Simple question, do you believe that there is absolute truth or is all truth relative?

Of course there is absolute thruth.

I should add then, what are some examples of these absolute truths?

Your mortality.

Two examples:

1 + 1 = 2

2 + 2 = 4

Dear RandomGuy,

Some people will say that there is no true reality,
only perceptions and opinions. Others will argue that
there must be some absolute reality or truth.( Two and
two are four, or the law of gravity, and so on).
Of course absolutism nearly always results from strong
religious faith. However, I shall answer in more depth
later on. It's late and I am tired.

Dear Ludwig,

Are you absolutely sure of that? ;)

Jesus Christ equals truth personified.

If you are talking about absolutism how can you go past the examples par excellence of the feminists and the Greens?

I will not bother with the first, the feminists, where there are far too many examples, occupying cartoonists for decades. Hold on, feminist absolutism explains the feminist sense of humour, such as it is.

Taking the latter, the Greens, a couple of examples could be the environment and the carbon tax, and morality and illegal migrants. Julia Gillard will lose an election and may yet lose her leadership before that, through genuflecting to Greens absolutism. What protest party or activist isn't absolutist? It is their modus operandi isn't it? A luxury of never having to face reality or be accountable.

Are there facts?

Yes.

Is there wisdom?

Maybe... okay; occassionally.

Is there insight?

Not sure, let me think about that, but you may want to make up your own mind.

Is there absolute truth...?

Sometimes.

Are there too many esses in occasionally? Can be if you type on an autorepeat keyboard without putting on your glasses.

Yes, for some of our posters every thing they post is truth.
And if we agree then in their minds that too is truth.

'What is truth?' said Pilate and didn't stay for an answer. Why did he not waste time discussing this? Because the question is meaningless. The truth about what, Random guy? Truth is a human concept like beauty, good, evil, and so on and varies with the individual. Define your question a little please.

Hi RandomGuy,

I've got to be honest with you - I don't know
what the answer is to your question of "What is
truth?" And whether there is such a thing as
absolute truth. I don't have the answers to all
the big questions in life as I'm still on my
journey of discovery. I don't think that Truth
can be owned by anyone - because things can
always be disproved as new facts are found.
Some people believe that without a God, morals
are relative and arbitrary. However as Richard
Dawkins tells us - "their source of absolute
morality is usually a Holy Book of some kind
interpreted as having an authority far beyond its
history's capacity to justify...very few people
look into the historical origins of their Holy
Books."

I guess what it comes down to is what people believe
or want to believe. I don't think anything is set in
stone. Take patriotism, "My Country Right or Wrong!"
This slogan commits the professional soldier to kill
whomever the politicians choose to call enemies.
And that's only one example of the effects of an
"absolute truth." That's why I'm somewhat reluctant
to say - "there are absolute truths," I'd rather say
that some people believe there are.

The closest thing to an absolute truth that I've read on
this thread came from onthebeach - who gave as his answer -
"your mortality." Brilliant reply.

<< Are you absolutely sure of that? ;) >>

Yes Lexi, 1 + 1 = 2 and 2 + 2 = 4.

But now hold on… that doesn’t mean that it always applies. I’m sure you could find examples where it doesn’t.

But if it doesn’t always apply, it doesn’t mean it isn’t an absolute concept in other cases, ie; the absolute truth.

Can you think of an example where it doesn’t apply and one where it absolutely does?

I doubt whether our treasurer believes 1 + 1= 2

Dear Ludwig,

In binary arithmetic:

1 + 1 = 10. 2 does not exist.

'The truth is rarely pure and never simple.'
- Oscar Wilde

Sometimes people can believe strongly something to be true even if it is not. Most things are impossible to prove absolutely.

Look at economic or ideology. Much of the 'truths' spouted are conjecture. It is all based on how people think societies should be structured, concentration of power, risk management, beliefs about effects and overall benefits eg. regulation vs deregulation.

There are no truths as such, just opinion.

David f is correct.

And on the planet Zog they know that in their system the ideogram of 2 + 2 = 3 is correct.

2 + 2 = 4 is only true on Earth because someone invented in their mind.

Dear runner,

You wrote; “Jesus Christ equals truth personified.”

Which gives us a great opening to discuss relativism.

For when Jesus proclaimed in Revelations that;

"Behold, I am coming soon! Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophecy in this book."

What did he mean by soon?

Us silly humans thought it might be a touch under 2 thousand years but hey in god speak who knows. That's relativism for ya.

Who invented Jesus Christ?

Dear Ludwig,

It depends on what type of measurement scale
you're using. The following link might help
explain:

http://virgil.azwestern.edu/~dag/lol/TwoPlusTwo.html

Also 2 feet plus two inches is not 4 anythings.

Of course there is only one truth.

However if you study humanities at most of our universities, you will find they like the idea of every one’s truth being equal.

This is a great idea if you aren’t very bright, so can’t understand most things, or have a lousy memory & can’t remember the truth.

This insidious garbage is slowly taking control in many of our uni ideas.

I hope they have any engineers so trained, restricted to designing university buildings. Having their buildings fall on their heads would be poetic justice come home to roost.

Dear Hasbeen,

Where on earth did you get this idea that humanities students are taught that there are many truths? The object of history, sociology, archaeology, etc., is to search for the singular truth.

Unfortunately there is insufficient evidence to define the truth surrounding many questions in these fields so that there exists numerous theories and ideas which go towards understanding some aspects of these subjects.

And of course there are some questions that just cannot ever be answered like What is the origin of the universe?

People like engineers don't need to be concerned about searching for the truth. They are trained to make things - not how to think.

Good example, david f.

1 + 1 = 2 in base 10 mathematics. 1 + 1 = 10 in base 2 mathematics.

Therefore 2 = 10…. when changing from base 10 to base 2!

So, we had an example of where 1 + 1 does not = 2. But in so doing, we found hard and fast truths in that 1 + 1 does definitely always equal 2 in base 10 and 10 in base 2 maths!

Meanwhile Mr Opinion, a true Zoggian, works on the primary premise that 2 + 2 = 3. Man, such a belief would have to really screw with your brain, wouldn’t it!?

Maybe this explains some of the amazing opinions he presents on OLO!! ( :>/

Hasbeen
Do tell. What is the one truth.

Good one Lexi. Yes, 2 + 2 does not = 4 in the nominal or ordinal categories.

However, 2 feet plus 2 inches does equal four somethings. It equals four sixandahalf inches!

Dear Ludwig,

I have only ever met quasi-Zoggians and I must admit to finding them slightly untruthful in my discussions with them.

csteele

What did he mean by soon?

If I knew I would tell you. I would prefer to concentrate on what is very clear in contrast with something that can be interpreted many different ways and often wrongly.

Ludwig,

"....It equals four sixandahalf inches!"

Or it could equal 208 skahoodlebakers - if a skahoodlebaker was a form of measurement (ie, fifty two skahoodlebakers = sixandahalf inches)

Poirot, it depends on the unit of measure...

For example in the ancient Eygptian units of length (you'll have heard of cubits) six and a half inches is exactly equal to one fist and three digits.

Just saying.

I'm not making this up. It is the truth.

Dear runner,

You wrote; “If I knew I would tell you. I would prefer to concentrate on what is very clear in contrast with something that can be interpreted many different ways and often wrongly.”

Who wrongly interprets 'soon' as less than 2,000 years?

Soon is not a few years, nor a few decades, nor a few centuries, nor a few millennia.

Soon is soon and he was very unequivocal about the word, no perhaps', no maybes, no in a little whiles.

To be saying otherwise is surely untruthful.

Perhaps some reflection on the word 'truth' might be in order.

If Christ really was telling the truth when he said he would return soon are you not in a bit of a bind? You must then admit you do not understand his truths and therefore have little grounds with which to expound them to the rest of us.

Would you like, for the sake of the exercise, try another of what you see as his truths on me? Let us assess it in light of your understanding of 'soon'. I feel we may both find it instructive.

Many men would hope paternity testing is 'truth'.

I will finish this subject.
Boolean algebra, the language of logic.

A+B = AB

Thats it, end of lesson.

Mr Opinion just try using the wrong grade of steel in your building, car or ship, & you’ll damn soon find out that engineers deal continually with the truth, the whole truth, & nothing but the truth. If you don’t believe that, you’d best buy a very good safety helmet.

Pelican I believe you realise I was referring to there being only one truth to each question. Did you, or did you not, shoot the gun? Yes or no, with no may be, possibly or perhaps. That sort of garbage is for our global warming con men.

I find most things are black or white. Can you swim across this river sort of thing? Try it, & you’ll find only a black or white answer.

I have found those who see lots of grey are usually too lazy to bother finding the correct answer.

Of course we all know the answer to everything, The Hitchers Guide told us, it is 46 I believe.

Hasbeen you miss the overall point. I am not talking about factual truth eg. is this text black. The answer is of course yes.

The correct answers are not always so easy to ascertain. Often it is opinion as your con-men comment about climate change suggests. You cannot seriously contend that you and you only, among all the scientists and everyone else knows the 'truth' about climate change.

Thank goodness for grey areas otherwise we would be run by lynch mobs.

err no Hasbeen 43 think.
Anyway it is A+B = AB that is the only possible answer.

Dear Bazz,

A + B is greater than AB.

A + B = AB only in the special case where A = B.

csteele,

if you are trying to convince me that your words are more true than that of Christ's then you are wasting your breath. Like every man except Christ you to have lied.

David f;

If condition A is true AND condition B is true
then AB is true ?

A-|
. .|--AB
B-|

Hmmm this website is no good for logic diagrams, hi !

David F and Bazz, if you are talking about the truth of genetics and blood groups, then
A+B does not always equal AB.

A + B could equal AB, or just A or just B.

So 'truth' can and does have different meanings...

IMHO, david f knows what he is talking about (the union of two sets always contains their intersection, similarly in Boolean algebra); I am not so sure about the others.

Dear Hasbeen,

Engineers are tradesmen - not philosophers.

I don't understand why engineering is taught at university level.

If it was a requisite to have a degree in engineering to work as an engineer than 70% of engineers in Australia would be out of a job.

Selecting building or machine elements in accordance with statutory codes and regulations is not the same as the search for knowledge.

No Suseonline we are talking Boolean algebra the language of logic.

David f well yes A does equal B because both are true.
That gate I tried to draw was an AND gate not an OR gate.
If either A or B were not true then AB would not be true.

Pelican makes the most sense in this senseless thread, when she defines 'truth' as answers to questions. No one else has bothered to define what they're writing about:
<<The correct answers are not always so easy to ascertain. Often it is opinion as your [Hasbeen's] con-men comment about climate change suggests. You cannot seriously contend that you and you only, among all the scientists and everyone else knows the 'truth' about climate change. Thank goodness for grey areas otherwise we would be run by lynch mobs.>>
While there may be some philosophic 'truths' in religious texts such as the christian bible, there are few, if any physical truths. There are no proofs of the existence of the biblical Jesus, for example, despite the searches of scholars in all the relevant documents of the Roman occupation of Palestine. It seems odd that they recorded the price of grain and the number of sheep and goats as well as weather conditions, but failed to mention a miracle or two.

A + B = AB?

Only in Boolean logic, not in logical logic!!

A x B generally equals AB in mathematical and scientific formulae.

So… does this make the Booleans illogical (and/or untruthful)?

Or does it make scientists and mathematicians illogical?

Dear runner,

I prefer csteele to Jesus. csteele submits to questioning. He does not make arrogant statements such as "I am the way, the truth, the life." He does not make intolerant statements such as, "Only through me can thou enter the kingdom of heaven." csteele does not claim sole possession of the truth. csteele has not accumulated masses of intolerant followers who massacre people when they refuse to accept the Christian mumbojumbo. csteeele does not demand that people worship him. I feel that I could have a reasonable conversation with csteele if I ever met him. I don't have that feeling about the Jesus of the Bible. Of course it is possible that Jesus never said anything that is attributed to him or even existed. The New Testament contains a number of fairy tales which were written after Jesus was supposed to have died. The Jesus of the Bible is probably a composite of various legendary wonder workers.

Opinion and belief are often confused with truth. One beauty of science is that it doesn't deal in truth. It deals in hypotheses and evidence. Any scientific hypothesis or theory must be abandoned if there is evidence that it is invalid.

I agree, csteele never claimed to be the son of God nor did anybody, to my knowledge, call him the “son of God”, whatever that might mean to a non-Christian.

Science indeed does not “deal in truth”, although the question of verisimilitude (or, better, adequacy) of a scientific theory - when dealing with physical reality as such (not just with some restricted family of phenomena) - is more complicated than valid or invalid, depending on evidence: Newtonian physics was not abandoned and it is certainly “valid” in many situations where the application of gravitation theory or QM would be too clumsy, inadequate for practical purposes.

There is also a difference between TRUTH - which makes sense only in trivial everyday situations, or as a subject of metaphysics/religion - and TRUE STATEMNTS, which are either formal (in logic or mathematics) or subject to generally accepted evidence.

My dear Mr Opinion, how typical of a humanities type. You let them up from the bottom of the garden for a minute, & they suddenly think they have some idea of the real world.

It is a damn good thing our building codes, were not designed by your Hocus Pocus experts, or our buildings would all have fallen down all ready.

I do find it interesting that you can not differentiate between the designer, & the bloke who puts the design together. Not surprising but interesting none the less. This would perhaps indicate why your lot still can’t sort the good from the bad or the ugly.

The only thing universities should be teaching is the provable. Knowledge that expands continually on it’s proven base, which must be taught to sustain our society.

Your subjects, where after a couple of thousands of years of talking, you still have gained nothing, belongs in the Druids circle. You should give a little thanks to the engineer/ physicists, who has developed a society rich enough to allow those with your interests to spend lifetimes meditating on their navel, with out ever achieving anything at all.

Dear Hasbeen,

One of my favourite oxymorons is: a civil engineer.

Ludwig said;
So… does this make the Booleans illogical (and/or untruthful)?

Ahh well, if A+B did not = AB then you are not reading this as your
computer is not working.

This is not a pipe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MagrittePipe.jpg

Quite right, Poirot. A picture of a pipe is not a pipe.

Dear davidf,

If you would permit a small correction my good chap, a link to a picture of a pipe is not a pipe nor is it a picture of a pipe.

csteele,

If a picture of a pipe is a pictorial representation of a pipe - then is not a link to a pictorial representation of a pipe a link to a picture of a pipe?

Hasbeen, who let them out ?

Ah but my good friends, this IS a pipe…

and a picture of a pipe….

and a computer image of a pipe…

and a computer image of a picture of a pipe.

Bazz, I hope this thread has the conclusions of truth...:) Isnt that is what the constitutions of good-will that our four fathers spoke of, when Philosophy was once a free agent?

The Greek gods would be rolling in there graves:)

"With a world of suitable change, truth can be the right course of action as long as it doesn’t get in the way of life itself. Every Human-being understands their own perceptions of truth, however…as a collective, we know very little of it:)

Anthropology, philosophy……in mathematical terms…mmmmm….maybe truth is just a number:) Love to talk more, but I have a roast in the oven:)

PLANET

Engineers are tradesmen - not philosophers.
Mr Opinion,
The engineers I have to contend with are exactly the other way round.

"""
What is truth?
"""

Something politicians are incapable of, pipe or no pipe.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Ahh, Planet Truth = 1, untruth = 0
Unless it Hasbeen, he, inverted, then untruth = 1 & truth = 0

Ludwig,

This is not a pipe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MagrittePipe.jpg

I have to agree with Mr Opinion on the subject of the humanities at university. If what Hasbeen says is correct - that our university humanities departments teach that everyone's truth is equal - it is my experience that what they mean is "equally flawed".

I have spent quite a bit of time studying humanities at university, and the basic principle I have been taught is that there is one single truth that is distorted by a number of different perceptions of that truth. Individuals' biases, as well as their access (or lack of access) to information, cause them to misreport the truth. Thus we cannot place absolute faith in one person's account of an event, a trend, a people or a movement. Certainly, we can place considerable trust in scientifically-supported evidence - carbon dating and so forth - but that evidence is contextualised by documentary evidence which quite often skews it. Thus, as Mr Opinion tells us, history and archaeology (I'm not so sure about sociology - it gets under my skin with its PC overtones) is about the search for that single truth that lies buried under layers of distortions.

Perhaps Hasbeen is right, though, when talking about disciplines like ethics and philosophy. My experience in those fields is far shallower, but it seems to me that they revolve around irritating processes of nitpicking, ultimately aiming to prove that we know nothing and there is no truth whatsoever. I don't have a lot of time for them.

