Progarchives.com has always (since 2002) relied on banners ads to cover web hosting fees and all.
Please consider supporting us by giving monthly PayPal donations and help keep PA fast-loading and ad-free forever.
/PAlogo_v2.gif "Progarchives.com Homepage") |
|
Post Reply 
|
Page <1 56789> |
| Author | |
Dean 
Special Collaborator 
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
 Posted: March 06 2015 at 04:17 |
|
Unless you've had your head in a bucket for the past few weeks you cannot fail to have noticed much brouhaha on the various social networks and news media regarding colour perception. Even here at the PA we have not been immune from immersing ourselves in the damn dress debate. The three offending topics are:
While on first appearances all this seems very scientific, on closer examination (i.e. reading the damn articles below the headlines) none of it is scientific at all. The last article pivots around the names used to describe colours and is based upon the observation that Homer used a very narrow colour vocabulary in the Illiad, most notably he describes the sea as being "Wine-dark" rather than blue (here in the UK the sea is predominately murky greenish brown, but that's by-the-by, the Med is blue enough for Homer to describe it as blue if he so desired). The puzzle there for me is not that Homer used the descriptive "wine-dark sea", but that modern scholars have interpreted this meaning he (and thus all Ancient Greeks) saw the sea as red, since that is the colour of dark wine. When all the sea you can see is blue, describing it as blue is superfluous, just as you don't need to call grass green or wood brown when everyone already knows that grass is green and wood is brown. What Homer is describing is not the colour (hue) of the sea, but its shade (saturation and lightness) at very specific moments in time, often following a tragedy that has befallen the heroes of the Illiad. That is, the sea is blue with the same shade as dark wine. To me this is the obvious conclusion since he uses the phrase wine-dark, not wine-coloured.
|
|
|
What?
|
|
 |
|
|
Atavachron
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: September 30 2006 Location: Pearland Status: Offline Points: 64349 |
Posted: March 06 2015 at 04:46 |
|
^ Well spotted, further I think the color/light relationship to the human
eye is a many-splendor and misunderstood thing; the "wine-dark
sea" of Homer is both an attempt to describe the impression, or poetry: the sea was as dark and richly colored as burgundy,
and the light phenomena or prose: the sea literally had deep red tones that were as clearly visible as the normal blue/green of a sea.
The shirt debate is as bogus as it is mysterious-- something fishy is going on. If people were that diverged about color perception you'd never have anyone agreeing on what color something was, which only occurs in subtle ways with people who are colorblind (purple reading as brown, etc.). What we need is a multiple image study that compares both the gold/white and the blue/black photos of the shirt and see what people see. |
|
|
"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -- John F. Kennedy
|
|
|
|
|
Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: March 06 2015 at 05:13 |
|
There are certainly instances where the sea can appear to be red, for example at sunset or when there is a profusion of red-coloured algae present, and in fiction it has been used poetically to announce that "The seas will run red with the blood of my enemies" or describe a sea awash with the blood of fallen sailors. With the Illiad that last case is a possibility, but I still think Homer would have not used the phrase "wine-dark" in that instance.
What all three of these "articles" have in common is that they all come from the business community, not the scientific community - the dress debate highlights the importance of correct lighting when photographing an article to sell, the tetrachromacy article was written by a person from a market research company and the seeing blue article was first published in Business Insider.
Edited by Dean - March 06 2015 at 05:13 |
|
|
What?
|
|
|
|
|
Atavachron
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: September 30 2006 Location: Pearland Status: Offline Points: 64349 |
Posted: March 06 2015 at 05:24 |
|
Well I guess the 'What Color is This Dress?' t-shirts will do well.
|
|
|
"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -- John F. Kennedy
|
|
|
|
|
Equality 7-2521
Forum Senior Member 
Joined: August 11 2005 Location: Philly Status: Offline Points: 15783 |
Posted: March 06 2015 at 10:22 |
|
I thought the illusion was pretty well explained. Randall Munroe was able to recreate it pretty well with a simple illustration.
|
|
|
"One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall. "
|
|
|
|
|
Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: March 06 2015 at 10:35 |
|
Me too - I "saw" it straight away and was initially puzzled by the polarised reaction people had to it.
|
|
|
What?
|
|
|
|
|
Equality 7-2521
Forum Senior Member
Joined: August 11 2005 Location: Philly Status: Offline Points: 15783 |
Posted: March 06 2015 at 10:39 |
|
I don't think people are comfortable with how subjective and manipulable their perception is.
