Adrian Hester

These were both good short replies (Alon's and punk's). Just a couple of comments. A good short one is Thomas Madden's Concise History of the Crusades. (I haven't read the revised edition, only the original one.) The Crusades started out as efforts to free Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Over several decades they developed into religious wars against non-Christians. Please, Muslims, not Arabs. Culturally Islam's a religion of three major peoples, Arabs, Persians, and Turks. The region where the Crusader States were established was largely Arab in population, but the great lights of classical Islamic culture were as often Persian as Arab (Avicenna, for example), and the military and political leaders were of all three language groups. (Saladin was Kurdish, for example, which is to say from a people who spoke an Iranian language, thus related to Persian.) As for Spain, its period of grandeur was under Arab rulers, the later Umayyads, and its decline was hastened with the introduction of Berber armies after the turn of the millennium (yet another distinct people important in parts of Islamic history). But enough with minor quibbles.

Jim Wright writes: Yes, and if they were scattered randomly throughout an infinite universe, then there would be no reason for the ones actually emitting quasars to be at a small number of distinct differences from us, as Arp claims (or is claimed to have claimed). Or it could be a coincidence. Much much more impressive, for example, is that the respective distances and radii of the Sun and the Moon are such that they have almost exactly the same apparent size when viewed from the Earth. That's a much greater cause for wonder, yet it's just a coincidence. Your memory's faulty. That means you were in high school between 1925 (when rhenium and neodymium were discovered) and 1939 (the year francium was discovered)--but promethium, element 61, wasn't discovered until it was artifically created in 1945 (after neptunium and plutonium). In which case (indeed, in any case) we have to wonder whether you could have even done what you claim below, since the magnetic fields of the planets weren't accurately measured until space probes passed them. Then you haven't thought to be very critical about what you did since then. If the Earth's magnetic field were due to an electric charge on the surface of the Earth inducing a magnetic field because of the Earth's rotation, then the north pole and the north magnetic pole would have to be identical. They're not (nor is the magnetic pole even fixed), and the magnetic and rotational axes of all the other planets except Saturn do not coincide. The magnetic axes of Uranus and Neptune are inclined around 58 and 50 degrees to their axes of rotation, in fact (and Uranus's magnetic axis doesn't pass closer than 30% of the planetary radius to the center of the planet), and the magnetic field of Jupiter is reversed compared to that of the earth at present even though it rotates in the same direction--which you could only explain by its having the opposite charge to the Earth. Moreover, you can't explain the fact that the Earth's magnetic field has reversed 170 times in the past 100 million years. Nor does it look like you can fit the actual figures to a simple model. The magnetic field of a charged rotating sphere is proportional to the charge density on the surface, the angular velocity, and the fourth power of the radius. For Mars, the radius is 0.53 that of Earth and the period of rotation is almost identical, so if the surface charge densities were similar, you'd expect the magnetic field to be about 6% that of Earth's, whereas it's actually 5 thousand times weaker than Earth's. So perhaps the charge densities decrease as you move away from the Sun, which would make sense if the charges were due to emissions from the Sun. But then you have Venus, with a radius almost that of Earth's and a period of rotation 240 times that of Earth. If the charge density were the same as the Earth's, then the magnetic field would also be about 240 times weaker than the Earth's, but in fact it's 25,000 times weaker, implying a surface charge density 100 times less than that of Earth's. Why such a concentration of charge on the Earth compared to Mars and Venus? It can't be due to distance from the Sun. And one wonders if you even thought to compare the repulsive electrostatic forces between any of the planets relative to their gravitational attraction; quite likely (though I won't bother to work through it) the electrostatic force would be enough to introduce detectable perturbations in planetary orbits, which would provide an independent test of this model of yours. Have you taken leave of every trace of your critical faculties? Solar radiation carrying negative charge? Physicists have actually tested repeatedly for whether photons are charged; the latest result I know of (from a couple of years ago) is that the charge must be less than 10^(-21)e. And if they have a negative charge, then charge conservation pretty much requires that they have an antiparticle, yet no trace of a distinct antiphoton has been found. More than that, radiation is constantly being absorbed and emitted by matter, and the charge would have to end up on the matter in being absorbed. Therefore, one should be able to observe fractional charges, yet assiduous search for them has come up negative. The trouble with people who brag about being "natural born skeptics" is that they're only skeptical of other people's ideas; their own ideas so often tend to be held together with spit and kleenex.

Another relic of writing too fast late at night: Rather, once you start fusing iron-56 (and other nuclides like cobalt-56 and nickel-56 that have almost the same binding energy as iron-56) with other nuclides. Mind you, the stage where you fuse such elements as silicon and phosphorus into nickel and iron doesn't last very long since you get relatively little energy out of it--on the order of ten days, in fact.)

Only to the extent that you're not being dishonest. That doesn't address the question whether it's bad for you and thus immoral on other grounds.

