Radical Edward

it wuz the CIA that did it because they think that we are too close to uncovering the kennedy conspiriacy.

pop = popular. New Scientist is just like an extended version of the Times science column.

a neverending supply of hope.

actually geostationary is just a special case of geosynchronous. geostationary stays in exactly the same place all the time, geosynchronous has a period of 24h, and may wobble up and down, or do anything else that orbital mechanics allows. so long as it gets back to where it started every 24h, it is geosynchronous. note that I am not including harmonics here i.e. a 12h orbit.

so how are you going to get the rod to hit the earth at 17,300 mph, give or take a bit. imagine a little thought experiment. you have a bucket full of water, and you are spinning it round on a rope, and the bucket is travelling with a velocity of say, 5m/s. your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to hit yourself in the head with this bucket at a velocity of at least 5m/s.

is it a requirement to keep switching randomly between imperial and metric? anyways. all you do is work out the momentum imparted on the propellant. so say 1000kg is accelerated to 1m/s, then p=1000kgm/s this will equal the momentum of your rocket. say the rocket is 10,000 kg, then it will be accelerated to 0.1m/s.

how about thick bulletproof, bombproof glass and a well designed vault, like they store the crown jewels in?

I've got opticsopticsopticsoptics all week long for the next 2 years. should be fun. add to that learning biology just for the hell of it so I can do another degree after I finish my PhD. I figure 2/3 masters degrees (2 so far) and a couple of PhDs under the belt would be cool.

well I never tried with any exams, and I didn't fail any.

I think it is time to shuffle through the QM to refresh my head.

does it, or does it not depend on how clever you are?

how do the orbitals go again? s,p,d,f.....

ignore the teacher and go and get some proper books.

my statement was not incorrect. it does depend on how clever you are.

brekkies, as suggested above. I suggest something slow burning to give you energy throughout the day. Also, drink lots of water! most people are actually dehydrated, and the body shifts into a dehydrated mode where it tries to slow down and conserve water. drinking a couple of litres of water every day will help this. try to drink steadily or you will be spending hours on the bog.

glo sticks I believe use a mix of luciferase and something else, possibly ATP (this is how fireflies do it). it might be interesting to seed a bog with luciferase as there would probably be stuff it could catalyse and make glow.

chris moyles is a regular poster here, but he didn't want to reveal this on radio 1 as he would seem like a nerd.

I don't quite understand what you are getting at there. be careful you don't muddle up SR and GR.

I would just put a steel door there. I think the rattling chains and whooshing bit of metal zipping up and down 60 times per second would be pretty noisy.

just hope that the war isn't over in the few months/years it takes to get the rockets there and back. A better solution would be constructing a solar powered mass driver on the moon. you could launch big lumps of rock into space with a relatively low energy cost (zero effectively, since it is all free solar anergy anyway) and hace a more or less continual supply.

didn't delete all the redundant parts of the post, is that a typo?

of course being stationary is possible.

but it does not get 17,300 mph of velocity. it only gets a little bit of velocity that you put into it. the rest is gained from gravity, and lost again because of terminal velocity when it hits the atmosphere unless the rod is guided and has a propulsion system (aka a guided missile). You also have friction to contend with and heat problems, especially if your missile is to be a high velocity guided one. think the recent problems with the space shuttle. There would be no advantage mounting it in space, because you couldn't make the missile any more effective than it already is on earth, not very easily at any rate. It has to be launched into space, it has to be completely unhackable, and it has to be cost effective. This is highly unlikely since current bunker busters already do a bloody good job.

nope, that is exactly correct. If you are on the platform, then you see the trains clock running slowly, and if you are on the train, you see the platform clock running slowly. This can lead to the so-called "twins paradox" in which a twin leaves earth, travels round the solar system at .99c, and then comes home with the problem that he saw his twin ageing slowly and his twin saw him ageing slowly. Obviously this is completely nonsensical, since A cannot be older than B and at the same time B older than A. I suggest following MrL's link, but the simple answer to this paradox is that one of the twins was doing some accelerating (the one flying round the solar system), and so you have to take General Relativity into account. It is good that you have observed this paradox though. another cool paradox-that-isn't-really is the pole vault paradox (length contractions)

told you already, it would just stay in orbit if you dropped it. in order to get it out of orbit, you have to accelerate it.