It’s about the physics of light. This is coming from a guy who insists that if light is sufficiently bright, it can ignore the speed of light — so starlight blitzes instantly across multiple light years. He has a whole cacophony of bizarre ideas about how light works, but that doesn’t stop him from challenging evilutionists with this challenging challenge.
If your ideas about light travel are true, you should be able to catch some of these photons from a distant star of your choosing, and ship them to me with a note telling me which star they’re from. Once I open the container, those photons jump into my eyes, and I see your star, I will come on to Pharyngula AND DDO, publicly admit my ignorance on light travel, and issue an apology, as well as reimburse you for any shipping costs.
Isn’t the announcement of that challenge sufficient evidence that he’s ignorant of how light travels?
But don’t worry, he immediately backs up his challenge with a declaration that any statement that notes he has made a very stupid assumption is an attempt to chicken out.
Any takers, or are you guys just going to grumble about how ignorant the challenge is and make excuses for why it’s not possible to meet the challenge?? That seems to be the MO here for many of you, or the few of you and your puppet accounts, whichever the case may be.
Gosh, creationist, how about if you take a box into church and have the congregation pray into it, so that when I open it, Jesus pops out? Isn’t that what your religion preaches?
Or are you going to grumble now about how ignorant I am of religion as an excuse to not meet my challenge?
You want your starlight in a box, I WANT MY JESUS IN A BOX.
Isn’t it one of the insights of quantum physics that every elementary particle is identical to every other elementary particle? That, not only is photon X indistinguishable from photon Y, but that it doesn’t even make sense in principle to distinguish between the two? (Rather, there is a disturbance in the photon *field* at location X, and another disturbance at location Y…)
Of course, the challenge breaks down long before that… Keeping a photon in a box? Heh…
jeez
medic0506 is sure getting a lot of attention.
and PZ, remember you had a piece of Jesus and look how that went.
So he wants a photo of a star?
The guy is either a Poe or insane. In any event, there’s no point engaging with him.
Re jamessweet @ #1
Not quite. Neutrinos produced along with electrons are different then neutrinos produced along with muons.
Darn roggg beat me to it. (Just send him a picture of a star)
Can you stop a photon? Could I, in principle, create a box in which the photons would simply continue to bounce around until the box was opened and the photons actually would come pouring out, except that they would no longer present any coherent image but just a brief flash of light?
Assuming I could also have a one way filter to let the photons in without letting them out, after all, even the most naive understanding of light, namely just the fact that photons travel at about 186,000 miles per second, show why we this is, at the very least, incredible difficult? Unless you can snap the box lid closed really, really, really, really, really fast….
Just trying to turn this idiotic blathering into an interesting question.
Wait, isn’t he literally just describing astronomical photography?
I wouldn’t want to keep starlight locked up in a box, doesn’t seem right. Jesus on the other hand…
Someone please send him a box with a hole in the bottom, and tell him to open it outside, upside down, at night.
Um, colnago? Are you just being difficult, or did you really think jamessweet meant something other than “all instances of a given type of elementary particle are indistinguishable”?
Yeah, oops, beaten to it by a few people. There were no comments yet when I clicked “comment”!
A small box with “FRAGILE – Deity enclosed. Do not bend” arrives… Inside is a communion wafer. So there, oh ye of little faith!
http://hediedformygrins.blogspot.com/2011/09/jesus-in-box.html
Oooh, this is a great challange! I’d like to propose a counter-challenge first, though. Write a page of text on a computer and print it out. Cut out each letter individually, then throw all the letters into a wire mesh box with holes about the same size as the letters that already contains cutouts of a bunch of other random letters. Do this in a room where it is raining letter cutouts. Then, ship the mesh box to me. I’ll open the box on my end in a room where it is raining letter cutouts; if I don’t see the page of text fully assembled in front of me, you’ve lost the challenge.
Oh, by the way. If your response is to grumble about how impossible the challenge is, or about how the two challenges aren’t the same at all, you’ve lost. After all, this should be trivial if you think that text is transmitted via printed letters over the postal system rather than the page spontaneously appearing before the recipient if it is written hard enough.
No, not a photograph. He literally wants the very same photons emitted (although he doesn’t seem to believe in emission) by a star stored in a box so that when he opens it, he looks inside and sees a star glowing there.
Yes, the urge to send this person a lot of astrophotos is strong. Or maybe I just want an excuse to spend an hour looking at Astronomy Picture of the Day.
This thing was hilarious enough out of context, but with context it’s amazing. He thinks bright stars send their message instantly to a person’s eyes, does he? How does he account for the fact that light can be blocked in transit? Does the star simply decide not to shine if it can’t be seen? How would mirrors and lenses work, since people use telescopes made up of those to see stars that are too dim for the naked eye? So many interesting questions, but this dude won’t bother since he just wants to say anything as long as it convinces other people that god did it.
So if I grow a plant with the light from a particular star, pick it, dry it, and mail it to him with instructions to burn the contents… does that count?
Oh, what an *interesting* theory of light. Does the speed increase with local intensity? Or does it depend on the brightness of the source? Or is the idea that some photons are faster than others, so if you have enough light, at least some of it will be millions of times faster? Or is it that light is not a thing, and we just see stuff magically?
I was trying to think how this could possibly fit in with the many ways we measure the speed of light, but then it occurred to me how critical this is for my own research, which uses picosecond laser pulses. If I focus the laser, will it get faster? What a theory. I look forward to Medic0506’s upcoming publication.
I glanced back at his other comments, too and I’m a bit confused by his confused understanding of the physics of light. There are centuries of academic debate over whether light was a wave or a particle, largely settled by the fascinating answer from quantum mechanics that they’re both, but there hasn’t been much doubt in a very long time that light is something, right? Even if we ignore photons and consider light as energy, as he seems to describe, isn’t electromagnetic energy still a wave, and doesn’t that wave still travel at the speed of light?
I’ll make an experimental counter proposal, since his is the hypothesis that is at odds with all known evidence and established theory, it is the hypothesis that ought to be tested and I can formulate an actual experiment that will do it. If light somehow reaches it’s destination faster if it is produced from a higher energy source (like a start), let’s do this: we’ve got a satellite fairly close to the sun, much closer than we are. We’ll have it send us a series of images of the sun. Then we’ll compare them to observations on earth until we match the same time range by comparing sunspots, flares, prominences, whatever. We’ll figure out the processing lag of the satellite and subtract it. Now we just compare that satellite timestamp to the timestamp of our observation on earth. If he’s correct, there will be significant difference, since the satellite signal will not have had nearly as much energy as the sun, it should get here slower. If all of physics is correct, then we’ll have matching timestamps.
There is always long ass fiberoptics?
medic0506 … why do I keep reading that as “mediocre”?
Dunno. But there it is.
I WANT MY JESUS IN A BOX
Why? You threw the last piece you had away.
Just a bit of background for those of you who have lives and so haven’t been following the other thread. The fruitcake’s hypothesis of vision seems to be the medieval idea of extramission. Light does not enter the eye, instead, there are “eyebeams” which are a part of you: Anything they touch you see. These are a part of you, a sense (like taste or smell or…), not light emitted by the eyes. Hence, you can see stars immediately after opening your eyes, rather than having to wait for a reflection or something. (It’s amusing to note that Aristotle though this was bullpucky.)
And there’s no such thing as photons because if there were, the ones from the Sun would “blow your head off” since they are “propelled” from the Sun at the speed of light like tiny cannonballs.
Seriously. With some extrapolation by various commentators, the above appears to be the fruitcake’s concept of vision. And light is just how bright something is…
So do I get that correctly: he thinks if light has finite speed, one must be able to catch it in a bbox, and hence the challenge? And if it isn’t met, that proves what exactly?
I wonder if Medic’s pastor is aware of ver obsession with Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Actually, that’s the problem. He doesn’t have any idea how light works and hasn’t share any. Since claiming light is not something that travels, we’ve asked him *dozens* of times what he thinks light is and his challenge (to show we don’t know either, I guess) is his way of not responding.
Hand him a telescope. He didn’t say how long they had to be stored in the box.
Seriously, he stated “If your ideas about light travel are true, you should be able to ..”. Well, nothing about our ideas of light travel indicate photos are storable. In fact everything we believe about light travel indicates they are not. So the box has to be opened as quickly as the photons are placed inside and traveled the distance inside it. A telescope, therefore, answers his challenge completely and in every detail.
If he’s insane we want have a morbid curiosity to see the limits of his madness and a blind hope that maybe someday someone will someday recognize one’s madness and get over it. If he’s a poe we want to break the poe. Which his refusal to answer “what is light’ seems to be doing. A good Poe needs to answer will a pseudo-reason who light can be an instantaneous thing. Heck, *we’ve* had to resort to doing his job for him but coming up with “extramission” and “eyebeams”.
I’m with Jeremy @8. A photograph is the capturing of photons onto a photon-sensitive storage medium (aka, light-sensitive film or digital imaging device).
It meets his requirements. As soon as he opens the box, he will instantaneously see what star it is. (As long as he does it with the lights on, of course. If he’s sitting in the dark, not so much).
It says nothing about the speed of light, of course, but that’s his problem, not ours.
blf:
How about that. Do they come equipped with high and low settings? Because that would be damned useful.
gussnarp @ 21:
It’s not that he thinks light isn’t “something,” but he thinks that light doesn’t travel. I don’t know of a point in history when people didn’t think that traveling was involved with sight. Even back when the ancient Greeks thought that your eyes sent out little hand things that felt the thing you were looking at, they still believed that those little feelers traveled out and back in. As far as I know, it’s a wholly unprecedented hypothesis.
This is like those old cartoons where a character would store words by shouting into a bottle and putting a cork in the opening. I’m not surprised to see a creationist whose notions of physics not only come from cartoons, but from cartoons that are meant to be funny due to their over-the-top silliness.
Here’s some light from a star in a (two-dimensional) box:
What you personally see is not the light from the star. That is light which is emitted by your computer monitor a few nanoseconds before it gets to your eye. The Hubble telescope is the thing that got the light from the star, in the case from my link above. It is Sirius, and it’s about 8.6 light-years away. The light left Sirius about 8.6 years before it arrived at Hubble.