This latest posting is quite vague, but this seems to be one of your problems right here. What do you mean by galaxies being "lost" due to the burning of their stars? The galaxies don't just dry up and evaporate into nothingness as the stars burn. They burn out, which means that after however many billions of years the stars in them stop shining one by one as they use up the lighter isotopes (especially hydrogen) and slowly cool off. Most of the matter in the galaxies will remain there in the form of heavier isotopes; it doesn't "go away." For an upper bound on how much mass would be lost to radiation over the lifetime of a galaxy, assume it starts out as a mass of hydrogen-1 and all of it is fused into iron-56. For each 56 protons fused into one iron-56 nucleus, an amount of energy equivalent to half the mass of a proton is released, or on the order of 1% of the initial mass. So, "losing" a galaxy means that at most 1% of its mass is lost as radiation; the other 99% or more remains there in a dark state after the galaxy burns out. How would "energy mass" be captured gravitationally? It wouldn't be unless it's by a black hole. Only matter can be captured gravitationally otherwise. Galaxies acting as gravitational lenses wouldn't cause the energy to be captured but only redirected as the radiation is focused. Huh? At first I assumed that was a typo for "mass into energy," but now I'm not so sure. So what sort of nuclear reaction would convert energy into mass? Well, fusion of nuclides heavier than iron-56 for one thing; fission of lighter nuclides for another. That's theoretically possible, but I don't see how you could make it work. Basically you'd have to have a massive inflow of energy into each nucleus--it would require extremely high-frequency radiation (gamma radiation, in general) of very specific frequencies, since radiation can only be absorbed by the nucleus if its energy is precisely that of one of the excited states or greater than the binding energy of the nucleus. Moreover, unless the radiation is sufficient to fission the nucleus in one step, the excited state would decay very quickly and you'd just have the same radiation re-emitted by the nucleus. But this wouldn't give you an explosion, as you postulate for the Seyfert galaxies, but a deep energy sink--talking of igniting such a nuclear reaction is thoroughly misguided. Moreover, only a small proportion of the energy emitted by stars is of a high enough frequency to fission these nuclei, so you can't have this done directly by the radiation from far-distant galaxies, which you assume into the bargain is continually losing energy as it travels. Note that such a process wouldn't fit your proposed mechanism for red-shifting light at all: The absorption of a given photon by a nucleus would be all or nothing and would affect only a small set of very high frequencies, which wouldn't give you red shifting at all but rather an unshifted emission spectrum with absorption lines at very high frequencies. In other words, you still have the problem of explaining how your proposed loss of radiative energy throughout every region of space (for which you have not proposed any sort of mechanism at all, I might add) somehow results in the energy getting shunted into the cores of Seyfert galaxies to break up heavier isotopes into hydrogen with the end result of the emission of quasars--a process which by your assumptions of eternity and infinity must require on average the conversion back into matter of pretty much all the energy being emitted as radiation! It's surprising we can see anything at all out there! In other words, you're now pointing to the appearance of just about twice as much mass as is lost through radiation. That won't work. See, this is where the standard model knocks your armchair philosophizing into a cocked hat: You just have to assume they sweep up matter in intergalactic space left over from the Big Bang. Intergalactic space gets emptier and emptier of matter as it gathers into galaxies. This process will slow down as time passes, of course, but that's no problem for the standard model, which assumes that there was a beginning to the present state of the universe (not necessarily to the universe as such) and to the processes that led it to develop to the state it is in now. Thus, in the standard model, there's no problem with the rate of creation of new galaxies by that mechanism to be twice as large on a mass basis as the rate of radiative emission from fusion--the two processes are entirely unrelated. The former just involves the aggregation of matter from a dark state into a bright state; the latter converts it back in the long long long run into much denser dark matter and radiation. In the standard model, it's no serious objection that the universe must run down and all the lights go out unless expansion reverses--if that's the way it is, then that's the way it is. And the standard model has another nice feature that your model doesn't have. If it takes 7 billion years on average for Seyfert galaxies to sweep up enough intergalactic matter to emit quasars, then assuming that the universe was fairly homogeneous when the first galaxies started forming, the emission of quasars by Seyfert galaxies would be correlated throughout the universe--they'd occur at pretty much the same time no matter in which direction you look. (In an eternal and infinite universe there would be no reason for such correlation in time.) And because the further away you look the further back in time you look, you should find quasars to be emitted only in narrow bands or shells of space centered on the Earth (and thus of time before the present) that are roughly periodic (every seven billion light years or so, according to what you now say), and uniform in all directions. And lo and behold! when I search on Arp, Seyfert, and quasars to check pro-Arp sites run by creationists and other windmill-tilters, I find the appearance of precisely this set of facts to be offered as proof of the falsity of the standard model: "The very existence of this quantization alone, is sufficient proof of the failure of the idea that redshift is only an indicator of recessional speed (and therefore distance). This quantization means (under the redshift equals distance interpretation) that quasars all must lie in a series of concentric shells with Earth at the center of the entire arrangement. Copernicus found out a long time ago that Earth isn't at the center of anything!" In other words, this creationist is a benighted ignoramus, but then what else is new? (In the standard model every point in the universe would appear to be the center of the universe if the universe is uniform over sufficiently large distances, so the appearance of concentric shells indicates that something happened throughout the universe at the time the light was emitted by the matter in that shell. The full triplet of equivalents is, of course, "redshift equals distance equals time." We know the redshift indicates distance because of the apparent luminosity of Cepheid variable stars, and we know there's a constant speed of light, so it's an uncontrovertible set of equivalences unless you throw out 20th century physics.) What atomic reaction? You haven't specified one. In fact, you say just below that it's "a matter that will be developed later": All you've done is erect a house of cards on the basis of armchair philosophizing (a practice rightly despised by physicists) amounting to saying that since you object to the standard model for extra-physical reasons, there must be somewhere some sort of nuclear reaction that somehow converts energy into matter: "it is obvious that it must be real and fully involved." "Obvious"? "Must be"? Your model doesn't stand up to sustained examination. It can't explain a wide variety of observations that the standard model was based on and it runs counter to modern physics and a very wide range of experiments. If anything, it's obvious that you had better learn a lot more about this standard model that you object to!

