with infinite dimensions? Or maybe the "Multiverse" is only a vibration produced by the tubular and plasma-like strings in other dimensions?
These are not my words. You'll immediately recognize at least some of it, if you keep a close watch on the latest scientific news and researches.
The theories you describe as "faith and belief" are actually based on something... people don;t just pull "string theory" and "big bang" from thin air. They may not be correct, and only some time in the future will they either be proven or disproven with concrete evidence, but they are put together by using cold hard facts, such as knowing that even something as miniscule as an electron has mass, and thus should not be treated as a zero dimensional object, or that all the galaxies appear to be moving away from one central point in the universe... these are measured facts, and are what are used to base these theories (right or wrong) on. I disagree that there is fiction/religious behaviour here in science, because any theory that's based on facts cannot be called fiction... it can be proved wrong, sure, but calling it religious belief or science fiction... that's stepping over a very large and obvious line...
yamraj said:
Why does science come up with as loud a theory as the Big Bang, but fails to explain what existed before it, or what caused it to happen? If it's not some (overdose of) faith or belief in science, how else would you explain it?
This is the one area of theoretical physics that is always going to be grey. Why? Simply because just as with religion, this deals with the past. The question of how the universe began is something that no one, except the proverbial time traveler, of course, can prove/disprove. As I said earlier, not knowing, and theorizing something is very different from being an overdose of faith or belief in science. Besides, it's not like the entire scientific community is out trying to prove or disprove the big bang theory, simply because they cannot. Instead, more people seem to be considering the multi-verse, dark matter, anti matter, and other things that can be proved/disproved, given enough time. Time travel, again, is one of those things that scientists/physicists are interested in. The speed of light, and whether it's attainable, problems that have a light at the end of the tunnel are a lot more important than us worrying about where we came from.
If anything, the big bang is the biggest religion vs science fight of all time, and a pointless one. Thankfully the majority seem more interested in where we're going rather than where we've been.
yamraj said:
I'm not qualified enough to think about a time-travel.
Wrong again. Thanks to the sharing of information, we're all qualified to read, understand and then think about things such as time travel. We may get a lot of things wrong, but not having a PHD in Physics is no reason to stop thinking or trying to understand such things. The very nature of science is to question, if you lose that most basic trait, what else is there to live for?
yamraj said:
It's an uttely rubbish concept, much to the fate and likes of dozens of others in theoretical physics. Even the Hindu mythological idea of the whole "reality" being only a dream of Vishnu is better than this!
I've put some effort in studying the wormhole idea. It'd take very large amount of energy, almost equivalent to that of a whole Galaxy to create one through a "hypothetically bent plane of Universe (laughable)", and even then, the hole would only be around a billionth-of-1mm wide for anything to travel through.
Stranger than fiction, indeed!
Whoa! You're suddenly qualified again? You rubbish a concept that has been spoken about by great names in physics? Wait, let me scroll up....
yamraj said:
It's rather interesting to see how my fellow "ametuer" scientists are trying to define "Time", which has been described as "one of the concepts that is profoundly resistant to a simple definition" by Carl Sagan. Similar explanations were given by Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking.
So do you just quote what suits you? Accepting what they say when it supports your arguements and rubbishing their own thoughts about something like wormholes? Incidentally, Sagan theorized that time travel through a wormhole was possible, which is what he uses in his novel
Contact, as does Kip Thorne. However, Hawking says it's impossible. Since you quoted all three, about the definition of time bein impossible to explain, which one do you actually believe?
Here's some interesting reading for the ones following this thread:
Carl Sagan said:
Such questions (time travel) are purely a matter of evidence, and if the evidence is inconsistent or insufficient, then we withhold judgment until there is better evidence. Right now we're in one of those classic, wonderfully evocative moments in science when we don't know, when there are those on both sides of the debate, and when what is at stake is very mystifying and very profound.
If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn't today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it's possible, but it's certainly worth exploring.
There have been some toy experiments in which, at just the moment that the time machine is actuated, the universe conspires to blow it up, which has led Hawking and others to conclude that nature will contrive it so that time travel never in fact occurs. But no one actually knows that this is the case, and it cannot be known until we have a full theory of quantum gravity, which we do not seem to be on the verge of yet.
One of Hawking's arguments in the conjecture is that we are not awash in thousands of time travelers from the future, and therefore time travel is impossible. This argument I find very dubious, and it reminds me very much of the argument that there cannot be intelligences elsewhere in space, because otherwise the Earth would be awash in aliens. I can think half a dozen ways in which we could not be awash in time travelers, and still time travel is possible.
First of all, it might be that you can build a time machine to go into the future, but not into the past, and we don't know about it because we haven't yet invented that time machine. Secondly, it might be that time travel into the past is possible, but they haven't gotten to our time yet, they're very far in the future and the further back in time you go, the more expensive it is. Thirdly, maybe backward time travel is possible, but only up to the moment that time travel is invented. We haven't invented it yet, so they can't come to us. They can come to as far back as whatever it would be, say A.D. 2300, but not further back in time.
Then there's the possibility that they're here alright, but we don't see them. They have perfect invisibility cloaks or something. If they have such highly developed technology, then why not? Then there's the possibility that they're here and we do see them, but we call them something else—UFOs or ghosts or hobgoblins or fairies or something like that. Finally, there's the possibility that time travel is perfectly possible, but it requires a great advance in our technology, and human civilization will destroy itself before time travelers invent it.
I'm sure there are other possibilities as well, but if you just think of that range of possibilities, I don't think the fact that we're not obviously being visited by time travelers shows that time travel is impossible.
Full interview at: *www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/sagan.html
yamraj said:
Not in my opinion. But a more general question would be - does anything have to do with time travel at all? Time travel fans will always come up with ideas to satiate their lust for the same. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them tried getting through a toilet pipe, if they were led to believe it was a way to travel through time.
Most physicists don't agree, or aren't sure, on a common theory as to what happens on the other side of the black hole. But a shared "belief" is the concept of Singularity.
As Prof. Mike Disney says, "Cosmology is close to the religion". My fellow Digit'ers may disagree, but they're simply not qualified enough.
You astound us all with the way you trivialize everything. If you cannot answer a question directly, perhaps you shouldn't try!
yamraj said:
I think, both religion and the present-day science are quite limited in what they can do to make us understand ourselves better. Both have been trying for long, but the efforts fall somewhat short of expectations.
That said, there's a definite place for philosophy in between the two. I also tend to think that future "versions" of Homo Sapiens will be armed with better understanding and knowledge to overleap what we're unable to achieve or grasp today. This is the very evolution that makes us different from the first Homo Sapiens that ever walked the Earth.
I disagree about science not being able to make us understand ourselves better. If that were true, we'd all be dead from the common cold or influenza. We would never have reached the stage of fearing AIDS, and we'd be killing the first person around us who sneezed or had a fever, just to "survive". If anything, it's science that has made us understand ourselves, and made us realize how miniscule we are in the context of the "universe", yet helped us enjoy our short little lives here, by helping us think, argue, understand, and continue to exist.
The second paragraph I've quoted, well is obviously something we all have to agree with. Of course, it's a pretty obvious statement isn't it?
Lastly, I appeal to everyone to cease the whole "religion" or "science vs religion" theme that this thread is taking on. We were talking about time travel, UFOs, Aliens, etc. Let's leave religion out of this shall we?
