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Goodbye Jesus

What Caused God?


R. S. Martin

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God was born when the earth was created, that is where life comes from. If I have to have a physical god in my life, then the earth is my god. I can prove it is here, I can feel it, and I can see her in action creating more life and that life creates more life. And, I can interact with this Mother Earth, to some extent by hunting for what I need to live on for food and she provides my shelter, and water to drink. I don't even have to pray to Mother Earth for her to provide for me. She doesn't talk to me but the wind that blows across her face can put me to sleep at night, cool me off when it is hot, and when she throws a fit weather wise, I can see that in the air too. When she gets mad, holy cow head for the cellar!

 

What does the xtian god do to prove he exists? Nothing, just according to xtians, he is ready to answer prayer. Boy Howdy! So, what does the xtian god have to offer? Nothing but air for prayer, no food, no water. Zip. But we are supposed to believe in him and especially the words of xtians or some other twit that god does exist and he will kill us all if we do not believe in him? Mother Earth has proven herself, what does an invisible one have to offer when he send his minions to do his dirty work for him? To really prove himself, god has people write books about him using someone else's name to legitimize their forgeries. They use the names of mythological animals and blame all of humanity's woes upon two young kids making their first mistake in life, and all of this is over a piece of fruit and a talking snake. Christians expect the rest of the world to believe God exists from a book with this kind of stuff in it? The Christian's only proof god exists is from what is written in this age-old rag of doom and gloom. There is much more evidence the Earth is alive, or a Goddess, than the one the Christians try to prove.

 

I love that! Of course, awkward questions are not allowed but who created Mother Earth (opening sentence)? No matter but my intellectual curiosity sometimes wonders how pagans deal with that question. Maybe I should post it on the Spirituality forum.

 

When she gets mad, holy cow head for the cellar!

 

That's what I like about the real universe. You actually know what you're dealing with.

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I love that! Of course, awkward questions are not allowed but who created Mother Earth (opening sentence)? No matter but my intellectual curiosity sometimes wonders how pagans deal with that question. Maybe I should post it on the Spirituality forum.

 

The Universe?

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I don't know if I've got the brains to understand this but I wonder if you'd be willing to try and illustrate it so I could visualize what it would look like if particles moved back in time. What would it be like? How would we know that it's earlier if it really happened after the first incident? The closest I can come is back in the mid-60s when I was in Grade 2 or 3 in public school we were shown a movie on a projector and reel. After it was over, they showed it rewinding. All the things happened backwards. I had never seen a movie before and it took me a very long time--maybe years--to figure out what had actually happened.

I don't remember which particle it is. I only remember reading something long time ago about one particle which theoretically should have a short life-time, but exists longer. But I suspect there could be some other explanation for that one.

 

However, they did an experiment sending a beam of light a fraction of a second back in time. Basically the light exited the tube before it entered. But the key is, you can't make it to any time back, or anything. There is some conditional stuff going on, because I think the exit-beam leaves at the same time as the entry-beam, and therefore at the point when you can't change the outcome. But I'm not sure. I have to go back to the article because it was a while ago, a year or two.

 

These things can only be done on a very restrictive way. It's not like you can go back in time and change things. But the key is that time, according to Einstein, relative, and everything so far in science confirms it. The most famous experiment was done in the first part of the 20'th century (and I'm telling from my memory, so I hope I get it right, I'll check later), they had two atomic clocks, set to the exact same time. They were calibrated to work exactly the same. There were no differences in their quality of measuring time. One was put on a plane going to the west, and the other on another plane going to the east, and they flew around the Earth and came back. Now they were one second off from each other, because what is happening (in a very simplified explanation) is that we measure time using matter, matter is affected by speed. Gravity is a form of accelerating power, so gravity itself will have an effect on how matter moves. And with one plane going with the Earths rotation and the other against, the matter itself was in two different stretches of time. Just think about how a time-piece measure your time. It is using physical components. These physical components are not synchronized with some magical super-clock in the center of the universe. So what they do is showing a relative process, relative to all the matter around it.

 

What Einstein realized was that if you were traveling in a spaceship, and you were increasing your speed, and you got close to the speed of light, you would still experience time as normal for you, but in reality you had slowed down. We would see you move in slow-motion, practically stand-still. You would travel in this high speed for one day, and you would think it was only a fraction of a second, but we would have seen you travel that whole day. Because your time slows down when you increase your speed.