Otokonoko,

I agree with you.

There is an objective truth/reality which gets distorted by people's bias'.

There is also the objective truth/reality that 'dare not speak its name' due to the machinations of the pc 'thought police.'

Academia is not the place for this type of indulgence. Academia should be the place where rigour of research and fearless and objective analysis takes place.

The poet J.W. Goethe on “truth” (from his “Faust”; since I do not think the English translation I found on the internet does it justice, I have included the original for German speakers):

Die wenigen, die was davon erkannt,
Die töricht g'nug ihr volles Herz nicht wahrten,
Dem Pöbel ihr Gefühl, ihr Schauen offenbarten,
Hat man von je gekreuzigt und verbrannt.

(The few who any thing thereof have learned,
Who out of their heart's fulness needs must gabble,
And show their thoughts and feelings to the rabble,
Have evermore been crucified and burned.)

Dear Poirot,

In homage and answer to Rene who wrote “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe?” I offer the following;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MagrittePip.jpg

;)

Dear individual,

Are you being sarcastic?

If not, and you really believe engineers are philosophers instead of tradesmen, could you please enlighten us on what subjects engineers are trained in that makes them seekers of knowledge?

One form of definition is the statement, A is B. However, all statements of the form, A is B, are not definitions since the verb, is, has many meanings. Where 'is' means equivalence A is B may be may be a definition.

"Green is the colour on the visual spectrum with a wave length of 530 millimicrons." is a definition of green. It is a definition since B is A makes equal sense. It is also a truth. That type of truth is a tautology. A tautology states an equivalence relationship. This is the way truth is used in mathematics. A mathematical proof proceeds from equivalence relationships.

The Bible uses the word, truth, as neither a definition nor a provable statement.

Luke 9:27 But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.

The above is a prediction. The prediction was false since the kingdom of God has not arrived, and we can assume that all standing there are now dead. The speaker was not lying because he could have believed in what he predicted. Nevertheless the prediction was false.

That kind of truth is also found in Marxism which makes the prediction that there will eventually be a classless society. I cannot prove that prediction is false, but I have no reason to believe it is true.

In John 8:32 we find “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Here truth is neither a tautology, a provable statement nor a demonstrable fact. It is belief. One of the meanings of truth is belief.

Belief is neither a tautology, a provable statement nor a demonstrable fact, but it is confused with them. I think it is best for me to get along without that kind of truth.

Except for mathematics, demonstrable facts and tautologies I will operate on the basis of the most plausible explanations and not engage in a search for truths that purport to explain everything as found in religions and prescriptive ideologies.

I believe, as usual, that david f is correct.

Turning to the earlier topic and to rephrase Herbert Morrison (who by the way is 107)... "Oh, the philosophy!"

Regardless of whether it 'is' a 'not pipe', it is a pipe that can be used by a non-smoker in a no smoking area.

Are you being sarcastic?
Mr Opinion,
No I'm not sarcastic at all. Those engineers I am forced to co-operate with (if I don't I don't have a job) are literally inexperienced, devoid of practical sense, egoistical gits. Not just one or two but literally the majority have no practical sense whatsoever. Those who actually are capable of producing good work are very few indeed. The majority are mere hangers-on who get employed simply because idiotic Govt policy stipulates that consulting engineers are to sign everything off. No question about their competence is ever asked. All they require is a few Uni degrees & they've got all over any other competent builder or mechanic etc. Those degrees have cost all of you many millions of wasted Dollars over the years simply because our even more incompetent bureaucrats do net question the competence of someone with a Uni degree. For some idiotic reason a Uni degree instantly places an engineer above all practical & common sense. That is exactly the reason for having so many infrastructure problems & associated expenses. I recently had a case where about an hour of manual work could have solved a long standing problem yet the consulting engineers insisted on spending 100 Grand & we still have the same problem. Even tough I physically proved that the one hour job works they still wouldn't give in. Now we'll have to spend more of your tax dollars to fix the problem plus give these morons another handsome payout for their own stuff-ups. That is a fact!

It's a good question.

The very variability of answers in this thread shows how difficult it is to get mankind to agree on anything.

But on the other hand, they can't all be right because they contradict each other. They could all be wrong. But I think truth is possible, and not just in mathematics, for the following reasons.

There's two ways of looking at it. The truths of mathematics seem to be binding on us. We can't think how they could be any other way. (That doesn't mean they're "absolutely" true of course. They could only be true relative to themselves.)

Mathematics is perhaps the model of discourse in which statements can be known and demonstrated to be true or false. Any other statement seems obviously false. But why? What is it about mathematical truths that seems to command such universal acceptance? By acceding so, are we admitting that there is a direct connection between mathematical truths, and objective reality? Or is it just self-defining?

But my point is, don't the truths of mathematics and logic underlie other truths about social life?

For example, if we put fertiliser on a field, its productivity will increase - up to a point. After that, it doesn't matter how much you put on, it's not going to increase productivity.

Therefore nature imposes limits on human action. And these limits are, in theory, logically knowable as truths, because we can apply logic to known axioms.

We accept that axioms, logical deductions, and valid conclusions are possible in geometry and mathematics.

The same must be true in respect of human action because nature imposes knowable limits on human action, e.g. action takes place in time. Therefore we are capable of truthful statements in respect of human action.

C'est certainement un tuyau mon cher Poirot !

It is certainly a pictorial representation of a pipe, Ludwig.

But it's not "a pipe".

If it was a pipe you would be able to stuff it with tobacco, light it, and sit back and have a good long puff.

Humanities subjects do serve a purpose. They are not just discussions about 'all truths being equal'.

While there might be a tendency to over-complicate it is good for people to re-examine their stance on various topics from time to time (without overdoing the navel gazing or pontificating for inordinate lengths of time).

One truth we can be certain about is that 'belief' is not truth even if people couch their beliefs in terms of 'their truth'.

Beliefs or opinions are shaped over time and influenced by upbringing, experiences and I would imagine genetic disposition.

We can see that belief or adherence to a political party tends to obscure truth with rarely bipartisan commentary on fora like OLO or in the media.

pelican,
I believe it to be the truth when people say Labor is incompetent.

david f
>>Luke 9:27 But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.<<

Unless one interprets “taste of death” and “seeing the kingdom of God” in terms accessible through (scientific) verification, and “till” as referring to measurable time, the prediction (actually a promise of “salvation in afterlife”) is not false but non-falsifiable, even meaningless.

One cannot decide about the truthfulness or not of a statement if one does not take its words in the context they are meant. This is especially so if this meaning clashes with their everyday meaning. (Like you cannot tell whether a statement about Hilbert spaces is true or not, if by “space” you understand only that what you are looking for if you want to park your car.)

As for John 8:32, it refers to the religious meaning of the word truth, that I mentioned above, so you are right to connect it with belief, or rather faith, meaningless to non-believers who, indeed, can “get along without that kind of truth”.

Dear individual,

I do not understand your position on engineers. One minute you are holding them up as philosophers and the next minute you are debasing them as dimwits.

Can we agree that they are not philosophers and are dimwits?

Dear Poirot,

My apologies at the rather droll humour. I had imagined you saying the following;

“The famous link. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my link?”

So I did.

Humour and truth are often in the eye of the beholder.

csteele,

Strangely enough, I was just about to say:

"The famous link. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my link?"

You did!....(very clever:)

Poirot, that old chap Magritte must have been a tad off his rocker to have produced an illustration of a smoking pipe and then titled it ‘This is not a pipe’!

It IS a pipe…. unambiguously.

He was a surrealist. But he took this one too far. Because it IS a pipe that he illustrated. His painting IS of a pipe. It IZZ a pipe!!

Uhh... now my head hurts!! ( :>|

Oi, Ludwig,

"His painting IS of a pipe."

Yup.

But his painting isn't a pipe - it's a painting.

: )

Dear Ludwig,

One must be aware what one is dealing with. 2 + 2 = 4 is only a definition based on the previous definitions of +, =, 2 and 4. It is not a fact in itself. It is based on the definition of the four symbols involved for starters. We assume that we are operating in a decimal number system, but that assumtion is not always true.

2 + 2 = 4 can be regarded as a theorem based on the axiomatic definitions of 2, 4, =, + and the number base in which the arithmatical sysytem is set.

In natural language we use shortland as implicit meanings are usually understood. You might say that you are Ludwig. Of course you are not really Ludwig. Ludwig is merely your olo pseudonym. You are no more Ludwig than your house is the address of the house. The name of a thing is not the thing named.

David your last post is absolute confirmation that we should shut down, at least half the departments in our universities.

If we are really nice, we should build a nice big sand pit, for all the staff from those closed departments to sit & play with themselves, & that is the truth.

Dear Hasbeen,

Your sort of thinking belongs to the Middle Ages.

You would have made a great church official in charge of the Dept of Geocentricity and Flat Earth Technology.

Don't worry Hasbeen, when the crunch comes their money will disappear
anyway and the only faculties will be in agriculture ! Hi !

Ludwig,

I'm also thinking that if you asked me to give you a pipe....and I handed you a painting of a pipe - would you then consider that I had handed you a pipe?

david f,
I agree.
2+2=4 is a logical conclusion of the Peano exioms for n atural numbers, hence if you accept these, 2+2 = 4 is a statement that is formally true.

Dear Hasbeen,

I picked that stuff up from hanging around street corners. You just haven't found the right street corners.

First – 42…. The answer provided by Douglas Adams. That is the correct answer (I hold no proof nor offer opinion regarding its truth).

As regards science (engineers included), these are practitioners in the skill of applying previously validated (not truthful) hypothesis/theory, through experimentation. These hypothesis/theory are then applied with the expectation results will be consistent and continue to validate the previously mentioned hypothesis/theory.

There is no ‘truth’, simply the application of knowledge to future problems. The empirical study and application of information to further expand the knowledge in each field to which knowledge is assigned. Hence, personally, why I never consider economics a science but simply an art (this is opinion, not truth).

As regards ‘the humanities’ or ‘the arts’ here, I propose, we find a body of thoughts on matters which may be described as an exploration of human thought, creativity, interaction and social structure.

Are they relevant? I would propose yes. The exploration of the universe is not and should not (in my opinion, not truth) be constrained to the physical. The impact of human thought, beliefs and social interaction on our lives suggests an understanding is required or at least worked towards (or explored for those who believe there is and never has been understanding). Why? So to better know our selves and in doing so, improve our selves. Or so I believe (again, I hold out no truth).

On Jesus. If it works for you, that is good. If it is ‘truth’ for you, so much the better. Is it universal truth? Not until the whole of the universe agrees with you.

On ‘the pipe’. I would propose each perception and attached self imposed definition leads to your own answer. Again, until the whole of the universe agrees with, it is not universal.

For the record, I feel the image depicts what may be considered a pipe but as it is an artists interpretation, it is not in fact ‘a pipe’ but a rendition of a pipe, with all that the word ‘rendition’ implies to me.

One problem in talking about truth is that the word has a multiplicity of meanings. George agrees that truth as mentioned in the Bible does not mean demonstrable fact, a logical conclusion or a tautology. However, I would not deny that it is truth even though I don't subscribe to that particular truth. One problem is that some conflate the meanings and say that one kind of truth is the same as another kind of truth. Therein lies confusion.

One answer to the question, "What is truth?" is that truth is a word with many meanings.

I concur with Reason's line of thought.

People study humanities / the arts in order to understand what it is to be human in all of its manifestations.

If one is only concerned with the pragmatic things in the world then study the sciences or do one of the trade degrees that will get one into a job as an engineer, lawyer, architect, etc.

On the pipe dilemma: for those who know, it's just another example of semiotics. An area within humanities / the arts that most people would not tend to come into contact with during their lifetime unless they are doing anthropology, etc.

Agreed david f; one must take into account the definitions of all symbols involved when one is asserting that something is the truth.

I think it is pretty reasonable to assume that the symbols +, =, 2 and 4 are well enough understood, to the extent that one CAN assert that 2 + 2 = 4 in arithmetical terms.

Thus, this IS an example of a hard and fast truth.

If someone wants to apportion a different definition to what is universally understood to any of these symbols, then of course that truth may no longer apply.

Poirot, a similar sort of thing applies when you are looking an illustration or a computer screen and saying; ‘that is a pipe’ or ‘that is not a pipe’.

If you take it for granted that you are looking at an image, then you can assert that you are looking at a pipe. If you don’t take for granted that you are looking at an image rather than the real thing, then you can assert that it isn’t a pipe, but rather, is an image of a pipe.

But it is bleedingly obvious that it is an illustration and computer-generated image that we have been looking at. With that in mind, and with no need to mention it because it is so obvious, we CAN indeed assert that what we are looking at is a pipe… just as we don’t need to question the meaning of +, =, 2 or 4.

.

Here is my understanding of truth

.

I see truth as information which has not been voluntarily deformed at the time of emission. Or should I say it is whatever version of reality, thought, ideas, qualia, dreams, or imagination a particular individual is capable of perceiving or experiencing and subsequently transmitting without voluntarily deforming it.

In this definition, truth and the object of truth (reality, thought, ideas, qualia etc…) are totally different entities. Truth is simply the absence of intent to voluntarily deform information concerning the object of truth.

That, of course, does not exclude the involuntary deformation of information concerning the object of truth. To such an extent, that the information that is emitted may be totally erroneous but perfectly truthful.

There are as many truths as there are observers and each one may be completely different from all the others, though each observer is telling the truth from his or her particular perspective, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I see truth as a perfectly subjective notion.

Our initial perception may be false. We may incorrectly interpret what we perceive. Shock or prejudice may prevent us from correctly registering what we perceive. We may suffer a lapse of memory at the time of transmitting the information. We may not employ the correct expressions or be sufficiently precise in relaying the information. Our body language may be inconsistent with our oral expression, etc. All these and many other factors may possibly result in the involuntary deformation of information concerning the object of truth.

The star we claim to see may have disappeared from the heavens millions of years ago. That does not alter the fact that we are telling the truth in claiming to see it. Truth is not reality in this instance.

Truth is a horizon that keeps its distance no matter where we turn and what strategy we adopt in order to approach it.

For there to be truth, somebody must emit information. If there is nobody around to do that, there can be no truth. No human being, no truth.

.

If one wants to be precise, 2+2 does not have to be 4:

2 + 2 = 1 if 0, 1, 2 are seen as members of a ring of characteristic 3, (and + and = have the usual meaning). In high school mathematics this would read 2+2=1 mod 3.

Of course, natural numbers - as formally defined by the Peano axioms - form a ring of characteristic 0, and they are the useful mathematical model for doing everyday counting. The same as Euclidean geometry is the useful mathematical model for doing everyday geometry, i.e. measurements. Both are “models” that our minds arrives at directly, relying only on our sense perception.

Nevertheless, speculations that lead people to imagine rings of characteristic other than zero, or non-Euclidean geometry, found a posteriori applications in science (physics). This is what Eugene Wigner called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

Banjo Paterson,

I agree with your last two paragraphs (I am not sure I understand the rest), but I think one must be careful not to confuse “truth” with “information” since both have a number of possible meanings (and although there is information science, where information is defined as a scientific concept, there is no such thing as “truth science” only formal logic and philosophy of science).

Correction:

"natural numbers … form a ring of characteristic 0"

should, of course, read

"natural numbers … are part of the ring Z of integers which is of characteristic 0"

Correction:

"natural numbers … form a ring of characteristic 0"

should, of course, read

"natural numbers … are part of the ring Z of integers which is a ring of characteristic 0".

.

Dear George,

.

[I think one must be careful not to confuse “truth” with “information”]

I am pleased to note that we agree that all information is not truth.

On the other hand, it is my view is that all truth is information, but only that information which has not been deliberately deformed.

.

Dear Banjo,

All truth is not information. My grandfather used to say, "Today, it will either rain or not rain." The sentence is analytic. An analytic sentence is true under all circumstances but provides no information.

.

Dear David F

.

How right you are. Your grandfather spoke but he did not say anything. He did not communicate any information.
No information, no truth.

.

Dear Banjo,

>>it is my view is that all truth is information, but only that information which has not been deliberately deformed.<<

I appreciate that you present these things as a subjective view; neither can I offer anything but my personal view on these abstract concepts (except where mathematics is concerned, although even there I managed a silly blunder).

I am not sure what you would mean by “deliberately deformed” if you used the term “information” in its contemporary sense as a sequence of symbols from an input-output alphabet (as described e.g. in Wikipedia under that name).