Instead of a box, I guess we could send the Hubble telescope to medic0506, but that would be pretty stupid too, because the photons don’t just sit there “in the box” once they’ve been “collected,” like it’s a fucking radiation landfill or something.
Anyway, stuff that’s 8.6 years old isn’t apparently a problem (unless we’re dealing with an actual Last Thursdayist, I guess). It’s just a problem for a creationist when it’s stuff that’s billions of years old, from the very same telescope using the very same physics.
What the fuck are we supposed to do at this point, except to say “you’re an ignorant, dishonest fool” and move on?
@25…nobody tell the guy about neutrinos — which are passing through you by the billions every second.
He’d positively freak the freak out.
Oh snap, is this part of all the new(rehashed) agey stuff like in Richard Bach’s books? Think of a blue feather hard enough a poof there she blows?
CR @ 33:
*Awe.*
@Inaji (#30):
Unfortunately, they only come in ‘ighbeams.
More likely he’d ignore it or deny it, or claim that is just .
In my opinion, he has no concept at all of “evidence”. He’s like Graeme “Stupider Than A Turkey” Bird with a few obvious differences: He hasn’t shown any inclination to conspiracy theories (albeit I don’t think he’s been pushed on that subject…yet); He’s a magic sky faerieist; And he very rarely gives references (Bird did, albeit usually to loopy / crank sites).
@blf 25
Clarification. Why haven’t verified that he believes in extramission. We’ve only speculated that extramission is the closest hypothesis in human history to what he claims. All we actually know is that he doesn’t believe light travels (not bright light travels faster– light is simply *not* a thing that travels). He believes that vision from an event is simultaneously observable universally. He does not explain how. And he does not explain how mirrors, lenses or blindfolds work.
He denies our explanations of anything about light travelling. At hundreds of thousands of miles a second it should knock our heads off. Now apparently if something travels we should be able to catch it in a box, stop it, and have it start up when the box is open. I have absolutely no idea how he gets from “Something moves” to “you can put it in a box”. Intuitively shouldn’t the exact opposite be true. “A cheetah can run 70 mph and therefore you should be able to catch a running cheetah in a box because it is running”. That conclussion (double s intentional) just doesn’t follow.
Rather counterintuitively, you can slow down and even stop photons. The problem is, as jamessweet points out in #1, all photons are identical, indistinguishable. That’s the main distinction between the Bose-Einstein statistics that they obey and the Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics that macroscopic objects obey.
If photons were in some way distinguishable, their behavior would be quite different from what is observed, so that’s a very good experimental test of their indistinguishability. Electrons are also indistinguishable, and obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Again, if there were any way to distinguish them, their behavior would be very different.
If you see two quantum particles approach each other, “collide”, and then separate, you’re not entitled to say which is which after the collision. If you see two billiard balls collide (even if they were the same color), you could say quite confidently which one was the one that entered the interaction from the left and which one from the right, after they bounce off each other. You absolutely cannot say any such thing about two subatomic particles.
So mediczero wants us to catch photons from a particular star, each one bearing a label like a luggage sticker showing where it came from, store them, and mail them to him. You can’t make this shit up! Who knew that biasevolution was holding out on us? He didn’t begin to plumb the depths of stupidity he encountered over there. I guess he thought nobody would believe it.
@blf
There is small but serious group of people advocating this. I wish I could remember what they called themselves, or how they explain photographs. It’s one of those theories where they have an answer for everything. At least once in my life I’ve seen a long, reasonably complete treatise.
“Yeah! You grumble about how my request is literally impossible. It’s not like there’s a good reason why or anything.”
how the hell does that person think that digital cameras function? or retina?
oh well, the wikipedia article on the sped of light:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
though somehow I doubt we are dealing with someone who is capable of being educated…
So this is the new Creationist version of the Randi challenge. Egad America is descending into ever new levels of idiocy. How else can you describe how a book and movie like Heaven is for Real can make such a killing. Only in America.
and our ability to measure the distance between earth and the moon using the DELAY of a light beam reflecting off of the mirrors we placed on the moon.
If I could save pho-tons in a box,
The first thing that I’d like to do,
Is to save every ray,
From a star that is light years away,
Just to mail them to you…
He doesn’t need to publicly admit his ignorance on light travel. The question demonstrates his ignorance on light travel.
So he doesn’t understand that we’ve actually definitively measured the speed of light? That we can simply put a light emitting device next to a light sensitive device, point them the same direction, put a reflector a long ways in that direction, and actually measure how long the sensor receives the light after the emitter emits it? And that a similar experiment has been done many times arriving at the same result every single time? This is not, then, about capturing photons in a box, photons are irrelevant to that question. We’ve timed light. It travels at 186,000 miles per second. Then you’ve got lenses, prisms, any number of things that operate based on light traveling at slightly different speeds in a medium… the experiments have been done. Medic, can you explain why a spoon looks bent or disjointed when placed halfway into a glass of water?
@chris j @ 31.
The eyebeam theory of the greeks allowed sight to be analogous to a sense of touch. We “touch” something with our eyebeams and that causes us to sense it through some sort of interconnection between the beams and us. There were concerns about field of vision and how such a finite beam generating within a human reach something as far as the stars. But I think issues of speed were not a concern or heavily considered. I don’t think they were ignored nor instantaneous transportation was assumed either though.
also, this idea that you can hold a moving particle in a box and then re-release it is silly. Try blowing your breath in a bottle, screw the cap on. does the air blow out when you open the cap again?
or does this person think that air isn’t particles either? who knows. what a silly person.
Nod to Christopher Hitchens. He still has all his work ahead of him!!!! If god made all of this 6k ago that means light broke the law as in speed. He needs to show me faster than light travel or speed and I will post picks of my newly brown under ware!
Fundamentally misunderstanding visual perception. Adults’ belief in visual emissions.
oh ye of imperial units!
Has anybody made the “It’s my photon in a box” joke yet?
woozy@39, Correct. I did say “seems to” and “[w]ith some extrapolation by various commentators” and other caveats, but it doesn’t hurt to make completely clear the fruitcake has been essentially silent on vision other than the “blowing your head” off nonsense. Thanks.
Gussnarp, no. 7
Light can be trapped in a box that has been sufficiently well designed. It’s called an optical resonator, and essentially consists of a couple of mirrors facing each other. I don’t know what the current record is for the lifetime of a photon in the best quality resonators, but in principle, these lifetimes can be extended arbitrarily by incremental improvements. I’ve seen some that approach containment for half a second.
We don’t need to snap the lid shut quickly, the photon can get in much more easily than it can get out.
I’ve no bloody clue why this guy wants to put a photon in a box, however. If he wants to measure its speed, the cavity would provide a method (the photon’s lifetime in the cavity would be determined by the photon’s speed, as well as the material properties of the cavity – at least, he would be able to verify that the photon from the star behaves the same as any other photon of the same frequency). But he could measure its speed without us having to post it to him first. Practically, this person’s request is as impossible as it is inane.
This is what happens when creationists listen to Perry Como I guess…
50.
@brianpansky (#50):
It’s called a balloon. ;P
I assume that actually addressing Medic0506 is completely pointless, but this gives us an opportunity to think about cool physics.
We certainly can trap light in a box, that’s what an optical cavity is. They’re used in lasers among other things. You have light bouncing back and forth between high reflecting mirrors. The thing is, there are always losses so you have to also inject light into the system some how. In a laser, you have a material which amplifies the light going through it, and that’s called the gain medium.
We have a couple lasers here but they’re out of Medic0506’s price range. Also, opening the laser and allowing the photons to jump into your eyes is not advisable…
ChristineRose@41, There are some fundiegrad inmates who seem to advocate extramission, but I’ve never heard of a modern(?)-ish thesis advocating it.
The fruitcake, by the way, has been asked about photographs (more than once), but as far as I know, has, to-date, ignored the questions.
About GPS, measurining the delay between the moon, broadcast, etc.: Before medic0 made the startling claim that “starlight isn’t something that travels” he claimed that the speed of light might not be constant universally. (As you’ve probably guessed, this entire discussion is in response to how we can see light from places more than 6,000 light-years away.) He has since claimed light from the sun (the energy of the photons would make our heads blow up) can’t have photons. So I think he has some sort of view that GPS and radio stuff works with a “speed of light” constant but vision and staright has absolutely nothing to do with it.
We have asked him “what is light” many times.
Any explanation of “speed of light” at this point of the conversation will be viewed by him as ““
We know he doesn’t think they exist. My current take is he wants to see one (and, somehow, not have his “head blown off”). And, since he says he seems to think he’ll see the star the photon came from.
To deal with this fruitcake, you really need to get into a medieval mindset where assertion is irrefutable proof, and evidence is what you think you’ve been told the ancients said.
Medic would be better off to just accept that the only way we could live in a universe that didn’t exist until 6000 years ago is if God intentionally set out to make it look as if it had existed for billions of years, even going so far as to create photons already en route from various stars, super novae, etc.
Yes. The thing is this guy doesn’t actually believe anything; he simply disbelieves everything. We find this really contrary to our ways of thinking. If we decided one that we don’t believe rain is made of water, we assume rain has to be made of something else.
It’s like the very stupid teenagers at the mall on the 4th of July what country we found for independence and when will answer “Korea, in the 50s”. It’s not that they actually think we fought for independence against the Koreans and signed the declaration of independence on July 4, 1776 (which happened during the fifties). It’s that they think history before their childhood doesn’t really exist. Or they “not think”. It’s really hard for people like us to comprehend.
@aggressivePerfector #56,
@miller #59
Thanks, that’s the kind of thing I was thinking of. I thought it seemed quite possible (BTW, my comment on snapping shut is just on the very naive notion of a plain box).
So I guess the only barriers to us doing what Medic wants are:
1.) The photons would not provide a coherent image of the star or any other way for him to know their point of origin.
2.) We’d want him to have some way of “opening the box” that allowed him to see a noticeable amount of light without it being coherent enough to damage his eyes.
3.) We’d have to be able to post the box to him in time for the losses to be minimal.
4.) He’d have to pay for it.
