Rapid limestone petrification: Yorkshire teddy bears “turned to stone” in three to five months

originally posted by: Barcs
a reply to: namelesss

Our planet is comprised of
billions of spheres of reality, generated by each individual human and perhaps even by
each animal.

Imagine again you’re on the stalled subway car worried about being late for work. The
engineers get the thing running again and most of the other commuters soon
disembark. What is your universe at the moment? The screeching sound of metal
wheels against metal tracks. Your fellow passengers . The ads for Rogaine and tech
schools. What is not your universe? Everything outside your range of perception does
not exist . Now suppose that I’m with you on the train. My individual sphere of reality
intersects with yours . We two human beings with nearly identical perception tools are
experiencing the same harsh lighting and uncomfortable sounds.

You get the idea. But how can this really be? You wake up every morning and your
dresser is still across the room from your comfortable spot in the bed. You put on the
same pair of jeans and favorite shirt and shuffle to the kitchen in slippers to make
coffee. How can anyone in his right mind possibly suggest that the great world out there
is constructed in our heads?

To more fully grasp a universe of still arrows and disappearing moons, let ’s turn to
modern electronics. You know from experience that something in the black box of a
DVD player turns an inanimate disc into a movie. The electronics in the DVD converts
and animates the information on the disc into a 3-D show. Likewis e your brain animates
the universe. Imagine the brain as the electronics in your DVD player. Explained
another way, the brain turns electrochemical information from our five senses into an
order, a sequence—into a face, into this page—into a unified three-dimensional whole.
It transforms sensory input into something so real that few people ever ask how it
happens. Stop and think about this for a minute. Our minds are so good at it that we
rarely ever question whether the world is anything other than what we imagine it to be.
Yet the brain—not the eyes—is the organ sealed inside a vault of bone, locked inside the
cranium, that “sees” the universe.

What we interpret as the world is brought into existence inside our head. Sensory
information does not impress upon the brain, as particles of light impress upon the film
in a camera. The images you see are a construction by the brain. Everything you are
experiencing right now (pretend you’re back on the subway) is being actively generated
in your mind—the hard plastic seats , the graffiti, the dark remnants of chewing gum
stuck to the floor. All physical things—subway turnstiles, train platforms, newspaper
racks, their shapes, sounds, and odors—all these sensations are experienced inside
your head. Everything we observe is based on the direct interaction of energy on our
senses, whether it is matter (like your shoe sticking to the floor of a subway car) or
particles of light (emitted from sparks as a subway train rounds a corner). Anything that
we do not observe directly, exists only as potential—or mathematically speaking—as a
haze of probability.

You may question whether the brain can really creat e physical reality. However,
remember that dreams and schizophrenia (consider the movie A Beautiful Mind)
prove the capacity of the mind to construct a spatial -temporal reality as real as the one
you are experiencing now. The visions and sounds schizophrenic patients see and hear
are just as real to them as this page or the chair you’re sitting on.

We have all seen pictures of the primitive earth with its volcanoes overflowing with
lava, or read about how the solar system itself condensed out of a giant swirling gas
cloud. Science has sought to extend the physical world beyond the time of our own
emergence. It has found our foot steps wandering backward until on some far shore they
were transmuted into a trail of mud. The cosmologists picked up the story of the molten
earth and carried its evolution backward in time to the insensate past : from minerals by
degrees back through the lower forms of matter—of nuclei and quarks—and beyond
them to the big bang. I t seems only natural that life and the world of the inorganic must
separate at some point.

We consider physics a kind of magic and do not seem at all fazed when we hear that the
universe—indeed the laws of nature themselves—just appeared for no reason one day.
From the dinosaurs to the big bang is an enormous distance. Perhaps we should
remember the experiments of Francesco Redi, Lazzaro Spallanzani, and Louis
Pasteur—basic biological experiments that put to rest the theory of spontaneous
generation, the belief that lif e had arisen spontaneously from dead matter (as, for
instance, maggots from rotting meat and mice from bundles of old clothes)—and not
make the same mistake for the origin of the universe itself. We are wont to imagine time
extending all the way back to the big bang, before life’s early beginning in the seas. But
before matter can exist, it has to be observed by a consciousness .

