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#641
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PHIL Thrown out of an FBO...
Matt,
They believe in their instruments. Ok. Define belief and we can move on. If you define roundness as flatness, then indeed the earth is flat. -- Thomas Borchert (EDDH) |
#642
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PHIL Thrown out of an FBO...
Crash,
PROBABILITY, not POSSIBILITY. Big difference. I know. I mistyped. Still: Nothing happens if it has zero probability of happening. -- Thomas Borchert (EDDH) |
#643
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PHIL Thrown out of an FBO...
Matt,
Having a hobby isn't like having beliefs. I don't think it is possible to have no beliefs and more than it is possible to "stop thinking." Well, you think wrongly. -- Thomas Borchert (EDDH) |
#644
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PHIL Thrown out of an FBO...
On 2006-11-16, Matt Whiting wrote:
To me the analogy is more akin to a computer CPU. As long as it has power, it is processing. The process my be excuting NOP instructions, but the point is that the CPU is ALWAYS executing as long as it has power. On a point of pedantry: It doesn't have to be so. The Z80 processor, for example, executes NOP instructions when it stops at a HALT instruction because this keeps the built in DRAM refresh circuitry running. However, it is entirely possible to design a processor that really does halt completely until it receives an interrupt. Even with a processor like the Z80 example, it is possible to stop it executing (not even NOP operations) and leave it powered up - just take away the clock signal, and it won't even execute NOPs nor will it refresh DRAM (which is not a problem if you use SRAM, or your embedded computer code is entirely in ROM). I believe the same is true of the human brain. It is always processing and always believing in something. So, I reject the idea that it is possible to either believe in nothing or have no beliefs at all. That's not terribly useful to this debate, though. It is entirely possible to not believe in a god. I suppose you can call it a 'belief', just as logic 0 is different to an input just left floating, but not believing in deities is not a religion. Absence of a religion is not a religion. -- Yes, the Reply-To email address is valid. Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de |
#645
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PHIL Thrown out of an FBO...
That's another misconception about science. Scientific thories are
=always= beliefs, until DISPROVEN. Nothing can be "proven" in science. Huh? It's a common misconception that science "proves" things. This is not so. Science is not about proving anything. Science is a method by which we try to figure out how the world works. It is an ongoing process, always subject to revision when experiment disagrees with our ideas to date. But since our experience (and experiments) are always incomplete, there will probably always be things we have overlooked, odd effects we hadn't seen, consequences we haven't come across. The more exepriments we do, and the more carefully we do them, the better a view of the world we can get. For a long time motion was a mystery. We knew (viscerally) how things moved, at least well enough to capture prey, escape being eaten, and play games. But we just accepted that heavy things fall. It was obvious that heavier things fall faster (feather, stone, duh) but nobody knew why. It's quite possible that nobody cared. But then somebody thought about it, and after a proverbial bop on the head came up with an idea that every action has a reaction, and that everything with mass attracts everything else with mass, including the earth. He formulated these ideas mathematically (so they could be measured and tested), and then he went out and tested them. This is called "falsifiability". If his ideas were incorrect, the experiment should show him up. This is critial to a true scientific theory. If it is not falsifiable, (that is, testable), then it is not a scientific theory. A statement like "There is a God" is not a scientific theory for that reason. It cannot be tested in a manner in which failure is meaningful. Anyway, after dropping things off of tall towers (I'm compressing scintific history here), measuring the twist of wires attached to heavy balls, and timing balls going down ramps, the findings did not contradict his idea, but supported it. Thus, we become more confident that Newtonian mechanics accurately represents reality. One of the experiments (rolling balls down an incline), if done simply, illustrates this. Calculate the forces on the ball, and figure out how long it should take to accelerate down the ramp, based on the angle of the ramp. You'll find the results actually =disagree= with theory. They go slower at first. Hmmm... think think think... Well, the balls are rolling; we didn't think of rotational energy the first time around. Physics must be a bit more complicated than we though. Now we have to come up with another theory, or modify the existing one. It makes sense that it takes some of the energy to spin the ball, in addition to the energy it takes to get it to move down the ramp. By using some mathematical techniques we can come up with a good idea of how much that probably should be. Once we add that to the theory, everything works out. We've discovered something new about the world. Newtonian mechanics (as modified to include torque) has =not= been "proven". It merely has acquired a lot of support. If it turns out that it is incorrect, the new theory will still have to explain all the stuff that Newtonian mechanics explained, and that's going to be hard. But not impossible. It turns out that NM is in fact -incorrect-. Experiments with light waves showed that at high speeds, things are different. More mathematics, and a new idea emerged... Einsteinian Relativity (ER). It's bizzare, to be sure, but experiments attempting to knock it down have failed to disprove it. Meanwhile, it explains everything that NM does, plus addresses high speeds, and gives us new insights to the world to boot. ER has gotten a lot of support, because it has =withstood= many tests designed to burst its bubble. It's not the last word. There never will be a last word. But as our understanding of the world gets more sophisticated, our theories get closer to reality. None is ever =proven=. Jose -- "Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where it keeps its brain." (chapter 10 of book 3 - Harry Potter). for Email, make the obvious change in the address. |
#646
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Thrown out of an FBO...
On Thu, 16 Nov 2006 02:38:49 GMT, Judah wrote in
: Atheism is not absence of religion. It's a dogmatic belief that there is no God. It is not all that much different in the dogmatic belief that there is a God. Or the dogmatic belief that there are numerous Gods. Or the dogmatic belief that there is a supernatural force that governs all things. Or the dogmatic belief that there are 4 elements that govern all things. Until someone can unequivocably prove one way or the other, they are all just religions seeking answers to pretty much the same questions... So then, this common, virtually universal, human dogmatic belief characteristic leads one to the question: What benefit does the devotee derive as a result of his belief? Has this instinctive, apparently irrational, tribalistic behavior some survival benefit? Is a tribe member better able to prosper than the solitary hermit? Is it time for rationality to prevail, or will those logical souls lose the benefits of tribalism? Inquiring minds ... |
#647
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PHIL Thrown out of an FBO...
Jose,
It was obvious that heavier things fall faster (feather, stone, duh) Actually, they don't. -- Thomas Borchert (EDDH) |
#648
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PHIL Thrown out of an FBO...
As demonstrated on one of the lunar landings when (I forget which) the
astronaut dropped a feather and a hammer and they fell together. mike "Thomas Borchert" wrote in message ... Jose, It was obvious that heavier things fall faster (feather, stone, duh) Actually, they don't. -- Thomas Borchert (EDDH) |
#649
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Thrown out of an FBO...
This conversation is no longer aviation related, so please take it to
another forum, perhaps alt.opinions.are.like.assholes |
#650
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PHIL Thrown out of an FBO...
Mike,
As demonstrated on one of the lunar landings when (I forget which) the astronaut dropped a feather and a hammer and they fell together. Maybe, if one believes strongly enough in it, they WILL fall at different speeds. Can you disprove that? ;-) -- Thomas Borchert (EDDH) |
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