Just how big do you think?

[Spellbound]

Some interesting posts. The anti-science bias is strange, but then it's part of a movement that's spreading in the States, particularly amongst the Christian right. Our entire civilisation is based on science, I personally am alive because I take two pills a day, without science we'd have a life expectancy of maybe 40 years, and yet people decry it. All very odd.

[Sylph]

Hey I would like to contribute to the discussion, as a "kind of" a physicist :

First, it is a fact that science that allows us to do everything we do in the modern world
Of course no one ask you to blindly listen to people, but usually real scientists (not the kind that look at the stars and tell you that tomorrow will be a great day because Saturn is aligned with Venus) use the scientific method to give us more knowledge about the world, thats not only using the theory, but also making experiments again and again to verify the theory.

A nice example is in the Large Hadron Collider, they recently discovered "something that resembles the Higgs boson", they use those words to indicate that its not 100% the Higgs boson, but 99.999995%.
Scientists should be careful before they say anything, like if you remember someone said they broke the speed of light, but it was a measurement error, and the one that was responsible was fired !

This is just to give scientists some credit because they do hard work, they don't just crunch the numbers and give use results ^_^

That being in mind, I would like to point out what we know about space itself and the stars - astronomy !
Many effort have been made to discover what happens around our little planet, some people paid dearly for it in previous centuries, but all of the knowledge we have allows us to know so much about planets even far away from us.
I do not know all the methods, but some of them (you can google them or ask me if you really interested talking about it ! ^_^) :
- Doppler effect, allows you to measure the speed of objects moving away from you
- allows us to measure the heat coming from an object, this is by the way also related to night vision
- Einstein theory of relativity, allowed us to predict the motions of the stars themselves This was actually one of the things that made people start believing it because its very mind breaking by itself !

A side note about Einstein relativity - you can get the equations E=mc^2 just with two assumptions :
1) speed of light is constant in vacuum
2) Laws of physics are same everywhere
So, yes, you right by saying we need to assume laws of physics are also the same at the place we measure at, but why shouldn't we ?
Is on another planet, gravity shove us away instead of pulling us ?
Why would that happen ?
You can assume such a thing, and bring with it a theory, but right now the assumption that the laws of physics are same everywhere given us results which are true, so we have no reason to think otherwise
After all, we can put shuttles in space, build chips so small they can fit into a watch, and communicate using electromagnetic waves traveling in space



P.S.
I cant post links, but those things can be googled

Um, I dink somebody is a smarty pants lol.

I suppose I can agree with this, however personally I find there to be to lot a variable in these situations, as you may discover something/invent something, but somehow, these things are always improved upon, which means at some level, they were never perfect or accurate from jump.

So my main issue is, even if another planet/universe's polarity or whatever is similar to ours, how can we know it is close enough to our own to measure it? The ions and electrons and all that fancy wizardry could be either too advanced compared to ours and our space shuttles combust for no reason apparent .

I just don't think any one person can be accurate of any one thing.

I would never say night time here is the same as in America, because we're two different places and while it's still night time in both places, there are many big and small differences to make them similar but not the same.

I could guess and measure, closely even, but I won't be accurate.

[Nightcrawler]

@Sylph I cant quote you because you have links in your message lol

You're right that there are alot of variables in those situations like calculating distance to a star, but the trick is to know which variables are important, and which are not.
I'll give you a cool example - in school we all learn about gravitation force when u drop an object, Force = mass * 9.8
That is very accurate when we are close to the surface of earth, but its very wrong when we are in space ! obviously objects don't fall so fast to earth when they are in space !
Then we have a more accurate equations (F=G*m1m2/r^2 just for the record) and if u plug in the variables for an object on earth, u can get results very close to our initial result, which is Force=mass*9.8 !!
My point is that according to the problem we have before us, we know how accurate we should be, and which variables we need or dont need.

So it all comes to how you define "accurate" ?
Is 99% not good enough ?
99.99% ?
99.9999999% ?
In physics they measure things like that with the "sigma" notation, you can search on youtube (I cant post links..) "Five Sigma" for a nice video about the subject

One last thing - we put alot of effort to make people safe while we build buildings, trains, and even space shuttles, even though there are many variables, we try to take into measure what's important and it works well, most of the time


P.S.
I'm not really smart, I just love physics, and if we love something, we can be good at it ! (and im very passionate about physics ^_^)

[Sylph]

@Sylph I cant quote you because you have links in your message lol

You're right that there are alot of variables in those situations like calculating distance to a star, but the trick is to know which variables are important, and which are not.
I'll give you a cool example - in school we all learn about gravitation force when u drop an object, Force = mass * 9.8
That is very accurate when we are close to the surface of earth, but its very wrong when we are in space ! obviously objects don't fall so fast to earth when they are in space !
Then we have a more accurate equations (F=G*m1m2/r^2 just for the record) and if u plug in the variables for an object on earth, u can get results very close to our initial result, which is Force=mass*9.8 !!
My point is that according to the problem we have before us, we know how accurate we should be, and which variables we need or dont need.

So it all comes to how you define "accurate" ?
Is 99% not good enough ?
99.99% ?
99.9999999% ?
In physics they measure things like that with the "sigma" notation, you can search on youtube (I cant post links..) "Five Sigma" for a nice video about the subject

One last thing - we put alot of effort to make people safe while we build buildings, trains, and even space shuttles, even though there are many variables, we try to take into measure what's important and it works well, most of the time


P.S.
I'm not really smart, I just love physics, and if we love something, we can be good at it ! (and im very passionate about physics ^_^)

Oh gosh gurl I'll concede this round, only cause um too dumb ma'am

You know I does not know maths all that well :crying-and-sorry-li

So mean

lol, just kidding, but no really, Um so lost lol.

I suppose scientifically speaking, there is ways to weed the variables out, but I'm still not very certain of knowing things enough to be considered being as known.

I suppose You gots all da brains though.. and all the passion to care..

I think the appropriate course of action now, is for me to have you put a ring on my finga, so that when you invent teleportation, I can be the gurl behind the man and claim all the credit xDD

[Nightcrawler]

@Sylph You're funny !
And I agree with you about it might be hard to know which variables u can weed out, I don't know either when it comes to astronomy thats something best leave for astronomers ^_^
By the way, teleportation is already invented, you're too late !
(u can google "Quantum Teleportation" if u dont believe me ^_^)

P.S.
You outmatch me with smiley usage, I bow to u