Bay 12 Games Forum

Again? Seriously?

Who is this ominous 'they' you are talking about?

You know damn well who I'm talking about, smartass.

The Illuminati, of course. Didn't you read the bit where Dan Brown explains that they were founded by a bunch of scientists?!

You, too.

The scientific community. They need some sort of leverage to beg for money, don't they? Something that "shatters everything we thought we knew" is a lot more compelling than "it's the same thing but smaller". Hell, begging for money is half the job.

Or maybe they just want their 15 minutes of fame. By the time it can be disproved, they're long gone. Or maybe their plan is to stay ahead of that and pull another reversal before people start catching on.

These are not saints, but human beings with normal desires, aspirations, and needs. People in other fields pull this shit all the time, so why should scientists be exempt?

That's precisely not what you are doing! 'Providing an alternate explanation' would involve - you guessed it - fairly rigorous mathematics. Right now you're just throwing words around. That's how all theories start, mind you - but the mathematical formalization is needed.
Plus you have in no way given examples of the current mathematical model failing, which is kinda the only reason a new explanation of the same phenomena would be needed anyway.

I'm saying you shouldn't take everything they tell you as the gospel. People can and do make mistakes. And if I recall correctly, there was a recent thing about rampant confirmation bias within the scientific community.

We don't "need" another explanation for anything, until we need it. Or unless we are engaging in intellectual masturbation, like we are doing right now. Lighten up.

Hey now, let's not be a bunch of douches about this.  Being skeptical and always challenging the data collected thus far is what keeps science healthy-- otherwise we would all still be prattling about phlogiston right now.

However, it is important to focus that skepticism.  Any model proposed NEEDS to answer questions and explain observed phenomena (at very tight levels, as I pointed out earlier) BETTER than the current models. As Helgo pointed out, this requires some pretty damned elite math skills.

Relativity did exactly that, which is why when its predictions were observed, it became a sensation.  You need to have predictions that are then confirmed to have any validity for any new models, and the resulting model needs to be better than what we currently have.

Simply "Not liking" or finding the model to "Not make sense" (to us) are not grounds to discard the baby with the bathwater.  Quantum field theory is very much "We dont like it", AND "Does not make sense" (To us)--- but it WORKS, and WORKS WELL. Keep that in mind.

I'm willing to drop the entire conversation if everyone else can agree to stop slinging shit after I leave (not directed at you, wierd). Can we agree to disagree?

Also, it all seems based on the assumption that gravity requires mass, which is wrong.

That's based on the assumption that light has no mass, and yet, is affected by gravity, which I am bringing into question.

Please forgive me, but I do not possess millions of dollars for the equipment to weigh subatomic particles. I guess I should just take their word for it.


I'm pitching a concept. For fuck's sake, that site actually claimed to know exactly how the 4th dimension works.

If speed really does approach an asymptote, perhaps photons move slightly slower than that, but still be really, really close.

Though that brings up another interesting question. If there was something out there faster than that theoretical maximum, how would we even be able to detect it? Maybe the matter we observe just sort of peters out at that point, but perhaps something more exotic could surpass it? But that's another can of worms, and I have no idea how it would work, having no basis of reference.

If photons are truly so small, then the miniscule amount of light coming out of the 2 flashlights would not have enough photons interacting with each other to produce a noticeable effect (with current equipment, at least). The field of photons would have to be much denser.

Even if the photon has an infinitesimally small rest mass, that's all it takes to make gravity affect it.

If the rest mass is so small, you could still get accurate results just assuming it doesn't have any at all, at least for the scale of current applications.

I am challenging the interpretation of those tests. Common interpretation is that light has no rest mass, and that, therefor, gravity should not affect it by itself, and yet, it clearly affects the path light takes. So they conjure up the idea that space is warped by gravity, and try to make time this tangible thing instead of an abstract concept.

We know light has momentum, and we agree that mass and energy are directly linked, except when it comes to light. They say that light has no rest mass, but I say that we simply don't have equipment sensitive enough to weigh it yet. I also argue that time is not tangible, as that would create too many paradoxes. The only way to make that work is to conjure up a new dimension, which we also have no other evidence of. I argue that a black hole is just a super dense ball of matter/energy, and that since light has momentum, and therefor mass, that enough gravity would be able to alter it's trajectory. We don't see things come out of a black hole on a regular basis because that stuff doesn't have enough momentum to escape the enormous gravity. At least until the black hole itself reaches critical mass. It has enough gravity to crunch together atoms, but each stem down in size has more energy. Eventually it's going to try and crush something too small and cause an explosive reaction. Try to squeese atoms together too tightly, and you get an explosion. But if there's already too much gravity to escape, the material stays there and collects more gravity. Allowing gravity to accumulate further, even the quarks and stuff the sub-atomic particles are made of will start overcrowding, which, following the observed pattern, would also explode their bonds eventually. And then the stuff that is made of, and so on and so forth. Gravity increases linearly, but the increase in bond energy increases exponentially every level you go down. Eventually, it will overtake the gravity, resulting in a rather large explosion we call the big bang.

I argue that my explanation has the benefit of simplicity. It doesn't need to conjure up a bunch of new stuff to make it's base assumptions work. Isn't the simplest explanation usually the best one, after all?