Monkey Magic

By Mangone

Sat, 25 Sep 2010
  • 4823 reads
12 comments
 

How do you control monkeys?
Well, bananas help.
Beyond that it is best to teach them who is Master.

Now it’s best to do that by stealth rather than by discipline as monkeys have a nasty bite.
So, if you can talk the monkeys into living in a cage and fool them into believing that you conjure the bananas out of thin air then you are accepted as Master.

After a while the odd one might start to cause a bit of trouble suggesting that they were better off before they were caged. The best way to deal with this is to say “Okay, off you go then.” because they will soon discover that they are no longer suited to the challenges of freedom.

Still, it is best to extend your control over them by adding to your magical powers... Start by reinforcing your position as Master.
Tell them that you are a friend of the Great Creator and that he has given you special knowledge.

In your kindness you are willing to share some of this knowledge with them.
You can invent pretty much any old rigmarole you like so long as you give them extra bananas for a while and credit it to the effects of their belief in the rigmarole.

Inventing some magical chants is always a good idea, preferably in an invented language of your own design. Monkey’s love to chant mumbo jumbo and it works even better if you tell them that it pleases the Creator, or simply that it improves the quality of the bananas.

Eventually it will probably become necessary to reduce the importance of the Creator as monkeys tend to latch on to various aspects of the rigmarole you have created to elevate their importance.

This form of meritocracy should be allowed as it tends to give the monkeys something to aspire to, feeds their ambition and makes sure the clever monkeys do not become dissatisfied and turn on you!

Eventually, the different ‘sects’ of the mumbo jumbo might cause conflict between their beliefs and your purpose. When this happens you can either turn one sect against another or initiate a change in the mumbo jumbo by asserting that the Creator is angry that the mumbo jumbo has lost touch with the rigmarole. Then you can invent a new mumbo jumbo to compete with the old one.

Continued…

Thanks FTSE (for the post below) that’s pretty much what I was getting at!
However, I wasn’t simply having a go at religion but at the simple gullibility of monkeys.

For instance, somewhere along the line it was decided that the Creator was becoming a liability as belief in Him got in the way of the more pragmatic aspects of monkeydom.

Sure you could get people to kill each other in the name of the Creator but just start doing experiments on dead baby monkeys to see if you can grow new monkey glands and people can get very upset.

So, you start spreading the rumour that the Creator simply created the rules for creation - that He neither was, nor is, personally involved in it Himself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Although we are told that there was a Big Bang that created everything over 13 or 14 billion years simply by the power of gravity it is only an opinion.

"Is the standard Big Bang theory the only model consistent with these evidences? No, it's just the most popular one.
Internationally renown Astrophysicist George F. R. Ellis explains: "People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations…
For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations….
You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that.
What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models.
A lot of cosmology tries to hide that."
http://www.big-bang-theory.com/

We are also told that life is just an accident that somehow learned to duplicate itself and was in danger of extinction from boredom until it discovered sex.

Sex was so great that almost all forms of life adopted it as their main form of procreation and many modern monkeys claim that it was sex that single-handedly evolved them to the godlike beings they are today!

Yet who invented sex?
Look on the Internet and see if you get any sensible answers.
Where would we be without male and female?
Surely a female must have come first but then what would that make God?

Is gender Universal?
How many different genders can there be?

If we know so much about how the Universe was created then we're bound to know the answers to these simple questions - are we not?

Still, maybe we don't know that much about the Universe after all...

"Astronomical observations tell us that 96% of the Universe is unknown." because it's invisible!

"About 70% is a new type of energy, the so-called dark energy, and 26% is dark matter."

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2010/14/News%20Articles/12551...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," writes Hawking. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/02/stephen-hawking-big-bang-c...

Well, it is brave and I admire Hawking for nailing his colours to the mast and being brave enough to claim that Law existed before the Universe.

