Hannibal

I think you should bear in mind, though, that back then the world was a much smaller place. Knowledge was much less freely available, and I'm not sure I could blame a person in those days for honestly thinking that africans, for examplle, were less than human. Now it seems silly to think like that because we all have access to books, tv, radio, and for most of us personal experience, which shows us that they are just people with dark skin. But for a person who's never even seen a black man, back in the late 18th century, reading stories about them, maybe getting a glimpse once in a while, it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to suppose that they were less than men. Remember we're talking about racism, not abuse. If all you know is that black men live in huts and have primitive cultures, then you might reasonably suppose that they are inherently stupid, or whatever. We have the luxury of knowing otherwise. I thought, until recently, that peanuts/monkeynuts grew on trees when infact they grow underground. How am i supposed to know? I used my experience of life to decide that they probably grew on trees. 18th century people may have used their experience of life to decide that black men were inherently uncivilised. Long winded way of saying that I'm not sure you can condemn him as a relativist on that basis alone. I do though agree very strongly with your assessment of skeptics and the whole skeptic movement.

I'm not trying to irritate some of the other posters here, Powder. But I think that (if I were to give you the benefit of the doubt regarding trolling - which I do after you last response to mine and not having read the other threads) some of them are making this unnecessarily complicated for you. I don't think it's useful for people to tell you that the idea of "God" is logically inconsistent or self-contradictory. This is the case only if we take a very narrow and specific definition of "God", and I actually think you have rightfully asked for definition in that sense. The thread is about atheism, not the disbelief in some particular God according to some particular religion. The fact of the matter is that it is impossible to prove a negative, so if we choose a definition of God which is not self-contradictory (and there have been many throughout history), as a square-circle is, then no one can truthfully tell you that there cannot be such a thing as God. So I would advise you to ignore all of the comments about self-contradiction, and just take onboard the fridge-monster comparison. IF, however, you choose a particular God which is self-contradictory in it's definition (like 'your' RC Christ), then fine - it's not even worth assessing the probability. But really this is just a distraction from your real problem, which is to understand the axiom that no one can prove a negative, and that probability is not the same a possibility. In the same sense one could argue that it is impossible to prove a positive, and I would agree; but we can demonstrate that the probability is so high that it is rational to consider it proof unless we receive evidence to the contrary. It doesn't even matter if you find a way to argue that the RC God is not self-contradictory, because it would STILL be so unlikely that it would be irrational (unreasonable if you like) to believe in it. This is the point.

Ok, this is going to sound rude, but I REALLY don't intend it that way. You don't even understand basic A-Level (I don't know what they might be called where you are from) physics, let alone theories of relativity. How can you expect anyone to take you at all seriously when you clam to doubt a theory which you have no understanding of? I can't use my own judgement to say whether it's true or not, because I am not a physicist and only know a very little popular science out of random curiosity. It's rational for me to believe the scientific community because I accept the scientific method as valid, so I trust those that practise it to convey the best theory they have at the time. The trouble is that I cannot engage in a useful discussion of relativity with you (to the limits that my very casual acquaintance of it allows me) because you don't even understand elementary physics. There's nothing wrong with that, but to then disbelieve the consensus of the scientific community based on your own ignorance of the subject is.... I can't find words for it. Arrogant? Ignorant? Irrational? "Organic matter" is just a name given to a collection of inorganic matter, which is arranged in a particular way. It's the same stuff. I should mention that those were just me rambling about the boggles boggling around in my mind - I can't properly understand it, so my examples probably might never occur due to some other factor o.O For example i'm assuming some method to stop the ruler breaking. The laser pen at a distant wall - lets say the moon - still nothing is moving faster than C. A light might shine on point X1 at time t1, and then be shining on point X2 at time t2 such that distance x2-x1 divided by time t2 - t1 is greater than C, BUT no actual thing will have moved faster than C, and there is no way that any information could be transmitted faster than C because a receiver at X2 when the light hits it could not have been aware already that it had previously hit X1. I know you probably already realise this - just saying.

Quoting now without having read further yet - forgive me if already properly addressed: I'm not saying that it's irrational to believe in something unless you can prove or [directly] experience it. What I am saying is that it is irrational to believe in something without any reason to, just like the monster in the fridge. So what I'm saying is that I cannot prove that there is no monster in the fridge without looking inside the fridge. The chances of there being a monster in the fridge, though, are so slim that it is rational to suppose that there is NOT a monster in the fridge. For the same reason it is IRRATIONAL to suppose that there is. I still can't prove that there isn't a monster in the fridge, and if we suppose that it's an invisible monster then even looking inside won't help. Now its very similar to the God question - what is the difference between our invisible fridge monster and God? I can't prove that either do not exist, yet it is entirely irrational of me to believe that they do. I assume that as you agreed with my fridge monster example before, you have no choice but to agree with it again now after it's been shown to be exactly the same as God ? So to go back to your question quoted, nothing here negates the possibility; and anyone who tells you it does is wrong. This is the difference between santa claus and a square circle. Santa claus cannot possibly be proven to not exist, whereas a square circle does not exist, by definition. But do you need absolute proof that something doesn't exist? You certainly don't live your life like that (which is the original point). If you did live like that you wouldn't be able to function as a human being in the world, and I would dare say that you'd be insane because you'd have no way of discerning what is and is (so very probably) not real.

