island

heheh... I don't think he's gonna buy that either, but they don't call Relativity "counter-intuitive" for nothin

Yeah... I meant the ISS So, shoot me...

But not before they saw, via camera footage, that the insullation had flown off of the fuel tank and hit the shuttle edge-on. And not before engineers were stiffled by upper managment when they tried to point out that some scenarios indicated the impact force of the insullation hitting the shuttle could end disasterously. And not before they picked up the damaged piece of the shuttle on radar as it fell off of the shuttle in outer space! And not before they failed to train available high resolution miltary telescopes on the damaged section to get a better idea of what that might have been all about... And then nobody took responsibility for the fact that they had enough fuel that they could have abandoned ship after space-walking to the MiR, whereby they could have decended to Earth via the many available soyuz capsules that the Russians have for just such an event. Instead, they dodged even discussing that option by claiming that they didn't have a docking ring... So. What? They didn't have to die... is what, but they were more of an loosely calculated economic risk that the powers that be... saw fit to take

1) It's not negative gravity, but it does have an antigravity effect if the universe is expanding. This is not the case if it is contracting or static. 2) The "idea" is supported by the most conservative approach to the cosmological constant, as well as any other theory that's worth having, so yeah, you might want to "consider the idea"... lol ... of Einstein, et. al... with a little more than idle curiosity... Yeah, okay... the rate of expansion beyond the Hubble distance is necessarily FTL, but no violation of SR.

Don't branes come in layers?...

The only truly universal pattern that I've ever found to extends to all *levels*... is for obvious good reason... a layers theory. Patterns being the essence of all math and physics, this "universatility" necessarily defines a ToE, which extends teleologically right across the philosophical and metaphyical realm, and into the reality of our everyday lives. The yin-yang is one philosophical example of this, because *related* layers oppose each other relatively or *complimetarily*. Matter/Antimatter symmetry examples the literal relevance of this.

Wow!... I disagree, and I am just now, after many *cough* years of personal observation of Spaceflight... finally figuring out why, because I feel the same way as Ophiolite when it comes to the risk that's involved. BUT... if someone asks the question, "Can we successfully explore deep space?", what happens to the answer when you have to consider that maybe the last 3 out of 7 space missions failed? I clearly remember my confidence that our first trip to the moon would be completely successful, and now I finally understand that my confidence came from our ability to do the impossible, yet still bring em back alive... ala, Apollo 13... and there is little doubt now, that this COULD have been the case in the last doomed shuttle mission too! They failed to consider all of the options in the last shuttle disaster, and there is no excuse for that, but the bottom line is that the success rate of the space program must far outweigh its failure rate... or we ain't got a chance in hell of any real long-term survival and we will know this... IN OUR GUT!

Damndest drug smuggling operation I've ever heard of...

I couldn't help but notice, and now I can't get over how awkward this looks, and I wanted to explain that it was not intended as an insult: "i" wrote: No "pinhead"... per the physics that I've previously given I simply meant to address this point: SpaceTime wrote: This viewpoint is more likely to be realistic than, the viewpoint where we all miraculously exploded out of a pinhead. I should have said something like... 'No "pinhead" necessary'... or something that appeared less insulting than the way that it came out, but it honestly wasn't my intent to call spacie a pinhead... On the other hand... calling him a "dink"... was quite appropriate under the latter circumstances... heheh

Originally Posted by Anarchaus The bigger the star, the farther out the planet has to be to support life(not too hot, not too cold). This is an interpretation of the anthropic principle, and you can use it more-broadly to predict where life is *more-probable* or more likely to be found. For example, it's a hard known fact that the *balance* between extremes that you've described is inherent to every single anthropic coincidence. In every case there is a fine range of potential which derives an ecosystematic balance, like Earth exists *between* Venus and Mars, our two nearest sister/brother planets that almost made it, but didn't quite make the grade. Venus and Mars are entirely necessary to the ecosystematic balance, in other words, so you should look for this range and its ecosystematic balance if you want to find life elsewhere in the universe, so you should look on the bands of spiral galaxies that are *about* the same age as ours, since older or newer systems exist outside of this narrow range or... plane of life This affects the probabilities because the principle indicates that bands of spiral galaxies that exist within the described, "relevant spectrum of potential" are analogous to "houses for life" and so life is extremely less-probable outside of this fine range of potential. You can research the ever growing list of "cosmic" or "anthropic coincidences" on the net, but beware that the physics is sorely abused in the creation/evolution "debate"... by one side... and dismissed out of hand without rational consideration by the other side. Ignore all that, and take note that the coincidences for life are not only balanced, but they are also balanced on the point of a needle, and would run very far away from our wildest dreams for the conditions that are necessary for life, if things weren't *near* perfectly balanced. This is important because "life as we know it"... is more likely to be the only way that life can exist because of this, so arguments for "other possible configurations" don't count for much: Like finding a pencil balanced on its point: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/lec28.html Also relevant: Dirac's Large Numbers and the Cosmological Constant

Okay, now let's look at Ned's example of Einstein's vacuum in a jar again, because we can very simply prove that the vacuum does *not* runaway during expansion if particle creation is the cause: If a piston capping a cylinder of vacuum is pulled out, producing more vacuum, the vacuum within the cylinder then has more energy which must have been supplied by a force pulling on the piston. If the vacuum is trying to pull the piston back into the cylinder, it must have a negative pressure, since a positive pressure would tend to push the piston out. Okay, the energy density of Einstein's vacuum is -- rho(vacuum)=0.5*rho(matter), so what happens to the vacuum if we get into the jar and squish this energy down over a finite region of space, until we have enough of it to achieve positive matter density? 1) You achieve positive gravitational curvature, and mass as well. 2) You have rarefied the vacuum, so negative pressure increases, and if there were no walls to contain it... ?... 3) The increase in mass energy is offset by the increase in negative pressure, so the vacuum does *not* runaway, as tension between the vacuum and ordinary matter grows, instead. 4) Eventually the forces will be compromised... and then what? hint: BOOM!!! Guess what that does to Dirac's hole theory if his "sea of electrons" has negative pressure until they get condensed to equal the matter density... ?...

