Don't be so rough on yourself, first of all. Second, I think that reality exists when we close our minds and remove our perceptions from it. And while we can percieve a reality that has little to do with everyone else's, it is not true that that reality is more important to your survival than evceryone else's.

Reality is vibrating point particles in space which send and receive signals known as Quanta to and from each other, telling each other where to be, how behave and how long to last....

Sight is the way a human or other other animal which can detect luminosity uses the reflection and absorption of electromagnetic radiation between 430 trillion Hz (red) to 750 trillion Hz (violet) to define his or her displacement vis a vis other objects or animals.

So I would tend to agree, the conundrum of the falling tree applies every bit as much to light as to sound...

If everyone in the world were to suddenly look away from the Sun, then look back up at it, it would still be there. The question, I suppose, is if it would still be visible while we weren't looking. I'd, of course, say yes.

The question is not meant to be answered in that way. The question is meant to make you challenge the way you perceive the natural world... Paradoxically, to realise how microscopically insignificant we are, we must first realise that we are the center of our own Universe....

I don't quite understand what either of you are saying. Please keep in mind I'm not that smart.

*hugs DarkChildYou* poor thing....

You are smart. Anyone who is not baffled by this kind of stuff has clearly not understood it...

i'm assuming by ideas you mean theories. most theories are interpretations of only a spectrum of reality. newtonian physics for example, defines reality perfectly to the unaided human perspective. it will not however apply to sub-atomic physics( the study of little teeny-weeny things), or to cosmology, ( the study of large things, like my cock- which i like to call my cack. cuz i wish i was from boston.)

for a few millenia, scientest and smarty pants liked to believe that the law of the conservation of matter applied to all things in existence. this began with the greek atomists who believed matter could be broken down into smaller pieces, until you reached the smallest particle. this particle was believed to be indestructible. there was a set number of these particles present in existence. they could neither be destroyed or created. they were the essence of god.

a short while back newton, who i like to call newt, developed a series of laws that described the behavior of matter. these laws are called newtonian physics, or classical physics. again everyone believed they had a final set of laws that would never be proven wrong. classical physics is what is taught in high school and in general college courses. even though several aspects of this set of laws is technically incorrect.

the past century, alert einstein (he smoked crack), and a number of atomic physicist shattered both these theories. they were the cornerstone of modern science. it was a very exciting time. it has been proven that mass can be destroyed and created, that newtonian physics has no bearing when observing mass of great or small size or mass moving at great speeds. this was the result of quantum physics, and relativity theory. the observation of the small and large, respectively. there has not been a succesful merger of the two theories to apply to reality as a whole. a number of scientist have incorporated both theories to describe certain aspects of particle physics successfuly, but those theories break down when applied to other sub-atomic phenomena. anyways what my point is, is that all laws are relative to certain parts of realilty except one, which is the law of the conservation of energy. which states the energy can niether be created or destroyed, although it can be moved and transformed into mass and vice-versa. that's what e=mc2 is. it stands for energy equals mass x the speed of light squared. mass is essentially an expression of energy patterns.

An idea such as 'gravity' remains perfect until it becomes something tangible..and when it is tangible then it is no longer an idea and so ideas=perfection.

Actually mate, science is a modus operandi for the accumulation and analysis of falsifiable data... No professional scientist would ever claim to understand the laws of nature...

no, you are defining scientific method, which is a procedure for acquiring data. science however, is defined as knowledge or a system of knowledge usually obtained through scientific method.

and i am sure every professional scientist will claim to understand laws of nature. a four year old who plays with a ball will have an understanding of gravity. i think what you mean is that every scientist understands the process of abstraction.

abstraction occurs when catagorizing and interpreting reality. when attempting to define a certain phenomena it is impossible to take in every feature into account. scientists understand that our perception is limited and that acknoweldging every feature we percieve would be superfluous to a goal in mind. thus we are left with abstract concepts pertaining to a certain truth. this does not mean we are ignorant to these truths or aspects of reality.

when i say that the law of the conservation of energy is not relative, i am saying that it is a law that is applicable in every aspect of reality percievable to the human mind. it is a law that has not been challenged and has not been violated. it is one of the more fundamental laws in science. even so that in particle physics, mass is irrelevant and objects are measured in energy units instead.

If we had been talking about this 100 years ago, I might agree with you, but the classical notion of science explaining all has been totally shattered in the last century...

Actually, the conservation of energy principle can be and is violated over short time periods vis a vis the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, established by Werner Heisengerg in the 1920's and put forward as part of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. Mass is not irrelevant, the great discovery of Einstein was that mass and energy are transmutable, with one being a concentrated / dispersed form of the other...