Hmm, one wonders what a professor of cosmetology would have to say about it. "Well, there are three types of coiffures that occur out there. There are round coifs, curly coifs, and pigtails. Probably the different coifs are chosen by different generations, but since we can't chat with them we don't know for sure." Or, "Well, the light gets shifted redder and redder the further you look out because that means you're looking at older and older galaxies, and as they get older they dye their hair more. It's odd that there's no brunette shift as well, but there's no accounting for taste."

Because you have to look at how coordinate systems are actually set up in general relativity. Coordinate systems are chosen so that an object moving unimpeded under the influence of a gravitational field can be treated as moving in a locally inertial frame of reference (thus, special relativity holds locally). The path of an object is then a geodesic in the coordinate system defined by this, which allows you to represent the space mathematically as a Riemannian manifold (which is a very general mathematical construct having lots of useful properties). In short, the coordinate system set up to span space so as to preserve special relativity locally follows mathematically from the distribution of matter/energy--it's set up so that space is, in a sense, nothing but the set of relations between physical entities. Curved space-time, then, isn't the mysterious action of a nothingness somehow imposing itself on physical reality; it is rather a concise statement of the actual physical facts, which are that all motions curve under the influence of gravitation. It's not the space itself doing anything; it's the measurement of space being chosen so as to reflect what gravitation causes to happen.

Oops. Not even thinking there. It would require quite a bit less, actually--the fusion of 70 protons instead of 560. (Each reaction releases 26.7 MeV, which is 2.8% of the mass of a proton, 938 MeV. To release the energy equivalent to the mass of one proton would require 17.5 reactions.) The point I made remains valid, however.

Reminds me of an old friend of mine, an Objectivist physicist, who asked once, "What in the world is wrong with curved space-time?" Indeed. It's not pure nonsense, and certainly not as a matter of course. No, not necessarily. The expansion of the universe implies that at a certain time around 15 billion years ago, all the matter in the universe was concentrated in a very small space; this might have occurred from a previous collapse. That we can't know anything at present about what the universe was like before a certain time (the time at which the density was greater than our current knowledge of physics can confidently handle) is uncontrovertible; however, that's not the same as saying it was necessarily a moment of creation. I looked at your proposal and off the bat already see a number of problems with it. One problem is that the stars produce energy by fusing lighter elements into heavier elements, but that process can't go on indefinitely. Once you start producing iron-56, you've reached the end of the road; any further fusion would require an input of energy. (Which is what happens during supernovae; some of the enormous energy production is expended in fusing the heavier isotopes. Indeed, it's thought to be what causes supernovae--once the star starts fusing lighter elements into iron-56, the production of energy in the core ceases, causing a collapse in the radiation pressure holding the higher layers of the star up against gravity; this collapse in turn causes a shock wave outward that blows the topmost layers of the star off into space.) The proportion of matter in the universe in the form of iron-56 would inescapably increase over time given what we know of nuclear physics; in an eternal nonexpanding universe, you'd end up with an eternal Iron Age after umpteen billion years, if you will. Not that all the matter will be iron-56--there will be lots and lots of matter in neutron stars, burned-out white dwarfs, and so on. But note that as time passes, more and more matter gets locked up in the burned-out remnants of stars--burned-out because they don't have sufficient mass to fuse them into heavier elements. That's the end of the bright shining stars. Yes, it would be billions and billions and billions of years in the future, but if it's an eternal universe those umpteenillions of years would be nothing compared to the dark eternity to follow. What I take to be your proposed mechanism doesn't get around this. Yes, you have a continual outflow of mass from the stars. The stellar wind would provide matter (mostly hydrogen and helium) that would eventually condense into new stars, as do novae and supernovae; that's standard astrophysics. (Note that it doesn't result in new galaxies, however; the matter for the most part remains in interstellar space within the galaxy. But you're doing a mass balance, so that's okay.) It's the radiation from the stars that's the problem (and as your figures show, it's 95% or so of the mass loss). What you seem to be aiming for is to set up a mechanism whereby radiation loses energy as it travels very large distances; since this energy has to go somewhere, presumably the energy lost from radiation is converted into matter. There are a number of very serious and fairly obvious problems with this. Now, to have a universe which would be eternal and roughly unchanging over that time (so that you don't end up with everything in burned-out stars), most of this energy would have to be turned into hydrogen. First, this would require some sort of pair production (an electron and a positron or a proton and an antiproton, for example; you could have other types of pair production, of course, but most of the particles would decay into electrons, protons, neutrinos, etc., quite quickly) since there's charge and momentum conservation, not to mention the other conservation laws of contemporary particle physics--which means there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter produced uniformly throughout the universe, including in our own galaxy. Yet there is no indication that there are substantial amounts of antimatter around. Where is it? Second, you'd have to have a rough balance between the production of protons and electrons, which you wouldn't expect since protons are so much more massive than electrons and thus should be produced at a much lower rate. Third, the whole idea of radiation gradually losing energy over long distances goes against what we know of quantum mechanics. Pair production would be a discontinuous process; that could happen only when a certain amount of energy had been built up in a given region (and one wonders how large a region would be involved). How would this energy be manifested before the particles are produced? Would its energy levels be continuous or quantized? Presumably continuous, since the energy loss would have to be proportional to the energy of the radiation to preserve the spacing of spectral lines. However, this wouldn't work under quantum mechanics, which requires a minimum quantization of energy. On the other hand, I consider this the least of my objections. Fourth, this pair production would have to be uniform throughout the universe--it would depend only on the amount of radiation traversing a given region, and in an infinite universe you'd have to have such uniformity because galaxies would have to be fairly uniform. (Otherwise over the umpteenillion years nonuniformities would be removed by gravitational attraction until a fairly uniform state would be reached.) Thus, what you would expect would be a constant "condensation" of radiation as matter throughout the universe, not just around Seyfert galaxies. In other words, even if we follow you in assuming that Arp's work shows there must be constant renewals of radiation as matter throughout the universe, Arp's work doesn't fit your model since your model wouldn't predict this condensation to be localized around existent galaxies. Fifth and most serious, even assuming you get around all that, it still just wouldn't work. Energy is produced in fusion by converting the mass difference between the reacting nuclei and the reaction product, and this mass difference is only a small percentage of the reacting nuclei. How many reactions would you have to have to produce one hydrogen atom? Since you have an infinite universe, all the energy in all light traveling large distances would eventually be converted back into matter (assuming it's not absorbed by matter, of course--which it wouldn't by definition, but it does bring up the question of how much of a bound we could put on the loss of energy from radiation with the laboratory techniques we have right now). Take the fusion of hydrogen into helium as representative, since it's the source of most of the radiation of most stars. You have the fusion of four protons into a helium-4 nucleus, which has 0.7% less mass than the four protons. So, to produce one hydrogen atom by losing energy from light would require the production by fusion of around 140 helium-4 nuclei, and hence the fusion of around 560 protons. (In fact, in practice it would actually be twice that since you'd have to produce an antiproton as well. However, the ratio would be the same.) The situation's pretty much the same for all the other fusion reactions within the stars. That ratio of 560-to-1 doesn't come anywhere close to offsetting the constant rise in the proportion of heavier isotopes; indeed, it doesn't even allow you to push back the Big Bang very much! In short, even if we accept your use of Arp's figures as indicating mass "creation" or, rather, "condensation" (which is a very big if), your proposal does no better than the standard model in escaping the eventual death of the universe and an eternity of darkness--and this follows directly from conservation of energy.