Physical reality begins and ends with the animal observer. All other times and places,
all other objects and events are products of the imagination, and serve only to unite
knowledge into a logical whole. We are pleased with such books a s Newton’s Principia,
or Darwin’s Origin of Species. But they instill a complacency in the reader. Darwin
spoke of the possibility that life emerged from inorganic matter in some “warm little
pond.” Trying to trace life down through simpler stages is one thing, but assuming it
arose spontaneously from nonliving matter wants for the rigor and attention of the
quantum theorist .

Neuroscientists believe that the problem of consciousness can someday be solved once
we understand all the synaptic connections in the brain. “The tools of neuroscience,”
wrote philosopher and author David Chalmers (Scientific American, December 1995)
“cannot provide a full account of conscious experience, although they have much to
offer. . . . Consciousness might be explained by a new kind of theory.” Indeed, in a 1983
National Academy Report, the Research Briefing Panel on Cognitive Science and
Artificial Intelligence stated that the questions to which it concerned itself “reflect a
single underlying great scientific mystery, on par with understanding the evolution of
the universe, the origin of life, or the nature of elementary particles.”

The mystery is plain. Neuroscientists have developed theories that might help to
explain how separate pieces of information are integrated in the brain and thus succeed
in elucidating how different attributes of a single perceived object—such as the shape,
color, and smell of a flower—are merged into a coherent whole. These theories reflect
some of the important work that is occurring in the fields of neuroscience and
psychology, but they are theories of structure and function. They tell us nothing about
how the performance of these functions is accompanied by a conscious experience; and
yet the difficulty in understanding consciousness lies precisely here, in this gap in our
understanding of how a subjective experience emerges from a physical process. Even
Steven Weinberg concedes that although consciousness may have a neural correlate, its
existence does not seem to be derivable from physical laws.

Physicists believe that the theory of everything is hovering right around the c

originally posted by: Barcs
a reply to: namelesss

Physicists believe that the theory of everything is hovering right around the corner, and
yet consciousness is still largely a mystery, and physicists have no idea how to explain
its existence from physical laws. The questions physicists long to ask about nature are
bound up with the problem of consciousness. Physics can furnish no answers for them.
“Let man,” declared Emerson, “then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to
his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are
in his own mind.”

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of
consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that
they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a
computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind
generates the spatio -temporal relationships involved in every experience. We can
never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the
modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects, instanteous,
therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process , as
existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a
spatio-temporal order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD—the
information leaps into three-dimensional sound, and in that way, and in that way only,
does the music indeed exist .

We are living through a profound shift in worldview, from the belief that time and space
are entities in the universe to one in which time and space belong to the living. Think of
all the recent book ti tles—The End of Science, The End of History, The End of
Eternity, The End of Certainty, The End of Nature, and The End of Time. Only for a
moment, while we sort out the reality that time and space do not exist, will it feel like
madness .

**************************

Robert Lanza is vice president of research and scientific development at
Advanced Cell Technology and a professor at Wake Forest University School of
Medicine. He has written 20 scientific books and won a Rave award for medicine
from Wired magazine and an “all star” award for biotechnology from Mass
High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology.

This article is copyrighted by the author. It may not be reproduced without permission of the publisher.
For reproduction or distribution rights, please contact [email protected].

Sorry you couldn't find the link, I happened to have a copy of the article just in case the link went bad.
Some interesting reading, anyway, and I hope I didn't violate any rules by posting all this!

