At which point, I suppose everything will be irrelevant
Yet_One_More_Idiot
I imagine that at that point in the universe, learning how to keep cool would be very relevant. 😛
I wonder if life in general will survive that long…?
TerribleName
Heat death doesnt mean everything gets hot, only that everything in the universe becomes the same temperature and no more energy transfers can occur. Given that space is very ‘cold’ and there is way more space than stars, the heat death of the universe will actually be quite chilly. Bring a coat.
TSED
Sorry, pal, but learning to keep WARM is what the problem would be. The heat death refers to the death of heat, because all atoms have spread out to uniform distances and there is nothing that can ever happen ever again.
Of course, that also means that any sapient entities in question would likely be long, long, LONG dead, because their corporeal bodies are made of atoms, which would be spread out…
Sithdown
You got it wrong. It’s not about the matter spreading, but the energy potential accounting to zero. All processes in the universe move energy from a high energy to a low energy, until it’s even. With no differences of energy, no work can be done. Thus nothing can *happen*.
kikasf
so that means that as long as souls exist to sing the praises of our heavenly father, the universe will never die.
(lets see how long I can keep a straight face)
N0083rP00F
That all would depend on if the universe is linear, parabolic or hyperbolic.
Vincent
Yeah, because the big crunch is a much better option.
Hey, anyone calculate a way of creating new singularities yet?
Yet_One_More_Idiot
I would just like to now say that I am actually well aware of what Heat Death is (I studied a lot of physics in my maths degree at university, as well as being kinda into cosmology since a young age and from my love of shows like Dr Who), and was just making a joke based off the counterintuitively-named term “Heat Death”.
Hence the 😛 smiley I appended to my comment, that it would seem people overlooked. 😉
Still, I wonder if life might still be around to witness the heat death of the universe? Possibly having transcended the universe entirely, and be viewing it winding down from the outside?
Malimar
Insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
chrisashtear
Praise be to Hossa.
Fish
Or perhaps they just made a pun? Isn’t that what the emoji is for? To symbolize “this is a joke”?
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Thank you, yes, I was. But my lame pun was lame, and I guess the 😛 got overlooked. ^^
How do you figure? There wouldn’t be any science written on carbon dating that far back, so anyone writing it would have to misunderstand it.
MeghanTheWorldEater
Psuedoscience is technically a type of science.
A Scientist
No…
Just because “science” is in the word, doesn’t make it science. Really, it’s the antithesis of science, usually involving drawing unfounded conclusions or cherry-picking evidence to support a bias. Science quells the “psuedo” through repeated experiments and internal consistency with other observations.
Rich
Thank you. Better said than I would have managed.
Freemage
This is grammatically correct, as well–‘pseudo’, by definition, means the thing it’s attached to is not actually the thing. A pseudopod is not an actual foot; a pseudonym is not the actual name.
Rich
Well, usually. My parents claim they knew a smartass couple in the 60s who saddled their kid with “Alias Pseudonym” – I supposedly played with her as a toddler, although I’m damned if I remember it. They nicknamed her Allie, understandably.
Still better than Moon Unit.
Storycat
Wonder how she keeps off all the “do not fly” lists…
Okay, while I completely agree with A Scientist (a far more reliable source than B Scientist), I must admit that I am curious. How do you figure that pseudoscience, which by definition is a sham of science, would count as a type of science?
MeghanTheWorldEater
I was just making a stupid pun >.>
A Scientist
Puns and science are two matters I take very seriously.
You may take the appropriate time to process the irony of taking puns seriously. (As a scientist and not a writer, I’m not sure whether or not I used irony correctly there–it’s more subtle than most things in language I bother to use–so corrections are welcome.)
Anyway, I suspected a pun, but on matters of scientific integrity, I may take no chances.
MeghanTheWorldEater
I would tell you that’s unnecessary but there probably are people dumb enough to actually believe what I said so I can’t.
A Scientist
I’ve spent enough time on the internet to know there are definitely people like that.
I’ve spent too much time on the internet.
N0083rP00F
I spend most of my workdays working with scientists and engineers. Most are only idiots when it comes to practical things like self preservation.
I always end up aback outside of the normal work environment when dealing with “norms” and “office Types” because more times than not a 5th grader knows more about the scientific method than these ignoramuses.
Mang
That was indeed irony.
As a Brit, I have an innate understanding of it. And sarcasm.
