Sisyphus

Surely, a great way to win over the librarians.

He's repeated himself a lot, but as far as I know he hasn't done any of those things. So, Duration, put up or shut up. Those aren't outrageous requests; they're the absolute bare minimum you need to even be coherent, let alone be taken seriously. If your next post on this thread isn't at least an attempt to do all three, I'm locking it.

The point is that there is no such thing as "world time," only time in a given reference frame, or time as elapsed for a particular person or thing. The other point with regards to quantum uncertainty is that what you'll be doing twelve hours from now is not yet determined. I could certainly travel to that time, and in fact I fully expect to. ETA is almost exactly 12 hours from now, my time.

Again: 1)Define your terms. 2) State clearly why you think [math]F =G\frac{ Mm}{r^{2}}[/math] is false. 3) State clearly why you think your idea is correct.

1) Define your terms. 2) State clearly why you think [math]F =G\frac{ Mm}{r^{2}}[/math] is false. 3) State clearly why you think your idea is correct.

The wording of the question is a bit ambiguous, but I'm sure the intended meaning is that the trolley isn't moving before the throw. If it were moving, you wouldn't have enough information to answer the question. The "it runs without friction" part simply means you don't have to take friction into account in the question, i.e. that it accelerates in direct proportion to the force applied. However, it doesn't really matter either way, since you can just read it as, "how much has the trolley's velocity changed after the throw," in which case it doesn't matter how fast it was moving to begin with. The physics of a motionless object and an object moving at constant velocity with zero friction are exactly the same. And yes, it is the case both that the trolley/stone's momentum before the throw must equal the sum of the two after, and that the trolley and rock, after the throw, will have an equal and opposite change in momentum. In fact, that's saying the same thing. In order for the total system to have the same momentum before and after, any change in one part has to be cancelled out by a change in another. It's just simplest to consider the trolley to initially be motionless (momentum zero), so the rock and trolley will afterwards simply have the same momentum in opposite directions. That equation is incorrect. You’re using kinetic energy instead of momentum, which is just mv. The total kinetic energy is not going to be the same before and after, since you're using potential energy in your arm to throw the rock!

By the same token, how can eternalism be right? In the same sense that my present is not your present, my future is not your future, either. The truth is quite a bit messier than that, as there is an overall past and future of the universe, just a lot of “fuzziness” caused by weaving world lines. There’s also the problem of quantum uncertainty, which is probably more pertinent to the question. The degree of true randomness which is introduced casts serious doubt on the idea that the future could be said to exist already, as there is nothing embedded in the present that determines the future. That is, unless you believe in multiple universes, in which case every time a particle could zag or zag it actually does both, and two parallel futures are created…

What Kyrisch said. If you consider the sheer number of events that happen around you per day and the probability that each of them could be interpretted as somehow purposeful or otherwise particularly meaningful to you (like a random event giving you an appropriate comeuppance, or a TV commercial answering a question you had been wondering earlier that day), you would expect such things to happen all the time. If you only notice these things and disregard all the insignificant stuff, it seems like there are intentional and mysterious forces at work. But really, it's just simple probability.

Well, I don’t know about that. Probably you’re right and there’s inflation. But how much? If you’ve got a ten billion dollar company and only one CEO, and having one of the absolute best guys instead of just a very good guy helps you increase your stock prices by 6 percent instead of 5 percent, that’s still an extra 100 million dollars, so paying your CEO tens of millions of dollars a year is actually worth it. Now, I have no idea if that’s what really happens and I don’t know in what ways it’s been studied, but it does seem at least plausible, right?

Because those professions are like frog jumping, and professional sports is like frog calling? The best delivery driver in the world is, as with the best basketball player in the world, probably only a tiny bit better than a large number of runners up. However, if you graphed the value to employers vs. skill level in the two professions, delivery driving would probably increase slower than skill at the high end and approach a horizontal limit relatively early on, while the professional athlete graph would be basically flat for most of its length, then get crazily, exponentially steep at the end, where tiny differences in skill make huge differences because of the directly competitive and winner-takes-all nature of the business. Well, right, except that it's not an illusion. The differences are small, but the nature of the contest magnifies those small differences to great importance. The slightly louder frog gets rewarded all out of proportion to its increased volume over the other frogs, right?

