Large Hadron Collider Creates Incredibly Dense Primordial Matter
- Thread starter Tom Goldman
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Meh. We're still using fossil fuels. We CAN'T have anti-gravity OR faster-than-light travel according to the current scientific paradigms (i.e. relativity). What we find out a CERN is probably only going to lead to more efficient batteries and better MRIs. We aren't even going to have fusion technology.Tin Man said:
Physicists are spoiled, you want to see world changing technology? Put more money into genetics.
Oh, and as much as I dislike monotheism, I'm afraid you can't make any definitive claims about the soul or God. Not without committing to your own form of physicalist dogmatism. It's true that all facts tend to point to the contrary, but we can't even explain what consciousness is. So unless you're willing to admit that you aren't conscious, then let's reserve judgment. A true skeptic is someone who withholds belief, not some Dawkins-reading d-bag with daddy issues.
And as far as people fearing death and wanting to live on... you're just a liar if you say don't fear death too. There's nothing wrong with wanting to extend one's life if one values one's life. The problem with the people you're angry at is that they just blindly accept what they are told, not that they want an afterlife.
Rabble are rabble. They need to believe that they are right, and the subject matter of their belief makes no difference. 'Conviction' is always a virtue upheld by the uneducated. Scientists used to be the Aristocracy, well versed in not only their field but Philosophy, Literature and the Arts as well. Specialization has large benefits but its largest downside is that people think their field is the measure of everything. As Nietzsche put it, those who work under an idea have no time to question it, in fact, they cannot even consider it worth questioning.Tin Man said:
Oh, and by 'Religion' you are clearly just talking about born-again Christians. While they are annoying and stupid, they are hardly the definition of what it means to be religious.
1) I never try to have a reasoned conversation with them, and anyone who tries is clearly insane.
2) When I have a conversation with someone who does try to back up their reasoning and proceeds in a cordial manner, I use reasoned arguments myself and return their courtesy, I do not simply label them an idiot and dismiss them.
3) What bothers me the most about the 'new atheists' is how utterly low-class and completely lacking in manners they usually are.
4) Dawkins is an academic who decided to make money. He isn't respected in academia and when confronted with people who actually know what they're talking about he reneges on most of his points, acknowledging his own ignorance. If you want to hear someone qualified to talk about human nature read Fans deWaal.
5) The 'new atheist' movement is an entirely un-academic, un-intellectual appeal to hipsters and people who have abusive religious parents.
6) Tell me how unafraid you are of death when you're on your deathbed and it's staring you in the face.
7) Wanting to live forever is a natural extension of our drive for self preservation, which, last time I checked, is the strongest and most natural instinct. We fear death and will do anything to put it out of our heads. Once again, the problem with fanatics, religious or otherwise is their dogmatism and blind, uncritical acceptance of things. You just want to focus on the afterlife because it's the only way a religious fanatic is different from a secular fanatic. Fanatics are fanatics as far as I'm concerned.
Ah its refreshing to see a man so arrogant he practically states that he is so wise that he knows undoubtedly there is no God just because he doesn't believe in him.Tin Man said:
Get over yourself.
Don't want to start a religious debate but you just come of sounding like a douchebag and that doesn't help add to the validity of your groups opinions just as much as retarded extremists don't help add to the validity of my group's opinions.
OT: So what exactly does this creation of this matter mean? Like what are its uses or potential applications, even if it is not this piece of matter exactly what does being able to create stuff like this mean? Also if there is a time where this causes any benefits to us when is it, seems to me like this stuff won't be useful for a long time.
Ah well smashing lead ions at incredibly large speeds and creating matter, GLaDoS would be happy, after all we're doing it....FOR SCIENCE!!!!
Well you see the other guy was a not sure if troll or stupid, decided if I'm gonna take one seriously might as well do the same for you too.MonocleClaire said:
OT: To people afraid of what'll happen if LHC makes a mistake during one of these experiments the answer is that the worst they the LHC could possibly do is damage itself again and put scientific progress back by however long it takes to fix and get it back to the energy level it was working at when it breaks.
Well in some substances (rare cases, mind you) liquids are actually denser than the solid of said substance. Quite a famous one comes to mind: Water. So it's not as counter-intuitive as you would think, then again I only know that because of chem class.Sporky111 said:
But yeah, stuff like this is why I'm going to be a science major. Just unbelievably cool.
