usenet weirdness

Didn't you know, that Antarctica is REALLY cold?

How could any sane person assume, that the Ice-sheet on top of Antarctica or Greenland would eventually melt?

The floating ice doesn't count, of course, because floating ice does not change sea levels, once it melts.

But sea-levels do actually fall slowly. That can be seen around the globe at almost any location you like.

For instance: the Sahara desert was once the bottom of an ocean, hence global sea-levels had dropped significantly in respect to former sea-floor areas.

We can also watch sea-levels dropping in connection with the low level islands in the Pacific, because they are mostly atolls. And an atoll is build from remains of corals and corals are animals, which live in the sea.

Since the corals are not supposed to fly above sea-levels (to build the atolls), the sea-levels have fallen in geological times.

Before the ice-sheets of Antarctican and Greenland could eventually melt, they need to become a lot wormer than their roughly minus 60° Celsius.

TH

But clocks can make much more accurate and finer-grained observations than any merely human observer ever could.

Time is what clocks observe - for us - and in that sense Einstein is absolutely correct. We've still got to read the clock before it's measurements mean anything.

I sympathise with your plight.

Jan

Rhetoric and words have no physical meaning. What is physical is precisely that which does not depend on the words used to talk about it,

Jan

Well, possibly causality is violated on cosmic scale.

What we regard as obvious and simply proven fact is mainly based upon our own experience and than upon our main place of being here on planet Earth.

But what happens in the entire universe is essentially unknown. Possibly our intuition is totally wrong, because we have no knowledge about how time behaves in the rest of the universe.

I personally think, that time isn't universal, but only local.

Other places have also local time, but that time could be different, if such remote locations have no causality connection with us.

I think, that 'backwards time' is actually a necessity in cosmology, because that would allow to balance the content of the universe.

TH

It's a very convenient assumption.The big bang theory has the universe starting to expand from a very small point some 13.8 billion years ago, and what we can see of the observable universe is consistent with that.

It's a main sequence star, and we'd see the consequences of heavier elements decomposing back into hydrogen and sucking up energy in the process - what we are seeing at the moment is what was happening there three years ago, and it doesn't look like that.

Nobody does. The assumption is that it would slide off into the ocean and float until it get closer to the equator.

It's has been doing that for the last few million years. When ice ages give way to interglacials, it slides off a lot faster. Anthropogenic global warming hasn't been going on for the sliding-off rate to rise all that much yet, but it will.

But ice that was previous sitting on solid earth before it slid down into the ocean does raise the sea level when it starts floating.

You need to read up on continental drift.

They fall quite a bit during ice ages, and go up again during interglacials. The Pacific Rim isn't all that geologically stable, and places like Iceland and Hawaiian Islands

If you want to draw conclusions from Pacific Island histories you do have to be specif about their geological histories.

And if the history of ice age to interglacial transitions is anything to go by, they get warmer by sliding off into the ocean and drifting closer to the equator. Ice bergs do it all the time and it doesn't take a lot of global warming to persuade the ice bergs to slide off faster.

James Hansen spelled it out in 2016. It's a minority view, because nobody know much about the processes happening under the surface of ice sheets, and the fossil carbon extraction industry really doesn't want anybody to look hard. They do have a lot of political clout.

They don't, they only have their proper time. We do know that it runs at the same rate, because we see the spectra coming from there.

They agre to such an extent that we can put strong limits on the possible rate of change of physical constants, such as \alpha.

Jan

Nothing new there, it goes back all the way to Huygens. (and Newton)

Yes, you misunderstood completely. Huygens faced the problem that there are many kinds of time, for example sundials and pendulum clocks. (and they don't all agree)

In addition there is theoretical time, as it occurs in the laws of physics, like F = ma. In order to determine a, by differentiating wrt time, you must know what time is.

Huygens short-circuited that with: Time is what the clock says it is, AND a clock is any entity that moves in occordance with the laws of physics. So his pendulum clock was right, and sundials needed to be corrected. Newton just took it over.

This is nicely circular, as it should be. The laws of physics define what a clock is, and clocks determine how the laws of physics must be interpreted.

Einstein followed in their footsteps, but he his fundamental insight was that Newton's equations must be replaced by Maxwell's equations to obtain a clock that moves in accordance with the laws of physics, (a photon clock for example)

Jan

The other day I saw a butterfly. There used to be tons of butterflies everywhere, something like the Monarch needs milkweed and is not very tolerant of otherwise habitat destruction, overpredation, and waves of invasive species, or neglect, if we were stewards of the environment.

