That's a great explanation of the absorption but I think the other missing piece of the puzzle is why the photons that aren't absorbed must be scattered or reflected instead of passing straight through (after all, atoms and molecules are mostly empty space). We know visible light can pass through some solid matter and radio and microwaves can pass through apples.

I don't relish pointing that out because I know the answer isn't easy: I think an answer to that might be need to get into the realms of QED and particle interractions. Nevertheless, I do think any answer to why an orange is orange (not all apples are red so not a great example imo) needs to explain why orange is scattered or reflected and not just why non-orange light is absorbed.

Maybe a simpler adaptation of the fire extinguisher analogy: a fire extinguisher that shoots a second of water before carbon dioxide. Operators were playing with deep fat friers thinking it was fine because they had CO2 fire extinguishers.

>"guilty" of having been in an extremely toxic relationship

That isn't a crime. It's a strange thing to dislike someone for.

>both of them were violent

I watched the trial and saw no real evidence that he was. I saw faked evidence (doctored photos, made up bruises), which strongly suggests it never happened in a way that no evidence at all would not: people don't to fake evidence of something that actually happened. Conversely, I saw his blood on the floor. That wasn't faked.

>he aired his dirtiest, stinkiest shittiest laundry for everyone to see

Yeah he had to clear his name. That took guts. It's also a result of him being honest during the trial (of drink and drug misuse). That honesty was commendable I think. I'm pretty sure self-medicating when you're being abused like that would be quite common.

You do you but that seems a very strange and judgemental take on the whole affair to me.

>I don’t think a piece of media can be toxic via the moral standing of its creator.

I think it's fair to say Mein Kampf wouldn't be half so toxic if it wasn't for its author (for his actions and infamy) and yes if Crime and Punishment had been written by Hitler it would be tainted.

>a worse piece of art

What does that mean? How is that not 100% subjective?

Very good point to make.

I think you can make a valid analogy between

DNA, biochemistry, and the physical forms of all animals and plants etc,

with

An encrypted hash (or lossless compression), the encryption/compression algorithm, and the thing that was encrypted/compressed.

The difference as you rightly point out is that we produce the hash from the desired end result 'encode' videos and images etc,

Whereas DNA evolves by the reverse process: with random hashes and if something useful emerges from that then the DNA gets kept and then adapted with more random changes that get kept or discarded.

Nevertheless, the end result is the same: a compressed/encrypted file that, with the application of the correct algorithm, can produce the entity in question. In that sense, 'encoded' is a valid verb for DNA: our physical forms are encoded within our DNA the algorithm is not reversible and never needed to be.

It's really hard to explain in words even in a book let alone in a few paragraphs.

Perhaps an analogy:

Langton's Ant is a mathematical curiosity. The idea is an infinite grid. The 'ant' is a marker with position and direction and gets set in motion from anywhere in any direction (the grid is infinite and uniform so it makes no difference). When the ant lands on a cell (a grid square), if the cell is white it turns it black and turns right, if the cell is black it turns it white and turns left. The future behaviour of the ant and the grid is entirely determined by those two rules and the colour-scape of the grid. No other information is present. But the picture it creates is immensely complicated.

Fractals like the Mandelbrot Set and Julia Sets could be another example.

A simple set of iterated rules can produce a very complicated structure and do so repeatedly and reliably. If you don't change the rules you'll always get the same structure.

The degrees of separation between the rules that DNA (combined with all sorts of biochemistry) provide and the physical structures they lead to are as a chasm but they are still pretty reliable and predictable so clones will reliably look almost exactly the same as each other (same rules, same outcome).

Another analogy would be trying to understand how a sequence of zeroes and ones, or the simple rules of machine code, can lead to what we can achieve even just nowadays with AI (outthinking grandmasters at Chess, generating convincing art, etc). It boggles the mind (or should). The rules of DNA (and their interaction with all sorts of biochemistry) are arguably much more complex and varied than machine code so it shouldn't really come as a surprise that it can produce an infinitude of possible biological shapes and yet do so as predictably and consistently as a computer program.

Does that make sense?

At an infinitesimal point yes but across a volume tidal forces exist. There would be a slight stretching in the direction of the Sun and squeezing tangential to the Sun.

Across a year those forces would rotate 360° and not uniformly (we could calculate the eccentricity of the elliptical orbit from that).

Edit: measuring all that would be a lot more difficult because the earth is spinning so would have to figure that out so we can subtract the effects of that on our measurements.

It's hard to imagine how any species could properly understand physics well enough to do this without seeing the night sky so perhaps a better mind experiment is if a scientist got teleported to a sealed windowless box on a random planet somewhere in the universe could they tell by measurement whether the planet was in orbit around a star or not and the details of that orbit. I'm 99% sure they could from tidal forces and possibly by other means too.

Edit 2: another way to tell would be from the time-dilation differential from one side of the room to the other. A clock slightly deeper in the star's gravity well would run slightly slower.

The hypothetical scenario is something like if we always lived in caverns miles beneath the surface so didn't even know the sun existed. Could we tell by local experiments that the earth was in motion and in orbit and the metrics of that orbit?

I think in theory we could from tidal forces and we'd notice a periodicity of a year for those and could in theory work the rest out.

>Can we consider that Earth is "accelerating"/spinning referent to the sun, because it's rotating around the sun? And the sun around the galaxy? And the galaxy around some center of mass of local group?

Absolutely we can and should but with a big caveat: general relativity tells us that the earth, the sun, the galaxy and everything that is only 'moving' due to gravity is following geodesics: 'straight' lines in a curved spacetime; they're not accelerating relative to spacetime; they're weightless in free fall. Just like a 'stationary' object infinitely far from any gravitational effects.

Nevertheless, things are definitely in motion. There is no frame of reference where everything is still. The earth is definitely rotating around the sun (and the sun around the galaxy) relative to any outside observer. But from the earth's frame of reference we can consider ourselves 'stationary' because we don't experience any acceleration from our orbit.

If we never saw the night sky it would be difficult if not impossible to prove by experiment that the earth is in motion around the sun. We could prove it's spinning at 1 rev per day because that's not due to gravity, the real forces of atoms in the Earth's crust are constantly accelerating us upwards against the freefall flow of spacetime and that allows us to spin at less than orbital speeds and feel the weight of things.

>So calculate the real time/speed of something really far, like another galaxy, can become very tricky

It is tricky to measure distant velocities but not really because of our motion or any acceleration: accelerations are rarely big enough to make massive changes in velocity quickly. There are exceptions: measuring the speed of expansion of a supernova would be difficult because it's accelerating (or decelarating) hard but not so for the motion of a star or galaxy across the sky. The difficulties in measuring that are nothing to do with its acceleration or ours. They are because all velocities are relatively small compared to the enormity of space. They might take a century to move a thousandth of a degree across the sky.

Nevertheless, for really accurate measurements of, say, the velocity of Andromeda relative to the Milky Way, we do have to take into account the movement of the Earth round the Sun and the movement of the Sun around and within the Milky Way but that's pretty easy to do, we know those velocities well and we just subtract them from the raw measurements.

I hope all that makes sense and I haven't laboured the point.