Sisyphus

Momentum is mass*velocity. But velocity is itself distance/time. It is "moving through time." The word "moving" implies time, in fact. With momentum, it increases in direct proportion to either mass or velocity. What increases in direct proportion to mass and time? As in, a 10 kg mass for 10 seconds is equal in what to a 5kg mass for 20 seconds. Well, it's equal in MT, or kilogram-seconds, or whatever. It doesn't have another name. That doesn't make it mysterious or unknown, just not useful enough a concept to have a special word for it in English. (It's definitely not "power," which means something specific: work per unit time.)

Why mass, time, and velocity? Actually, let me suggest you have a look at dimensional analysis, which basically means breaking down quantities into their more fundamental components. So momentum is mv, but v is itself distance per time, so momentum would be mL/t, etc. The fundamental dimensions would be mass, time, distance, temperature, and charge. And of course there can be any exponent for any of these - acceleration is distance per time squared, for example.

I would say an extremely large ball would have a higher energy density overall, since you could have a much higher average linear velocity with fewer RPMs. The limiting factor isn't going to be linear velocity, it's going to be centripetal acceleration. a=v^2/r

I do see your point, and thanks for clarifying. You're not disputing the value of listening to expert opinion, just pointing out that apparent expert opinion is not always real expert opinion. Right?

It's not quite the same, though. Even if you don't understand what the smart Russian scientists are talking about, you can understand the scientific method and thus have confidence in it, and have you can have confidence those smart Russian scientists are abiding by it because you know a lot of people who do know what they're talking about have looked it over. Not as good as understanding it yourself, of course, but hardly blind faith. And even further, even if you have no idea how science as a whole works, you can at least see that it gets results, which is itself a reason to go by what "science" is saying as the best available information.

That quote is an argument for why a westward tendency of plate tectonics is not a result of lunar tides. As in, that can't be the cause, because that much tidal friction would have locked the Earth, and the Earth is not locked.

I think the confusion stems from ambiguous English in the OP, which can be interpretted that way. What you should have said is "religion is a cause of psychosis" or even just "religion causes psychosis." So, out of curiousity, do you believe that I am an ancient Greek hero, writing this from a mountainside in Tartarus?

That's the definition of perspective.

Yes, of course that's what I mean. And though the math is slightly more complicated, it's not fundamentally different than "translating" to the perspective of someone standing next to you. There's nothing mysterious about it.

So you're limited to tertiary sources (somebody writing about what Einstein thought about Spinoza's thoughts)?

Also, person A and person B will both agree on what person A is experiencing, as long as they both know how relativity works. It's not subjective in that sense.

I really can't imagine that happening. I think most people wouldn't even hear about it. It would be a quirky item in the science sections of newspapers, Bill O'Reilly would hold it up as proof that scientists are a bunch of commie atheists, and it would be added to the list of memes people argue about on the internet, but nothing else would happen.

Question 1 is really dozens of questions. Some illegal drugs are considerably more "mild" than totally legal substances, some will pretty much ruin your life with one dose. (Don't do heroin, kids.) And everything in between. Question 2 is an extremely complicated question. Though it mostly can be boiled down to paranoid reactionism, and the fact that it's much easier to make a law than get rid of a law. If you're a politician and you say you want to legalize cannabis, for example, then it doesn't matter how rationally you argue your position. You're officially the "pothead politician," who wants to get my children hooked on dope. It just isn't worth anyone's political capital. Question 3 is also complicated, but you're right that the "War on Drugs" doesn't seem to be effective at doing anything but giving dangerous people lots of money, draining government coffers, putting a lot of harmless people in prison, and making sure a lot of sick people never get better.

That's rather a separate discussion than the hypothetical question of the OP. However, this is a good example: Spinoza's "God" is an example of an unfalsifiable one. Tell me, have you read any of his books?

Well, "God" can mean almost an infinite number of different things, many of which are fundamentally unfalsifiable, others pretty much exist by definition ("God is everything" etc.). So that's not going to happen. Also, there's some iffyness about what "beyond a shred of a doubt" actually means, and whether that's realistic. However, to answer your question (pretending that what everybody means by "God" is something scientifically falsifiable), I don't think it would have much effect at all. People believe plenty of totally discredited things already. Just because somebody figures out that something can't be true doesn't mean that everybody will listen or care.

