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Old 10-10-2011, 09:30 PM
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Default Re: A revolution in thought

Everything 'shines', except maybe things that are unbelievably cold.

It's just that everyday objects are too cold to shine in the visible part of the spectrum - they give out mostly infra-red radiation, which of course can be 'seen' by an infra-red camera.

When you heat up an object, it begins to emit more and more photons with a higher frequency - you see this with everyday objects in your house such as the element in your toaster that gets red hot, emitting red light. And the filament inside an ordinary incandescent light bulb is hot enough to emit light of all visible wavelengths, so it gives out (roughly) what we call 'white' light.

As things get hotter still, they begin to emit ultra violet, and eventually X-rays. Most things on Earth never get this hot, but some stars that are much hotter than the sun look blue, as they emit much more of their light at the blue (short wavelength) end of the spectrum.
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  #12077  
Old 10-10-2011, 10:58 PM
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Default Re: A revolution in thought

I read that bright white paper is as reflective as a mirror, and that the reason we can't see an image is due only to diffusion from the rough fibers of paper.

I thought that was an interesting factoid
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Old 10-11-2011, 12:28 AM
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Everything 'shines', except maybe things that are unbelievably cold.

It is my understanding that heat is an effect of the atoms in a material vibrating, the hotter it is the faster they vibrate, and this movment is associated with emitting photons. So what we preceive as heat is the atoms in matter being more and more excited and emitting photons which we feel as heat. Going the other way when the temp. of matter is lower, as in getting colder, the atoms slow down and are more still. It has been theorized that if the matter is cooled to absolute '0' the atoms will stop moving and disapear, but that might be a bit of fiction?
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Old 10-11-2011, 12:41 AM
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There are experiments that can be done to show that "efferent vision" is different than our "light vision" way of seeing, although it has no effect on the the picture of what we see. It's just that one is the actual image versus an interpretation of that image.
Really? So if I place a blue filter in front of my eyes has the object now instantaneously turned blue or am I only seeing with the light that reaches my eyes?
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  #12080  
Old 10-11-2011, 01:44 AM
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Here's some background Dragar. This is what has informed peacegirl's opinions and what she is trying to confirm. I edited out the fake dialog Lessans was so fond of.
Thanks LadyShea for boiling this down.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lessans Pages 117-120
We simply need light to see, just as other things are a condition of hearing. If there was no light we could not see, and if there was nothing to carry the sound waves to our ears, we could not hear. The difference is that the sound is being carried to our eardrums whereas there is no picture traveling from an object on the waves of light to impinge on our optic nerve.
Okay it starts here with the claim that there is no picture [image] traveling from an object on the waves of light...

So how in the world does a camera obscura work? According to this it can't. And of course by using optics all sorts of images can be formed from waves of light which can be observed in movie theaters, TVs, cameras of all kinds, projectors of all kinds and so on.

Score: F - Lessans didn't know optics

Quote:
If a newborn infant was not permitted to have any sense experiences, the brain would never desire to focus the eyes to look through them at the external world no matter how much light was present. Consequently, even though the lids were removed, and even though many colorful objects were placed in front of the baby, he could never see because the brain is not looking.
The infant may have difficulty focusing their eyes but this does not mean that can't see things at the right distance.

Score: F - Lessans didn't know optics and he didn't understand how the eye works and apparently he relied on folk lore for his source of information which he took as cold hard fact.

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The eyes are the windows of the brain through which experience is gained not by what comes in on the waves of light as a result of striking the optic nerve, but by what is looked at in relation to the afferent experience of the senses. What is seen through the eyes is an efferent experience.
It looks like Lessans didn't know the meaning of words and suffered from basic ignorance and confusion. I am sure the phrase "look out at the world" has more to do with his concept of "efferent vision" than the direction of neural signalling.

Score: F - Lessans didn't know how to look up words in a dictionary or understand what he read. He was a simpleton that often took common phrases literally because he just didn't know any better and was not that smart nor keen at observing reality.

Quote:
If a lion roared in that room a newborn baby would hear the sound and react because this impinges on the eardrum and is then transmitted to the brain. The same holds true for anything that makes direct contact with an afferent nerve ending, but this is far from the case with the eyes because there is no similar afferent nerve ending in this organ. The brain records various sounds, tastes, touches and smells in relation to the objects from which these experiences are derived, and then looks through the eyes to see these things that have become familiar as a result of the relation. This desire is an electric current which turns on or focuses the eyes to see that which exists - completely independent of man’s perception-in the external world

Again Lessans is basing all of this off of misinformation. Because newborns do track light and will turn their heads toward light.

Score: F. It is just hilarious how Lessans takes common phrases like "looks through the eyes" and turns vision into "efferent vision". He is a mondo moron.