I posit that medi0506 gets his notion of photons from having seen Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. The Disney theory of light, to match his puerile comic-book notions about the animal kingdom :-\ (and I’m not knocking comic books per se, btw. There are great ones. But Tinkerbell is not a viable basis for forming one’s concept of what a photon is and how it will behave)
oh come on horde, read his challenge a little more literally:
Don’t try to trick out of it with a simple photograph, which just bounces local photons off a paper image of the star. He wants the actual photons, those that came from the star itself and travelled X light-years. And you gotta label those photons to show him exactly which star they came from. Don’t tell him, “That’s not possible.” That’ll just prove him right. !shucks!
…
What can one do with such a false dichotomy? He says photons are emitted by they eye to see stuff, while thinking: we say photons are actual objects from distant stars that take years to get here. Then sets up the “challenge” for us to prove our hypothesis. And so, asks for us to send him some of those photon-objects to him, to prove our case. How do you win such a “challenge”? He already said, as part of the “challenge”, that he won’t accept any kind of excuses for not receiving a box of photons from us. All I can think of, to answer this challenge; is from the eternal question: “What’s the best part of banging your head against the wall?” A: “Stopping.” —> walking away…
Arrgh. Typoes to the point of illegibility. Try again.
Shit like this makes me feel so extremely grateful for the education i received during my formative years…even if it was at a catholic school. Apparently i was far luckier than i ever realized.
@69
that reminds me…
I was raised fairly fundamentalist, but I don’t think I was ever really taught any fundamentalist stuff about light. And yet I remember quite well in my grade 8 science (or whatever year it was) when we learned about how light bounces off of stuff, I rejected it. I had some odd vague notion that it was a science lie, and against my religion somehow. I don’t remember how. I think maybe real explanations are more likely to sound suspicious to people who have only ever had magical just-so stories given to them? I dunno.
blf@60
I think it could only have been one of two places: The University of Michigan Physics Library “Non-Standard Physics” collection or that vast hive of villainy known as the Internet. I looked though and couldn’t find it. I’ll continue to search as I am quite intrigued now.
Add the word rational in there and I could probably agree.
He does seem to believe in babbling “kinds” (albeit he can’t say what they are), which suggests a belief in the flud (not sure what he has said, if anything, on that specifically). And, last I checked, he seems to believe in some form of six day creation, but not that there are at least two differing accounts in the first paragraphs of the first babbling chapter. Whether or not he’s a babble literalist is unknown, but him being one might not be a silly bet…
All that is assuming he’s not just a contrarian or other such beastie.
Rather amusingly, I’m now getting an ad for the “Light In The Box® Store.” No idea what they sell, but they promise “Global Shipping”.
Take it away, Morbo.
@72 blf.
Ah, yes. I meant “believe” as in having theoretical models. Light is this. Life happened this way and than that. All canines are canines, were never anything but, and never will be. medic0 doesn’t believe in any models like these.
He believes the earth is 6,000 years old but doesn’t have any impression of what any implications of that would bee. He could believe the world was 50 years old or 27 quintillion years old for all the difference it makes. He believes animals are in kinds (defined by common ancestor!) and that they can evolve like crazy within the kinds but he has no model for determining how to classify which animals have which original common ancestors. And he seems remarkable uncurious, despite this being the only issue distinguishing his version of creation from evolution. (evolution says all life has a common ancestor. So by his definition all life is one kind. He says no, there are distinct common ancestors but creationist have no magic method for determining what they are so oh well, what the hell, why should it matter). He seems to believe in the flood but just because he doesn’t deny it when we all assume he does. It’s what creationists believe so he seems to believe it because it has “no reason not to”.
He believes the bible offers “an accurate view of nature” because “he has no reason not to”. He doesn’t have any belief that “god is the only reliable witness” or “god’s morality speaks to us” or whatever. He does believe God is capable of preserving his word as a counter to translations and editorial mish-mash a thousand year old collection of folklore would naturally have.
He’s a bible literalist but he doesn’t seem to have any theology like the Ken Hams do. And he doesn’t seem to care what reality is in that, unlike the Ken Ham’s who try to hammer reality into their model whether it fits or not, medic0 simply doesn’t believe any science if it counters his viewpoint. Ken Ham believes light is a thing. I’m actually surprised medic0 hasn’t started denying DNA and genes exist.
I don’t think they did. Extramission from the Presocratics through Pythagorus and Plato proposed a “fire” was emitted from the eyes that made contact with objects in the visual field and allowed instantaneous, direct perception of them, as objects. Aristotle’s objection was not that the transit time would be a problem, just that the visual field was too wide at long unobstructed distances for a beam of such “fire” to “illuminate” all the objects in it at once. His alternative did not involve anything traveling through space other than the impression of objects, which, again, was instantaneously transmitted due to the inherent properties of adjacent transparent media (air; vitreous humor).
We need to keep in mind that materialist concepts like energy and causality were simply absent (as they appear to be for our friend medic0506); they just weren’t available to constrain such theories. Vision was a property of bodies, it was not a subset of a larger framework including a theory of optics. Absurdly, Euclid did devise a working theory of optics, but nobody, including him, ever thought to apply it to the problem of vision. And what the medievals inherited from Galen was even worse than extramission or Aristotle, being kind of a muddle of the two.
76 comments and no sign of medic0506.
Time zone?
and
@22 johnfredlund
First thing that popped into my head was “how would this affect fiber optics?” Yeah, how “bright” do we need before a photon goes faster than light? We should be able to easily prove his theory using fiber optic networks. If increasing intensity results in instant photon travel, then we should be able to reproduce that across a fiber optic cable (maybe use different wavelengths).
I’m sure he’d come back “we can’t produce light bright enough”.
chigau @ 77:
If/when he does come back, he’ll probably just do a quick ctrl-f for “ok” or “accept,” fail to find anyone that accepted his challenge, then smugly claim victory because none of us can show him the goods. It’s not like he actually cares about learning anything; I’ll be that the challenge seems ridiculous to him as well, so he concludes that the “light travels at the speed of light” theory must be ridiculous as a result.
Do we get to issue silly challenges as well? Either turn a glass of water into squirrel pee by telepathy, or there is no God!!!
Sorry, Jesus isn’t available. Will Dick do?
Here’s a recent article giving more detail to what aggressivePerfector @56 and miller @59 were talking about.
We need Discworld reference.
So I don’t know if it was this guy, probably not, but I do remember an article sometime back now about the idea that in the early (biblical creationist) universe, that light may have moved at a differnt speed. My first thought was ‘I’d like to see the math on that.” But no math was in the article. :(
There’s the Darkon Theory of Light. Essentially everything emits darkons and certain objects (stars, light bulbs, flames, etc.) are darkon sinks. Photons are holes in the darkon field. We can see because darkons are absorbed by the darkon sinks. If you enter a room at night and turn off the light, the darkons are no longer absorbed and the room becomes saturated with darkons, making sight limited or even non-existent.
Incidentally, we need to rename LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) to DSDs (Dark Sucking Diodes).
Even if this was possible, how would he verify he got what he asked for? Also, if we knew what he was expecting, it would probably be really easy to fake.
I dunno. I’m not sure you really do want Jesus in a box. Pretty sure I don’t. And even if either of us did, I’m pretty sure the USPS has rules about shipping human remains…
(Cf. ‘Surely by now he stinketh…’)
… granted, the rules on demigods/zombies/somehow-both-divine-and-human-at-once-but-honest-it-still-makes-sense-really/entirely-mythical-or-so-heavily-mythologized-it-might-as-well-be are less clear…
In not really related, and roughly as substantive a contribution to this discussion as I figure the thought that creo’s put into it deserves, I briefly/originally read the ‘nym concerned as ‘medioc’… and, reading further, thought to myself: a bold claim, that.
Not much more seriously: there’s something almost morbidly fascinating about watching him mangling multiple fields like this. It’s a bit like watching some gratuitous Warner Brothers animated thing, with the ongoing awful falls sequence, near the end, where the villain’s got smacked with an anvil or whatever, and now he’s wobbling around dizzily… now he’s gonna trip over the rake… fall down a hole… in which the dynamite he unwisely lit earlier is still hissing along the fuse… And you almost feel bad, but you’re still watching anyway, because hey, what will happen next? How implausibly silly ‘n gratuitous will it be, finally? How many times will they get exploded/hit by falling pianos/etc.? Stay tuned.
@80: Yes, pretty much that’s what they do.
They think of a challenge that, if successfully completed, would completely invalidate the scientific principle in question. Then, they make that challenge as if it’s the proof of the scientific principle in question.
As in: “Show me a dog turning into (or giving birth to) a cat” as proof for evolution. Never mind that such a demonstration would prove without question that evolutionary theory is WAAAAY off base.
None of these people did well in 6th grade science class. They were “D’d out” by the teacher who didn’t want to deal with them the next semester.
Ah. Pft. Now I see Kevin Kehres already noted the ‘medioc’ thing…
Same neural glitch, presumably. My bad.
Reminds me of this old thread.
@87…all of the stink would be gone from Jesus-in-a-box by now. Just bones, bone fragments, and bone dust.
After all, at the time, what people did was place the unembalmed remains in a tomb for a year so that the flesh would rot away. Then they’d go back and put the bones in an ossuary. No more flesh, just bones.
You didn’t think that tomb alleged Jesus was in was going to be his permanent abode? No way. Those things were used over and over and over again.
The following was all explained to medico in the other thread, and e dishonest wanker has not responded to any of it.
The observed change is the time it takes to empirically observe the eclipses of the moon so Jupiter proved that light moves at a finite speed. This has been known at least since Romer in 1676.
Isaac Newton’s experiments with prisms proved that light is composed of physical substances that can be split apart and recombined, and whose paths through space can be bent.
Albert Einstein with his experiments on the photoelectric effect proved that light was composed of discrete packets of energy, today known as photons.
And medico’s view of light is utterly incompatible with these empirical observations.
Kevin/#91:
Considering this further, I became briefly curious about what the USPS rules would be for archaeological artifacts, and at what point bits of bodies would cross over from the one category to t’other..
(Didn’t turn up in their shipping FAQ, though.)