Just to be persnickety, this is not the same case as you being in an inertial reference frame moving relative to me since there's a period of acceleration when you first move away from me. It's not crucial, however, because you can imagine instead starting out a distance away from me and accelerating in my direction, then each of us measuring the tick rates of our two clocks as you pass me at constant velocity after you've ended accelerating. In fact that's a separate effect. (It was assumed early on that if you actually saw a stick moving at a high speed, it would appear shortened in the direction of motion. However, it was pointed out in the 1950s, I think it was, that if you take into account the differences in the paths of light from the two ends of the stick, then at large distances from you the stick will appear rotated.) You mean, what is causing you to measure them as essentially moving more slowly than someone at rest with them would? Time dilatation depends only on the relative speed, whether toward me or away from me. As for "what's doing it?," well, that's just the way it is. (Notice that in the situation you've described, the fact that you've accelerated so as to change your direction now can't be ignored. This means that for the time of your acceleration you're not in an inertial reference frame; this introduces an asymmetry between you and me that results in another old chestnut of a paradox, the Twin Paradox, whose solution is often given as a homework assignment in relativity courses. However, if you're simply asking instead what I would observe if you were moving at constant velocity towards me, it's the same time dilatation as if you're moving at the same constant speed away from me.) Not quite. The space-time interval (urgh, I won't try typing the equation in; look it up) between two events is an invariant (it will be the same for all observers). Invariants are what take the place, if you will, of an absolute reference point. First off, if it's just one photon, it will be absorbed (and observed) by only one of us. You have to consider a beam of light; that means you and I are observing different photons, which means that you observing the flash of light is a distinct event from me observing it. There's a third event, when the light source emitted the flash of light. These events have to happen in all reference frames, of course; they're definite physical events. The relations between them are not the same when measured by you or by me, however. (In particular, if we're moving relative to each other, I will not see as simultaneous events that you will observe as simultaneous, and vice versa. Their time-space intervals will be the same, however.) More to the point, we're not even measuring the time interval differently between the same two events. To get the point of the constancy of the speed of light, better would be for you and me to arrange things so that when you pass me at a constant velocity, we both emit a flash of light in the same direction (directly opposite or directly along the direction you're moving). These flashes will arrive at a given point at the same time regardless of how fast you're traveling. It's the relation between that event and the observation of later flashes of light that can be tricky and counter-intuitive (in a different way than the constancy of the speed of light). The best thing to do if you're really interested in this would be to learn how to handle simple space-time diagrams. Once you get the hang of them they're quite handy and you don't have to start out with the equations for the Lorentz transformation. One good introduction is here; it's detailed and takes its time about things: http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/html/FTL_part1.html You should also look through some of the old discussions on this forum about relativity with Stephen Speicher; he's far more up on it than I am and I wouldn't want to try to duplicate what he's already done better than I ever could. But the basic point is that special relativity takes great care in analyzing what is meant by observation, measurement, and events; this is what makes it abstruse and counter-intuitive.

