J.C.MacSwell

Thanks Spyman that's what I was after.

This is conjecture at this point. We have no idea of how or why. I thought the EM and W were the same at higher energies, not just connected, but I may have been mislead as Severian suggested. I thought Weinberg, Glashow and Salam won the Nobel prize for that?

I think physicists, for the most part, are pretty good at staying objective. But I do question the degree of "faith" they seem to have in "theories" such as the Big Bang Model. Built up on strong circumstantial evidence, and having no serious alternatives "remaining standing", has seemed to have produced a paradigm of certainty beyond what seems warranted. I think "science" puts the Big Bang Model as the clear front runner, but faith, mob mentality ( ) or just by default it gets pushed into the all but certain range.

Time took a serious beating back in 1905... and still hasn't recovered.

In your opinion would he give a good review to a well written anti-string book? I know people that, where I respect their work, I would take with a bucket of salt their opinion of a competitor or colleague. Not that I know anything at all of Dr. Motl, but why shouldn't Martin urge others to ignore him, if he feels the guy is not being objective and is on a crusade?

You could also try a warm glass of milk.

As in a gravitation only effect, the weakest known force, or are there other possible effects they are looking for?

Interesting how that works out.

Note the idea of using a historical definition. Pluto and anything bigger would be "in". It might be interesting to have a "minor planets" definition in this way. Pluto and Xena would qualify, and anything smaller would be dwarfs, asteroids etc.

I read somewhere here (IIRC, I tried to search it but the search didn't work for some reason) that light intensity at astronomical distances stops falling off at the expected rate (I think it would be inverse squared combined with the redshift etc.) If I didn't dream this does anyone have an explanation or link?

I think a good arbitrary definition of a major planet would be that it must be larger than our moon. That would get rid of the ambiguous "cleared it's path/dominant" part. Moons would still be excluded and Pluto would still be out so it wouldn't change anything at present.

As long as we weren't in geosync with the "Eye". Can you imagine that thing staring at you full time?

Pluto should have been given a grace period lasting til the end of '06. This would have allowed for "farewell to Pluto" parties to bring in the New Year.

For what porpoise? (I would hate to see the suggestions if they were transuranus )

I have read this in some reports and "dominant in it's area" in others.

I should know this, but neutrons themselves aren't candidates as they radiate via their charged quark components, right?

Thanks Martin So if say the mass was estimated correctly but the distances overestimated by a factor of 2 (thus galaxy volume by 8 and gravitational force by 4) then "3 masses" worth of dark matter would be "found" (no longer needed) Or in your example of a 20% mass sun if the distances were reduced by 55% then everything would stay in balance. Is there any correlation between "dark matter required" and the distance away?

Let me think about that for about 12 hours.

How much stronger gravity would be required, in the average galaxy, to hold it together? Put another way, if we assume that the mass that we can observe is all there is in each galaxy, how much smaller would the average galaxy have to be to hold it together? Could our mass estimates be correct, but our distance measurements be off enough to allow for the difference? Could this be evidence of space curvature over a certain scale? (If I was on the North Pole, could see the equator along the curve etc. and correctly estimated the distance to the equator but thought the Earth was flat, I would overestimate the length of something lying along the Equator)

Aren't we all? I read most of Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind" and found it quite interesting. The math's were over my head there also but I think I got an impression of where he was going.