(February 16, 2017 at 5:05 pm)bheath Wrote: An apologist friend of mine said this a while back and I thought I'd pose the question here. He says, there is a god, because e=mc².

Any clue what he could be talking about? Or where he could have gotten this idea?

He isn't really 'talking' about anything. This is simply one of the latest manifestations of arguing from ignorance. Not saying your friend is stupid, exactly, but I'd be willing to wager a fair sum that he has - at best - a rather vague notion of what the equation means or implies. You get this all the time when people start going on about frequency, vibration, quantum entanglement, and so on. They inflate their own lack of understand to the point where they're claiming the concept (whichever one is the flavour du jour) isn't understandable. Since - in their mind and to confirm their own bias - something isn't understood by human beings, it must be the product of a super-human intelligence. From there, it's simply a short rhetorical spasm to land in the lap of God.

The trouble with this is painfully, grindingly obvious: the inability of one mind to grasp a particular concept doesn't mean that the concept is ungraspable by someone else. For example, I'm not remotely a physicist (I tend to visualize an atom as something about the size and shape of a small pea), but my own ignorance doesn't negate physics. And even those bits of nature which are not yet understood by any human doesn't justify dragging God in as an 'explanation'.

Boru

(February 17, 2017 at 8:31 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: He isn't really 'talking' about anything. This is simply one of the latest manifestations of arguing from ignorance. Not saying your friend is stupid, exactly, but I'd be willing to wager a fair sum that he has - at best - a rather vague notion of what the equation means or implies. You get this all the time when people start going on about frequency, vibration, quantum entanglement, and so on. They inflate their own lack of understand to the point where they're claiming the concept (whichever one is the flavour du jour) isn't understandable. Since - in their mind and to confirm their own bias - something isn't understood by human beings, it must be the product of a super-human intelligence. From there, it's simply a short rhetorical spasm to land in the lap of God.

The trouble with this is painfully, grindingly obvious: the inability of one mind to grasp a particular concept doesn't mean that the concept is ungraspable by someone else. For example, I'm not remotely a physicist (I tend to visualize an atom as something about the size and shape of a small pea), but my own ignorance doesn't negate physics. And even those bits of nature which are not yet understood by any human doesn't justify dragging God in as an 'explanation'.

Boru

I agree. I wouldn't say he's an idiot, but maybe a delusional fool even if I should be polite.

Yes, it's always a good idea to be polite when discussing anything with a delusional person who believes in the afterlife.

(February 17, 2017 at 9:36 pm)bheath Wrote: I agree. I wouldn't say he's an idiot, but maybe a delusional fool even if I should be polite.

Credulous, maybe. Gullible, even. You know him better than we do.

Relativistic mass: Family member forces you to go to church.

Invariant mass: Same damn service you saw last time.

(February 16, 2017 at 5:05 pm)bheath Wrote: An apologist friend of mine said this a while back and I thought I'd pose the question here. He says, there is a god, because e=mc².

Any clue what he could be talking about? Or where he could have gotten this idea?

we are in a system that can be described as life.  We can make a measurement of that, kind of, but we can.

So I don't know about e=mc2 but what they think of as god is just a big ol' life form. That we are part of.

I'm grateful for this post, I never really got into negative energies or this aspect of the arguments. So I did some research.  I also learned that e=mc^2 is not the full equation (which included momentum).  However I do have some questions. There is controversy, and a number of different ways of looking at this; it still being discussed by those in the relevant fields of study.

Most of the explanations of negative energy, point to gravity and as an explanation that to move an object away from a gravitational field, that it takes energy in the opposite direction.  I can understand how this is useful in describing the relationship between potential energy, and the conversion to kinetic energy in relation to mass and gravity.  This would appear to me, to be talking about vector, where as energy is normally considered a scalar quantity which does not include a direction.  I am curious how these numbers cancel out in regards to net energy. In regards to the shape of the universe, it seems to me, that we are talking about force (which does have a vector) and not energy. 

This also got me thinking about the example of two equal and opposing forces acting on an object.  The net force on the objects will be zero, and will result in zero acceleration.  However the pressure or tension (depending on direction) of the individual forces will be summed and applied to the connected object.  So while it is correct to say that the net force, is zero; it is also incorrect to negate them out of all the other equations of their effect.  Perhaps someone can help explain to rational here?

(February 17, 2017 at 12:31 pm)Alex K Wrote: Maybe time is actually running backwards towards the big bang, and we simply can only remember the future... think about it...

(February 24, 2017 at 12:28 pm)Harry Nevis Wrote:

(February 17, 2017 at 12:31 pm)Alex K Wrote: Maybe time is actually running backwards towards the big bang, and we simply can only remember the future... think about it...

I see you have no refutation of my idea, just mockery!

(February 24, 2017 at 2:20 pm)Alex K Wrote: I see you have no refutation of my idea, just mockery!

It's an interesting idea. I have no clue how to approach it, but it sounds like another framing of a cyclical universe. Once past the singularity, does time move "forward"?

What does get me is that the same organism is not said to result from evolution twice. So how does that figure into a cyclical universe?