As for truth, as I said, I prefer not to use that tern at all, and speak instead of ”true (or truthful) statements” (except for a religious context, but even there I prefer not to analyse the concept). For instance, david f grandfather’s statement is true by default (it is a tautology), irrespective of how you “define truth”.

Dear Banjo,

My grandfather spoke truth without information. His statement was true but contained no information. His statement was logically consistent and did not contradict facts. Therefore it was true. Truth need not contain information.

To all those who are not fortunate enough to be arts graduates may I suggest that you enrol yourself into an epistemology class if you are interested in the topic of this thread instead of trying to reinvent the Cartesian wheel.

<< Truth need not contain information >>

What an interesting concept, david f!

I can’t see how that could possibly be true. Surely if there is no information, then there can be no truth or falseness about it.

<< “Today, it will either rain or not rain” >> is a statement that DOES contain information, isn’t it?

Yep, Ludwig, I agree - it does contain information.

Perhaps we could say that all information has to be the truth.

Because anything that is not true has to be misinformation!

I'm sensing from the lack of response to my last two comments that:

THE TRUTH CAN HURT.

Dear Ludwig,

What do you know that you didn't know before after hearing that statement? It contains no information that I can see, but it is certainly true.

"What is truth?" is a question which implies epistemology. Truth is a word with many meanings. The questioner could have made a statement containing the word, truth, and started a discussion of its meaning in the context of that particular statement, but he didn't.

"Through a point not on a line one and only one line can be drawn not intersecting the given line."

"Through a point not on a line no lines can be drawn not intersecting the given line."

"Through a point not on a line an infinite number of lines can be drawn not intersecting the given line."

The above statements are contradictory as they are. However, there are all axiomatic embedded in the appropriate logical system. The first statement applies to Euclidean geometry, the second to spherical geometry and the third to hyperbolic geometry.

Tautologies or equivalence statements are absolute truths.

That answers the original question.

<< What do you know that you didn't know before after hearing that statement? It contains no information that I can see >>

Ah but it does contain a lot of information, david f.

It tells me that this person could be somewhat mentally or intellectually challenged! ( :>)

It tells me that they had uttered a statement that contains eight words and thirty letters!

It tells me the sex of the speaker, the presence or absence of an accent, and provides information about age and demeanour. It contains all sorts of information, not pertaining to the meaning of the statement!

Now, if we knew whether the lines in question are straight or not, and whether they are of finite lengths or not, and whether we are operating in two or three dimensions, we would know which one of your three options is the truth… in all forms of geometry, would we not?

For example, if the line was straight and of infinite length, then you could only draw one straight line of infinite length that would not intersect it… if you were operating in two dimensions only. In three dimensions, you’d have an infinite number of possible lines.

So, once you have defined the parameters, you can assert hard and fast truths. Truth is thus not a word with many meanings. It has one meaning. And it can be asserted once we are confident that we know exactly what the parameters and definitions are.

This is fun.

Surely David's grandfather's statement contains information without any absolute truths.

If he were an astronaut on the moon which has zero precipitation and therefore no possibility of rain then his comment would be nonsense, which would in turn possibly convey information about his state of mind or sense of humour. Therefore we assume he is on the surface of a planet with the possibility of rain, probably Earth.

If instead he said “Today we will either suffer catastrophic decompression from a meteor strike or we won't” then a quite different set of information is being conveyed. It is just our familiarisation with the assumptions implicit in the statement about rain that lets us think no information is being delivered.

I know this cheats a little but as an aside did any of you know before now that David's grandfather was capable of speech, or that he was still alive when David could converse with him?

Doesn't quantum physics tell us that ultimately knowledge of absolute truths are the luxury of the gods or any entity capable of seeing the future.

Even our mathematics are just a way for our species to describe the rules of the universe. Who knows how an intelligent alien race might approach the science but one imagines it would look very different to ours.

Dear Ludwig,

We are back to the picture of the pipe. The number of letters or phrasing is merely the form in which the statement is put. That has nothing to do with the information contained in the statement. If the statement were translated into Italian the words and the number of words and letters would be quite different, but the information content would be the same - nil. Information content should not vary with an accurate translation. My grandfather was quite an alert old guy, and he repeated the statement every day in a ritualistic manner more or less because we expected him to do so. You are talking about the statement rather than the information contained in the statement. The information contained in a statement is independent of language, form or the mental disposition of the person making the statement.

Dear Ludwig,

To Poirot's pipe.

Scientist found that to hand rear a particular species of gull chicks they could not just put the food in front them and expect them to eat. They tried holding the food above their heads to mimic how their parents would have fed them but still no joy. Then one tried painting a peg yellow, attaching a pair of paper eyes to it and holding the meat in the end of the peg. Hey presto it worked. The chicks all sat there, mouths agape, screeching for their food.

For them there was a line crossed where the abstraction became mum.

Now imagine our painting done in a looser style where only 95% of the population recognises it as a pipe, is it still a pipe? What about 50%, or even just 5%? At what stage does is it not a pipe?

In truth there was no mother gull just as there was no pipe. Human or bird perceptions do not make abstractions reality.

That was not a pipe.

;)

Got another email today & I'm leaving it to you OLOers to make up your mind re
what is truth.
Mind you, this is general conversation on Cape York.

The sad thing about this is that when Ipswich flooded none of those residents was allowed to go to the air force base, it was considered too risky. Keep in mind that no one lives on Amberley base these days, but has huge amounts of accommodation, an officer's mess kitchen ( now unused) a movie theatre, could have helped with the kids. Endless source of water, electricity and room for vehicles... But NO, they were not allowed to go there, but Muslims that have disrespected our Air Force base in Weipa are allowed to stay.

WHAT IS GOING ON in this country?

Received this info from a friend of a friend who drives the pilot boat in Weipa:-

Three hundred boat people have been housed at RAAF Sherger Air Base in Weipa.

All are being accepted into Australia .
All are men.

All receive the pension same as our pensioners – all get the same amount again for hardship payment – this equals twice what our pensioners get.

All receive fifty dollars a day for spending money.

Security staff employed to watch them.

Chefs employed to feed them (one quarter of a tonne of chicken a day alone is cooked).

They won't pick up their own rubbish.

There was a massive dispute because they didn't like the radio station.

Another dispute because batteries were flat for the Nintendo games.

Tents set up for mosque prayers had to be air conditioned.

The Bores/Wells set up to run RAAF Sherger adequately are now dry because taps are left running all day long.

Sewerage systems now blocked with condoms (??) supplied to them (and all of them are men remember)

Dept of Immigration & Citizenship (DIAC) wants Dept of Defence to pay all the bills so they can hide the costs of allowing three hundred refugees into the country from taxpaying Australians.

Australia needs to know.

Can we agree that they are not philosophers and are dimwits?
Mr Opinion,
sorry about the late reply but I've been out in Telstra Country (no coverage) again, only just got back.
The answer to your question is yes, the majority are dimwits & also pseudo philosophers.
A very small number of engineering Uni graduates are actually proud owners of any level of competence. The majority are from my experience a gross waste of our tax money.

Dear individual,

Hearing news like this makes me want to sit down and write a book: The Country That Was Australia.

David f, the key thing is that the parameters be defined and that the meanings of everything involved be concise. Once you have these prerequisites, you can indeed assert truth.

The actual words, letters or language and all possible alternate meanings of all words, terms and phrases, become inconsequential once you know concisely what is being asserted.

<< The information contained in a statement is independent of language, form or the mental disposition of the person making the statement. >>

The information pertaining to the intent of the statement might be independent of these things, but there is other information contained in all statements, as I outlined in my last post. And some of this information will differ with different words or language.

( :> |

A yellow peg with attached paper eyes does not a mother gull make!!

Csteel, I doubt whether there would be a person on the planet who would assert that this peg IS a mother gull! It is obviously a very crude imitation of mum gull, good enough for the chicks, but not good enough for even the dumbest human to be fooled by it!

But as for that old Belgian codger Magritte’s pipe; it is definitely a pipe! Obviously it is an illustration. Then once we all understand that, which everyone does straight away, then we can assert that it is a pipe! And I doubt that there would be a person on the planet who would say that it isn’t!

Whether you call it an illustration of a pipe or you call it a pipe while knowing full well that it is an illustration and not the actual object, but also knowing that this is so obvious that you don’t need to say it, is surely moot.

Surrealists and abstract artists do have the habit of making things less than obvious. So a lot of the time they might paint an object but make it a bit cryptic, in which case you can’t really assert that it is the object that it might appear to be.

I can assert that the sun is shining where I am right now. But there are very thin white clouds around. If one comes across the sun, I am not actually sure whether I could say that the sun is still shining, partly shining or not shining. But the undeniable truth is that it IS shining right now, here on Aldinga Beach, Adelaide.

There are shades of grey all over the place.

But Magritte’s pipe is crystal clear.

It IS a pipe. It IZZ a pipe. IT IZZZZ A PIPE!! !! !! { :>0

Dear Ludwig,

It is apparent that the concept of a name or depiction of an object is not the object named or depicted is a difficult concept for you to make explicit. You are not alone in that difficulty even though I am sure that implicitly you understand it.

A computer memory has various cells which contain numbers. Each cell has an address. If we want to place a number in the cell or examine a number that is in the cell we must refer to the memory address. A command might be equivalent to: Place the contents of cell 302 in cell 857. The address of cell 302 is not the same as the contents of cell 302. Beginning computer programmers may find this concept difficult. It is one cause of programming errors.

In the language we speak we need not make the distinction between the name or designation of an entity and the entity itself. We can be understood without clearly making the distinction. In looking at family photos someone may say, “That’s Uncle Harry in the backyard.” We know quite well that it is a picture and not actually Harry in the backyard because we get the meaning. We have taken a logical step that the machine language of a computer is unable to take. Magritte merely has made it explicit that a picture of an object is not the object that is pictured.

Some forms of magic depend on this confusion. A doll can be made to resemble a person, and pins are stuck in the doll. A person will not be affected by that if he or she does not know about it. However, if the person knows about it, believes that in some way there is an actual identity between himself or herself and the doll the person will be affected by it.

The mass where a wafer is assumed to somehow become the body and blood of Jesus is similar magic.

A pipe is a pipe. A picture of a pipe is not a pipe.

The mass where a wafer is assumed to somehow become the body and blood of Jesus is similar magic.

A pipe is a pipe. A picture of a pipe is not a pipe.
david f.
one is symbolical the other is fact. both of them are the truth.
just like an educated person is not necessarily intelligent but the uneducated blue collar worker is. that too is truth.

Dear Ludwig,

To paraphrase your good self without any slight being intended;

'Ludwig, I doubt whether there would be many on the planet who would assert that this pipe IS a pipe! It is obviously a very crude imitation of pipe, good enough some, but not good enough for even the dumbest humanities student to be fooled by it!'

The artist himself declared this was not a pipe.

We are telling you this is not a pipe.

Are you not being a tad gull-able?

Although perhaps in your dreams...but then this would make it a pipe dream.

Sorry.

To your sun. Given it takes about 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach out planet there is a chance that some quirk in the time continuum or quantum probability may have completely obliterated it from our universe, yet you remain blissfully unaware of its absence while making your assertion that “But the undeniable truth is that it IS shining right now, here on Aldinga Beach, Adelaide.”.

The best you can contend as an undeniable truth is that there is sunlight reaching you, not that the sun is shining right now. What you are experiencing is an image of something that may or may not be there.

Margritte's pipe may be entirely the product of his imagination with no actual model being used. Is the collection of brain cells that holds this stylised image of a pipe within his brain a pipe? No.

This is still not a pipe.

This is not Magritte.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wolleh_magritte.jpg

(but it is a photographic representation of him)

.

Dear David, George, and Ludwig,

.

Sorry to have taken so long to get back to you.

Of course if we examine David's grandfather's tautology as such (a pure exercise in logic) it is true.

However, pure exercises in logic do not exist in nature independently of mankind (as I think Ludwig was attempting to demonstrate).

David's initial presentation was: "my grandfather used to say ..." Understand: it amused him to appear to be making some profound reflection while, in fact, simply invoking the possibilities regarding rain today. In other words, he was simply joking.

However, if David's grandfather were to be taken seriously, the question is not whether the tautology is true or not but if David's grandfather was expressing his true thoughts or not.

If, for example, he had a long and intimate experience of the micro-climate of the region in which he lived and recognized all the signs which indicated that rain was imminent and, indeed, considered it was about to rain, then, in saying what he did, he "voluntarily deformed information at the time of emission". His statement, albeit a tautology, did not represent his intimate conviction and was, therefore, not the truth.

The fact that we can only agree with what David's grandfather said (the tautology) does not mean that it is the truth. The qualifying factor of truth is not the sense of a statement in itself (considered in isolation) but whether it corresponds, or not, to what the person making the statement ("emitting the information"), considers to be the truth, to the best of his knowledge and ability.

In the same manner that truth and reality are two different notions, truth and credibility are also two different notions, though we often have to settle for credibility as the best we can achieve at any particular point of time.

Regarding the term "information" which George mentioned, I understand it in a slightly broader sense than he suggests, as an intelligent system of signs and symbols designed to convey a message, including, for example, body language, which I think Ludwig also suggested.

.

Looks as though there's a new truth evolving here. One that's considering matters of frivolous debate over matters in society & economics & Law.

Yes Indi. I’ve had enough of all that ‘meaningful’ discussion. Truth is; this is MUUUUCH more fun!

The wages of life is death. An era of fun ends in a funeral.

<< This is not Magritte >>

But…but… I clicked on your link Poirot, and there he was!! As large as life and just as ugly!

How could that not be him?? ( :>|

Now, as well as being Magritte, it is also a photograph of Magritte, and a digitised image of a photograph of Magritte, and a computer image of a digitised image of a photograph of Magritte that I am looking at.

It is not a matter of it being only one of these things; it is a matter of it being ALL of them.

So um… you aren’t really Poirot, are you! { :>/

Maybe I should be truthful and call you Paspoirot from now on! ( :>)

Dear individual,

Do you like my oxymoron: a civil engineer.

Isn't that just truer than the truth?

Also, someone once told me: There are only two types of people who work as engineers: those who are mad and those who are going mad.

Another one of life's truths.

those who are mad and those who are going mad.
Mr opinion,
the acronym of the above eventually works out to be Australians.

<< The artist himself declared this was not a pipe >>

Yes csteele, he was so bored out of his silly little brain that he declared that his OBVIOUS illustration of a pipe was not a pipe! Poor fellow!

He produced a pretty nice image of a pipe (whether it was modelled on a real pipe or just drawn from his imagination / memory of what a pipe looks like is surely irrelevant). But he should have left it at that, coz he was no good at tautology or intellectual discussion…

…because it is a pipe. It IS a pipe! IT IZZSZZZZZSZZZSZSZZZZSZZZZSZ A PIPE !! ! !! ! !!

Uhhh!

Perhaps he was being a tad gullible with his pipe-dream of hearing people say en masse; ‘yes oh mighty master Magritte… it is not a pipe…it is not a pipe….it.. is… noooooooot…. a ….piiiipe! ( ;~/

Csteele, the sun IZZ shining brightly here at the moment (which reminds to get outta this café and back down on the beach before it gets too hot [37 in Adelaide today], seein as I am now a professional beachbum n all). Even if the sun had somehow been wiped out of existence five minutes ago, it is still shining where I am.

The shine is shining. That is the truth, whether or not it exists!! You could also say that the non-existent sun is shining, if you happened to know that it had just been obliterated. Both would be true!

In just the same way, some stars millions of lightyears away still shine their light into the telescopes of planet Earth, even though they turned into supernovae and exploded into smitherines perhaps a million years or more ago. These stars are shining. You could also say that these non-existent stars are shining. Both would be true, yes?

Ludwig,

Gawd your image of the pipe must have special qualities. What did it feel like. Was the bowl smooth? When you turned it over in your hands, did it catch the gleam of the setting sun. How much tobacco were you able to fit in the bowl. Did it light well? Was the aroma of the tobacco all that you imagined?

And did you ask Magritte how he came to think up his "image"? Was he forthcoming on the process? (My Magritte is merely an image - he's not actually there - but apparently your "Magritte" exists in flesh and animation)

Dear individual,

Given the number of murders and attempted murders taking place daily in Australia I think you may have a very good point.

Try this Ludwig, rotate it 90 degrees in your line of sight. Is it still a pipe? What if you rotate it 180 degrees? Is it still a pipe?

