On Monday, August 25, 2025 at 4:55:59 AM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Aug 24, 2025 at 9:43 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote: *>>> One of my axioms is that Something cannot transform into Nothing, and Nothing cannot transform into Something. Do you find this axiom completely ridiculous* *>> It's not ridiculous, it's just unnecessary because experimental results can be explained without it, and General Relativity would need a complete overhaul because as it is now "conservation of energy" doesn't have a unique meaning because energy doesn't have a unique meaning in GR. And you don't fix something if it's not broken, and as of today there is no evidence that General Relativity is broken. * *> It is broken, or let's say incomplete. When energy is lost in the context of red shifting, it can't explain where the energy went (or came from in the case of blue shifting), other than to rely on de facto magic.* *General Relativity does NOT need to explain where the energy went because General Relativity says there's no such thing as a LAW of conservation of energy, it's not a LAW it's only an approximation that is pretty good for small volumes of space, like the size of a galaxy, but when you get to volumes much larger than that the approximation becomes lousy. You however DO need to explain where the energy went because you claim there is a law of conservation of energy and that law is sacred, and yet you are unable to do so. Your proposed new axiom not only can't help in answering any previously unanswered questions, it creates new questions that you don't have answers to. * I don't think you get it. I don't have to give a full proof for my position to be valid. I just have to point out an insufficiency which someone can fix, maybe me. This pov is well within the scientific method. And the insufficiency involves the fact that a photon is a point particle, with no length (or internal time). So, unlike in classical theory, it's impossible to form a model about its wave being stretched or contracted, depending on whether there's red or blue shifting, respectively, as it moves through space. I mean, you can talk about this alleged stretching or contracting, but if you think deeply about it, you'll realize you have no idea what you're referring to. As far as axioms are concerned, you have an unstated axiom which is the negation of mine, namely that Something can become Nothing, and Nothing can become Something. Neither axiom, yours or mine, can be proven. Such is the nature of axioms. But I can point out that mine has an empirical basis, say in the principle of conservation of energy, whereas yours, I submit, just affirms magic. Einstein affirmed conservation of energy, at least locally, so if it fails globally, an explanation is begging. AG * > It seems to me (ISTM) you've calculated and got the answers you want (predicted by GR),* *Not quite. We've made calculations using General Relativity to make predictions, and observations have confirmed those predictions; hell it even correctly predicted what the complicated waveform gravitational waves would have when two black holes collide, and it even enabled us to determine what the mass and the spin of those two black holes were. And General Relativity also predicted that space was expanding so photons would lose significant amounts of energy if they travel over cosmological distances. * How could Einstein have predicted that, when Eddington showed in 1930 that GR just established that the static universe was unstable. When did Einstein add the CC to his equations? How could he know the sign of the CC if he didn't know whether the universe was expanding or contracting? Did he add the CC after Hubble showed the universe was expanding, but before he knew that the static universe was unstable? Dates here are important. AG *> What I don't get is why increasing entropy is necessary, or even related to the arrow of time. AG * *If you saw a film of somebody scrambling an egg, could you tell if that film was being run forward or backwards? Of course you could because a scrambled egg has a much higher entropy than an unscrambled egg. And the arrow of time is why watching a scrambled egg become unscrambled looks ridiculous even though both the forwards and backwards versions obey all the laws of classical, quantum, and relativistic physics. * Please ignore my comment, as it was based on your previous claim that entropy tomorrow and yesterday are, or could be, higher than today. But entropy for a closed system can never decrease -- that's the correct statement of the 2nd law. So when are you assuming the egg is scrambled? It's unclear what contradiction you were referring to; that entropy could be higher yesterday and tomorrow, than today? I do understand that entropy is associated with the arrow ot time, since some events, for all practical purposes, FAPP, are irreversible. But I don't understand the problem you pose, which is allegedly solved by the BB causing our universe to start with low entropy. AG * John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* 4vv -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/c6a9c661-efee-4440-aca0-8d07cdccea9dn%40googlegroups.com.
