Sisyphus

Such a thing would be amazingly useful, since you could use it to make a perpetual motion machine and get unlimited energy from nothing. I don't see how you would get faster than light travel, though. Just near lightspeed for "free," which is still pretty good! I don't know what would happen at zero mass - the scenario is nonphysical, so there isn't a real answer, I don't think.

I don't really know anything about the California government, but it sounds like "other states would love to have California's problems" isn't necessarily inaccurate, no?

I still don't understand. Isn't this just an example of a cube having a larger silhouette at a diagonal than straight on? i.e., a sphere wouldn't change, right?

I don't know, but I very much doubt it. Remember that everything that we put into space starts out with the Earth's velocity, and any change in velocity (acceleration) requires a force. I reckon it would take a tremendous amount of fuel to "stop" something and put it in a "reverse" orbit like that, and I don't really see the point.

Well, per relativity, wavelength is frame dependent. So, in a way, a given photon already is every wavelength, from arbitrarily small to arbitrarily large, depending on which frame of reference you pick. In a reference frame in which the emitting object is moving, the photons emitted "behind" will be redshifted (increased wavelength), and those emitted "forwards" will be blueshifted (decreased wavelength). That will never be infinitely small or infinitely large (flat line), just arbitrarily large. Furthermore, there is gravitational redshift: "climbing out" of a gravity well redshifts light. And the gravitational redshift at the event horizon of a black hole approaches infinity, so I guess you could say that is the "flat line," more or less.

It would still disturb the orbits of the other planets, just like Earth does. But anyway, there have been a bunch of solar orbiting missions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Solar_missions

Could you explain that picture some more? I can't tell what I'm looking at.

I don't think the "dressing slutty means you deserve to get raped" or "leaving your door unlocked means you deserve to get robbed" analogy is quite apt, here, since neither of those things actually hurts anybody. Right or wrong, the terrorists claim grievances, not just tempting opportunity. So maybe it's more like, I rob your house, so you hunt me down and shoot me and my family. You're still a murderer, but I'm still a thief.

There is an exception to that. Namely, if the goal of the policy is to reduce terrorism, as in fighting a "war" on it. Just saying.

While SFN is indeed influential, I don't think we're quite powerful enough to make that kind of a change to global monetary policy. Thank you for your suggestion, though.

Probability 1st one is corner piece = 8/125 3 other cubes touch corner, so probability of second touching first = 3/124 Therefore, the probability that it will be a corner piece, touching another, is (8/125)*(3/124) = 24/15500 Then, just do the same for edge pieces (24 of them, each can touch 4 others), face pieces, (54 of them, each can touch 5 others), and interior ones (27 of them, each can touch 6 others). Since any one of those situations satisfies the conditions, just add those probabilities together. [(8/125)*(3/125)]+[(24/125)*(4/124)]+[(54/125)*(5/124)]+[(27/125)*(6/124)] Unless I made a mistake somewhere, it should be 432/15500, or 108/3875.

I don't know why that is all addressed to me. I was just commenting on the strange use of "Democrat" rather than "Democratic" as an adjective which I've been seeing lately. It was off-topic, I think.

Is there some kind of war on adjectival forms that nobody told me about? It is a Democratic plan. Do you give a rat's ass what's in the local groundwater, or vented into the atmosphere? I completely disagree that their point is a good one. How could you not say this about any environmental law at all? "Design me a power plant so that I don't WANT to dump toxic sludge into the river, and then you won't NEED to ban it." "Design me a bird so I WANT to hunt, so then you won't NEED to ban hunting bald eagles." Come on. And, by the way, I'm against banning incandescents, for various reasons. I just think that reason is absurd. Environmental law is all about externalities.

X, Y, and Z are not galaxies, they are events. The galaxies where they took place would be lines extended through them, and those lines spread apart over time. Since those events are not simultaneous, when "distance between them" is not one quantity. The locations of those events were much closer together at time Z than at time X, for example. So no, while it is true that you would be witness the same events (albeit with different redshifts), you would not calculate the same distance between those galaxies from Earth today as you would from Distant Galaxy then - there has been additional expansion since then.

Wow, the people in that jet following the same course at the same time are lucky they weren't hit by the missile!

To add the surface of last scattering to the diagram in post 13, wouldn't you just draw a horizontal line almost at the bottom?

Otherwise known as "the horizon?"

I assume so. It's a dollar sign, and Gizmodo is American. That doesn't seem cheap to me.

The question "who launched the missile" assumes it was a missile. I think the optical illusion explanation is pretty convincing.

How do you figure? Or, more to the point, if "objective reality doesn't exist," then why do all observers agree on it? And how is this implied by relativity but not by classical mechanics? Well, first of all, that's not what the uncertainty principle is. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle It isn't an implication of relativity. Second, relativity is consistent, so that principle as quoted isn't even true.

What would count as "witnessing" them? Inferring is all we ever do - we take in sensory data, and infer things about the world around us. That doesn't mean that objective reality doesn't exist, and it's not new to relativity. The uncertainty principle is not based on relativity, btw.

What point of view? You mean one reference frame? And how is this different than anything else? You can't deduce much about anything from one snapshot. For example, it took a lot of careful observations at different times to deduce that the geocentric model of the universe was wrong.

As I said, it's cosmic expansion that is the reason they're all moving away. Only very close galaxies would even have the chance to be moving towards us. Here is an image of the galaxies in our immediate vicinity:

I don't know what this sentence means.

That doesn't say that galaxies come in pairs. It says that they often group up, which they do. There is nothing special about the number 2 in particular.