It's not a pipe. This is a pipe:

http://www.deltat.com/uploaded/In-Line_Pipe_Heater_from_Convectronics.JPG

Cheers,

Tony

Tony Lavis,
Wrong again ! That is a picture of a stainless steel pipe with a T-piece & a nipple & a bleed screw.
Actually it reminds of the Rudd/Gillard Governments. Polished on the outside but hollow on the inside & although you can see the light at the end of the pipe you still can't see anything because it's aimed at the sky !

Dear Ludwig,

In an average conversation on your beach it would be perfectly okay to refer to a picture of a pipe as a pipe. But this is a thread on 'Truth'.

Therefore it it perfectly appropriate to assert that a picture of a pipe is not truthfully a pipe but a representation of one.

And if one values truth then one would of course accept this assertion as fact, unless the midday sun had something to do with it. :)

Csteele, this IS indeed fun!

You say:

<< In an average conversation on your beach it would be perfectly okay to refer to a picture of a pipe as a pipe. But this is a thread on 'Truth'. >>

Oow, I must correct myself. You didn’t say that at all; you WROTE it! Hmm, I presume you can technically call typing something on a keyboard; writing! ( :>? [Wow, one has to be super-careful on this thread!]

This is indeed a fundamental point. What you are presumably saying is that there is often a difference between what we take as the truth in our everyday lives and what is technically the truth.

Well, I would put it to you that if something is generally accepted as the truth by the vast majority of people, but this actually differs from the technical truth, then perhaps the majority opinion should prevail….at least some of the time.

Example: Speed limits. Road safety has been one of my main subjects on OLO. One of my big gripes is that the speed limits, along with all manner of other road rules, are not policed at face value. What is true in technical terms is not true in the real world.

The road I have just driven on had an 80kmh speed limit. That’s the hard and fast truth, in technical terms. But in the real world, you are most unlikely to get booked unless you are doing ?8 or more over, and just about everyone does a few ks over. I let my speed actually slip just below 80 a couple of times, at which points the car behind me came up very close and demonstrated intolerance at my slow driving!!

In the real world, the speed limits are NOT what the signs say they are. The technical truth is false in practical terms! And the practical truth is the truth that counts in this instance.

continued

In an average conversation, one would look at Magritte’s pipe and have absolutely no hesitation in calling it a pipe. And in all probability those also looking at it would have no hesitation in agreeing. Only after being told what the title; ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ means, would they see that it could be interpreted as not being a pipe.

So…. if one values the absolute technical truth, and wants to make sure that they never say or assert anything that is not technically true, then they’d soon go mad…. if they weren’t already!!

Multiple truths can exist regarding just the same thing… if you change the parameters. As I said in an earlier post:

This IS a pipe…

and a picture of a pipe….

and a computer image of a pipe…

and a computer image of a picture of a pipe.

Ludwig,

3 out of 4 ain't bad.

...it's not a pipe.

Dear Ludwig,

The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second. For all practical purposes it is rounded out to 300,000,000 but technically the former matters as it is involved in setting a standard with the metre and the second.

The truth is it can never be 299,792,459 metres per second much less 300,000,000. We can never call the majority of those who round the figure up for ease correct or truthful about the speed of light, just human.

There are not multiple truths as you assert just plenty of close approximations that suffice as truths to make life easier until something absolute is required.

This thread is about the absolute truth therefore your pipe is not a pipe.

Dear Poirot,

Lol. Quite impish I must say. I think you are becoming a pipette.

In US slang "That's a pipe!" means that it's certain. "That's a pipe!" is short for, "That's a lead pipe cinch." I have no idea why a lead pipe cinch should mean certainty.

.

Dear David F,

.

"I have no idea why a lead pipe cinch should mean certainty."

.

Here are a few suggestions ...

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/lead-pipe-cinch.html

.

Dear Banjo,

Thank you for that.

Dear Paspoirot, my sweet little pipette, how can you say that three out of four are right?

Going by your very strict definition of ‘truth’, surely only one of my four assertions could be right.

And that is that it is a computer image of a picture of a pipe that we are looking at!

You say that there are three truths here. But csteele says that there are not multiple truths.

Who’s right? (Of course, I think you are both wrong)

Ludwig,

There's no contradiction.

Picture or image, whichever way it's generated, is what you've got.

But it is not a pipe.

Dear Ludwig,

My mistake. When I said Poirot was becoming a pipette it doesn't then follow that she is now one.

I should know by now I need to be careful around your good self.

I referred to a pipette because her post to you was beautifully succinct and measured to a tee, plus the play on 'pipe' made it impossible to resist.

And impish because I'm sure I saw the glint in her eye from here.

Poirot is not a pipette.

Now to your statement; “These stars are shining. You could also say that these non-existent stars are shining. Both would be true, yes?”

Relatively yes but absolutely? Of course not.

If you were to visit a gallery to view Magritte's picture of a pipe you might claim that as it hangs on the wall it is being perfectly still. That would be true in relative terms, particularly in relation to yourself, but it is not the absolute truth. It happens to be moving at great velocity around the Earth's axis which in turn rotates around our Sun at high speed which is also moving as our galaxy rotates etc.

There is only on absolute truth, the picture is not perfectly still.

Dear csteele,

I thought the picture was a still life.

Actually there is no absolute frame of reference in the universe so whether the picture is still or moving is dependent on the frame of reference. There is no absolute truth about its motion as its motion is dependent on the frame of reference.

Having checked online with the LA County Museum of Art, the frame of reference for 'The treachery of images' is a simple wooden longnose ogee with mitred corners.

I always found 'still life' oxymoronic... if what was depicted really was still it couldn't be described as quick so wouldn't it be dead?

But it would be true to say it was 'still dead'.

<< There's no contradiction >>

But Poirot, if you adamantly assert that it is not a pipe, then by exactly the same reasoning, it is not a picture of a pipe either that we have looked at.

We have looked only a computer-generated image of a picture of a pipe, have we not?

Or if you consider a computer-generated image to be a picture, then it would be a picture of a picture of a pipe!

Going by your super-strict interpretation of the truth, we could only call it a picture of a pipe if we were standing in front of Magritte’s original artwork.

Any other reproduction, in a magazine or on television for example, would be a picture of a picture of a pipe.

Csteele, I note that you didn’t comment on my statement:

< You [Poirot] say that there are three truths here. But csteele says that there are not multiple truths. >

But at the end of your last post, you say:

<< There is only on absolute truth >>

So… do you agree with me that Poirot is not correct when she said… er … wrote… that;

<< 3 out of 4 ain't bad >>?

Do you agree that by her reasoning and yours that what we have been looking at could only be a computer-generated image of a picture of a pipe…and not a picture of a pipe, per se?

Ludwig,

It's an "image".

It's a "picture".

Frankly it's just semantics you're playing at.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/image?fromAsk=true&o=100074

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/picture?s=t

But it's not a pipe.

<< There is only on absolute truth, the picture is not perfectly still. >>

Yes it is!!

Csteele, if Magritte’s wonderful work of art is hanging on some wall in some gallery somewhere, then it is in all probability perfectly still!!

Compared to its surroundings, it would not be moving. And this would be the parameter in which most people would consider its stillness or non-stillness!

Sure, if you compare it to the sun or the centre of the Milky Way or to the Andromeda galaxy, it is not still…. and is actually hooting along at a mind-blowingly huge speed!

So again, there are multiple truths here, depending on how you define the parameters.

There is often more than one truth!! !! !!

Dear Ludwig,

Leaving aside davidf's observation for the sake of the exercise I reiterate my earlier point;

“There are not multiple truths as you assert just plenty of close approximations that suffice as truths to make life easier until something absolute is required.”

There are no inconsistencies with your latest post.

To say the picture is absolutely still might not be considered a 'close approximation' but it is designed to make life easier. And yes relative to the wall it is stuck on the picture is still and thus able to be described in this manner. However if we require an absolute truth about the stillness or otherwise of the painting then the explanation about its trajectory in space is required.

On the subject of the being stationary (or not):

Here's some thought-provoking stuff from Brian Greene in "The Fabric of the Cosmos".

On gravity and acceleration being equivalent:

"...Right now you feel gravity's influence. If you are standing, you feel the floor supporting your weight. If you are sitting you feel the support somewhere else....you probably think that you are stationary--that you are not accelerating or even moving at all. But according to Einstein you actually are accelerating....Since gravity and acceleration are equivalent, if you feel gravity's influence, you must be accelerating..."

(Greene earlier used a character called "Barney" jumping into an evacuated airless shaft as an example)

"When Barney jumps from his window into the evacuated shaft, we would ordinarily describe him as accelerating down toward the earth's surface. But this is not a description Einstein would agree with. According to Einstein, Barney is "not" accelerating. He feels no force. He is weightless....He provides the standard against which all motion should be compared...From Barney's perspective as he freely falls by your window...you and the earth and all the other things we usually think of as stationary are accelerating upward.....

Clearly this is a radically different way of thinking about motion. But it's anchored in the simple recognition that you feel gravity's influence only when you resist it. By contrast, when you fully give in to gravity you don't feel it. Assuming you are not subject to any other influences (such as air resistance) when you give into gravity and allow yourself to fall freely, you feel as you would if you were freely floating in empty space--a perspective which, unhesitatingly, we consider to be unaccelerated.

In sum, only those individuals who are freely floating, regardless of whether they are in the depths of outer space or on a collision course with the earth's surface, are justified in claiming that they are experiencing no acceleration."

In physics, “experiencing no acceleration” means you are moving with an inertial system (a frame of reference within which bodies are not accelerated unless acted upon by external forces). By physics I mean classical physics or special relativity; the case is more complicated in general relativity.

This is different from "being stationary", a term that (in physics) makes sense only in the sense of stationary WITH RESPECT TO something, some frame of reference. There are many inertial systems that are not stationary with respect to each other.

The motion of any object in the universe is seen differently according to the frame of reference chosen. The difference may be too small to measure, but the motion that we see differs with each observer. If we assume the frame of reference is ourselves an object that we see at rest is at rest with respect to ourself. That does not mean we have stated a truth. We merely have chosen a particular frame of reference. If we assume the frame of reference is the sun the earth and all on it are moving through space around the sun with the additional motion that objects may be moving with respect to the earth. We can assume any point in space is a frame of reference. Some comments on this string have confused the choice of a particular frame of reference with a truth.

If we use the earth as a frame of reference we can say the sun goes around the earth. At one time people did, and a complicated path of the sun could be calculated from that assumption.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle tells about the path computed under that assumption. However, we choose to use the sun as the frame of reference and assume that the earth goes around the sun. If we do that the path of the earth's motion is much simpler. It is an ellipse, and we can compute the motion using the Newtonian laws of motion and the Newtonian law gravity so we say that the earth goes around the sun. In doing so we ignore the fact that our solar system is part of a galaxy and the entire solar system is moving with respect to the center of that galaxy. It is reasonable to do this since the sun is by far the most massive body close to the earth, and the effects of the other celestial bodies on the earth's motion is very small with respect to that of the sun.

However, there are not multiple truths merely multiple frames of reference which can be chosen.

Dear david f,

Nicely explained, I think, except for

>>We can assume any point in space is a frame of reference.<<

I think you mean “any position” or something like that, since a frame - fixing a coordinate system with respect to which you do your measurements and calculations - is obviously not given by just a point but about the point plus a triple (quadruple in case of special relativity) of linearly independent vectors.

In classical (and that of special relativity) mechanics there is a privileged class of frames of reference, called inertial, with respect to which physical laws of mechanics are mathematically simple and formally the same irrespective of which one such frame (coordinate system) you use do express them in.

This is theory, and you have shown that in practice the frame associated with our sun is much closer to being an inertial system than the one associated with our earth.

Of course, “truth” (whatever one means by that in theoretical physics) has nothing to do with the choice of a frame of reference or coordinate system.

Dear George,

One problem with this discussion is that truth is a word with many meanings. You got the point of my post which was the arbitrary choice of reference point which you made clear has to be supported by other data has probably nothing to do with the truth which the originator of this string talked about. So I ask RandomGuy who started this string, "What do you mean by truth?"

Dear david f,

>>"What do you mean by truth?”<<

I think, after all, the best answer is obtained by replacing “time” with “truth” in the following quote from Augustin’s Confessions:

“What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”

Whenever something is stationary or moving, it has to be with respect to something else, as George says.

So, Magritte’s painting is both moving and not moving, with respect to the sun and the wall, respectively!

There are thus multiple truths about whether it is moving or not.

Einstein's notion that if you are in free-fall, you could be considered to not be moving, while everything else around you is moving with respect to you, is very simple and logical.

In just the same way, I often feel as though I am not moving while driving down the highway at 100kmh, while it is the landscape that is moving past me.

<< …there are not multiple truths merely multiple frames of reference which can be chosen >>

David f, there is only one truth for each fully defined frame of reference, or parameter as I have referred to it. But there can be multiple truths if you don’t define the parameters.

Thus, there are multiple truths as to whether Magritte’s work of art is moving or not, but only one truth as to whether it is moving with respect to the wall that it is hanging on.

<< …truth is a word with many meanings >>

I can’t see how this could be true! What we have been pursuing in this discussion is the absolute truth. And in order to do that, we must have a crystal clear understanding of truth itself is, yes?

So again I would say that there is only one meaning of ‘truth’, only one truth for each set of parameters and often multiple truths for simple statements in which the parameters are left undefined.

Hmmm, there is only one truth for any set of parameters? Maybe there could be multiple truths if the parameters are not defined enough to lead to only one truth??

For example; Magritte’s artwork is probably moving relative to the wall, if you consider the probability that the wall vibrates to some extent due to the hustle and bustle of the city around it, and the artwork vibrates differently as a result of the same forces.

For that matter, there is surely some movement at the atomic level when comparing atoms in the wall to atoms in the painting. And then there are electrons within atoms which are apparently constantly moving!

So, with the parameter of ‘with respect to the wall’, we could say that there are still multiple truths as to whether old Rene Magritte’s pipe is moving or not!!

So then, there is only one truth for each fully defined set of parameters but there could be multiple truths for partly defined parameters!

.

Dear David, George and Ludwig,

.

Many living species are capable of truth and deceit. Nature appears to have developed this capacity in them as a defense or ruse in their struggle for survival.

However, not all living species have this capacity. Innate objects are not capable of truth or deceit either. They are not capable of deforming the image they project of reality. They are neither truthful nor deceitful.

Nor is there any morality in nature - no good nor bad. - just whatever is the most efficient for survival and development.

Truth is not reality, nor is it synonymous with reality. The two notions are different but, regrettably, all too often, confused.

Reality is objective. Truth is subjective. There can be only one reality. There are as many truths as there are observers, though some may be identical.

I should also have liked to have been able to participate in your discussions on the application of Einstein's general and special theories of relativity.

Unfortunately, my very limited formal education does not grant me unfettered access to a proper understanding of these theories.

Perhaps you would be so kind as to indicate if they apply independently of all forms of life as we know them here on earth? Or is it necessary for there to be an "observer" for them to have application?

Do Einstein's theories concern the application of the laws of physics of reality or simply our vision of that application?

Does Einstein consider that where there is life, there is applicatiuon of his theories of relativity. And where there is no life, there is no application of his theories?

Or does he employ the term "observer" figuratively? In other words, does he consider that his theory is valid even if the "observer" were an innate object.

.

.

To all and sundry,

.

The pope's recent resignation raises serious questions concerning his "true" motivations.

He declared on Sunday 24 February, to a crowd of about 100 000 people amassed on the place Saint Pierre in front of the Vatican to receive his final blessing:

"God asks me to continue to serve with the same dedication and love as previously but more suited to my age and strength. The Lord asks me to climb the mountain and devote myself more to prayer and meditation."

The pope did not offer any details regarding the means of communication., i.e., if he had a vision or if his god spoke to him. Nor does anybody seem to have asked him to provide any further details since he made that amazing declaration.

As it stands, the declaration states that his god told him he is too old and feeble to carry on as pope so he must climb a mountain and devote himself to more prayer and meditation.

The message seems quite confused. If he is too weak to be pope, how on earth could he climb a mountain?

It certainly leaves sufficient room for doubt for us to legitimately request further details in order to be in a better position to judge whether the pope is telling the truth or simply attempting to justify an arbitrary and unilateral decision on his part to abandon the mission conferred upon him by his peers just eight years ago ( his predecessor remained in office for nearly 27 years until he died).