RE Myself @78 – After reading the remaining comments (refresh before posting!), I see this guy doesn’t think light travels at all.
I’ll have to think about the implications of that on fiber optic communications.
Cremains are allowed, if in an approved box. My dad’s ashes came packaged all nice and legal. Smaller but heavier than I expected.
You can order real-human-bone skeletons if you’re a school, research institution, etc. They have to be properly marked; and you can’t have them delivered to a home address, because they’re considered hazardous.
But Jesus-in-a-box would be even trickier, since he wasn’t cremated, just de-fleshed by nature. (Assuming for the purposes of the argument that such a person actually existed — which I tend to disagree with due to lack of evidence). I think Jesus-in-a-box would have to be a special shipment.
Who needs creationists to have a stimulating conversation? We can make our own fun!
I have 3 words, Bose Einstein Condensate and slow light, so we could send him such light.
http://youtu.be/EK6HxdUQm5s
Lene Vestergaard Hau -another great woman scientist
@96
great stuff, but is it possible for you to see the star when you open the box?
Re @97;
The various experimental methods currently researched to trap photons would in principle be able to allow one to see the star in the box, provided the trapped photons retain their original information. To trap enough photons and maintain their directionality to have the resolution of an image would be a technological tour de force far beyond what we are capable of now. It is doubtful that such a device would ever be made – it could never cost effectively compete with a camera, and the market for satisfying lying creationist kooks is too small the sustain the r&d and economies of scale….
gussnarp @7
That’s what we call an optical cavity.
—
I wonder if this creationist knows that we can easily generate light brighter than most stars? And, you know, measure it?
Well we could get some milage discussing how the Discworld sun actually moves faster than the speed of light
(the speed of light is slower than our speed and the sun is described as a tachyon star)
I wonder if the “eyeball = creation” guy is an extramissionist. It would make the eyeball seem more magical.
Indeed, I wonder if extramissionism isn’t widespread among creationists. If it’s really true that up to 50% of college students believe in extramission <shudder>, that would line up well with levels of belief in creationism.
If this person thinks light doesn’t travel, I wonder how he would explain this…
I find this pretty cool to contemplate, all the same, though…
I mean, besides the more obvious reasons, besides any pedestrian contributions to particle physics, think of the cosmologically vast scales on which the goalposts would then move…
Imagine… Perhaps we could set a new record, beyond the most facepalm-inducing yet recorded…
Perhaps, yes, we could record the largest redshift of goalposts ever observed.
That might make it worth while. Let’s get CERN on this.
For yes, I think that’s where it would go. This, beyond any direct observations of superfluidity and superconductivity, is what such an audacious project would achieve. As awesome as the Bose Einstein Condensate camera would be, the goalposts would achieve speeds at which the relativistic effects were easily observable…
For this is the ground state of the thing; this is what is invariable, this is the fundamental law: whatever is placed before them, the creo must deny it is evidence. Capture the star in the box if you like; indeed, fund and organize a massive multi-millenial project to fetch a whole damned red dwarf and bring it back here for them to observe, somehow preserving them, too, so they live to see its return, they’ll find a reason to claim it’s still not evidence. Yea, unto the last syllable of recorded time.
This guy doesn’t think you can keep photons in a box. He thinks that when we insist photons are physical, with physical limitations in speed, that implies WE think it could be kept in a box.
This is a variation of the creationist argument that biologists believe a living thing can spontaneously assemble itself out of random chance. Since that is obviously impossible, the scientists must be wrong. His challenge is a strawman, nothing more.
He believes that when he looks at a star, he is seeing it as it exists today. If it is bright enough, he sees it in real time, and this is possible because light is non-physical. He holds onto this view, because if not true then in a YEC universe we couldn’t see stars more than 10,000 light years away.
I’m fairly early in the discworld series, but one of the books recently covered speed of light in discworld (Small Gods, maybe?)
Something about using some very loud slaves spaced widely apart, and I think the determination was that light moved a bit faster then sound.
:)
Anyways, I wouldn’t expect a response (let alone a reasonable one…) from medico.
-He seems to only respond to something once or twice a day, and the basic format is a really wordy version of the schoolyard “NUH-UH”, without explaining anything, or actually answering a question, just denying something a hundred or more comments down-thread.
@medic0506
When you stand with an intense light source behind you, how do you explain your shadow in front of you?
All I got is this:
http://youtu.be/hN_hBDpC4SY
Maybe we could as him, a Christian, about the inconsistency in the Koran. I sure that as a Christian he would know about them, and be able to give us the suitable appologetics. /snark
As tempting as this is, I’m inclined to say not likely. Creationists don’t want to appear ignorant and anti-science. That’s why they invented Intelligent Design after all. When it comes to good old fashion science that doesn’t have anything to do with evolution they don’t want to appear whacky. Although the will grasp at strange things if it’ll help explain a young earth or instant bio-diversity.
I think simple ignorance is what’s widespread among creationists. The “eyeball = creation” guy is simply a politician who just plain doesn’t know anything.
Mmm…. the average person is dumb but …. Well, maybe I’m being optimistic but I imagine if students are answering the question wrong I think they are simply misunderstand the what’s being asked. I suspect most don’t understand optics but I imagine most know that light comes from the object to the eye and if you ask if it goes the other way they will think you are asking something entirely different. Most probably believe in “staring daggers” and “I feel like I’m being watched” (sigh) so they do think “stuff comes out of the eye” but I don’t think many think that’s has anything to do with vision. But if we specifically ask about this in terms of vision they might assume the test giver is smarter than they are and change their minds. (This was Piaget’s big mistake with child development. Children knew objects didn’t objects numbers were preserved whether visible or not, and that large size didn’t mean large quantities but the didn’t understand the questions because they were so strange that they answered the way they thought the testers wanted to hear.)
Then the arrow drawings of arrows from the eyes to the object (*never* the other way around)…. Well, I think that’s really a cartoon-like representation of content and activity and concept rather than anything they think physically is occurring. (They are on par with thought balloons and motion lines).
I’m sure he’ll claim in some sense that it is part of the immediate observance of light.
So I have a thought experiment. Suppose you have four things in the universe each many light years from each other. They are: A bright object, two observers, a large opaque object. They are arranged several light years apart from each other such that observer A can see the bright object but observer B can not because the opaque object in the way. Now imaging we place a large lens between observer A and the bright object in such a way that it appears to bend the light so that it no longer shines on observer A but now shines on observer B. (We can easily do this with objects and observers that are feet apart from each other so by geometry we can assume we can do this on a large scale light years apart. [If not, why not?]) By your beliefs this change should be observed by all instantaneous even though the lens is light-years from the object and from either observer. But how is the information or mechanics on which path and shape to alter the observers-light-lens path conveyed to all disperse and separated parts? Does the “information” travel? Well, we have no definition of such “information” but what possible mechanics would allow the light at the end to “know” to jump from observer A to observer B light years away all because a lens is being placed a third place light-years from both. Doesn’t that imply the passage of information through a medium? And wouldn’t passage require speed and time?
Three dubious poems:
If light lacks direction
To send its reflection
Its photons will surely be pale
Till god in his wisdom would wrap them in packets
And send them along in the mail.
If light from a star
(which comes from afar)
Could sit in a box for millennia
It would wait with forbearance
Throughout its conveyance
Then leap straight into your retina. (oh well, I almost got it)
Oh! Send me a box of dear jesus
Send him through the heavenly mails
Fold him in four pieces
And throw in some leaflets
And don’t forget to send nails.
I’ll bang up a sign
Reads “free body, free wine”
We’ll feast until nighttime prevails.
The Dunning-Kruger is strong in this one.
AJ Milne @103
Thread winner.
I thought it was already past infra-red, approaching microwave frequencies….
Easy enough to meet the challenge. All we need is a small piece of slow glass and a week or two to expose it at the eyepiece of a telescope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_of_Other_Days
I think mykroft @ 104 is right. medico506 thinks he’s pointing out how absurd it is to think that light consists of physical particles that travel at a finite speed.
I tried, I really tried. But I just couldn’t get past
Step 1: Cut a hole in the box…
Late to the party, but @Gussnarp #7
You would need a camera with three demons: one to operate the shutter, one to deflect the wrong protons, and obviously one to
paintcatch the right protons. Because asking a single demon to do all that would be ridiculous.Right, except science says light a wave traveling at constant speed….the delusional thinking is obvious….and no citation to back up the idea is shown….
Stopping light…sort of:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.0520
Both, actually.
Never mind giving him a photon in a box is anyone else a little worried that medic0506 might actually be practicing medicine?
@myself (46):
A bit belatedly, but apologies to Jim Croce…
Yep, that is what I learned back in college, with the wave form appearing to dominate with interference patterns and like, not explained by particles (which nicely explained Einstein’s photoelectric effect). QM has it being a wave, and since QM is extremely predictable and accurate, it does appear to be much more of wave than a particle.
medic 0 so just plopped another few turds in the other thread. Here’s the one most pertinent to the idiocy in the OP of this thread:
He’s just challengin’ the status quo, folks!
Good grief, he is that stupid.
I’m curious if medic thinks a lit room with no observers in it would be filled with light or not.
Seriously, this bears repeating:
“The obvious question then is, if photons and light travel control what we’re able to see in space, why does our field of vision exist??”
I think this is medic 0 ‘s magnum opus. The purest and most refined illustration of their stupidity. It is his “why are there still monkeys?”.
Creationists do well to prove that there are such things as stupid questions.
medico
when you say photons that are not detected by your retina “do you no good” are you forgetting all the photons from our sun that drive photosynthesis, and that do so whether you or anyone else sees them or not? All these tasty vegetables do you some good surely?
Where do Chloroplast’s fit into your theory of photon observation?
In case anyone wants to know, when I visualized the n levels of hydrogen atom as being where a stable electron wave could exist, that was clincher for my visualization as light and electrons as best described by wave properties.
It’s almost refreshing to see a creobot with as poor an understanding of physics as most have of biology.
Like these guys
(Warning: I am not responsible for any injuries, including but not limited to: choking, busted guts, and strokes)
mclarenm23 @129 Re: “do you now good”
I don’t think medic0 means “does you know good” in any god/efficiency test. He means simply that you will not see the stars if they are out of your field of vision, even if somehow they were to manage to turn around and poke you in the eye.
