The Steel Guitar Forum

Other than it's your usual "rear About Face" wont!

I only understand Ground underfoot, is it that you like your "Vice Versa" ?

That darned profanity checker, I actually said (in Phonetics) "aah-se"... and it changed it to rear which is NOTHING like what I meant..

No...NOTHING like that. It's where we all will be going when this is over !!

Six feet under ground. Not for a while, I hope.

.........I...
___________________

.........reacted..........

Is it possible, then, for nothing to catch up to something? (And those ZB's sure are something!)

Yes, if "nothing" can travel at 186,285 miles per second, then it is most definately possible.

Indeed, can "nothing" ever come into being as "something" by any sort of physics- or grammar-related transformation?

Most certainly __ the "big bang" is a good example.

It's been said that nothing exists in a vacuum. I took mine apart, and I found a whole lot of somethings in there, so I'm not sure that that's right....

This poses the question, why would anyone want to own a machine, such as yours (vacuum cleaner), for the purpose of cleaning a vacuum? Why wouldn't a vacuum already be clean? You were not really cleaning a vacuum; or, your vacuum cleaning machine has self-destructed and the debris inside is the residual of its working parts.

...so SHOW OFF is still the winner with 191,947 !!

Beats 186,285 any day but think NOTHING of it !

Hey, nothing's not through yet.

Rick Collins wrote:

Indeed, can "nothing" ever come into being as "something" by any sort of physics- or grammar-related transformation?

Most certainly __ the "big bang" is a good example.

But the Big Bang didn't come out of nothing. It came out of everything concentrated in one spot. In fact the Big Bang was the opposite of nothing; it was everything.
There is a theory that the Big Bang came out of the Universe contracting down to a point where it could contract no further, and then started to expand again with the Big Bang. If that is true, then the Universe has always existed, and goes through repeated expansion and contraction, rather like simple harmonic motion. It would explain why the mathematic formulæ break down in the first microsecond after the Big Bang; because they assume a start at zero, when, in fact, there never was a zero.

In layman's terms, there never was nothing nohow.

Does "nothing" become something by having an identity as "nothing"? Because it has an identity it must exist. Maybe it is both something and nothing at the same time.

Ahhh.... Duality.

Is that an argument or a contradiction?

Even the "null" character has an ASCII code (and an EBCDIC code also).

Alan Brookes wrote:
But the Big Bang didn't come out of nothing. It came out of everything concentrated in one spot. In fact the Big Bang was the opposite of nothing:

You are postulating this because of our very limited knowledge of the workings of the universe.
All of your assumptions are derived form the currently known laws of physics.
The Hadron collider might very well change some of these.
Before the big bang, there was no space. As matter was created, space was created along with the matter.
Space exists because of matter.

From this "known" I can conclude that creation is extremely difficult to comprehend.
This gets very close to explaning my reason for believing in a Superior Reasoning Power.
Perhaps findings from the Hadron collider experiments will reveal a better picture of creation.
If the experiments show nothing before the big bang are we to conclude that there was nothing before the big bang?

But Alan: What if b0b sees that NOTHING never existed, we're all going to be OFF TOPIC !! All 2,315 of us !!!

The reason this discussion will go without end is because "nothing" is both a word and what it describes.

The word "nothing" obviously exists, and as such IS something, i.e. a word.

What the word describes is the lack of anything. If only one item exists then there is no lack of everything.

But in English usage the word "nothing" is usually taken to mean the absence of anything within parameters. e.g. There is nothing in my wallet.

Unfortunately, "nothing" is not one word, it's two, which happens to have become compressed in contemporary English. If you take the above sentence, and write it as "There is no thing in my wallet" it cannot be misconstrued as that there is a thing in my wallet called "nothing".

Found this great video of a lecture by a particle physicist on cosmology. It's fun to watch, all the way through, even if you only understand some of what he's talking about. He's strongly anti-religious, but it's worth watching for the science.

'A Universe From Nothing':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo

Lawrence Krauss and his ilk are a "dime a dozen".
He speaks to get giggles from the crowd when he displays his limited knowledge of the workings of the universe.
What has he ever done? How about NOTHING?
His books are plagiarized from already known theoretical physics ideas.
Great people like Einstein and Bohr didn't talk like this.
Would he be distinguishable from Clara Bell if he had an airhorn to toot when he tried to come up with an original idea?