No, that's a misstatement. Our measurement of the rate of a clock traveling with him would be slower than his measurement. Similarly, his measurement of the rate of a clock travelling with us (a different clock, note) would be slower than our measurement. That is, as measured in his frame of reference, our time would dilate. The cases are exactly parallel. The curvature of space can be determined within that space (in principle) by measuring the divergence of two locally parallel beams of light over large distances. This is something general relativity predicts; so far it's passed the tests quite well. The ether as conceived of in the 19th century in order to explain the observed properties of light was pretty much nonsensical and internally contradictory. Light is polarized, so the ether had to support transverse vibrations (vibrations normal to the path of the light, not back and forth in the direction of the light, or longitudinal, as in sound in fluids), which meant that the ether had to be extremely rigid--much more rigid than any metal to allow light to travel as fast as it does. On the other hand, it had to be exceedingly rarified in order not to cause observable drag of material objects. The only call for pursuing the idea of the ether was to make sense of electromagnetic phenomena, which allowed it to be testable. With the Michaelson-Morley experiment, one model of the ether was eliminated; later experiments ruled out others. Your maunderings on the ether are much less sophisticated than any of those theories. Then presumably light would lose energy over large distances. Presumably then you'd argue that that's the cause of the red shift of very distant celestial objects. How would this lost energy manifest itself? By conservation of energy it would have to show up somewhere. The problem is it wouldn't pay this "tax" all at once. As an object moves relative to the ether, it would have to continue pushing the ether aside. Thus, to continue moving at constant velocity with respect to the ether, it would have to continue paying out energy the whole time. Either the object would cool down (causing any number of thermodynamic effects that are not observed), so that eventually any moving object would come to rest with a much lower temperature; or else an object would not continue paying out the energy at a constant rate, thus slowing down in the absence of friction from material objects (which is not actually observed); or else you have to throw out the law of conservation of energy: You have energy coming in from no one knows where to overcome an unobservable drag, and then what? Does it manifest itself after being absorbed by the ether as some sort of heat or other form of energy we're familiar with, or does it just disappear again into no one knows where? Damn straight there are. Non sequitur. It could lose energy by dimming more quickly than the inverse square law would predict. However, the inverse square law can be checked with extreme precision, on the order of one part in a hundred billion, if memory serves. (That is, the exponent is -2 to that degree of precision. However, this might be the precision in the inverse square law for the force between electric charges; but the inverse square law for radiation is of a similarly high degree of precision.) You're contradicting yourself. If the ether did not exert a force on an object moving with respect to it, then the object would not have to displace it. If the object has to displace the ether, then the ether exerts a force on the object. You can't have it both ways. To get around that, you introduce an "ether displacing field." Why? It doesn't help you accomplish anything--you'd still have to push the ether aside, and to do that you'd have to supply energy to it, which means an object would have to lose energy as it moved through the ether, or else you'd have to have a magical supply of power to any and all objects moving through the ether, a power supply that would, paradoxically, show up as an absence of energy loss in moving objects under all circumstances. In other words, to have your theory explain the observed facts, you have to introduce something that is unmeasurable, unjustified, and vaccuous. "Proportional property of energy" is meaningless. You seem to mean (though it's hard to tell from such a vague statement) a property of some sort proportional to the energy (kinetic? total?) of the object. But with the ongoing loss of energy, the energy of the object would decrease; you'd have deceleration due to ether drag. This is not observed. And this loss of energy, I might add, would hold for any motion relative to the ether, which means that at best you'd find the energy of any object on Earth increasing and decreasing on a 24-hour cycle with a smaller 365.24-day cycle superimposed on it as the Earth rotates and revolves around the Sun; otherwise you'd have a decrease in energy at a rate varying over a 24-hour period, etc. This also is not observed. I don't think so. First, it's a bunch of ad hoc armchair philosophizing that doesn't display any understanding of relativity. Second, I don't see where you've idenitified any genuine paradoxes in relativity. The only thing that even seems paradoxical is your ridiculous misunderstanding of time dilatation. Try to find a copy of Milton Rothman's Discovering the Natural Laws: The Experimental Basis of Physics. It goes into the experimental tests of the conservation of energy, the inverse square law for radiation, and relativity in great detail.