 

Somehow, I think you're talking about things on a totally different level.

What we experience as time is dependent on space, matter, energy, process, all the things we have here and now. If another universe exists, parallel to us, their way of telling time will be different, and aging would be different, everything would be different. It's not like we could synchronize our watches with them. And that is disregarding all the problems of how to communicate with them.

 

---

 

I looked up the "backwards particles" and it's the tachyons (should have known, they're used a lot in sci-fi material :HaHa:). It is not really believed anymore they travel backwards in time, so I take that back. It was something I remembered from studies long time ago, so I knew it was a bit shaky ground. Well, the correction is, no time-traveling-particles.

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I looked up the "backwards particles" and it's the tachyons (should have known, they're used a lot in sci-fi material :HaHa: ). It is not really believed anymore they travel backwards in time, so I take that back. It was something I remembered from studies long time ago, so I knew it was a bit shaky ground. Well, the correction is, no time-traveling-particles.

 

Thanks for clarifying that.

 

These things can only be done on a very restrictive way. It's not like you can go back in time and change things.

 

Yeah, that's what we need God and Jesus for. The blood of the lamb and such.

 

But the key is that time, according to Einstein, relative, and everything so far in science confirms it. The most famous experiment was done in the first part of the 20'th century (and I'm telling from my memory, so I hope I get it right, I'll check later), they had two atomic clocks, set to the exact same time. They were calibrated to work exactly the same. There were no differences in their quality of measuring time. One was put on a plane going to the west, and the other on another plane going to the east, and they flew around the Earth and came back. Now they were one second off from each other, because what is happening (in a very simplified explanation) is that we measure time using matter, matter is affected by speed. Gravity is a form of accelerating power, so gravity itself will have an effect on how matter moves. And with one plane going with the Earths rotation and the other against, the matter itself was in two different stretches of time. Just think about how a time-piece measure your time. It is using physical components. These physical components are not synchronized with some magical super-clock in the center of the universe. So what they do is showing a relative process, relative to all the matter around it.

 

I can understand the clocks being out by one second due to the pull of gravity and all, the way you explain it.

 

What Einstein realized was that if you were traveling in a spaceship, and you were increasing your speed, and you got close to the speed of light, you would still experience time as normal for you, but in reality you had slowed down. We would see you move in slow-motion, practically stand-still. You would travel in this high speed for one day, and you would think it was only a fraction of a second, but we would have seen you travel that whole day. Because your time slows down when you increase your speed.

 

Somehow, I think you're talking about things on a totally different level.

What we experience as time is dependent on space, matter, energy, process, all the things we have here and now.

 

I cannot quite accept the idea that time is factually relative. I personally have always seen time as an objective "thing" like math that is imposed on me from the outside, this cosmic calendar and/or clock. Were it not for the demands of my body and other people's schedules, time would not exist. However, I do have a body and understanding time is critical to its survival. Under normal circumstances, I know the time any time of day or night without a watch, though I always carry a time piece just to be sure.

 

Time seems relative. When I was five years old I lived from bedtime to bedtime. A year was an inconceivable concept. When I was ten, I could remember last winter, last Christmas, etc. When I was twenty, I could think back an entire decade. Now that I've passed my fiftieth birthday I am shocked to find myself making statements about landmarks forty years ago. (Only old people can do that, right? Absolutely right! :3: )

 

I've come across the concept that a yard is three feet no matter where in the universe you are. I would see time the same way and I cannot get any other concept into my head.

 

I agree that human experience is "dependent on space, matter, energy, process, all the things we have here and now." But how does that human experience translate into something called "time"? In my mind, time would exist whether or not the human experience happened. I use human experience all the time to measure time. For example, I count how many things I've done since I last consulted a time piece to get some idea what time it is, esp. if I'm not carrying a watch. The concept of "space-time"--I just draw a blank on it. How time can stop when the world stops--I haven't a clue. How time could start when God created the world, or when the Big Bang happened--makes no sense to me.