Ok... lets see if we can sort this out. So we synchronise 2 atomic clocks and put one on a plane and fly it around the world. When it lands we compare them and the one on the plane is behind the other. To map that to your scenario, the moving clock is the spaceship twin, and that clock/twin has moved through time, relatively to us on the ground with the stationary clock/twin, more slowly. This test has been done. We synchronise 2 clocks and put 1 on the ground and the other at a high altitude, and wait a while. When we bring them back together the one on the ground is behind the one that was at altitude for the duration. This test has been done. The first is due to time dilation because one clock was moving relative to the other. The second is gravitational time dilation because time passes more slowly in regions closer to the source of gravitational force. So if we've proven that relativistic effects can slow down actions at the atomic level, then why would you suppose that that same physics, at a more course grained level (biology) would be any different? If every atom that made up a man performed all of it's actions at half speed, then why do you suppose that the man, which all of those atoms collectively make up, would find his body chemistry (which is just applied atomic level physics) is not affected in the same way?

I think there's some misunderstanding somewhere. Time dilation affects every physical process. It really is time itself that passes at different rates for the accellerating and non-accellerating twin. If the space-twin comes back from the journey after five of his years, and ten years have passed for the earth-twin, then the earth-twin has definitely consumed twice the calories, and aged twice as much, and his clocks have advanced twice as much, and the radioactive carbon-14 atoms in his body have undergone twice as much exponential decay. (please excuse the weird quote nesting) This - I think LifeISbrief is confusing "travelling to the future" by having one's own time slowed down, relatively speaking, with travelling faster though time (i.e. time flowing faster to get to the future which might sound more intuitive). I forgot to ask.... As someone already mentioned, why does this always come up here? Why don't people just pop over to a physics forum where there are recognised experts who have explained this all a thousand times before, properly with fewer mistakes.

Gotcha, and agreed. I'm glad we had this exchange because what you just said is a good nugget - to put it into my own words, all of the relativistic effects are real, but different people in different frames of reference may disagree on that reality. So you're right - reality s typically considered an absolute, but in reality (D'oh) reality is relative. What I find fascinating to try to grok is the fact that there is a speed limit to reality, i.e. if C is an absolute limit to the speed at which information can be transmitted, no matter what, then our experience of the universe is constrained by that speed limit. So if we had a really long ruler and pushed it forwards at nearly C, that ruler would ACTUALLY shrink, because the 'information' (cause and effect of atoms pushing against each other, transmitted forward along the ruler) from the pushing point might have to travel a mile, and by the time it can do that (at C), the pushed end of the ruler is already nearly a mile further forward than when it started. So that universal limit actually limits our experience of reality, and more boggling to me is that "our experience" of reality in this context, IS our reality, because the universe can only have any effect on us, at all, within the constraints of that speed limit. If a speeding (ALOT ) car shrinks in length because of the universe's inability to transmit information fast enough, such that the car just misses us rather than hitting us, we do live!

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. What Kevin wrote was exactly right, except for those 2 examples (imo). It might seem picky but for someone struggling to understand why we don't need to prove a negative (and why we cannot), those little inconsistencies could cause confusion. I'm happy to be called out too, because by little fixes here and there the overall quality of the message is improved. Very pleased to see another (I assume) Ayn Rand fan too!

I get the point. My point is that dismissing "square circles" and "married bachelors" is not the same thing as not having " to turn over every rock in the universe to say that santa doesn't exist"; especially when the OP is asking why it's irrational to disbelieve in improbable things. They are two entirely different and incomparable ideas, and if they are used as examples in the book in the same context, then they are also very bad example there. To suggest that because the OP doesn't believe in square circles and therefore shouldn't believe in the flying spaghetti monster, is a non sequitur; and I'm not convinced that using logical fallacies to encourage logical and reasoned thinking is the best approach.