Off the cuff, I'd have to say I disagree with you. However, I think the gist of your argument is close to what I'd say: The morality of fantasizing about an action is not determined by the morality of that action in real life, because fantasizing about an action is an entirely distinct act from actually doing the action. For example, it is pleasurable and probably not at all harmful when you're in the middle of a rather odious or uninspiring piece of work necessary for your career to fantasize about chucking it all and going to climb a mountain. Actually doing so, however, would be harmful, not just from the damage to your career and reputation but from the damage to you--the harm to your pride and self-respect in not keeping your word. Or: Fantasizing about putting an obnoxious boss in his place with a well-constructed bit of wit is harmless; actually doing so would probably be harmful. (He might have a new-found respect for you, but likely not.) Similarly, fantasizing about getting back together with an ex might well be pleasurable and harmless; doing so in real life probably would be harmful. More interestingly, fantasizing about putting her in her place publicly and sharply could be harmful (by agitating you, dredging up what is over and done, not letting you get over the past and moving on) or beneficial (by helping you recognize more fully the character traits you can't stand, various manipulative gambits, and so on, and helping you respect your own interests more forthrightly in the future); similarly, actually doing so could be immoral (if you go out of your way out of a desire for revenge) or moral (if you run into her by accident and she wheedles or imposes on you, for example). However, whether the act is immoral depends on different factors than does the morality of the fantasy. All actions have to be judged morally by their benefit to you. However, fantasizing has to be judged by its effects as a mental act, not by the content of the fantasy, which is largely distinct. Not entirely, because thinking about some unpleasant things or immoral actions can have a depressive, deleterious effect on your mental state, just as thinking about moral actions can have very positive effects on your mental state. With sexual fantasy, you're deriving pleasure from fantasizing about the valuable traits of another person selected away from the negative qualities that might make sleeping with her (him) immoral in real life; and presumably the person has some good qualities. I get the impression that some of the people arguing in this thread against masturbation find it self-evident that the morality of the fantasy and the morality of the act in the fantasy are identical and then argue rationalistically to find some example, any example at all, of how that immorality is manifested in some putative deleterious mental effect. (Jason King's last paragraph is a perfect example. He argues that only sex with an ideal partner is moral, so fantasizing about sex with anyone else at all is immoral. Feeling the need to show why, he comes up with, "it's an immoral waste of time, and an immoral clouding of your mind in order to experience a sensational pleasure that does not stem from an emotional connection of values originating in the mind..." No argument is offered for this remarkable conclusion; he seems to think it evidently follows from the recognition of "what you're doing in your mind at the time. What you're doing with your thoughts.") That's why I think this point of yours is very well-taken: Add "morally" to the very end for emphasis and I agree completely. I'll just add that this is a distinct point from whether fantasies are amenable to moral judgement.

No, pleasurable sensations are not "always physically beneficial" to the person experiencing them. Shooting up heroin is pleasurable, but it is not "physically beneficial." Its pleasure is misleading. (Italics added.) Nonsense. What is the use of living life without taking pleasure in your existence? Is your sense of happiness that divorced from the simple enjoyment of life? And humans are physical beings with physical needs, which you've come close to setting up in opposition to man's conceptual nature. Pleasure is life-affirming; it reminds you of why life is worth living as a conceptual being. First, it's not that hard to show that something is harmful to human life. Second, pleasure as such does benefit your life--it makes it richer, fuller, and more enjoyable. The issues are whether certain pleasurable acts (1) are worth the time and effort of pursuing them, and (2) have deleterious consequences. These are separate issues, though you seem to have run them together. Moreover, pleasure is both physical and mental (and thus involving the conceptual faculty on some level, if only in the recognition of something pleasurable as something to enjoy or that makes life worth living); by opposing "purely sensational pleasure" to the pleasure obtained from accomplishing your goals, you've set up the conceptual faculty as a censor over the purely animalistic responses of the unruly physical side of humanity--a side you then sneer at as not the primary aspect of man's being. It's a view a lot closer to Saint Augustine's than you might recognize. More to the point, it requires you to view all pleasure as a threat to you unless you can show it to be fully "conceptual." That's a recipe for rationalization and repression. There you go again, equating valuing pleasure with hedonism: "seeking pleasure (in and of itself)." Pleasure is a value, and the question here is whether its value to you is greater than that of the time and effort you expend. Contrary to your claim that "all actions should be considered immoral unless shown otherwise," all actions should be weighed carefully for their pros and cons, and if in your context of knowledge the action is more beneficial than the alternatives, then you should do it; if it turns out you were wrong, then you'll know in the future that doing it under the same circumstances would be immoral. If you know an action is immoral, then you should not do it, but otherwise you should act on your best judgement--such as, to return to the issue at hand, the case of whether to do something pleasurable with your time. If you have no grounds for thinking that pleasurable action is harmful, then you should weigh whether it's worth the time and effort. Maybe you'll be wrong, but that's a failure of knowledge, not morality. And I suppose children are immoral as well when they play make-believe without actually intending some day to become a cowboy or a doctor or what-not. They derive pleasure from it, but think what they're doing to their thoughts! They're faking reality without fantasizing about their actual ideals, and spending time that could be better spent on homework or meeting their long-term goals or whatnot. "Clouding of your mind"? Give me a break. When you masturbate, you derive pleasure from imagining yourself having sex with someone desirable on whatever level. This is no more or less immoral than children playing make-believe, and it serves the same purpose of deriving life-affirming pleasure from the exercise of your imagination. Fantasizing about making love to someone you find attractive on some level even though you'd not bother to sleep with her (him) in real life is not harmful to your mind; it's a response to some values (though not to all that person's values or, perhaps, to your own highest values), it's a recognition of your response to those values, and it's an act of imagination that makes those values come alive to the mind. (This includes masturbation even when you're in a committed relationship, which I don't consider wrong so long as it isn't done in preference to sex with your partner.) As for that final rhetorical flourish of yours that again sets up purely physical pleasure as something animalistic that must be rigorously censored by the conceptual mind, I'll remind you that sexuality is conceptual in humans and is tied to values--the equivalent for a man of the purely physical and entirely unconceptual act of humping someone's leg is to finger your prostate to automatically trigger ejaculation. Not too many men masturbate that way.

