Radical Edward

It would be nice to know if we could just do it first of all. wormholes are just a solution of GR< no-one knows how to make them or connect them to a particular place, or if we can, the other end has to be put there. then there is always that big problem of the fact that GR and QM don't like one another. I'd rather just explore the landscape of the physics we can see before we start shooting off the horizon int ostuff we can't even theorise, let alone do.

because there is no good reason that it should.

origami is Japanese

no, because if you did arrive at it's past, then you could go to the past of a planet, set up another wormhold there, and come back even further into your own past, ad infinitum. you only arrive at what you percieve as it's past, because it's present hasn't been seen by you yet, as time takes a finite time to get to you.

that's bollocks. one would expect the orbital period to have nothing to do with the masses of the objects, except the central one around which everything is orbiting (well okay, the centre of mass, but we'll let that slip as an approximation)

well interstellar travel is going to be a really slow business unless we know wnough about the universe to see how it can be manipulated to our advantage.

I prefer not to use time-based words when talking about the 'beginning' of the universe, as it invariabl makes people think of what happened before the universe. Now if time originated at the big bang, as well as space itself, matter and energy, then saying 'before' the universe makes about as much sense as 'north of the north pole' now here's an interesting thought. When we look at Quantum Mechanics, all the various conservation rules - energy, angular momentum and so on, are the results of symmetries. Rotate or displace something (depending on the sort of symmetry you are looking at), and if it does not change, then it is symmetrical and you have an invariant, or conserved quantity. Energy conservation is demonstrated in one of these symmetries - which one? Well rather interestingly, it's time. So if time is irrelevant, so is energy conservation.

thanks. I know the classic double slit experiment. I will ask one of my friends about this today, he has been working on QM for a while...

well I doubt it is specifically constructed with numbers in mind, although it is an interesting thought, expecially for those who consider it a holy language. I don't know alot about it, nothing at all in fact, and to be honest I'm a bit cynical, since you can find anything if you look hard enough.

I don;t think we do mess up the equation really, since chaos is thrown into the measure. we are just highly organised structures that's all, the universe still follows the same rules, as do we.

I see no relation to a vortex, whatsoever. and yes, the orbital periods are independent of their masses, but they are not related to the axial spins of the bodies in any way.

Is that the only place you have seen it? does the article reference any papers I can look at, as I don't hav the book.

I doubt it. It is similar to the 'if a tree falls in a forest and there is no-one around to hear it, does it still make a sound' question.

I doubt there will be ant protection as such. I think that either there will be casual loops, or that current thinking is actually wrong, and the universe won't allow time travel in the first place. failing that we can always fall back on one of the more exotic theories, such as multiple universes.

no, it's not quite like that... there was no vacuum in the first place, no space or time, these only came into being at the big bang. when we say space is expanding, that means space itself, not just stuff flying out into a big (sort of) empty space. In the balloon analogy, all space is the surface of the balloon, nothing occupies the 'volume' of the balloon.

Granted it is going to be essential if we are going to exist beyond the earth's magnetic core giving up the ghost and letting the planet get irradiated by the solar wind, but what do you think of planetary colonisation? how should we go about it? Should we try and keep planets as they are until we know more about them, or should we start just trying to hurry up and infect mars and so on with some genetically engineered life forms?

I think you have the right sort of idea there John... think of all the coincidences that occured just in order to bring you here, right from the first cellular lifeforms right the way through things hitting the planet and so on. Suddenly the huge numbers involved in getting the universe to look right don't seem so ominous. I still see no reason for any kind of planning, besides, if any of it is planned, then the planner must be planned too. and so must the planner of of the planner of the planned -> (extrapolate ad infinitum)

Einstein's lambda was a fudge factor, because he thought that the universe was steady state, and his theory predicted an expanding universe. He stuck lambda in to stop the universe from expanding. Of course when it was discovered that the universe was actually expanding, he regretted adding this spurious constant in, telling a friend it was the "biggest blunder of my life". Since then though, there has been a bit of a turnaround in the books, and lambda has reared it's ugly head again, although now it is the other way round - actually accelerating the universe, and potentially splitting everything up into DeSitter space. Where lambda comes from and how big it is, is still not known, as QM can't even figure it out. The only predictions of it's magnitude (and I've not a clue as to what the calculations are, unless it is the same thing as casmir forces) are about 10^120x too big. no doubt we will figure it out eventually, and it will probably be in a theory of everything.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2199093.stm sadly it looks like this probe isn't going to get to bite the cometary dust like it was intended to. Looks like it bit it's own dust first...

how did they manage that? The stories of the destruction of the Library have been circulating since the first century AD (around the time of Julius Caesar), and yet the first crusade didn't actually begin until about 1095 AD. Or are you talking about entirely different crusaders?

I wonder if they will ever get round to engineering some of these genes into chimps and so on. I hope they hurry up and have a go in the next few years. It would be fascinating to see if they can artificially push evolution forwards...

heh. anyway the emphasis is on protecting the message. It might only be a short term thing, like protecting bank details when a transaction is made, the codes to the Nuclear weapons launch (which are changed on regular intervals) or other military purposes and so on. current methods are okay, such as PPP and so on, but they are crackable - it just takes time. this method of a one time random key that is as big as the message is uncrackable.

yeah that's the thing. It's all very well and good having a 10GHz chip, but that doesn't actually make it good. Take for example the PS2 and the Xbox.... one of which runs at 300MHz and the other that runs at a GHz or so.... I'll leave you to guess which is which

AMD will catch up

I still stand by the anythropic principle. I see no reason why any universal laws should have to have been started off by someone... definitely not the timeless being we normally attribute to religion. the only possible exception to this, is if that 'timeless' being actually came about from a universe that was perfectly explainable, right down to how it started.