 

If we can think about things being in existence prior to the Big Bang--and scientists very much do think about such things (I listened to a video Voices of Science in which Dawkins interviews Steven Weinberg), then in my mind, time existed. A way of knowing/measuring sequential process is required to talk about it. If that is not time then what is it?

 

If another universe exists, parallel to us, their way of telling time will be different, and aging would be different, everything would be different. It's not like we could synchronize our watches with them. And that is disregarding all the problems of how to communicate with them.

 

I sometimes ask myself why we even speculate what life could be like in another universe. I can never quite get my head around the drastic changes between summer and winter that I witness annually in my tiny spot of this planet. If this can happen here, what might not happen in another galaxy or universe? As for aging, my father has always been taken for ten years younger than he actually is because he looks young. So have I. Other people look older than they are. This difference can occur between siblings. Maybe this is due to my lack of science education...

 

I'm not entirely comfortable posting this. Normally I agree with the things you say...but this does not tie in with my experience of life and I simply cannot figure out how to twist my brain to make it make sense.

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I'm not entirely comfortable posting this. Normally I agree with the things you say...but this does not tie in with my experience of life and I simply cannot figure out how to twist my brain to make it make sense.

It takes time to accept and understand. ;)

 

But time is definitely relative. Countless experiments prove it. It's probably better if you get a book about it. I have a conceptual understanding of it, but I think I would do a very bad job explaining it further. :HaHa:

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I'm not entirely comfortable posting this. Normally I agree with the things you say...but this does not tie in with my experience of life and I simply cannot figure out how to twist my brain to make it make sense.

It takes time to accept and understand. ;)

 

But time is definitely relative. Countless experiments prove it. It's probably better if you get a book about it. I have a conceptual understanding of it, but I think I would do a very bad job explaining it further. :HaHa:

 

Okay. Something about relativity of time? What kind of key words would I look for? Maybe I'll start with that in wikipedia and see where it takes me.

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I found two links that I'm thinking might work as an introductory to get me started:

The person speaking at the beginning of this video is identified as Michio Kaku, City University of New York. I think it's real science as opposed to science fiction.

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Look up Time Dilation.

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Okay. Something about relativity of time? What kind of key words would I look for? Maybe I'll start with that in wikipedia and see where it takes me.

Einstein's Relativity. Special Relativity. General Relativity. Time Dilation (like Neil said). Length Contraction. And there's probably a bunch more keywords you could use.

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[*]But science itself employs a kind of faith.... Science is built upon a faith that the world is understandable.... It also holds, as an article of scientific faith, that such exploration is worth the trouble....
Whenever people use this argument for the existence of God, I always automatically think of Russel's teapot in response.

 

[*]God is the reason for nature, the explanation of why things are. He is the answer to existence, not part of existence itself.
Why do they always make this argument but don't back it up with any evidence? In the past, people used to think God was literally in the skies and part of existence. They only moved God out of the skies and into another dimension when science discovered God wasn't in the sky and hell isn't really in the center of the Earth. Yet what evidence does he have that God is not a part of existence? If it's possible for a god to exist that's the answer to existence but not somehow existence itself and if he's basing this all purely on faith, then it's just as likely a god could exist that's apart of existence and he has no evidence as to what the nature of God is like. Besides, what's the point of believing in God he's basically admitting is non-existent? Why not just become an atheist then? It sounds to me like he's in denial.

 

[*]The categorical mistake of the atheist is to assume that God is natural.... By making God an ordinary part of the natural world, and failing to find Him there, they conclude that He does not exist.
So, is he basically admitting his god is purely imaginary? I'm reminded of how when children make up imaginary friends and an adult asks them where their friend is if they're real and the child protests that the friend isn't imaginary, they're just invisible.
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The Experience and Perception of Time, in Stanford Encyclopedia Online (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience).

Perception of time can be even more confusing. It's enough trying to understand the basic principle of the cones of time, and strings of time, and all that.

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I'm watching the video. I would like for the scientists to explain why they switch between light and time as though they were the same thing. Kaku says that in 1897, J. J. Thompson discovered that inside the atom things are different that in the world as we know it, and this includes time. Kaku mentioned something called photons.

 

I looked up photons in wikepedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon). Photons are not described as time. They are described as light and matter. The article made one reference to spacetime so I looked up spacetime.

