You exist in a world that has a set of rules and consequences.
That is still unproven. Descartes tried with "cogito ergo sum".
Of course, the idea that the world is ultimately chaos without universal rules and consequences contradicts what we experience. And certainly what religious faith wants us to think. But what if the only way that our brain and senses are able to experience the world is to organise according to rules and structure that really don't exist outside ourselves, so we only see a fraction of reality that comes out as order because that's what our perceptive filter does. But I think we're beginning to tumble down into the dark cellar of philosophy now. And metaphysics. It's outside my comfort zone as well.
What I meant was that clearly we "exist" in some sense. Whether this existence and the context of it is external or internal to our minds is not the point. And by rules and consequences, I meant that there are natural laws, and there are also social considerations. So even if everything that you think is real is internal to yourself, you still have to cope with the aspects of it that you can't control, and the consequences of performing any given action, whether those consequences be a product physics or social forces. Ergo, whether solipsism is true is - from a practical standpoint - an irrelevant question.
But as you said, this is moving outside of both of our comfort zones and I'm pretty sure that half of the stuff I'm saying now is probably inaccurate to some degree
...lulz
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Edited by HarbingerDawn - Monday, 15.04.2013, 12:18
This guy must really be an idiot okay, how about just really, really ignorant regarding the concept of time travel and information. (EDIT: I mean the iranian "scientist." Not the guy in the posted video.) That sounds harsh but consider this: If you invent a TIME MACHINE then you're rich- instantly. Just predict the stock market or something. You wouldn't need to sell it or worry about knockoffs!
The Shape Of Space:
This is brilliant: I was always confused about what they meant by "what shape is the universe- flat, or round, etc." and this video describes it perfectly.
Edited by werdnaforever - Tuesday, 16.04.2013, 03:24
As far as I know it's 3. But the injuries are the bigger problem. Over a dozen dozen people were injured, and at least 10 were missing limbs, which is the worst thing I think.
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I have three geophones registering movements in all three directions. Their peak sensitivity is around 4.5Hz. Then I have a Lehmann type seismometer with a period of 17 seconds (0.059 Hz) registering movement in the N-S direction. It behaves like a 70+ meter pendulum, and ground movement can be registered by measuring the position of the weight of the pendulum relative to the ground. Of course, having a 70+ m pendulum at home is impractical, so the Lehmann type seismometer emulates the pendulum with a weight at the end of a boom which is carefully balanced on a frame (kind of like a gate). Nanometer movement of the boom is registered by having a magnet on the boom and a coil beneath it on the ground. When a distant earthquake occurs the coil and magnet will move slightly with respect of eachother changing the magnetic flux through the coil and the voltage that it produces, which can be amplified and measured. It's well within an amateurs capacity to build this (I admit, though, that I bought a set with all the parts needed to build it for around £400). It's incredibly sensitive. It will pick up any M6 in the world. The limiting factor is mainly noise, in my case often generated by big Atlantic waves crashing the shoreline of western Norway more than 400 km away or by local wind.
The geophones are best for relatively local quakes, less than a few 1000 km away. But powerful quakes like today's will show up as well. Here's what the vertical geophone got:
Earthquakes generate different kinds of waves through the Earth. On the geophone plot we can see the arrival of the P wave (primary or pressure wave). This is a compression type of wave that goes straight through the earth. These waves are high frequent waves, so even a 4.5 Hz geophone can see them clearly. Next is the S wave, the secondary wave that is a transverse wave, which travels slower than the P wave. As a rule of thumb about half the speed (around 7 km/s or P waves and 3.5 km/s for S waves, but the speeds really depend on the material and depth). The clever part is to look for the time difference between the arrivals, and then one can calculate the distance. Then make a network of seismometers around the world, and you can locate any earthquake with pretty high accuracy. It is remarkable that even the lower frequency S wave of today's quake shows up on the geophones (visible from 10:59:38). That's rare. The quake must be very powerful or close.
The seismometer with a period of nearly 20 seconds is much better at detecting these distant quakes:
Here the arrival of the S wave is clear. What then follow are the surface waves, which are the powerful waves that make the worst damage after a quake. These do not travel through earth but along the surface. Today's quake was more than 5000 km away, and the readings for the surface waves went off scale, so I can't get accurate measurements. But the ground movement here in Oslo must have had an amplitude of about 1.5 mm. That translates into a quake a little under magnitude 8 at a distance of 5200 km. The ground moves between the extremes only a few times per minute, so this movement is of course impossible to feel. For comparison the 2011 Japan quake was more than 7000 km away and caused ground movement here of nearly a cm. Still impossible to feel, but it was possible to watch the boom move!
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