happyjack27 wrote:oh, and have you ever heard of solid hydrogen?
nope, and you never will. it is physically impossible. ...
According to my college physics book the melting point of hydrogen is -259.19 Celsius.
possibly the _boiling point_ of hydrogen.
EDIT: ah, i was mistaken. it is _helium_ which does not freeze. at atmospheric pressure, at least. forget about that part. phase transitions are a function of ambient pressure. so it is possible to freeze it, given sufficient pressure.
EDIT: btw, wikipedia calls this a "consequence of the heisenberg uncertainty principle". this is not true. not anymore than anything in quantum physics is a consequence of the heisenberg uncertainty principle. the heisenberg principle is just a mathematical statement that can be derived from the shrodinger equation. as can zpe. zpe is more properly a consequence of the fact that a charged particle about another is confined by coloumb forces in a parabolic well, and by definition it can't have negative energy. putting these factors into the time-independant shrodinger equation (solved in this case by dirac - which he won a nobel prize for) you discover that the only way to avoid negative energy values is to have a non-zero energy "ground state". to say that the value of a possible quantum energy state is due to the uncertainty principle is non-sensical.
Last edited by happyjack27 on Tue Dec 21, 2010 3:40 pm, edited 3 times in total.
KitemanSA wrote:Ok, you and I will just have to disagree about this. Slavery was SUPPORTED by religion for more than a millenium and it was the religious mainstream that were amongst the last to give up on it. It was the "cults" that were against slavery.
Sorry but you are mis-informed on this one.
Slavery was *never* condoned in the Bible, not once ever. The term "slavery" when it was mentioned in the Bible would today be referred to as "indentured servitude".
Other times, when *real* slavery took place, it was when people were taken hostage (like when the Israelites were taken to Egypt) and were truly slaves. Never was it condoned in this sense.
Betruger wrote:Stalin's atheism's was his motivation for genocide? God's and God's divine inspiration's inexistence in Stalin's mind is what guided Stalin's hand?
His "religion" to the state is responsible for Stalin's crimes, not atheism.
"When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything." - Emile Cammaerts
The option of choice for the last century for putative Atheist Humanists has been the Nietzschean Ubermensch.
I was at John Cole's presentation on making metallic hydrogen as delivered at STAIF '07. Was fascinating stuff. They crunch it with a diamond anvil. . .
would liquid metal hydrogen technically be a plasma?
CaptainBeowulf wrote:There is also another argument for why Europe advanced beyond China: internal conflict and competition.
Every time it almost fell apart, the Chinese empire succeeded in restoring itself. However, the Roman Empire fell apart irrevocably. The fractured mess of successor states were then driven to improve themselves economically, militarily and technologically in order to survive against each other.
This didn't start immediately. It first becomes visible with the northern Italian city states around the 13th century, as the rudiments of capitalism get going.
Then it spreads to France and England. Eventually it spreads to all the others, tied up with the rise of nationalism.
Yet another argument is that the Black Death in the 14th century created such a shortage of workers that feudalism died. Regional overlords were came to be willing to accept worker mobility from one area to another.
Interestingly, an echo of this theory has been applied to the 6th century, where it is argued that that earlier iteration of the Black Death also created a worker shortage, and therefore was the final necessary catalyst to putting an end to slavery.
These circumstances undermined the alliance between the Church and local secular powerbrokers, and so created the conditions where Protestantism could emerge. Yet another bunch of people (Max Weber et al.) have argued that it was the Protestant work ethic and outlook on life (as opposed to a generic non-denominational one Christian one) that allowed for continuing acceleration of technological advances.
I've thrown down a soup of a few theories above, but I think it's fair to argue that without the disruptive influences that those theories discuss, Christianity may well have just become another theocracy fused with a worldly imperial government.
These theories might be contributing factors, or they might be deterministic factors. It's not always easy to put your finger on a nexus and say "Aha! This is where it all changed! "
My argument regarding Christianity being a major influence on the Development of Science started out as a post hoc ergo propter hoc sort of thing, but over time, there has been some supporting evidence discovered.
James Burk of "Connections" fame, opined that literate monks were invaluable in promoting the rise of science.
Anyway, it's an interesting subject to speculate about.
So, dumb question. How do the cells know when to start differentiating? Is this happening according to some sort of plan that the too dumb to think cells are following?
Its all in the programming.
Anyway, you can divide this as many times as you want and you will get many morulas that can all develop into fully grown individuals.
So the matter is not quite as simple as you were putting it. These cells are not a human being, they can be many human beings too.