It's February in the Rocky Mountains, so it being spring-like is also not conducive to usual accounts of ecological development.

Here "Four Seasons" is considered ideal.

Anybody check the Earth's average distance to the Sun or the "definition" of "1 Astronomical Unit" lately?

We've seen a few Monarchs this year in our backyard in San Francisco. We and some other people are planting milkweed for them.

We get lots of butterflies here, expecially some flimsy little white ones. The birds like them.

We have two seasons. Summer is cool and dry. Winter is cool and wet.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

c_0 = 299 792 458 m/s

(now: c) in the SI:

F'up2 sci.physics.relativity

"cool" is gilding the lily a bit; "cold" might be more accurate for much of the summer. I was married for the first time in mid-June 1968 in San Francisco (more exactly on Treasure Island). In those days British people didn't fly half-way round the world to attend weddings, and the only member of my family who came was an aunt who lived in Toronto. I warned her that she would need warm clothes for a San Francisco summer, but she didn't believe me (everyone in Toronto knows that California is warm and sunny throughout the year). She was OK for the wedding itself, when it was indeed warm and sunny. However, then she went for a week to Carmel, where she had to buy herself a new warm coat

I grew up in New Orleans, where the temperature and humidity can both be 98, and the mosquitoes are as big as chickens.

I like it here. Nobody I know has air conditioning.

I was just sitting outside on the deck in my undies, reading a Hornblower book, manufacturing vitamin C and thinking about cryogenic level sensors.

We went to a surprise wedding on East Brother Island. That was fun.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

For the kiddies: Loddie has completely lost any connection with the reality; but that was obvious earlier.

Global Warming doomsaying is *so* last millenium. Sub-zero temps and six feet of snow didn't help the cause.

The real money now is is in predicting the death of humanity from microplastics.

Do try to keep up.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It may not be fashionable to mention it, but anthropogenic global warming is still in full swing. The planet is still warming up, and a little faster than it was when first became big enough to stick out of La Nina/El Nino type noise, around 1990. China does seem to be on the verge of burning less fossil carbon than it did last year, and the rest of the world will eventually catch up - China is exporting a lot of cheap solar cells. They are also exporting a lot of wind turbines. Donald Trump isn't interested in those markets.

One of the symptoms of global warming is more water vapour evaporating off the ocean surfaces, feeding more energy into extreme weather, but unsophisticated observers don't understand the implication of that.

The real money is still in digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel - the people who do it know that they are going to run out of market soon, so they spend a lot of money on lying propaganda to keep the money flowing as long as possible. "Microplastics" is just the latest modish fad. It seems unlikely to kill off all that many people or make a lot of money for the people boosting the fad,

With a gullible twit like you?

Sure, but clocks are necessarily local!

Any clock and any observer needs to be somewhere.

And most observers we know about live on planet Earth.

So, let's assume that the surface of planet Earth is actually a 'time bubble' (actually I used the term 'time domain').

This realm is the space, in which we as human beings usually live.

What is happenign outside of this realm is more or less unknown.

But we have hints already, that time behaves in strange ways, if the universe is observed from very remote locations (like e.g. by the Pioneer probe).

(This btw was my personal explanation for the so called 'Pioneer anomaly'.)

TH

Sure, it's convenient.

But is it actually true???

Big bang theory suffers from a 'little' problem:

how would you actually create a universe from nothing?

Far better is actually my own approach, which goes like this:

I take the 'big bang' as case of a 'white hole'.

(That is 'the other side' of a 'black hole'.)

This 'white hole' spreads out and creates, what we call 'universe' in which we as human beings live on planet Earth.

But 'universe' isn't universal at all and the timeline from big bang to us isn't the only timeline possible.

Our past is just one of an infinite number of possible timelines, which all connect a big bang with something much later.

This is more like a HUGE clock with one hnad only, that circles once every ten billion years or so. This 'hand' moves slowly forewards and creates new universes every time it moves.

Now new universes need new stars and those new planet.

This causes what also regard as true: Growing Earth.

(plus, of course, growing moons, stars and galaxies)

The overall picture of my approach assumes a 'real universe' which is mainly invisible, which folds back into itself, where time is local and where matter is actually 'relative'.

The latter 'relative matter' is actually, what disturbs the most, because it would violate one of our most important assumptions which is called 'the great materialistic meta-paradigme'.

...

TH

(have a look at my book, if you like