With regards to sports stars, I think you're underestimating the differences even at the level. Professional leagues are on the whole presumably made up of the best of the best of the general population (or at least of those who have attempted the particular sport), yet even there, there are clearly stars among even this highly rarified group, and those stars make a real difference in winning games. There are only a few Michael Jordan equivalents out there, and the teams that win their contracts win more games. And there are dozens of swimmers almost as fast as Michael Phelps (in the entire world, but still), but the he's the only one bringing home eight gold medals. So yeah, despite the very large supply of aspirants, there's an extremely limited supply of stars. So too with the huge number of business school graduates vs. the number of people who could individually give a billion dollar company a tiny (but compounded) edge over the other billion dollar companies.

It's also a representation of the relationship between spatial dimensions. Lines at right angles to one another have extension in entirely different dimensions, which makes them an obvious choice for any number of things, including graphs which show the relationship between different parameters. It also means that right angles have real physical significance whenever there's ever a unidirectional motion or force, like gravity: the relationship between vertical and horizontal is a right angle. Vertical being the direction of the force of gravity, and horizontal being the direction in which gravity has no effect.

Well, I knew money could be seized as evidence for a specific crime even if it wasn't already proven to be illegally obtained. I can understand that. But this is seizure from someone who is not even accused of any crime, let alone a crime in connection with the cash in question, and that's ridiculous. That's not even "guilty until proven innocent." That's "guilty of something until proven innocent of everything." I'm supposed to be able to account for where all my money and property came from to the arbitrary satisfaction of any police officer who asks me, or else it can be seized until I prove my innocence of some unspecified crime I haven't even been accused of? What the hell.

We don't know that. In fact I'm pretty sure the conventional wisdom suggests the opposite, that time extends "only" 14 billion years into the past. There are several reasons for that, although I'm not really the best one to explain them. In that case, “270 billion years ago” would be a meaningless phrase. Interesting article for laymen on the subject: http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/big-bang.html

Alright, my bad. That's really interesting, actually. So does that mean there's no artificial way (as opposed to bringing a large ecosystem with you) to get a cycle that has an input of energy and nothing else?

Yeah, if that's really how it works, then that's pretty outrageous. It's actually making me angry thinking about it.

Ok, but that was just an example. The ISS doesn't rely on shipments of oxygen or spew CO2, because their life support system mechanically recycles the air they have. The point being that that's clearly a lot easier. Well, you'd shoot it downwards, but yeah, I guess.

Maybe, but I think being legal, even if they don't speak English well, is still a marketable attribute. Namely, it makes them attractive to businesses that don't want to run illegally. Increasing the legal unskilled labor pool would likely lower the wages of those jobs, but not below minimum wage, and still under better conditions than illegals are typically employed under. It would also make them harder to exploit even in those sub-minimum wage situations, since they wouldn't be relying on their employer for protection from the law (in fact it would be the other way around).

Um, I'm pretty sure the Pope's problem with birth control has nothing to do with condom litter.

Also, what's the point? It's not like air actually disappears when you breathe it in. It's recyclable. Have some plants onboard. And finally, all other factors aside, if you're sucking up a significant quantity of air, you're directly pulling yourself downwards, via Newton's Third Law.

Think about what you're saying. If it accelerated at a rate of 372,000 miles per second, then its velocity at the end of that second is 372,000 miles per second. But one second later it has only moved another 186,000 miles. And a second after that it has moved only another 186,000 miles (where by your calculations, it would have been moving at 1,116,000 miles per second by that time). Clearly, it is not accelerating, and it is certainly not accelerating at a constant rate. "If it doesn't exist the velocity is zero miles per second." No, if it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.

I'm not sure what you mean by "how" it's possible, but it is an observed fact that light only exists traveling at exactly C. It is true that there is no light before you turn it on. It is not "at rest," it just doesn't exist.

The initial velocity is 186,000 miles per second. The velocity after 1 second (or 2 seconds, or 5 minutes, or 10 billion years) is 186,000 miles per second. 186,000 - 186,000 = 0 miles per second per second Your math is only applicable for objects that start out at rest and undergo a constant acceleration. That isn't the case here.

Wow, entire subcultures deemed unworthy of life, while mice get the rights of any human. I'm glad you're not in charge! Agree to disagree, indeed.

In your own frame of reference, you are not moving, and the light is moving at C away from you. After one second it is 186,000 miles away from you. In the Earth's frame of reference, you are moving at 0.5C and the light is moving at C towards the earth and 0.5C away from you, and after one second it is 93,000 miles away from you. This is possible because time and distance are are different depending on what frame of reference you're in. Also, light does not accelerate. It only ever moves at exactly C. The photon, which has no mass, comes into existence already traveling.