michel123456

Besides: Aren't the aliens all from another planet? And: No.

The rubber band could work for attraction, but not for repulsion. Anyway, my comment was intended to say that the interview was a bit the same kind of those of some celebrities: the journalist don't care about the answers, the main purpose is to make the celebrity talk. You may note the agony of the journalist when his first question made a flop: the "what are they feeling?" was not well received. The "why" engaged a wonderful development that made everybody happy.

So you say Reality with a big R exists and is invariant when fully described in 4 dimensions. Is that a fair interpretation of your statement?

Emphasis mine. Well done Lemur. That is the point.

With all my respect: 1. he didn't answer the question (intentionally). 2. when you ask a vague question you get a vague answer. 3. as a journalist never ask a scientist "why": he will go into philosophying. 4. as a scientist, never use a paradigm taken from the behaviour of a living organism in order to explain a physical phenomena. (the journalist was unaware of that, or too respectuous). 5. the "I cannot explain in terms that you will understand" is to be understood as "I am the smart guy who knows and you are the dumb guy who don't" but we knew that in the first place. Nobody doubts that Mr Feynman is very smart. In the end, the whole interview has reached its goal: show how intelligent he is & how dumb we are. The OP had the same purpose.

Maybe this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetorheological_fluid#Material_behavior "As mentioned above, smart fluids are such that they have a low viscosity in the absence of an applied magnetic field, but become quasi-solid with the application of such a field. In the case of MR fluids (and ER), the fluid actually assumes properties comparable to a solid when in the activated ("on") state, up until a point of yield (the shear stress above which shearing occurs). This yield stress (commonly referred to as apparent yield stress) is dependent on the magnetic field applied to the fluid, but will reach a maximum point after which increases in magnetic flux density have no further effect, as the fluid is then magnetically saturated."

I don't know about black holes. Why do we always have to discuss those things? The equation means that space & time are factors that transform mass into energy. Or that mass embedded in spacetime corresponds to a certain amount of energy. Time is in it. What the equation doesn't say is what is mass that is not embedded in spacetime.

After reading carefully your post several times, I am still confused. First of all, this is not a philosophical debate, although it may be fruitless and endless. How do you conciliate that "Two distinct observers simply have different rulers, and different clocks" (in which I agree)and that "Length "contraction" is real"? (in which I disagree). What is your argument that will me change my mind? When you say "they see the same physical event" my question is: what is this event? Can you make an invariant description of it? (since you wrote that "Physical events are invariant")

It is at the wrong place.

Vargo is playing.

010101100110000101110010011001110110111100100000011101000111001001101001011001010111001100100000011101000110111100100000011010000110100101100100011001010010000001100101011101100110010101110010011110010111010001101000011010010110111001100111001000000110100001100101001000000110010001101111011001010111001100101110

It is possible we will evolve into marine mammals. Our nose is closing, our toes are closing together, we are losing our hairs, we enjoy water because we feel lighter, and we are getting fat like elephant seals. But I may be wrong, I am not aware of any study in this field.

Interesting: what is that for an airplane with reverse wings shape? A glider?

Found this:

Dean is attacking a disturbing subject. Why me? You can answer that following the steps of the anthropic principle. If you weren't you there are 2 possibilities: 1. be someone else. But in this case you could ask the same question and return to the starting point asking why me again. 2. not be. Shaekespearean dilemma: to be or not to be. As it seems, nature (your father & mother in the circumstances) decided you to be. And since you were lucky enough to arrive at sufficient age & mental development, you can ask the question. I guess you will continue to interrogate yourself when your professor will ask you to come and answer a difficult question (why me?) or when a bullet will kill your fellow best friend on the battlefield (why not me?), I hope this will never happen. The good thing is that when you are being, you can ask question. When you are not being, you cannot ask any question. Does that answer something? ----------------------- Maybe not. Conscious awareness. Where does it come from? I don't know. Here is my opinion: What I know is that the brain is essentialy made to do another job, that is to regulate the incredibly complicated functions of the organism. Of course, this regulation cannot be achieved without some knowledge of external variables, that is the reason we have senses. The whole combination has developped in the human being into a system including recognition of itself and conscience. I don't know if it is a privilege of the human race but I know I have those abilities. We call that "intelligence". IMHO it was not exactly intended to be, it just happened. Maybe it is an error of nature and evolution will erase that function in the future, or decide it is terrific and expand the technology to other species. I will not be there to know. What is the relation with Quantum Theory I would like to know...

Interesting: I will not criticize this theory simply because I do not like the idea we have no free will is the contrary of I will criticize this theory simply because I like the idea we have free will. That is all I found interesting.

Great. That was the answer I expected in another thread question 2. We are accelerating.

This is not speculation. It looks like a fair question. Or do you have a hidden agenda?

There is a tendency when something new is discovered to relate everything to it. When Newton discovered the laws of motion, scientists thought everything had been explained. When laws of electromagnetism were discovered, some of them (Tesla?) thought everything could be explained through it. When holograms were invented, some scientists thought maybe the Universe was a hologram. More recently, when fractals were discovered, some thought maybe the universe was a fractal. etc. I believe that each new discovery opens a new door and that of course investigation of new discoveries is of a great importance. Besides elecricity has not been ignored since. But electromagnetism is a more than 100 years old discovery and I see no reason why standard cosmologists would conspirate in order to hide a presumed electric nature of the universe. I don't believe they are dumb either.

I have no problem with velocity. I have no problem with duration. Because those concepts are somehow "outside" of an object. they are not the object itself. I have problem with length. There is a distinction between rest mass & relativistic mass. Why don't we consider "rest length" and "relativistic length"?

The peculiar thing is that we are convinced that there is only one cube, that we are living in it. That we are traveling in time in this single cube, making stupid comments like "how wonderful is our cube!" or asking stupid questions like "how is it possible that we have such a chance to live in this cube?", forgetting completely the infinity of other cubes.

The difference is that when you step on the bus, you find no money, no kinetic energy. But the bus has a length. And it happens that it is the maximum observable length. Coincidence? Because I am persuaded that only one reality exists (that's the question), I choose this length as THE length of the bus. I call that length "Reality". All measurements made by other observers from other FOR are paramophosis of observation, not a true contraction of the object. That's the way I see things. I may be wrong. But the option to consider that an object can have simultaneously multiple lengths looks like total crap to me. The last option, to consider length as a relative concept could be acceptable if all values for length were available. But the absence of length dilation suggests this hypothesis is not correct. Unless length dilation exists...

I am. The gravitation constant is another puzzling question like C. So you say that Energy = kilograms by Joules divided by kilograms, after simplification Energy = Joules. Does that help? Personally, I prefer say that Csquared is acceleration by distance (m/s^2 by m). But that doesn't help either. IMHO one of the best posts. I just became a DH fan.

If you look at the question, it does not really matter why SOL has this or that value. In any chosen unit system, the value will be different. The real weird thing is that SOL is not a dimensionless physical constant, like the fine structure constant, or number[math] pi [/math]. When someone translates the [math] e=mc^2 [/math] equation into the statement that "mass is energy", he omits to realize that [math] c^2 [/math] has units, and that the real constant is not what we measure ([math] {c} [/math]), but [math] c^2 [/math] with bizarre units of square meters by square seconds (what is that?). If "mass is energy" were correct, the multiplying factor should be dimensionless. But it is not. The multiplying factor has units that transform something called "mass" into something else called "energy". The correct statement is that "mass is proportional to energy". And the most weird thing is that nobody seems interested in the question of "what are these strange units representing"? The common answer is "square speed" (the speed of a speed??) which is not an acceptable answer IMHO.

Perhaps something like Time ?