It is a bit difficult for me to see exactly what gravity could do to influence nothing and convince it to become a Universe or how gravity could create a Universe without mass.
It also leaves the big question - What is time if it can pass when nothing is aware of it?
I mean what can be said to have passed if there has been no change?
Does gravity have an internal clock?
Does the law of gravity evolve or is it eternally constant?
If it doesn’t change how does gravity know when it is time to create a Universe or is it laying them constantly like a well fed chicken?

It make you wonder what is the difference between an Eternal Gravity creating the Universe from Nothing and God.
Presumably the difference must be awareness for surely God must be aware if not necessarily self-aware. Yet, why is it easier to believe that gravity created everything rather than God?

At least with God you get awareness and He did it by choice.
I mean if Gravity is an eternal law are we to believe it randomly creates Universes and always will?

Could it be that Gravity evolves over time creating steadily improving Universes from nothing?
What happens to the old ones, does gravity clean up after itself?
We will have to wait and see :O)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A friend recently commented on some of the people who make a living from spouting such nonsense... though not Hawking of course.

'A bunch of sad, soaped up, scifi writers who are desperately in search of an orgasm, and increased book sales, wanking in the bathtub convinced that by observing the ripples created by their self masturbation they can gain a mathematical insight into Creation.'

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, I suppose we all take a bath now and then so pass the soap...

I’ve been thinking about Balance a bit more and it seemed to me that Balance was really what Einstein was looking for too.
He was trying to show that although things may look different they are often really the same - just seen fron different veiwpoints. Relativity.

I’m considering constructing a whole new method of measurement...
Some way of viewing the Universe that focuses on the balance rather than change.

I see inertia as being the champion of Balance and I’m certain it is the key to unlock the secrets of the stars.

Looking again at Kepler’s laws it makes me wonder if where ever a planet is in its orbit it is the same… that is that although we see it as being, nearer to or further from the sun, moving faster or slower, having more or less mass, in fact all these things are in some way relative and the planet doesn’t change.

I suppose I should clarify, what I mean is that certain things must be interchangeable… as some now see matter and energy.
Strangely I don’t see them as interchangeable at all.

I still believe that mass is based on matter and that the apparent changes in mass are simply that, apparent - and yet...

Does Einstein suggest in Relativity that mass is only apparently increased by speed?
Is it in fact really velocity that changes mass, or apparently changes it, by its movement relative to the observer.

Certificate U
Story
Tales Of The Rainbow Dragon
Humour

Comments

Submitted by Mangone on
It’s strange how things can connect… Thinking about the role of sex in the universe caused me to remember the Watchmen (film) where Dr Manhattan has become so ‘distant’ that his girlfriend has abandoned him for the warmth of the Owl. Dr Manhattan, seemingly sick of the machinations of mankind’s puppeteers, forsakes Earth for Mars and is increasingly drawn into a kind of clockwork world of his own creation. However, there is still a bond, a glimmer of love perhaps, that connects him to the girl he once loved, surviving somewhere deep within the scientific, almost callous, attitude he has slowly adopted as he becomes ever less human and ever more godlike. Yet this small glimmer of emotion has the power to change the future and perhaps save the planet. Because it causes Dr Manhattan to realise what a miracle the existence of his ex-girlfriend truly is, all the more so because of the unlikeliness of her parents ever getting together… In an instant of insight he realises that she is not so much a result of her parents coupling as their coupling was a result of the future's need of her!