 

So far as I can make out, spacetime is nothing but a theoretical model to make things easy for scientists when they're talking. Here's the introductory paragraph:

 

In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space being three-dimensional and time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different sort than the spatial dimensions. According to certain Euclidean space perceptions, the universe has three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. By combining space and time into a single manifold, physicists have significantly simplified a large number of physical theories, as well as described in a more uniform way the workings of the universe at both the supergalactic and subatomic levels.

 

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

 

Can someone break that down into plain English? I've heard the term spacetime being tossed about for so long and I trusted that it actually was something. What am I missing? Is this just another god?

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I'm watching the video. I would like for the scientists to explain why they switch between light and time as though they were the same thing.

I never seen anyone do that. I guess I have to watch the video.

 

I looked up photons in wikepedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon). Photons are not described as time. They are described as light and matter.

Correct. Except it's not real matter, but pure energy, and it at certain times behave like matter. It's the dualism of the nature of light, it can behave as a wave or as a particle, depending on how you set up the experiment.

 

The article made one reference to spacetime so I looked up spacetime.

 

So far as I can make out, spacetime is nothing but a theoretical model to make things easy for scientists when they're talking. Here's the introductory paragraph:

No, I don't think so. Spacetime is: space and time. The dimension we move within, plus the time factor, i.e. the moving. That's the four basic dimensions of our universe. So we have the 3-dimensions of space (sideways, forward/backward, up/down) and the fourth one: time, moving forward only.

 

In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space being three-dimensional and time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different sort than the spatial dimensions. According to certain Euclidean space perceptions, the universe has three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. By combining space and time into a single manifold, physicists have significantly simplified a large number of physical theories, as well as described in a more uniform way the workings of the universe at both the supergalactic and subatomic levels.

All four dimensions exists, but it's hard for us to see time as being something similar or same as the physical up/down/left/right/forward/backward (X,Y,Z) dimensions. So for us, time and space are two different, but yet very real, things, and in the mathematical model they combine them as four, all considered as the same thing. And somehow things are falling into place when they do that. It seems like on paper (even if our experience can't see it) that time is one of the dimensions of the universe.

 

So space (3 dimensions) + time (1 dimension which to us seems to be different than the other 3) = spacetime (4 dimensions, and the formulas magically work better).

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I'm watching the video. I would like for the scientists to explain why they switch between light and time as though they were the same thing.

I never seen anyone do that. I guess I have to watch the video.

 

I looked up photons in wikepedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon). Photons are not described as time. They are described as light and matter.

Correct. Except it's not real matter, but pure energy, and it at certain times behave like matter. It's the dualism of the nature of light, it can behave as a wave or as a particle, depending on how you set up the experiment.

 

I understand this. It ties in with my experience of life. With my low vision, if I'm not wearing glasses, my vision is like finely grained particles. This discussion has finally given me the vocabulary to explain the difference glasses make! My mother asked me many, many years ago if the glasses help me see better and I said that even the darkness looks different. She said, "Huh! darkness is darkness." So I shut up but I knew she was wrong.

 

Throughout my lifetime when I was bored, I have often experimented with light waves and separating the particles with the frames of my glasses, or whatever. There are especially interesting effects when it's raining and I'm driving in the open buggy in the dark and there's cars on the highway. The head-lights on the raindrops on the glasses make far more fancy designs than the few he shows on the video, esp. when the lenses are all covered with rain. I was never sure how I could still see to drive but I could. These days I live in town and use the bus.

 

However, I don't understand how photons or energy can also be the "stuff time is made of." How can time be "stuff"? I understand full well that this is nineteenth century thinking. However, they got a lot of stuff right in the 19th century and there is nothing wrong with 19th century thinking if it's correct. If it's incorrect, I need to understand my mistake. Somehow, the word of authority has never ever meant a thing to me. If it did, I would still be driving horse and buggy, content with a Grade 8 education. In other words, all the scientists in the world are not going to convince me until I understand where my thinking is wrong. My argument is more fully developed below.

 

The article made one reference to spacetime so I looked up spacetime.