Any request for further details should not be a problem for him as he was, himself, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the "Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, the historical Roman Inquisition.

Also, if any further justification should be necessary, it would suffice to recall the motto Benoît XVI chose to adopt on his ordination as Archbishop, which was "Cooperatores Veritatis" ("Co-workers of the Truth").

.

Dear Banjo,

“The language of physics is mathematics, and it cannot be done honestly without mathematics. That makes it inaccessible. The language of literature is English or Chinese or whatever, and that makes it accessible. And literature is about the human condition. Physics is about the non-human condition. It's not a taste that all human beings have.” (Leonard Suskind, the founder of string theory in http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729040.300-into-the-impossible-with-a-father-of-string-theory.html?page=1; you have to be registered to read this interviewcompletely).

Indeed, “It's not a taste that all human beings have.”, The same about the language of - and taste for - (Christian) religion.

Although I am sure there are many more people who can properly understand what the Pope meant, than those who can understand Einstein’s theories (although many use e.g. a GPS in their cars that would not work without Einstein’s theory of gravitation).

Sorry for not being able to answer your questions about Einstein in a language more accessible than what I tried in the preceding couple of posts. david f is more successful. He is a better popularizer than I, and I shall read his responses with great interest. ,

.

Dear George,

.

Don't worry. I understand. In my ignorance, I didn't realize I had asked such a difficult question.

I guess there is no dictionary that translates Maths into English.

Apparently the pope's god was also speaking in coded language when he told Benedict XVI to "climb the mountain".

I heard on the radio this morning that the Vatican spokesman explained that the pope will retire to a monastery in the Vatican city called "Mater Ecclesiae" which is currently under renovation and will be prepared for his arrival.

It seems the monastery is just a stone's throw from St. Peter's Basilica and the luxurious papal apartments in the Vatican Palace.

According to the spokesman, Benedict XVI will not be cloistered but entirely free to come and go as he pleases. Just like any other retired gentleman of his age.

Let's hope the pope and his spokesman got that translation right. Otherwise he might find himself headed off in the wrong direction.

Might I add that although no god said anything to me about it at the time, I guess I too "climbed the mountain" a few years ago ... without knowing it.

Indeed, it seems there are so many people "climbing the mountain" these days (without knowing it) it's not sure we shall all manage to survive up here.

It shouldn't be a problem for Benedict XVI though. He will have free board and lodgings, a comfortable old-age pension, a well-furnished library, a private secretary, a team of nuns to look after his every need and a vegetable garden of 500m2 with peppers, eggplants, and orange and lemon trees to supply fruit for preparing his favourite jams.

Nothing like that where I am. Maybe I "climbed the wrong mountain".

Here's Benedict's "mountain":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9S-O104E4o&feature=youtube_gdata

.

Dear Banjo Paterson,

I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree to a degree with George's take on this.

It was Einstein's imagination that gave him the insights that made him arguably the greatest physicist who ever lived.

It was that imagination that gave rise to thought experiments like;

"I realized that if I was riding on a beam of light , time for me would stop."

In his later years he became obsessed with conquering the mathematics that would allow for a grand theory of everything but in doing so he forewent the vivid imagery that had made him what he was.

The maths is of course quite important but take it from me your imagination can take you a long way into physics without any great competency.

For instance take my sun scenario posed earlier. If the sun were to suddenly disappear then the conventional wisdom is that it would take a little over 8 minutes for an observer here on earth to register the fact it had gone. Or would it? If the source of gravity that forces the Earth into an elliptical orbit is suddenly removed would the Earth then begin a tangential trajectory instead of continuing as it had been? Would the effect be felt instantaneously? Or does the fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light mean that we would experience darkness before a change in the Earth's path?

BTW you actually ask some pretty good questions particularly this one; ”Or does he employ the term "observer" figuratively? In other words, does he consider that his theory is valid even if the "observer" were an innate object.”

Quantum mechanics and the double slit experiments throw up some really interesting answers. For instance the 'spin' of particles are in limbo until an observation is made. Once that occurs then another particle entangled with the first but potentially light years away will reveal its state.

You might enjoy this.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6546462/The-10-weirdest-physics-facts-from-relativity-to-quantum-physics.html

csteele,

"Would the effect be felt instantaneously? Or does the fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light mean that we would experience darkness before a change in the Earth's path?

We'd notice darkness and a change in gravitational pull at exactly the same moment.

Warps and ripples in spacetime travel at exactly the speed of light.

Dear Poirot,

"in the case of two gravitoelectrically interacting particle ensembles, such as two planets or stars moving at constant velocity with respect to each other, each body feels a force which is directed at the instantaneous position of the other body, without a speed-of-light delay."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity#section_5

;)

Dear csteele,

"If one of two gravitoelectrically interacting particles were to SUDDENLY BE DISPLACED (accelerated) from its position, the other particle would not feel the change due to the acceleration, until a delay corresponding with the speed of light." (from your link).

csteele,

On the subject of sudden displacement.

From "The Fabric of the Cosmos":

"...how quickly can warps and ripples--ripples like those on the surface of a pond caused by a plunging pebble--race from place to place through space? Einstein was able to work this out, and the answer he came to was enormously gratifying. He found that warps and ripples--gravity, that is--do not travel from place to place instantaneously, as they do in Newtonian calculations of gravity. Instead, "they travel at exactly the speed of light". Not a bit faster or slower, fully in keeping with the speed limit set by special relativity. If aliens plucked the moon from its orbit [his earlier example], the tides would recede a second and a half later, at the exact same moment we'd see that the moon had vanished. Where Newton's theory failed, Einstein's general relativity prevailed."

(As George noted from your link)

On the subject of Einstein and imagination, I think George and I have discussed before (he has the exact quote) that Einstein lamented that once the mathematicians had got to work on his theory of general relativity - that he no longer understood it himself.

He was a theoretical physicist and imagination for him was his greatest tool.

I like this quote from Einstein:

"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."

Okay you two a disclaimer if I may. I failed VCE Physics twice (49 both times) and have had very little formal mathematical education but I'm not sure how on earth you expected me to let you get away with taking my “two gravitoelectrically interacting particle ensembles, such as two planets or stars moving at constant velocity with respect to each other” and downsizing them to “two gravitoelectrically interacting particles” to prove your point.

I'm calling foul.

I understand this is little more than kicking the footy around the backyard but my turn to punt one in your direction.

Granted we can not conduct the experiment of instantaneously disappearing a star or moon so might we not look a little further afield?

The escape velocity of a black hole is greater than the speed of light. If the speed of gravity can not exceed the speed of light then why does a black hole have an external gravitational influence?

P.S. I know enough to be wary of anyone claiming to have a definitive understanding of gravity.

As to imagination I remember as a youth thinking about Einstein astride a sunbeam. It stimulated a little thought experiment involving being on a spaceship accelerating to the speed of light. As I looked through a telescope pointed back toward earth I imagined seeing time slow down as it took longer for the light to reach my eye. At some point I would have seen time standing still as my velocity matched that of the reflected photons. At that stage I take the telescope to the front of the spaceship which accelerates, through the magic of my mind, past the speed of light. My view then would be of time shifting backwards and ultimately (it was a very powerful telescope) seeing myself landing again.

Ah youth.

csteele, I think the answer was in the sentence after the one you cited, "The principle of Lorentz invariance demands symmetry between what is seen by a body moving in a static field, and what is seen by a moving body that is the source of such a static field."

Removing one of your planets or stars stops the 'condition' of a static field therefore creating an abberation which will emanate at the speed of light.

As to your question about black holes' external gravitational influence... just think of it as all the gravitational influence on 'our' side of the event horizon. That is, all the gravity before the 'infinity' of the hole itself.

For a thought experiment see what you come up with if you imagine that dark energy is what is created when gravity moves through time.

csteele,

I was replying to your proposition that "...If the sun were to suddenly disappear..."

I don't know much about mathematics or physics (unlike George, who appears to have a background in mathematics).

I read - and occasionally something gels.

Dear Poirot,

My apologies, it was George only who did the downsizing.

The crux of the point I am making can be found in the following observation.

If we look up at the sun we are actually only seeing the position it held a little over 8 minutes ago, not where it is right now. This makes sense as it takes the light that amount of time to get to us. However if we examine the position toward which the Earth is being accelerated by the sun's gravity it is actually where the sun is right now without the 8 minute delay. Some will postulate that this is because the speed of gravity is higher than the speed of light, others will pooh pooh this because it would conflict with Einstein's theories on Relativity.

The problem is that the theory states there can not be a delivery of information that occurs faster than the speed of light yet somehow the Earth 'responds' to this 'future' position of the sun, not the one delivered to us through the constraints of Einstein.

You don't need a degree in mathematics to know that seems a little odd.

Perhaps one of the more learned of our posters can be persuaded to straighten us out on why this would be so.

WMTrevor might be able to expand a little on his offering to clear the wool from our eyes.

All good fun.

Dear WmTrevor,

Thank you for the explanation of the gravity of the black hole.

I will admit to being a little confused still.

When you say “just think of it as all the gravitational influence on 'our' side of the event horizon. That is, all the gravity before the 'infinity' of the hole itself.” shouldn't I be able to substitute light for gravity.

It would then read; 'just think of it as all the light on 'our' side of the event horizon. That is, all the light before the 'infinity' of the hole itself.'

The problem is that the only light on our side of the event horizon is that from external sources none from the hole itself.

This might be a simplistic question but why is gravity able to reach past the event horizon but not light? Once again isn't it a case of information, in the form of gravitational influences, being able to be felt past the restraints of the speed of light?

csteele,

Yep it's fairly boggling for us lay people : )

But the Earth is responding to the sun's mass warping spacetime, isn't it?

csteele,

Just a little more on the subject....

From "The Fabric of the Cosmos" (once more)

"...Spacetime and, in particular, the way it warps and curves, is an embodiment of the gravitational field. Thus, in general relativity, acceleration relative to spacetime is a far cry from the absolute, staunchly un-relational conception invoked by previous theories. Instead, as Einstein argued eloquently a few years before he died, acceleration relative to general relativity's spacetime is relational. It is not acceleration relative to material objects like stones or stars, but it is acceleration relative to something just as real, tangible, and changeable: a field--the gravitational field.
In this sense, spacetime--by being the incarnation of gravity--is so real in general relativity that the benchmark it provides is one that many relationists can comfortably accept."

"The earth stays in orbit around the sun because it follows curves in the spacetime fabric caused by the sun's presence."

I can only cope with all this stuff by analogy… Which is always inadequate. In this discussion we are all reliant on George with regard to the mathematics.

One of the problems with the infinity of a black hole is that at 'infinity' descriptions, explanations and comprehension all break down and make no sense – at least to human brains.

csteele asks, "shouldn't I be able to substitute light for gravity" to which the answer would be yes. If they were the same thing, or behaved in the same way. But they're not and they don't.

It would be a bit like asking "shouldn't I be able to substitute plankton for the ocean or its currents?"

"This might be a simplistic question but why is gravity able to reach past the event horizon but not light?"

Is probably best coped with by recasting the question as why is the 'effect' of gravity able to reach past the event horizon? The answer being because it has distorted the topology of space itself – a frequent analogy being a 'stretched rubber' billiard table with a black hole like an infinitely deep corner pocket where the billiard ball photons of light can roll into the pocket – can exist inside the pocket – but can't roll up out of it.

The effect of the gravity is on the shape of the table surfaces.

It is an inelegant analogy because it relies on the way we imagine things falling to picture what it is that causes the things to 'fall' in the first place.

For further headaches, imagine a Tesseract – now imagine moving around inside one. Next, look at pictures of the orthogonal projection envelopes of the Tesseract. Lastly, now try to imagine moving around inside one.

To quote Monty Python, "My brain hurts."

I don't believe it is possible for our brains to cope with these sort of tasks – even if we can cope with the mathematics involved, which humans demonstrably can cope with because that's how it was thought of in the first place.

csteele,

>> how on earth you expected me to let you get away with taking my “two gravitoelectrically interacting particle ensembles, such as two planets or stars moving at constant velocity with respect to each other” and downsizing them to “two gravitoelectrically interacting particles” to prove your point.<<

I am not sure whose point was there to be proved. The question you posed was: “If the sun were to suddenly disappear … would the effect be felt instantaneously?”

You offered a quote from http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity#section_5 the part that spoke of “ two … planets or stars moving at constant velocity with respect to each other”, which I juxtaposed with another quote from the same source that spoke of “two gravitoelectrically interacting particles were to SUDDENLY BE DISPLACED (accelerated) from its position”.

Since the sun and earth are neither “moving at constant velocity with respect to each other” nor does the sudden disappearance of the sun seem to be the same as that of an elementary particle, I do not think any of the two quotes provides an answer to your original question.

I do not know the answer for sure; I do not even know how to “model” in e.g. Einstein’s gravitation theory the “sudden disappearance” of something that determines the gravitation field.

In Newton’s theory gravity acted instantaneously. In Eintein’s theory it is more complicated, see e.g. the discussion in http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12736/does-gravity-spread-instantly. They seem to know more about physics than do we here.

WmTrevor,

It is not the mathematics that it is hard to “cope with” here, but the physics, more precisely the question of what does our “theory” (a mixture of a theoretically incompatible Einstein and QM) forecast as an outcome of a thought experiment that we are unable to actually carry out.

My brain hurts too.

Cheers,

Tony Gumby

George, of course you are correct in describing the difficulties about our understanding of the physics... but please accept that for me and (I've no doubt) other Gumbies here the mathematics is as difficult, but in a slightly different way, which is why we regard you as the specialist.

P.S. Don't forget the anaesthetic!

Dear WmTrevor and Poirot,

I get that light and gravity are not the same things however they are both mediums for the transmission of information, which according to Relativity can not exceed the speed of light through a vacuum.

Here is were I am stuck. The gravity of a Black Hole can only 'distort the topography of space itself' if it can escape the event horizon. To do so it requires a speed greater than light. The space distortion isn't there for the black hole to fall into but is instead created by it. If gravity has a finite speed then it should be governed by the laws that say it can't exceed that of light. It appears not to do so.

Dear George,

Thank you for the link. Here is another from the same site.

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5456/the-speed-of-gravity

As you say they obviously have a better handle on the physics than I and from your admission possibly your good self but to tell you the truth they seem almost as perplexed.

And for many reasons I thank you for the “I do not know the answer for sure”. Kudos.

This business of the gravitational pull of the Earth being toward the instantaneous position of the Sun rather than the observed one really puts a spanner in the works for me. The explanation given in the link above doesn't seem all that satisfactory. If the Sun instantly disappears then it is difficult to comprehend the Earth being attracted to an imagined Sun for 8 minutes. I don't think it works like Google Maps which makes the assumption you are continuing on your merry way going past where you may stop and only corrects itself one fresh data is calculated.

Also may I refer you to your quote;

“Since the sun and earth are neither “moving at constant velocity with respect to each other”.

Aren't they?

Comparing other planets this would be true however one would have thought, elliptical orbit not withstanding, the Sun and the Earth are moving at a fairly constant velocity with 'respect to one another'.

csteele,

With respect to - "....If the Sun instantly disappears then it is difficult to comprehend the Earth being attracted to an imagined Sun for eight minutes..."

But the Earth isn't attracted to the Sun. The Earth responds to the warp caused by the Sun's presence. Because gravity travels exactly at the speed of light, one assumes that it would take eight minutes for the warp in spacetime to dissipate - by which time light from the Sun would also have dissipated.

I'll have to ponder your black hole question.

csteele, regarding your unfathomable black hole (which Poirot is also pondering)...

To summarise the three links, below, here is my new favourite quote from NASA, "In particular, black holes don't need to radiate to have the fields that they do. Once formed, they and their gravity just are."

Maybe these will help:

http://sciastro.astronomy.net/sci.astro.4.FAQ
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/BlackHoles/black_gravity.html
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980601a.html

I found this link very helpful:

http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/BHfaq.html

Cheers,

Tony

Dear csteele,
>>“Since the sun and earth are neither “moving at constant velocity with respect to each other”.

Aren't they? <<

Well, since the Earth orbits the Sun, its velocity (a vector) with respect to the Sun cannot be constant. From Wikipedia: “To have a constant velocity, an object must have a constant speed in a constant direction. Constant direction constrains the object to motion in a straight path (the object's path does not curve).”