The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 AD. Then the Vandals sacked Rome in 455 AD. The Huns invaded the Western Empire in 451-2 but didn't actually take Rome.

As a matter of fact, it is. Pleasure is a sensation indicating that something is conducive to life. You have to argue that this sensation is misleading in a given case. You're confusing pleasure and happiness, as pointed out before, and you're confusing emotions and pleasure as well. What is the purpose of cooking flavorful food from scratch? It takes a lot of time and the only difference between eating that food and something bland or prepackaged is that the taste is (presumably) better. And think of the costs--you could be spending your time and money on accomplishing your long-term goals rather than the immediate pleasure of the good taste. And of course there are alternatives that are more efficient with your time--you could heat up some Ramen noodle soup, slam it down, and go back to your long-term goals. Similarly, what's the point in painting the walls of your house a bright color that pleases you? It costs time and money for nothing but pleasureful color. For that matter, why not just live in a dry cave? It costs less money and it protects your property just as well if you install a door. I've seen from your pictures that you don't live in a cave. So tell us, since pleasure is not innocent until proven guilty, what your argument is for living in a bright, well-lit place. Presumably it gives you some degree of pleasure to do so. So how do you know it's good? Have you teased it out down to the roots? If not, then you're acting on range of the moment emotions, by your argument, and you need to stop right now and determine how it contributes to your long-term goals and how it's not harmful.

I assume you mean "in no way." Neither does eating well-cooked flavorful food as opposed to, say, Ramen noodle soup and vitamin supplements. It also tastes good. If nutrition were the only thing involved (since it's what's necessary to insure survival), there'd be no reason to choose between ice cream and bland processed algae or unflavored tofu. (Indeed, the latter might well be better on nutritional grounds.) But there's more than survival, there's enjoyment of life. Yes, and you shouldn't confound survival and happiness, as you did in your reply.

But then you'd have to be consistent about the system you're using. If you take the Earth and the Sun together as the closed system, then you have to calculate the entropy increase for the whole system, not just for the Earth. That's very simple physics, but apparently it's too intelligent for the Intelligent Design crowd. Because it is possible to identify almost-closed systems, just as it is possible to identify systems which are almost friction-free or almost inertial, allowing Newton's laws to be used with as much accuracy as you need. Similarly, it is possible to set up systems which have a negligible energy flow across their boundaries (a beaker of liquid helium isolated in a thermos, for example), in which case you can treat it as completely closed for thermodynamic calculations. The Earth is not an almost-closed system, nor even close to one. By that argument, no science would be possible that idealized a physical case by simplifying and isolating parts of reality. If you admit that science in general is possible even though it idealizes reality by ignoring all of the universe that only affects a system negligibly, then your argument doesn't hold for thermodynamics either. What is necessary for classical equilibrium thermodynamics to be applied to a system that you treat as closed is for the net energy flow (or its associated entropy flow) across the borders of the system to be negligible compared to the changes within the system. That doesn't hold for the Earth, especially in the case of the metabolisms of living beings; even in bulk, all living beings taken as a group, the energy changes involved in metabolism do not dwarf the energy flux from the Sun (to say the least). Hence, the Earth is not even approximately a closed system, and thus your use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is utterly invalid.

False. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy increases in all closed systems. (And entropy is strictly defined only in systems infinitesimally removed from equilibrium.) The Earth is not a closed system since there's a net influx of solar energy. It's been known since the 1930s with the work of Lars Onsager that under the condition of a net influx of energy, local entropy can decrease, as in fact it does as living beings eat and build tissue. (Onsager won the Nobel Prize for his work on nonlinear and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, in fact.) Bullshit. Your worthless argument for "Intelligent Design" has been entirely out of date since the 1930s; it was out of date when it was peddled by "Scientific Creationists" in the 1960s, and the fact that you can't do any better than that shows that proponents of "Intelligent Design" are equally unscientific and out of date.

The trouble (one trouble, rather) is that Popper's position comes down to claiming you can't be sure you know anything certain (and the sense of certain as Popper takes it is important) about reality, regardless of how many experiments you've run, never mind how widely and cleverly you've set them up. He argues that since what we think we know might be knocked into a cocked hat tomorrow, all we can really say is that a theory hasn't been falsified yet; perhaps it never will, but that might just be from our looking in the wrong place or the wrong way all the time. As he argues in The Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, a large succession of positive results in a wide variety of circumstances does not, as you might naively think, increase the probability of a scientific theory being true. (Mind you, from what I remember of it, his distinction between probability and verifiability is valid.) The obvious rejoinder (and it's been made for a while) is this: Imagine you have to build a bridge. There are two contractors, one of which has built bridges for a century using the latest engineering knowledge, and they've had no failures. The other contractor relies on, say, feng shui and scented candles. They've never built a bridge, but they also have never had any failures. Which should you choose? Taking Popper's pronouncements about falsifiability at face value, it's a coin toss. If you revolt against that, then you must accept that repeated experiments that don't falsify a body of theory tell you something about reality.