Those last two are bad examples, because they are logical impossibilities, which is an entirely different thing altogether. Not to be picky - just mentioned it because making that mistake invalidates (insofar as an argument is concerned) the rest of what you wrote. To the OP - as other have mentioned, it's not about proving that something doesn't exist. It's about not supposing that something does exist unless there is a reason to. Your whole life as a human being revolves around your rational ability to discern the realities of nature in which you exist. You might suppose that there is a monster hiding in the fridge, but you don't let that stop you from eating because it's sufficiently unlikely that it is rational to suppose that there is NOT monster hiding in the fridge. If you agree with that above paragraph (please let me know if you don't - i'd be shocked), then you MUST see how you MUST also concede that it is irrational to believe in god. You say that you don't disbelieve in fairies, but you don't make any kind of consideration to fairies which has any effect on your life (I assume). If your views on God are the same, then it's really just a form of mental masturbation - you're suggesting that it's wrong to presume the non-existance of a thing which you act entirely as if it doesn't exist.

Glad to see that you're better versed in physics than Einstein and all that came after him Photons move, in a vacuum, at C (maximum possible speed of anything). As such, they don't experience time - at 100% C the passage of time drops to zero. Therefore, from a photon's perspective, it is everywhere at the same time. It is timeless. Your scenario doesn't make sense in that context, as from a photon's perspective, it isn't moving. Your logic is all broken because you're choosing arbitrary frames of reference at different points throughout the same thought experiment. Experiments have proven that light travels at a constant speed (through a constant medium - in this case air ) for every observer, regardless of relative motion. Your mistake is to measure the speed relative to air inside the plane, and then air outside, when the actual observer which the light movement is relative to is the passenger. The air inside the plane is moving zero relative to the passenger, so when you choose to use that frame of reference there is no problem. BUT, when you randomly choose to change the frame of reference half way through to that air outside, then it shouldn't be surprising that it doesn't add up. If the passenger fires the pulse inside the plane, then a stationary man floating on a cloud outside as the plane flies through it at 500mph would measure the pulse at the same speed as the passenger that fired it. How? because speed is distance over time, and as the distance and speed remain the same, then the time must be different. The two men are experiencing a "faster" flow of time relative to the other guy. How does "I don't see how" equate to the theory being wrong? "I can't see how" is the whole point. "I can't see how" is fixed by supposing that time slows relatively with relatively increasing speed. Experiments verify that it does. And for the sake of the experiment, there is no indicator that anything is accelerating. For all we know he experiment is stationary, while the universe moves. The parameters of the experiment don't violate 'special' relativity.

I would encourage people to ignore things like doppler shift, because that IS just an optical effect as the OP alluded to (although i'll admit that it's kindof complicated, as the speed of light being the universal speed limit makes it a 'speed limit of reality'). Also, in reality your view (optically speaking) of the situation would be pretty much wiped out by red/blue-shift, Tyrell effect/tunelling, etc. So I have to disagree strongly with this: Those relativistic time dilation effects, without any kind of acceleration being considered at all, ARE REAL. They aren't 'observational quirks'. The 4d geometry of space-time means that the passage of time really is different for both frames of reference with regards to each other. It's not just some kind of illusion. The solution to the twin paradox (I'm talking to an audience in general now) lies in the fact that the turnaround in the journey falls outside of the bounds of 'special' relativity, as you already pointed out. The best way to understand this (for me at least) is to look at a spacetime diagram of the journey, and to chart the simultaneity of events between the earth twin and spaceship twin (see 'relativity of simultaneity' for anyone to which this is a new concept). Lets suppose, for simplicity, that our model starts with the spaceship twin passing right by earth at full speed already, and ends passing by at full speed in the opposite direction, right by the earth again. SOMEHOW we can synchronize their clocks at the start, and somehow we can compare them at the "end" (some calculated time that makes both observers agree on when that actually occurs). Looking at the chart, you can see: Taken from the perspective of the spaceship twin, he'll see the earth disappearing into the distance, spinning at 50% of normal. When the spaceship begins to decelerate at the half-way point, that twin will see the earth as being "in the past" (clocks behind, even when you factor in the time for light to travel from clock to distant eye) and it's passage of time beginning to increase. By the time the spaceship has accelerated back up to full speed in the opposite direction, the earth is now "in the future" because while turning around it's passage of time increased dramatically (relative to the spaceship's - so the same as the spaceships slowing down a lot ), until now it's settled back to 50% as the spaceship's acceleration has fallen back to zero. Now the earth is "in the future" by quite a lot, but it's time is flowing more slowly relatively to the spaceship, again, so that when the spaceship twin gets back to the start the earth is now %50 "in the future", relative to the travelling twin's time spent flying. From the earthbound perspective, the other twin simply sees the spaceship zoom off with the astronaut ageing at 50%, and zoom back again ageing at %50. When they both "meet" at the end, both agree that the spaceship twin is younger. The diagram below shows the journey with an instantaneous turnaround, and the simultaneity gap shown is what I was referring to by the earths time rapidly speeding up during turnaround (i would assume that it's actually the acceleration forces causing the spaceships time to run very slowly - the relative effect is the same):

It's all relative. So when a shuttle for example goes into orbit, it is also hurtling around the sun at 67,360 mph, give or take. There is no absolute frame of reference, so if we're measuring differences between earth and shuttle, from the perspective of either, then motion relative to something else, such as the sun or any other thing, is of no concern.

