Metaphysics - Fact or fiction?

First, be advised that Einstein described the relationship as: E = M

• C^2 meaning that matter is (highly) concentrated energy; call that WSM if you want. Seems energy can be described in the form of vibrations, and it seems that the various particles of the atom (electron, proton, neutron) are seen to be vibrating and/or are "fuzzy" (positions uncertain) which could be interpreted as a "side effect" that they are concentrations of energy.

Symple..

As per wikipedia " Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms: "What is there?" "What is it like?"

My level of metaphysics is vacation spots. What is there? Beaches. What is it like? Hot.

Ontology. It's an entertaining philosophical topic. Leibniz was a relatively late arrival at the party, which conventionally is dated from the pre-Socratic philosophers living mostly in the Greek colonies around the 6th century BCE.

Time for a link to my favorite from Dresden Codak:

You forgot....sandy!

=3D M

ems

So, do you also think space is infinite? I have trouble with infinity. But I guess it's either infinite or finite. Either way is a problem. If space is finite, why isn't it just a little bit more or less?

-Bill

What's worse - it could continue expanding. So it's finite in extent at any given moment, but it grows without bound, so it's infinite.

Just not yet...

-- Les Cargill

We can only see about 14 billion years into the past, so there's no way of knowing if anything beyond "the edge" is there or not.

I kinda like this website for my metaphysics questions:

Cheers! Rich

Not true. We can see if things out there are affected by things "beyond the edge".

Current best guess is the universe is something like 50Gly across, with the observable, obviously, being 13Gly. Best way to picture this is as a horizon -- there's stuff past the curvature of the Earth that limits your distant view, but you can't see it; that doesn't mean it's not possible to infer its presence from what visible things are doing. You can talk with a relatively distant HAM through a relay station (without ionospheric bounce) when you're both line-of-sight to the relay but not to each other. Same idea.

The reason the universe apparently can grow faster than the speed of light is, it is space itself which is expanding, while light just goes along for the ride.

If there's anything beyond that which is beyond (i.e., more than a couple horizons away), trying to observe it is a very high order thing and either

1. there ISN'T anything out there (finite universe), or 2. even if there is, there's no reasonable way to calculate what its distribution is (we can't tell / don't care).

There could easily be other Big Bangs out there, proceeding in different stages of evolution, under different physical parameters perhaps (more or less total mass for instance, or maybe different physical constants as we know them), but these are so distant (>>100Gly?) that any such idea is entirely theoretical.

Tim

Both.

It is hard to comprehend that it is BS.

-- Many thanks,

Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073 Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552 rss:

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at

Well, maybe to *some* people.

Obvious (and intuitive!) but the edge of the observable universe is really much farther away, since it has been receding ever since, well, ever. The estimates are of the radius that I've found are out to about

You have slept since then. It's moving so fast that you are wrong as soon as you post the value.

Thanks. I guess I asked for that one.

-Bill

one: (928)428-4073

Reading through the replies:

e.g. #9, talking about measuring relativity and its consequences.

I can just imagine. Many decades down the road, centuries probably, instead of Newtonian physics they will teach Relativistic physics primarily. And so, whenever a student waves his hand and says, "ohh, well the distance will be about so-and-so", it will already be including an approximation of the relativistic length contraction, or RME/kinetic conversion, but estimated entirely in the wrong direction, because (as students often do) the calculation was not checked correctly...

One thing I'm willing to bet a lot of money on, accidents like the Mars probe unit conversion error, or theoretical errors like incorrectly estimating mass or energy or velocity or length or time, will always be present as a part of human fallability. :)

Tim

It's BS to the extent that it purports to be a description of what is actually happening. Physics is a model of reality. A complete model would allow (in principle, at least) a prediction (sometimes statistical in nature) of the outcome of any measurement.

But that's as far as it goes, and as far as it ever can go. If Metaphyics goes beyond that, it is making claims that are unfalsifiable by definition.

Sylvia.

Yes, but why would space be finite at any instant in time? Why not a little bit more or less? Where does the instantaneous absolute number come from?

-Bill

Pseudo-scientific codswallop.

And real physicists think you are a idjit.