Which most of these ‘puns’ are. 😉
Rycan
Ah, that makes sense. I thought maybe you were saying that pseudoscience could be studied as a science (call it the study of cherry picking).
yomi
No, I think cherry picking science should be about the harvesting of these delicious small red fruits. You know, testing which method of picking them is how efficient, or how delicious the cherries are depending on how you pick them.
fogel
You CAN study pseudo-sci scientifically to gain scientific knowledge and understanding of it , just as pseudos pseudofy science (ie pseudo it up when they put it through their pseudo filters).
gwalla
Wait, what was the pun? Is the “psuedo-” misspelling a hint at another reading? I’m confused.
A Scientist
Yeah, also, B Scientist is a jerk.
fogel
Scientist A just made an argument “ad hominem” boyz and grrlz. I think that it must be joke, because ad hominems cannot invaldate an empirical &/or logical arguments.
Bad science is a type of science, Pseudoscience is just “Jumping to conclusions” at escape velocity. Sometimes I make myself giggle when I write things.
Rycan
And pseudoscientists think that you reach escape velocity by jumping up.
Tualha
Well, you can. On a sufficiently small body, such as an asteroid. Not Earth.
fogel
Ive read stories about that. But they were labeled “science fiction”?!?
Kennerly
Pseudo science is a kind of science the same way atheism is a religion.
SDGlyph
Oh, now there’s a can of worms just waiting to be opened.
Rycan
And I have an absolutely furious cat in this bag here.
Apparently, after 80 years in a box the cat is definitely dead.
Roborat
Fogel, technically, not quite right. Atheism is the lack of belief in the existence of god(s), NOT belief in not-god. See the difference?
Jen Aside
weeeeeeell, I feel that pseudoscience PRETENDS to be science, while atheism (by definition, if not by some of its argumentative “followers”) declares itself NOT religion
but language is fluid and literally means not literally, cats and dogs living together OH NOES
fogel
Atheism professes belief in Not-God. If – IF, i say– religion is about the nature of God and Stuff, then we can make a case that Atheism is a religion. The negation of religion isnt Atheism, its “Meh, whatever”.
Rich
“Meh, whatver” would be Apatheism, right?
HiEv
No, atheism professes no beliefs at all, especially in the area where gods are concerned.
Atheism is a belief in the same way that bald is a hair color, “off” is a TV channel, and not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Aisling
The way some atheists go batshit about there being no god you would think they worship nothing lol.
Freemage
Now that is a lovely bit of wordplay.
Just A. Thinker
No – not really. In science, people make guesses about how the universe works. Then they use those guesses to make predictions. Then they compare those predictions to what they actually observe in nature and in the laboratory. If the predictions made by the guesses are incorrect, then they have to go back to the drawing board and create a new set of guesses. That means that science is sometimes wrong, and in its early days it was often wrong, but it also means that as soon as scientists become certain that something is wrong, they change their guesses to try to be more accurate. Science slowly weeds out all the stuff that’s wrong.
We don’t have to observe stuff in real time to test predictions. For example, the Theory of Evolution predicts that some old species went extinct and some new species came into being. Common sense and geology say that, if evolution is really the case, then species that didn’t live in the same time period shouldn’t be buried in the same layer of rock. This is exactly what we observe in the field, so Evolution made a correct prediction. It doesn’t mean that Evolution is completely correct or definitively true; it just means that we haven’t been able to prove something false, and that it DOES provide an accurate description of what we observe.
Psudoscience may use similar terminology as science, and it may have “theories”, however the issue with psudoscience is that people begin to ignore or overlook the times when their predictions and guesses are incorrect.
Chupicron
Well, we also witness evolution on a regular basis. So evolution the process is an inarguable fact. The big debate as the creationists see it is whether or not evolution leads to speciation, the age of the Earth, and whether or not humans started out as such. But we also as a species have lived to witness speciation on both the microscopic and macroscopic scales without even using the fossil record, such as with certain mountainous tree frogs in Australia. So at this point what the actual theory of evolution is definitely isn’t getting thrown out. Perhaps tweaked slightly, as it has been a few times already, but we have more solid basis for it than we currently really do Relativity.
