ant wrote:1) Where in Nature does a perfect circle exist?

Andy Resnick suggests

A soap bubble (or any liquid drop) on board the space station is, for all practical purposes, a perfect sphere.

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=424387

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Robert Tulip wrote: The ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle is always equal to pi

mmmmmmm awesome!


Dr Lots-o'watts adds

Here is something inspiring :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzahpSqGbVg

But basically, because of Heisenberg's principle, a length cannot be perfectly defined, so neither can a radius. It just comes down to how small we wish the error on the circle radius DeltaR to be.

mind over matter

The liquid drops aren't static. There's motion which distorts the sphere. It may be a be perfect sphere by chance at one point. But if this is the case then statistically perfect spheres in nature do occur but are extremely improbable... that's if it's possible for a water droplet to be a perfect sphere without any type of distortion down to the atomic level but that's well beyond my extremely limited knowledge of physics.

I didn't know we were using the space station to observe water droplets. Money well spent! Lol

President Camacho wrote:The liquid drops aren't static. There's motion which distorts the sphere. It may be a be perfect sphere by chance at one point. But if this is the case then statistically perfect spheres in nature do occur but are extremely improbable... that's if it's possible for a water droplet to be a perfect sphere without any type of distortion down to the atomic level but that's well beyond my extremely limited knowledge of physics.

I didn't know we were using the space station to observe water droplets. Money well spent! Lol

Those are some good points you make.


As a side note: I seriously doubt Plato's Realm of Perfect Forms exists on the space station.
That was a nice try by Yahweh's step child though.

Mr Tulip said Physics: the laws of physics last forever within time. The universe appears to be permanently consistent.

President Camancho said With Physics, a law may be a law unless something changes. Laws are only laws until they're broken and if these are laws based on a universe that will cease then the laws cannot last forever because the conditions in which they explain will not last forever.

The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. It will never contract for another big bang. As it approaches maximum entropy, the universe will eventually consist of an infinite field of subatomic particles barely quivering at near absolute zero temperature. This universe will indeed last forever!

:punk:

My view is that eventually, after several trillions to the power of trillions of years, after each galaxy has long coalesced into a single black hole, the force of gravity will reverse the accelerating expansion, and galaxies will then slow and stop and reverse their separation, forming tricklets and brooks and creeks and rivers of black holes rushing back together, until all the matter of the universe falls back together into a single oceanic black hole, which will then eventually destabilise for the entire process to begin again.

From nothing, something. That's more natural than nothing into nothing.

ant wrote:As a side note: I seriously doubt Plato's Realm of Perfect Forms exists on the space station.

who said it does?

ant wrote:That was a nice try by Yahweh's step child though.

do you get off on insulting me ant?



i wish you would just stick to substance and refrain from the personal needling.

but by all means if you want to cement your position as booktalk's resident prick then carry on.

The nature of time has been an obsession for me since I bought Being and Time by Martin Heidegger back in 1983, and then wrote my MA thesis on it.

'Eternal' is a word with several meanings, as I noted above in looking at the different ideas of permanence, values and logic. Etymologically, 'e-ternal' means 'outside time' or 'unchanging'. Mathematical relationships, because by definition they do not change, are therefore intrinsically eternal. Then the problem arises of how ideas exist. A good book on this topic is Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio, which points out that mathematical relationships are discovered not invented, so have independent real existence from human thought about them.

Plato discussed the relation between change and stability in his dialogue The Timaeus. Stability is always the same or identical. Change involves constant difference. For Plato, the model of identity and difference is the X in the sky formed by the unchanging path of the Milky Way Galaxy and the constantly changing path of the solar ecliptic, the path of the sun and planets.

'Forever' depends on your reference frame. In one sense diamonds are forever.

Lmao. Fiiiight! Are you going to take that Ant??? ::: stirring the pot::::

Arg, time to crack open Plato. Be back when I get done reading it. Tulip is getting older and all the drugs he did back in the 80's for Australia's army experiments have left him both highly intelligent and highly super crazy. All information must be confirmed by interpretation of sane individuals. Brb

OMG, Tulip, I stumbled on the perfect definition of you my friend.

Robert Tulip: Marsupial which seeks scientific truth combined with mythical truth in which great spiritual truths can be found.

How spot on is that? Honestly. It was right here in my translation of Timaeus.

I'll leave you the poem in the introduction as well. I know you like that.

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved. . .