User talk:Tom Cod

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Some contributions: created article on Church Farm School which I attended from 1963-68 (grades 5-9), contributed to article on Governor Dummer Academy which I attended in 68-69 (and which my grandfather also attended), before I finished out my secondary education in the public schools, graduating from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in 1971. I also have contributions to article on folksinger Phil Ochs, to discussion page of the NYSE (1914 closure, "Gallagher's Evening Exchange") and critiques of neo-conservative views and the sectarian Left. Recent contributions: Richard Mattingly murder case

[edit] Harvard Extension

I replied to your questions on the Harvard talk page. Kendrick7 19:17, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I have to wonder if yesterday's farmer isn't today's rat-racer. For example, they advertise for the Extension school quite heavily on the Red Line subway, and perhaps the other lines for all I know. As do many many other educational facilities, English Second Language schools, etc.

I thought awhile about your second-fiddle comment. In my younger days, I was much more the poet and philosopher. But today, on the day-to-day, I'm an engineer. There has been many a science-fiction story about how one day the engineers went on strike and ended up in charge of everything when people realized that without the fix-it man, they were completely out of luck. But this never happens in practice, because ultimately engineers just want to keep things running smoothly. (I did go through an anarchist phase where I decided that the fact that things were running smoothly was ultimately the problem, but that's another story.) And it isn't too far (of an analogy) from the second thing I thought about, how when I rebelled against my hippie father at age 14 and joined JROTC, the Sargeant would always say: "Don't call me sir, I work for a living." But then I thought about it in terms of your own analogy -- Is it a terrible thing to be second-fiddle, even in Rome, if the Emperor has no clothes?

Well, depends on how you feel about it or as the answer to the question, "how many therapists does it take to screw in a light bulb?" goes: However many you feel comfortable with. But seriously I can just imagine that young lady who turned down Hopkins sitting in a job interview for some little position proudly answering that she has a degree from Harvard with the employer responding in a patronizing tone: " . . . Was it from 'Harvard Extension'?" and how crestfallen she might feel.Tom Cod 05:51, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

My grandfather was among the first Irishmen allowed into Harvard. I sometimes joke with the townies that, "of course he later flunked out, I mean after all, he was a dumb mick" but as I was told the story, the Great Depression came along and who at that point could afford Harvard? Hard to get a student loan when the banking system has collapsed!

I believe it was Chuang Tzu who said that the tallest tree is the first one to get cut down. Not sure how that applies, but second class has its privileges -- Kendrick7 20:11, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Good, sounds like your not going to allow yourself to be snubbed by those first classers. Thomas Wolfe in "Of Time and the River" describes some provincial rube who feels so hurt and humiliated by the snobby characters he encounters when he goes to Harvard that he can't wait to take the next train out.Tom Cod

Yes, my great grandfather had to attend Ottowa University in the late 19th Century because Irish need not apply. Another sociological issue to contemplate is how, for example in the area of engineering, medicine or other technical disciplines, it is the subject matter itself that tends to trump the cachet of any institution, a different way of saying its the actual skills a person has that really matter in determining his professional, vocational and economic success. And of course in the business world it is one's discipline, parsimony and determination, factos sometimes vaguely denominated as the "entreprenuerial spirit" that are more significant than any business degree. Thus someone with a philosophy degree from Harvard, like my father, might wind up as a bohemian intellectual struggling to survive by driving cab while an individual with a degree in engineering from Harvard, Long Beach State or anywhere will be able to get work anywhere and prosper etc. Brings to mind the child's story about building your house with brick and not flimsy degree paper to shelter yourself from the Big Bad Wolf of economic hard times and social upheaval as bios of those like John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Sam Walton and Bill Gates dramatically demonstrate. In that regard I am fascinated by the rise of wealthy cultural proletarians, "rich rednecks," alumni of the worthy institution known as School of Hard Knocks, or as Gould called it, "The School of the Street" as the new monied class in our society who are begining to have increasing social influence and contending with "yuppies" for cultural hegemony and who are a critical political constituency. Tom Cod 05:18, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Science and the Expanding Universe

First of all, you have some serious background reading to do. It sounds from your comments that your education in physics and astronomy is based mostly on classical physics and celestial timekeeping. There's more to physics and astronomy than that. I might suggest getting a basic text on astronomy, most of the questions you ask are dealt with in those books. You also may find it illuminating to get a layperson's book about special relativity and general relativity as a lot of your distrust of the concepts seem to stem from never having been exposed to the work of Einstein.

You can start by reading those pages and their linked pages on Wikipedia, though they may be a bit technical. Otherwise, if you have more questions, you can ask me. Your questions really are quite good, but it's difficult to answer them as succinctly as I must due to time considerations. I'm afraid that it may often be that my answers will provoke more questions than they may resolve. Hopefully, however, I will have pointed you in the right direction to get all your questions answered.

When you say space is properly defined by a metric, what do you mean, as measured by units of the metric system? Absolutely not. A metric (mathematics) is a way of measuring distances using geometry which may or may not be Euclidean geometry. In modern physics, people have become aware that spacetime defines a Lorentz invariant which acts similar to a distance, but combines both space and time. It's this connection between space and time which is the foundation of special and general relativity.

Have any of these conceptions been adopted by modern engineering, which to my mind is the embodiment of the application of classical physics. Yes. The concepts that govern these effects have direct applications. Both general relativity and special relativity effects must be accounted for in, for example, GPS systems.

How can a void expand? It expands because it is a property of the void itself. If that's unsatisfying, maybe you can think of your question as being analogous to the question of why time always progresses in one direction (forward). The arrow of time can be described in many ways, but it appears to be a propoerty of time itself.

