Radical Edward

gravity doesn't exist, the earth sucks.

you do that, don't be a slacker like I am/was

but not meaningful. the planck time is (quantum mechanically) the shortest meaningful length of time, as the planck distance is the shortest meaningful distance scale.

however if we don't, then you will have a load of A-Levels to do that you haven't revised for.

voltage is measured across a device, and isn't the only thing to be considered when looking at the wattage: P=IV=I2R

quantum fluctuations of the vacuum energy ( 1/2:h::lcomega: ) if I recall correctly. what do you mean by surpass escape velocity though?

ace...

because it is.

An interesting study of people with a certain form of epilepsy has shown that they are prone to religious visions, and a connection made with one of the founders of a religious sect (the Seventh Day Adventists) seems to confirm this. The study is in more detail here, and seems to point to a 'source' in the brain for religious type thoughts. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2865009.stm

a drifting speed of light over time is different to the constrant speed of light referred to in relativity. I try not to confuse the two.

thanks, and I don't use LaTex. I have just heard of it, and I was wondering if anyone had opinions on it.

well it depends on how much energy you are willing to dump into accelerating them. People aren't all that big, and energy is fairly freely available, so depending on the power source (fusion? antimatter?) you might be able to get up to significant fractions of c. of course there would be lots of problems associated with this, such as radiation and so on (since the stuff you are travlling towards would be massively blue shifted)

does anyone else here use LaTex for writing reports? I hear it is a good way to do it (albeit complicated) but I don't really have any idea about it myself.

well I intend to, though I am busy at the moment with my PhD. If someone could convert the lecture course from the link I posted into PDF an put it somewhere for me, I would be much appreciative, as I don't know what I need to read ps files.

It occurs purely be the result that the speed of light is constant*... and the inclusion of this "fact" means that SR and GR are unavoidable. assuming that c in a vacuum is always the same, and doing a little bit of maths gets the SR result quite simply. THe Lorentz transforms themselves I have just put in the announcement at the top of the relativity section of the forums. *the velocity is obtained from the maxwell equations, and is equal to 1/sqrt(:mu:0 :epsilon:0)

they are axioms.

the free faller would definitely reach the EH. local time is not altered at all for him (well okay, it will be a little bit because of the huge warping of specatime over his own body volume, but for simplicity we will ignore that).. however someone watching him yould never see him reach the EH as he would be redshifted out of existance.

placebos are a good way of making people stop focussing on the illness and leave the doctor alone.

Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics.

that is about my position. I disagree with the reasons we went to war, however the war itself was not really a bad thing, in that it Got rid of saddam. Now the hypocrisy starts though, beceuse we* won't be going to war with any other equally bad regiemes that need getting rid of, and we will still be paying them large lumps of money in order to opress their people. *we this time, being the west as a whole - both those for and against the war.

you play a game with baseball bats, knifes are used for cutting food and other such things. Guns are for nothing but killing. you can argue all you like that "but they are for sport too" but then why have semi automatic weapons, weapons that reload automatically? At the most for a sport you need a single shot weapon. most of it though, as has been pointed out, is down to the people with the Guns. I wouldn't really argue against Blike having a gun, because he seems like a pretty intelligent sort, but there are far more people out there who shouldn't have guns, and until something is done to limit stupid people getting hold of insanely powerful arsenals of weapons, then I can't really condone the availability of Guns as it stands. Britain's lack of Guns came about after the Dunblane massacre, a typical case where Gun access laws were not good enough, and an idiot got hold of a load of weapons... As a result of a public outcry and knee jerk reaction by the government, voila, no-one has (legal) guns anymore... however the problem was not solved at all, because since Dunblane, gun crime has been rising. In essence, the banning of guns in the UK was completely pointless, and so the same would probably be said for the US. Gun crime may remain at a persistant level (though probably slightly lower, as less family feuds would end up in firefights), however one thing that really would drop, is Gun deaths by suicide.

if we made car theft and mugging legal, crime rates would drop too.

perhaps it is in your subconscious.

That would be Einstein, in his formulation of Special Relativity.

have fun with maths then.