“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Gail Combs is off tonight due to the tragic death of her neighbor, as well as the insurance company coming after her home, and other assorted trials and evils. Please join me in praying for Gail, her husband, and their neighbors. May they be strengthened in their hour of need by the Almighty.
We must endeavor to persevere with this placeholder.
This is a placeholder.
Most of this post is boilerplate, but with sprinkles of minor mirth.
Just as Wheatie’s Stormwatch Monday Open Thread was created as a place for people to openly express their thoughts and opinions, so, too, is this Wolfian Wednesday Persnickety Placeholder and Open Topic, where honest but civil discussion of all topics is encouraged. This thread is also to be known as Wolfie’s WOO-WOO Wednesday, due to the author’s expected rambling about his most WOO-WOO opinions. Please bear with us!
We are living in an episode of The Outer Limits.
Please label all AI-generated content as being such, unless it is patently obvious (e.g., humorous AI images). It is important that we as individuals not begin to pretend that socially derived artificial intelligence is actually our own, as this form of stealthy social information averaging and feedback would be one more pretense and deception between people, in service of stupid Marxist socialism, and of those who wish to substitute their communally protected lies for actual truth.
The source of alleged truth matters, not for the truth itself, but for validation.
And yes, it’s WEDNESDAY…again.
So are we halfway through the week? Is this really HUMP DAY?
Let’s try that again.
OK – maybe Wheatie’s rules need to be posted on Wednesday, too.
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
Other rules may be derivable from these, and that conjecture is left for discussion.
If there is nothing beyond the “W” below, then this is a pure placeholder. For health reasons, I can’t always post a timely opinion before each Thursday Wednesday, but I will try. Otherwise, you have this placeholder post, where YOU provide the content. Enjoy!
How did Q put it? Ah, yes.
“Enjoy the show!”
W
OK – y’all got a real placeholder on the Monday upon which this post was saved. We’re gonna try to give you some actual fresh content today.
Pot may not kill you, but it has friends like jet engines who are willing to do the job. Stay safe out there, mellow tokers!
(2) The Far Out Dude Prophesies
How did the 1970s get the future so right by warning us about what we shouldn’t do wrong, and then somehow failing to stop it?
(3) Pick a Number – Any Number!
Not so easy, when you think too much about it! Welcome to the “axiom of choice” – which fixes everything and breaks it, too.
(4) Dark Energy Is A Placeholder!
No, I did NOT say that Placing Holder Under Arrest is a Dark MAGA Energy. Nor did this lady. But she did say that “Dark energy is a placeholder for a lack of knowledge of what leads to the expansion of the universe.”
Actually, she said a whole lot more. If you want a good general explanation of the state of modern physics in words and no numbers, this gal can provide, during the first half hour.
After that, you enter the arena of physicists fighting each other. Grab some popcorn!
(PS – as you can see by the image on the video, these new AI anti-wrinkle creams and age-reversing formulas for men and women really work!)
(5) Does This Research Smell Sweet or Stink?
“Scent of a woman’s tears brings calm to men”
Remember – the Weizmann Institute had some researchers who straight-up lied about some covidian stuff, IIRC. This would mean that there are simple volatile chemicals that pacify human aggression. Are they putting those in everyday products? And if not, why not?
This was brought here a long time ago by somebody – and sat in my tabs forever.
This man, making Christmas calls from the White House, believes the world is a sphere. And he has even flown around it! So has our beautiful FLOTUS, who happens to be his wife!
Truth and common sense must be valued by us, as individuals, in order to lastingly disempower the authoritarian fake news media. This includes the perniciously smarmy science media, which never answers for its errors and lies. I believe that the media has been responsible not only for leftist pathologies like scientism, medical fascism, and radical gender ideology, but also for reactionary movements like modern flat Earth, rejection of all medicine, and Biblical geological literalism.
Just as Wheatie’s Stormwatch Monday Open Thread was created as a place for people to openly express their thoughts and opinions, so, too, is this Thank God Thursday Open Thread, where honest but civil discussion of all topics is encouraged. This thread is also to be known as Theistic Evolution Thursdays, due to the author’s expected “pontification” about his scientific, religious, and political opinions. You are welcome to pontificate back! Free speech matters!
Please label all AI-generated content as being such, unless it is patently obvious (e.g., humorous AI images). It is important that we as individuals not begin to pretend that socially derived artificial intelligence is actually our own, as this form of stealthy social information averaging and feedback would be one more pretense and deception between people, in service of stupid Marxist socialism, and of those who wish to substitute their communally protected lies for actual truth.
The source of alleged truth matters, not for the truth itself, but for validation.
And yes, it’s THURSDAY…again.
And that’s it. We’re done stealing from Wheatie.
OK – maybe her rules need to be posted.
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
Other rules may be derivable from these, and that conjecture is left for discussion.
If there is nothing beyond the “W” below, then this is a placeholder. For health reasons, I can’t always post a timely opinion before each Thursday, but I will try. Otherwise, you have this placeholder post, where YOU provide the content. Enjoy!
W
This is an X thread that I told Aubergine about a while back, which I thought would be of interest to her because it borders on her metaphysical beliefs about time, God, and the universe.
The thread concerns a cosmological hypothesis which demonstrates that not only is time not absolute in our universe – the relativistic nature of time has resulted in UNEVEN AGING within the universe, due to the uneven nature of matter. There appear to be differences of age of billions of years between different parts of the universe, just according to their own clocks.
To be clear, the ages are still billions of years everywhere, but they’re different billions. Time has run faster (more billions) in the voids, and slower (fewer billions) near concentrations of matter, like clusters of galaxies.
