I don't have a background of physics either - it's just a hobby
Quote:Hmm I would also like to address a dilemma of mine to get
your opinion. You seem to want to know alot of things like me
But how did you pick what you wanted to study out of all the
sciences there are Hope it doesn't disappoint - I'm an "amateur
scientist" - in other words - self-taught - always reading,
always thinking, always exploring. I think you should have at
least an "Intro-To" course in ALL of the above. I never finished
college, but I did take a some AP Physics in high school, took a
bunch of psychology courses in college (regular psych, abnormal
psych and two child psychology courses), took AP biology in high
school but didn't do well in that. Took two courses in
sociology, never took a philosophy course. But It's important to
read the "Cliff Notes" of all the Greek philosophers - maybe
Wikipedia, or one of other websites that gives a basic synopsis
of each of the greek philosophers and what ideas they came up
with. What's cool about it is that it'll all seem VERY familiar,
because a lot of modern philosophies and religious thought stem
directly from them. [even Buddhist ideas took from the Greeks on
some things - they weren't isolated societies believe it or not]
If you take an intro-to course in each of them (or if you're
lucky, you'll find a "comparitive science" course of some kind)
- you'll know enough to have a global overview of the major
ideas that shape the world of thought. Get hooked on every
Science Channel (or Nova or PBS or whatever TV stations you have
around) you can find. Go to your public library where the DVDs
are and rent every science DVD you can find, ESPECIALLY those
from the BBC (they do the best job at these things at explaining
it all). Don't be afraid of the older ones (like Cosmos from
Carl Sagan) - even if they don't mention dark matter or dark
energy in the older videos, they're 99.44% accurate (because
there haven't been a heck of lot of modifications of the various
cosmos theories since the mid 1970's - they've just added new
ideas on top of them). Youtube has a lot of great short videos
as well - a lot of B.S. is there (like the "what the __ do you
know?") but it's easy enough to figure out the good from the
fluffy "sounds-too-good-to-be-true" stuff. Basically, just like
you are doing, it's good to work on getting a basic
understanding of what they've already figured out, and
especially, what questions they DON'T have answers for. I just
read a book called the Five Unanswered Questions of Science
(something like that) which goes over five questions from five
schools of science that there's no answer for yet. I never took
any math courses in college 'cause I took my interesting ones,
managed to CLEP through the basic Math and English and when I
dropped out, I never did get around to taking any more math
courses. It's also important, I think, to get a "feel" for
history that DOESN'T start in 1776. The biggest breakthrough for
me is when I was church-hopping (it was my thing - it's not
everybody's thing) and I ended up in the Russian Orthodox Church
for a year or two (I almost became a monk, believe it or not -
even though I'm not Russian). The fact that it was a religious
thing is besides the point - what they did for me is give me an
ALTERNATIVE VIEW OF HISTORY that wasn't Western in origin. I
started to see a continuous line from the ancient Greeks through
the Western Roman Empire (which the Greeks take all credit for
inspiring) and when Rome fell, the Eastern Roman Empire in
Constantiple continued (along with advances in science and math
and philosophy) and a generation before Constantiple fell in
14-something (1466 I think) to the Ottoman Empire, people
escaped from Constantiple and started up secret schools in Italy
- and these are the schools that brought the ancient knowledge
back to the West and started the Renaissance and a revival of
ancient Greek philosophy, science, art and culture. I no longer
think of the Puritans as ancient history - I see them as modern
history. I see Columbus as modern history. To me, ancient
history IS 500 BC. It's a "sense of historical time" - once you
get that - a feeling that the whole of history is accessible to
your brain, where you can sense the chain of thought that moved
from one generation to the next, from one culture to the next -
THAT'S when you start really getting a really solid view of the
nature of things, because it no longer seems mysterious or
obscure. And get your B.S. detector locked and loaded. There's a
lot of it out there, and if you know the history behind things,
you can really sniff it out when you see it. What psychology
helps do in this case is have COMPASSION for people who are
following a weird philosophy or spirituality
lock-stock-and-barrel and let them believe what they want to
believe, for they do not know what you know. You see their
beliefs from a historical perspective - as an outcropping of the
ideas of various people who lived throughout the millenia.