Let's go back to Ned Wright's excellent treatment of this: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_constant.html Vacuum Energy Density, or How Can Nothing Weigh Something? Recently two different groups have measured the apparent brightness of supernovae with redshifts near z = 1. Based on this data the old idea of a cosmological constant is making a comeback. Einstein Static Cosmology Einstein's original cosmological model was a static, homogeneous model with spherical geometry. The gravitational effect of matter caused an acceleration in this model which Einstein did not want, since at the time the Universe was not known to be expanding. Thus Einstein introduced a cosmological constant into his equations for General Relativity. This term acts to counteract the gravitational pull of matter, and so it has been described as an anti-gravity effect. Why does the cosmological constant behave this way? This term acts like a vacuum energy density, an idea which has become quite fashionable in high energy particle physics models since a vacuum energy density of a specific kind is used in the Higgs mechanism for spontaneous symmetry breaking. Indeed, the inflationary scenario for the first picosecond after the Big Bang proposes that a fairly large vacuum energy density existed during the inflationary epoch. The vacuum energy density must be associated with a negative pressure because: The vacuum energy density must be constant because there is nothing for it to depend on. If a piston capping a cylinder of vacuum is pulled out, producing more vacuum, the vacuum within the cylinder then has more energy which must have been supplied by a force pulling on the piston. If the vacuum is trying to pull the piston back into the cylinder, it must have a negative pressure, since a positive pressure would tend to push the piston out. The magnitude of the negative pressure needed for energy conservation is easily found to be P = -u = -rho*c^2 where P is the pressure, u is the vacuum energy density, and rho is the equivalent mass density using E=m*c^2. But in General Relativity, pressure has weight, which means that the gravitational acceleration at the edge of a uniform density sphere is not given by g = GM/R^2 = (4*pi/3)*G*rho*R but is rather given by g = (4*pi/3)*G*(rho+3P/c^2)*R Now Einstein wanted a static model, which means that g = 0, but he also wanted to have some matter, so rho > 0, and thus he needed P < 0. In fact, by setting rho(vacuum) = 0.5*rho(matter) he had a total density of 1.5*rho(matter) and a total pressure of -0.5*rho(matter)*c^2 since the pressure from ordinary matter is essentially zero (compared to rho*c^2). Thus rho+3P/c^2 = 0 and the gravitational acceleration was zero, g = (4*pi/3)*G*(rho(matter)-2*rho(vacuum))*R = 0 allowing a static Universe. Einstein's Greatest Blunder However, there is a basic flaw in this Einstein static model: it is unstable - like a pencil balanced on its point. For imagine that the Universe grew slightly: say by 1 part per million in size. Then the vacuum energy density stays the same, but the matter energy density goes down by 3 parts per million. This gives a net negative gravitational acceleration, which makes the Universe grow even more! If instead the Universe shrank slightly, one gets a net positive gravitational acceleration, which makes it shrink more! Any small deviation gets magnified, and the model is fundamentally flawed. In addition to this flaw of instability, the static model's premise of a static Universe was shown by Hubble to be incorrect. This led Einstein to refer to the cosmological constant as his greatest blunder, and to drop it from his equations. But it still exists as a possibility -- a coefficient that should be determined from observations or fundamental theory.

You only have to know enough about enough and you did a good job... Thanks for the welcome

lol... what a dink contraversial ... and learn how to spell "harbor" right-n-proper like us yankee Sepo's do... mate...

Humans are specially required players in the thermodynamic game of our expanding universe, and the anthropic principle is actually an "entropic... anthropic principle". There are also other scientists like, Eric Schneider and James Kay, who also think that life is actually a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics, and they have written a number of supported peer reviewed papers on the subject. Both of these scientists are cited on the "EvoWiki" website as sources of rebuttal for misrepresented usages of the second law of thermodynamics by some creationists. Eric Schneider and science writer, Dorion Sagan have more recently teamed up to argue that 'life does indeed serve a purpose in nature, and thus life does have a meaning that transcends the self': The more complex the structure the more effective is the energy dissemination. Populations are better in this respect than single individuals; ecosystems even more so, and most effective of all -- so far -- are human high-tech societies. Thus, goes the argument, the second law of thermodynamics is not contrary to the existence of life; rather, it is the cause of life. That law drives evolution to higher levels of complexity and to more sophisticated societies and technologies for the sole purpose of disseminating energy gradients. More on this can be found in the following article, and the author, Arne Jernelov, is professor of environmental biochemistry, an honorary scholar and former director of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna and a UN expert on environmental catastrophes: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/09/30/2003204990 The following is yet another more universal and independent derivation of this theory, including a clarification of the anthropic principle, and a valid natural design hypothesis: http://www.anthropic-principle.ORG Dung Beetles don't make antiparticles

Yes, but the vacuum is growing.

Hi, I'm the new guy... This is a new take on an old theory: Einstein's static vacuum: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_constant.html In order to make a real particle from Einstein's vacuum, you'd have to condense enough vacuum energy to achieve positve matter density over a fininte region of space. What happened to the vacuum when you did that?...