Quote:
He doesn’t see these objects because they strike the optic nerve; he sees them because they are there to be seen. But in order to look, there must be a desire to see.
Tell that to a blind person.

Score: F. This guy was so out of touch with reality and so into his own bullshit that I am sure he could be easily suckered.

Quote:
Consequently, to include the eyes as one of the senses when this describes stimuli from the outside world making contact with a nerve ending is completely erroneous and equivalent to calling a potato, a fruit.
This appears to be something Lessans does as easy as breathing. He confidently claims that things don't work as he claims others think they work. He often gets the opposing claims wrong to begin with, but leaves it there as if he has "proved" something. He appears to be a very binary thinker that is convinced that all they need to do to show the other guy is wrong and this somehow makes them right. It never occurs to them that they could be wrong as well.

Score: F. No ability to think critically. So full of himself as to not consider for one second his fallibility, even though peacegirl insists that the record of his words has no bearing on her claims to Lessans humility.

Quote:
Once again certain facts have been confused and all the reasoning except for light traveling at a high rate of speed are completely fallacious. Scientists made the assumption that since the eyes are a sense organ it followed that light must reflect an electric image of everything it touches which then travels through space and is received
by the brain through the eyes. What they tried to make us believe is that if it takes 8 minutes for the light from the sun to reach us it would take hundreds of years for the reflection of Columbus to reach Rigel, even with a powerful telescope. But why would they need a telescope? Let me show you how confused these scientists are.
This is so ridiculously funny. He throws in "even with a powerful telescope" as if he has a clue as to what he is talking about. The confused person here is obviously Lessans. I'm sure he heard some talk about astronomy some place, picked up a few snippets here and there, garbled them together and voila, he has constructed a strawman to rail against.

Score: F, again he refers to his own muddled knowledge of science a some kind of argument that he must be right about "efferent vision". More binary thinking.

Quote:
The actual reason we are able to see the moon is because there is enough light present and it is large enough to be seen. The explanation as to why the sun looks to be the size of the moon — although much larger — is because it is much much farther away, which is the reason it would look like a star to someone living on a planet the distance of Rigel. This proves conclusively that the distance between someone looking, and the object seen, has no relation to time because the images are not traveling toward the optic nerve on waves of light, therefore it takes no time to see the moon, the sun, and the distant stars.
Lessans ignorance is so profound that he doesn't realize that the reason why the sun looks smaller is because of the properties of the image formed by the light from the sun and the moon. He recognizes that light travels at a finite speed but is completely ignorant of optics.

And somehow because he is ignorant, therefore "it takes no time to see the moon, the sun, and the distant stars."

Score: F. The conclusion has nothing to do with the assumptions. It's as if Lessans has no basic reasoning skill.

So Lessans was an ignoramus with no reasoning skills and no critical thinking skill or power of observation, that is well established.

Those traits appear to be hereditary.
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  #12081  
Old 10-11-2011, 02:51 AM
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Default Re: A revolution in thought

That last paragraph is particularly bizarre.

We know we can use the light to make images. But in in Lessan's world, what we see should not match what is recorded on, say, a CCD, since the latter is information carried by light (which took time to reach us), while the former is what we see (and hence took no time to reach us).

What a weird way of trying to view the world.
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Old 10-11-2011, 03:57 AM
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Couldn't it be as simple as the farther away something is from the earth's axis (due to seasonal changes), the longer it will take to orbit, which would account for the longer time to see the eclipse? Just a thought, so don't get crazy on me. :sadcheer:
I suppose this could work as an explanation if the object in question were orbiting Earth. You do know, don't you, that Jupiter and its moons are not orbiting Earth?
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  #12083  
Old 10-11-2011, 04:18 AM
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It looks like peacegirl never mastered 3rd grade science.
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  #12084  
Old 10-11-2011, 08:11 AM
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Default Re: A revolution in thought

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Originally Posted by peacegirl
Even if we are seeing remnants from the past, we are seeing them in real time if Lessans is right.
Ermm.. if we see "remnants from the past" then Lessans is wrong, because we do not see instantly or directly. Lessans states that we somehow have a direct experience of an object as it is, - that we do not detect the visual spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, and interpret that as images.

This is demonstrably not the case, as has now been repeatedly shown in great detail.

