Radical Edward

quakenet. I usually hang around there.

China Miéville's books are astounding, espeically Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Iain M Banks is excellent too, though he writes to slowly to keep any momentum up. Pratchett is excellent too, though his books have become a bit too familiar of late I think.

put really simply, the only measureable difference between the two twins is that one of them accelerated.

actually, Maxwell's equations do allow us to prove the equal angles if incidence and reflection, and also the angles of refraction.

well look at it relativistically: ignore the earth and all gravity for the moment. You get in your spaceship and fly away from your twin at very high speed, watching him age more slowly than you. but he also watches you fly away at a very high speed, and he sees you ageing more slowly then him. so he turns round, and comes back, seeing the same thing happen again. oh no you think, what happens when he gets home: I am older than him, but he is also older than me! where has everything gone wrong? well the only difference between the two situations (relativistically) is that he had to accelerate to that speed, and accelerate back towards you, and then decelerate (still acceleration really, just in the opposite direction). during these periods, the twin who doesn't accelerate sees time pass more slowly for the other brother, the other brother sees time flying by for his accelerating twin, and the issue is resolved.

no real existance? what about relativity?`what is an "observer"? what is a "mind"? why shouldn't the clock ever tick? I never said that time is not continuous, and I never planned to. the planck time is merely the smallest meaningful time. why does it have to tick relative to anything? and you can have discrete things. you cannot say that simply because something may be "mathematically" smaller than a given number it can be smaller in reality: electrons are discrete, so why can't you have half an electron?

we can all laugh as normal when the sun rises at the normal time in asia. some of the debunking sites are rather cool though I thought, though there are too many clever people wasting their time on this crap. oh, is adam still about, or is he on top of a mountain somewhere?

what about the paradoxes then? oh, I should clarify a bit: the main issue with ftl is that of information transfer.

apparently the earth starts to stop tomorrow. http://www.zetatalk.com

the mass of the galaxy can be calculated by looking at the speed at which objects orbit the centre. there is a discrepancy at large distances though, since the planets out there are moving too quickly. this is one of the hints at dark matter existing. you are viewing the big bang as an explosion from some point, this is not the case. the big bang happened everywhere, and all space was created in it. there is no edge or shockwave, at least according to the standard model.

you are being tremendously subjective.

where did you ge that? we don't even know what shape this universe is yet, even assuming there are others.

tell him to carry on cutting wood. Tesla did things that people thought were impossible, but were not theoretically impossible. should the speed of light be constant (locally) then ftl travel would be able to be used to create paradoxes, like sending you a message telling you you have broken your leg before you break it, hence allowing you to not break your leg. I will type up the paradox tomorrow.

blasphemy, Giles is a nice guy.

you can fire photons one by one and get the same effect.... the problem is that you are thinking classically, and in these cases you can't think of an electron as a particle alone, only when it interacts with one thing.

wave particle duality; the "particles" have both particle like, and wave like properties. you cannot apply classical thought like that in the quantum realm.

the issue in this matter is more to do with general relativity rather than special. at some point you have to accelerate towards the earth, that is when you age less than it does. the SR stuff is not really important in this case (twins paradox)

actually no, the electron double slit interference experiments are done in a slightly different way, and the results are because of the wave nature of electrons, rather than electric field interactions. this can be demonstrated mathematically since we have a good understanding of both the quantum mechanical nature of the system, and the field structure too.

TV is almost infinitely more damaging than games in terms of corrupting peoples' minds.

It has not been proven, because light does not have mass. there aren't even any theoretical suggestions that light has mass. furthermore, I assume you are talking about photons. you have to be really careful here because of wave-particle duality. you cannot say that a photon is really a particle, because it has both particle like and wave like properties. In reality a photon is an excitation of the electric field. I suggest you read (at the very least the forword )Principles of Quantum Optics by Rodney Loudon, he explains it rather well, though I believe his explanation was borrowed from Lamb.

It is one very thin flexible mirror with a bunch of actuators behind it - at least the ones I have seen. they may have multiple mirrors for bigger devices though.

the mass for all intents and purposes is irrelevant, because the gravitational effect of the nucleus is infinitessimally small. the only effect the nucleus has on the frequency is in it's electromagnetic and quantum interaction with the electrons - which is exactly the forces I have been talking about, and nothing to do with your statements. even then, these effects are only absolutely minor perturbations and really not worth considering unless you are delving into the more advanced world of spectroscopy.

what is being eluded though?

yeap, this is the main problem with surface telescopes (as well as absorption) and the reason people are developing laser guide stars and adaptive optics. have a google for them, they are quite interesting. THe asme adaptive optics technique can be used for advanced retinal imaging

the universe appears pretty closed.