Well, it's not entirely off, that test. 1. Ayn Rand (100%) 2. Epicureans (87%) 3. Aristotle (87%) 4. Jeremy Bentham (84%) 5. Cynics (82%) 6. Thomas Hobbes (81%) 7. John Stuart Mill (76%) 8. Nietzsche (68%) 9. Aquinas (64%) 10. David Hume (58%) 11. Spinoza (58%) 12. Stoics (58%) 13. Jean-Paul Sartre (51%) 14. Plato (47%) 15. St. Augustine (43%) 16. Nel Noddings (41%) 17. Kant (38%) 18. Prescriptivism (35%) 19. Ockham (27%)

Since you didn't have a sexual relationship before her, you simply don't know whether you'd think that or not. Also, while something might be worthless to you now, that doesn't mean it would have been worthless to you at an earlier stage in your life. How would you know? By your own admission, you don't. You simply don't know whether "that kind of life is NOT...of any significant value." More to the point, it's quite possible to find very great value in a sexual relationship with someone you know you can't have a permanent relationship with, so long as they have admirable qualities. Perhaps it's actually not possible for you, but since your whole position is based on your imagination and nothing more, you don't even know that.

It would seem a no-brainer to you because of the misanthropic view of humanity you see fit to argue from. You have said in this thread that "99.9% of the people I meet, see, and talk to are in messed up, broken, dysfunctional, or sham relationships" (#37). To you most of them, I take it, are "animal" who "cannot be convinced with reason" (#56). Most of humanity to you ranges from seriously damaged goods to ravening beasts, and those who have not yet subsided into ravening beasts are slowly being poisoned into them by their irrational ideas, and if you get too close to them they'll drag you down too. In other words, most of humanity is a threat, however insidious, and as a result, you seriously think that marrying anyone who is not a fully-integrated Objectivist is equivalent to "engag[ing] in sex and marriage with random strangers." And you add that if a woman marries someone who's not a fully-integrated Objectivist, she stands a significant chance of being beaten into the bargain. I most assuredly don't share this view of humanity. What I'm discussing is marriage with someone you know well enough and have been with long enough to know how she will act day to day and in challenging circumstances (this last taken very widely). I consider that a sufficient basis for deciding about marriage; the major risk then is that she will change over time in ways that will prevent us from continuing the marriage. (Which is always possible because people possess free will.) As to your view that the risks that are philosophically significant include beatings, being reduced to a purposeless shell, and all the dangers of promiscuity, that's so far afield it only suggests that you view your interlocutors little better than you do the rest of humanity. I said, "Presumably...there are no fundamental conflicts between your views of life." I suspect it appears that way to you because you're convinced that only a rank emotionalist would disagree with you. Read it again: "Presumably a person you love makes you wonderfully happy and there are no fundamental conflicts between your views of life..." Why would this not be "quite sufficient grounds for marriage" if the person makes you happy enough? (And I don't consider the other person's making me happy an irreducible primary either.) I doubt our positions are that different in actuality; there's a great difference in emphasis, however, because you view other people as much more of an active threat than I do. That sort of sarcastic nonsense is so far from my position it's not even insulting, just tedious. But that is not the argument I was addressing. Tommyedison didn't say anything about the morality of taking big risks; he was discussing relative degrees of happiness. His argument was simple, clear, and explicit: The mere possibility of ideal happiness trumps the actuality of nonideal happiness by its nature, so pursuing nonideal happiness (even when there's not someone more ideal to pursue) is immoral. Which of his words were unclear to you?

The very fact that you couch your position in terms of risk bothers me. What are you risking? Your principles? Only if you're not well-enough integrated to know when to break off such a relationship. Your happiness? Presumably a person you love makes you wonderfully happy and there are no fundamental conflicts between your views of life, and for many people that's quite sufficient grounds for marriage. You seem to have the view that a romantic relationship is ideal (and thus marriage possible) only if there's some sort of fusion of the two of you, so that any "poison" in the other person's makeup can all too easily seep into your bloodstream too. You talk as if you're not just responsible for your own character but for the other person's as well, and if (as might happen with other beings having free will) you turn out to be mistaken, then it's your own moral failing. It's a dark, suspicious, indeed pessimistic view of humanity, and I don't share it. I don't consider marrying someone you love greatly without being absolutely certain (in the sense that you seem to demand of well-nigh a rigorous logical demonstration, but that is perhaps just your emphatic tone) you know every working of every cranny of their character to be so great a risk.

Well, I think many people are too eager to marry in the first place; we'd probably agree there. However, given a proclivity to marry more readily than you'd ever do, I don't think marrying a student of Objectivism would necessarily be immoral. But here it becomes a question, I think, of how ready you are to solemnize a deep longterm romantic relationship with marriage. My views on that are probably laxer than yours but stricter than most people's.

I'd not object.