Quote:
Originally Posted by peacegirl
How can photons not be emitting light for a telescope to detect them?
:lolhog:

Photons are light.
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  #12085  
Old 10-11-2011, 01:09 PM
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Default Re: A revolution in thought

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Originally Posted by peacegirl View Post
There are experiments that can be done to show that "efferent vision" is different than our "light vision" way of seeing, although it has no effect on the the picture of what we see. It's just that one is the actual image versus an interpretation of that image.
Really? So if I place a blue filter in front of my eyes has the object now instantaneously turned blue or am I only seeing with the light that reaches my eyes?
Of course not. That would be like covering a window with a blue coating and seeing the world as blue.
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  #12086  
Old 10-11-2011, 01:15 PM
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I am not going to talk about that one excerpt, which Lessans himself would have removed from all the commotion.
Removing that one excerpt (where you explicitly DISAGREE with Lessans) doesn't change the fact that it is YOU and not him claiming light must be present at the eye. Lessans never made any such claim.
He wrote that. Don't make me have to go searching through his books to find it. :(

Quote:
Originally Posted by Spacemonkey
I'm still waiting on your answer as to what properties of what (and where) determine the color of a real-time photograph.
Quote:
Seeing in color involves a combination of the properties of light and the properties of the retina.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spacemonkey
<cut and paste snipped>
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spacemonkey
Don't just cut and paste material you don't understand. Answer my question please.

What properties determine the color of a photographic image?

If properties of light, then WHERE is the light whose properties determine this?

If properties of light AT THE CAMERA, then how can light of color matching a newly changed object be at the camera instantaneously to interact with the film?

Stop falling back on faith and avoidance. Follow through and deal with the logical implications of your own claims.
The logical implications are very clear. If efferent vision is true, then cameras work similarly. Although they don't have a brain, they work very much the same as the lens of the eye and the retina. You have to look at it from this perspective, which you're not doing. It would mean the camera's lens focuses on the object from which the mirror image is instantly seen due to light. Yes, the red photon was ahead of the blue, but that is not what is being captured by the lens.
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  #12087  
Old 10-11-2011, 01:25 PM
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Default Re: A revolution in thought

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They are produced by and travel away from the source. They are not producing light.
So are they part the source, or are they independent of the source?
The photons are emitted by the source, but after emission they are independent of it.

Once the photons are travelling away from the source, nothing that happens at the source can affect them. For something to affect the photons, it would need to catch up with them. This would involve travelling faster than the photons themselves and nothing can do that.

Note that the emission source may have an associated gravitational field that can affect the photons as they move away (red shifting them). However, it's the field at the time of emission that matters. In the unlikely event that the gravitational field of the object changes after the photons have been emitted, then even that can't affect the photons. It may cause a gravity wave to pursue the photons, but even gravity waves can't travel faster than light.

An analogy is a gun shooting bullets. After the bullets have been fired, the gun could be moved, painted blue, dropped in a bucket of water or be crushed. None of this would affect the flight of the bullets in any way.
Even if photons are independent of their source, we are not going to get a full image of the event from which those photons originated without the source being present. That's the entire debate in a nutshell.
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  #12088  
Old 10-11-2011, 02:02 PM
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Default Re: A revolution in thought

But then photons are somehow dependent on their emitter. We have already shown they are not. If they were, radar would not work, for instance.
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  #12089  
Old 10-11-2011, 02:29 PM
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Really? So if I place a blue filter in front of my eyes has the object now instantaneously turned blue or am I only seeing with the light that reaches my eyes?
Of course not. That would be like covering a window with a blue coating and seeing the world as blue.
It would seem that if there is a blue film or coating on the window then the image on that blue film is the object that the eye is seeing, and the light from the object on the other side of the film is forming an image on the blue film. Peacegirl, is this a reasonable discription of the way efferent vision would work? Or does the eye somehow look thru the film and see the object directly, and if this is so, how does the blue film change the color of what we see?
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  #12090  
Old 10-11-2011, 02:41 PM
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Even if photons are independent of their source, we are not going to get a full image of the event from which those photons originated without the source being present. That's the entire debate in a nutshell.
And you continue to natter your nonsense like the ninny that you are.

If the sun were turned OFF by God at noon, we would conitnue to see the photons that left it before it was turned off for another eight and half minutes.

Hey, peacegirl, the moons of Jupiter example by itself conclusively proved Lessans was wrong. He got everything about light and sight wrong. He was an ignoramus. Too bad.
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  #12091  
Old 10-11-2011, 02:51 PM
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Couldn't it be as simple as the farther away something is from the earth's axis (due to seasonal changes), the longer it will take to orbit, which would account for the longer time to see the eclipse? Just a thought, so don't get crazy on me. :sadcheer:
I suppose this could work as an explanation if the object in question were orbiting Earth. You do know, don't you, that Jupiter and its moons are not orbiting Earth?
I never said that. Another strawman. :sadcheer:
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Old 10-11-2011, 02:55 PM
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a) What does 'the object being present' mean? Do you mean having an instantaneous clear path between the observer and the object, or the object at the observer's location, or the object being seen at that moment by the observer, or something else?
Finally there is a relevant question. I'm not saying others have not give relevant questions, but this question is more pointed. To answer your question, the object is being seen at the exact moment the observer sees it due to how the lens works.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dragar"
b) You don't need experiments closer to home. But even those have been done already, they are just more complicated (because it's a lot harder on small distances to notice any speed to light).
If it is the speed of light that you are so convinced of, there's a problem. Tell me, why we don't see a picture if the OBJECT OR IMAGE is one centimeter out of the line of sight if the image is due to light? Why do you keep handwaving this observation away other than wanting to make your observations fit your hypotheses, so you can be right. :( So all I see is that everyone handwaving this away for their convenience.
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Old 10-11-2011, 03:11 PM
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It looks like peacegirl never mastered 3rd grade science.
You're still on time out, so be careful what you say and how you say it natural.atheist. I would hate to put you back on ignore, but that's the alternative that I will have to use if you don't shape up. :sadcheer:
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Old 10-11-2011, 03:13 PM
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It's not the speed of the light. That's why we don't see a picture if the OBJECT OR IMAGE is one centimeter out of the line of sight. Why is everyone handwaving this away? :chin:
Because it's wrong. The object has to HAVE BEEN in the line of sight AT THE MOMENT the photons we see from it were emitted. But the object could very well have moved out of the line of sight, or the object could even have ceased to exist by the time we see it.