 

So far as I can make out, spacetime is nothing but a theoretical model to make things easy for scientists when they're talking. Here's the introductory paragraph:

No, I don't think so. Spacetime is: space and time. The dimension we move within, plus the time factor, i.e. the moving. That's the four basic dimensions of our universe. So we have the 3-dimensions of space (sideways, forward/backward, up/down) and the fourth one: time, moving forward only.

 

In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space being three-dimensional and time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different sort than the spatial dimensions. According to certain Euclidean space perceptions, the universe has three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. By combining space and time into a single manifold, physicists have significantly simplified a large number of physical theories, as well as described in a more uniform way the workings of the universe at both the supergalactic and subatomic levels.

All four dimensions exists, but it's hard for us to see time as being something similar or same as the physical up/down/left/right/forward/backward (X,Y,Z) dimensions. So for us, time and space are two different, but yet very real, things, and in the mathematical model they combine them as four, all considered as the same thing. And somehow things are falling into place when they do that. It seems like on paper (even if our experience can't see it) that time is one of the dimensions of the universe.

 

So space (3 dimensions) + time (1 dimension which to us seems to be different than the other 3) = spacetime (4 dimensions, and the formulas magically work better).

 

Thanks so much for trying to explain it. However, time is not just about moving. Time is also about how long I have to sit and wait:

  • for church to be over
  • for the bus to arrive
  • for life to be over
  • for god to show up
  • for the hour hand to move from 11:00 to 12:00

[inserted later: Now I remember that you come from a Pentecostal church so "sitting in church" may have had a different meaning for you than for me. We had to sit perfectly still for two hours straight (we got to kneel twice for prayer)--or however long the Spirit inspired the preachers to preach extemporaneously and all the other speakers, and however long it took for them to say they had nothing to say. And we had to be interested in what they said; if we weren't, that proved how arid we really were spiritually. Falling asleep was a bad sign but it could be tolerated. I was never able to fall asleep but I did develop migraine headaches.]

 

Time is how long I get to play after all the chores are done, how far I can travel depending on what means of transportation I am using (walking, traveling by horse, bus, car, or jet), how big--what type and quality--plants will grow in a certain place and between certain dates (some hybrid plants grow fast but have loose fibre in lush conditions while in harsher conditions the natural breed produces much higher quality fibre over a much longer growth period).

 

The video shows stuff--matter or photons--being sucked into a black hole by gravity. Supposedly that is time either slowing down or speeding up, I forget which. Not once does he actually tell me what the stuff is that time is made of AND how he knows that time is made of something and why I should believe him. He just makes all these sensational propositions. Science can do better than that.

 

About fifteen years ago, I was told that one light-year=the distance light travels in one year. That, however, is not the same distance a young man can walk in one year. Other species travel at other rates. Planets and moons, etc. don't all travel at the same speed, either.

 

We also know that there is quite a difference between the distance the various species on our planet can travel in one day, week, or year. For all these reasons, it makes no sense to me to collapse time and space into one. On what basis, or by what criteria, is it being done?

 

It's just that I'm so sick and tired of feeling so confused about reality and having to believe stuff about reality that makes no sense. If time can actually stand still, as he says it can, I might as well believe the story about Joshua or whoever who made the sun stand still. If reality really is some monster that doesn't make sense I would rather believe in the Judeo-Christian god that I've heard about all my life than some mechanical monster from science fiction that I don't know about. But I can't go back to that life.

 

He's a physicist and he shows a lot of other scientists (mostly physicists) that I've heard about or seen before. I'm sure what he says is scientifically sound and that the problem is just my total lack of education in science. Maybe something I said here will give someone a clue what it is that I am missing.

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The article made one reference to spacetime so I looked up spacetime.

 

So far as I can make out, spacetime is nothing but a theoretical model to make things easy for scientists when they're talking. Here's the introductory paragraph:

No, I don't think so. Spacetime is: space and time. The dimension we move within, plus the time factor, i.e. the moving. That's the four basic dimensions of our universe. So we have the 3-dimensions of space (sideways, forward/backward, up/down) and the fourth one: time, moving forward only.

 

In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space being three-dimensional and time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different sort than the spatial dimensions. According to certain Euclidean space perceptions, the universe has three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. By combining space and time into a single manifold, physicists have significantly simplified a large number of physical theories, as well as described in a more uniform way the workings of the universe at both the supergalactic and subatomic levels.