This does not comport with my recollection. Do you have a source for this?
So, dumb question. How do the cells know when to start differentiating? Is this happening according to some sort of plan that the too dumb to think cells are following?
Its all in the programming.
Anyway, you can divide this as many times as you want and you will get many morulas that can all develop into fully grown individuals.
So the matter is not quite as simple as you were putting it. These cells are not a human being, they can be many human beings too.
This does not comport with my recollection. Do you have a source for this?
if i may interject, it logically follows from the fact that the cells are identical and do not themselves change in any way (save multiplying) until they reach sufficient numbers (they can ascertain this through e.g. chemical signaling).
thus e.g. when you remove half of them it's equivalent to rolling back the clock to when there were only half as many (save perchance some chemical signaling residue, but you could take care of that, too.)
Diogenes wrote:
So, dumb question. How do the cells know when to start differentiating? Is this happening according to some sort of plan that the too dumb to think cells are following?
like i said life isn't some self contained thing, it's a property of the dynamical relationship among multiple things. just like the liquid phase is not an element on the periodic table.
I see the distinction as between having a file in a folder... or running an application. One is a sequence of instructions. The other is instructions being carried out.
Diogenes wrote:
This is an old philosophy question. When do dead atoms make a living thing? While I love to get into metaphysics, at the moment it is irrelevant to the point. It is not debatable that "living" creatures are made of "dead" atoms. Life itself points to a sort of reverse entropy in that a meaningless jumble of random components are spontaneously assembled into a structure of a higher level of order.
negentropy
there's also information entropy and the "free energy" version of entropy. all strongly related. (also see "dissapative structures"). problem which thermo entropy - well there are many problems with it - is it discussing the situation of an adiabatic closed hamiltonian system. such a thing simply does not exist.
(more...)
there's nothing spontaneuous about it. and like i said life is not made of atoms. it's made of dynamical and morphological relationships existing in an entropy/energy gradient. (e.g. "dissipative structures") which an important point, and it's not so much a philosophical point as a mathematical/logical/spatial one
Diogenes wrote:
Whether it meets some one's technical standard or definition, it still serves as a very good analogy for what is occurring. If anything, what is going on with biological decompression is far more advanced than is ordinary data compression techniques. It is a program that runs in matter, as opposed to memory.
i gave this some thought as i did my christmas shopping. if i were to make a computer analogy i'd say the dna is the _output_ of a metaheuristic algorithm. (or more properly a small portion of the solution vector at a given point). however, among other things, the time is not discrete, so you open up an infinitely larger set / group for periodicities and the like. e.g. the different between the set of integers and irrational numbers, or in this computable and uncomputable. but any case, the output of a metahueristic algorithm whose search space gradient is continuously and unpredictably changing.
But it has been running for over a billion years, so it's output has been pretty well refined at this point. It is also recursive.
well see then, it's just a matter of transplanting the dna from one cell to another. say, from a skin cell to a stem cell.
really there are still more things you have to do to stimulate the right phase transition in the cell's state ("execute the program" as you'd call it in your analogy). and i don't know what the state of research is in that area but i imagine we still have quite a ways to go there.
but point being you can just transplant the dna into the cell. it's fairly easy to grow cells. and we've perfected dna transplanting long ago. then you can take the dna from anywhere in the body and transplant it and get the same result.
Last edited by happyjack27 on Tue Dec 21, 2010 7:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
and that we have to make "considerable progress" in order to transform a mundane cell into an embryo
The process is called cloning and has been done on animals. It has not been done on humans, because it is not allowed. Technically this has already been possible for a long time though, even long before Dolly was created.
Diogenes wrote:
Whether it meets some one's technical standard or definition, it still serves as a very good analogy for what is occurring. If anything, what is going on with biological decompression is far more advanced than is ordinary data compression techniques. It is a program that runs in matter, as opposed to memory.
i gave this some thought as i did my christmas shopping. if i were to make a computer analogy i'd say the dna is the _output_ of a metaheuristic algorithm. (or more properly a small portion of the solution vector at a given point). however, among other things, the time is not discrete, so you open up an infinitely larger set / group for periodicities and the like. e.g. the different between the set of integers and irrational numbers, or in this computable and uncomputable. but any case, the output of a metahueristic algorithm whose search space gradient is continuously and unpredictably changing.
But it has been running for over a billion years, so it's output has been pretty well refined at this point. It is also recursive.
mind you it's a very efficient optimization algorithm (low time complexity class), still, that's not very long if you put it on the appropriate time scale, esp. when you consider that it's chasing a moving target. (namely, its tail.)
