Wolter-1 mirrors

[Plane]

  For all we know at this point , a spotless sun would not work.

    Next you are going to tell me that Leopards should not be spotted.

    I can't see that a sunspot is anything like a flaw in the design of the sun, nor any sort of imperfection.

      Is Florida more perfect than Colorado for being flatter?
      Would the ideal Human Face have no orifices on it?

      I just can't see your origional premise as being logical in the least.

[Xavier_Onassis]

You should consult St. Thomas Aquinas about his images of perfection. They are his images, not mine.

I think that his imagery comes from Plato.

In his mind, the Earth was corrupt and chaotic, and everything in the Heavens was perfect and free of disorder. I don't think that he thought of anything in the sky as serving any purpose other than being sort of like God's furniture.

A Sun without sunspots would be likely to function perfectly. Galileo was one of the first to examine the planets and other heavenly bodies with a telescope. St. Thomas had no telescope, saw no sunspots or other irregularities. The Church said that there were no sunspots or blemishes,and that if Galileo saw them, it was simply more evidence that Satan was clouding his vision. They forced Galileo to rescind his observation that the Earth was immobile in the center of Creation, with all the other bodies rotating around it. This is because Man was God's greatest Creation and the sole motive for the creation of the universe.

Again, this is not my logic, it is St.Thomas's logic. The Earth became imperfect as a result of Adam & Eve's original sin, but had originally been created as a perfect place. Since God is perfect, all His creations are perfect: if he draws a circle, it will be only a perfect circle. If he creates an sphere, it can only be a perfect sphere, because God by His nature only creates perfection.\

I don't think the Church scholars got into mountains as being imperfections, but of course, if God created a sphere, it would have to be a perfect sphere.

God created Man in his own image, so a perfect human face would be an exact replica of God's face.

A leopard uses its spots as camouflage, to make it a better hunter. A leopard in a perfect world would probably be a vegetarian, since violence is chaotic and there is no chaos in a perfect world. The lion would lie down with the lamb and all creatures would live in harmony, so a leopard might not have spots.

[Plane]

  This version of the sublime is rediculous.

    Thomas Aquinus might have been right about many things, Plato may have been right about many things, but they were not writing Christian scripture , none of which makes this particular mistake.

     

[Xavier_Onassis]

Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas all made many mistakes.

Chaos and randomness demonstrably rule the universe to some degree.

Galileo was correct in his approach to determine the truth: observation.

Aquinas was incorrect in his approach: to reason it out, based on  incontrovertible holy scriptures.

[Plane]

Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas all made many mistakes.

Chaos and randomness demonstrably rule the universe to some degree.

Galileo was correct in his approach to determine the truth: observation.

Aquinas was incorrect in his approach: to reason it out, based on  incontrovertible holy scriptures.

   Apparently not.
    Aquinas was reasoning it out in the style of Aristotle or Plato and repeating the mistakes therein.
     I don't feel the need to reconcile Holy writ with Aristotles works.
    Observation has expanding limits , but there are still limits.
     Logic knows no limit , but depends on having true facts to start with.

[Xavier_Onassis]

There were errors in Plato, Aristotle AND the Bible. Aquinas was bound to be wrong.

The problem was that the holy writ was in fact controvertible.

[Plane]

  I do see you proveing Aquinus, Plato and Aristotle to have errors.

    That was easy wasn't it?

[Xavier_Onassis]

It is easy due to what science has learned in the past 200 years or so.

The fact is that the Earth is chaotic, but no less so than the rest of the Universe. Original Sin apparently has had no effect on the physical world as once claimed by Aquinas.

[Plane]

Chaos has a math to describe it , and it is found in surprising places.
Like the top of a billards table.
All the more miraculous that order shows up often enough for life to exist.

Chaos is only a term for what is impossible for us to controll for, it is the very face of God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.

[Plane]

Say , this is good stuff.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

Chaos theory is applied in many scientific disciplines: geology, mathematics, programming, microbiology, biology, computer science, economics,[6][7][8] engineering,[9] finance,[10][11] meteorology, philosophy, physics, politics, population dynamics, psychology, and robotics.