I thought he did a good job of tieing a lot of different theories together, and covering a lot of subject matter in a short period of time. It made it all more understandable to me, more than other people I've seen on TV whose purpose seemed to be more to just entertain or sell a book.

Once I started watching that video I watched the whole thing, all 1 hr. 5 mins. of it. Yes, it plagiarizes the works of others, but then so do everyone else's lectures; it's impossible not to. I didn't find the style of presentation that much different from people like Carl Sagan and Steven Hawkins (allowing for the fact that Steven Hawkins has to be accompanied by a speaker nowadays.) A lecture addressed to amateur physicists will always be "dumbed down" to a certain extent. I've never heard a lecture by Albert Einstein, but I don't imagine it would have differed that much in presentation, after all he was usually lecturing to undergraduates.

The idea that the grand sum of the Universe is zero, so that any random fluctuations would generate equal and opposite random fluctuations, and hence bring the Universe into existence from nothing, makes good logical sense, but, to me, the question then becomes, in the complete absence of anything how do random fluctuations occur ?

I've thought that over and can contribute nothing.

Either way - without getting into an argument about whether it just happened or Someone constructed it - it's amazing and fun to think about how it works.

At the time of the Big Bang, if it happened, I wasn't conscious of it. At the time of the Big Crunch, or the Whimpering Out, I won't be conscious of it. Scientists in the past who have speculated about the origins of the universe have later had their theories dismissed or disproven, but they died thinking they were right. In the end, how is it going to change our lives right now if we speculate correctly or incorrectly on the origin of the universe ?

Anyway, there are a lot of people out there who think that the Rapture will come on Saturday (today), so I guess we don't need to know any further as all the humans will be removed from the planet today and all that will be left will be the wild animals.
http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/outreach/tracts/may21/

I reckon nature needs a break anyway. This Earth has been infested with humans long enough. The good we've done to the planet adds up to nothing.

Alan: NOTHING may come of this but I have to disagree with you...I shall begin a list of those who have helped make it a better world. It will begin with your name and end with mine. In between those will be the 500,000,000 people the planet is supposed to hold per the Mini Stone Henge somewhere here in Georgia. I see NOTHING left for the other 6 and a half billion folks...

Alan says,

Anyway, there are a lot of people out there who think that the Rapture will come on Saturday (today), so I guess we don't need to know any further as all the humans will be removed from the planet today and all that will be left will be the wild animals

According to the Bible, not all people make it up. There are those that go and those that are left behind.

There are 2 1/2 hours left before we declare this guy a false prophet. An alternative view, the rapture was cancelled for a better day. Perhaps it was postponed so that more people can participate in the big event.

Sometime today or early tomorrow, NOTHING will exceed 91,841 views and while that is NOTHING to sneeze about, it is still 100,000 views behind Show Off. Maybe by the time the next Rapture Warning is issued, we'll make the grade...that may be a long time to wait for NOTHING considering what just happened !!

..........NOTHING !!

Yes it does look like that prophecy didn't come true, which would be a shame for all the people who bought the T-shirts and invested and made arrangements for their pets. But it seemed so believable - maybe his mathematics were off just slightly again. Did he include Quantum Mechanics in his calculations? Maybe it did happen, but he just had the wrong parallel universe. Or maybe time goes backwards sometime in the future and returns to 5/21/11 and then it happens. Or - Has anyone seen Mr. Camping today? Maybe he was the only one taken. Or if he is apparently still here, it could be a clone.

Don Kona Woods wrote:...According to the Bible, not all people make it up. There are those that go and those that are left behind...

I guess the selection criteria were very strict. We seem to have all been left behind.

We had better change the subject or this thread will be closed, as it comes close to having nothing to do with nothing.

Alan: You may have something there...I mean NOTHING THERE !! Have you noticed the lil' icon bell in front of this thread file ?? It is beeping some sort of signal that says NO NEW POSTS !! b0b may be trying to tell us something or do you think it is like all the rest of this... NOTHING ??