Scientific Quandary- or Logical Devil's Advocate

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Every animal adheres to its own set of natural laws. Humans adhere to logic because it describes how they perceive the world.
I find it hard to believe that our perception of the universe is the be all end all of how it operates. It's just as likely that a dolphin's view of reality is as sound as our ideas of it.

Just because we can't explain the supernatural does not mean that it doesn't exist. The probability of there being something that transcends our understanding is more likely to be the case then our 200 years or so of knowledge of how life forms on earth.

I have that. Where was what you are referring to in it?

I tend to think that time is cyclical, because everything in our world is or can be reduced to a cycle. Within the each cycle, there is linear progression.


"Spiral" implies something geting bigger, accumulating. Which is an intriguing thought.

no, wait let me try to explain better, so you see it is not getting bigger because it is infinite. inifinite can not grow to bigger than what it is is.

picture yourself standing on a line drawn on the ground. this line is time. it stretches out ahead of you to the horizon (the future), and behind you into the past. now imagine, like the surface of the earth, this line is curved down away from you....and continues to curve until it eventually ends up behind you again. this would be one "cycle" or circle. now imagine that the ends don't EXACTLY join up where you were standing on that "line" but actually pass by infinitesimally close to each other, and continue on, along the same curvature. if both ends continued to do that, you would have a spiral that stretched out forever in one way and forever in another. now presume once again that that path the spiral is following is not a perfect straight line either, but another large curvature, like that of the earth, where the two "ends" of the length of spiral (now looks like a slinky, i guess lol) curved back towards each other as the original "time-line" did. and when they came close together again, passed very closely by each other again, and this would form another spiral, whose two ends stretched out along a curve and made anther spiral, and another, on and on into infinity. there is no "getting bigger" because these "cycles" that form each spiral are loops of time where the universe is created and imploded, over and over again.....infinitly. i don't know if you could say that anything e were being added with this process. that would be arguable, i think. you could maybe argue that time would have to be constantly being added to make this argument true.....but if time is truly infinite, can it be "added to"? or is it's shape simply infinite, and we have to see it as getting larger because "adding" and "beyond" is one of the few ways we can actually imagine the concept of infinity itself. something going on and on, getting longer in the distance or larger with time. that one is beyond me, i think.

Last edited by starvingartist on 31 Dec 2008, 1:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That is way-cool.

If time is an unbounded spiral, do you think space is, as well?

i think i would need a lot more knowledge base on physics than i currently have to answer that question. my theoretical base in scanty, at best. mostly just stuff i think about on my own, little formal study. i certainly would like to learn more about theoretical physics, nature of gravity, relativism, theory of everything, stuff like that.

That's okay. I'm way out of my depth here, as well.

I think it was in the shape of time and then he relates it again in the shape of the universe, and if it wasn't a holiday I would look it up myself in a library book.

Course I could be wrong and it could be a loop. Curse my crappy memory.

that is not true. There are multiple different sizes of infinity and some sizes of infinity are larger than others.

there are an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1, and an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 2.and one is bigger than the other.

Infinity can be defined by numbers?

Where is Chever?

Orwell's avatar made me think of him,

This is not true. f: (0,1)->(0,2) such that f(x) = 2x is a bijection between the first and the second, and hence both have the same size, 2^aleph_null. In fact, it isn't too difficult to show that there exists a bijection from (0,1) to R, and hence the interval (0,1) is of the same size as the set of all real numbers. (proof of this is left to the reader).

However, your point about their being different sizes of infinity does still hold; for example, the set of naturals is smaller than the set of (real) numbers between 0 and 1.

You are still subscribing to natural law. Is there a point where you can say that goes beyond human comprehension?
If there is than that is by definition "supernatural".

I over simplified to make a point... noted.

While there can be no reason to suppose that there is nothing that exceeds the possibility of human comprehension, the problem is that we may quite well be unable to say when it begins.

Until then, I will yield to nothing.

Can you say that once again in a robot voice for all us yokels?

?? not sure what you are saying.