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Sceptic agenda
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thats exactly what closed mined is. You accept nothing until have the definitive proof for it (yet you accept the brain and the mind are one which hasnt been proved - confusing)
Again with the "definitive proof" nonsense ... are you listening to anything anyone is saying?
Science does not provide proof (definitive or otherwise) of anything.
It provides models who's accuracy at representing a phenomena can be tested. The more accurate at matching observation and prediction a model is demonstrated to be, the more inclined "close minded skeptics" such as myself are to consider the model as an accurate representation of what is happening in the phenomena. That is how one learns what a phenomena actually is
This is how one learns about the world in a scientific, structured, fashion. Nothing is ever proven.0 -
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I hope I havent been offensive. When I get irked I try to go away and do something real rather than blow steam here.Well i haven't been on this sub-forum (the skeptics corner) too long, but the brief encounters I've had it seems to be the "silly woo woo people" (for want of a better classification) who are doing all the actual insulting.
I would be careful not to confuse someone saying something like "nope, that is nonsense" with someone genuinely insulting someone
Ive been here years. And there are many many examples here of the kind of derogatory comment Im talking about, and to be fair, its usually noobs to the forum that post them. But not always.
I know this comment is not insulting to one particular poster, but it is an example of the tone I see here all the time. A sweeping pooh poohing of the whole area.Nolanger wrote:Maybe they are just rational and intelligent people who hate seeing gullible others being fooled?0 -
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I'm not really a regular here, but I just have an itch that when I hear someone make a claim on something that is unlikely then I would want to see evidence for it. I mean it's just common sense in my opinion. If there were real proof that there exists some kind of paranormal world, I would love to study it and find out more. Imagine, it would be amazing! A whole new unexplored and mysterious world to look into. This is why I would be skeptical and look for evidence of paranormal claims.
Also I have a big problem with mediums and phsychics, as even though most of the time they may be just some harmless fun, from personal experience I know that they sometimes act very irresponsibly, and to be blunt it makes me very angry.
What Sandman has said is really spot on. other post too.
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Ok, trying very hard not to sound like a member of the elite league of intellectually superiors I will attempt to explain current understanding of quantum uncertainty.MrMojoRisin wrote: »It has been proven (but no-one knows why yet) with this thing called the Two Slit Trick that atoms will behave in one way if a human is watching them and in a totally different way if they aren't. The scientists fired some atoms through a sheet that had two slits in it. They expected the atomic particles to act like sand and pile up in two equal-sized atom stacks behind each slit on the other side of the sheet. But that didn't happen. Each atom behaved in a way that suggested it had gone through both slits at the same time,but that is obviously impossible.
So they were wondering how they could figure that out and they installed a tiny camera that filmed the atoms in action (without them watching it live). But when they watched the footage afterwards,the atoms actually started to behave like grains of sand and piled up neatly on the other side of the slits in the sheet. Like they had expected. Now, when the scientists switched the camera off and repeated the test,it was as if the atoms didn't want to be seen acting mysteriously and just went back to looking like they were going through the two slits simultaneously.
How do you explain that (if youre a quantum physicist)?
You are correct that individual particles such as photons or electrons behave like that. It is known as quantum uncertainty. If a particle is not being "observed" (more on what that means in a minute) it does not exist at a single point.
The most important thing a person needs to take from that is that this is very weird. Very very very f00king weird. If anyone thinks this isn't weird they are not understanding it probably.
It is difficult to imagine but it exists everywhere and no where at the same time. All we have is the probability that it will exists at a particular point when we observe it. If the electron was travelling in a straight line and we know it existed at point A a microsecond ago the odds are high that when it is observed again it will exist at point B a little further a long that line. But it may not. Technically when observed it may exist on the other side of the universe, though the probability of this is very very low.
The slit experiment demonstrated this. When the test was run with millions of photons all fired towards the slits in a straight line photons started appear in places you wouldn't think they would. This is because if you play the odds and repeat the experiment a large amount of times the unlikely positions will start to happen simply due to statistics. You build up packets of photons (or electrons) in places you wouldn't think they should be, simply because over millions of firers of the photon gun even the unlikely low probability places eventually happen.
A >>>>>>>> B (99%)
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`` C (01%)
If you fire your photon gun at B 99% of the time the electron will be at B, but some of the time it will be at C. Repeat the experiment 100 times one of the times one of the photons will be weird and appear in position C even though you fired it at position B
Initially scientists believe that this was simply down to us missing something. An electron is only at one point at any given time, but we were missing something that is happening to it that makes it be where we don't expect it to be. A lot of scientists simply could not accept that at a fundamental level nature would be so different to how we observe it to be in every day life. As Einstein famously said "God does not play dice".
But eventually it has been demonstrated in experiments that this is actually what is happening in nature, not simply that the photon is actually in one place but we were lacking the ability to tell. The photon really does not exist anywhere until something causes it to be there, and where "there" is is determined by probability. Or to put it another way the photon exists everywhere until something causes it to be in one spot. One of the difficulties with this idea is that we have no frame of reference to describe it. Nothing we know from ordinary life works like this.
This realisation in the early 20s has lead to some even weirder and more far out discoveries about the universe that have called into question our common sense ideas of time and causality. For example it is pretty well accepted now that something can cause something to happen in the past.
But back to the point, what is some what relevant to this discussion here is the term "observation".
The photon exists in a state of quantum uncertainty until it is observed. But in terms of quantum physics "observed" does not mean a person looks at it. It means something, anything, interacts with it. You mentioned a camera. What it actually was was a photon detector which can detect photons passing through it. But equally it could be the wall it is fired at that eventually observes the photon and cause it to exist in one point.
The reason the universe does not seem to be one bit probability wave to us is that in our day to day lives all the matter around us is "observing" all the other matter around us, and thus collapsing the probability wave to single points.
So it wasn't when the scientists themselves were watching the experiment. The thing that eventually observed the photons was the photo sensitive piece of card that they hit.
The bright bands are where the probability that a photon from the photon gun will hit is high, and dark bits where it is low. Repeat the experiment enough and you will find, as you would expect, that the possible locations for the individual photons to be are higher where the probability is higher.
TBH I don't really get when people say things like Oh you so called sceptics are so cynical, you don't believe anything weird is happening. I believe quantum uncertainty and non-locality and all the weird conclusions of that for time and space are accurate, and that stuff is far far weirder than anything that is discussed on the paranormal form 0
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