Just a speculation:

We laugh at medieval thinkers discussing the number of angels that can sit on the head of a pin (probably meaning, in today’s language, whether angels - that were part of their world-view - had spatial dimensions). Maybe in a couple of centuries our descendants will laugh at our speculations about how Earth’s inhabitants would experience the SUDDEN disappearance of the Sun (from the gravitational field that essentially depends on the presence of the Sun), an event that is unimaginable as a physical process (only as the result of some supernatural intervention).

George,

Good point - yet it's this sort of imaginative hypothetical thinking that allowed Einstein to come to his conclusions. It's the same kind of reasoning that allows us to compare the sudden disappearance of the sun from the fabric of spacetime to the sudden removal of a bowling ball from a trampoline....it gives us a realistic perspective - a toehold - in the real world for us to fasten to.

The same can be said of Einstein's imagining riding on a sunbeam.

"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."

Most of us don't like to visit the "absurd" to find solutions to supposedly rational conundrums, which is why people like Einstein, etc stand out.

Dear George,

Tut tut my friend.

Try this on for size.

From 'Improbable Research - Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK'.

http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i3/angels-7-3.htm

Surely laughing and thinking are two of the more pleasurable human activities (not discounting sex of course and about a dozen other vices) so shouldn't we be all for things that allow us to do just that?

Here are some snippets;

“According to Thomas Aquinas, it is impossible for two distinct causes to each be the immediate cause of one and the same thing. An angel is a good example of such a cause. Thus two angels cannot occupy the same space. This can be seen as an early statement of the Pauli exclusion principle. (The Pauli exclusion principle is a pillar of modern physics. It was first stated in the twentieth century, by Pauli.)”

and

“One of the first reported attempts at a quantum gravity treatment of the angel density problem that also included the correct end of the pin was made by Dr. Phil Schewe. He suggested that due to quantum gravity space is likely not infinitely divisible beyond the Planck length scale of 10exp-35 meters. Hence, assuming the point of the pin to be one Ångström across (the size of a scanning tunnelling microscope tip) this would produce a maximal number of angels on the order of 1050 since they would not have more places to fill.”

finally

“Assuming that each angel contains at least one bit of information (fallen / not fallen), and that the point of the pin is a sphere of diameter of an Ångström (R=10exp-10 m) and has a total mass of M=9.5*10exp-29 kilograms (equivalent to that of one iron atom), we can use the Bekenstein bound on information to calculate an upper bound on the angel density. In a system of diameter D and mass M, less than kDM distinguishable bits can exist, where k=2.57686*10exp43 bits/meter kg. This gives us a bound of just 2.448*10exp5 angels, far below the Schewe bound.”

In fact I think it would make an excellent university assignment.

Dear George,

You said;

“Well, since the Earth orbits the Sun, its velocity (a vector) with respect to the Sun cannot be constant. From Wikipedia: “To have a constant velocity, an object must have a constant speed in a constant direction. Constant direction constrains the object to motion in a straight path (the object's path does not curve).””

I think you might find the critical words are 'with respect to the Sun'.

Of course the Earth changes its absolute velocity as it orbits the Sun because of the nature of the elliptical orbit, slower at the pointy ends but quicker through the flat sides.

Yet an observer on the Sun sees the Earth travelling through each 10th of an arc in the same amount of time therefore exhibiting, with respect to themselves, a constant velocity.

Dear WmTrevor,

Thank you for the links.

They might need to be treated with a degree of caution as most are about 15 years old and there has been a lot more work done on Gravity.

One explanation has a logic problem;

“If a star collapses into a black hole, the gravitational field outside the black hole may be calculated entirely from the properties of the star and its external gravitational field before it becomes a black hole.”

So even if this black hole sucks in another star its gravitational field can never grow in size from its original strength?

But I do like this one;

“The key point is that electromagnetic interactions (and gravity, if quantum gravity ends up looking like quantum electrodynamics) are mediated by the exchange of *virtual* particles. This allows a standard loophole: virtual particles can pretty much "do" whatever they like, including traveling faster than light, so long as they disappear before they violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.”

Virtual particles? – I think we have found our modern day angels.

Dear Poirot,

This could possibly be just an issue of terminology so can I rephrase my statement to;

....If the Sun instantly disappears then it is difficult to comprehend the Earth falling toward the warp in the fabric of space and time caused by an imagined Sun for eight minutes...

Remember this field is moving as the Sun moves in relation to the Earth. Experiments show that the Earth is 'falling' toward where the Sun is now not the position indicated by the light reaching the Earth.

The quandary is how does the field keep moving after the Sun is gone?

csteele,

Regardless of terminology, the warp would dissipate at the speed of light - not instantaneously.

Do you reckon?

"One explanation has a logic problem;"

Does it, csteele?

"So even if this black hole sucks in another star its gravitational field can never grow in size from its original strength?"

The 'it' in the sentence, “If a star collapses into a black hole, the gravitational field outside the black hole may be calculated entirely from the properties of the star and its external gravitational field before it becomes a black hole.” clearly refers to the 'subject' of the star (the one that collapses) at the point in time rather than space (get the joke?) of it becoming a black hole.

Here's the spin on black hole astrophysics doing the rounds over the past few days...

http://www.space.com/19980-monster-black-hole-spin-discovery.html

Let us know if you notice anything inconsistent with those older links, above.

Dear WmTrevor,

Thanks for the link.

I managed the following on the quiz;

“You Scored 78%”
“You answered 7 out of 9 questions correct!”
“If you got 7 to 9 correct, you'd make Einstein proud. If you got 4 to 6, you're ready to apprentice to Stephen Hawking. If you got 3 or less right, it's time to review your black hole basics.”

Which was lucky as the last thing I wanted was some stranger reviewing my 'black hole basics'.

Hint – the one about the Sun being replaced by a black hole of equal size is a bit tricky.

To the quote;

“The gravity doesn't have to get out of the black hole.  General relativity is a local theory, which means that the field at a certain point in spacetime is determined entirely by things going on at places that can communicate with it at speeds less than or equal to c.  If a star collapses into a black hole, the gravitational field outside the black hole may be calculated entirely from the properties of the star and its external gravitational field before it becomes a black hole”

Yet I would have thought if it increases in size, as it gathers more matter, gravity or rather the effects of the gravitational field do escape to impact things outside the event horizon.

Where am I going wrong?

"Where am I going wrong?"

Surely a metaphysical dilemma rather than an astrophysical one, csteele?

As for the accretion of mass to a black hole I simplistically imagine it as a subtraction of that mass from the spacetime field on this side as it passes through the event horizon... or else I think of it as a phase transitional thing. The black hole has a mass 'x' now and it will have a mass of 'x+' as matter transits the event horizon. So not a gravitational field 'escaping' the black hole so much as the current gravitational effect being increased through drainage.

Alternatively, the entire concept is wrong and the grafitti is right, "There is no such thing as gravity, the earth sucks."

csteele,

I've been reading some stuff on black holes, so my mind is basically comprehensively boggled at present : )...however, I'm still grappling with your question.

Are you saying "How come gravity escapes from the event horizon but not light?"

My answer would be that the "gravity" of the black hole is merely the warp the black hole's mass makes, or the ripples that are emitted from its presence in spacetime - and, therefore, it doesn't "escape" from the black hole, it is the "effect" on spacetime of the black hole's existence.

Stephen Hawking wrote:

"Th event horizon, the boundary of the region of spacetime from which it is not possible to escape, acts rather like a one-way membrane around the black hole: objects....can fall through the event horizon into the black hole, but nothing can ever get out of the black hole through the event horizon. (Remember that the event horizon is the path in spacetime of light that is trying to escape from the black hole, and nothing can travel faster than light)..."

But, as I say, I'm slightly boggled at present : )

Poirot,
Einstein riding on a sunbeam (or the sudden removal of a bowling ball from a trampoline) are attempts at EXPLAINING to NON-SPECIALISTS the Minkowskian geometry of special relativity, (and the curvature of space-time caused by the presence of matter, respectively). I doubt it that this is how Einstein’s intuition worked when he arrived at his theories, although, of course, I cannot know.

These are popularizing explanations, very different from the situation where one uses a thought experiment to make predictions based on a theory (in this case Einstein’s gravitation) that one understands only in its popularized form.

As to my skepticism expressed above, I might understand a thought experiment looking for answers available from Einstein’s gravitation theory relating to the Sun being ACCELERATED OUT OF its present position (though still, one would wonder by what agent), better than speculations about a “supernatural” (i.e. not accountable for from the physical theory) agent removing the Sun SUDDENLY from the field it creates.

(By the way, the answer is trivial within Newton’s theory, which assumes gravity is an external - to space and time - FORCE acting instantaneously.)

Please note that these are all personal opinions, based on how I understand the “workings” of physical theories, while being neither a physicist nor a philosopher of science. So my skepticism might be overruled by a professional physicist who might or might not be able to explain his reasons to me, a non-physicist.

csteele,
Sorry, I cannot express myself better than in that quote from Wikipedia. You probably confuse speed (a scalar) with velocity (a vector). If you circle around a fixed point at a constant (angular) speed your velocity vector will keep on turning around, hence not constant. Only the speed, i.e. its length, will remain constant. “With respect to the Sun” means assuming Sun is that fixed point.

George,

I realise that complicated theories are simplified to popular jargon for non-specialists.

Nevertheless, Einstein's genius was to build upon his knowledge and curiosity by employing his imagination. His imagination furnished him with the necessaries to go forward.

From "Einstein. A life in Science"

[on the nature of light, which Einstein had been studying earlier in that year]

"The question Einstein puzzled over was this. If you could travel alongside a beam of light, at the same speed as the light, what would you see?....."

On general relativity:

"Einstein began worrying about how to extend the special theory to include a description of gravity almost as soon as the special theory had been published, and even before Hermann Minkowski came up with his geometrical description of the special theory in terms of four dimensional spacetime. Like most of Einstein's great ideas, the theory of general relativity began with a piece of physical intuition..."

(Einstein)

"[In 1907] There occurred to me the...happiest thought of my life....'for an observer falling freely from the roof of a house there exists' - at least in his immediate surroundings - 'no gravitational field'. Indeed, if the observer drops some bodies then these remain relative to him in a state of rest or uniform motion, independent of their particular chemical or physical nature (in this consideration the air resistance is, of course, ignored) the observer therefore has the right to interpret his state as 'at rest'"

and

"I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: 'If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight.' I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward the theory of gravitation."

It seems that imagination and intuition had a lot to do with Einstein's breakthroughs. It's probably the reason why he leaped such bounds.

"This simple thought...."

Poirot,
Well, I concede, Einstein riding on the sunbeam was probably also part of the intuition that lead him to special theory of relativity, although it is a good exmple to explain the property thereof concerned with time dilatation.

However, I still maintain the that there is a difference between

(a) various thought experiments meant to explain to laymen how the given theory works

(b) the using of thought experiments by specialist physicists who want to understand the ramifications of given theory that they properly understand (including the mathematics involved) or - as in the case of Einstein - who want to extend it to a theory applicable to a wider family of physical phenomena,

(c) the using of thought experiments by non-specialist only to try to predict the outcome of a thought experiment as an outcome of a theory that he/she can understand only on the popular (including non-mathematical) level.

But could Einstein, or any extant person contributing to this thread, tell me what the TRUE time is here, right now!

Officially the time is 12.20pm here at Aldinga Beach, south of Adelaide. But that’s daylight saving time. So perhaps the true time is 11.20am.

Or perhaps the true time should be determined whereby midday is the midpoint between sunrise and sunset, in which case the time would be different as you move east/west, but not if you move absolutely north/south.

Or perhaps there are other ways of determining it.

I think that there are multiple truths here, depending on how you define the parameters, as I have explained earlier in this thread.

Any comments?

D'Oh, I posted two seconds too soon!! ( :>/

"Einstein's Time"

Based on "Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps"

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay-einsteins-time.htm

(Mightn't be exactly what you're after, Ludwig, but it's a good read:)

Ludwig,

Hope you don't mind if I quote a little more from Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos" (cracking good read and all that:)

"The relativity of space and of time is a startling conclusion.....From the well-worn statement that the speed of light is a constant, we conclude that 'space and time are in the eye of the beholder'. Each of us carries our own clock, our own monitor of the passage of time. Each clock is equally precise, yet when we move relative to one another, these clocks do not agree. They fall out of synchronization, they measure different amounts of elapsed time between to chosen events. The same is true of distance. Each of us carries our own yardstick, our own monitor of distance in space.....Space and time adjust themselves in an exactly compensating manner so that observations of light's speed yield the same result, regardless of the observer's velocity....."

(my preferred layman's explanation below)

"Newton thought that motion through time was totally separate from motion through space....but Einstein found that they are intimately linked....When you look at something like a parked car, which from your point of view is stationary--not moving through space, that is--all of its motion is through time. The car, its driver, the street, you, your clothes are all moving through time in perfect synch: second followed by second, ticking away uniformly. But if the car speeds away, some of its motion through time is 'diverted' into motion through space...the speed of the car through time slows down when it diverts some of its motion through 'space'. this means that the car's progress through time slows down and 'therefore time elapses more slowly for the moving car and its driver than it elapses for you and everything else that remains stationary'."

"Moreover, the maximum speed through space is reached when all light-speed motion through time is fully diverted into light-speed motion through space-- one way of understanding why it is impossible to go through space at greater than light speed."

"Space and time are individually relative: spacetime is an absolute entity."

Thanks Poirot.

I take issue first with the notion that the speed of light is constant. As we have discussed, speed is a relative thing – we have got to say what something is moving or is stationary in respect to.

So, even if light is emitted at a constant speed, it is travelling at a different speed with respect to all objects that are travelling at a different speed to the object that emitted the light… or even at the same speed but in any direction other than exactly the same direction that the object emitting the light is travelling!!

And at any rate, given that no object seems capable of reaching more than a tiny fraction of the speed of light with respect to any other object, what’s the point of pondering it??

The only truth here is that that old Einstein dude really was a whacky as he looked!!: http://tinyurl.com/b4gsvkp

Wow!

So you're disputing that the speed of light is a constant?

Double Wow!

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module3_is_it_true.htm

..............

"...what's the point of pondering it??"

Triple Wow!

(As in why, if you question the point of pondering one entity, do you bother to ask questions and ponder others?)

Noooo! It can’t be true! It doesn’t make sense!

This universe is just plain weeeird!

Stop the world, I want to get off… and go live in a PROPER universe!!

Or maybe this IS a proper universe… and there are just some real nutters out there, Einsteinians if you like, who just want to confuse us and make it out to be what it is isn’t.

In these Michelson/Morley experiments, maybe they were making a false assumption to start with regarding the nature of light. Does it really have a simple wave pattern as with sound waves, whereby two similar beams interact and form peaks and troughs?

You would think that if light waves interacted like this, we’d see this effect all the time, given that there are light beams passing all around us which are of slightly different wavelengths.

We hear beats all the time whenever there are two very similarly pitched sounds. This is particularly common in vehicular traffic noise, in the city, for example.

Does light ever behave in this manner? If not… then what are these guys on about??

<< "...what's the point of pondering it??" >>

Well… just coz there doesn’t seem to be any point, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it! Not everything we do has to have a point to it…. does it? ( :>)

Ludwig,

You're the one who asked "what's the point of it".

(I think the point is that we're a curious species - and although we don't know much in the scheme of things, the things we have worked out have all been accomplished because we are curious and we do see a point to investigation. Our technogies are testimony to that)

Btw, Einstein and people like him can't just pose something and bingo! it's true. His theories have been tested and tested, both mathematically and physically - you're arguing against the scientific process.

What are "technogies"?

That should have been "technologies".

Arrrrgh!

: )

Technogies are economies based on technology.

Similar to how a knowledge economy is techknowledgey?

Dear George,

You still seem to have an issue with the words “ two … planets or stars moving at constant velocity with respect to each other” being applied to the Sun and Earth.

Perhaps it was me being a little less than judicious with the terminology by using the words 'with respect to the Sun' instead of 'each other'.

However using your strict definition then where in the universe would we ever find “two … planets or stars moving at constant velocity with respect to each other”? Perhaps at a pinch a binary star system might fit the definition but little else.

I suspect that if an observer on the Sun were to be able to view the imaginary velocity vector arrow emenating from the Earth in the direction of its orbit it would remain unchanged right through the varying parts of the ellipse.

The fact is without outside references it would be impossible to detect whether is was the Sun or the Earth was the body in motion.