|
|
|
"One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall. "
|
|
|
|
|
Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: March 06 2015 at 11:06 |
|
No one likes to have their perceptions challenged either.
|
|
|
What?
|
|
|
|
|
Toaster Mantis
Forum Senior Member
Joined: April 12 2008 Location: Denmark Status: Offline Points: 5898 |
Posted: March 06 2015 at 13:11 |
|
Elsewhere on the net, I found this analysis of That Dress from the angle of not just optical science but also ethics, philosophy of religion and sociology
Edited by Toaster Mantis - March 06 2015 at 13:44 |
|
|
"The past is not some static being, it is not a previous present, nor a present that has passed away; the past has its own dynamic being which is constantly renewed and renewing." - Claire Colebrook
|
|
|
|
|
Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: March 06 2015 at 13:26 |
|
Oh goody... more pretend science.
|
|
|
What?
|
|
|
|
|
Equality 7-2521
Forum Senior Member
Joined: August 11 2005 Location: Philly Status: Offline Points: 15783 |
Posted: March 06 2015 at 13:26 |
|
Exactly one of those analyses could yield something useful.
|
|
|
"One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall. "
|
|
|
|
|
Toaster Mantis
Forum Senior Member
Joined: April 12 2008 Location: Denmark Status: Offline Points: 5898 |
Posted: April 11 2015 at 05:07 |
|
"The past is not some static being, it is not a previous present, nor a present that has passed away; the past has its own dynamic being which is constantly renewed and renewing." - Claire Colebrook
|
|
|
|
|
JJLehto
Prog Reviewer 
Joined: April 05 2006 Location: Tallahassee, FL Status: Offline Points: 34550 |
Posted: April 15 2015 at 01:00 |
|
Not sure if this is the type of stuff this thread does, and I don't pretend to understand science more than the typical layman, but I found this supremely interesting.
The claim the universe came from nothing, which I guess is not news to science in any way, but that supposedly "nothing" would actually be incredibly unstable, so much so that nothing MUST produce something, he says. This is where I struggle. While I understood more or less all of it, can anyone explain what exactly is "nothing"? Does he mean a vacuum, or some "pre universe" type of nothing, as in no time or literal existence? Guess I can't wrap my head around it, if anyone is familiar with him/the theory and can elaborate, would be appreciated! I don't much care for his snarky attitude but, what can ya do?
Edited by JJLehto - April 15 2015 at 01:05 |
|
|
|
|
Gerinski
Prog Reviewer
Joined: February 10 2010 Location: Barcelona Spain Status: Offline Points: 5093 |
Posted: April 15 2015 at 05:53 |
In this context 'nothing' is not a vacuum (which is 'empty space'). It is the absence of Space, Time (more precisely of a Spacetime), and of all the energy which fills it. It is not sensible to talk about anything 'pre universe' since the prefix 'pre' assumes the existence of a Time. Our Universe is defined by the existence of a Spacetime and different manifestations of Energy within it. Spacetime itself is a manifestation of Energy (a negative one). What this theory says is that: 1. the total energy contents of the Universe equals zero 2. zero energy (= 'nothing', meaning absence of a Spacetime and other energetic manifestations in it) can spontaneously decouple into positive and negative energy manifestations of energy (one of them being the emergence of a Spacetime with a cosmological constant as the negative manifestation, and the rest of energy filling the Spacetime (dark matter and ordinary matter and radiation) being the positive manifestation. Positive and negative have the same overall value and thus cancel each other). 3. Such decouplings constitute the spontaneous creation (appearance would be a better word) of a Universe. Each such Universe very possibly has different laws of physics and possibly different dimensional characteristics, likely random (although there are different versions about this). 4. Most such Universes will pop up and disappear right away, in a sort of immediate annihilation between their positive and negative aspects. But under some particular conditions of dimensional configuration and laws of physics, a phenomenon called Inflation can happen before the annihilation, and in such case the Universe can grow avoiding its annihilation. Our Universe happens to be one of these (as it could not be otherwise or we would not be here to tell). What should we make of or call the 'whatever' the Universes pop up 'from' or 'in' is quite meaningless. It is not a place nor a time as far as we are concerned, nor is it 'something' since it's energy value is zero. It is 'nothing', it is 'zero everything we know of', zero energy, zero space, zero time. Saying that such 'nothing is unstable and must produce something' is a way of saying that, outside Time, if something CAN happen it MUST happen. It is a bit like saying that regardless how infinitesimally small the probability of something is, as long as it is not IMPOSSIBLE, if we wait long enough it will eventually happen (as long as we have infinite time to wait for). We can not say if the spontaneous creation of Universes out of nothing happens 'a lot', 'quite often' or 'extremely rarely', since without a Time these expressions are meaningless. We can only say that if the appearance of a Universe out of nothing is not impossible, it DOES happen. So if we reach the conclusion that the spontaneous appearance of a Universe out of nothing is not IMPOSSIBLE (it does not seem to violate any conceivable demand of logic and self-consistency we expect to hold true), it follows that the existence of a Universe like ours is unavoidable.
