J'Dona

Well, if the speed of light has always been c (2.997 x 108 ms-1 that is), then even if the expansion of the universe proceeded at the speed of light in all directions (and I would assume the rate of propogation of spacetime), then it should still only be 27.4 billion ly across, not 156 billion. For it to be expanding at that rate and reach that size in this time, the rate of expansion would have had to have been on average about 5.7c (I know the rate of expansion slowed down and is now speeding up again, but that means that at one point it was slower and at one point it was faster than 5.7c so the problem is still there). That's why I was confused... because I'm assuming that the current theories of the big bang state that the universe was created from a single point or very, very small volume. We've all heard the stories about how it all came from something the size of an atom, and whereas this may be just the sort of misleading popular scienctific examples you're talking about, I hope they weren't exaggerating the situation that much (i.e. to the point where it wasn't a singularity). On another point, I thought that maybe during the big bang energy had not converted into matter yet, and that quarks and such did not come until some time after (maybe a fraction of a second, maybe a few hundred thousand years, but not at the start). I'm not sure on this, I'll have to read up on it. Hopefully one of your links will help there. If it had infinite spatial extent and any density at all, it would have infinite mass and energy. If the big bang didn't begin from a very small volume though, why was it called the "big bang"? (though of course that was only a name invented by Fred Hoyle, trying to make it sound daft) Sorry, I really shouldn't be asking these questions, and should instead be reading the sources you've provided. But the first point I made at least I'm still not sure about, and unless there were some bizarre time dilation effects for the better part of the universe's life, I don't see how anything explains it. :/

Whereas not everyone agrees and I certainly can't say that I can appreciate the situation as well as a single soon-to-be-mother might, this is the way I see it. When a couple perform their discrete undercover rummagings and conctraception happens not to work, then the mother could choose two options, a) abortion, or b) no abortion, resulting in: a) One happy mother b) One unhappy mother and an unhappy child But there are two people in the second one. Now that conception has occured, is it really moral for the mother to knowingly terminate the child's life before they are born because - as she sees it - her happiness and her unborn child's happiness is more important than the child's life? If you think of it mathematically (weird, but still, just showing), if the happiness is H and when you're happy you're +H and unhappy you're -H, and when you're not alive it's a null state of zero, and a life is valued at L, you get: a) +H + L = H + L (best case scenario, not considering abortion to mean -L from aborted child) b) -H + L - H + L = 2L - 2H If you value a) more than b) (for abortion in other words), then you think (after cancelling an L from both sides) that H > L - 2H, or 3H > L. That means that you think that the happiness of three people is better than one person's life, which makes no sense at all. Okay, forget that, it's not right bringing maths into morality. Don't quote me on that. Even if you don't consider it to be "terminating the child's life" because they aren't born yet, you are still stopping someone from being born. I wonder whether preventing someone from living before they are born is better than preventing someone from living after... particularly if you replace "born" with "alive", and make the point of being "alive" so fuzzy that it could range from the night of the deed to 9 months and counting, depending on your definition. So in my somewhat convoluted opinion, abortions - except in cases where the mother is at risk of death - should be banned. This is a pretty strange stance coming from me, being pretty much a liberal, but I don't believe that there's any room for "liberty" in choosing whether or not someone can live, not from the mother or anyone else.

This one's alright: http://www.scienceforums.net I suppose you could try http://physicsforums.com but it's much larger, so you might not get quite as much specialist attention. These forums are a good size though, without too many experts in one field, and the atmosphere is better, and it's *cough* well moderated. Since not everyone here is an expert in their field (or even in their field at all) the learning experience is pretty much shared, so you don't get a flat out answer or get demeaned if you disagree with/don't understand it.