It is all a little fringe but fun none the less. If you have the time this paper has a decent crack at exploring the other side of the argument.

http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp

Be that as it may it has been a good reason for me to explore the topic again so thank you

csteele,

I'm getting a "skeptic" twitch from that site : )

This is the guy that set it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Van_Flandern

Check out section on Le Sage's theory of gravitation and the speed of gravity.

"These claims were dismissed by mainstream physicists."

Dear Poirot,

Your whiskers should indeed be twitching, but the best answer of others to explain black hole gravity would appear to be virtual gravitons.

And I do like the waterfall analogy;

“To retain causality, we must distinguish two distinct meanings of the term “static”. One meaning is unchanging in the sense of no moving parts. The other meaning is sameness from moment to moment by continual replacement of all moving parts. We can visualize this difference by thinking of a waterfall. A frozen waterfall is static in the first sense, and a flowing waterfall is static in the second sense. Both are essentially the same at every moment, yet the latter has moving parts capable of transferring momentum, and is made of entities that propagate.”

But there are other parts of the paper that are questionable.

The part about the differences between the absolute speed of gravity and the speed of propagation through a gravitational field is also interesting.

Ah physics, when you think you have answered one question another 10 pop up.

I suppose that for a layman like myself comprehensible explanations are often found in less than specialist sites.

Dear csteele,
>>However using your strict definition <<
I have certainly not defined “constant velocity” or other terms that are found in any first year textbook on physics or applied mathematics.

>> where in the universe would we ever find “two … planets or stars moving at constant velocity with respect to each other”? <<
I certainly don’t know. You will have to ask the author of the strange article http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity#section_5 that you yourself brought up here. I cannot understand what it is trying to say, but I can understand first year material on mathematics and physics.

As to http://www.metaresearch.org/ I could not put it better than Poirot. The author, Thomas Van Flandern, is arguing against the majority view among theoretical physicists, perhaps not unlike people like William A. Dembski who argue against evolution and natural selection against the majority view among biologists.

I cannot follow Dembski’s arguments using advanced mathematical statistics as I cannot follow Van Flandern’s arguments from astronomy and experimental physics. So in both cases I rather trust the overwhelming majority of specialists in the particular fields. Especially since what I know and understand about the matter coincides with that majority view.

Poirot,

Thanks for the entertaining quotes (concerning Special Relativity) from the book by Brian Greene. Perhaps you would be interested in his recent article “Is mathematics the root of reality?” (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729062.400-physics-crunch-is-mathematics-the-root-of-reality.html).

Thanks, George - I will check it out : )

csteele,

"I suppose that for a layman like myself comprehensible explanations are often found in less than specialist sites."

I suppose they are - but there's a reason for that. Things like the constancy of the speed of light seem counter-intuitive. But these things are also mathematically proven. Time and time again mathematicians and physicists find it to be true.

My take is if you're a layman and having trouble digesting things which are counter-intuitive, you should start with the basics and work your way up - aiming toward the understanding that physicists and mathematicians possess - rather than starting out at skeptical sites (which you might like to visit if, having garnered a good insight into those disciplines, you still think the theory is wrong)

An interesting article on "spinning" black holes.

http://theconversation.edu.au/cutting-through-the-spin-on-supermassive-black-holes-12528

Poirot,

>> Things like the constancy of the speed of light seem counter-intuitive. But these things are also mathematically proven. Time and time again mathematicians and physicists find it to be true.<<

Mathematics cannot “prove” anything about the physical world. It is the physicists, both theoretical and experimental, who decide that this or that mathematics “adequately” - in the sense of making experimentally verifiable predictions - models (the part of) physical reality (that they are concerned about). Mathematics can only prove statements like A implies B, and until Goedel it was assumed that mathematics was just part of formal logic.

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality” (Einstein)

Many years ago, as an undergraduate student, I was also puzzled and disturbed when first trying to understand the consequences - as I saw them - of Einstein’s (special) theory of relativity. The whole world seemed to come down, everything in that theory seemed to be against common sense or even logic.

It was not until I came across a book that properly explained the mathematics behind the theory that I realised, that what I held to be common sense was simply the setup of Newtonian physics that needed to be abandoned, or rather extended, not common sense (though common sense at this level became somehow irrelevant). And certainly not mathematics which remained the clear symbolic frame of reference compatible with both the old and the new physics.

So what you referred to as “counter-intuitive” is perhaps in fact just “counter” our being used to Newtonian physics (and the strict separation of “absolute” space and time).

I once read somewhere a speculation that for Aquinas it would have been easier to understand Einstein than Newton. Well, I am not sure to what extent was this philosopher able to put himself into Aquinas’ intuition about what today we call physics, but still.

Yes, George,...thanks for that. Right you are.

I remember you and I swapped that quote by Einstein in a thread once before. It's a wonderful quote.

Thanks for elucidating your feeling on understanding the mathematics and how it helped you understand the shift. I can only glean the incredible extension from Newtonian physics from a layman's point of view.

I'm spellbound by the kind of things that Einstein intuited. Of course, the simplicity of his realisations rested upon his prior knowledge, and also the knowledge he gleaned from his contemporaries. So both the simplicity and the complexity needed to be in the same person at the same time - a lot of circumstances came together to place him in the patent office in space and time to allow him the freedom to let his mind roam.

I'm also struck by the humanity and humility that comes through in his writing. It's that, as much as anything else, I think, which draws me to him.

Dear Poirot,

Sorry, came close to being sucked into a black hole it seems.

Thank you for your post. I consider myself suitably chastised. Guilty pleasures are sometimes hard to give up but I will endevour sticking to reputable science sites from now on.

For quite a few years I have had on my phone 3 podcasts on Einstein from 'Einstein & the Mind of God' by Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett. They are titled Einstein's Ethics, Einstein's God, and The Mind of Einstein and I commend them to you.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/einstein-the-mind-of-god/id387565038

Truly a great and inspirational man and I try to remember to re-listen to these every few months, particularly the one on his ethics. We all need centring and reminding of a standard on occasion and this does the trick for me.

I hope you get a chance to enjoy them.

Just for interest sake.

Chinese physicists measure speed of Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’: At least 10,000 times faster than light.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/150207-chinese-physicists-measure-speed-of-einsteins-spooky-action-at-a-distance-at-least-10000-times-faster-than-light

Well, as its stands, the Chinese do not seem to be the first ones. See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7206/edsumm/e080814-10.html (Publication date 2008) and http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=quantum-weirdnes-wins-again-entangl-2008-08-13 which concludes with perhaps the only enlightening comment on this quantum weirdness:

“Theoretical physicist Terence Rudolph of Imperial College London, author of a commentary on the new paper, says that putting bounds on faster-than-light entanglement is useful for researchers trying to imagine theories that might extend beyond quantum mechanics.&#8232;&#8232;

What might such a theory look like? Rudolph says we're probably stuck with instantaneous entanglement, which seems impossible to us because we're stuck in everyday space and time. ‘We need to understand how quantum mechanics sees space and time," he says. "I think there's probably much deeper issues.’”

.

Dear csteele and George,

.

If you are talking about two particles in space where space means where there is nothing then nothing separates the two particles and if nothing separates the two particles then they touch each other.

If, however, space means not where there is nothing but where there is only an infinitely small quantity of matter then the distance that separates the two particles is infinitely small.

Perhaps these considerations may slow down the calculations a bit and help the "spooky action" respect the speed limit.

.

Dear Banjo,

I don’t know how to translate what you wrote into the language of quantum physics, the only theory, as far as I know, that tackled and tried to explain the phenomenon of quantum entanglement (spooky action at distance).

Irrespective of that, I do not know what “infinitely small” (quantity, distance) means.

I don’t think we can solve here the question of how to measure entanglement in order to decide whether it is instantaneous or associated with a finite speed, equal or not to that of light.

Dear Banjo, George et al,

Was at Rainbow Beach enjoying the ocean without access to net. Nyet to net. Just talk, beach, reading, writing, eating and sleeping.

Read "25 Big Ideas" while I was there. Pages 133-138 described developments in quantum entanglement.

"25 Big Ideas" mentions http://www.quantum.unvie.ac.at/ and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-entangle/ as sites with info on quantum entanglement.

Dear csteele et al.,

http://www.quantum.unvie.ac.at/ is wrong.

http://www.quantum.univie.ac.at/ is right.

That doesn't work either. Sorry.

Dear david f,

The link to Stanford Uni works, it is certainly a serious source. It sees entanglement as “a physical resource like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems.”. This would seem to make the measurment of the speed of entanglement meaningless, instantaneity being built into its definition.

Since you are specialist in QM, am I right assuming the mainstream opinion about entanglement being that it is instantaneous (provided you suitably see it embedded in space and time)? Would you endorse that as a mainstream opinion among physicists?

Dear davidf,

Shouldn't that have read;

http://www.quantum.unvie.ac.at/ is left.

http://www.quantum.unvie.ac.at/ is right.

Dear George,

I am not a specialist in QM having last borne the title of physicist in 1950. I just read popular science accounts of physics and not the journals. However, I cannot believe in instantaneous transmission of anything although I see no reason that the speed of light must be a limit except for certain phenomena. I feel we do not as yet have the tools to measure the speeds involved in quantum entanglements. I feel there is something involved similar to the 500 ms delay that we have built into our consciousness. Between applying a stimulus to the brain and conscious detection incorporated many millisecond delay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_of_Libet.27s_experiments However, our brain apparently backdates the conscious response so we have the impression of no delay. Although the ‘instantaneous transmission’ is detected by instruments I feel there is a somewhat analogous process going on.

In 1948 Dutch physicist Hendrick Casimir predicted that there would be a force pushing two metal plates together as the quantum vacuum energy would be greater outside the plates than between them. This was a very feeble force, and its existence was not confirmed until1996. It was measurable when the plates were closer than a hair breadth. I feel something analogous will take place with quantum entanglement. I don’t know the mainstream opinion among physicists, and I could be wrong.

Dear csteele,

It should read;

http://www.quantum.unvie.ac.at/ is left and real.

http://www.quantum.univie.ac.at/ is right and imaginary.

The added i makes http://www.quantum.univie.ac.at/ imaginary.

Carl Gauss was the smart fellow who thought of imaginary numbers and congruences. There are some enjoyable number theory problems in Beiler’s ‘Recreations in the Theory of Numbers.”

Guess that’s my four posts for the day.

David f,

You get eight posts a day per thread in the general section.

: )

.

Dear George,

.

I note that my "infinitely small" and David's "very feeble force" and "closer than a hair breadth" seem to be at the same end of the scale at which David suspects quantum entanglement may possibly take place.

.

Dear csteel and david f.,

I could not access any of your" quantum.univie" links.

.

Dear david f,

Thanks for the reaction. I agree that “instantaneous transmission” does not make much sense. Note that I referered to entanglement as being either instantaneous (no transmission) or associated with speed. Probably I should have referred to the standard “non-local" (connection) instead of the clumsy “instantaneous”.

I don’t see the relevance of experiments with unconscious processes, except that the weirdness of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM hinges indeed on its seeming involvement of consciousness, i.e. conscious observer/measurer.

Perhaps the following is a good non-technical explanation of why quantum entanglement is not a transmission (http://www.razorrobotics.com/knowledge/?title=Quantum_entanglement):

Quantum entanglement, also called the quantum non-local connection, is a property of certain states of a quantum system containing two or more distinct objects, in which the information describing the objects is inextricably linked such that performing a measurement on one immediately alters properties of the other, even when separated at arbitrary distances. Specifically, such a system is said to be in an entangled state if it cannot be written as the tensor product of its constituent subsystems. This discovery posed a serious conceptual challenge to physicists of the day, because faster-than-light influences were assumed to be prohibited by special relativity. In that framework, it was thought superluminal effects would lead to causal contradictions because a change of reference frame can reverse the order of the events. It is now understood that while these nonlocal correlations do occur, they cannot be used to transmit information and thus do not violate causality.

I really think that we cannot solve here the questions raised by the two papers about the “speed” of entanglement.

Dear Banjo,

I can understand what “very small” means, I have only problems with “infinitely small”.

.

Dear George,

.

"I can understand what “very small” means, I have only problems with “infinitely small”.
.

I sympathise with you.

May I suggest that for there to be quantity of something, that something must exist. If something does not exist it cannot have quantity.

For something which exists, I call "infinitely small" the minimum limit of its existence.

In other words, “infinitely small” means the smallest quantity of something which exists.

The difficulty lies in identifying, apprehending and measuring such a quantity, but that is probably true whatever the quantity.

Can we measure anything exactly?

.

Dear Banjo,

Sorry, I still do not understand how to interpret what you wrote within accepted physical theories. Existence of entities at the very basic level of physical reality depends on the theory you use to represent reality with, and cannot be handled by using “common sense” approach to these abstract concepts, as I tried to argue - referring to Hawking and Mlodinow - in http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14464.

>>“infinitely small” means the smallest quantity of something which exists <<
Space (and time, and other physical entities) are usually represented as continuum, hence “smallest quantity” does not make sense (like there is no smallest positive number). Unless you hint at the unusual (and still speculative) Lee Smolins’ Loop Quantum Gravity theory (see the article Atoms of Space and Time by Lee Smolin in Scientific American, January 2004, pp. 56-65):

“Loop quantum gravity predicts that space comes in discrete lumps, the smallest of which is about a cubic Planck length, or 10^(-99) cubic centimeter. Time proceeds in discrete ticks of about a Planck time, or 10^(-43) second.” (Here ^ stands for “to the power of”).

Thus if Smolin is right, it is more useful to represent spacetime as a discreet set of events, not a continuum.

Mathematically speaking infinity is a limit. Consider the infinite series 1, ½, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, …… Each term of the series gets smaller and smaller, and terms get very small. Let us consider the nth term of the series. Its value is 1/n. No matter how big n is, its inverse is very small but greater than 0. The value of the number is infinitesimal but not infinitely small mathematically speaking.

However, Banjo was not mathematically speaking. In natural language an infinitely small number can be one that is so small that it is 0 for all practical purposes.

Banjo and George are both right. They were merely using different languages. Banjo was using natural language, and George was using mathematical language.

Dear david f,
Thanks again, for providing an opportunity for further attempts to explain my position.

“Mathematically speaking” neither “infinitely small” nor “infinitesimal” makes any sense, although the latter is used in popular language as “a value approaching zero”. As I used to tell my students, a value cannot “approach” (or “go to” anything), because it has no legs, meaning that these verbs depend on the concept of time, that belongs to physical, not mathematical, reality. You might remember the epsilon-delta definition of continuity to avoid the intuitive, but imprecise “f(x) goes to f(a) as x goes to a”. As we used to say, Newton would not pass our first year (pure) maths exams, exactly because of these matters.

Of course, Newton’s approach to calculus was based on intuition, the same as Leibniz’s who allegedly was the first to use the term infinitesimal. Also, a physicist’s evaluation of observations/experiments must start from intuition, after which he must incorporate them in some existing theory, or suggest a new one, which at the end cannot avoid the language of CONTEMPORARY mathematics.

I can understand what “a number can be one that is so small that it is 0 for all practical purposes” means, provided the context - all practical purposes e.g. when speaking of elementary particles - is known.

I am afraid the times have gone - latest with Einstein - when one could build physical theories (about the structure of matter or physical reality) using only non-mathematical, imprecise “natural language”. Of course, one has to use natural language when explaining the matter to non-specialists. That is why I did not argue against Banjo’s suggestions using the term “infinitely small” (or infinitesimal) quantities; I just did not understand what in my limited knowledge of physics he was referring to.

.

Dear George,

.

[>>“infinitely small” means the smallest quantity of something which exists <<

"Space (and time, and other physical entities) are usually represented as continuum, hence “smallest quantity” does not make sense (like there is no smallest positive number)".]

.

Apparently, the precision "other" indicates that you consider space and time also to be physical entities. Rightly or wrongly, I do not. I consider that neither "exists", the latter being purely a human concept.

I was not referring to either space nor time but to something which "exists" and the smallest quantity of that something.

Even if the "something" could be described as a "continuum" I do not see why it should not be quantifiable and divisible. Perhaps this differs from the mathematical definition of "continuum" which you may have in mind.

I see, for example, a one meter wooden ruler as a divisible continuum. Perhaps not so in mathematical language.

Also, I note that you indicate that space and time and "other" physical entities "are usually represented as continuum" - not "continua". Do you mean that each is a separate "continuum" or that they, considered as a whole, form a single "continuum"?

.

"Existence of entities at the very basic level of physical reality depends on the theory you use to represent reality with ..."

