In addition to Einstein being a scientist who recognized the possibility of the atom bomb, he was also a pacifist who recognized the necessity. The weight of his signature was both as a scientist and as a political statement because of his known pacifism.
I've never been able to understand how the absence of a mechanistic explanation causes recourse to theology.
--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
(Richard Feynman)
On a sunny day (Sun, 06 May 2012 14:23:46 GMT) it happened Chiron wrote in :
Einstein was a refugee, and not only because he was Jewish, but also his professor had told him that the idiot was a disgrace to the university and should leave. (freely translated). Einstein played the Jewish card, and of course had huge support for that in the US. He later got a Nobel for an other flipped idea of his, the 'photon'. You can look up on teh internet etc how many scientist did object to him getting a Nobel for 'photon'.
Later on he was in sort of a constant disagreement with the others who worked on that bomb project and was proven wrong every single time (spooky huh?).
To call him a scientist would be a bit too much, even E=m.c^2 often attributed to him was somebody else's idea long before him.
Politics works that way[1], they push him, and attribute anything good to him. But politics and science are often 2 very opposite things, I have some experience with that. Politicians want - and use science and duality to push themselves up the ladder so to speak, and Einstein was just a stepping stone.
[1] We today see Chen the blind human activist being used to up the human rights issue by Obama. Now all we need is Chen signing a letter to Obama to start .... and would it have anything to do with Chen? who cares about him? No it would be designed by the powers that are, the politicians. A bit like the global warming, oh, or was it cooling, oh, better make it changing, 'scientific' issue. Absolutely none of that has anything to do with science.I was reading some article that the weather satellites are becoming less and less in number, I will miss my rain-radar, but maybe the warmists/coolers/changers will the shut up a bit, their sound is deafening.
temperature,
planet
reasoning that I did not think of today.
sticking out, and then sip some more coffee.
with even more advanced algorithms.
Well maybe some one should use their Network analyzer and see if it detects any possible protocols in that noise!
Jamie
university and should leave.
in the US.
Support for Jewish immigration to the US? Have you read about the S.S. St. Louis? Anti-Semitism in part prompted the Johnson-Reed act of the mid-1920s, that set extremely limite quotas on Eastern and Southern European immigration (not to mention minute or zero quotas on Asian immigration). The US cherrypicked a few top Jewish scientists, that's all.
One strong reason for the U.S. to support the infant nation of Israel was to keep Europe's remaining Jews out of the US. Christian DPs were allowed to enter, but Jews could be diverted.
Well, the fundamental source and nature of the universe is one of those Big Picture issues. Quantum mechanics is mystical, and may never have a rational explanation.
Religion and quantum mechanics both require faith.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
Why does quantitization itself require faith? Religion doesn't make testable predictions... QM does.
-- Les Cargill
I don't think so, Bob. I hooked a crystal earphone across the series resistor and listened to the noise. It sounds random, like a Geiger counter. Low light, random popping noises. High light, beginning to sound like white noise but fewer pulses. Like tearing paper.
My scope also shows the pulses to be random (as best as I can tell).
John S
It's the "God of the Gaps." Whatever science can't (yet) explain, is God's doing. Of course, as science slowly increases its knowledge, God's role has become somewhat restricted.
-- Life begins at the centerfold and expands outward. -- Miss November, 1966
It's strange... I grew up in a place with lots of educated people and they were a lot religious. Didn't seem to bother them. Freeman Dyson is like that. The schism between religion and science seems to be a Baby Boom feature - the people I am talking about were Greatest Generation or Silent Generation.
Even Charles Murray is an agnostic, but he thinks religiosity is a genuine good thing because of it's social effects. As I recall, he also holds that other things could replace religiosity - it's just that there needs to be a thing people can have in common that has a system of values that are also more or less common.
-- Les Cargill
Oh, I think there was plenty of opposition throughout history. During the early 20th Century, people seemed to take science in stride, because it was useful. There was a sudden burst of useful inventions that made life easier for many people. Qualms about the Biblical implications were probably less readily heard or expressed. Better living through chemistry. New inventions - radio, TV, cars, machines, etc... Science, the Salvation of Mankind. Science, striding proudly into the future, blah-blah-blah.
But now the novelty has worn off, and we're more aware of the down side of science - pollution, new diseases, old diseases now resistant to treatments, decreases in the quality of life even as the amount of "stuff" increases, and so on. No one believes that science is going to solve all our problems; some are thinking that science is *causing* most of them.
Many religions have no problem at all with science. The ones that do are commonly the ones who claim their scriptures are the True, Only, Inerrant, Word of God (tm). Since science says what it finds, and not what it's supposed to say, it often speaks contrary to scripture. Hence its unpopularity among Fundamentalists of all sorts.