Submitted by Mangone on
I'll give it a try FTSE. Here is a tune that might at least inspire a little jig... "Astronomical observations tell us that 96% of the Universe is unknown." because it's invisible. It is the Universal equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes. You can only ‘see’ this invisible 96% if you’re really intelligent and since most people aren’t then they have to trust the few people who are. It is there folks, our theories prove it! If it is invisible how do you know it is still there? Well, we can tell by the way that some of the light gets bent. “Okay, how long has this light taken to get here?” ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I suppose we ought to consider the speed of light because it has very important consequences. Almost everyone has seen the famous Einstein equation E=MC2 … NB read as E = MC squared. Einstein was telling us that Energy was related to Mass by the constant C. The problem is that the speed of light isn’t constant. Well, probably not a problem since that is very likely the reason Einstein used it in the first place. First, I should add that C is actually the speed of light through a vacuum. Now that does help to bring the speed closer to a constant but of course Einstein tells us that light is bent by gravity and so that would likely affect the speed, as would, in the case of the Earth, the effect of the sun’s bubble which envelops the Solar System. Still, as I said, Einstein probably relied on the fact that C wasn’t actually totally constant because he needed something that reflected the local state of space. The speed of light through a vacuum whereever you (the observer) are can be used as a constant because everything else is relative to that speed. Problem is we have never actually managed to get anything outside the sun’s bubble let alone into deep space and so we know nothing about what’s beyond our Solar System other than by telescope and guess work. It may well be that space time has several different ways of bending light and that gravity is simply the most convenient one to explain why the current theories don’t fit the observations!

Submitted by Mangone on
I don't argue with you FTSE. However, how often do you actually see "If Dark matter exists..."? or "If the Universe started with a Big Bang."? All these theories are invariably presented as facts! By the way FTSE. I've been thinking about the dispute we had over whether or not speed is massive. I was quite confident at the time since Einstein himself had asserted that as the speed of an object approaches the speed of light then its mass approaches infinity. However, it did occur to me that even if this were to be so surely it would only be true in the direction that the object was travelling - that it would be the mass of the velocity and not of the speed that would be apparent to a relatively stationary observer. Hence it follows that you are probably right and speed doesn’t increase mass only the relative mass. Does that mean we were both right, relatively speaking? ;O) To tell the truth I'm starting to have my doubts about Einstein's theory of gravity!