All four dimensions exists, but it's hard for us to see time as being something similar or same as the physical up/down/left/right/forward/backward (X,Y,Z) dimensions. So for us, time and space are two different, but yet very real, things, and in the mathematical model they combine them as four, all considered as the same thing. And somehow things are falling into place when they do that. It seems like on paper (even if our experience can't see it) that time is one of the dimensions of the universe.

 

So space (3 dimensions) + time (1 dimension which to us seems to be different than the other 3) = spacetime (4 dimensions, and the formulas magically work better).

 

I looked at this again. If I clear my brain of the idea that time is "stuff" I can see the concept of space and time being four dimensions that describe the human experience in the universe. But to say that time is energy or stuff of some sort that can be manipulated--I feel like I'm saying, "I believe in God the Father Horus, Progenitor of the Ancient Greeks from whom come all the living...." That isn't science! How does science prove that time is stuff?

 

Okay, I'll shut up for now. Just wanted to say that I got part of the explanation.

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I looked at this again. If I clear my brain of the idea that time is "stuff" I can see the concept of space and time being four dimensions that describe the human experience in the universe. But to say that time is energy or stuff of some sort that can be manipulated--I feel like I'm saying, "I believe in God the Father Horus, Progenitor of the Ancient Greeks from whom come all the living...." That isn't science! How does science prove that time is stuff?

Space isn't stuff either. Neither is up, down, left, or right. There are "things" that exists that doesn't have a physical form, but exists nonetheless. Vacuum is the absence of stuff, and yet we have a name for it, and if you create a vacuum, you have vacuum!

 

What time really is, is that it's a measurement of motion. It's the steps of how some thing can move from one state to another. A clock ticks at a certain speed, to measure time, it's a process of steps to create the idea of time. So time in itself isn't a thing, but the result of things in motion. It's a relationship. Thing, Motion, Time.

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Thanks. You are so patient. It's really late here tonight. I'm not sure how straight I'm thinking anymore but I'm beginning to see some light. Maybe with a night's sleep eventually things will fall into place. Kaku uses a lot of visual imagery to show the stuff of the universe and time. But maybe it is mostly for illustration of concepts. Philosophy profs sometimes draw diagrams on the blackboard to explain their theories and show how they hold together. Kaku calls himself a theoretical physicist. His medium is high technology rather than a chalkboard. I know some of the things he showed are computer generated images because they are not satellite or Hubble images. And no one could have been out there taking photographs of time going down the drain.

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Okay. Something about relativity of time? What kind of key words would I look for? Maybe I'll start with that in wikipedia and see where it takes me.

Einstein's Relativity. Special Relativity. General Relativity. Time Dilation (like Neil said). Length Contraction. And there's probably a bunch more keywords you could use.

 

I didn't see this post, or Neil's, last night. I looked at Time Dilation tonight. I'm still reading up various articles.

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Dr. William Lane Craig has his belief system because of what some primitive men living thousands of years ago wrote down. When I want to learn about the nature of existance, I'd rather read about Einstein's Theory of Relativity, or watch an episode of, "The Universe," or read Brian Greene's, "The Elegant Universe." Who are you going to believe, cutting edge scientists, or primitive men?

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Dr. Craig is the king of ad hoc reasoning. To his credit, he recognizes that he can't just employ question-begging arguments, the downfall to so many other apologists. So he tries to take valid philosophical constructs, such as Kalam, and retrofit God into them. In fact, he passively admits this in his debates. You'll often hear him begin a rebuttal by reminding everyone in the audience, "I'm presenting an argument", and then goes to great lengths to explain how all of the illogical holes have been plugged. He might as well be saying, "I designed this argument to win."

 

With Kalam, all he's doing is borrowing the causeless cause attribute of the universe and reapplying it to God, so that now there's a redundancy in to add to something that didn't need to be added to.

 

Christians philosophy is just philosophy with down syndrome.

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Who are you going to believe, cutting edge scientists, or primitive men?

 

Neither.

 

I'm going to believe that which makes sense based on what I have experienced of the universe. Obviously, though, as one little human being, I cannot experience very much in a single lifetime. For this reason, I either need to remain extremely limited in my knowledge of this vast and wondrous universe or I must accept what others share of their experiences.