I created incredibly dense matter once! It created a black hole and released an electrical beast. Hooray! (Sorry, Chester A. Bum hijacked my keyboard for a second)
Captcha: isotope ryStall
Stop tracking my internets, captcha!
Captcha: isotope ryStall
Stop tracking my internets, captcha!
Sorry this is late, but I was away from my computer for quite a bit and just wanted to clarify a few things. I do think we largely agree, as I'm no fan of organized religion or more generally of the herd instinct that underlies organized religion as well as countless other institutions. I just want to lay out a few counterpoints so that you can moderate your stance and have a more balanced view of things.
Conviction blinds one to the truth because it means that one thinks they already have the truth. It makes people complacent and recalcitrant to change. While it is true that one needs to be motivated to act, one needn't be cemented in one's belief system to do so. And a belief system is a belief system. Period. The subject matter doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is how uncritical the belief is.
The most well educated tend to be agnostic and reserve judgment completely. People who identify themselves as atheists are usually materialists, but are unaware of the metaphysical implications of materialism, and how it has been undermined by physics. Faced with the strange stuff that happens at the quantum level, Einstein himself said that psychic phenomena could be true. (Einstein was also a theist as I recall, and he was a clever fellow).
Of course we can create whatever values we like, regardless of the nature of death, my point is just that you might have a much harder time convincing people to do certain things without the idea of an afterlife. Without the idea of god there isn't much hope for an objective right or wrong. Frankly I don't think there is an objective right or wrong as far as I can see (I'm a moral error theorist), but that scares the crap out of a lot of people. If there's no divine punishment then there's one less reason to be good.
I'm uncertain about any sort of afterlife, but it seems arbitrary that I am merely a complex bundle of stuff that spontaneously became conscious at birth and will spontaneously become unconscious at death. Either:
1) I'm not conscious now and there's no such thing as consciousness (which is either absurd or a meaningless semantic argument about the term 'consciousness'),
2) consciousness spontaneously comes into existence when matter organizes itself in a certain way (which, again, seems very arbitrary), or
3) there is some continuation of consciousness in some form or another (or an up-filtering of consciousness) after death.
I don't know the answers to these questions, and while I would very much like to know, I'm not going to pretend that I do just to comfort myself intellectually.
My point was that we can hardly criticize people for wanting to live forever. What we can criticize them for is for believing that they will live forever without any proof. But that is just a criticism for uncritical acceptance of ideologies. I thought your point was that religious people are worse than other mindless believers because the idea of an afterlife was somehow arrogant. I agree that they are arrogant to think that they deserve an afterlife just because they believe in something and others don't, but once again, that isn't any argument against afterlife qua afterlife.
I know that I sure as hell would like to have some sort of afterlife and that desire isn't any different from my desire to live right now or keep living in the future. In fact, it is just an extension of that desire.
But if your point is that people should live their lives as if there is no afterlife, then you should realize that for a lot of people that might mean doing as much bad and selfish things as they can get away with. Not everyone, mind you. My point is just that it isn't necessarily good to live for the present in every case.
I think it's enough to criticize religious people for the uncritical nature of their beliefs. Just because there are religious zealots out there it doesn't therefore mean that we must become zealots to combat them ourselves. Rather than sinking down to their level, I think the answer is to try to act as coolly and rationally as possible in order to set a better example. Sometimes this means admitting that we could be wrong, and in these cases we must content ourselves with the fact that it is only very implausible that we are wrong.
(It's funny you mention Gandhi, because he was nuts. He was an orthodox Brahmin who believed that his ascetic religious practices were mystically holding the country together. He didn't just believe that it was the power of nonviolent action that helped the Indian people, but actual religious rites and ceremonies. He doesn't strike me as someone you would want to use as an example.)Tin Man said:
Conviction blinds one to the truth because it means that one thinks they already have the truth. It makes people complacent and recalcitrant to change. While it is true that one needs to be motivated to act, one needn't be cemented in one's belief system to do so. And a belief system is a belief system. Period. The subject matter doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is how uncritical the belief is.