fogel
Evolution — continuity AND change of geno & extended phenotypes through time — is a bloody well established fact. It was labelled the “theory of evolution” before it was established as fact, BUT today youd label it a falsiable “hypothesis” about facts. THEORIES explain facts. Evolution is a fact. The theory of “the origin of species” BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION is 1/one theory which explains the facts of evolution. And its a bloody brilliant and wonderful theory (“there is wonder in this view of nature” C Darwin ). AND IT IS A fabulously powerful and successful theory because of its predictions of what the facts are and what the facts will be,both as evolution continues AND as we continue research to discover facts which tell us what already happened in the past, in exactly the ways so nicely put by Just A. Thinker and Chupicron. People who say its “just” a theory havent a clue about what theories are or what science is (its kindof like sayi g that Truth is just Truth, Beauty isjust Beauty, Love is just Love). Theories do not turn into facts, no how, they remain theories even after theyve been tested and their explanatory power — and their limits (they all have limits: there is no “Theory of Life, the Universe and Everything, outside of THHGG) have been Tested and established. There are even today a few scientifically minded creationists who understand this and understand what the core scientific issues are even ss they are extreme outliers regarding the status of the relevant hypothseses and evidence. But they are only a few. There are some creationist who accept core facts about evolution and even accept a very limited/crippled theory of natural selection. These folks are scientific, but are wayoutliers from one of THE scientific consensuses. MOST creationists are pseudo in both fact and theory, and the more biblically literalist creationist they are, the more pseudo they are, to therealm of ludicrous fantasy. Including, the “theory of natural selection”which they claim to have refuted, isnt Darwins theory.
Jerden
That would have been a lot more readable with a few paragraphs. Still, admirable enthusiasm.
480 thoughts on “Radiometric”
Jen Aside
Dina: “THIS ONE ACKNOWLEDGED SEVEN DIGITS OF YEARS I CAN DO THISSSS”
still relevant
MeghanTheWorldEater
That picture will be relevant until the date marked on it.
Rycan
At which point, I suppose everything will be irrelevant
Yet_One_More_Idiot
I imagine that at that point in the universe, learning how to keep cool would be very relevant. 😛
I wonder if life in general will survive that long…?
TerribleName
Heat death doesnt mean everything gets hot, only that everything in the universe becomes the same temperature and no more energy transfers can occur. Given that space is very ‘cold’ and there is way more space than stars, the heat death of the universe will actually be quite chilly. Bring a coat.
TSED
Sorry, pal, but learning to keep WARM is what the problem would be. The heat death refers to the death of heat, because all atoms have spread out to uniform distances and there is nothing that can ever happen ever again.
Of course, that also means that any sapient entities in question would likely be long, long, LONG dead, because their corporeal bodies are made of atoms, which would be spread out…
Sithdown
You got it wrong. It’s not about the matter spreading, but the energy potential accounting to zero. All processes in the universe move energy from a high energy to a low energy, until it’s even. With no differences of energy, no work can be done. Thus nothing can *happen*.
kikasf
so that means that as long as souls exist to sing the praises of our heavenly father, the universe will never die.
(lets see how long I can keep a straight face)
N0083rP00F
That all would depend on if the universe is linear, parabolic or hyperbolic.
Vincent
Yeah, because the big crunch is a much better option.
Hey, anyone calculate a way of creating new singularities yet?
Yet_One_More_Idiot
I would just like to now say that I am actually well aware of what Heat Death is (I studied a lot of physics in my maths degree at university, as well as being kinda into cosmology since a young age and from my love of shows like Dr Who), and was just making a joke based off the counterintuitively-named term “Heat Death”.
Hence the 😛 smiley I appended to my comment, that it would seem people overlooked. 😉
Still, I wonder if life might still be around to witness the heat death of the universe? Possibly having transcended the universe entirely, and be viewing it winding down from the outside?
Malimar
Insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
chrisashtear
Praise be to Hossa.
Fish
Or perhaps they just made a pun? Isn’t that what the emoji is for? To symbolize “this is a joke”?
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Thank you, yes, I was. But my lame pun was lame, and I guess the 😛 got overlooked. ^^
Jen Aside
It reads as
[01F]
[61B]
on my browser, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
jpic89
http://i0.wp.com/metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/shia-labeouf.png?crop=0px%2C0px%2C638px%2C319px&resize=650%2C325&quality=80&strip=all&w=644&h=322
I don’t know how to hyperlink text.
LynneB
Hyperlink like this:
<a href=”http://www.urlhere.com”>the text you actually want to show<\a>
LynneB
Dammit. That was supposed to look like:
Hyperlink like this:
<a href=”http://www.urlhere.com”>the text you actually want to show<\a>
leadsynth
Just like that, except use a forward slash / instead of a backslash \ in front of that last a.
Screwball
I just cheat :P. Highlight, drag & drop…
http://www.hyperlinkcode.com/make-hyperlink.php
AtomsOrSystems
It’s not too late. IT’S NOT TOO LATE!
Wire Segal
It’s never too late for shipping!
