Hi Buz,
I had no intention of replying, but since Cavediver mentions the layperson level of understanding I thought maybe some clarification might be helpful.
When you're talking to Cavediver you have to realize there are actually two levels of layperson understanding. The first level is the uninformed layperson level. This is the person who has done no reading at all and is only aware of popular impressions. This is where you seem to be on this topic.
The second level is the informed layperson level. This includes those who have read
*and* understood popularizations, except that Cavediver believes that on some issues the simplifications are so severe as to be very misleading or even wrong, but I don't think Cavediver has taken this position on anything that's come up in this thread so far. I don't believe you're at the second level, familiarity with popularizations, for most scientific topics.
Applying quantum uncertainty to incredibly large objects like planets and solar systems is an example of why people always begin to question your understanding. It's okay to have something wrong. We all get stuff wrong all the time. It's that once you have something wrong you refuse to be corrected. You'll go on for pages and pages arguing for misimpressions you have. I'm not going to the bother of reading back through the thread to see if that was the case with QM and planets and solar systems, it's just a topic I recall you raising, but the reason I would prefer that you not participate in the science threads is that one can easily imagine that by post 300 no one would have been able to convince you that QM doesn't apply to large objects, and the original topic of the thread would have been long forgotten.
Another example is when you assumed that we know whether the entropy of something the size of a planet is increasing or decreasing. We literally have no idea. It's just too huge and complex an entity. We can say with great assurance that the entropy of the entire solar system is decreasing because probably to a couple levels of approximation it is an isolated system, but about individual planets we can say no such thing. The sun is adding energy, energy is radiating off into space, the core is cooling, there's gravitational interaction with the moon, sun and other objects, there's the magnetic field draining energy off from currents in the core, sometimes heating breaks apart bonds creating increased entropy, sometimes heating creates bonds decreasing entropy, cooling causes crystallization and more order and therefore decreased energy, it's just all so complex no one knows whether the entropy of the earth is increasing or decreasing. But one can easily imagine that you'll still be arguing this is something knowable today at post 300.
If you'd like to take Cavediver's advice and listen instead of insisting that your views have merit, then your presence in the science forums would be fine. But if you're just going to dig in your heels on whatever mistaken belief happens to strike your fancy and refuse to allow any explanations to have any impact, then we've seen too, too much of this already.
| -- | Percy |
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