Peace and Love

a reply to: namelesss

Do you have an external link that contains what you just typed or a version that doesn't contain so many problems with the spacing? I'm sorry but the line breaks are making it very difficult to read and it sounds like the usual woo woo to me, but I didn't read it all so if you could fix the line breaks or give me a link that would be great.

originally posted by: Barcs
a reply to: namelesss

Do you have an external link that contains what you just typed or a version that doesn't contain so many problems with the spacing? I'm sorry but the line breaks are making it very difficult to read and it sounds like the usual woo woo to me, but I didn't read it all so if you could fix the line breaks or give me a link that would be great.

I apologize for that mess!
I really tried to fix it, but it appears that my computer ignorance has overtaken my ego! *__-
Yeah, I'm sure it's just woo woo...
Just let it go.
Sweet dreams! *__-

a reply to: namelesss

theamericanscholar.org...

Found it. Looks like a philosophy article, not a scientific research paper. I'll read through it, but philosophy does not hold weight over science.

Newton's laws are still the foundation upon which relativity and quantum mechanics are built on and are still used today. Once I read through the article I'll drop another response.

originally posted by: Barcs
a reply to: namelesss

theamericanscholar.org...

Found it. Looks like a philosophy article, not a scientific research paper. I'll read through it, but philosophy does not hold weight over science.

WHAT?!?
Then you have no clue what philosophy (or science) is!
All sciences, all avenues of man's knowing are feeder branches on the tree of philosophy!
A philosopher can tell you in 10 minutes or less what a scientist can reluctantly tell you after a couple decades (or centuries) of wasted grants and tax money!
(Imagine good illustrations here)
But if I have to explain this (there is no argument), I'm just not seeing the point of this conversation, anymore.

Newton's laws are still the foundation upon which relativity and quantum mechanics are built on and are still used today. Once I read through the article I'll drop another response.

You know, with all Love and respect, I really haven't the 'energy' to take this discussion to it's boring and predictable conclusion! *__-
I pointed in a direction. You seem intelligent enough, that if you are really interested in expanding your Perspective, you can do your own research, like I did. I don't have the time or energy to re-discover the past half century's worth of notes, studies and original thought involved.
That you dismiss this as 'just philosophy' means that I am just urinating into the wind.
So, it's all 'out there' if you honestly want info and food for thought.
I think that I have offered a good start on that road, but I don't need to tread it again.

The great Acarya Maitreya says in his Saptadasa-bhumi-sastra-yogacarya:

"Before accepting a challenge for a debate, one should consider whether his opponent is a person worthy of carrying on debate through the process of proposition (siddhanta), reason (hetu), example (udaharana), etc. He should, before proceeding there, consider whether the debate will exercise any good influence on his opponent, the umpire, and the audience. But first of all, he should consider whether a debate - even won - would not bring him more harm than benefit."

I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to get you upset. That article is very long and I haven't gotten the chance to read the whole thing yet. Perhaps you can give me a summary or quote the relevant parts? Giving me a wall of text to read is not pointing me in the right direction and if you don't understand the fundamental difference between philosophy and scientific research, I can't help you. Nobody's saying Newton was perfect or everything he ever thought about was absolute fact. Just that his laws still apply today, so they aren't wrong. They are just not the full picture.

This is basic stuff. Philosophy is NOT science. It is used to develop hypotheses or make educated guesses. That's as far as it goes in science. Science involves the rigorous testing and verification for facts. Philosophy only holds true, when the premise in question has been verified by science. Otherwise it is nothing more than educated guessing. I already told you in my previous posts, I deal with hard science. I don't care about guessing games and what ifs.

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with philosophy, it leads to many great ideas, but without the science to verify it we're simply left with somebody's opinion. I do not mean any offense by this, that's just the way it is.

That you dismiss this as 'just philosophy' means that I am just urinating into the wind.
So, it's all 'out there' if you honestly want info and food for thought.
I think that I have offered a good start on that road, but I don't need to tread it again.

A "good start" would be breaking down your article with relevant quotes to our discussion instead of just telling me to read an entire 20 page article with no summary or context whatsoever.