He is, of course, utterly wrong. You will see *precisely* the photons theat poke you int the eye and you will see no photons that do not. Your field of vision is precisely, no more, no less, the range of the photons that do reach you and poke you in the eye. That is the definition of the field of vision. The only way to see a star outside your field of vision is to distort the light with a lens or a mirror (or water or glass or air or another gas or a telescope or a Lena Hau box or ….) in which case the items you see are *exactly* the photons that manage to poke you in the eye. In which case the star is no longer outside your field of vision. It is in your extended range of vision (extended by the mirror or the lens or whatever magic medic0 had in mind when he imagined the photons doing a u-turn).
medic0 continues to claim we do not see by photons entering our eye. Yet he absolutely refuses to explain how we *do* see.
I suspect he is setting us up (I do not believe he is sincere) so that we will claim all his denial of how vision works by photon is so that we will accuse him of denying vision is caused by light. Then he will claim that *of course* vision is caused by light but light isn’t photons and our claiming he said vision isn’t caused by light just shows how narrow-minded and muddled and in refusal to understand we all are.
I wonder if he ever does that trick during a thunderstorm where you count the seconds after you see the lightning and wait for the thunder. You are hearing a lightning bolt that hasn’t existed for several seconds. Are thunderstorms counter-intuitive?
Sample light from star (Sol), force it to soliton, dump into ring resonator, lather rinse repeat for a while, rig box containing said resonator to release all photons upon lid opening. See if head is indeed catastrophically damaged by release……hmmmm…..guess I just found my next garage project!!!11!!enty. Off to find a garage.
According to Wikipedia, as many as 50% of American psychology students believe in visual emissions. Source:
Winer, G. A., Cottrell, J. E., Gregg, V., Fournier, J. S., & Bica, L. A. (2002). Fundamentally misunderstanding visual perception: Adults’ beliefs in visual emissions. American Psychologist, 57, 417-424
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12094435?dopt=Abstract
“The obvious question then is, if photons and light travel control what we’re able to see in space, why does our field of vision exist??”
What da fuq?!
(Emph. mine)
Mirrors, how do they work?
I think he gets off on forcing us to say utterly banal and simplistic things like “We see things because light in our field of vision enters our eyes and reacts with our retinas and passed as an image through our optic nerve” just so he can say something like “It hurts when a finger gets in our eyes so isn’t it going to rip our heads off when photons traveling and 186,000 miles per second enter our eyes” and we bogger and stammer what the heck can he mean and he wastes 60 posts about “we don’t see things because light enters our eyes, we see things because they are in our field of vision” and by the time our head explodes over the circular definitions he’ll say “of course we see by light; I just don’t think light is made from photons” and he jacks off cause he got us to spell out absolutely trivial things for utterly no avail.
He did the same thing with “kinds”. The obvious question we ask is what *is* this vague definition of kind. He answers organism that can interbreed and/*or* have common ancestor. What? we all say then how can you determine which do or don’t have common ancestors because if different species have common ancestors that means they evolved and all we need to determine how many common ancestors there were. We say one, what say you. He hemmed. He was asked were bats birds or mammals. We need to know how to determine the lines between “kinds”. It takes 500 posts before he answers “Well, I assume you are asking why the bible lists them.” Da fuq! The *entire* conversation is what a “kind” is and how it is determined and if it *isn’t* how the heck does his version of creation work. We want to know what “kind” bats are. Of course, we don’t care why the bible lists them. But it gives the guy some jollies to get us to have to spell out low-level trivialities. I think he thinks he tricked us into something.
medic0506 has acquired some A grade reality filters over the years.
medic0506, if you have any intellectual courage, educate yourself on what science actually says about biology and physics. There are lots of easy pathways, including educational videos that lead you through the concepts.
If anything, do it to keep from embarrassing yourself in public, as you have done so far. I’ve Googled your ‘nym, and you’re not hard to find. Go back, learn some science. Then come back and play. We’ll be here.
It’s possible medico has never looked into a mirror, for fear it would steal his soul…
Phwoar. Sounds like he needs to be asked to design an experiment that would conclusively determine whether his model is correct or the model using photons is correct. Helpfully nudge him towards the double slit experiment.
Anyone mentioned radiowaves, the EM spectrum in general, optical fibres, delays in transmission times for broadcasts yet?
@Suido: Multiple times. This guy is so dense, he should sink through the Earth’s mantle.
I am also desperately hoping medic isn’t an ACTUAL MEDIC who has contact with ACTUAL HUMANS.
Really??
143 comments and medic0506 still isn’t here?!?‽!
He says EM radiation isn’t light and has different rules an is another phenomenon altogether. Still ignores simple prisms. Hasn’t actually stated starlight is the same as visible light but the door is wide open for him to drop it with an “oh gee, you were assuming starlight and visible light were the same? Gee, you evolutionists really make a lot of assumptions, don’t you?”
It’s his MO, pretend everything fits with normal science until something implies anything against creation, then utterly reject it to the fundamental core even if it is a basisis of all known mechanics for hundreds or even thousands of years, act surprised that any one has an issue with it, and than dismiss all scientist for adhering to theoretical BS.”
@ Inaji #52
You would think someone trained as a designer would know better. This is what I have open on my desktop right now (a plan I am reviewing). Link to picture. Almost without exception, designers draw the view emanating from the eyes of the human figures they place in their drawings.
“Looking” is something you *do*.
One answer to medico’s challenge is our moon. The photons from our sun strike the moon and are reflected off it to us. If light isn’t a physical thing that travels, how could it strike the moon and bounce off of it?
aaronpound #147
I’m pretty sure™ that god sez that the moon rules over the night.
yer welcome
then how cum I seez it during the day too, huh?
is it… moonlighting?
I personally see no need to grumble about an obvious fact.
Ichthyic
possibly just mooning
)*(
Isaiah 30:26
Ag sies, ‘n poepstertjie!
medic0506,
You think you’re so smart, if you don’t believe in our atheist theory of light, why do Christians still say QED when you have proven something?
—> TOTAL PWNAGE!
What are the odds that medic will understand that joke? I mean, he can’t even find this thread.
@ Alex
FYI:
QED —-> Quod Erat Deificari !
(From the latin for Goddidit!)
From medic0506:
Jesus fucking christ, how does he even remember to breathe?
I….i can’t….i….fuck………
This isn’t fun anymore…this is seriously sad…
@theophontes
I’m not even going to deify that with a response.
Maybe. In the other thread, I quote from the only description I was able to find of the paper in question (the paper itself seems to be behing a paywall):
It would be interesting to look at the paper and see precisely what was asked, etc.
Knock thyselve out
http://www.google.de/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CEMQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffaculty.weber.edu%2Feamsel%2FClasses%2FPracticum%2FTA%2520Practicum%2Fpapers%2FWiner%2520%26%2520Cottrell.pdf&ei=c6hoU_ySDILfOcHZgOAH&usg=AFQjCNH9miaaN2e_tbs2wVqyfPLTIaVhrw&bvm=bv.66111022,d.ZWU&cad=rja
Wouldn’t do any good. Think medieval: Intuitive physics. Such as, if it ain’t being pushed, it don’t move. (I don’t know if he actually holds that specific belief or not.)
You are dealing with someone who denies the existence of photons, denies that light involves anything which “travels”, appears to think vision is an instantaneous sense and does involve light entering the eye, optics phenomena are simply a matter of “brightness”, and on and on. And on.
Concepts like EM spectrum he’d probably just deny ( is a typical “rebuttal” from him (when he simply doesn’t ignore or misconstrue the question / point entirely)); Experiments and observations are trumped by assertion; Evidence is wrong(? unimportant?) / can be dismissed if it is counter to his beliefs; et al.
With most(?) creationistas you can agree on some common things. Like a cow is a mammal which goes “Moo”. Not with this guy! Last I checked, he seems to not know what a mammal is !
(And referring him to a dictionary, Ye Pffft! Of All Knowledge, or other source hasn’t worked — He either ignores the reference or else badly misreads it / reads into it what he wants to confirm.)
That such misconceptions will regenerate, even ex nihil, means we can never rid ourselves of them.
Thanks, Alex! Heating up the boilers under the printer now so I can print if off for some lunchtime reading…
This, I think, is a crystalline masterpiece of delusional thinking.
Oddly, it was also the source of my personal, then deconversion, and now, in a somewhat* different sense, remains one of the last things I think before passing into nightly unconsciousness (often with reference to the existence of minds like our beloved and sure-to-be-sainted-in-some-strange-puddle Medic’s).
*totally freaking
That’s just COW THEORY, not COW FACT!
Gah! Correction to myself@161: “You are dealing with someone who … appears to think vision is an instantaneous sense and does not involve light entering the eye…”
Oops. Crap. I just love making corrections when the mere fact that they must be made makes the corrected thing pointless… but…
Should have been: “… the source of my personal conversion, then deconversion…” yadda bla mumble…
eyeroll @111
I was inspired by one of your poems. I hope you don’t mind.
(To the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”)
Oh send me a box of dear jesus
Send him through the heavenly mails
Oh please fold him up in four pieces
And throw in some leaflets and nails
Free meat
Free wine
We’ll feast until nighttime prevails, prevails
Free meat
Free wine
We’ll feast until nighttime prevails
@wyleyl
may I add one :-)
How sweet your transsubstantiation
How tender that transcendent steak
So better become roman cath’lic
For Jesus and your stomach’s sake.
How do “eyebeams” work with photographs? Does your camera have its own eyebeams that shoot out and collect the light in front of it? How is it that the people behind imaging technologies can make such amazing cameras when their interpretation of light is so flawed?
Our field of vision works because only light with an unobstructed path into your eye is visible to you. Light from behind you hits the back of your head, and you can’t see it (except the light that bounces off the wall in front of you).
Light doesn’t do u-turns under normal conditions, but its path CAN be curved by massive objects (like black holes), and that does change where our eyes think the object is. For a demonstration of a different effect that causes things to not be where light tells you they are, put a straw in a glass of water and see the broken straw caused by refraction.
