insane_alien

as soon as we finish construction of a 1.21GW heisenberg-shroedinger cat-toast device to power the feline accelerator.

in theory, yes. in practise, any effect would not be noticable and the conditions under which it would need to occur would result in the cats being dead. technically, everytime you walk through a door way you get diffracted a little tiny bit.

going back to the hbomb, in a dyson swarm it could be much more destructive than on a dyson sphere. 1/ the dyson sphere would hold up well because of the enormous strength needed already, damage to the sphere would be minimized 2/ (this is my main point) debris from a unit of the swarm could affect other units and so on. we are already seeing a similar issue on a more local scale. with all the space junk we have up here scientists believe it is approaching a 'critical mass' where the number of collisions will grow exponentially due to existing space junk colliding and breaking up. now, if a dysons swarm is to capture all of the suns energy then that means its going to be relatively densely packed. one little hbomb could trigger a cascade of collisions each making the situation worse. of course, i fully expect a civilisation that has actually built a dyson swarm to have mechanisms in place to prevent such an occurence

well, it is a lot of energy so yes, if someone is close to a 100megaton nuclear bomb detonating, they will be fataly ionized. ions are not the same as antimatter though.

even with iron, or any other form of matter for that matter(no pun intended)

well, it leaves your constituent components in a state less like their origional configuration than mere vapourisation and ionization with a bit of nuclear augmentation thrown in. both result in you being exceedingly dead so i guess from the human perspective the result is the same.

yep, even if it was far exceeded. unless anti matter actualy contacted you, you would not be turned into photons. you'd just be turned into a cloud of ions.

no it would not destroy them. i think that you would benefit from coming on irc as comunication is a lot faster there and we can discuss it a bit more indepth if you want. this will help you get on there, http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=33273 i'll be in the chat room for the next few hours anyway.

the same as if your were at 0 km/sec

if someone was standing next to a 100megaton nuclear bomb upon its detonation they would be vapourised and ionized. they would not be turned into photons.

100 megatons of energy doing what? and applied to what? and how quickly.

it is indeed impossible. to have an average speed of 60 mph he must complete the journey within 1 hour. to do this he needs to travel infinitely fast back to point a. as this is impossible(in the real world and a hypothetical one where the laws ofphysics must be obeyed) he cannot do it.

no, s/he would turn into photons.

seeing as we have no diea what level 'physics 1' is then that doesn't help. but trigonometry will be very very useful, so would vector maths. my highschool didn't have a seperate class on nuclear radiation but that was a whole topic in the normal physics class. i'd say it was normal. it covers a fair number of fields in physics and is a good allrounder to study.

arr there be an edit button for a reason. </pirate accent>

yes you would be. however, generating this frequency similar to the way a radio signal is generated would be impossible. much easier to use a lightbulb/laser.

topugh often staff are technically illiterate as well, as found out in my short stint selling computers at pc world(don't hate me i needed money and i was fair to the customers and explained how things really worked). when a sales rep mentions its got high capacity capacitors as the selling point of a printer then you know he doesn't have a clue about anything.

tiny number, in chemistry you deal with mols. 1 mol is 6.022*10^23 atoms or molecules depending on what you apply it to. then you have my field, chemical engineering where you can be dealing with several hundred Mmol, or several hundred times 6.022*10^29. thats getting on a reasonable sized number, then you consider the number of atoms in the earth alone, then the solar system and so on. i'll admit that i have difficulty imagining correctly the number of atoms past planetary scale but this is because it is far outside my usual realm. i'm quite sure i could learn to imagine it more accurately with a little practise. i will say again, it is not unimaginable just because you cannot correctly comprehend it.

all planets will and have magnetic fields, some of them are exceedingly weak and due to magnetic minerals on their surface and others have considerable ones formed in the core of the planet like our own.

no, changing the wavelength of light will not alter the fact that the light is there. thats like saying 'can you paint a prisoner a certain colour so that he is no longer in prison?'

not unless the 2nd law of thermodynamics can be broken which has never been observed anywhere. and if it can be it will involve some obscure quantum mechanical type thing and not a couple of magnets, bit of stickyback plastic and a yoghurt pot. (reference to blue peter, a kids tv show, for those not in the uk)

it could be a RAM problem, try reseating it(taking it out and putting it back in) and see if that helps. if not, download the ultimate boot cd http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html and burn it to disc. boot it up and run memtest 86+, go to the cinema/tv and watch a movie, if it hasn't thrown up and errors by then then it is not a RAM problem. try the usual virus scans and such.

you said: helium-3 and helium-4 are stable, therefore have a halflife of infinity(or if proton decay is ture, a half life much longer than the life of the universe), much more than one measly second.

what baout He-3 and He-4? oh and the legend says that it means less than one day, not second. He-6 comes close(for the unstable isotopes) at just 0.2s short of a second.

anyone who touts that accidents won't happen to them because they are too well trained/careful/etc are idiots, i have to agree with john on this one. the moment you become complacent is the moment you mess up bigtime. ontopic though, i think it is possible that handgun availability will increase suicide rates, mainly due to the fact that it is a pretty easy way to do it. i'm not however sure if this would increase suicide rates significantly. i also agree with the idea that if someone seriously wants to kill themselves then they will succeed. the handgun availability would do the most harm to the people doing it to seek attention.