.
It is my view that "reality" pre-exited mankind and will continue to exist post-mankind. I consider that it is independent of what mankind thinks of it and not in the least influenced by his opinion.

Btw, I do not see "infinitively small" as “a value approaching zero” but the final value before zero.

Thank you, George, for the link to your very informative article on "The nature of reality". I think you often underestimate your ability to render complex mathematical and scientific concepts comprehensible to uninitiated persons such as me.

I truly appreciated your copy and hope there will be more.

.

Dear Banjo,

Thanks.

>>you consider space and time also to be physical entities. Rightly or wrongly, I do not. I consider that neither "exists", the latter being purely a human concept.<<

Well, maybe “entity” was not the right word to describe space and time. In philosophy (Immanuel Kant) “category” is used instead. However, if you want to take into account the progress in physics, that somehow bypassed that in philosophy, you need conceptual models or representations that cannot do without non-trivial mathematics. So e.g. time is modeled by the real line (mathematics) - unless you accept Smolin’s model.

Here “the final value before zero” does not make sense. (Whatever positive number you would suggest I can always name a smaller, but still positive, one).

Neither do I understand what are “purely human” concepts. What other concepts are there?

>> I see, for example, a one meter wooden ruler as a divisible continuum. Perhaps not so in mathematical language.<<
Mathematical language does not deal with wooden rulers, and I do not understand what “divisible continuum” - in distinction to “indivisible continuum” - means. We know from elementary physics that the smallest piece of "wooden ruler" obtained by mechanical means is a molecule. Beyond that you need chemistry and nuclear physics and to understand the latter you need the non-trivial mathematics of quantum physics.

>> Do you mean that each is a separate "continuum" <<
By continuum I simply mean spacetime modeled by quadruples of real numbers, in distinction to “discrete” (see Smolin) modeled by quadruples of integers.

>> It is my view that "reality" pre-exited mankind and will continue to exist post-mankind. I consider that it is independent of what mankind thinks of it <<
What you describe here is the BELIEF in the existence of a (physical) reality independent of how we perceive it, a belief shared by practically everybody although it is not something that can be obtained as a “logical” consequence of scientific enquiries, as I indicated, following Hawkins and Mlodinow, in my article. We try to understand it by representing that reality through concepts, theories etc

.

Dear George,

.
[Here “the final value before zero” does not make sense. (Whatever positive number you would suggest I can always name a smaller, but still positive, one).]
.

We humans have developed and continue to develop greater intelligence than all other living species.

Our capacity for abstract conceptualization is greater today than it was 5 to 7 million years ago when we broke away from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. There is nothing to suggest that it will not be even greater in 5 to 7 million years time.

What we have difficulty conceptualizing today may not be a problem tomorrow. The fact that something "does not make sense" today does not mean that it will not make sense tomorrow.

Quite a large number of phenomena "did not make sense" to many scientists and mathematicians before new concepts provided the appropriate explanations.

You correctly quoted me as saying “the final value before zero”. For the reason you indicated, I did not hazard a guess as to what that final positive number might be. I shall leave that important detail to the next Euler, Gauss, Riemann, Euclid or whoever.

.

[Neither do I understand what are “purely human” concepts. What other concepts are there?]
.

I understand that all living species equipped with a brain are capable of conceptualizing (making mental representations) to varying degrees. This would include all animals except certain invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, adult sea squirts and starfish.
.

"I do not understand what “divisible continuum” - in distinction to “indivisible continuum - means.”.
.

This looks like a false problem. I thought you may have a definition of "continuum" which excluded its divisibility so that "smallest quantity" made no sense to you.

.

"What you describe here is the BELIEF in the existence of a (physical) reality independent of how we perceive it ..."
.
Yes. I call it "faith" - but not "blind faith". This is faith based on circumstantial evidence, with a high degree of confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof.

.

Dear Banjo,

Sorry, I cannot better explain elementary properties of real numbers. There is no such thing as the smallest positive real number and nobody can or will change that, unless you redefine the meaning of the words involved. I am sure david f would confirm that.

Also, I spoke of the belief, (acceptance, assumption) of something that is the basic building block of most everybody’s world-view. Not of faith, blind or not. Circumstantial evidence, high degree of confidence etc, are things that depend on, well, circumstances, your state of mind, and other subjective factors. These would be relevant to justify religious belief (or “unbelief”) that certainly not everybody shares, but not in the case of belief in the existence of a reality outside and independent of my (and your) mind that, as I wrote, is shared by practically everybody, I suppose even by those who for philosophical reasons (to stay within what can be scientifically established) prefer the Hawkins-Mlodinow working assumption.

.

Dear George,

.

"There is no such thing as the smallest positive real number"

I am not sure that we are talking about quite the same problem.

You will recall that I defined the “infinitely small” as the smallest quantity of something which exists.

The problem is not whether there is such a thing as "the smallest positive real number" or not, but whether there exists such a thing as the smallest quantity of something or not.

If the answer to that question is "yes, then perhaps my definition of "infinitely small" may be considered as making sense.

Perhaps "the smallest quantity of something" depends on the nature of "the something". If the something were a gas, for example, perhaps its minimum quantity may be a molecule. If reduction (or should I say decomposition) of the molecule results in zero quantity of the gas, then a molecule of the gas is what I referred to previously as "the final value before zero" of that something (the gas).

If we wish to go a step further and measure "the smallest quantity of (that) something which exists" we would need to be able to measure the molecule of that particular gas.

The problem is not to measure the smallest of all positive real numbers - which you say does not make sense - but to measure "the smallest quantity of something which exists".

I have no idea if physicists and mathematicians are capable of identifying and measuring that quantity. If, today, they are not, I see this as a difficulty, not an impossibility.

.

" Circumstantial evidence, high degree of confidence etc, are things that depend on, well, circumstances, your state of mind, and other subjective factors ... belief in the existence of a reality outside and independent of my (and your) mind that, as I wrote, is shared by practically everybody ..."
.
All those "subjective factors" which, as you wrote, are "shared by practically everybody", backed up by objective circumstantial evidence, certainly provide a solid base for belief (faith) in the existence of a reality independent of mankind.

.

Dear Banjo,

Sorry, but I really do not know what “"the smallest quantity of something" is. I am glad you agree that if that “something” are positive real numbers, then it does not exist. If it is a material object then "the smallest quantity" is a molecule or atom, or some elementary particle etc, depending on what you call “smallest”, but we have been through that already. Otherwise, I don’t understand, so please just have to leave it at that.

>>All those "subjective factors" which, as you wrote, are "shared by practically everybody”<<

I never said that. On the contrary I said those subjective factors were relevant only in the context of RELIGIOUS beliefs “that certainly not everybody shares”, whereas you do not have to resort to these factors in the case of the belief in a reality independent of our mind, because it “is shared by practically everybody”.

.

Dear George,

.

"Sorry, but I really do not know what “"the smallest quantity of something" is. ... If it is a material object then "the smallest quantity" is a molecule or atom, or some elementary particle etc, depending on what you call “smallest”".
.

Yes, I was referring to "matter" (thing that has mass and occupies space), the smallest quantity of which being that which is the smallest in all its physical dimensions while remaining capable of stable independent existence without undergoing a change of nature (without modifying its physical or chemical properties).

My definition of “infinitely small” as the smallest quantity of something which exists applies to all forms of matter:

- element (a substance that is made up of a single type of atoms)

- compound (a pure substance that is made up of two or more elements chemically combined in fixed proportions)

- homogeneous mixture (matter composed of two or more components in which the compositions are variable and the components are indistinguishable from each other)

- heterogeneous mixture (matter composed of two or more components that are visibly distinguishable from each other)

I have done my best to speak your language and hope you find it comprehensible.

.

Dear Banjo,

Yes, this is more or less what I summarized in “If it is a material object then it is a molecule or atom, or some elementary particle etc, depending on what you call “smallest”, , except that I have never heard of molecules being called “infinitely small” (they have finite sizes that can be expressed as a fraction of cm) or “the final value before zero”.

.

Dear George,

.

"I have never heard of molecules being called “infinitely small” (they have finite sizes that can be expressed as a fraction of cm) or “the final value before zero”.
.

I have never heard of that before, either, George.

"Infinitely small" just seems to me to be the most appropriate term to describe the smallest possible quantity of something which exists. There is always smaller than very small, and even smaller than extremely small etc., but there is no smaller than infinitely small.

Also, "infinitely small" does not mean that something does not have physical dimensions, as in the case of a molecule or an atom or an elementary particle etc. which all " have finite sizes that can be expressed as a fraction of cm".

Anything "infinitely small" necessarily has physical dimensions, otherwise it would not exist.

Having said that, George, to be quite honest, I do not expect anybody from the scientific community to adopt my definition of "infinitely small" as the smallest quantity of something which exists.

That's life.

.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitesimal

Cheers,

Tony

Dear Tony,

Reminds me of a Redditor's effort at describing quantum theory in words of four letters or less.

I think he/she did a fair job.

Big grav make hard kind of pull. Hard to know. All fall down. Why? But then some kind of pull easy to know. Zap-pull, nuke-pull, time-pull all be easy to know kind of pull. We can see how they pull real good! All seem real #cut# up. So many kind of pull to have!

But what if all kind of pull were just one kind of pull? When we look at real tiny guys, we can see that most big rule are no go. We need new rule to make it good! Just one kind of pull but in all new ways! In all kind of ways! This what make it tiny yard idea. Each kind of tiny guy have own move with each more kind of tiny guy. All guys here move so fast! No guys can move as fast! So then real, real tiny guys make this play of tiny guy to tiny guy. They make tiny guys move! When we see big guys get pull, we know its cuz tiny guys make tiny pull!

Dear Tony,

Your wikiedia article is only partly right.

And, I don’t think we can answer questions about quantum entanglement (which was the original context) if we folow this article, and use “infiniresimal” either as

(a) a 17th century understanding of a mathematical concepts or

(b) concepts whose only justification is that “students easily relate to them” altough no usuful and verifiable resilts can br obtained from them, or

(c) mathematical concepts belonging to non-standard analysis, that is not taught in undergraduate courses of pure mathematocs, only later.

.

Dear George,

.

To sum up that rather lengthy discussion, I think it is safe to say that we have aired most of our points of mutual incomprehension due, essentially, to your occasional recourse to mathematical language and competence in which, apart from the four basic operations of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, I am both totally illiterate and incompetent.

I wish to thank you for your patience, forbearance and kind indulgence.

Einstein has certainly left us an interesting legacy. His "spooky action at a distance" paradox will no doubt continue to animate lively discussion for quite some time, including on this forum.

.

Dear Banjo,

>>I wish to thank you for your patience, forbearance and kind indulgence.<<

And vice versa.

A bit of verse:

I don't like the family Stein,
There's Gert, there's Ep and there's Ein.
Gert's poems are bunk.
Ep's statue's are junk.
And nobody understands Ein.

From "Before the Big Bang" p. 95

"It was Eddington who, according to legend, is said to have showed his grasp of communication skills when asked by a journalist if he was one of only three people who understood Einstein's general relativity. Eddington did not reply, and the interviewer pointed out there was no need for him to be modest. Eddington corrected him instantly. He wasn't being modest; he was trying to think of who the third person was."

Jean Smith's bio of Eisenhower shows that Eisenhower was a very intelligent man. His communication skills were better than Eddington's. He got elected president twice by communicating that he was just an ordinary person. I voted for his opponent because his opponent seemed more intelligent to me.

Some very small objects above the atomic level are zircon grains. The oldest grain dated on earth as 4404 million years old is a cut and polished zircon grain 150 micrometres wide.

Thank you for your discussion and the civilised way you ended it.

.

More on misunderstanding ...

.

It was the man from Ironbark who struck the Sydney town,
He wandered over street and park, he wandered up and down.
He loitered here, he loitered there, till he was like to drop,
Until at last in sheer despair he sought a barber's shop.
''Ere! shave my beard and whiskers off, I'll be a man of mark,
I'll go and do the Sydney toff up home in Ironbark.'

The barber man was small and flash, as barbers mostly are,
He wore a strike-your-fancy sash, he smoked a huge cigar:
He was a humorist of note and keen at repartee,
He laid the odds and kept a 'tote', whatever that may be,
And when he saw our friend arrive, he whispered "Here's a lark!
Just watch me catch him all alive, this man from Ironbark.'

There were some gilded youths that sat along the barber's wall.
Their eyes were dull; their heads were flat, they had no brains at all;
To them the barber passed a wink, his dexter eyelid shut,
'I'll make this bloomin' yokel think his bloomin' throat is cut.'
And as he soaped and rubbed it in he made a rude remark:
'I s'pose the flats is pretty green up there in Ironbark.'

A grunt was all reply he got; he shaved the bushman's chin,
Then made the warter boiling hot and dipped the razor in.
He raised his hand, his brow grew black, he paused a while to gloat,
Then slashed the red hot razor-back across his victim's throat;
Upon the newly-shaven skin it made a livid mark -
No doubt it fairly took him in - the man from Ironbark.

(continued ...)

.

.

(continued ...)

He fetched a wild up-country yell might wake the dead to hear,
And thought his throat, he knew full well, was cut from ear to ear,
He struggled gamely to his feet, and faced the murd'rous foe:
'You've done for me! you dog, I'm beat! one hit before I go!
I only wish I had a knife, you blessed murdering shark!
But you'll remember all your life, the man from Ironbark.'

He lifted up his hairy paw, with one tremendous clout
He landed on the barber's jaw, and knocked the barber out.
He set to work with tooth and nail, he made the place a wreck;
He grabbed the nearest gilded youth, and tried to break his neck.
And all the while his throat he held to save his vital spark,
And 'Murder! Bloody Murder!' yelled the man from Ironbark.

A peeler man who heard the din came in to see the show;
He tried to run the bushman in, but he refused to go.
And when at last the barber spoke, and said ''Twas all in fun -
'Twas just a little harmless joke, a trifle overdone.'
'A joke!' he cried, 'By George, that's fine; a lively sort of lark;
I'd like to catch that murdering swine some night in Ironbark.'

And now while round the shearing floor the list'ning shearers gape,
He tell's the story o'er and o'er, and brags of his escape,
'Them barber chaps what keeps a tote, By George, I've had enough,
One tried to cut my bloomin' throat, but thank the lord it's tough.'
And whether he's believed or no, there's one thing to remark,
That flowing beards are all the go way up in Ironbark.

.

Ah, at last… a bit of commonsense on this thread!

This is one of my father’s favourites and hence was one of the first poems I became familiar with as a small child.

As a botanist, I have a great passion for the eucalypts, especially the ironbarks of north Queensland, for which the taxonomy is in bad need of review. I know of several unnamed species.

Hence I have been called the man from ironbark from time to time.

The ironbarks dominate savannah woodlands over huge areas in the north, and yet the esteemed botanical authorities haven’t seen fit over the years to get them sorted out! This is all the more amazing given that several rare and restricted species requiring special conservation measures have been named in southeast Queensland and there is certainly the potential for some to be formally recognised in the north.

The vast ironbark woodlands inland from Townsville on the enormous basalt plains of the McBride Plateau and extending into many adjacent areas, consist of as yet unnamed species!!

And I used to have a flowing beard too!

True!!

.

Dear Ludwig,

.

That's a very noble profession. I love the bush but I'm afraid I don't know much about gum trees.

When I was a kid one of my daily chores was to chop the wood for the fire. It's a long time ago now, but I seem to recall that ironbarks were the toughest. Bloodwoods were a bit easier. They split fairly easily if you hit them hard enough.

We still have an old wood stove in the family home on the Darling Downs and I'm afraid my brother has had to chop all the wood on his own for so many years now I've lost count. The pine as well but that's no problem. We used to take it in turns when we were kids.

I sometimes dream of that flock of white cockatoos that seems to have elected domicile for just about as long as I can remember down at Rangers Bridge on the Condamine river, 18 km from Dalby on the Warrego Highway. There are some very tall gum trees down there and the white cockatoos are always to be found, swirling around in the light breeze high among the gum trees.

I have no idea what the life span of a white cockatoo is but I suspect that I am probably looking at a different generation every time I go back there, which is not too often.

Those are some of the things I miss, living in Paris - not chopping the wood - the cockatoos and the gentle tinkling sound as the gentle breeze rustles the leaves of the gum trees down by the river side on the Condamine.

That was where I spent most of my school holidays whenever I had nothing better to do - which was the case, most of the time.

When I think of it now, I'm sure glad I did.

.

Wouah, gai Paris!

Juste un peu différent au Australien buisson!