JessWitt
It’s never too late for now!
Undrave
I can ship it!
Kryss LaBryn
Yes you can!
N0083rP00F
FedEx – anything anywhere.
dmaxx
And when you get it is another matter in itself, more likely later then sooner…
Sooooo, Yup, just like fedex xD
nothri
You put it in my head, now I put it in yours!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KUtwgtri_E
Arianod
I see it and raise it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LWCZhNVUsI
DJTsurugi
https://youtu.be/vyGzPmgR1QY
it’s never to late for RIGHT NOW. ~<3
Zamer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdtTfQJCO2Y
Ship happens and this ship has been around for over 234 million years.
Screwball
XD Love that clip XD
otusasio451
As a biologist-in-training, I am liking where this is going.
JustCheetoDust
That alt-text is still kind of depressing, though.
TheOthin
How do you figure? There wouldn’t be any science written on carbon dating that far back, so anyone writing it would have to misunderstand it.
MeghanTheWorldEater
Psuedoscience is technically a type of science.
A Scientist
No…
Just because “science” is in the word, doesn’t make it science. Really, it’s the antithesis of science, usually involving drawing unfounded conclusions or cherry-picking evidence to support a bias. Science quells the “psuedo” through repeated experiments and internal consistency with other observations.
Rich
Thank you. Better said than I would have managed.
Freemage
This is grammatically correct, as well–‘pseudo’, by definition, means the thing it’s attached to is not actually the thing. A pseudopod is not an actual foot; a pseudonym is not the actual name.
Rich
Well, usually. My parents claim they knew a smartass couple in the 60s who saddled their kid with “Alias Pseudonym” – I supposedly played with her as a toddler, although I’m damned if I remember it. They nicknamed her Allie, understandably.
Still better than Moon Unit.
Storycat
Wonder how she keeps off all the “do not fly” lists…
Foxhack
That’s the (sad) joke. 🙁
Rycan
Okay, while I completely agree with A Scientist (a far more reliable source than B Scientist), I must admit that I am curious. How do you figure that pseudoscience, which by definition is a sham of science, would count as a type of science?
MeghanTheWorldEater
I was just making a stupid pun >.>
A Scientist
Puns and science are two matters I take very seriously.
You may take the appropriate time to process the irony of taking puns seriously. (As a scientist and not a writer, I’m not sure whether or not I used irony correctly there–it’s more subtle than most things in language I bother to use–so corrections are welcome.)
Anyway, I suspected a pun, but on matters of scientific integrity, I may take no chances.
MeghanTheWorldEater
I would tell you that’s unnecessary but there probably are people dumb enough to actually believe what I said so I can’t.
A Scientist
I’ve spent enough time on the internet to know there are definitely people like that.
I’ve spent too much time on the internet.
N0083rP00F
I spend most of my workdays working with scientists and engineers. Most are only idiots when it comes to practical things like self preservation.
I always end up aback outside of the normal work environment when dealing with “norms” and “office Types” because more times than not a 5th grader knows more about the scientific method than these ignoramuses.
Mang
That was indeed irony.
As a Brit, I have an innate understanding of it. And sarcasm.
Which most of these ‘puns’ are. 😉
Rycan
Ah, that makes sense. I thought maybe you were saying that pseudoscience could be studied as a science (call it the study of cherry picking).
yomi
No, I think cherry picking science should be about the harvesting of these delicious small red fruits. You know, testing which method of picking them is how efficient, or how delicious the cherries are depending on how you pick them.
fogel
You CAN study pseudo-sci scientifically to gain scientific knowledge and understanding of it , just as pseudos pseudofy science (ie pseudo it up when they put it through their pseudo filters).
gwalla
Wait, what was the pun? Is the “psuedo-” misspelling a hint at another reading? I’m confused.
A Scientist
Yeah, also, B Scientist is a jerk.
fogel
Scientist A just made an argument “ad hominem” boyz and grrlz. I think that it must be joke, because ad hominems cannot invaldate an empirical &/or logical arguments.
Opus the Poet
Bad science is a type of science, Pseudoscience is just “Jumping to conclusions” at escape velocity. Sometimes I make myself giggle when I write things.
Rycan
And pseudoscientists think that you reach escape velocity by jumping up.
Tualha
Well, you can. On a sufficiently small body, such as an asteroid. Not Earth.
fogel
Ive read stories about that. But they were labeled “science fiction”?!?
Kennerly
Pseudo science is a kind of science the same way atheism is a religion.
SDGlyph
Oh, now there’s a can of worms just waiting to be opened.