If the ruler stretches, or the clock marks time differently, then to me that represents a mechanical flaw and failure, material stresses on these objects, not a variance or indicia of some quasi-mystical property of reality. You need to then study the history of special and general relativity which states that the physics in all reference frames is the same and that clocks and rulers are not as immutable as you seem to think they are. By the way a "clock" and a "ruler" mean any clock or ruler, and it is made plain fact that these clocks and rulers are accurate and undamaged. While you yourself carry them, they function perfectly. While another person carries them (they go to a different frame of reference) you will observe the clocks and rulers to have different properties than when they were in your reference frame because time and space itself has changed.

Moreover, those who state that the "universe" began with the Big Bang are negating the principle of cause and effect and seem to be asserting a variation of the theory of "spontaneous generation" disproved in biology by Pasteur. Not really. The Big Bang only states that the universe used to be much hotter and denser. It doesn't currently adequately answer the questions of where this hot, dense universe emerged from {see cosmogony).

To me time and space are abstractions, like the King's Foot or pi, that cannot fundamentally be, ironically, affected by any material forces. This belief of yours is in direct contradiction to the empirically confirmed theories of special and general relativity. You'll need to study these subjects very carefully before you can dismiss them out-of-hand as you just did.

Culturally my skepticism is further conditioned also by New Age gurus, even "intelligent design" advoctes who sieze upon and tout these conceptions as evidence of the supernatural and so forth (See the movie "What the Bleep is this"), something that raises a big red flag in mind re the rule of reason versus sophisticated feel good superstition. Don't let the pseudoscientists scare you away from the real science. The New Agers are indeed wrong in their claims of significant ramifications for quantum mechanics/relativity in our day-to-day lives because the theories don't apply unless you are in regimes of very high energies, very small scales, etc. It's not the fault of the theories that they get abused by the New Agers who don't understand them, it's the fault of people interpreting the theories without doing the legwork necessary to learn what they really say.

No, as a former mariner I know time, for example, is not defined by clocks, it's measured as an interval of the rotation of celestial bodies, The rotation of celestial bodies are clocks too. Relativity doesn't make any argument about what KIND of clock experiences time dilation. It talks about ANY clock you care to use from a swinging pendulum to a spring clock to your beating heart. Likewise with rulers. length contraction applies to rulers of any sort.

A second or an inch is immutable whether on Mars a black hole, the Bowery, or wherever. Nope. A second and an inch is measured different by different observers in different gravitational and velocity scenarios -- but ONLY when you get to extreme conditions of gravity (like a black hole) or velocity (near the speed of light) and even then there is a sense in which you are right because individual observers (in their own inertial reference frames) will always measure their own inches and seconds to be the same, it's only the inches and seconds of others which will be measured to change.

The ant on a balloon can't be an analogy to the universe as there's the area above and outside the balloon, whose surface area actually is expanding due to the material cause of the introducion of air gas into it. -- Yes, this limitation is mentioned in the article. However the concept we are attempting to illustrate is that the expansion of the balloon is an inherent property of the balloon. The ant doesn't go flying off in some direction, the ant stays still even while all points around the ant recede.

I'm really going to have to see some more compelling empirical evidence before I'm going to believe that matter came out of nothing in a genesis moment and that space, a vacuum, can explode any more than I'm going to believe the Biblical version as they both defy common sense. -- You don't have to believe that matter came out of nothing, that's not a part of the Big Bang theory. There are speculative extensions to the Big Bang that don't require this (eternal inflation). The singularity found in the Big Bang may or may not be a physical reality.

To me, Zeno's paradox says it all. I would say that space is defined a void, that extends infinitely in all directions and that time is its chronological context that similarly extends from the infinite past to the infinite future. There are formulations of the Big Bang which correspond directly to your philosophical notion of how the universe must be. You probably would have championed Fred Hoyle's steady state universe back in the day. Unfortunately, this model has been repudiated by observational evidence. While the philsophical inclination you have is a very common and realistic one, it cannot be empirically tested because there are limits imposed on our ability to observe set by the speed of light. Also, it doesn't really have anything to do with Zeno's paradox.

Thus there cannot have been a beginning or can there be an end because for every moment and event there was surely one preceding it and one which will succeed it and for every distant point, however far from the last atom, there's a place farther beyond it. While you may be right (science can't say if you are right or wrong) what you must concede is that there could be a "practical" beginning and end. For example, if the universe changes character so much that atoms no longer exist, that'll be the "end" as far as you're concerned. There was a time in our universe when energies were so high that atoms could not be bound together. Therefore, that can be considered a practical "beginning" as far as you're concerned.

Thus, are you sure the Known Universe is not expanding in the sense that observable matter and energy is expanding through infinite space on the basis of the force of an ancient explosion. This model is known as the Milne model. It was repudiated by general relativity which says that spacetime is curved by mass and therefore you can't simply have a stable grid of spacetime into which explosions of matter occur.

Isn't that what the red shift type evidence shows, the increasing velocity of matter through space? No, because redshift is not just due to velocity transformations.

--ScienceApologist 12:38, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks so much for taking the time to address these issues in such detail. I don't know that I'm entirely convinced, however. My impression is that there may be a subtext of affinity for mysticism involved here. Tom Cod 01:25, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bradford Bishop talk page

My apologies, I was patrolling the Recent changes page, looking for vandalism. I have left your comment on the talk page, because I think it would look a little funny for me to remove it--someone might think that I was trying to vandalize! If you still think it should be removed, please do so when you are logged in AND provide an explanation in the edit summary. As the young people say, “my bad”. Cynrin 14:52, 19 January 2007 (UTC)