Edited by Gerinski - April 15 2015 at 07:47 |
|
|
|
|
Gerinski
Prog Reviewer
Joined: February 10 2010 Location: Barcelona Spain Status: Offline Points: 5093 |
Posted: April 15 2015 at 08:40 |
|
^ BTW, the key point here is of course number 2, the speculation that 'nothing' (zero energy) can spontaneously decouple into equal-valued positive + negative energy manifestations thus creating a Universe. While we do not know whether this is the case, the idea is inspired by the 'virtual particles' in quantum theory, which are briefly explained in the lecture with the example of them constituting most of the mass of a proton, with the 'empty space' inside the proton being actually full of virtual particles continuously popping in and out of existence.
Virtual particles do indeed spontaneously pop up out of the empty vacuum with zero net energy input, a pair of particle and antiparticle (positive + negative) which in most cases immediately annihilate each other. While virtual particles are not directly observable they explain correctly many observed phenomena so the fact that positive + negative energy manifestations can spontaneously appear out of nothing in our Universe is considered a confirmed fact. The cosmological theory extends this idea to the the appearance of a complete Universe out of nothing.
|
|
|
|
|
JJLehto
Prog Reviewer
Joined: April 05 2006 Location: Tallahassee, FL Status: Offline Points: 34550 |
Posted: April 15 2015 at 11:01 |
|
Again, layman here
"pre universe" is basically what I meant, the absence of spacetime and energy. Your last two paragraphs of that first post were pretty much the point of his lecture, I'm glad it's not psychobabble and thanks for clarifying what exactly "nothing" is as he meant it.
|
|
|
|
|
Gerinski
Prog Reviewer
Joined: February 10 2010 Location: Barcelona Spain Status: Offline Points: 5093 |
Posted: April 15 2015 at 11:43 |
|
About the spontaneous creation of something (positive + negative in equal values) out of nothing, which under certain circumstances can lead to 'things happening', an analogy would be having zero money.
Assuming that you lived in a world where doing anything costs money, if you have zero money you can do nothing. In some sense you do not exist in that world, nothing will happen. But the laws of banking allow that your zero money can be turned into a loan of 1000 dollar and 1000 dollar cash in your pocket. You still have zero money, but the laws of that world also say that the combination of a 1000 dollar loan and a 1000 dollar cash allow you to do things, it allows things to happen. Both are different manifestations of zero, but while one does not allow anything happening, the other does.
|
|
|
|
|
CosmicVibration
Forum Senior Member
Joined: February 26 2014 Location: Milky Way Status: Offline Points: 1327 |
Posted: April 15 2015 at 12:42 |
|
I need to watch the video but when I contemplate the “nothing” I cogitate pre-singularity.
our current material universe -- stars –- gasses –- light –- big bang –- singularity -- nothingness |
|
|
|
|
The Dark Elf
Forum Senior Member
VIP Member Joined: February 01 2011 Location: Michigan Status: Offline Points: 12681 |
Posted: April 15 2015 at 13:15 |
God is a...banker? That would explain the very low interest rates, the lack of loans, no refunds for bad service and the steep penalty for early withdrawal.
|
|
|
...a vigorous circular motion hitherto unknown to the people of this area, but destined
to take the place of the mud shark in your mythology... |
|
|
|
|
JJLehto
Prog Reviewer
Joined: April 05 2006 Location: Tallahassee, FL Status: Offline Points: 34550 |
Posted: April 15 2015 at 15:50 |
Ah money and banking, something I can much better relate too! My follow up, and where I still struggle, is: In that analogy, there of course the banks. How does this work for the universe? Since the theory states God is not a banker, (and indeed he feels it invalidates the need for one) what does it? Is it "dark energy"? Is this the "law" that allows the things to happen from nothing a la the banking law example?
Edited by JJLehto - April 15 2015 at 15:54 |
|
|
|
|
Post Reply
|
Page <1 56789> |
| Forum Jump | Forum Permissions You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot create polls in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum |
The Science Thread
Topic Options
JJLehto wrote: