Sisyphus

Or for that matter, just a bigger single one.

I think that the ones who most wanted change are perceiving much less of it than they would like. However, there seem to be lots of people who think Obama is a communist terrorist lover, and their outrage seems to stem from a perception of far too much change. That certainly seems to be the stance among any conservative with an actual audience these days. What the two groups have in common is frustration, so I'd say you're right about that much.

So, I was shopping around for flash thumb drives (my old 256MB one was too small), and out of curiosity I looked for the highest capacity one I could find. As far as I can tell, it's 256 GB, currently. This prompted two immediate questions, for those more tech savvy than myself: 1) Is the skyrocketing capacity/plummeting price likely to calm down anytime soon? 2) Why are we still using hard drives with moving parts, that are slow and seemingly always the first part of any computer to malfunction? Is it just price per byte?

If you wouldn't pull things out of it and put them on the internet, it probably wouldn't get chewed as much.

There are two claims here, and I think they're both pretty clearly false: 1) We don't understand anything about how QM works. 2) Things we don't understand are "magic." Does that about sum it up?

In the sense that that is "perpetual energy," all energy is perpetual, since it can't be created or destroyed, just converted and/or transferred. Which is why perpetual motion machines don't work. Two magnets can do work on one another, but only if you do a greater amount of work on them first. In other words, you can extract energy from them pushing apart, but you'd have to use more energy than you could extract to push them together in the first place. Another example is gravity. A rock sitting on the edge of a table, as swansont says, has a constant potential energy. "Perpetual," even. This can be harnessed by tipping it over the side, in which case it is converted to kinetic energy as it accelerates. This uses up the potential energy. If you want to restore it, you have to use more than you could ever extract from it falling to get it back up on the table. (In an ideal world, you would only use the same amount as you extract to get it back on the table, which of course is still useless. In the real world, there are always inefficiencies, where some of the energy will be dissipated in the form of heat, vibration, whatever, so you always get out less useful energy than you put in.)

The whole "C is constant from every reference frame" means that not only can you never catch light, but you can never get any closer to catching it than you are right now. If you throw half the energy in the universe into your thrusters, then turn on your headlights, the beams will move ahead of you at the same speed they do from a parked car. You can, however, move at arbitrarily close to C relative to some other object, like the Earth.

It's a scientist's job to be skeptical of accepted ideas, and even more skeptical of new ones. This happens to be neither, but a third category: already discredited idea. And many, many times over, at that. So people are going to be extremely skeptical of it unless you give reason to believe otherwise, and that is how it should and must be. That's what the burden of proof is. And "a reason to believe otherwise" is not a gut feeling, it is a successful experiment others can repeat for themselves.

Especially since the job description doesn't make any sense in the case of already knowing everything.

A scientist by definition does not believe that he knows everything.

Actually, it does. All of relativity and the predictions thereof are a consequence of C being constant to all observers. If this interests you, you should begin by looking into what special relativity is all about. To the contrary, the constancy can be observed simply by calculating its speed between planets at different times of year (and thus at different relative velocities).

No, that is not what it means. Light is composed of discrete photons, which is something you should probably look into.

Worth resurrecting a dead, locked thread for? http://www.theonion.com/content/news/conspiracy_theorist_convinces_neil?utm_source=a-section

It should be noted that evolution is self-referential, as well. Every organism is part of its own environment, and there is no constant ideal survival strategy.

That link actually says 2*10^10 C, or 20,000,000,000 times the speed of light. However, that is not a scientific paper, just some dude's thoughts. General relativity predicts that gravity propagates exactly at C, and experiments, though still insufficiently precise, support that.

Actually, being in the sad position of having read a great deal of theology, I assure you that many (most?) theologians would claim to be doing exactly that. Also, this: is, in fact, very much faulty logic. To argue against it implies that human beings are capable of acting towards an end, not that they must, and willfullness /= towards an end, let alone by coherent or rational means. This is Aristotle stuff.

What that thought experiment demonstrates is that there is an upper limit on the rigidity of an object. The motion can't travel down the stick as fast or faster than the speed of light. Moving one end would create a wave moving at sublight speeds down its length.

To put it even more basically: a hydrogen car is an electric car. The hydrogen fuel cell replaces the battery in a conventional electric car. It's advantage is that it can be "refueled" quickly and with high energy density, like gasoline, while batteries are heavy and take hours to charge. It works (very basically) like this: *Electricity can be used to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. *Combining hydrogen and oxygen back into water can produce electricity (which can run an electric motor). *Oxygen is abundant in the air, but hydrogen is not. So you need to supply your own hydrogen, but not your own oxygen to do so. *So the inputs are oxygen from the air and hydrogen from your fuel tank, and the outputs are electricity and water.

Raising an unscientific idea is not crackpottery, it's healthy curiousity. However, insisting on that idea against all evidence is. We don't ban here unless you're actually disruptive, although we'll close topics that get too repetitive and/or ridiculous. Just a note. Anyway, no, it won't work. It will quickly reach equilibrium and stop. If you don't believe me, build a prototype - that shouldn't be hard. In fact, many, many people have tried pretty much the same thing. Also, neither galaxies nor atoms are "perpetual motion machines." Why would you think they are? You can never get more energy out of any system than what you put in + what is already there. If it were otherwise, the universe would be a very different place.

Here's a fun statistic: in 2009, 73% of all stock trading volume hasn't involved human decisions, but automatic, high-frequency algorithmic trading. So not only is it totally divorced from what they're actually buying and selling, but it's not even human beings looking at the numbers. Human beings get the profit, though, pretty much directly at the expense of long term investors. So, just as technology has lowered the barrier to entry with online investing, it raises it back up again (big firms can spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars on these algorithms). And it's not even pretending to be related to intrinsic value. Who wants to make a prediction about what's going to happen next?

My theology is a priori truth, while of course all others are wildly unrealistic. (For everyone's sake, I think it's time to broaden your reading material.)

I'll add a third no, generally speaking. Most economic arguments I've read don't even focus on actual empirical data, but rather what "makes sense." Hence the persistence of (::turns head away from worm can lid: stuff like classical economics that assumes rational actors, or certain left-wing ideologies that assume benevolent ones, when actually looking at the world shows these things to be nonsense. And when they do, of course its always historical analysis, not predictive experiments. Just to be devil's advocate, I could say that, for example, astrophysics doesn't really have controlled experiments either. Then again, they have astronomical amounts of data...

This is more of an English language question than a physics question. Earth is the name of the planet we live on, although it's sometimes just called "the planet" or "the world," if it's clear from context what you're talking about. Sometimes "the world" can also mean the whole universe, although that usage has been uncommon for a long time.

That's pretty funny. Whoops! I wonder how that phrase worked its way into her consciousness as positive, while not knowing what it specifically referred to. Maybe she's discovering some relatives are actually big old racists.

Those weren't/aren't scientific ideas, they are ideology. A scientific statement would be "human evolution can be intentionally directed towards certain traits by means of artificial selection." The political idea is that this would be a desirable thing to do. Is/ought, etc. Similarly, the scientific statement per global warming would be that it is occuring to X degree for Y reasons with Z results, and the political statement is that we should try to mitigate it by means of A and B. It gets mixed up, because so many try to argue with the science as if it were politics.