Don't know, that's just some random link I found with the xplanation already typed up from some previous person's question, I assume. It didn't ask me to register, so I assume it's okay. :/

Out of curiousity swansont (because I really just don't know how it works yet), if the speed of light is invariant, then how do they know things like the universe being 156 billion light years across when light would have only travelled 13.7 billion ly's at the most since its creation? I would have assumed that the speed of light was not always the same as now (as some recent but perhaps discredited theories have suggested), though maybe I'm just not taking into account relativistic effects or some such. Also, if at the universe's creation all the matter in the universe was confined to a very small volume, surely it would be a singularity and all matter would immediately recollapse unless the speed of light were higher then? Or maybe the matter just was moving so quickly and its mass was higher that the force decelerating it was less... but then that still wouldn't explain how photons escaped. I'm getting confused. :S

Given how small the ball and socket are, you could technically repair them, but it would be too difficult to be worth the bother. Since, as 5614 pointed out, biros cost somewhere in the order of zero pence (or about 2 cents ) there's no real point, unless you're really attached to that pen (is it a really expensive one?). When people die, they become biros.

Well, obviously it's a joke. I hope. Taken from the FAQ: Not to mention the proposed propaganda projects on the main page.

I just tried typing up the formula with an explanation for you but it messed up, and I have to go immediately to catch a bus, so I'll just leave you with this link which should hopefully explain it: http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae388.cfm

I started using Firefox after I reinstalled XP on my computer, and my sister showed it to me. Since then I haven't gotten a single pop-up that I can remember, and certainly no adware. It was slower at first, but it doesn't seem to be anymore (not because I've gotten used to it being slower or anything, it's faster now). And it's more minimal than IE in terms of interface, and it's got the google search bar built in, and the icon is much nicer. When you've got multiple windows for a certain site open you can switch between then via a tab bar that apears, instead of having to sort through the IE windows that appear on the taskbar, and frequenty stack. I much prefer Firefox to IE, and this is after using IE for about 5 years. If I might also say this, for anyone who's looking for a good mp3 player as well, I'd recommend STP. It's a quickbar mp3 player that only takes up about 4 MB of RAM, and you can bind hotkeys to the different functions.

Ah, my mistake. I thought I remembered that it could only carry one person from an article in NewScientist, but they must have been talking about one of the others. :S By the way, am I the only one who's completely amazed that a private company could be the fourth independant party in history to launch a spacecraft into space (after Russia, the USA, then China, which are all entire countries)? Why haven't any other countries tried this yet? I know the ESA works on this, but usually in cooperation with other agencies, like NASA.

I believe that SpaceShipOne isn't eligible for the X-Prize as it has to carry at least three people (one pilot and two passengers) to win. But doing it first is all that really matters. My sister's boyfriend (soon to be husband) in California has gone to go see it launch, so hopefully he'll be able to report back and give us a first-hand tale of it.

If it ain't broken, fix it until it is. To quote the FAQ: So, custom title insults are allowed and should be necessary to tell newcomers about certain users, like Cap'n Refsmmat's list suggests.

A bit of a strange topic, but anyway. Turquoise, because it looks very nice in moderation so long as it's not confused with aqua or lime green. Like a turquiose pen, but not a turquoise car (or a turquoise, electric Lambourghini Diablo like I say I'd want in order to scare people). 11's my favourite number; it used to be whatever my age was up until then and then it stopped. It's nice and easy to write. Also I vastly prefer odd numbers to even, except for 13 which I hate. (EDIT: I'm a victim of culture for hating 13...) What about yours though, YT2095?

Well yes... we could go to another site for science fiction related discussions. But then we'd have to deal with, quite frankly, a bunch of people who know nothing about science and/or the scientific method, where all posts inevitably degenerate into Star Trek vs. Star Wars flame wars or discussions about the bra size of the latest Star Trek supermodel. We could likewise just go to physicsforums.com for our science related questions, but this site it a hell/heck of a lot better as it's smaller, and it's a much better environment. Just like a smaller student/staff ratio is better, it's also better moderated, hence the generally good quality of posts here. People who are serious about the science in their stories don't want to ask scifi nerds about it; they ask scientists. Basically, I'm saying that we could make an intelligent scifi section in this forum. There wouldn't need to be a section for general scifi chat (though maybe blike could make a sticky telling us why he hates Babylon 5 so much ), and it would only need be science-related. The purpose would be to remove ideas like those found in the pseudoscience forum and focus on real science. A lot of people seem to think that science fiction - because it did at one point consist cheifly of ten-storey spiders and moon-men come to steal our women - will always be worthless, and a lot of scifi writers call their work "speculative fiction" because science fiction has got such a bad rep now. :/

I think Cap'n Refsmmat is referring to the use of heck rather than "the other one", which you were opposed to in the thread titled "Hell". But I agree; how could this plant sense the death of another plant by a particular person at all, and how do they hook up a polygraph to a plant? And how exactly could it go "crazy"?

I had to get out of bed and turn on my computer to post this last point after reading it; the foreword, by the author: I'd agree with both of your points there, particularly the first after this. Now I'd better go sleep, last week of college tomorrow and I need to revise some more...

Erm, I haven't read that book yet so that comment's lost to me, it's on my floor now, waiting. After a very breif second discussion about the points I made in the second post, my mom has told me that she was really talking about "primary consciousness", which is apparently another name for instinct. She's also provided me with a few books on the subject: "The Fields of Life", "The Unseen Self", and "Frontiers of Consciousness". The last one is a whopper; it deals with 11 issues, including "Death as an Altered State of Consciousness", "Ecolgical Consciousness", "Psychical Research" and "Paraphysics", among other things. I'll post the ISBN's if anyone is interested. Apparently these fields are electromagnetic in origin. How this influences consciousness (when not in the brain, of course) I'm uncertain. I woldn't vouch for the scientific objectiveness these books, of course. The inside leaf of "The Fields of Life", the only one written by someone with a degree, is as follows: Bearing in mind that this book is supposed to have been written by someone with a doctorate, I wonder about the rest fo it...

I tried to, and started by asking if I could suggest an alternative hypothesis (those were my exact words). Before I could my mom said that that was subjective, by coming up with ways to explain the results whilst disproving the idea that plants are conscious. I think the main problem is that this consciousness or, as some would attribute it, life force is undefined and undetectible, so even classifying it as such is subjective. I was going to suggest that the result could have been due to the plant somehow registering that this particular animal (based on their scent/hormones/etc.) was somehow "remembered" by the plant as one which had killed another plant earlier when it rembered the other plant dying. This wouldn't be conscious thought as such, but still involves massive assumptions about the plant being able to detect and remember its surrounding and the events that take place around it, which is made all the more difficult as plants don't have brains or a central nervous system. So the experiment basically suggests that consciousness, reasoning and memory can be produced via this proposed life force by itself, thus rendering brains redundant.

This thread is only meant to ask everyone here about the subject itself, and what's currently known about it. I've put it in the pseudoscience section for obvious reasons... Though it sounds a bit lame, I was just involved in a half hour or so argument with my mother about this subject, starting out when she suggested that I try writing a short story (which I like doing) in which the main character is a virus or bacterium. I didn't mean for it to last that long, and it's particularly annoying as I missed taping Invader Zim because of it. Basically it qiuckly turned into a debate about whether plants are conscious or not in the end (or middle, somewhere anyway). During the debate my mom happened to mention things in passing about a life force, energy fields, auras, and ESP, and a lot about bigotry and bias in mainstream science. But she did mention one particular experiment that had been done in the past involving plants and an apparent awareness of some sort. What happened was that there were two plants in a room, and in comes a man who pulverizes one of the plants. Later a procession of random people is lead through the room with the plant, including the man who destroyed the plant. This plant was hooked up to some sort of meter, a polygraph apparently. The graph was normal for everyone who walked through, except when the man who destroyed the first plant entered, when the graph went crazy. I plan to Google this now and try to find out more about it, but perhaps there's someone here who knows about this experiment and anything else about it, or on the subject of plant consciousness. Or even a life force for that matter, aside from the dozens of popular science books on the subject. What sort of physical evidence is there for these sort of things?

