Radical Edward

what stops the particles from just carrying on in a straight line?

not quite... looks like water filled the basement and they boiled it. I'll look into it a bit more.

oh, how does this water thing work by the way? forget that question: http://www.scientecmatrix.com/seghers/tecma/scientecmatrix.nsf/_/583A4822C7CA5B3CC1256B9E00354968

nice car ^^"

hmm.. it seems a little unlikely to me, but then it could have some truth to it, as goldfish and other fish can see in the IR, and when considering the thermal vents (on the base of the oceans, and one possibility of where life may have evolved) there may be some truth in it, since this would allow stuff to navigate between one vent and another. still, it's conjecture, I'll look into it, as I don't know anything much about the properties of life round these vents.

what are your assumptions based on?

see.. it's true I tell you!

the future of the universe is in fact set in stone, since there are only a finite number of things the universe can actually do. there is a great paper on the computational capacity of the universe that I have downloaded from nature and stuck on my webspace here as I'm bot sure if you have access to nature's full papers or not

boom goes yellowstone.....

I always know that if I am on the toilet and the phone rings, no matter how quickly I rush, when I get to the phone, it will always stop just as I am about to pick it up. This is called Sods or Murphy's Law, and is a fundamental tenet of the universe.

with current theory it is actually impossible to interfere with quantum encryption, since the wavefuntion is altered on a measurement. the actual description of how quenum encryption works is understandable, but quite lengthly, and diagrams make it easier. maybe I will have a go later if people are still interested. anyway, ultimately the quantum element of the engryption isn't encryption at all, but rather the generation of a key, that cannot be seen by an outside observer. It has been mathematically proved that if a random key is the same size as the original message, then that message is immune to any attempts at deciphering it (not only is it mathematically provable, but it's also rather intuitive) the way current encryption systems work is by the use of an asynchronous encryption key (the public key-private key system) rather than the more standard substitution ciphers. the maths to encrypt a message one way is usually simple (the public key) but to decrypt it, requires extra knowledge about the public key that was handed out. there is a great book on encryption by Simon Singh called 'The Code Book' which has a good description of the development of encryption throughout the ages, from the basic substitution ciphers, through the enigma machine, and onto PGP and quantum encryption.

no mummies were found in the pyramids. here is one source. http://www.crystalinks.com/gpstats.html

not to mention accumulated damage and of course, the curse of Gravity and so on.

these sites offer some interesting informaion on the pyramids, although to be honest they are more interested in alternate histories http://www.grahamhancock.com/ http://www.robertbauval.com/ It is unlikely that slave labour was used, since forcing people to do soemthing to that sort of accuracy would be difficult. The construction workers themselves are likely to have been farmers and so on who offered their time freely when there was no other work to be done. this is out of one of the books by the authors mentioned above... (or some other one, I don't recall now)

>_< .. oh heh, I get it now, thanks

spectrometry is great. It's also how helium was first discovered actually, by looking at the spectral absorption lines in the sun (hence the name helium, derived from the word helios) since at the time, helium hadn't even been found on the earth, and they thought it was something that just existed in the sun.

geting fusion working in the first place would be a start. ^^ unless you want to carry a very small star in the boot of your car... personally I would walk or use public transport, I'm not really a car person, still it's nice to see people coming up with new ideas. Apparently alcohol based cars work rather well, and alcohol can be produced quite easy using existing waste biomass and a few enzymes...

I can't see the link between a planet just outside the orbit of pluto, and a galaxy 50 billion light years away... or however far it is.

in many of the tombs (not the pyramids), they had all sorts of stuff killed and put in the tomb with them, servants, horses. you name it. the strange thing about the pyramids is why they were made so obvious, when compared to other tombs such as those found in the valley of the kings, which were about as secret as you could really get. (I posted a few intleresting links, but they are at the end of the last page)

actually there is alot of really interesting stuff on this sort of thing here , here , here and updates on this kind of thing here <edit: this last link is down at the moment, I think it's only temporary though> not strictly on topic, not at all in fact, but It's a past-time of mine I thought I'd share with you ^^

safety is one of the easiest things to do, since with the majority of experiments it is fairly clear what is going to happen. I am shocked that someone with no concept of safety could actually be qualified enough to teach a class. Any experiment that stands a chance of exploding shoule be carried out behind a screen, indeed our chemistry teacher wouldn't drop little lumps of lithium into water unless there was a screen in the way, and all that does is fizz a bit.

yes, but there is not 'proof' of anything. Remember Science is a work in progress and should be treated as such Can you suggest something better than the big bang, while taking into account redshift of galaxies (and hence the expansion of the universe) and the Cosmic Microwave background, and also the predicted abundances of hydrogen and helium being about the same as what is observed (discrepancies due to nuclear fusion and not being about to see everything) or at the very least somehow demonstrating that these things are irrelevant. I certainly haven't seen any more reasonable explanations as to what caused these particular phenomenon, and indeed most of the reasonable scientists within the scientific community can't have either. please enlighten me. furthermore I have never offered an explanation as to why the big bang occured, or even for that matter what caused it and how all the matter came into existance, but I know enough to say that at this surrent time, any suggestions would be little more than idle conjecture, as no theory we have can actually approach the very instance that everything came into being (indeed time makes no sense at a singularity, so one can't really apply words like before, and 'at the moment of') However all the evidence so far points to the fact that at some time in the past, everything was very small and crunched up together, and that suggests a big bang. incidentally, since you have mentioned it several times but I've not seen an explanation. could you tell me what this pyramid water is, and offer the proof that you imply that you have. thanks.

celebritised ignorance is one of the major culprits I think, not to mention the general obsession with image and frivolous things. I'm not against looking good and enjoying yourself and so on, but too many people have it as the core of their existance. It could also be the fault of the Education systems too. I can't speak for other countries, but in the UK, learning isn't actually all that interesting. The learning process is to rigid and focussed on results and examinations, which often show little else than the person being tested has been well coached to pass an exam. Almost any pre-degree exam can be passed by anyone if they have facts stuffed into their head in the right way. Granted intelligence does help, but alot of the time I don't think that these exams show up genuine intelligence. sadly while I can go some way to identifying the problem, I can do nothing to suggest a cure. That I will have to leave to the sociologists and other qualified people.

I'll address your final points first. (try not to complain so much - you'll only get a reputation, and it doesn't add anything to the conversation) there is actually evidence for a big bang, several pieves in fact - or at the very least evidence that the universe was once very small, and is expanding. extrapolation from this suggests that the big bang occurred. I point you in the direction of the red shift of Galaxues (which shows they are receeding at some velocity) and the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is in essence, a black body spectrum of the universe when it was all in thermal equilibrium. since the universe is not in thermal equilibrium now, but has been in the past, you can say that all the energy and matter must have been very close together in order to maintain that equilibrium, and hence the universe was very small. the universe left equilibrium when the temperature dropped enough for the young atoms such as hydrogen and helium (which made up the bulk of the universe, and still do) to become transparent to the electromagnetic (aka light) radiation, and at that point the universe began to diverge away from an equilibrium state. water is actually very stable. If it wasn't it would be almost no use as a solvent - this is essentially the only funtion that water has (by volume anyway). life does not actually produce all that much water, and it can be produced very easily in the clouds of gas that form in the regions where stars are being born: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/water_space_010220.html (it's a bit pop sciency, but never mind)

well like us, we have a nervous response to heat. mind you, I'm not entirely sure what the mechanism that these nerves use to convert temperature into a signal in the nerves, but I suspect the general layout of the cells would be quite different to that of the rods and cones and such.