Example: See Ghost Hunters? I don't watch it 'cause I've been
there, done that. Ghost Hunters/Paranomal < X-Files <--
Poltergeist <-- The Exorcist <-- Chariots of the Gods (1960's
book - read it if you want to see where the "pyramids are built
by aliens" idea and crystal skull stuff came from (I am a
Stargate fan so I love that stuff, but I don't believe it) <--
spiritualist movement of the 1920's & 30's (Edgar Cayce was one
of them) - and Quantum Physics and Einstein had a great role to
play as it mystified people back then too, bringing back their
faith in ghosts) <-- the discovery of electricity and finally
back to the discovery of magnetic fields in the 1840's ---
THAT'S when the modern movement of "ghosts" and possessions
began. People were mystified by "fields" (I stlil am) - and a
lot of strange religious/spiritual ideas of the time are based
around fields and electricity and photography and a major
immigration of Gypsies into Europe and the USA all mixed in
there and they started going from town to town with the
carnivals bringing the idea of "mediums" to people, who them
started their OWN groups trying to contact the dead. Go from the
mid 1800's through to 2008 and you have Ghost Hunters. It's
harder to explain than it is to understand. What I wrote makes
sense to me but I probably would have to expand my
run-on-sentences into a few pages to really explain what the
heck I'm talking about. It's just that, the more you understand
PEOPLE, WHY they think the way they do, WHY they act the way
they do, WHO influenced them at that time, WHAT was "the
uncertainty" of that particular era - things start to come
together in your mind, and it keeps you from having a blind
faith in anything, except for what "makes sense" to you. Beware
of groups that have their own weird terminology that "just
doesn't quite make sense". If they have to use special words to
explain something and CAN'T MAKE AN ANALOGY to a common thing
that's pretty much understandable - then there's a good chance
they don't know what they're talking about. They just like using
"buzz words" a lot. ::: off soapbox ::: Quote:Concerning what
you said: So 4 dimensions exist? Time is subjective and does not
exist without mind I believe. Does that mean there is no forth
dimension? The measure photon movement you need other photons to
do so. But with the interference of the other photons they end
up in a unpredictable fashion. Which makes ppl beleive that
observation changes reality, but it just changes the procedure
which changes the outcome? Well, you can say "Time is the
measure between events" (whether the event is the ticking of a
clock in "one second increments" (therefore, time passed) or the
sun rose and fell - two separate events - the "stuff inbetween"
was time. I think there are five dimensions - four spatial
dimensions PLUS time. I think time IS a valid dimension - I do
not believe it is fully subjective. I think our PERCEPTION of
time is subjective (when you are scared, time slows down, as if
your brain is taking a thousand photographs a second and the
measurement in the brain between "moments" is a whole lot
shorter than when you're not scared. It's like filming a movie
at high speed - you use up more film (take more pictures) then
when you play it back at regular speed, you can slow motion. Our
own brain does "stop animation". If every day is pretty much the
same to you and nothing ever happens, your subjective sense of
time is that there IS no time, BECAUSE NOTHING (no events) EVER
HAPPENS worth recording in the brain as an "event". For you,
there is no time. But if there is movement - if there was
something that "just happened" but isn't happening anymore, then
time happened. Of course, we could get into "WHEN IS THE PRESENT
MOMENT?" or "When is "NOW?"" -- that's a mind-fk waiting to
happen. (I picture time as a fat wooden bead with a piece of
flat fabric going through its big center hole. Where the bead is
moving forward, the fabric is PINCHED in the bead, leaving a
shape like this: >< - the part where the arrows meet, that's
NOW, the left is PAST the right is FUTURE. But the bead in
reality is infinitessemly tiny and can't be stopped. Just
experienced - whether it is human that is experiencing it, or a
rock, or a star or a thought going through the mind. (the
explanation of the photon was to show that we don't really
change reality but rather that scientists that are throwing a
photon at a particle to be able to measure its location figure
out its location but end up banging it out of place so that it
stops travelling the way it was travelling. Yes - I think you
have the concept nailed down tight) ______ Kenneth Udut
Webmaster of [1]
http://free.naplesplus.us Junkie of "who-am-i"
and "what is it, fundamentally" philosphies
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