A full understanding of life cannot be found by looking at cells and molecules through a microscope. We have yet to learn that physical existence cannot be divorced from the animal life and structures that coordinate sense perception and experience. Indeed, it seems likely that this creature was the center of its own sphere of reality just as I was the center of mine.

Perhaps the creature was too primitive to collect data and pinpoint my location in space. Or maybe my existence in its universe was limited to the perception of some huge and hairy shadow stabilizing a flashlight in the air. I don’t know. But as I stood up and left, I am sure that I dispersed into the haze of probability surrounding the glowworm’s little world.

We consider physics a kind of magic and do not seem at all fazed when we hear that the universe—indeed the laws of nature themselves—just appeared for no reason one day.

I've read the beginning, but it's a very slow read and takes a while to get to the point. The reason I'm saying it's "just philosophy" is due to statements like the ones above. I'm not really seeing much about Newton. Help a brother out and point me to the facts.

Darwin spoke of the possibility that life emerged from inorganic matter in some “warm little pond.” Trying to trace life down through simpler stages is one thing, but assuming it arose spontaneously from nonliving matter wants for the rigor and attention of the quantum theorist.

Statements like this are just silly.

Spoiler:

The minerals on earth are, for the most part, all formed spontaneously.

Quartz (SiO2), the most abundant mineral on earth's crust, has a -910 kJ/mol heat of formation... This stuff is formed instantaneously from its given reacants. Limestone formation is also spontaneous, along with all the other oxidized minerals on our earth.

originally posted by: Barcs
a reply to: namelesss

Newton's laws are still the foundation upon which relativity and quantum mechanics are built on and are still used today.

Relativity rendered Newtonian physics out-dated:

"In classical physics (Newtonian), we had one clock, one time flow, for
all observers ...Time, and therefore such words
as "simultaneously", " sooner", "later", had an abso-
lute meaning... the relativity theory
forces us to give up this view." (Einstein, Evolution of Physics)

a reply to: cooperton

Quartz is not spontaneous nor does it form instantaneously. It forms from a chemical reaction in specific magma bodies; however, size of the crystals varies depending on the magma body in igneous rocks. It is also found in basalt lava flows (same type of magma body that forms granites). Limestone is also not instantaneous...It follows a specific process in its formation.

a reply to: namelesss

a reply to: Barcs

Furthermore, it seems the article is more about romanticizing QM rather than explaining it scientifically. QM only applies on the quantum level. This is why large objects still follow Newtonian mechanics. Quite a bit of assumptions involved from what I've read of the article thus far.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

The OP of the thread referenced above explained the QM misunderstanding that reality doesn't exist until it is observed. That is just woowoo.

Misunderstanding 2:

Reality does not exist unless you observe it.

This misunderstanding spring from an incorrect interpretation of the quantum model (QM). The misconception spreaded even quicker as sensationalist journalists and misguided scientists (or perhaps misguided journalists and sensationalist scientists) kept on repeating it to the not-so-scientifically-inclined masses of population. The truth is, in physics, "observation" doesn't have the same meaning as it does in vulgar english. In physics, "observation" is the action of taking a measurement of a target using devices such as electron microscopes. And since electron microscopes send, well, electrons at the target, well the mere act of "observing" (scientific meaning here) a target will affect said target if the latter is small enough to be kicked off by the impact of an electron. But for bigger objects such as trees and people and planets, the impact of an electron will hardly affect their position. This is why larger objects obey Newtonian and Einsteinian laws; for the QM applies only for particles subject to Heisenberg's uncertainty formulas. Additionally, if reality really did stop existing once one stopped observing it, then major causality problems would arise. For instance, since an embryo has no way to observe the entire mother, then the entire mother (cause for the embryo's existence) would not exist... casusing the embryo to stop existing!

It seems like quite a bit of the article hinges upon this misunderstanding and runs with it, when they begin talking about abiogenesis and things spontaneously arising from nothing. That seems to be the gist of it, but perhaps you can break it all down for me and explain what I am not seeing.