Not only does this finer-grained look at time offer more physical and cosmological certainty about the rate of expansion of the universe – it helps us think more precisely about time at a metaphysical level. When we realize that time isn’t even homogeneous within our universe, it helps us to break free from the assumption that any kind of time, corresponding to our own, much less an absolute time similar to our own natural reckoning, necessarily exists beyond or outside of our own universe. When we try to consider a God capable of existing “outside of time”, we should consider the possibility that “time” itself may not even apply.
Try to follow along with this fascinating thread, which has sat in a long-preserved tab which I can now close!
(1)
This could be an incredible revolution in Cosmology.
The Dark Energy model of the universe, which won a Nobel Prize in 2011, may be completely wrong.
The accelerating expansion instead is simply because time runs faster in the voids between galaxies.
The standard workhorse of cosmology for the last 25 years has been the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) which assumes the universe is roughly homogenous.
Originally Lambda was Einsteins 'fudge factor' to explain why the universe wasn't collapsing under its own weight pic.twitter.com/vyHS4eUoxh
In 1929 Edwin Hubble made an incredible discovery: the further away a galaxy was, the faster it appeared to be moving away from this.
He was able to determine this by measuring Cepheid variable stars, which have a consistent relationship between their brightness and pulsation… pic.twitter.com/T3kucYJacc
In 1929 Edwin Hubble made an incredible discovery: the further away a galaxy was, the faster it appeared to be moving away from this. He was able to determine this by measuring Cepheid variable stars, which have a consistent relationship between their brightness and pulsation period, and so they can act as excellent distance markers. Using these markers Hubble found that the more distant a galaxy was, the more red-shifted its spectrum of light became, meaning it was moving away from us at a higher velocity. The further the distance to a galaxy, the faster it was receding. Therefore, the universe was expanding.
(5)
The fact the universe was expanding meant Lambda was no longer necessary to balance out gravity, and Einstein called it his 'greatest blunder' pic.twitter.com/haDwARAwDk
If you run this expanding universe backwards in time, it seems like everything is expanding from a single origin point, and in the 1960s astronomers detected faint radio signals coming from all directions in space.
This model of the universe, where things started from a single origin and uniformly expanded outwards, dominated for decades until the 1990s. Astronomers were looking at Type Ia supernova at high redshift to see how the expansion of the universe was slowing down over time Type 1a supernova are useful as ‘standard candles’ because they have constant brightness, since they form by a star stripping mass from its neighboring binary partner until they reach the Chanradesekar limit from below, at which point they expldoe. So, they always explode with the same energy and brightness.
(8)
Instead, at high redshift they found that supernova were much dimmer than expected than if the expansion had been slowed down by gravity.
On the contrary, the rate of expansion appeared to be accelerated. Lambda, the cosmological constant, was so back. pic.twitter.com/X4wZI3iVmo
This is the current mainstream cosmological model. Dark Energy, a mysterious unknown entity that makes accounts for 69% of the total energy constant, drives a constant volumetric expansion of space. More space means more expansion, which is why the size is accelerating. pic.twitter.com/1sLWsMTmn0
Mass curves spacetime to produce gravity. But, there's no difference between being accelerated by gravity or accelerating from a rocket.
This is called Einsteins Equivalence principle, and applying it to inhomogenous cosmology may eliminate Dark Energy altogether pic.twitter.com/dfmnphnf7n
This is because the further down a gravitational well you are, the slower clocks run compared to clocks further up-well.
You can reason this yourself if you consider bouncing a photon between two mirrors at the top and bottom of an accelerating rocket. Exercise for the reader pic.twitter.com/eSry9h7vdu
The important thing is this: In the voids between large galaxies time runs much faster than inside galaxies, and these voids are inhomogenous.
If you had an initial expansion of the universe from the Big Bang, more time has elapsed in the voids – possibly billions of years more pic.twitter.com/WqzWAccwtu
The researchers behind the Timescape model, as its known, used the familiar Type 1a supernova as standard candles and compared a goodness-of-fit Bayesian statistics to assess how timescape versus LCDM model can explain the observed redshift pic.twitter.com/WHoqjkz4x9
Now, you can do a lot of statistical trickery to get a favored result to your own pet theory. Why should Timescape model be taken seriously? Two big reasons:
– The universe is emphatically not homogenous, and so void regions DO have a faster clock-rate than galactic… pic.twitter.com/KIBHAxUqwT
Now, you can do a lot of statistical trickery to get a favored result to your own pet theory. Why should Timescape model be taken seriously? Two big reasons: – The universe is emphatically not homogenous, and so void regions DO have a faster clock-rate than galactic superclusters and filaments and this should be accounted for in any model of expansion. – Dark Energy is supposed to make up ~2/3rds of the universe’s energy content yet doesn’t correspond to anything we’ve ever observed experimentally. It solely exists to explain this anomaly of distant supernova redshift. In the timescape model, the universe very well may be slowing down in expansion after some initial Big Bang event – its yet to be determined. The future fate of the cosmos seems still to be determined as advances in cosmology regularly demand we revisit our models.
So there you have it. Does it make sense?
W
PS – something extra.
Aubergine posted this tweet…..
NEW: The man with the world's highest recorded IQ says he believes Jesus Christ is God and is "the way and the truth and the life."
"I believe that Jesus Christ is God, the way and the truth and the life."
NEW: The man with the world’s highest recorded IQ says he believes Jesus Christ is God and is “the way and the truth and the life.” “I believe that Jesus Christ is God, the way and the truth and the life.” YoungHoon Kim of South Korea is pointing to quantum physics to support his belief in God and afterlife. Kim was recognized by the Giga Society in April 2024 as having the highest IQ in the world at 276.
One of the replies included this image, alleging that it was from Werner Heisenberg.
Having been made too dubious by so many liars, I tracked that down to a source, which includes even more interesting material.