@U Frood
In the end, it’s not clear to me what his(?) position is.
I don’t think that the guy really denies the existence of light, or does he?
He just thinks it’s an immediate effect. Or does he think seeing does not
operate using light, but is merely enabled by light (light falling onto an
object enables the eyes to see it…)?
bethy @ 143:
I Googled his ‘nym. He’s a paramedic, apparently, and into scuba diving.
This guy is so wrong that the word “wrong” doesn’t even apply.
Guys like this don’t get how applications can prove theory. If scientists were all wrong about how light works, then we wouldn’t be able to make lasers. But we do. We make really cool lasers. Some are so precise that they can do various kinds of eye surgery. Some can cut through steel. Lasers fucking work, and they’re made of light. If we were all wrong about light and how it works, we wouldn’t be able to do that.
Dear Person:
Photons are NOT marbles. I can easily capture them in an envelope, where they will impact the paper and either bounce off (making the paper visible) or be absorbed, or a little of both.
I cannot deliver them to you without trapping them in a very powerful magnetic field, which would requre so much electricity as to bankrupt you.
Love and Kisses,
Usernames
Would anyone be surprised if medic-zero was a Moon landing hoaxer too?
So we probably couldn’t convince him with the bouncing a laser off the moon trick?
Re anteprepro’s quote of Medi @125:
Cheeze and crackers! Assumptions? He really has no idea how well tested the physics of light are at this point. The assumptions are minimal and fit with everything else we know about reality. He’s another of those who ought to give up his computer and internet access because he doesn’t believe in them.
I can’t even count how many new assumptions his view would require because he can’t even state it coherently. He proposes no mechanism, he just says “it just is”. I’m truly flabbergasted.
And to then mention neurology, as if we con’t also have an incredibly good and still growing understanding of the visual processing system, one that fits perfectly with what we know about light. Why do we have a field of vision? Because we had to evolve a visual system from nothing. I guess it is true that if God created us as we are today he could have done a much better job, so I guess that’s another reason for his ridiculous notion. It explains away why we have such a relatively shitty visual system if a God created us perfectly (never mind that even in his concept of light, a 360 degree visual field would still be better).
It’s hard to see why his “theory” explains field of vision better, especially when it’s an extremely simple concept. (Despite theories about your Mom having eyes in the back of your head, she can’t actually see you without turning around…)
Any takers, or are you guys just going to grumble about how ignorant the challenge is and make excuses for why it’s not possible to meet the challenge??
Are you kidding?! We’re laughing so hard that grumbling is impossible.
This is like those old cartoons where a character would store words by shouting into a bottle and putting a cork in the opening…
I like the bits where a character would pull a hole out of his pocket (or some other unspecified orifice — some of those characters didn’t even have clothes), lay it on the ground for another character to fall into, then pick up the hole and stick it up on a ceiling, where the latter character would fall out of it. Yeah, this guy’s ideas are about at that level.
I glanced back at his other comments, too and I’m a bit confused by his confused understanding of the physics of light.
“Confused understanding” is an oxymoron. I’m sure this guy has no understanding at all, either of present knowledge or of past theories. I’m not even sure he’s over 10 years of age. His “challenge” isn’t worth anyone’s time; just let him become mayor of Toontown, or whatever he promises to do when he grows up.
Thanks to Alex@160, I had some interesting reading over lunch. My comments below, however, (1) Are from someone who is. at best, in this particular set of areas, an “interested layman”; and (2) Are after a bottle of very good wine.
The key finding came from so-called “Experiment 3”, where the researchers “[explicitly refuted] the extramission belief”. They found a significant regression in college students: “All 33 of the original college refutation group students had five or more items correct [initially after lessons “refuting” extramission] compared with 10 of 17 returning students [tested again 3–5 months later].” In other words, the college students went from more-or-less comprehending that there is no extramission to mostly believing there is extramission. As the researchers note, “The extent of the regression … shown by college students was dramatic.”
My problem is I’m unconvinced “Experiment 3” did any refutation.
Appendix B of the paper describes the refutation (the following is typed in manually so any errors are probably my own):
All true but weakly put. For instance, “Nothing has to leave the eye” would be better said as “Nothing leaves the eye”.
Continuing:
That puts it perfectly. The statements are a denial, not a refutation. There are no thought experiments as to why “extramission” is ludicrous. Most of the videotaped lecture ignores extramission, the statements appear to be tacked-on as an afterthought. And it seems to address only a few forms of extramission, where “rays” are emitted-from the eyes. But as per various comments above, that is not the only form of extramission. Other ideas are “fingers” rooted in the eyes, some sort of magic sensory field with instantaneous transmission, and probably other hypotheses.
Whilst I think the results are interesting (and alarming), I’m not as convinced the results are measuring what is claimed. As reported, the researchers do not seem to be measuring the effects of a refutation so much as an unevidenced denial.
On the other hand, that vin was quite goooode…
@blf
Thanks for the summary! Now I also feel like having some “lunch” :-D
As far as I know, his belief in various conspiracy “theories” has not been explored (anally probed
;-))…Wildly speculating, his “thinking” seems to be so medieval-ish I’m not even sure he comprehends physics kookery, moon-landing hoaxes, and so on, other than as yet another denial (or simply ignoring / misconstruing). For instance, if you deny photons, finite speed-of-light, and think starlight is seen in “real time”, arguing about relativity is so far out of your league it’d be like a baby playing professional rubgy — as a forward.
It would be entirely consistent with what he’s said about starlight for the stars to be hung in a crystal firmament above our heads. It would not surprise me at all if he believed all space travel to be hoax, since everything that appears to be in space is really just a crystal sphere at a fixed distance…
the tl;dr at the bottom.
Funny thing is that with a bit of a modification we’d actually be able to do what the dolt is asking.
Current record is keeping photons trapped for over a minute ( in crystal that turns opaque when a control laser isn’t directed at it, using that feature to trap a second beam that is shutdown after the crystal goes opaque, then turning the control laser back on to release the trapped photons).
All he needs now is something that can read the spectrum, seeing that the only way to identify a star, if you can’t do it by position in the sky, is by looking at the absorption lines in the spectrum.
Might want to tell him that he doesn’t have enough money for the shipping costs though, this little timewaster of a project would also cost a couple of billion to make all the gear needed so that when he opens the box he’d get that flash of light.
So the recap his challenge is just an engineering and money challenge, not an it can’t be done challenge.
To bad he won’t ever concede defeat since he put in an impossible condition, the ability to use the eyeball Mk.1 to identify stars. That bit of weasel wording will get him out of ever admitting he’s an idiot even if we’d meet the rest of the challenge by simple expedient of him not claiming to recognize starlight.
If I can remember the burden of Albert Van Helden’s Measuring the Universe,: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley, although it’s hard to get exact estimates of the distances ancient and medieval astronomers assigned to the celestial spheres, it seems like the “sphere of the fixed stars” was smaller than the earth’s orbit around the sun.
This represented the “infinite spaces” whose “eternal silence” so “appalled” Blaise Pascal. I feel that this is very much the kind of universe mediczero is trapped in. Personally, I’d kill myself.
Actually I would. It’s not his MO.
His goal isn’t to deny a moon-landing because that’d imply his worldview is wrong. His goal is to simply blithely ignore that the world has anything to do with his worldview (and thus nothing will ever counter it).
He’s a disarm us with earnest incredulity type. His goal is to get us to admit we don’t actually know what we are talking about either. It’s like the guy who asks “How do you really know the world is round?”
A religious fanatic or a whacko denialist are easy to dismiss as the warped reality is clearly theirs. But a “you simply having convinced me that plants grow from seeds” or “aren’t you relying on faith when you assume adding a second scoop of ice cream will result in more ice cream? How do you know two scoops of ice cream isn’t less than one scoop?” doesn’t have a warped reality so much as a reality with a huge gaping freaking incomprehensible hole it it. To counter it we have to fill it in, but the hole is at such a low and basic level it’s really difficult for us to squint so hard. He wants to see us struggle and trip or resort to profound theoretical physics to explain basic intuitive concepts just so he can say “gee, you scientists really make a mess of it, don’t you?”
====
@186:
Ah, but the photos would no longer be in formation. Note his loophole. He needs to see the star and recognize it as the star. (His other loophole is that we actually have to do it. We can’t just point out how it can be done or that it’s been done by another or why we can’t do it.)
Hand him a fucking telescope, I say. He never said how long we had to store the photons for him.
#186 Who Cares
The problem with using even a wildly extended Darmstadt experiment (in which light was trapped via electromagnetically induced transparency) is that Medic will react as his kind always do… which is find an out. And that’s simple enough, because the criterion for its validity need only trespass slightly into his spheres of ignorance or intransigence, both of which describe very, very close orbits.
In this case, it will amount to reading explanations of the experiment up to the point where it is explained that the energy of the photons is converted to spin waves during storage, and back to photons when transparence is restored.
And I am willing to guarantee that his conception of conversion of energy ends well before classical physics, whenever necessary to his cause. And we’ve already seen rafts implying his beliefs regarding the individual identities of the constituents of matter.
You simply cannot stuff quantum biscuits into a dog whose leash ends somewhere between medieval and mid-Newton.
@Woozy(#188) & knownot(#189):
The out is that he has to be able to identify the star using his eyes. Even if he could that (and he can’t) he’d claim he doesn’t know which star we just showed light from.
@188 woozy
This. And with additional darkons I say: THIS.
@190 Who Cares
My horse is dead. Long live my stick…
Yeah. I was just thinking, OK, even if his eyes were miraculously blessed with an unboxed image of the star, it would just be a super swell photograph really, dammit, because conversions. And thus I take the whole thing far too seriously.
@knowknot etc
You are all missing the point.
In order to forumlate his challenge, he has to argue why according to our conception of light such a think should be possible, and then maintain that it is, in fact, not possible.
If he fails to argue why such a feat should in principle be technologically possible with finite resources, he has no challenge.
If you make a single proposal how to do it, you already concede too much.
@193 Alex
Not so much. And backatchya. I came from the point. Which, in itself, proves nothing.
