Film at 11: Equal Time

[athelind]

It infuriates me that, while almost every prime-time show we watch regularly has at least one ad supporting the reprehensible Proposition 8, I have yet to see a single ad opposing it. What happened to "equal time"?

Or is this a situation where those foul "pro" ads work just as well to stoke up the fury of any thinking person against this?

From the bile these people spew, you'd think that they believe that if their proposition to Eliminate Rights* doesn't pass, same-sex marriage will become mandatory for everyone.

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*Bless you, Jerry Brown, for renaming this Act to accurately describe what it means.

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Comments

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Oh, really? Would you care to demonstrate that? Offer some shred of proof that it exists?

I will tell you why I'm sorta skeptical here. When someone asks my wife what she does for a living and she says "mathematical physicist" there are two general reactions. The first and more common is for people to place what she does on this pedestal and veer away from the subject entirely. The second response is for people to start to assert that their favorite wild hypotheses are absolute fact and begin the discussion from that ground. My own education is epistemology and history of science, so this is absolutely fascinating to me how people will take abstruse cosmological arguments, simplify them to the point of meaninglessness and then project some pet hypothesis they have - and then refuse to acknowledge that the basis of their reasoning is an extremely controversial and unproven scientific theory whose truth value is quite nominal. I think that's what's going on here.

For instance, I think you're referring to the particle horizon of the observable universe or the event horizon of the universe. But there's a lot we don't know about the actual shape of the universe much less the non-observable entities into which it may or may not be expanding into, where that expansion comes from, where it's going, etc. To speak of this unobservable particle or event horizon as having specific characteristics is simply wild speculation. I mean, y'know, wilder than the wild speculation about the universe's event horizon, shape and destiny.

So, in my opinion, you're not asking a scientific question, but seem more interested in gaining validation for your speculation from a scientist.

For the record, I actually forwarded your question - verbatim - to my wife. She said, "I don't know enough to begin to answer that question." Like I said, she doesn't actually work in the cosmology field (if you want to know about double-diffusive convection and salt fingers in astronomical studies, she might be able to give a better answer, hehe), though she has written a computer simulation of galactic supercluster expansion taking into account dark energy. That's the extent of her work in the field. She has never worked to answer the question of "what is dark energy?" though I *do* know that she believes that no-one knows the causes of the increase in the rate of galactic expansion.

On the other hand, perhaps you've got a unique insight into a thorny question. You should write up a paper about it. ;)

[starblade-enkai.livejournal.com]

I can try. Unfortunately I don't know enough about physics to actually put this knowledge to a test. All I can do, at this point, is speculate.

Actually I do know that Unruh Radiation occurs whenever there is a horizon, and in a black hole it is called Bekenstein-Hawking Radiation. It has been explained to me that if you are constantly accelerating then some events will never interact with you. There is a surface beyond which light from those events cannot interact, and this creates the observation of thermal radiation.

What I'm saying is that if expansion creates an actual horizon (which it should if cosmic acceleration causes light from other parts of the universe to then be unable to reach us due to faster-than-light velocity differences) there should be black-body radiation coming from that horizon.

Oh, and maybe I will just write a paper on it. Who knows? Maybe that cosmic microwave background radiation will turn out to be just this black-body radiation. It could even be the source of global warming! :P