I can make bread rise from the dead. I can turn water into tea. I can walk on ice. You lose something through the generations.
which is exactly what i was telling you. there was no point in your bringing up the useless dictionary definition and taking the discussion out of context. you frequently waste time doing that. i know the word "universe" can mean what you said, in certain contexts, but it is totally irrelevant and meaningless in terms of what i was saying. it was begging the question. the universe is everything because the definiton says it is. the premise is true because the premise says it is. if you are smart enough to understand what hawking means when he says "finite but unbounded", good for you. i dont understand it, to me it sounds contradictory and inconclusive. i cant make head or tails of that. i say nothing. i do not know. my brain is strained. my only point thus far is that we can be too quick to draw conclusions. i have no clue if aliens exist, and i do not really grasp the concept of an infinite universe completely.
that is pretty good, i am gonna say that in a conversation about omnipotence sometime and pretend i just made it up.
i found an article that will help red along in his intellectual development: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_definition
The dictionary is only useless to those that don't use it. I have to point out your careless use of definitions far too often. I can make heads of it, at least. Only Hawking can make tails of it, apparently. I believe what he is saying is that that the universe is finite in size, but infinite in spatial extent. It is closed and yet has no boundaries. It has been described in 3-D as the surface of a sphere. You can walk around it an infinite number of times without ever finding the end (or any boundary). But the sphere still has a finite size. The same is true for the universe, only in 4-D. A finite size, but expanding at the speed of light. Difficult to conceptualize for us all. The key to understanding it is to know that space-time is curved, thus you would be travelling in a circle that only appears to be a straight line. If a theoretical laser beam were projected from here through the centre of the universe it would not hit the other side of the universe, it would eventually (theoretically) hit you in the back. Einstein himself demonstrated how matter in the universe distorts the space-time continuum by accurately predicting how much our Sun distorted local space.
The dictionary definition that I quoted suffers from none of these logical fallacies. Are you sure you want to debate logic with me?
oh if that were true. you are a research-first, comprehension-second type of guy. gobbledygook, got it. i tip my hat if you fully understand that. no, it would be futile. you prefer rote research to logic. it is never the definition, it is your application of it. in fact your fallacy in this thread is the first one listed: "Circularity If one concept is defined by another, and the other is defined by the first, we have a pair of circular definitions, somewhat similar to a question-begging argument: neither offers us enlightenment about the thing we wanted to be enlightened about." you argued that the universe was whatever the definition said it was, which was pointless. which is fabulous, but totally irrelevant. a dictionary definition does not an infinite universe make.
Quite incorrect. This is my first post(non joking) on this subject, therefor I cannot possibly be "playing with a definition, again." Secondly, I did not claim that life does exist elsewhere, I claimed that the possibility is there, because we cannot measure the universe. You cannot dispute this. Ole Miss can claim the possibility exists that they will beat us, before we play them and that it true. Until the outcome is a known, the unknown is a possibility. Firstly, you prove my point for me. We cannot see the end of the universe, therefor it is infinite. Secondly you assume that we will. There is no proof to substantiate this at all. We could be long extinct before we ever develop the technology to see the end of the universe, if it truly exists. Again, I made no definitive statement that life must exist elsewhere, I made the statement that given our limited powers of perception, life could exist elsewhere. This is the nature of science. All things are possible until a set of laws are discovered that say they are not. The job of science is to eliminate the things that are not possible, therefor proving what is possible. You cannot prove that life cannot exist elsewhere, therefor you cannot disprove the possibility that it does. Perhaps, in the future we will prove that we are the only ones in the universe, or just the opposite. Until we can eliminate a set of theories and condense it to a set of laws, we will not know, therefore life is possible elsewhere.
i was referring to the thread, not you specifically, with the word "again". i should have been more clear. i don't. what i dispute is: this statement is so nonsensical i cant take it seriously.
Absolutely not true. It makes perfect sense. If you cannot measure something to it's end, then it is immeasurable. Regardless of what the reason may be, our lack of ability to measure or the universe in fact being infinite. We cannot perceive the end of the universe, therefor it is not a finite sum. You can want the universe to be finite, but science cannot prove this.