“Conceding too much” is, in this and similar cases, like the kind of conceding too much one necessarily does with a 6 year old. For equally obvious reasons. This is not, in fact, an issue with a sensible referee of reason, and never will be.
How many challenges of this kind have there been? And how valid were any of them? And when did the lack of validity have an effect on anything? And how seriously were any of them taken in the first place; how difficult was it to see the ignorance an silliness in them?
And yet, the discussions continue, if only in the hope that something sinks in somewhere, as it did (in, thankfully, much less bizarre contexts) with me, and others known to me.
he is just playing word games. he only accepts what he feels is intuitive is real. What he feels is intuitive is what he was taught when he was little and what he understood as a child. He only wants the stories he believes to be true to be true and it is most definitely what HE believes with the HE the most important part and not any objective truth that can be observed and tested by anyone. He is not content to just do that but he feels compelled to argue with others who do not accept his favorite story. The mere existence of an alternative view regardless of any evidence must form a existential challenge that he can not face. Hence the ridiculous proposal and the complete absence of any coherent argument. only opposition.
he is simply a sincere troll lost within the dreams of reality inside the stories in his imagination.
uncle frogy
I’m at the point where I think he believes that there is no rhyme or reason in the universe, therefore all explanations are wrong. Chaos reigns supreme in his conception (or lack thereof) of the universe.
@127…what about the refrigerator light? Is it still on when you close the door or not?
That would baffle him completely for about a week.
I think he’s basically a solipsist. These threads have been both entertaining and educational, so thanks for that.
medic0506 is 650 comments behind in the other thread.
And medic 0 is still chuggin’ along, one comment at a time, every hour or four. I….don’t quite understand the point….
I hope medicO506 stays out of the NRA thread. I can’t begin to imagine the blindingly incoherent views he might dazzle us with over there.
I think everyone here has completely misunderstood something deeply fundamental about medic0506.
Think a bit: What has eyes that “see”, yet do not interact with light in a normal, physical manner, and therefore must have instantaneous direct perception of that which they “see”?
Hint: They have no reflection in mirrors.
Yes, it must be true: medic0506 is a vampire . . . !!
QED
Owlmirror:
and probably one of those pseudo vamps from Twilight at that…
Next story I write about vampires I’m going to claim they can not use telescopes or look through windows (nor be seen through either). That should provide speculations for the readers. Neat (but really weird) idea.
medic0506 practically beamed with pride when they announced that we’d only be rid of him by banning him, he claims he intends to very slowly and very stupidly rebut every single point in ascending order. It’s quite stupid to behold, it’ll be WEEKS before he gets to responses to his muddled rebuttals.
Ascending order with respect to what? Cromulence?
What a sad waste of time, he could learn the basics of newtonian physics in that time :)
Aren’t vampires generally considered to be quite intelligent? (Or is that just the Discworld model?) An intelligent vampire this fruitcake is. Not.
Not a zombie, either. They eatz brains. Well, Ok, maybe a zombie that ate its own brain…
An animated coprolite would make more sense. Both as the fruitcake, and compared to the fruitcake.
204 woozy
Liking.
…can’t sense any light if passed through glass, as in light bulbs, therefore vulnerable when in artificially lit environments. Difficult for them. No Denny’s. Pathos.
What was this thread about?
knowknot @ 208>
not much really. pretty much how creationists pop up claiming irrefutable evidence to overturn all scientific knowledge, and then refuse to explain how anything actually works, and just keep insisting any and all currently accepted frameworks are so obviously wrong.
And the combination of peer-reviewed literature and scientific method has, um, less basis then some old book or something.
At least I can get some amusement value out of some of these threads…:/
Stars in a Can™ brand Photon Soup®.
Tony! The Fucking Queer Shoop! @ 203;
Now that is quite the insult. Is it even humanly possible to be as annoying as a glittery Twilight twit?
They could have ultra-acute hearing to make up for it, maybe? In any case the fictional vampires will be more interesting than medic0506 has already become.
blf @ 210:
This thread is the one that really needs that Dave Bowman “My God! It’s full of stupid!” pic from a few Thunderdomes ago.
Hey… I think I just figured this Medic(numbers) thing out.
– See, Some time ago (which is right now in magic star time) I did some exhaustive research on the predictions of the Mayans, Nostradamus, and the peculiar quantum nature of the fluid in the common magic 8 ball, contrasted these with the credit purchasing habits of Deepak Chopra (obtained from NSA records via Edward Snowden’s psychochromatic aura), and finally compared these results against a hat full of alphabetical characters fractionated from Glenn Beck and Pat Robertson broadcasts occurring on Thursdays (excluding the most recent) and discovered a recurring reference to PHARYNGULAGATE!
– It turns out, as inadvertently stated by David Icke in microexpression code during a super secret interview with Ken Ham, during which both were dosed with LSD and Lawrence Welk brand energy drink by the mega clandestine International Destroy America With Healthcare Totalitarianism League (sponsored largely by illegitimate offspring of Bill O’Reilly and various members of White Rappers Inc.) that a multidimensional lizard twin of PZ Myers would arise in the last days to test the unfaithful as a prerequisite for entry to anyplace but heaven or Disneyland.
– People, I’m telling you, it’s Medic0506. It should have been obvious. In the year of PZ’s birth on May 6th (05/06), the (P)ullit(Z)er (P)ri(Z)e was awarded to John F. Kennedy AND the last episode of “I Love Lucy” was broadcast (A cosmic reference to Australopithicus, an apparently evolutionary thing, and the loss of the last morally pure television show, in which couples were required, when in the bedroom, to keep on foot on the floor at all times).
– Medic0506 is testing us, friends. This is PHARYNGULAGATE! Darrel Issa is an angel of light compared to what is coming. WE MUST REMAIN STEADFAST!
@214 me
Oops. Blockquote fail. Never mind.
knowknot
I don’t think missing blockquotes has any effect on your *ahem* theory.
;)
PHARYNGULAGATE?!
That must be it!
*Calculates*
4th October, 1957 – Sputnik launched.
3rd November, 1957 – the day I was born – the Soviets sent a dog into space.
Yep. Worldwide conspiracy, alright!
@216 chigau (違う)
OK… CAP LOCK then.
I’m still waiting for a photon to blow my brains out. Before I started reading medicofuckwit’s blatherings I really, really wanted to live forever (or at least until the end of the next Dr Who series), but now I just can’t wait for that single effing photon to free me from this torture!
… if light is not something that travels, and is instead transmitted instantaneously to your eye, then how do blindfolds work? Indeed, how do eyelids work?
@Thumper
They interrupt the instantaneous transmission. What a stupid question! :-D
@ Alex:
That ain’t the half of it. Remember you can still swivel your eyes behind a blindfold. So to take the farthest naked-eye object, a signal goes from your eyes (created by your “neurophysiology”, apparently) that can penetrate a blindfold, goes 2,500,000 light years to the Great Nebula in Andromeda, and tells it not to “propel” light in your direction—all instantaneously!
*chuckle* :)
As much as I want medicowhat’stheirface to asnwer that question, I have a sinking feeling Alex may be right on the money at #221.
Bah, *answer. All hail Tpyos!
What… no.
What’s going on in quantum physics is that “wave” and “particle” are the same thing! Although counterintuitive, it’s simple: every particle has a wavelength and is able to interfere with itself after going through two slits at once while still being able to act like a billiard ball that kicks another particle out of place.
Comment number!
He reads one comment, replies to it, and then takes a nap!
I got bored, and finished the song (#46). Again, apologies to Jim Croce, and dedicated to Medic0506 and his “challenge”…
If I could save pho-tons in a box
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every ray
From a star that is light years away
Just to mail it to you
If I could constrain rays forever
If your warped view of science was true
I’d save every ray like a treasure and then,
Again, I would send them to you
[Chorus]
But there never seems to be enough time
For light to travel quite as far
As it seems to
I’ve looked around enough to know
That the universe is far older
Than you imagine
If I had a box just for photons
And beliefs that will never be true
The box would be empty
Except for the memory
Of how time was wasted on you
[Chorus]
@ 222 The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
What would you call the smirking version of that thing when you laugh and milk comes out your nose?
Whatever it is, that’s what this did to me.
Nice one, Richard Smith.
@ knownot:
Must be a “smilk” instead of a “smirk”.
Oh, I am really enjoying the poetry! Please keep it coming!
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high,
Station’ry photons in the sky,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
Medic told me what you are!
That was a great one Richard Smith! Bravo!
I think the most problematic thing for anyone considering extramission is explaining shafts of light peeking through the clouds miles away on a cloudy day. Oh, and the whole “we’ve tested the optical nerves of animals by firing photons at them to count individual photons” thing. But, as we all know, that’s just an opinion, no more valid than any other. Right?
Sorry, not
the most problematic thing. Just one of many.It’s medic0506’s fault anyway. He can’t prove that it isn’t.
Just wait until medic0506 gets here.
You’ll be sorry.
It’ll spoil you Christmas.
@chigau (違う) (#233):
Yeah, but that’s, like, 19 months from now…
Tigger:
Shouldn’t that be “Medic DIDN’T tell me what you are” ? He’s been a little light on explanations.
I had a brain fart on the other thread, a sudden insight into how medic0506 might be viewing light (that it happened just after talking with a toddler about how he couldn’t open my bathroom door with a walking stick (cane for USAians) might have had something to do with it).
Perhaps he sees a photon beam as a stationary beam: like a roof beam; or like a kind of thread, sticking out of the star. In order to ‘see’ it, we have to line up our eyes with the end of the beam; and because the beam is in permanent contact with the star, it is showing what the star is like in real time (like those pin pictures which show an instant image of something pressed into the other side).
His ‘challenge’ would then be how to detach the other end of the photon beam from the star and fit it into a box (perhaps we could fold it?); when he opens the box, he just has to line up the appropriate end of the beam with his eye in order to ‘see’ the star it came from.
Tigger #236
By George, I think you’ve got it!
Photon as permanent structure explains its lack of travelling.
This reminds me of a thought experiment someone once asked about transmission of information at the speed of light.
Imagine if you constructed a rigid beam between earth and Alpha Centauri (or really anywhere far enough away). Then you pushed on the earth end of the beam. Would not the other end of the beam move, simultaneously, thus allowing you to convey information about your push, or even tap out a morse code with it, instantaneously, or at least faster than light speed?
