Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Sculptor1]

He just took a pedantic side swipe at me
in a post that was directed towards you.

That's all he can do — long pedantic pseudo-scientific side swipes.

Sculptor, could the theory of Darwinian evolution be mistaken?

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=13310&p=451309#p451309

.

No not really.
There is so little to it. And you can see it working in so many areas.
When people get it it's like oh f*ck is so bleeding obvious you ask why no one had thought of it before.
As I was Darwin and Wallace arrived at the same idea at around the same time.
It only took a pinch of religious skepticism to unpack the endemic assumption of a creator, and a thorough study of natural history - which both men had made their lives' work to join up the dots.

[Halc]

I think much of the hullabaloo concerns my personal wrong theory about events.
My reference is the wiki page on spacetime, which this site does not allow me to directly link.

The physics/geometry definition of 'event' is a point in spacetime.

The physics definition of 'event' is a point ?

A point in spacetime. A point on say a line segment is not an event. The wiki article uses 'position' rather than 'point', but I see 'point' used more often.

In ordinary space, a position is specified by three numbers, known as dimensions. In the Cartesian coordinate system, these are called x, y, and z. A position in spacetime is called an event, and requires four numbers to be specified: the three-dimensional location in space, plus the position in time (Fig. 1). An event is represented by a set of coordinates x, y, z and t.[4] Spacetime is thus four dimensional.

You try to equate experimental physics with geometry, pal.

Relativity theory is a geometric theory. Geometry (of relativity and other theories) is mentioned 34 times in the article referenced. 'Event' is mentioned well over 100 times.

Which school have you graduated from, again ?

I made no claim to a specific school.

OK, then according to your definition, spacetime is made of points.

It's not my definition. The definition above doesn't say that. Nowhere in the article is it suggested that spacetime is, or needs to be, 'made of' something.

Are these spacetime points purely mathematical, or physical ?

They're objective, meaning frame independent. They're physical in that sense. The coordinates assigned to each event are frame dependent and thus not physical, but rather an abstraction.

If spacetime points were physical, then what is their physical size?

A point (or location, or position) by definition has no meaningful size. If it had a size, then only a finite number of them could fit in a given volume.

[Dr Jonathan Osterman PhD]

My reference is the wiki article on spacetime. Geometry (of relativity and other theories) is mentioned 34 times in the article referenced. 'Event' is mentioned well over 100 times.

There are thousands of wiki articles
that mention God a total of 2,827,539 times:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3616&p=451374#p451374

[amorphos_ii]

2op

What if everything IS made of nothing? e.g. space is akin to a still wind, then it blows and curves are formed [string theory – my take], but what is a curve itself, nothing, what is time, nothing!


_

[Alan Masterman]

If space, or Einstein's spacetime, were made of no physical substance at all, then they simply would not exist at all, because to exist is to be made of something. Agreed?

If "something" is made of "nothing", then this "something" is "nothing" (does not exist). Period.

And, if space was made of some physical substance, then, in principle, we should be able to experimentally detect the physical existence of such substance, either directly or indirectly. Agreed?


So, what is space made of ??

We DO know that it is permeated with the smell of kerosene, because some eminent American experienced it on his deathbed (presumably as an out-of-body experience), and lived long enough to share the information. I forget his name. Can a smell count as "something"?

[ChanRasjid]

If space, or Einstein's spacetime, were made of no physical substance at all, then they simply would not exist at all, because to exist is to be made of something. Agreed?

If "something" is made of "nothing", then this "something" is "nothing" (does not exist). Period.

And, if space was made of some physical substance, then, in principle, we should be able to experimentally detect the physical existence of such substance, either directly or indirectly. Agreed?


So, what is space made of ??

You can google my:"Physical Reality Has Only Euclidean Space And Universal Time.
Authors: Chan Rasjid Kah Chew"

Fundamentally, the question of what is space is outside the purview of physics theory; it is more a metaphysical question. You use words as "exist", "something", "nothing", "physical substance". So your type of questioning may lead you to question : "If electron, protons are physical, then are the electric, magnetic fields also physical". Physics never question what is physical reality. We only use experiments which detects what could be detected with our instruments. Our scale may measure mass, but it does not say much about the absolute, only that the scale balance has a use to weigh objects.

I will stay on topic of Newton's "Principia", no 4D spacetime.
Newton's Principia does make some statements about the property of space, but the space of Newton was no different from what philosophers before him talk about space - the three dimension expanse of the universe which man can sense and geometry would use three cartesian axes to map space; but the rectangular axes is created only to map space, but does not touch on "what is space"

Newton did not develop any physics theory about space itsef. He only developed the "mathematical principles of natural philosophies", i.e. the laws of motion of bodies in space and time. Space and time in Newton's physics are only the framework of the physical world in which the laws of physics would manifests.

Chan Rasjid Kah Chew
Singapore.