Scientists are like any other people who strive for wisdom. The first step towards gaining it is to realise that by the time you are 80, not an iota of the knowledge of the Universe will have been fed into your mind...

The first thing any scientist who deals in QM or GUT will tell you is that to understand it is not possible. We use analogies of particles that "spin" and wave / particle signals crossing between pin points in space and time because the truth is utterly beyond the five senses we possess, and it always will be...

Any reasonable scientist will tell you that. Science is a method, not a religion...

i had something to say, but it didn't make sense... gimme some time.

i never claimed that science explains all. again, i was only responding to guy's challenge to find a law or rule that isn't relative.



i assume that you are refering to nuclear force or what you called strong force earlier in the thread. force is an older term though, it is more common to use the word interaction. all interactions occur with the exchange of particles. for example electromagnetic interaction is the exchange of photons between charged particles. nuclear interaction occurs when particles called mesons are exchanged between nucleons(protons and neutrons). (i think you referred to mesons as gluons). meson is a general term by the way, there are several different mesons that can be exchanged between nucleons. during all these interactions there is a set amount of energy that is distributed and redistributed as particles are created and destroyed. since mass is energy, there should be more energy needed for the creation and exchange of a massive meson during a nuclear interaction. in experiments however, massive mesons are exchanged at unlikely times. in other words when energy seems to be lacking. this is not because energy is created though. it is because the amount of energy is a probability during these experiments. probabilities are very common in quantum physics because of the uncertainty principle. it applies to several aspects of atomic physics. for example, if we want to be more certain of a particles position, it's speed will become more uncertain. another aspect this principle applies to is the time span of a particle interaction, and the energy present during a particle interaction. because we view the exchange of mesons durring such a small time span, we only have a fuzzy picture of how much energy is present during the exchange. thus the conservation of energy law is not violated. it is a common mistake for these occurences to be explained in classical terms to a layman, thus misrepresenting the actual occurences taking place.

what you are saying is true, but it is equivocal. lets say on a table i have the ingredients i used to make a cake, i could say these ingredients are in the cake and also that the ingredients are a dispersed form of the cake. but i could also make a loaf of bread and cookies and pizza dough with the ingredients. my creations will be concentrated forms of my ingredients and also my ingredients will be dispersed forms of my creations. however, my cake will not be a form of my pizza, or my bread or my cookies. in physics energy is the ingredient and mass is only a creation. i was hasty in saying mass is irrelevant however. i was trying to emphasize the importance of energy over mass.

this is not true. again you refer to abstraction as ignorance, which it is not. the last century saw the biggest progress in human knowledge during the last 10,000 years if not in human history. this occured because of what we have learned and understood about the subatomic world, electrodynamics, and cosmology. the five senses are tools of the mind. this does not mean they are the mind.

i would argue that everything is a method, including religion.

Evrything human is method. Everything nonliving is blind will.

As for my original challenge: "Gravitation, n. The tendency of all bodies ro approach one another witha strength proportioned to the quantity of matter they contain -- the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A." --Ambrose Bierce. All discoveries in science must be based on proof. The proof used must be proved by another set of proof that must again be proven, ad infinitum.

Is that any way to understand the world?

No arguement there. All I am saying is that any scientist to trade will reject the notion that science is a belief system...

I am referring to any particle, whether it be a meson, an electron or a man, or even a massive star. On the macroscopic level, like for a persons body for example, uncertainty in Energy and Time is insignificant, however for a neutrino the same is not true. Remember that every point in the spacetime continuum is potentially every particle at large. I am well aware that this picture of reality is incomplete, but anything claimed beyond this is still pure conjecture. Remember, the Heisenberg principle that you mention is not a limitation of men, it is a limitation of the Universe and applies to Time and Energy just as surely as it does to position and momentum...

Once you make a pizza, you can't then turn it into a cake. What you are saying is true, but it is only half the picture. Mass is also an ingredient to create any form of Energy your heart desires...

I don't agree. It saw the biggest advance in technology in the last 10,000 years. Humans are still every bit as talented at being ignorant as they ever were and always will be. It is worth noting that so far, no one has been able to understand Quantum Theory. We can use it as a tool, to be sure, but ultimately it yields more questions than answers. We make crude analogies like Bhor's billiard ball picture of the atom to try to rationalise the theory because we lack the mental fairy dust to actually conceptualise and visualise it...

Religion is a system of belief. Science is a method of acquiring data and testing it against falsification...

sorry I dont have time to read what people said but for what Socrates was a merely a belief that reasoning could lead us to virtue-inducing wisdom became in the hands of the most peesimistic philosophy, Plato a completely worked out system of a world immune to change and thus immune to decay and death.

Are you guys even a little sceptical that the symbolic sciences in general are worthless on a grand picturesque scale?