Radical Edward

how about the earth having four corners and there being a mountain from which you can see everything and the rain coming from opening doors in the firmament.

do you have any idea what a black hole is?

no, energy doesn't exist like that. I think you are talking about photons, which are an excitation of a field, which comes under the category potential as MrL described (in this case an oscillating potential) MrL was right in saying that the three forms of energz are: mass, kinetic and potential energy.

If you live in somewhere like Zimbabwe, then I agree with you. However I doubt it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3005875.stm One of the greatest problems in mathematics, the Poincare Conjecture, may have been solved by a Russian Mathematician, but only as an afterthought to his solution of the "Geometrisation Conjecture" proposed by the American mathematician William Thurston in the 1970s - a far more ambitious proposal that defines and characterises all three-dimensional surfaces. Should his solution survive scrutiny for two years, then he wins a $1m prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Massachusetts. apparently this has great implications for physics and maths, but I don't know what they are!

It depends on how you define planet. Alot of people think there are only 8 planets, because they believe that Pluto is just one of the inner members of the Oort Cloud, and not a planet in it's own right. (I added "other" to the poll)

it goes here, in Pseudoscience.

we don'T even know the mechanism for sentience yet as physics is horrifically incomplete. It definitely won't be done with computers (Strong AI). See "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose

and my argument is still that you are relying on arbitrary undefined mechanisms to stop me from doing anything. all the conclusion of your argument eventually suggests, is that it is not possible to travel in time, since, were there a time machine and I left a piece of paper with instructions as to how to build a time machine, it would actually be there for me "the first time round" or I would never build a time machine in order to leave myself a piece of paper telling me how to build a time machine. but then where did the information come from? an infinitely simpler and more likely conclusion is that time travel cannot occur. Even the multi universal idea is not really time travel - it is simply travelling to a different universe in which different things happen (see Red Dwarf - Ace Rimmer)

interesting this, as one needs to define perfect. You are indeed perfect... at being you. no-one else could do it better. This is why I hate it when people say God is Perfect... I am a more perfect version of me than God could ever be.

yes. This is the basis of a type of quantum computer. You have do do it through interactions however, as spin must be conserved in all interactions. (spin is the quantum analogue of angular momentum, which must also be conserved in all interactions)

sounds odd... have you virus checked your computer at all if you don't have any other problems?

First of all, do not believe anything school science books tell you. As MrL points out, the electrons orbiting the nucleus idea is wrong, and very old - almost as old as the plum pudding model of the atom. These modely are useful in that they can help simplify some models (orbital for simple bonding, and plum pudding for thermodynamics), where you don't need all the extra information, but they are still inaccurate. saying that without quarks, electrons etc, there would not be any atoms is obvious, same for no galaxies wihout stars... since that is the definition of a galaxy. The thing is, you can't immediately go from this analogy to saying that the big bang is like a supernova, as the physics is completely different. The Supernova exists within space, wheras the Big Bang didn't .... furthermore the supernova is an artefact of the old(ish) universe, in which all the forces have separated, however in the early universes, the forces were unified.

The way aman described it, it sounded like more energy was added to the universe after the big bang, not conversion of one type of energy to another, which is what you describe.

what exactly would be done with him then? he would become a divine martyr instead.

well arguably we only see 2 dimensions with our eyes, and then our brain does some clever trickery to make it look 3D. But what Mr L is talking about is the 3D projection of a 4D object, in the same way that you can project a 3D cube onto a 2D piece of paper, and still recognise it as a cube. and do you mean one temporal dimension rather than spacial [sic] (should be spatial)

your whole argument relies on arbitrary, unidentified mechanisms. were I to build a time machine, what would actuallly stop me from leaving a piece of paper after I use the time machine and travel back in time, which tells me how to build a time machine? The whole causality argument would sugest to me a far more simple conclusion: that it is impossible to travel in time.

then it is alive. However, like fire, unless it was well designed, it would have two flaws in that it wasn't capable of mutation and (hence) adapting to cope in different environments.

electrons themselves move very fast indeed. treat them simply using a bit of thermal physics and you will see what I mean. The drift however when you apply an emf across a circuit, is very slow. While individual electrons may whip about at speeds approaching c, they bounce off alot of stuff and this slows them down. If I recall, the average drift is a few mm per second. rather nicely, you can then insert this into the lorentz transforms and work out a magnitude for the magnetic field around a wire.

like a photon, they are massless... though calling them particles is a bit flawed too as a result of wave-particle duality. saying they are "made of energy" is a bit of a grey area, since what is energy? Energy is always manifest in some form, in an excitation of some field, or electron, or momentum or something, but it never exists as an entity in itself. Energy is merely a conserved quantity which may take one of many different forms. Photons in particular being excitations of the electomagnetic field.

basically saying everything that has already happened has already happened and you can't change it.... perhaps so, but that doesn't stop different causality violations, such as sourceless information.

catching or killing the likes of Bin Laden or even Saddam would be higly difficult to deal with politically... where would they go on trial? where would they be imprisoned? what would you do with the body? It's the same as Hitler... even if these people were found, they would probably "disappear" rather than be presented to public scrutiny.

viruses are awkward yeap, plus if you accept that they are alive, you have to accept that alot of other things are alive too, for example computer viruses and so on, or even computer programs that are designed to be reproductive and so on (for example some life simulations) - or would you say that the stuff they are made of has to be "matter" ?

are sterile people not alive then?

so it is more like conscious justification than conscious action?