Honestly that doesn't cover a whole lot beyond monotheism. In fact, I think recent polls show that the majority of Christians in America believe that you'll get into heaven as long as you're a good person, no matter what you believe. Most monotheists aren't fanatics. The fanatics are just the loudest minority.Tin Man said:
It's quite true that traditional atheists are less confrontational and more educated. However, I was talking about the 'new atheists' who believe that we should actively try to annihilate religion (e.g. the 'four horsemen of new atheism': Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchins.) These people are just downright rude and give a bad name to atheism.Tin Man said:
The most well educated tend to be agnostic and reserve judgment completely. People who identify themselves as atheists are usually materialists, but are unaware of the metaphysical implications of materialism, and how it has been undermined by physics. Faced with the strange stuff that happens at the quantum level, Einstein himself said that psychic phenomena could be true. (Einstein was also a theist as I recall, and he was a clever fellow).
The soft stuff that Dawkins writes about in his books commit to hard genetic determinism for human behavior. Ask any neuroscientist whether our behavior is strongly determined by our genes and they will laugh their butts off. Dawkins is a clever ecologist, but his popular works are just that: popular. They aren't respected in academia and are largely viewed as pandering to the general public. What is worse is the fact that they deal with things far outside his field of expertise, which is a practice quite rightly looked down upon in academia. So yes, he did decide to make money because those works are not academic and are geared towards the general public.Tin Man said:
Mmm... are we aware that 'living for now' can easily be construed as a call for mindless hedonism and indulgence? Why should I care about any of my lasting effects on the world if I'm just going to be annihilated by death? Why should I care about learning if I'm just going to lose all of my knowledge?Tin Man said:
Of course we can create whatever values we like, regardless of the nature of death, my point is just that you might have a much harder time convincing people to do certain things without the idea of an afterlife. Without the idea of god there isn't much hope for an objective right or wrong. Frankly I don't think there is an objective right or wrong as far as I can see (I'm a moral error theorist), but that scares the crap out of a lot of people. If there's no divine punishment then there's one less reason to be good.
I'm uncertain about any sort of afterlife, but it seems arbitrary that I am merely a complex bundle of stuff that spontaneously became conscious at birth and will spontaneously become unconscious at death. Either:
1) I'm not conscious now and there's no such thing as consciousness (which is either absurd or a meaningless semantic argument about the term 'consciousness'),
2) consciousness spontaneously comes into existence when matter organizes itself in a certain way (which, again, seems very arbitrary), or
3) there is some continuation of consciousness in some form or another (or an up-filtering of consciousness) after death.
I don't know the answers to these questions, and while I would very much like to know, I'm not going to pretend that I do just to comfort myself intellectually.
I don't think you're familiar with the debates about consciousness in philosophy of mind. Because you seem to have a lot of presuppositions about the nature of consciousness that you might not have reflected upon. The fact of the matter is that we have a hard time talking about ourselves just being conscious right now, much less after death, so the problem isn't nearly as cut-and-dry as you make it out to be.Tin Man said:
My point was that we can hardly criticize people for wanting to live forever. What we can criticize them for is for believing that they will live forever without any proof. But that is just a criticism for uncritical acceptance of ideologies. I thought your point was that religious people are worse than other mindless believers because the idea of an afterlife was somehow arrogant. I agree that they are arrogant to think that they deserve an afterlife just because they believe in something and others don't, but once again, that isn't any argument against afterlife qua afterlife.
I know that I sure as hell would like to have some sort of afterlife and that desire isn't any different from my desire to live right now or keep living in the future. In fact, it is just an extension of that desire.
But if your point is that people should live their lives as if there is no afterlife, then you should realize that for a lot of people that might mean doing as much bad and selfish things as they can get away with. Not everyone, mind you. My point is just that it isn't necessarily good to live for the present in every case.
I think it's enough to criticize religious people for the uncritical nature of their beliefs. Just because there are religious zealots out there it doesn't therefore mean that we must become zealots to combat them ourselves. Rather than sinking down to their level, I think the answer is to try to act as coolly and rationally as possible in order to set a better example. Sometimes this means admitting that we could be wrong, and in these cases we must content ourselves with the fact that it is only very implausible that we are wrong.
This could be the end of the world.......or the start of a new one....
Come on everyone,say something that could be extremely historic and memorable :]
Come on everyone,say something that could be extremely historic and memorable :]
So where are they keeping this stuff? It has to be on the very bottom floor, or else a chunk the size of a die would collapse an entire floor. And the article said they have more of it they've made. What are they planning to do with it? Sugar of the gods? Or just make perfect liquids for all, so that we all can keep our tea mixing without stirring it. Sandra Bullock, eat your heart out.
But the possibilities are almost limitless. This is the tip of the iceberg man, we could find out so much.Kanatatsu said: