OT Primordial black holes are dark matter.

The latest New Scientist issue fits good into this discussion.

What was the question again?

But handy. Shortens the look-up tables.

Yes, but there are many functions one can fit to a given set of data. Most are nonsense. Some are enlightening. Those are the ones we're looking for. Those are the ones that deserve the name of 'physics'. The others are mere numerology.

Jeroen Belleman

It seems to have been an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps not directly for the individual, but for the group and from that for the individual and the offspring.

So your altruism is in reality selfishness? (no offense implied).

The problem with all this discussions about free will and consciousness is that we do not really what we mean by this. We already know that much of what we believed is free will is just chemistry by hormones. What we call love for example is mostly trick by evolution to create offspring, keep the parent together to be able to care for the offspring until their hormones start to play their game again.

But even when we know that, it's still fun.

Sure your curve has to come from some theory.

And yeah I've seen people try to shoe horn data into the wrong theory. (Which is silly but happens. As I once said (non flatteringly) speaking of a colleague, "He never lets data get in the way of a good theory."

George H.

In this case, knowing that the term is "non sequitur", i.e. "doesn't follow" would maybe have suggested that some argument to that effect was required to make the point. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Well, saying _most_ of physics is an exaggeration, of course.

The number of adjustable parameters required to fit the data is an important figure of (de)merit for a theory. It's been gradually decreasing.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The Eastern Orthodox are caffeine-free teetotal vegans for a total of about 4 months per year, at least if they follow the guidance of their Church. (I might be heading over that way one of these days, since Anglicanism is in the tank in Britain and North America. (It's flourishing elsewhere.)

Spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are tools, not obligations. The point is to free us from disordered attachments to even the good things of the world. This isn't the Hindu or Buddhist kind of detachment at all. The key word is "disordered"--I love my family, and I'm fond of coffee and gin-and-tonics, and I don't intend to change any of that, because those are good things. However, it's possible to be attached to any of those in an unhealthy way that prevents us from putting God first. The disciplines stress-test those attachments and show us how strong they are and therefore what we need to work on. (Don't want any nasty surprises later on.)

As Aragorn said to Pippin, "He who cannot cast away a treasure at need is a slave."

Sure. God is Love, and it says all over Scripture that we can tell how much we love God by how much we love our neighbour. If I think I love God but am grouchy and unfair to others, I'm kidding myself.

One of the saddest and at the same time funniest things I've ever heard was Paul McCartney's comment when George Harrison died: "George was a great guy. A great lover of humanity...didn't suffer fools."

IOW he loved humanity, it was people he didn't like. Same idea.

"Altruism" is one of those psychobabble words that made it into the language somehow. I prefer to call it "goodness". Being loving doesn't always mean being easy-going and soft-spoken.

I agree in general, though--we are conscious and creative and loving because we're made in the image of God. Marred masterpieces, that's us.

And designing stuff is fun.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

There is a mechanistic, evolutionary explanation for altruism. It makes sense for (most critters) to not eat their own species. But I just feel that there's more going on.

Most teenagers go through a phase of believing that all acts are selfish. Even if you die for another person, you're just doing it because it makes you feel good. I won't attempt to argue against that theory.

That's the beauty: life has mysteries and magic.

Unless you have enough intelligence and willpower to pass on that slice of cheesecake, because you *know* it will make you fat.

How old are you anyhow?

Yup.

I interpret the word to mean being good to people or critters without obvious personal advantage. The fact that it often pays off in the long term sort of clouds the philosophical concept, but further encourages the act.

I don't think it's meaningless, just that ISTM it reframes the idea in an unhelpful way, as though it were somehow separate from morality (in humans).

The whole "it's chemistry and hormones and stuff" thing is based on a philosophical mistake. The way I explained that to my Sunday school classes BITD was "Our knowing partly how God does something doesn't mean it isn't Him doing it."

Of course lots of this stuff works partly by chemistry. But He invented matter, among other things, so why not?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The vast, vast, vast majority will be having the identical conversation since the universes would only differ by the decay of a neutron or the path of a photon in a far flung galaxy etc.

So we are mostly introduced already.

What unique time stream/universe and which is the "we" that we traverse?

And now we don't.

(Hope you're still there....) :)

AIUI (and of course I don't UI *really*) - the various "interpretations" of QM are mathematically identical.

There is one test of the MWI you can easily do yourself but it is a bit drastic and possibly messy. And most of our branch of the multiverse would miss out on your future valued contributions to SED, your future editions of your book and so forth.

I'm not sure there is anything "philosophically" wrong with the MWI. E.g. once you accept one - possibly infinite - universe created from "nothing" (or God if you insist)... then why not an almost infinite number, continuously?

In two years I will be a nice round number again: 0x40.

It is just about possible that gravity falls off in just the right way to make it possible, but you would need in addition some magic fudge factor to permit some of the recently discovered dark galaxies which are extremely short on visible luminous matter to the point where they have only recently been discovered and were overlooked before.

Such dark galaxies must have something else gravitationally binding them together in Coma cluster or they would be ripped apart by the actions of the more obvious normal galaxies we can easily see.

Popular science article:

Unpopular scienec article:

Dark matter I am resigned to since that is the most coherent way to make everything from galaxies upwards to behave as we see them.

It is another name for Einstein's cosmological constant (the one put in to permit stable steady state universes). It is just that it is now observationally making things accelerate apart. TBH I'd prefer to believe that there was something odd about the earliest metal poor supernovae but I am tild that possiblity has been ruled out.

And HEP is little more than stamp collecting.

We are also stuck with our location in a spiral arm of our galaxy. We can only study the parts of the sky we can see - although we have come a very long way in high resolution multispectral imaging since the 1980's. Now everything from cm up to X-rays has been observed.

Regards,

The Bullet cluster "collision" is also hard to explain with a MOND theory.

George H.

That's fine, but it is a common claim from religious folk that there is *no* "materialistic" explanation for altruism.

Not among instructed Christians, it isn't--and certainly not in my acquaintance. Of course in any group that large, you can always find someone to say something as stupid as you like.

That said, materialism as a philosophy is self-contradictory, because one of its elementary consequences is that rational thought is impossible, i.e. the philosophy cannot consistently be held.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yes well we have had that discussion before.