This is the point, we have no objective evidence that magic, because that’s what he described, is even possible, and as you say it is at odds with objective facts we know about how matter behaves, but we do know as an objective fact, that all the natural explanations you offered as alternatives are possible, so even prima facie they are plausible explanations, and magic is not.
that is because it is a scam
I have no idea how often such events are reported, but I imagine its very low. Creating this by will using equipment is very technical. Also involving ‘quantum’ methods. I am not quite understanding how they are separating ‘the physical’ from ‘the quantum’, other than matter on a very, very, very, …very small scale apparently behaves very different from our frame of reference. But ultimately, isn’t our physical objects also made of up ‘quanta’?
At the very least information apparently can be transported great distances without crossing the space in between physically. I am not sure they are claiming that actual particles have made ‘the quantum leap’ along with the information.
It sounds like its the transfer of information only, at this point
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=a+single+atom+teleported&mid=CC25B4DAC5FE2080A993CC25B4DAC5FE2080A993&FORM=VIRE
The scar was at least twenty years old. It was already in a ‘healed’ state as far as most people count healing. This event is called ‘retracing’. In effect the body recreates the damage, and then restructures the tissue for a much higher level of healing.
Actually, my skin now as if the burn never happened. I have photographic evidence, which obviously will only be use to me, as it just looks like a fresh scar. It looked and FELT like it had just freshly been burned, but the burn event was at least 20 years earlier. And now there is no sign of a burn ever happening.
That is much easier to explain. Most people experience just the regular scaring as ‘healing’ for a traumatic event, as regular nutrition, and biological energetics is generally too low to permit a complete healing. But if one ever has some sustained improved nutritional input, retracing may occur. I am sure there is some thresh hold which must be achieved, and that is difficult to determine for every person.
This?
UK Atheist
1 Like
Bob wants to teleport a AA battery to Alice. Let pretend for a moment he has a magic wand and just does it:
When the battery disappears out of Bob’s hand, and at the same time appears in Alice’s hand; from Bob’s view point, the battery has disappeared, and has not reappeared yet (as the light bouncing off the battery hasn’t had time to travel from Alice to Bob since the battery was teleported); so if Bob was to reformulate the laws of physics, he wouldn’t deduce that energy is conserved (a battery just disappeared!).
Now from Alice’s perspective we get the opposite: Alice sees the battery in her hand, and for a tiny fraction of time can still see the battery in Bob’s hand. In Alice’s world, batteries don’t disappear into thin air, they appear out of nowhere. Just like Bob, Alice will find that the laws of physics don’t conserve energy.
If you believe in the conservation of energy, then teleportation (at least like it is done on Star Trek) is impossible.
This is why they give you the bait and switch in these kinds of articles; speaking like it is Star Trek, then back-peddling to the movement of information when questioned about it.
People forget that the transporter was conceived because the original Star Trek series didn’t have the budget to be constantly landing the ship or even shuttles on planets. It was cheaper to do a lap dissolve superimposed over falling aluminum dust. Later they retconned a bunch of hand-waving explanations around how it works but even if you can get past the fact that people are being murdered and a (presumably exact) replica created at the destination, usually without even a receiving device; the amount of invasive scanning that would be required to reproduce every cell and the brownian motion of every atom would kill the subject in the first place. And if they had all these technological breakthroughs, why wouldn’t they make copies of people. Why wouldn’t a society make a dozen copies of its Einstein? Etc etc. A little thought and the whole concept falls apart.
sorry I didn’t intend to take a cheap shot at Star Trek, just using them as an example most people are familiar with.
1 Like
Oh goodness, I didn’t think it was a cheap shot and no offense was taken. There are far more important things to be offended about that Trek canon!
1 Like
In several Trek episodes, transporter accidents did make copies of people. In an episode of Voyager, two people were combined by a transporter accident.
While I may provisionally accept the idea that transporters may seem to break the laws of thermodynamics, what of wormholes?
A wormhole could make an object disappear here and reappear over there, and the end result would be just like the teleportation of the transporter.
I am a professional science fiction author, so I had to chime in . . . although this discussion has made me wonder if backward time travel may be impossible because of the law of conservation of mass-energy.
If I traveled back in time, I believe that the Universe (back then) would increase its mass by the amount of mass that makes up my body, so maybe the First Law of Thermodynamics is what keeps this from being possible?
Conversely, backward time travel would subtract my mass from the Universe now, so we have the same issue?
Yeah and in the original series one person was split into two, Jeckyll and Hyde fashion (along with some unfortunate dog-like creatures). And there were other variations. The thing is, you could do it as a matter of course. It would be simpler (and less morally fraught) than destroying the original.
