Time

[fredhedd]

honestly, are the both of you finding yourselves logging on here very eagerly to see what the other has written because you can't wait to be right?

this isn't an attack.  it's just interesting how much more energy there is available to use when someone is arguing/ferociously debating/whatever word you want to use for it, compared to making progress in some way.  it seems to be in abundance.  

the desire to be 'right' seems to take precedence over everything at the time, even reason.

[beavis]

<---- stops swinging his science penis and puts it back in his pants

[fredhedd]

now that we have that out of the way...

A simple solution would appear to be simply to select more wavelengths. For that matter, why not select every data point in the spectrum? The reason is that the Mahalanobis model tends to become overfit very quickly as more wavelengths are added. This is only logical when the method of calculating Mahalanobis matrix is considered. Since all the inter-wavelength variations are considered just as important as matching the corresponding wavelengths, the likelihood of an unknown sample having the same relative intensity values at all selected wavelengths decreases substantially. In the worst case, using too many wavelengths can cause "good" samples to be misclassified as not in the group. In practice, using more than approximately 10 to 15 wavelengths can lead to misclassification of known samples. In other words, samples that should be classified as members of that group, are rejected as non-members. There have been procedures put forth for optimum wavelength selection33 based on all the groups used for comparison. However, this can be a time consuming and computationally intensive process.

A fast and precise position of GRB was needed, where the Holy Grail of GRB scientists, i.e. the counterpart, could have been searched for at all wavelengths. This became possible within a year after the launch on April 30, 1996, of the Italian-Dutch satellite BeppoSAX, named after Giuseppe (Beppo) Occhialini, one of the fathers of high energy astrophysics in Italy. The poor positional accuracy of Gamma-ray instrumentation is circumvented by associating to a monitor of gamma-ray bursts (GRBM, which provides the temporal signature of a GRB), two wide-field X-ray cameras (WFC), able to locate the GRB within 3', in a field of view of 40° x 40°. A deep search of the afterglow emission of the GRB is then carried out with a set of more sensitive, narrow-field (~ 1°) X-ray telescopes (NFI), by re-orienting the satellite towards the location provided by the wide field instruments. On February 28, 1997, the gamma-ray burst GRB970228 was detected by the BeppoSAX GRBM and localized by the WFC. The NFI were pointed to the GRB location 8 hours after burst, leading to the discovery of a previously unknown X-ray source. The new source appeared to be fading away during the observation. On March 3, another observation confirmed that the source was quickly decaying: at that time its flux was a factor of about 20 lower than at the time of the first observation. This was the first detection of an "afterglow" of a GRB (Fig.1). While the X-ray monitoring of GRB970228 was going on, numerous observatories probed the location of the GRB, which had been provided by the BeppoSAX team, at all wavelengths. This campaign led to the discovery of an optical transient associated with the X-ray afterglow by a group led by Jan van Paradijs. Yet, the crucial information on the distance of the GRB was still missing. On 8 May 1997 the second breakthrough came with another BeppoSAX GRB: GRB970508, which was observed by the BeppoSAX NFI 5.7 hours after the burst, and by optical telescopes starting 4 hours after the burst. The early detection of the optical transient, and its relatively bright magnitude permitted a spectroscopic measurement of its optical spectrum with the Keck telescope by a team led by S. Kulkarni. The spectrum revealed the presence of absorption lines at a redshift of z = 0.835, produced by the gas of the galaxy hosting the GRB, and therefore demonstrated that GRB970508 was at a cosmological distance. As of today, we have measured the distance of 20 GRB, and all of them are in distant galaxies.


this should clear up any misunderstandings.

[cainam_nazier]

It's as clear as mud.  How did I miss that one?

It's really just all gibberish isn't it?

[no_leaf_clover]

After thinking about what I read about the new theory on time that I posted on the Astral Chat forum, I'm going to spit this out to you guys and you tell me what you think. I don't know if it's what this new theory is stating or whether I'm completely off, but I think its an interesting idea nonetheless.

Time is infinite, so no matter how you divide it, it's still infinite, and therefore you cannot truly divide it, right? You can measure it to a certain point, and use those units of measurement in equations, but when you start playing around with time itself, you wouldn't be able to assign time a number at any one specific point in time, because you can divide that moment trillions and trillions of times over and you'd still be 0.000000% done towards picking an exact 'frame' or 'moment' in time. They simply don't exist as modern theories hold (that time is like a freeze-frame sort of camera: specific moments that flow together like the way pictures flow together to form movies).

You can't define a specific moment because a specific moment is infinitely small. In fact, our whole lives are infinitely small. The only moment in time, is time itself (time is infinitely long and a single moment is infinitely small, so therefore they equal out and time itself is equal to 1 freeze-frame, if that's the idea that you're used to), and everything that will happen and has happened.

If everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is just 1 moment, the only moment, an infinite moment, then every lifetime, every day, every year, etc., all take up the same amount of time: an infinite amount of time. Remember the last time you ate? You're eating that meal now and you always were and always will be. BUT, you are no longer conscious of it or experiencing it, obviously, or things would get get very confusing as you went to do something else.

This is what leads me to believe that time was designed to organize experiences. Without time, you would be doing everything in your lifetime at once, including dying and being born, which would be extremely hard to make sense of with the kinds of brains we are equipped with here.

As far as the astral and realms above it, the units of time we use to measure the speed of our flowing consciousness (and not the flow of time itself!) distorts, but time itself still exists, or else, once again, you would experience everything you are to experience at once in that realm. Time no longer exists when you finally a part of the universal consciousness, and you finally *do* experience everything that you ever have or will experience at once. At that point, since time no longer exists, that 'moment' can actually be called just that: a moment. It would impossible to measure in means of time since time would no longer exist. It's a situation that I don't think I can even comprehend, since I'm to experience everything with the help of time.

So there you go.. To me, it sounds possible at least, if that is actually the new theory. If it isn't, like I said before, I think it's an interesting idea. I love topics like this [8D]