Of course, in reality no rigid object is truly absolutely rigid, so if you tried to construct such a beam, assuming you found a material that could be made into something that long, your push on one end propagates as a compression wave through the object, and the other end only moves when the compression wave gets there, and the compression wave will move slower than the speed of light.
Tigger@236, Yer “brain fart” reminds me of some of the early (ancient Greek) objections to intromission. Excepting Euclid, they had no(?) known hypothesis of optics, and hence postulated that if intromission was true, then objects had to constantly transmitting “images” of themselves.
That was widely(?) perceived to be batty even at the time, which according to some of the reading-up I did for the other thread, is one reason extramission, despites its own difficulties, was the preferred hypothesis for vision over the (correct) intromission.
@236
That’s exactly how he sees it. But a telescope, then, precisely does the cutting and reconstructing that you describe.
For the third time I say, A telescope answers his challenge in every way.
@238.
Well, even if it were strictly rigid, relativity and the impossibility of synchronisity come into play. I don’t want (not sure I know how) to do the math, but just as objects become larger as they go faster the period of time “now” at one point of the stick is not the same time moment “now” as another point of the stick being shoved. Basically you are saying “Well, if we ignore relativity for a slightly simpler model, then we could have faster than light communication” which is a … yeah, so? … moment.
I (and by “I” I mean “someone else”) will have to set up a relativistic model to come up with the exact objection, but I’m sure there is one.
As I was taught; medieval thinkers (upto Maxwell’s time) considered light to be instantaneous. However, Maxwell was able to calculate (from 1st principles), the exact speed of light. But that was before photons, everyone, at that time, agreed it was a wave, but waves only travel THROUGH something. Resulting in the concept of aether, that Michelson and Morley worked so hard to measure, but came up short; only to be supplanted by Einstein’s concept of spacetime (single word, not hyphenated). That was just a brief synopsis for you, medic, that science is eternal fighting amongst its adherents, never saying, “This is SO. Don’t say any different.” Debate (i.e. argument) is welcomed amongst scientist, what you call debate is not what you think it is.
re woozy @241:
One does NOT have to assume a non-relativistic model to ignore relativity. but given the setup, neither party is moving relative to the other, so relativity doesn’t need to be considered and loss of synchronicity is not an issue.
Buuutttt, errrp, the only issue is the observer that sees that the reception occurs simultaneously with the transmission. The observer has to be equidistant to both, to say that Reception was instantaneous. (assuming light travels at finite speed which medic will quibble about)
woozy @241: ‘Rigid’ bodies and special relativity have an interesting history. Example; the Ehrenfest paradox. When is pi not pi?
Amphiox @ 238:
Of course, the compression wave would only move at the speed of sound in the material, so…quite a bit slower than the speed of light.
There was a small contingent of people who absolutely refused to accept the existence of black holes, so they had to imagine something—anything—that would hold up a neutron star of 2 (or is it 3) solar masses and prevent it from collapsing inside the event horizon. The only way that could happen if there could be a material with an equation of state so stiff that the speed of sound in it was greater than the speed of light. Apparently some of them were willing to accept that, or at least not think about it very much.
Alex @#206:
If he watched the Feynman videos I linked there he could learn quantum electrodynamics even faster. :-)
woozy:
I’m not sure this is entirely true; lenses and telescopes don’t prove photons, they can be explained perfectly under the wave theory of light, even though that’s wrong. That’s the reason I linked to night vision devices: it’s clearly photons-to-electrons-to-photons, and you can’t use them the other way round like you can with a telescope. (That is, looking in the wrong end to make things look
smallerless bright!)@243: fair enough.
In my naivete… well, I guess Amphiox was saying exactly the same thing as I was. I was thinking Amphiox meant it as a structural engineering concern but I guess he meant it as a relativistic concern. It seems like it’s been covered in the Born Rigidity concerns.
Although the discussion and rebuttal sound like: “What if I try to get around the speed of light by doing this?” “Well, that’d be impossible because you are going faster than the speed of light.”
The real issue is where exactly does it fail and what happens if you try it. I’ll have to peruse it further. This doesn’t seem off hand to be right “Even though such an object cannot physically exist due to relativity, objects can normally be assumed to be perfectly rigid if they are not moving near the speed of light” but I guess ’twas_brillig’s explaination is probably correct.
@247. He’s not asking for a proof of photons– merely that we put them in a box and let him take them out of the box and see a star. A telescope will do this although the time between us putting them in and his taking them out would be *really*, *really*, *really* short.
woozy @248:
If A pushes, and B feels the push instantaneously (in their shared inertial frame), the problem is that there is a frame of reference in which B is seen to feel the push before A pushes. We relinquish causality only very reluctantly.
@250
Right. Which is why I’m reluctant to make claims that we can ignore relativity simply because the observers aren’t moving in relation to each other. Wasn’t Einstein’s thought experiment about two projectors on two sides of a film screen only within a single frame of reference? I was under the impression synchronisity never exists because there will always be another frame of reference. And, although I could be wrong, I’m comfortable with saying rigidity is an impossible concept at any speed.
I apologize for not knowing the proper terminology. And I apologize in advance for being wrong.
woozy @251: Nothing to apologize for.
Another way of looking at it; if Alice pushing the rod is event A, and Bob feeling it instantaneously is event B, we’re tempted to say that A caused B. But if it had been Bob pushing instead of Alice, the events would still have the same spacetime coordinates (same times and places), but in that case we would want to say that B caused A. So we can’t say either.
Re: relativity:
The reason I tried to get mediczero to learn something about the Minkowskian spacetime we all live in was that it makes it blindingly obvious why c is a speed limit. If you look at the Minkowski diagram, you can see—with no pesky arithmetic—that motion represents a shear rotation, and as you move faster and faster, your x´ and ct´ axes get closer and closer together, until at the speed of light they coincide. There’s nowhere to go from there.
Expecting anything to travel faster than the speed of light is geometrically absurd—like thinking you can turn your head far enough to see the back of your neck!
@252 Rob Grigjanis
No, I understand. And it appears I wasn’t wrong. (Apologizing for being wrong in advance was my idea of a little [very little] joke.) But I guess I *don’t* understand ’twas brillig’s comment after all[1]. Nor do I understand wikipedia’s comment on their page about rigid bodies: “Even though such an object cannot physically exist due to relativity, objects can normally be assumed to be perfectly rigid if they are not moving near the speed of light”. It seems to me we need to also stipulate that body be short enough that the time for light to travel its distance is not significant.
Language is ambiguous and concepts, if subtle, can get their intentions absolutely botched by someone viewing things from an ever so slightly different perspective. I think that’s my mental disconnect right now. I mistook Amphiox’s comment for a purely engineering rather than relativistic one, and I mistook twas brillig’s comment as implying relativity doesn’t apply rather than saying that the framework where the events synchronize is a third and distant one.
[1]Oh, wait, now I do. But that’s still the same issue. For relativity reasons we can’t view A and B in the same framework at the same time.
====
@253 Battleaxe
On a side note, it’s funny how quickly this does become intuitive. To one unfamiliar with modern (last 300 years) of science, instantaneous transfer doesn’t seem incongruous. In fact, it seems very intuitive and natural. Until one starts to think of things very far apart. “Half way across the world?” “On another planet?” “Isolated points in distant parts of the universe?” I think when we start eliminating items and “landmarks” that the two points have in common we intuitively start thinking that they can’t be “in contact” with each other at all and start to wonder “How can point A know what point B is doing? For that matter how can point A and point B even know that time it is for both of them?” Turns out that’s pretty much how the world is.
That is why I want medic0 to consider what placing a prism 5,000 light years between two points 10,000 light years apart. *Instantaneously*, a 5,000 light year long beam of light *rips* away from its path and forms another light beam in an entirely different direction. Imagine further *this* new path has an observer some 200,000 light years further. Imagine the upheaval of *snapping* off a 5,000 light year long beam of light and swinging it 90 degrees and *plowing* it into everything in a 2000,000 light year path. I mean imagination, simply can not fathom it.
But all that is merely intuition.
woozy @254:
If you don’t understand something on a wikipedia page, there’s a good chance the problem isn’t you. Yeah, size matters as well.
77, chigau (違う)
When the other thread closed, with 1240 comments, medic0506’s last comment was at 1224; he was replying to 229.
The follow-up thread, at the time of posting this, is already at 48 comments.
It could be months before he gets here!
Tigger
I hope not.
My memory ain’t what it used to be.
Anyway, he flounced; so the point is moot.
TL:DR:
Gotta say it here, since he flounced away. I think the problem with trying to communicate with medic, was that we were speaking two different languages. We spoke in Science, while he was speaking in Philosophy. EG we spoke about light/photons/waves, telescopes/supernovae, etc.; while he was talking about VISION. That light is the stimulant of the eyes, but it is the eyes that are the SOURCE of Vision for the consciousness. That was his reason for accusing us of “materialism”, meaning we were only talking about “things”, not what goes on in the consciousness. Maybe I’m going too far, BUT, this seems to be like the Kant philosophy that reality is only what our senses tell us, and that is the real reality. The things that cause those sensations we just Assume are physical objects separate from us. Like his question, “Why does everything exist, rather than nothing?” is not a question meaning everything/everything. uhm ultimate dualist, his mind is separate from everything else, he was asking why all that other stuff exists instead of just his mind only. And that’s also why he implied that scientists are just mass hallucinations: everything they measure are just measurements taking place inside their minds…what is Reality, really? When he looks at a star, he sees it instantly, how can we know that what he is seeing is photons that had to travel such a long time? He sees it NOW. So, … I could go on and on, but I just conclude with a nasty judgement. Medic is just locked in his own head. Everything he knows about everything is just images in his own head, and he’s trying to understand what all those scientists are so strident about. He just can’t speak their language, so tries to communicate with them in his language. After trying to hard for so long he finds us incapable of speaking his language, so decided to leave us alone. And I have tried to speak his language, but I find I’m inadequate at it, so this is my final(?) word.
As requested, here is your Jesus in a box.