Chaotic behavior has been observed in the laboratory in a variety of systems including electrical circuits, lasers, oscillating chemical reactions, fluid dynamics, and mechanical and magneto-mechanical devices, as well as computer models of chaotic processes. Observations of chaotic behavior in nature include changes in weather,[5] the dynamics of satellites in the solar system, the time evolution of the magnetic field of celestial bodies, population growth in ecology, the dynamics of the action potentials in neurons, and molecular vibrations. There is some controversy over the existence of chaotic dynamics in plate tectonics and in economics.[12][13][14]

A successful application of chaos theory is in ecology where dynamical systems such as the Ricker model have been used to show how population growth under density dependence can lead to chaotic dynamics[citation needed].

Chaos theory is also currently being applied to medical studies of epilepsy, specifically to the prediction of seemingly random seizures by observing initial conditions.[15]

Quantum chaos theory studies how.............

[Plane]

You should consult St. Thomas Aquinas about his images of perfection. They are his images, not mine.

    This is a problem.


     Is anyone present willing to assume Saint Thomas Aquinus's champion role?

      Preferably someone who thinks he has a point, or at least is better breifed than X or I.

       Seeing as we are referencing him so often even though neither XO nor I think he was right about these things.

[Plane]

Pt.1/9 High Anxieties - The Mathematics of Chaos


Chaos on youtube.

     There is a real butterfly effect, the more factors are involved the more the little ones matter, the more time passes, the more a pretty simple system departs from predictability.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Seeing as we are referencing him so often even though neither XO nor I think he was right about these things.

==============================================
It will be difficult to find anyone who will argue that the Earth is at the center of the Universe and the Sun and other planets all rotate about it.  It will be difficult to find anyone who will say that the Earth alone is imperfect and chaotic, while the rest of the Universe is in peaceful, unchanging, uninterruptible harmony,

The fact is that Aquinas was clearly wrong, and was proven so by science starting in the Renaissance period.

The Church no longer even tries to tie the Bible and the nature of the physical universe together.It is officially one of the mysteries of the faith.

[Plane]

Seeing as we are referencing him so often even though neither XO nor I think he was right about these things.

==============================================
It will be difficult to find anyone who will argue that the Earth is at the center of the Universe and the Sun and other planets all rotate about it.  It will be difficult to find anyone who will say that the Earth alone is imperfect and chaotic, while the rest of the Universe is in peaceful, unchanging, uninterruptible harmony,

The fact is that Aquinas was clearly wrong, and was proven so by science starting in the Renaissance period.

The Church no longer even tries to tie the Bible and the nature of the physical universe together.It is officially one of the mysteries of the faith.

     By "the Chirch" you don't mean the Catholic Chirch do you?

       My prodestent faith accepts that members will be wrong about things now and then, I don't know about Catholics.

       Do they insist that all of their members are always right?

       How about you , do you have as much confidence as Thomas Aquinas did that the science of our day has a true picture of how the Universe works?

[Xavier_Onassis]

By "the Church", I mean the Roman Catholic Church. It was pretty much the only Church in the time of Aquinas.

Aquinas was convinced that he had reconciled the Christian religion (ie the Roman Catholic Church) with Greek philosophy into a logical view of the Universe. He had faith that it was true.

Science does not deal with certainties. It deals with probabilities. There is always a willingness to disprove old theories in order to refine them into new theories. What we know about gravity at the practical level is pretty clear. If you get into the very large or very small areas or into black holes and the like, then we still know that there is much that we cannot explain so easily.

So I have a working knowledge of such things as they apply to me, not a faith that I know everything for sure.

Protestants leave the theology up to the individual, with the result that there is much variety about it. I taught an intro to philosophy class several times, and was amazed that so many students who claimed to be Christians believed in astrology as well and could not see why they could not believe that their fate was determined by the stars and at the same time  by their beliefs and actions.

Of course, if you are fated by the stars, then salvation is impossible. You are either blessed or doomed by the position of the stars at the time you were born and that is it.

It is easy to believe contradictory things if you never bother to think about it.