Submitted by Mangone on
I shouldn’t take much notice of these musings as they are essentially meant just for Mystic and mates. Following a dispute with FTSE over whether or not speed was massive I came to re-think Relativity. Were we mistaking WHAT Relativity actually provides? Is it just a means to see things from a different viewpoint rather than a way of understanding the Universe? Let’s consider some aspects of Relativity that are obviously simply about communication. The fact that it takes light a certain time to get from one place to another should be no more relevant than the fact that sound does the same - were it not that Einstein posits that nothing can travel faster than light. The nonsense that travelling faster than the speed of light would make you time travel is simply saying that if you could catch up with yesterday’s light then you could see the past - but not be present in it. The nonsense talked about time travel is a misunderstanding of Einstein’s belief that the Universe too is limited by the speed of light. Hence if the sun blew up we wouldn’t notice for about 500 seconds. While blowing up the sun would be a rather extreme experiment I agree that you wouldn’t see it explode for just over 8 minutes but that the Earth would notice immediately! Still, we can leave all that for later for now we should consider why mass increases with speed. Well does it? As (I think) FTSE put it ‘you can’t get mass from nowhere’. Yet there is no doubt that as a body accelerates its mass does seem to increase. However, if we use Einstein’s trick of moving the observer - make him the pilot of a space craft. If his ship was travelling at close to the speed of light, but not accelerating, would the mass of his craft be noticeably greater than if he were travelling at a much slower speed? The point being - can you calculate your speed from your change in mass? It might seem difficult to guess so let’s look at an orbiting space craft. If it is an orbit in which the crew seem weightless what does that say about the speed of the craft? It is important to realise that although the crew are weightless they still have their original mass… In fact since they are moving relatively quickly (by vehicle standards) their mass should be greater. Still, how to measure the mass if it has no weight. Hit it with a known force and measure the result… So, mass is related to inertia and need have no noticeable weight. Right so if mass increases with speed it must be because it feels some resistance from empty space. Presuming that we can imagine that a craft orbiting at about 80% gravity is essentially in empty space. NB when I say 80% gravity, I mean at a distance from Earth where the acceleration of gravity would be (about 8 metres per second per second) Now Newton presumed that the resistance to acceleration would be linear but Einstein predicted that in fact it would not be at very high speeds and that the resistance would increase to infinity as the object attempted to accelerate to the speed of light. In other words the mass would become infinite. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ So, let us consider E = MC squared. Since we are saying that mass does increase with speed then can we say that the increase will be equal to the increase in Energy divided by the (supposed constant) C squared? Where is the speed in this formula you may ask and I would argue that it is in the measurement of C. Imagine that you are in a space craft travelling at 99.9999% of the speed of light and you measure the speed of a light beam along a fixed distance from the back of the ship to the front. Now, since the light source is already moving at almost the speed of light how fast will the beam travel through the empty space that the ship is moving through. Perhaps you might find it easier to imagine a strut at the back of the ship and one at the front that contain the light source and detector. Since now the light is travelling through space and not the ship it might make it clearer. Well, I think that the beam will travel at the speed of light as, we are told, it always does through empty space - yet, since the detector is also travelling at an almost similar speed then the beam must appear to be travelling much slower than normal. Yet, if we use the measured speed as C how does this effect M? Since C squared is now much less than it was then M must be much greater since M = E divided by C squared (don’t forget that C is the speed of light through a vacuum). :O) So it would appear that although a speeding object does not gain matter it does gain mass. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Before we continue to think more about mass we should consider weight. Many people believe weight to be a measurement of mass on Earth… In a way they are right and in another way they are wrong. As we know inertia causes a ‘reluctance’ to change and so if matter is ‘attracted’ by gravity it resists that attraction, put simply inertia limits the acceleration of falling objects. Some argue that not just mass but energy too is effected by gravity - I’m not convinced but we will look at the possibility later. For now let’s concentrate on gravity and matter and mass. Gravity causes matter to fall unless something counters it. Hence weight is the force of the matter toward the centre of the gravitational attraction... usually seen as down. So, you stand on a covered spring and the downward force compresses it moving a pointer on a scale which indicates your weight (weighing scales) or you stand on one side of a pair of true scales and someone adds a number of known weights to the other until they balance. Now weight becomes confused with mass because mass reflects the amount of matter and it is matter that is effected by gravity! It would be great if someone who wasn’t as lazy as I am could actually find how fast things would fall were in not for inertia. However, we must remember that this inertia is ‘remembered’ and can be reclaimed, as say, by a ball bouncing. I suppose that I ought to add that energy that causes movement which affects the overall inertia of a body would effect the mass of the body and so I have no quarrel with those who, for instance, see kinetic energy as being slightly massive. I will go off and think about whether energy itself is effected directly by inertia and if not where this leaves the mass of so called Dark Energy. Sorry Mystic - I'll tidy this up later I want to add more first. What's your take Paul?

