I fully understand that a virus doesn't have the ability to replicate on its own. It seems to be more of a way of passing information from one cell to another than anything else. Much of the DNA in your cells came straight from viruses. There is a theory though that encapsulated RNA (viruses) in the primordial soup are the very earliest form of life and that life evolved from that very primitive and simple exchange of information. Obviously viruses aren't alive in the conventional sense.
Yeah, and for the laws of thermodynamics..! It is simply scientifically irresponsible to teach as fact that all came from nothing when such violates so many known laws of physics and since it has never been demonstrated.
Actually stuff comes from nothing all of the time. Pair anti pair creation and destruction is constantly occurring.
Now if you said that everything were made up of waves of energy then I'd just want to discuss it more. This is possible anyway, although I as of yet have not been convinced that all matter is waves. I am convinced that light are waves, however.
You need to read up on the double slit experiment. It clearly demonstrates that light is both waves and/or particles. The same with atoms and even molecules as big as bucky balls. This may not make intuitive sense at first, but it helped me to understand that matter is an emergent property, just like the transition states between water vapour, water and ice.
This idea of waves of nothing seems a little far out. Please explain these waves of nothing to me. As I said, I'm nowheres near the brightest kid on the block, nor the most educated. But waves of nothing sounds like fairy tails. Perhaps if you clarify or rephrase that one then I'll be able to answer it - at present it's not even a coherent question.
Hmm, maybe a divergence will help explain it. The Michelson- Morley experiments proved that there is no ether. Einsteins theory demonstrated that light is a particle (that is what he got the Nobel for) waves have to travel in a medium, there is no medium for them to travel in. Einsteins Theory of relativity put it back in as Space-Time. Waves of nothing is Space-time. Good luck with that explanation :)
I still don't see how Stern-Gerlach or the double-slit proves that matter is waves or that vacuum can fluctuate or that all could have come from nothing. Are we just doing a bit of single-point extrapolation, here? :-)
Read up on the double slit experiment and its variations. This is basic fundamental science, the farthest thing from single-point extrapolation. It is the basis for almost all of our scientific research today, in physics anyway.
Poor body design (hips, knees, etc.) give credence to the idea that God made mankind in the beginning but over the hundreds of generations, they have devolved. [grin] It happened to German Shepards. (that is to say that they devolved and many of them now have bad hips. But that's not the way they always were.)
Devolution is an integral part of the theory of evolution, it is just that variations that don't help die and don't perpetuate as fast as good variations. Could your dogs survive without your assistance?
Do you have any evidence that in the beginning Man was perfect and has devolved over time?
Exactly what I said! "One day we will have the evidence. I just know we will." Doesn't sound all that scientific to me.
You seemed to overlook this statement. " Right now, we are just doing crude comparison matches, very soon though, in the next 10 to 20 years they will be able to take any two samples and be able to determine how many generations back they had the same parents."
We already have the evidence now of common ancestry. It is just that in the future we will be able to say with certainty exactly when and how it happened. Let me give you another analogy, right now we are at the musket stage in the arms race, in a few years we will have 50 caliber sniper rifles. It is the same basic technology (theory) just refined and improved. For the victim it doesn't really matter whether it is a ball that hits him or a high velocity bullet, the results are the same.
excellent post ping.
And in #411:
but a wave needs a medium. If you look out at waves in the ocean just what exactly do you see? You probably don't see water molecules going in circles, but that is what is happening.
You seem here to be mixing up different domains of concepts, in trying speak as if radio/light waves were the exact same species as waves on water or through air.
But these are actually 3 different kinds of waves. Radio/light is the one, and the other two, which are in an entirely different realm, are Pressure and Surface waves.
Let me explain.
Surface waves are like those on the ocean. They move very very slowly, compared to all other kinds of waves. Pressure waves, on the other hand, are like those which carry sound through a substance with mass (like water and air). Pressure waves are much much faster then Surface waves for any given medium. It is true and well demonstrated that Pressure and Surface waves do require a medium.
But radio and light (heretofore just 'radio') waves are of a completely different species from pressure/surface waves.
For example, pressure and sound waves are the actual movement of atoms of mass - it is a purely mechano-kinetic process. No electric fields are produced from them, and they are not produced directly from electric fields. And they must always travel inside a medium. (Or at least every experiment so far has concluded that.)
Radio waves, on the other hand, are generated by oscilating electric fields, and radiowaves do themselves carry an electric field as well as a current field. They can be detected either by the voltage they induce upon an antenna or by the magnetic field they induce into an iron bar.
The standard method for measuring the strength of a radio signal at a certain distance from a radio station transmitter is to measure the "Microvolts per meter."
That's why we call radio waves and light "Electro Magnetic Field."
Furthermore, radiowaves have been demonstrated to propagate through what we call empty space -- as a matter of fact, that is where they work the very best.
I would be most helpful to your study and understanding of science if you can begin to think intuitively about these differences.
-Jesse
PS Ethan Clive Osgood: Check out the results from my experiments this weekend involving the wave properties of light!
You can conclude from this that light is not "waves travelling in a medium". That's what the last 100 years of physics has been trying to tell you.
Einsteins Theory of relativity put it back in as Space-Time. Waves of nothing is Space-time.
x,y,z,t appear as independent variables in Maxwell's equations. How do we reconcile that with your notion that light is waves of x,y,z,t? Should we read Maxwell's equations upside-down?