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reply to post by Arbitrageur
New age ideas have not been repeatedly tested and therefore aren't theories from a scientific perspective, so I have no idea where you got that misconception from.
The key is understanding the meaning of the word "metaphysical traditions" in the following explanation of New Age in Wiki:
Originally posted by MamaJ
Just trying to understand your mind set in regards to the quote above.
By the way what new-agers portray as "quantum physics" support for what they say is usually very inconsistent with real quantum physics as most don't even understand quantum physics.
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational psychology, holistic health, parapsychology, consciousness research and quantum physics"
The issue with non-empirical activity of course is that 100 people can tell you 100 different things some of which contradict each other, so how do you know who among the 100, if any, is right? This was the situation for all philosophy at one time before science branched off and allowed empirical activity to determine which of the 100 versions was correct.
Prior to the modern history of science, scientific questions were addressed as a part of metaphysics known as natural philosophy. The term science itself meant "knowledge" of, originating from epistemology. The scientific method, however, transformed natural philosophy into an empirical activity deriving from experiment unlike the rest of philosophy. By the end of the 18th century, it had begun to be called "science" to distinguish it from philosophy. Thereafter, metaphysics denoted philosophical enquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.
According to Anaxagoras the cosmos is made of infinitely divisible matter, every bit of which can inherently become anything, except Mind (nous), which is also matter, but which can only be found separated from this general mixture, or else mixed in to living things, or in other words in the Greek terminology of the time, things with a soul (psuchē).[10] Anaxagoras wrote:
All other things partake in a portion of everything, while nous is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself. For if it were not by itself, but were mixed with anything else, it would partake in all things if it were mixed with any; for in everything there is a portion of everything, as has been said by me in what goes before, and the things mixed with it would hinder it, so that it would have power over nothing in the same way that it has now being alone by itself. For it is the thinnest of all things and the purest, and it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest strength; and nous has power over all things, both greater and smaller, that have soul [psuchē].[11]
Originally posted by swan001
reply to post by CLPrime
The amount of gravitational force in a galaxy is actually enough to compensate the space stretch?! I am truly surprised. After all, expansion is a pretty strong force.
I would have tough that it would surpass by far the amount of gravity in even the smallest of galaxies. Your statement implies that even the smallest of galaxies, say the Small Magellanic Cloud, have a sufficient mass to compensate expansion... I know gravity is locally strong, but that strong?
I understand what you say about wavelength, but when I say space, I really mean the amount of distance, not physical space. If "space (the amounts of distances)" is stretched, it means that if you would put a ruler in this expanding field, it would follow the expansion. Thus you would see that the lines on the ruler would follow the stretch too, right? So one milimeter would be stretched to (if you are an outside observer) say 5 milimeters, but if you are part of the field you would still see the stretched 1 milimeter line as it looked before expansion stretched it. Didn't Einstein once said if you fall in a black hole, to you your clock will seem to work OK but to an outside observer your clock will seem to slow down and even stop? My statement that space expansion (not talking here about gravitational redshift, to which I actually agree) can't affect light's wavelength directly follow from these two phenomenons: the ruler which follows space expansion and the clocks. Was I misinformed about the clocks?
There are certainly examples where my thought processes are not reflected in any wiki article. However in this case, the articles I cited overlap with my viewpoint pretty well and I tried to fill the gaps where they didn't.
Originally posted by MamaJ
I know the meanings you can obtain from the Internet, I was more interested in your thought process regarding the " new age" movement that is not new at all!
Thanks for the link which is pretty long, and I'll read it when I have time, but I don't want to derail this thread if it's not related to the topic "Can Expansion Theory Really Explain Observed Universe?".
Have you ever heard of Anaxagoras?? If not... Read the entire link... It's interesting!
Me too. Even with our best telescopes we apparently can't see any more than 5% of it. The other 95% we can't see is a fascinating mystery.
When we gaze at the stars we see and observe the light, but what is it we don't see is what I'm interested in. :-)
Originally posted by CLPrime
reply to post by ImaFungi
Or more active forms of space.
That's an interesting point because the next generation space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope is being designed to see what we humans can't see...infrared. The reason for this is the expansion of the universe results in such great redshifts of more distant objects that limiting our observations to visible light may be limiting what we can observe. So WE are for the most part not observing infrared. Our eyes can't see that. We build instruments which can see infrared which then translate those wavelengths into something we can interpret with our senses.
Originally posted by MamaJ
What are we ( keyword WE) observing first and foremost? The basics of the observation of the universe has many perceptions upon observing so the basics such as light matter and energy would first need to be understood first... And that's where I came into this thread.
Of course I have great respect for great minds of the past, but I think many of them would have respect for the scientific method we have if they were alive today. At the time Plato lived, (from your link that you suggested relates to this thread but I'm still not quite sure how it does) the concept of infrared wavelengths was not understood, yet this turns out to be critical to advancing our observation of the most distant objects which are redshifted so far that infrared wavelengths are relevant. I don't fault Plato for this, but I do point out there were limitations in ancient scientific knowledge.
Before science was born philosophy existed. Some of our great thinkers of the past had great ideas.