Submitted by Mangone on
SPECULATION! If we go back to the space craft mentioned earlier which is orbiting at 80% Earth gravity and we slow it down a little - what would be the result? It would start to fall. Why? Because, now, it can! I’ve often pointed out the Foucault pendulum and gyroscopes are amazing examples of objects with an acceleration that allows them to disregard other forces. So, let’s speculate that a planet in orbit around a sun is not falling because it has a sufficient acceleration (from gravity constantly changing its direction) to ignore gravity (in a strange way a lot like the tempo of a pendulum swing depends on its length because its accleration sets its speed) which suggests that the ‘reluctance’ of the inertia of the planet might have reached its maximum due to its orbital motion and so it cannot fall. Put simply, the planet's speed around the sun uses all it's 'allowance of reluctant motion' and so its inertia will not allow it to fall... it has no movement allowance left :O) This would suggest that in one sense speed is king, in that an object can only travel at a certain speed (regardless of direction) limited by its ‘reluctance’ but that the 'reluctance' is based on the object’s acceleration :O) I think I’ll come back to that when my head stops spinning ;o) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you consider the main difference between Newton and Einstein it is in the essential cause of gravity. Newton believed it was simply the attractive force between two or more bodies which was instantaneously transmitted THROUGH space. Einstein on the other hand seemed to believe that gravity was a property OF space and was limited by the speed of light. So for Newton space was merely the distance between the masses but for Einstein the mass curved space and created gravity. I don’t know if you are familiar with Escape Velocities, even if you are you may not know that it is a speed not a velocity and it equals (at least in space) the speed at which a falling body would be travelling, when it reached THAT distance from what it was falling towards, were it to have fallen from an infinite distance. Clear as mud? Okay, if you have a sun with planets then the speed of each planet is proportional to its distance from the sun. So, anything in orbit at the same distance from the sun travels at the same speed regardless of mass. Now, the escape velocity of any planet of that sun is about 1.4 times its orbital speed. It is actually the square root of 2 which is approximately 1.4142. Now if you think about it the escape velocity must be almost as fast as anything can travel through that bit of space if it is equal to the speed that a body would have reached had it been falling for an infinite distance. So, what does that suggest? It suggests that the orbital speed at any point is related to the maximum speed at the same point by the same ratio as one side of a square has to its diagonal. To me that does NOT suggest that space is curved so much as the speed is the same for both but since we call the orbital velocity the orbital speed then it seems less... but I suppose that you can argue that relatively speaking the ‘curving’ is using up the rest of the speed. A different way of expressing this is that, if hypothetically you could create an airless hole to the centre of the Earth and drop something into it. By the time that something reached the centre it would be travelling at the same speed as a similar hypothetical something orbiting the Earth (at ground level without being effected by air resistance etc).

Submitted by Mangone on
Just a thought - since scientists calculate the speed that stars are moving away from us by using Doppler shift I was wondering how they can differentiate between frequency shift caused by the velocity of the stars and that caused by gravity. It struck me that all the light that reaches us from distant stars must come from fairly massive ones and since I believe that gravity compresses space-time then I would imagine that it would cause an increasing Red shift as the light moved into less ‘dense’ space. If this were to be so then it would mean that many of the calculations of how fast the Universe is expanding would be exaggerated. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I've always wondered what effect lenses, mirrors and of course atmospheres have on light that has spent most of its 'life' travelling through 'empty' space - the problem being that anything used to detect light must effect it. Does light have a particle aspect when it travels through 'empty' space?

Submitted by Mangone on
Further back I wrote the sentence below which is still true but not for long… “Problem is we have never actually managed to get anything outside the sun’s bubble let alone into deep space and so we know nothing about what’s beyond our Solar System other than by telescope and guess work.“ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "We have gotten to the point where the wind from the Sun, which until now has always had an outward motion, is no longer moving outward; it is only moving sideways so that it can end up going down the tail of the heliosphere, which is a comet-shaped-like object," This phenomenon is a consequence of the wind pushing up against the matter coming from other stars. The boundary between the two is the "official" edge of the Solar System - the heliopause. Once Voyager crosses over, it will be in interstellar space. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11988466

Submitted by Mangone on
“... now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.” http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1...

Submitted by the parkster on
Very interesting piece, once again questioning life. I like it, although there's a lot of different things to take in at once. I love the initial monkey analogy though! Brilliant :)

Submitted by Mangone on
Thanks parkster! I remember someone saying that if a dog wrote a book it would mostly be about bones so I presumed that monkeys would mostly write about bananas :O) What I hope to point out to people is that we don't know that much about ourselves and so we too often don't take 'human nature' into account. We lie to ourselves and to each other and form relationships and organisations that are always in danger of being totally corrupted by the lies we choose to believe. In a way I'm simply arguing that we don't know ourselves well enough to notice how much power corrupts us!

Submitted by valiswaverider on
You should read Roger Penrose. His stuff is the bomb check it out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Reality:_A_Complete_Guide_to_th... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_of_Time_(book)

 

Submitted by Mangone on
Thanks Valis! Your links are always interesting and often amazing.