Sisyphus

I'm thinking they're not teenagers anymore. That post was worth the wait, though!

Either that, or she has access to weather forecasts.

Photons have energy. The E=MC^2 equation gives the equivalence between energy and mass. So any type of energy can also be expressed in terms of mass. They have momentum proportional to their frequency, and this is in turn dependent on frame of reference. i.e. moving towards a lightsource will blue-shift the incoming photons, and so they will have more energy. (They will still have a velocity of C relative to you, though.) Light follows geodesics, which basically means "straight lines" accounting for the curvature of space. Mass curves space, and so a beam of light passing by a mass will appear to "bend" as viewed from an outside observer. It never turns, though, or accelerates in any other way. It only travels at C in a straight line. Black holes bend space so much that any straight line inside a certain radius will just lead elsewhere within that radius. There is literally no way out. I don't know what the rest of this means.

tl;dr = too long, didn't read I did read, though, and the main problem I see is that there's no reason meta party members would vote for the selected candidate in the general election. Suppose I'm a liberal. I vote for a candidate I like in the meta party primary, but an authoritarian theocrat wins. Am I really going to vote for that guy in the general election, if there's a candidate I don't find repugnant nominated by the Democrats or Republicans?

No. The pull of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the center of mass. In a black hole, all of the mass is theoretically in a single, dimensionless point, meaning you can get arbirtrarily close to the center, meaning the pull of gravity as you approach diverges to infinity. For example, a black hole of 1 Earth mass would have 1g of gravity at 1 Earth-radius distance, 4g at 1/2 Earth's radius, 16g at 1/4, 1000000g at 1/1000, etc. Maybe it is. However, the point is that there exists no known force that would prevent it from collapsing to infinite density, i.e. into a zero-volume, dimensionless point. Once you reach a certain threshold, (the Schwarzschild radius), the force of gravity is strong enough to overcome all other forces that would prevent its collapse. And as it collapses further, the force of gravity only gets stronger. We don't know of anything that would limit density. As far as we know, all of the mass occupies the same mathematical point. AFAIK the most fundamental particles don't have any inherent volume in themselves (I may be wrong about that), they just occupy space because of the forces that repel them apart and bind them together.

He engaged in much empirical research, but was inconsistent in its application, sometimes instead extrapolating from common knowledge. Where is the confusion?

No, I don't agree. At least, I don't think that conclusion follows. It's just circular reasoning. There's an after, therefore time hasn't ended, therefore there's an after....

...right?

If there's an "afterward," then time hasn't ended, has it?

Now you're catching on.

Aristotle loved empirical research, actually. The guy enthusiastically and accurately wrote about many natural phenomenon, including stuff like the embryological development of sharks. He just didn't consistently apply it, and ended up at some of his crazier assertions by extrapolating from "common knowledge." In other words, he didn't have a "scientific method," he was just curious about everything, and sometimes the easiest way to get an answer was to actually look.

You don't know whether it makes a sound for the same reason you don't know whether the world existed before you were born. There is an apparent consistency in the way the world works - most of our actions are based on this implicitly, and all of science is based on this explicitly and formally. But can you prove the tree makes a sound any other way than observing that sounds are made in similar situations? (And don't say "yes" and talk about mathematical models and whatnot - fundamental physics is empirical too.)

"It's not my fault! I just say whatever I'm told to say!"

What's a "deep space craft?" You mean an interstellar craft that carries humans? If so, then I expect they would be very large, self-sufficient, spinning (for simulated gravity) ecologies. Since traveling to even the nearest stars would take decades if not centuries, the ships themselves would be permanent homes. In fact, they would have to be permanent communities in every sense, including raising children. What form of propulsion they would have is unclear, but things like Bussard ramjets are possibilities, and obviously that would greatly influence what the "ship" looked like. As for weapons? No weapons, probably. There's no point. A space ship in deep space is utterly on its own. Talk about "pirates" is crazy - there aren't any pirates if your nearest neighbors are a 200 year journey away. But if you must blow stuff up, it wouldn't be that hard. A space ship is already going to have a crazy relative velocity to stuff around it, so any old dumb projectile will have plenty of kinetic energy. Throw a can of soup at it. As for a "space compass" or standard reference system, what would be the point? In space, you can see exactly where you are relative to everything else, at all times. Great visibility! Plus there aren't really any fixed landmarks, at least not with great precision. And more than that, relativity makes any kind of a common frame of reference technically impossible. Any craft would just use itself as a point of reference, I guess.