 

It has been my observation that with sufficient care and cooperation, humans have developed means by which they can build on each other's experiences and findings of the universe, and that this can be done across generations and centuries, and across geography and cultures and languages. These findings comprise the fund of human knowledge in our hands today.

 

However, it's a seriously mixed bag. Methods of finding, receiving, and discerning knowledge vary across time, place, culture, and especially religion. Philosophers seem to pull ideas out of thin air and play with them. Religionists do the same but they think they got the ideas from supernatural entities. Scientists probably do the same thing but they subject their ideas to rigorous empirical testing.

 

The question I need to have answered is HOW DO YOU KNOW?

 

Regarding time, how do scientists know that something as basic as time can be manipulated? So this guy "discovered" in 1897 that inside the atom time is different from outside. How does he know this? I'd like to see some evidence of this before I am asked to just accept it. I find no evidence or explanation for what he saw that put him on such a trip. I read stuff about muons. But muons seem to be light. Time is just a concept, the same as an inch. An inch cannot be stretched or squeezed together. You can take a cube of cheese or bread that was cut an inch square. You can squeeze or stretch it (depending on its texture) to other sizes. But it will no longer be an inch square cube because the inch will forever and always be an inch. Unless you open the door to crazy other-worldly philosophy.

 

I'm for real-world stuff that one can see, feel, touch, smell, taste and make sense of via the senses, intellect, and emotions.

 

There's all kinds of "realities" in the universe and I experienced all kinds of things as a very young child from my own inner experiences. After getting considerable exposure to academic ideas (in my forties), I settled on the human experience as the baseline. Gotta settle on something humans have in common, and go from there because humans are my main conversation partners; not too many dogs and horses and cats who condescend to discuss the realities of life with me. What all of us have in common (more or less) is the five senses, the emotions, and the intellect. I say "more or less" because no two people see exactly the same thing when they look at a colour, nor do they mean exactly the same thing when they talk about love, or any other concept. But it's close enough for meaningful conversation and discourse.

 

So WHO will I believe? Nobody! If I'm going to just accept some word of authority, I might as well accept what my parents taught me. After all, they gave me life and kept me alive. Who is better qualified than them as an authority, if I'm going to just believe? It's impossible for me to just believe something. That's blind faith. It's GOTTA MAKE SENSE!

 

Back to time. That article about the Experience of Perceving Time was easy and down-to-earth common sense. It did not look at "Special Relativity Theory." So I'm back to square 1. An inch is an inch. A minute is a minute. Magnets and all kinds of things can cause time pieces to act funny and move at different speeds but that does not affect how much time actually passes. A totally blind person cannot see the sun rise and set but that person can still have a sense of how much time is passing. I can be standing at a red light at the intersection and eventually I "just know" that it is time to move up to the curb and get ready to cross the street.

 

I've caught myself doing this and almost stepping into the street without looking at the light. This alarmed me. I checked the light. And sure enough, it changed to green a milisecond after I arrived at the curb. My body knew even though my conscious intellect did not. I've been using this intersection for only six years and I'm sighted. A blind person could probably cross the street unaided by now. So there's something about the rhythm of time that's built into our very bodies. And I can see that this is seriously disturbed and/or disoriented when the body moves at a very different speed. All I have to do to get mine disoriented is get up or go to bed at a weird time. Being in a different form of transportation is enough to do it.

 

There's something so comforting about the rhythmic clip-clop of a horse and buggy ride. A ride in a car can be very disorienting. The smell of a car is so strange, the feel of the ride--it's smooth yet you speed up and slow down at rates that leave your stomach behind. And your head--it jerks backward and foreward, how you ever manage to keep it attached is a mystery but never mind, your stomach is coming up and.....

 

So what I'd like to know is how do scientists know that time is different inside the atom than outside? How do they know that time can split? How do they know that sending photons through a machine (particle accelerator, I think) is the same as experimenting with time? How does light translate into time? Or vice versa? How do they know they are right? How can I know it? What is there in the everyday human experience to prove it--to tie it to reality? Maybe clocks just act funny when funny things are done to them, the same what that human and animal bodies react funny when funny things are done to them. If this is not the case, HOW DO WE/THEY KNOW?

 

Should I move this to the science section?

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