Sisyphus

Also, remember that Little Boy and Fat Man were really no more destructive than large-scale firebombing missions. The Japanese already knew the Allies were willing and able to level cities. That they had apparently discovered mysterious new ways of doing so wouldn't have fundamentally changed the situation, although I imagine it made the need to surrender, even unconditionally, seem more urgent. But twenty years is implausible. For the Japanese, the war was already lost.

I really don't think so.

Jesus didn't need no public healthcare to heal the lame. You know who did? ADOLF HITLER.

What do you mean by "see the waves?" We do see the light. When light enters our eyes and hits our retinas, optic nerves are activated and carry signals to the visual cortex, which interprets it and puts together a coherent picture, etc. We have the ability to distinguish between some different wavelengths (by activating different types of nerves), which is what we call different colors. That's what color is. And, clearly, light that doesn't hit your retina isn't seen.

Yes, gravity has a finite velocity. I still can't tell what you're talking about, though. You can't outrun light, and you can't outrun gravity. The rocketship will be caught by the gravity of the created mass. If the mass of the Earth disappeared for one second, the Moon would travel in a straight line for one second, then go back into a (very slightly different) ellipse.

I haven't tried to follow the description, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out why it won't work, yourself. Find the step in the process that will do more work than is needed to run it (i.e., more energy goes out than in). That's the part that won't work.

"Science cannot explain?" What does that mean? Before we knew what electricity was, science couldn't explain lightning. Was it magic then, and not magic now? Also, I agree with ydoaps. "The work of the god" means nothing to me, unless you explain what you mean by the word "god," and what kind of work you're talking about. (Not trying to be difficult, just showing some problems with the question.)

Define "magic" and "miracle" and I'll give you an answer.

One could see a surface of last scattering at 1 billion years, and at 13.7 billion, but not the same surface. And calling it a "surface" is misleading, since there's no actual shell of opaque space or anything. It's just that in the beginning of the universe, everything was opaque, and so light that takes the full length of the universe to reach us is going to show us this opaque space. If you were to watch a given point on the "surface" for billions of years, you'd see that space become transparent, galaxies form, etc., and you'd see a "surface" that was farther away, which would be light from that same early period that has had a longer time to get to us. When they say the universe was 84,000,000 ly wide, they just mean that the stuff that is the farthest away we can see right now was only that distance away when the light we're seeing was emitted. In other words, light emitted from an object 84,000,000 ly away when the universe was 300,000 years old is just reaching us now, 13.7 billion years later. And the reason is because space is expanding, so as the light was traveling the journey was becoming longer and longer, and in total it ended up traveling 13.7 billion ly, even though that wasn't the distance between source and observer either at the beginning (opaque universe) or the end (present day) of the journey. Today, that stuff is something like 46.5 billion ly away.

Personally, I wish we could give/take varying amounts of reputation. A quick helpful note and an epic, well-thought out, perspective-changing essay both deserve reputation, but I'd like to be able to give more to the latter.

If I understand you correctly, then I don't think that's enough information to do what you want. Those percentages you give represent the portion of races each has won, right? But it's against different competitors, meaning the numbers are not directly comparable. I could win 100% of the time vs. a bunch of 2 year olds, and you could win 0% of the time vs. a bunch of olympic sprinters, but that doesn't mean I have a 100% chance of beating you.

I don't really understand the scenario you set up. However, I should point out that gravity propagates at the same speed as light, and you can never "outrun light."

Yeah, I know. I'm just making sure it really is as dumb as it appears.

The Joker is a socialist?

Somehow I don't think they thought it through that clearly, or had any particular plan, shooting anyone or "making a statement" or whatever. Some guys just bring guns to an angry mob.

That would indeed be amazing, since I've met plenty of humans who I doubt would figure that out. But if it's not, that also doesn't mean it's just rote repetition, like a rodent pushing a lever for food. I'm sure early human tools predated abstract understanding of the physical principles behind them by a long time, but that doesn't mean they were just going through the motions. To make and improve on a spear, for example, you need to know that sharp stuff punctures living stuff, and have the inclination to experiment with manufacturing techniques, but you don't have to have any theoretical understanding of anatomy, aerodynamics, minerology/metallurgy, etc.

Exactly. There have always been people who think the end of the world is right around the corner, and there probably always will be. 2012 is just a convenient date in the last few years, because of the Mayan calendar thing. Personally, I can't wait for January 1st, 2013, so we can get some more variety in the doomsayers. Of course, I guarantee on that day or soon after, someone will post on SFN about how the previous calculations were wrong, and the end of the Mayan calendar is really a few months or years after that, and bla bla bla.

What's the OHE?

Sound already exists.

There's also a lot of middle ground between pre-experiment deduction of how a system works and merely remembering a happy accident. You can figure out how it works by means of deliberate experimentation, generalize to similar situations, modify methods to suit different circumstances, etc.

You can walk in a straight line as long as you want and never reach the edge of the Earth, and yet the Earth has a finite surface area. This is because the surface bends back to meet itself. A 3D space can do the same thing, creating a finite volume with no edges. It's just not really something you can visualize from an "outside" perspective. You can from the inside, though: squint through the telescope far enough, and you'll see the back of your head. Another example is lots of computer games (though these are usually 2D too: go off the "edge" of one side of the map, show up on the other side.

Wouldn't there be an upper limit to resolution based on the fact that light is quantized? No matter how big your array is, a photon has to find its way from the white of that alien's eye into your lense.

I can't recall ever seeing Obama visibly angry about anything, now that you mention it. [/nonsequitor] [/or is it?]

There really wouldn't be any reason for that to happen, I don't think. At least not directly - animals evolve to be smarter only when being smarter helps them survive better, not to "keep pace" with any other species. Although, humans have dramatically changed most environments on Earth, so our presence will definitely push the evolution of many things in rather different directions. However, we've only really just arrived, geologically speaking, so crows' high intelligence almost certainly couldn't have evolved just to help them deal with us.

Technically, they revolve around one another. The Sun and the Earth each exert the same force on one another, but since the sun is so much more massive than the Earth, the Earth does most of the moving. That's why we usually just say the Earth revolves around the Sun. Although people had suggested the idea for thousands of years, it was generally believed that the sun revolved around the Earth until Nicolaus Copernicus showed that celestial observations were more easily explained by the Earth revolving around the Sun. His book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (published 1543), gives all his observations, calculations, and reasoning, and it's too much to share here. Isaac Newton, in turn, through the theory of gravity, showed why the Earth revolves around the sun (or rather, why they revolve around one another). And of course, in modern times, with spacecraft and such, obviously there's no doubt about it. However, interestingly, with the theory of relativity, it no longer really matters. Copernicus, etc. weren't wrong, but what is at rest and what is moving is just a matter of perspective, and you can have a self-consistent system no matter what perspective you choose.