So you want the probability that at least one of the 5 picked is one of the 30 you have studied? Ok. That's the same as 1-(probability that none of the 30 will be picked). So: first ball: 45/75 chance of not being picked second: 44/74 chance, assuming the first wasn't one of the 30 (there is one fewer not studied, and one fewer total) third: 43/73, same reason fourth: 42/72, same reason fifth: 41/71, same reason The probability that each will happen in turn is (45/75)*(44/74)*(43/73)*(42/72)*(41/71) = 146611080/2071126800 = about 7%. So if you study 30 there will be about a 93% chance that at least one of them will be picked. Good luck.

The only time that happened, as far as I know, is when he was, in fact, wrong, with his famous "God does not play at dice" and related beliefs. Ok, so define what you mean by "intuition," please, and how it's different from the impression I got. If that's how it seemed to me, and that's not what you mean, then you need to communicate more clearly.

Problem 1 is that you seem to think "intuitive" is the opposite of "rational," and is synonymous with "psychic."

Before we even get into issues of burden of proof, you would have to make a coherent hypothesis. This you have not yet done, as far as I can tell. And my point about "intuition" is not that it has no value - quite the contrary. My point is that what you think "intuition" means is wrong. I'm not arguing with Einstein. I'm arguing with you.

Do you understand what it's implying? I'll give you a hint. It's not implying that you can arbitrarily decide what's true by "feeling it."

I really don't know what's going on in this thread any more! Maybe I just need to believe!

Ok, a few things: You wouldn't change decaliters to decameters, since they're measures of different things: volume and length. A cubic decameter is a measure of volume. One thing I always suggest is the "does this answer make sense" test. Imagine a cubic decameter: a cube 10 meters (about 39 feet) on a side. In other words, a really big cube. Your answer says that 1 million of those is the same as 1 kiloliter, or just 1000 1 liter bottles. Obviously that's way too many. I'm not sure why you're multiplying 100^3, so I'll just say how I would do it, and you can figure out where you went wrong yourself. Now, what you know is that 1 milliliter is equal to 1 cubic centimeter, right? So how many milliliters in a kiloliter? 1000 milliliters per liter X 1000 liters per kiloliter = 1 million milliliters per kiloliter. Next, how many cubic centimeters per cubic decameter? How many little tiny cubes fit inside the one giant one? Well, there are 100*10=1000 centimeters in a decameter, right? But that's not the same as cubic centimeters. 1000 cubic centimeters all in a line would just be one edge of the giant cube. The giant cube is 1000 little cubes wide, 1000 little cubes high, and 1000 little cubes deep. So the whole thing is 1000*1000*1000=1,000,000,000 (1 billion) cubic centimeters. Which means there are also 1 billion milliters in the giant cube, because that's the same thing. So if there are 1,000,000 milliters per kiloliter, and 1,000,000,000 milliliters per cubic decameter, how many kiloliters per cubic decameter?

Well, the fact that there is no edge of space. What curve? What outside?

What would you guess, and why?

You would fall slowly, but I'm not sure that you could jump higher. You would jump, and the rope would go slack, since presumably the temporarily unencumbered balloon would rise from buoyancy slower than your launch velocity, and the rope would only go taut again near the top of your jump. Maybe some rigid connection between you and the balloon? Of course, then you'd be pushing all that air out the way.

That's true for Euclidian geometry, but that's not what the universe is. It can be finite, and what's on the other side of "the wall" is right where you started. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged That is not true. It is not "expanding" in the sense that things are moving away from each other through space, it is expanding in the sense that more space is being added between things. Not necessarily. How many whole numbers are there? An infinite amount, each 1 unit apart. Now multiply them all by two (thereby "expanding" the whole). Now there are still an infinite amount, and they are two units apart. Why not? There wouldn't be universes elsewhere in space, but that's already true, by the definition of "universe." Imagine an infinitely long line. Now imagine another infinitely long line, parallel to it. They are both infinite, yet there are two of them, and that isn't a contradiction. However, what the human mind can imagine has no relevance to what is true.