Radical Edward

actually, it is. there are just rules. oh, and zarkov, if you're going to come up with another theory. spell it right. It should be 'Celestial'

well after 2003, maybe . to me though, it looks more like Cruithne is a near earth asteroid locked into a 1:1 resonance with the earth.

couldn't we just shift some of the threads into different forums, and then remove the old forum and rename the remaining one? that might work. If you want, I'll shuffle physics round into something a bit more consice.

It could be yes. In fact, it probably is, in a sense. remember all we have is a mathematical model, that predicts what we will observe, based on a bunch of 'interactions'. All it is, is just some mathematical explanation of what we see. An analogy would be making a mathematical model of a car, based on what we do to the car, and what we observe, without ever being able to look under the bonnet. It would produce the right result, and we could say 'hey, now we understand this car' but in reality we don't. This becomes particularly acuse when we look at the likes of Quantum mechanics, where so far as I can see, we have to resort to using imaginary numbers in order to get a result... well what are they? for those of you who know, skip this bit, or correct it if I'm wrong: the imaginary number i is basically the square root of minus one. while it may seem useless, as it isn't a 'thing that exists' - for example you can't have i apples, it is a tremendously useful tool in mathemetics. well i isn't 'real', but it is nescessary, so wither we have a flawed understanding of 'i' or our model is nothing more than that, just a mathematical construct, that by fair means or foul, comes up with the right answer.

well I'm sure if you multiply it by a collection of random numbers, you'll get your answer.

still working on it. heh.

turns out that it is a lump of Saturn V, that could run into the moon in 2003. I hope it does, it would be interesting to watch. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2253385.stm

Conservation of energy is a result of symmetry in time, when you work it out through Quantum Mechanics. If there is no time, there is no need for energy conservation, as at the point of the big bang. That's my intuitive view on it anyway, though granted I haven't managed to unify QM and GR yet, so I can't tell you if I'm right or not.

the size of the object isn't really the important issue here, the thing that we look for when observing Really Small Stuff is the interactions. There are a limited number of ways in which particles may interact with one another, as a result of all the conservation rules and so on - for example lepton number, spin et al. and it is by looking at these interactions that we can figure out what it is we're actually looking at. Some things interact very very rarely, for example neutrinos, but in this case there are so damn many of them (billions pass through your body every second) that the chance of seeing a neutrino interaction becomes quite high.

ho won earth can you come up with a theory and baerly know any of the facts? It seems completely proposterous. and you still haven't addressed the violation of dirac's equation

If any energy had been 'injected' since the big bang, I expect there would b some issues with energy conservation. furthermore, life needn't acually be 'in' the equations that describe the universe, merely it neds to be possible. I see no raeson why life shouldn't have come about as a result of random interactions, it need only happen once, and the universe is a pretty big place, especially when you consider all those amino acids swimming abuot the cosmos.

no no, you're misunderstanding the big bang. It didn't start in a place, since there was no place for it to start in. In effect it 'came about'* everywhere at the same time. as for the first cell, it probably just came about as a result of a few billion generations of simple self replicating chemicals. nothing difficult about that, it's all just statistics. oh, shouldn't this be in physics?

eh? The mass of the planets is trivially small compared to the mass of the sun. Have you ever actually worked your way though the mathematics of a simple two body problem? If you do, you'll find that basic classical mechanics predicts pretty much everything you need or want to know about the earth moon system, from the orbital period through tides and so on.

not really. If there are no outside influences (namely a two body problem) then nothing will happen to the orbit. If there are outside influences, you can't figure out what is going to happen really unless you calculate all those influences explicitly.

you could make a great torture device by inserting an implant that stimulates that bundle whenever you press a button.

I was always under the impression that a dyson sphere was a massive inhabited sphere around a sun. It seems a bit impractical to me, as you would just fall in over most of it, however you could set up rings, like Larry Niven's Ringworld (big ring right round the sun), or Iain M Banks' Culture novels (orbital rings, bigger than planets though) The technology might be a tad tricky for those though, I might work out what the strain on a reasonable thickness would be, that would be say, 10,000km across and have earth gravity/24 hour day.

well if you wanted to extract chemicals from it, there are probably far more efficient methods than melting it.

heh. I bet you waste stuff. If entertainment is a waste, then we should get rid of TV, stop listening to music, forget songs and poetry, literature and so on and so forth.

Actually no. This is just an approximation based on the fact that the sun is a hell of a lot bigger than anything else. The masses of both objects matter in reality. The objects actually orbit around the centre of mass, this gives rise to one of the two tides, and the fact that binary stars orbit around apparently empty space. There will be a general relativistic argument to this no doubt, but I see no real reason to stray beyond cimple newtonian mechanics to debunk you point.

It was the way he used the word 'just' - as if it was an easy thing to do like just going to the shop for a minute.

not knowing anything about M-Theory, I'm just using the meanings of the words as I understand them. If you can explain yourself a bit more clearly, that would be nice.

well there will of course be varying climate matters such as this, that doesn't meant that global warming is not happening though. Ultimately, even if global warming isn't as major an issue as we thought, that is no excuse to carry on burning fuel and releasing crap into the environment at the rate we currently are.

that made me laugh, honestly

missed the E^2 .. thanks for noticing it. and err. what negative time term? I'm, inclined to look at light from the point of view of Fermat's Principle.

maybe I'm getting you wrong somewhere, but wouldn't this imply that light of different wavelengths travels at different speeds?