Rycan
And I have an absolutely furious cat in this bag here.
DarkoNeko
Let Schrödinger’s cat free !
Jerden
Apparently, after 80 years in a box the cat is definitely dead.
Roborat
Fogel, technically, not quite right. Atheism is the lack of belief in the existence of god(s), NOT belief in not-god. See the difference?
Jen Aside
weeeeeeell, I feel that pseudoscience PRETENDS to be science, while atheism (by definition, if not by some of its argumentative “followers”) declares itself NOT religion
but language is fluid and literally means not literally, cats and dogs living together OH NOES
fogel
Atheism professes belief in Not-God. If – IF, i say– religion is about the nature of God and Stuff, then we can make a case that Atheism is a religion. The negation of religion isnt Atheism, its “Meh, whatever”.
Rich
“Meh, whatver” would be Apatheism, right?
HiEv
No, atheism professes no beliefs at all, especially in the area where gods are concerned.
Atheism is a belief in the same way that bald is a hair color, “off” is a TV channel, and not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Aisling
The way some atheists go batshit about there being no god you would think they worship nothing lol.
Freemage
Now that is a lovely bit of wordplay.
Just A. Thinker
No – not really. In science, people make guesses about how the universe works. Then they use those guesses to make predictions. Then they compare those predictions to what they actually observe in nature and in the laboratory. If the predictions made by the guesses are incorrect, then they have to go back to the drawing board and create a new set of guesses. That means that science is sometimes wrong, and in its early days it was often wrong, but it also means that as soon as scientists become certain that something is wrong, they change their guesses to try to be more accurate. Science slowly weeds out all the stuff that’s wrong.
We don’t have to observe stuff in real time to test predictions. For example, the Theory of Evolution predicts that some old species went extinct and some new species came into being. Common sense and geology say that, if evolution is really the case, then species that didn’t live in the same time period shouldn’t be buried in the same layer of rock. This is exactly what we observe in the field, so Evolution made a correct prediction. It doesn’t mean that Evolution is completely correct or definitively true; it just means that we haven’t been able to prove something false, and that it DOES provide an accurate description of what we observe.
Psudoscience may use similar terminology as science, and it may have “theories”, however the issue with psudoscience is that people begin to ignore or overlook the times when their predictions and guesses are incorrect.
Chupicron
Well, we also witness evolution on a regular basis. So evolution the process is an inarguable fact. The big debate as the creationists see it is whether or not evolution leads to speciation, the age of the Earth, and whether or not humans started out as such. But we also as a species have lived to witness speciation on both the microscopic and macroscopic scales without even using the fossil record, such as with certain mountainous tree frogs in Australia. So at this point what the actual theory of evolution is definitely isn’t getting thrown out. Perhaps tweaked slightly, as it has been a few times already, but we have more solid basis for it than we currently really do Relativity.
fogel
Evolution — continuity AND change of geno & extended phenotypes through time — is a bloody well established fact. It was labelled the “theory of evolution” before it was established as fact, BUT today youd label it a falsiable “hypothesis” about facts. THEORIES explain facts. Evolution is a fact. The theory of “the origin of species” BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION is 1/one theory which explains the facts of evolution. And its a bloody brilliant and wonderful theory (“there is wonder in this view of nature” C Darwin ). AND IT IS A fabulously powerful and successful theory because of its predictions of what the facts are and what the facts will be,both as evolution continues AND as we continue research to discover facts which tell us what already happened in the past, in exactly the ways so nicely put by Just A. Thinker and Chupicron. People who say its “just” a theory havent a clue about what theories are or what science is (its kindof like sayi g that Truth is just Truth, Beauty isjust Beauty, Love is just Love). Theories do not turn into facts, no how, they remain theories even after theyve been tested and their explanatory power — and their limits (they all have limits: there is no “Theory of Life, the Universe and Everything, outside of THHGG) have been Tested and established. There are even today a few scientifically minded creationists who understand this and understand what the core scientific issues are even ss they are extreme outliers regarding the status of the relevant hypothseses and evidence. But they are only a few. There are some creationist who accept core facts about evolution and even accept a very limited/crippled theory of natural selection. These folks are scientific, but are wayoutliers from one of THE scientific consensuses. MOST creationists are pseudo in both fact and theory, and the more biblically literalist creationist they are, the more pseudo they are, to therealm of ludicrous fantasy. Including, the “theory of natural selection”which they claim to have refuted, isnt Darwins theory.
Jerden
That would have been a lot more readable with a few paragraphs. Still, admirable enthusiasm.