Surely Mars would be better in this case though... it's the same distance away and the miniscule increase in chance of being hit by a meteorite hardly counters the benefits of the presence of water and materials, atmosphere and so on, plus the potential for future real development. Considering that, according to that data, Phobos has an escape velocity of only 10.3 metres per second, I don't think there'll be enough gravity to even make a difference for exercise, though the moons might make a useful base for spacecraft in the future, when transferring supplies between Earth and Mars, if needed. Oh, and the reason Martin thought you were in Antarctica is because it shows that as your location under your avatar.

If he was in jail for hacking into the computer network at his school, I don't think they'd give him access to another computer to make a post instead of a phone call... But seriously, what were you thinking when you did that Crash? This is how they might see it: 1) Installed a keylogger which could be used to steal passwords or confidential information 2) Disabled the antivirus system, leaving the computers vulnerable to attack by viruses that for all they knew you might have been trying to install 3) Did that for potentially every computer in the school 4) Funneled user information to your personal email address when people used the computers 5) Covered up your tracks to avoid detection, suggesting that you knew what you were doing was wrong This would place you in control of a LOT of information. What were you trying to do wheh you did all that anyway?

I don't know enough about basic string theory yet to really make a comment, but why couldn't there be multiple time dimensions? The reason I think this is that it might explain something about parallel universes. Imagine everything is travelling through time normally at a constant rate (assuming no relativity effects due to near light speed travel). It would have a constant rate of travel in the x-direction of time. But maybe every time there is a probability of some sort, every time someone in one dimension does one thing and their twin in another does something else, they're moving differently in the y-direction or the z-direction. How this would occur I've no idea, these are just unfounded ideas. If this were the case though, it might resolve the causality problems with travelling back in time (and before anyone rolls their eyes, I didn't come up with all this for some science fiction story idea, I had it during a physics seminar at Leeds university). If you had certain (x, y, z) co-ordinates and you travelled back in time, to a point where your universe was at different (x, y, z) co-ordinates to your own, then unless you could control the particular aspects of the time dimensions that you travelled through you could quite possible miss your past and end up in someone else's. Alternatively, if you did make it back to your past, then any changes you made (which you would make simply from being there) wouldn't affect your future, because you would split that dimension off onto another direction through time and the future from which you came would be unaffected, because by going back to the past in which you weren't originally there, by being there the universe must split off onto different (x, y, z) co-ordinates, because it's different. Okay, most of that was probably rubbish, but mostly I'm just wondering why there can't be multiple time dimensions. How do the current theories explain the idea of parallel universes now with one time dimension? I'm not challenging current science, particularly as I don't yet understand it, and if someone could tell me how current theory precludes the need for multiple time dimensions, I'll breathe a sigh of relief and leave it at that.

Isn't that molecule just called ethane-1,2-diol? Or is etilenglycol the nonstandard name? I don't remember anything about it being extremely toxic...

Yes, there are a few here... some probably joined just to ask questions that relate to their stories. Whereas this would only be one use of it, it would be great to have a section where science fiction writers can post their ideas on science in stories to get feedback in that respect, thus helping to prevent convulsion-inducing technobabble that some poor soul of weak constitution might otherwise read some day in the future. It might also serve as a more relaxed part of the forum, where instead of debating based on current theories and facts we could just let our imaginations stretch a little and consider what it might be like one day, or could be like, even if you have to leave the science a little foggy. I'm not talking about pseudoscience of course, and anyway, people would come to it looking for solutions to their theoretical science probems, not to post conspiracy theories like in the pseudoscience section. If anyone came in with ideas for their scifi story that they aren't prepared to change even if the science is completely wrong, then we can just cry blue fantasy and leave them be. It would help to educate writers in science, and be a positive draw to the forums.