For example, in a total solar eclipse, when the last sliver of sun can still be seen just before totality, the sun has already been totally obscured. Light takes about 1.3 seconds to travel from the moon, so we see the moon in the position it was 1.3 seconds ago.

There is no doubt at all that we do this - when we send rockets to land or pass close by other planets or their moons, the rockets would all miss their targets if we didn't aim the rockets allowing for the fact that the targets are all in front of their apparent positions.

The scientists are smart enough to say, 'We see Jupiter's moon Io there, but we know that light from IO has taken 43 minutes to travel to us so Io will really have moved on and be there at this moment.'

Because we see Io as it was, and in the position it was, 43 minutes ago, we can sometimes be still observing Io when we know that it has actually moved out of our line of sight, behind Jupiter.
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Old 10-11-2011, 03:23 PM
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Tell me, why we don't see a picture if the OBJECT OR IMAGE is one centimeter out of the line of sight if the image is due to light?
Because of optics...the branch of physics dealing with light and how it behaves and interacts with matter as in vision (or technology based on vision like cameras). Optics explains why there is a finite field of view and how we can extend it through technology


Quote:
Why do you keep handwaving this observation away other than wanting to make your observations fit your hypotheses, so you can be right. :( So all I see is that everyone handwaving this away for their convenience.
Nobody is handwaving. You are making claims without understanding even the basics of the multiple branches of science involved.

Lessans- in a few paragraphs- challenged thousands and thousands of discoveries and experiments, without understanding what he was doing. The body of knowledge is simply not easily summed up in a page of text. Did you see the article I linked you to on the science involved in photography...that's just one microtopic!

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Old 10-11-2011, 03:42 PM
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Even if photons are independent of their source, we are not going to get a full image of the event from which those photons originated without the source being present. That's the entire debate in a nutshell.


This image of a Tiger consists of thousands of dots. If humans can make a recognizable "image" in this manner, why do you think light photons cannot?

What about the image of the Pinwheel Galaxy you've ignored 3 times now? Is that not a "full" image?
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Old 10-11-2011, 04:39 PM
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Even if photons are independent of their source, we are not going to get a full image of the event from which those photons originated without the source being present. That's the entire debate in a nutshell.

If you are only considering a few of the photons, yes you do not get a complete picture, but when all the photons from the source that are collected by the eye are considered you do get a complete picture with all the relevant data. Once the photons have left the source the object is irrelevant to the eye receiving the photons and the brain intrepreting an image. This is how vision works, as has been observed and tested for many years.
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Old 10-11-2011, 06:23 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dragar"
b) You don't need experiments closer to home. But even those have been done already, they are just more complicated (because it's a lot harder on small distances to notice any speed to light).
If it is the speed of light that you are so convinced of, there's a problem. Tell me, why we don't see a picture if the OBJECT OR IMAGE is one centimeter out of the line of sight if the image is due to light? Why do you keep handwaving this observation away other than wanting to make your observations fit your hypotheses, so you can be right. :( So all I see is that everyone handwaving this away for their convenience.
We do. For instance, it's sunset in a few minutes time. The sun's position is actually behind the horizon. Right at this moment, there is no direct straight line to the Sun; the Earth is in the way.

But I can still see it, because I am seeing the photons it emitted eight minutes ago, when it was above the horizon.

As ceptimus says, we have to account for this effect in all manner of things. Such as sending rockets to other planets.

Nobody is handwaving this away at all. It's a fundamental part of how we do physics and it works. Why would it work, if it was wrong?
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Old 10-11-2011, 06:45 PM
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She's talking about why we can't see a person, or tree or house or whatever that is in a straight line in front of us, but is beyond our visual range due to distance.
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Old 10-11-2011, 06:52 PM
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I really couldn't tell you what she thought at this point.
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