Particularly not from orbit!

Sorry, you're making a lot of claims about what science supposedly is and is not, I thought that's what you meant. That's not how it works, no. Observation just means interaction with something. You will be able to find some physicists who believe that consciousness has some special role, but that is a minority view. However, the fact that it is discussed disproves your claims that scientists are unwilling to do so. This is what I meant about you trying to have it both ways. Yes, durations, distances, and relative velocities are frame dependent. I still don't know what point you're making. It's the same "reality."

Cartesian dualism is the idea that mind and body are separate. It is, in fact, specifically not materialistic. The "observer effect" wrt quantum physics does not refer specifically to a conscious observer. An electron can be an "observer." And I don't even know what point you're trying to make about relativity.

Since... 1) The mind appears to be a property of the body (specifically the central nervous system), and 2) the body itself is a part of its own environment, I think the whole question is rather fuzzy. How can what's going on in the mind not affect everything else, and vice versa? I'm aware of words in my mind, that represents activity in my brain, that results in my fingers typing. This involves all sorts of unconscious activity and moving around of chemicals inside all the different cells involved.

You assert that your experiences occured as you describe them. Which happens to be an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims are not problematic in themselves, but unsupported ones are. The support you claim to offer is not really that. You're citing godel's incompleteness theorem and vague allusions to quantum mechanics. Incorrectly, as it happens, but they're red herrings anyway, and totally separate discussions (which you're perfectly welcome to start in their own threads). Anyway, your assertion seems to be that these are examples of proofs that, essentially, nothing is knowable. While this is valid in a broad philosophical sense (though not for the reasons you give) under certain definitions of "knowable," it's really just a deflection from any actual discussion. I could just as easily assert that I am the Norse god Odin, and when challenged on my extraordinary claim just say you can't "prove" I'm not because your first axioms are unsupported. Alright. Agree to disagree...? The point is that the number of potential extraordinary claims is infinite. It is not out of dogmatism that one rejects those with no support whatsoever, but simple practicality. It is literally impossible to accept everything. But getting back to the support you claim to draw from modern physics - this makes no sense. You're talking about science. Is science bound by dogmatic "materialism" that seeks to invalidate everything not already understood, or does science show that dogmatism to be false? You can't have it both ways. You don't have to prove it. People are just asking for any support.

You're asserting something is true. If you're not "asking anyone to believe anything," then what is the purpose of the assertion? And how is asking for an explanation or any kind of evidence "trying to fight something you don't understand?" I think people here have shown themselves to be extremely open-minded, but you've treated even the questioning of it as some kind of religiously motivated persecution. What is that you want from people here?

Well, whatever the real statistics are, I think we can all agree that the best thing to do is treat it as the gravest threat imaginable. Lock up your children, write to your congressman, burn down some Verizon stores. Because really, won't somebody please think of the children?

Is that the right link? I don't see what that has to do with "antigravity." Also, not that there's much to work with in the other articles, but why "antigravity" and not just propulsion? What do they mean by "losing weight," exactly? And isn't a "gravity shield" essentially a perpetual motion device?

An object spinning around its own center still has a centrifugal effect trying to rip it apart. An atom on the edge of that ball is still moving in a circle, and so the faster you spin it the greater its constant acceleration, the greater the forces acting on it. Thus it can't spin any faster than the point at which that force is greater than the molecular bonds holding it together.

It's the delay due to distance that lets us see the early universe. So no. What prevents us from "seeing the big bang" now is that the very early universe was opaque, so the end of that period is as far/early as we can see. What it would mean is that we would have no limit to the distance we can see like we do now. There would be no "observable universe" in the sense we have now, no cosmological horizon. In theory we could see infinitely far, though not in practice, just because there would be stuff in the way. The sky, I think, would look different, though I'm not quite sure how. Would distant objects still be redshifted? Would it be extremely bright? I'm not sure.