I am not decrying plot devices in science fiction. I love science fiction. I enjoy suspending disbelief in the service of a good story.
The point for purposes of this conversation though is that teleportation of any flavor is not a likely explanation for anything.
2 Likes
Hi! We don’t account for them unless there is scientific proof to back it up.
2 Likes
Leaving aside for a moment the technical issues involved in actually constructing a wormhole … once a wormhole is constructed, traversing it doesn’t involve violating any physical laws. You’re simply moving along a trajectory through space.
All that’s different from normal motion, is that the space you’re moving through, happens to couple distant points that would normally take you far longer to travel between, and the curvature of the space you’re moving through makes up for the discrepancy.
The question that’s far more difficult to answer, is whether or not the resulting topology is physically realisable.
Meanwhile, there’s a topic I want to address here, and the title of this entire thread has just launched it.
Why is it, that whenever those of us who paid attention in class, express doubts about fantastic assertions, the response to said doubts are inevitably cast in in terms taking the form of “Why do atheists do X”?
The response from mythology fanboys, almost never takes the form “Oh, I didn’t think of that”, or “Now that you mention it, that does seem implausible”, whenever their ridiculous assertions are dissected. instead, their ‘go to’ response is to try and represent proper scepticism as the product either of purported malice, purported discoursive deficiency, or the same brand of adherence to doctrinal assertions that we’re questioning in the first place, and to label this misrepresentation of our scepticism as “atheist”.
Er, no. Anyone with functioning neurons can, if they apply said neurons to an assertion, determine whether or not that assertion is absurd. We’re not wearing special “atheist goggles” when we perform the requisite examination, we’re simply applying the rules of proper discourse. But this projection of mythology fanboy ideological goggle wearing onto us, apart from being offensively duplicitous, is yet another indication of the failure of that approach.
At bottom, we know of two reliable methods of determining the status of an assertion. Namely:
One, is that assertion supported by observational data? This approach being taken within the physical sciences. If you’re going to take this route, then you had better spend time learning the same lessons as scientists, with respect to the proper treatment and analysis of observational data, instead of playing dishonest apologetics therewith.
Two, is that assertion supported by an error-free deduction within a properly constructed formal system? This approach is, of course, the approach taken within pure mathematics. If you’re going down that route, then you had better ensure that the only items you bring to the table are:
[1] Properly chosen relevant axioms or relevant previously established theorems;
[2] Reliable rules of inference to apply to the above.
Now with respect to axioms, I recently provided a lesson on the proper choice thereof in this post elsewhere. Failure to learn the lessons therein, and apply them, will result in said failure inviting the requisite attention here.
The point I’m making here,is that none of this requires one to be an atheist, it merely requires one to conduct discourse competently. Indeed, if not being an atheist handicaps you in this regard, it’s time to reconsider your position. But I digress. The point here is that plenty of people who weren’t atheists, were able to conduct discourse on all manner of topics, and in numerous cases produce ground-breaking advances in knowledge, because they exerted the diligent effort to apply the above tools to whatever assertions were being considered.
At this juncture, I admit that the above paragraph will come as an unheralded shock to those among the mythology fanboys, who made the mistake of inviting my withering scorn and derision. But they did so precisely because they exhibited a particularly insidious combination of incompetence and duplicity. Do not be surprised if behaving in the same manner leads to the same response from me.
Of course, I’m still going to hold the view, that treating unsupported mythological assertions uncritically as fact, constitutes a farce. I’m also going to expound, at every opportunity, the view that those doing so should abandon said farce with all haste. But I recognise that not everyone was given the opportunity to escape that farce. Accident of history or social background counts for much in this respect. Said circumstances didn’t stop Newton from developing a view of physics, that ultimately enjoyed the best part of 250 years of success, and can, upon proper analysis, be said to have been in part killed by that success. Nor did circumstance impede Darwin from revolutionising biology, or any of an entire panoply of figures, from Boyle through Lavoisier and Wöhler, from launching chemistry as a robust and successful scientific discipline.
If you have access to the requisite pedagogical tools, neither should circumstance impede you. Indeed, we now live in an age, where access thereto is made easy to a hitherto unprecedented extent by the Internet. Prior to which, access to, for example, peer reviewed scientific papers, required you to take out expensive journal subscriptions. Now, millions of those papers are available for free, and the only effort you need to expend, is a reasonably competent Google search, followed by a few mouse clicks. A similar level of availability holds for textbook type material, and indeed, I’ve been able to acquire some highly informative reading material via this very route.
And, once again … you don’t need to be an atheist to do this. You simply need to be a properly functioning human being, willing to exert a little effort.
So, can we once and for all, toss the constant irrelevant reference to “atheists”, with respect to the matter of learning the truth value of assertions?