There is no fundamental conflict between a belief in God, and an acceptance of science. They concern different domains of existence. The problem arises when you try to impose scriptural claims onto physical reality. It doesn't work. I suppose science trying to impose its own notions on the spiritual world is also futile...
But in their respective domains, there's no real conflict. Science deals with the physically real. God - if there is such a thing - deals with the spiritual domain - if there is such a thing.
-- Things are not always what they seem. -- Phaedrus
On a sunny day (Sun, 06 May 2012 18:34:44 GMT) it happened Chiron wrote in :
Its a complicated interactive stuff. The biggest blunder Einstein made, and one that keeps haunting todays 'science', is, and you got to have an inflated ego bigger than a hyper inflated balloon leaving earth atmosphere to make such a statement, he stated "nothing (can) move faster than light". To tell the Universe what it can and cannot do based on "I have not seen it so it does not exist" is so incredibly stupid I would not even associate the word 'scientist' with such a person.
Sure there are physical laws, and these, as far as we know, in our frame of reference at least hold. BUT WE DO NOT MAKE THEM. Einstein made the light dogma, and perhaps this is - or has, a religious background, if you look at the Bible: In the beginning there was nothing and then God said: "Let there be light." Then there was light, there was still nothing but you could see it a lot better. (freely translated ;-)), anyways that 'light' seems to be the magical word here for many. You see J.Larkin in this thread refer to religion when addressing QM, while for Feynman, who was in fact very modest about it, it was just probability math, So maybe if somebody says "FTL" (Faster Then Light) then all sort or religious brain wash happens and the dirty laundry shows, 'cause and effect seem to be violated in some peoples mind'. In fact in FTL nothing changes, things just move faster, if you go at twice light speed from US east coast to US west coast you will be there in half the time from traveling at c[1]. I know there are some mathematicians who think other_wise_, but, oh and have 'proof', and on that subject I was thinking about string theory, and then how to get from a string to a 'brane', and the math needed (its on their website the math you need), and then I had this incredible realization: If they can imagine a string (nobody has seen one), then I have a great shortcut, (don't tell anybody) I can imagine a brane (not brain and no one in specific either), so that saved a h*ll of a lot of math. So, basically you can imagine (probably) anything you want, even that nature obeys the God Einstein and will bow and NEVER EVER go faster then light. So that is his biggest mistake. [1] I know about muon decay.
leaving earth atmosphere to make such a statement,
So, what moves faster than light?
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
That's crazy. Science and engineering have doubled life expectancy, and it keeps increasing. An astounding revolution is brewing in genetics, and one day genetic diseases, cancer, even aging will be mostly conquered. Science isn't over.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
'science',
leaving earth atmosphere to make such a statement,
Jan's bigotry.
-- You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.
Religiosity has nothing do do with faith, or a belief in God. It has been described as 'Religion for religion's sake', which describes those who pretend to believe and show phony 'faith' just to trick other people. Several well known 'Reverends' come to mind.
-- You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.
Yes, that was interesting. The fact that the interference patterns of the charged particles was the dual of that of the uncharged ones gives a clue. Particles have fields around them, even uncharged ones. It's the fields that interfere. Of course, for uncharged particles, the fields do not extend very far, so the slits have to be very close together to get any interference at all.
Jeroen Belleman
'science',
leaving earth atmosphere to make such a statement,
As I remember it, he stated nothing of the sort. What he said is more like "If lightspeed is the highest possible speed, then what are the consequences?"
I'm confronted with some of these consequences on a daily basis. If he'd been totally wrong, one might think I would have noticed? (OK, I'm an engineer: Four or five digits is usually close enough for me.)
Jeroen Belleman
I'm not 100% sure what the difference is. Seriously? I have to wonder if it wasn't *hippie* versions of religion that got threaded into things that messed things up.
I don't mean "hippie" as a perjorative here. But the time lines are remarkably correlated.
I... I don't know how any of that is the result of science. Pollution was much worse before - read of before they got sewage figured out in London. The old diseases killed people outright.
Getting cancer is the privilege of those who don't die of cholera...
I think the appeal of them is that there isn't any science.
I think people fear what they do not understand. And I think that "you think you're better'n me?" happens a lot. And to be honest, much of what the Fundies get railed about isn't really *in* other versions of Christianity.
I did the Presbyterian "catechism" and it was mostly a history course. They've narrowed down the mystical stuff to a very minimal set of ideas, and clearly state them as articles of faith - and not believing in one is your choice.
Fundie stuff is, to me, less intellectually mature. It has its appeal - ( a good friend's Dad is a very sharp pastor in a Fundie sect, and he's an interesting guy to talk to).
Of course not.
Only moreso. I dunno - the dualism of it appeals to me. You can cross-pollinate ideas between the two.
Yep. Sometimes, I just think people wanna get railed about something.
-- Les Cargill
'science',
leaving earth atmosphere to make such a statement,
Yep, anti-Semitism still runs strong and deep in Europeons.
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.