Surely, you have read the article and didn't just copy paste the first google hit you could find to agree with your view of QM before reading it.

originally posted by: Barcs
... and if you don't understand the fundamental difference between philosophy and scientific research

How can I even respond to such ignorant dismissive arrogance?
I am tired of this discussion, and it ends here.

, I can't help you.

And I, obviously, cannot help you.

I did think of you this morning, or yesterday, when I saw the news about the new Emdrive engine that, stubbornly, seems to violate Newton's laws.

emdrive.com...
www.space.com...

As our new understanding of Reality becomes experience, much is left behind, of great value perhaps, once...

Good luck, and, please, feel free to avoid/ignore my other ignorant replies.
You win! *__-

originally posted by: namelesss
How can I even respond to such ignorant dismissive arrogance?
I am tired of this discussion, and it ends here.

You have got to be joking. So you just ignore the rest of my post and arrogantly dismiss it without reason over a single line that was clearly explained later in the post? I broke some passages from the article down and explained some misunderstandings and you get bent out of shape over a single line about philosophy and science that is TRUE? I am not arrogantly dismissing anything. Philosophy and science are not equal. I'm sorry that you don't like this fact. I explained the relationship between science and philosophy quite clearly, but you have no response for that, only to one single simplified line in the beginning.

I did think of you this morning, or yesterday, when I saw the news about the new Emdrive engine that, stubbornly, seems to violate Newton's laws.

emdrive.com...
www.space.com...

I see you still didn't cite any research papers. Can you quote me where exactly this engine conflicts with conservation of momentum by objects in space? I've said it like 5 times now and you completely ignored it, Newtons laws still apply at most velocities. This is not one of them.

I guess when your viewpoint can be summarized by:

originally posted by: namelesss
It is all shown to be crap!

it really exemplifies your anti science position.

It seems like you just have anger issues and don't like being wrong, so you romanticize philosophy as if it weighs more than objective evidence. Instead of getting super upset, break down your counterpoints for me. Show me where the relevant passages are in that article you posted. Argue against my points, anything... I just don't see the reason to get bent out of shape over this. When you refuse to even engage in the discussion, it speaks volumes about the validity of your claims.

originally posted by: BarcsIt seems like you just have anger issues and don't like being wrong, so you romanticize philosophy as if it weighs more than objective evidence.

You are even ignorant of the words that you use in that sentence.
I will not be baited, I am not angry, son, just bored, despite your vain imagination/ego.
I already gave you much, in which you found nothing of value. You want to sit in my lap and have me think it through line for line for you? Just so you can argue and challenge every line?
I don't think so.
That tells me all I need to know of your intellectual honesty.
Your belief-addled ignorance is just too profound and deliberate for me to waste any more pearls.
Believe as you must...
Last insulting bluster is, again, yours.
Have a nice night and, perhaps, we'll run into each other again...

a reply to: namelesss

Wow. Okay then. I guess you do not want to have a discussion. I really don't understand why you are so upset over the fact that science holds more weight than philosophy. Yes, I said FACT. You have done nothing whatsoever to justify your position and you refuse to engage any of my discussion points or even show me relevant passages to our conversation in the long article about nothing.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting a forfeit the second things got tough. By all means, just ignore everything I've said and call me ignorant over and over again with no context. That attitude will get you really far in life.

I thought maybe I would learn something new engaging with you, but it's clear you have no intention of doing anything except insulting those with differing viewpoints than you and insulting legitimate scientists. So sad and so lazy. If you don't want to have a discussion,then don't respond. It's not that difficult.

That tells me all I need to know of your intellectual honesty.

This is the funniest line right here. Yes, I am intellectually dishonest because I want to have a detailed conversation about your article and about philosophy and science and how Newton's laws still apply today.

I would have to examine the teddy bears to see if they had petrified 100% through and through. There is such a thing as really hard water. But calling these teddy bears "petrified" depends on your definition of "petrification". Are the teddy bears hard as stone? Or have all the fibers actually been replaced with minerals? Those are not equivalent.