If his picture on wikipedia is representative, then he didn't even need to use steroids. He looks great, but isn't very big at all. Are the steroids and crazy weights fact or rumour? because he doesn't look like a he did either (although i'm sure lots of people use steroids which don't help them at all).

I don't have this problem, but it's no different to being an anarchist among statists. The more you embrace truth, and value truth as core to your being, the smaller your circle of friends will become unfortunately. The thing is, as you circle of friends shrinks, the less you will care because you will realise that some of those friends are worth much less when viewed in the light of your better understood values. I'm not saying you have to call them out on Facebook (i just don't use it at all), but you should never compromise your values. You don't need to get involved in an argument, but you shouldn't hide. I.e. you don;t need to comment on someones post about evil atheists, but at the same time you shouldn't avoid posting about evil theists if the mood takes you.

The GPS system we've already mentioned is just a series of orbiting clocks. They aren't light clocks - the relativistic effects aren't just optical effects. Regarding moving at double speed through time (i.e. compared to someone else's time flow) - yes, of course you would use twice the calories, etc.

No. To put it simply, if one guy sat on a train with his light clock measures a second each time the light pulse bounces up and back down again, then a guy on the platform watching as he train passed by would see the same clock ticking, but the light would be taking a zig-zag path instead of just up and down. As both men measure the speed of the light pulse to be the same constant value, and the man on the platform sees the light taking a longer (zig-zag) path, then the man on the platform must see the clock tick slower. So... if the light pulse travelled the same distance (obviously it can't travel two different paths simultaneously) & both men measured the same speed, then as speed is distance divided by time and we know that the speed and distance were the same, then the time must have been different according to each man. The man on the train sees the man on the platform's time passing more slowly, and the man on the platform sees the man on the train's time passing more slowly. Lets say 0.866 times the speed of light because it comes out at a nice 50% ratio. In that case you'd see the sun go round twice as fast as normal, and when you land back on Earth you'd say "Holy cow! did you see that? The sun was going round twice as fast as normal!". And your pals would look at you like you're nuts and say "Um... no. You were gone 4 years and the sun went round 4 times. By the way - while you were gone I spied through your spaceship window with my telescope. Why were you brushing your teeth in slow motion?".

How can "nothing" be curved? I might ask you how "nothing" can be linear? yet you assume that things should move through space-time in a "straight line". Dilated, relative to an observer in an inertial frame of reference. Sure - every time I use my SatNav. The GPS satellites which it uses are constantly keeping their clocks synchronised with each other, using complicated mathematical algorithms, in order to compensate for relativistic time dilation effects due to their relative velocities & gravitational effects. Without the constant compensation, my SatNav would be out by miles within a few hours.

Does the government borrow money to pay it's debts and obligations? yes.

...because it's fun. I've heard this mistake from religious folk so much recently I figured I'd post it here in the atheism section for all those who haven't had the pleasure of a Christian-ish upbringing (I say Christian, but perhaps it's just Roman Catholic - I dunno). Explain to them that they don't understand their own scripture when you catch them referring to the/an immaculate conception as a conception without sex. I.e. the virgin Mary - mother of god, or some other person that claims they can't be pregnant, unless it was an "immaculate conception". The immaculate conception refers to Jesus' mother Mary being conceived without original sin - a special exception having been made as she was destined to be the vessel for Jesus. Nothing to do with sex. Oddly enough it's entirely clear from looking at the wikipedia page, but I find it funny that people recite all of the mumbo-jumbo that they do in church, while probably at least 2 thirds of them don't even understand half of what it's supposed to mean. Disclaimer - you guys in 'merica! seem to have many more complete nutters (most of the folk here in the UK are fairly apathetic in their nutterness, so maybe your lot are bang-on the scripture )

SOYLENT GREEN IS POO!

+1 "In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win." - Ayn Rand. Compromising men are the most dangerous, and are responsible for almost all of the worlds evils, past and present.

Lol. Funny. When I first saw this thread a couple of days back I thought "*sigh*... why has someone started yet ANOTHER JP/zeitgeist thread which adds nothing to the other half dozen". You still win though, because I couldn't possibly side with someone named 'poopmeat" O.O

I think you answered your own question there. Animals. I don't know about you, but I'm more than an animal.

There's nothing wrong with enforcing laws with force. The difference is in what can be considered a law. It's as simple as that.