Sayonara

Motor Daddy: Your maths is "wrong" only where you are trying to use it to describe a scenario in which you are disregarding the known physical effects of relativity. IOW, your maths may well describe the part of the scenario you are paying attention to, but because of this gap where the disregarded physics should be, it falls short of describing the actual events which take place in the example. People on here have repeatedly attempted to explain to you why these physical effects cannot be disregarded, and how they apply to the example you provide. You have consistently ignored those members and ploughed onwards with fallacious and repetitive soap-boxing about the particular figures you happen to have chosen. This kind of behaviour is considered trolling by our staff, and it is only their opinion of what constitutes trolling which determines their reactions to it, and whether the admins will support or overrule them. By all means continue with this discussion, but have the common decency to actually listen to the people who are trying to help you, instead of playing the same broken record over and over like an obstinate child. The bottom line is that your measurement of the duration of a second in your frame of reference is not necessarily the same as it is from the perspective of a different frame of reference. If you can get your head around this somewhat counter-intuitive relativistic effect, the thread will make much more sense to you.

Thread closed. This thread will not be reopened or duplicated. Guidance for Moderators: There is no need to wait quite so long to kill off threads which are nothing more than a protracted argument from incredulity, especially when the O/P: Has opened other threads which make the same argument States that he has "discussed" the same topic on other forums States that people on those forums started to ignore his repeated stance of denial

I read the bolded part as "magically", which is a quality I attribute to any fanciful effects whose mechanisms can't be pinned down.

Thread which duplicates previously posted topics without adding anything new: closed. So... yes.

Granted, but I personally think that the difference between "highly" and "possibly slightly" is a big one.

While your post is informative and quite rightly picks up on my incorrect use of terminology, I am not sure such precision is necessary when we are faced with such gems as "Mars can be summed up as a highly vocanic planet that still is volcanic in nature since ice is the product of heat generation".

Welcome back you crazy maverick son of a gun.

The idea is that the Black Death (and various other plagues prior to that) caused the frequency of the gene to increase in the European population, not that it "created" it. I am surprised the New Scientist entry doesn't make this distinction. In fact, it even says "it was probably not handed down from ancestors who survived bubonic plague." Well of course it was. It would hardly be handed down by the victims. What they should have said was "it probably did not originate with ancestors who survived bubonic plague." AIDS is a syndrome - it doesn't evolve. Human Immunodeficiency Virus is one of the factors which can lead to AIDS, and it evolves rapidly with multiple strains in existence. But your point is valid; HIV evolves much more quickly than we do. Although there have been documented cases of people with what appears to be a natural immunity, it would take a catastrophic population crash to force HIV out with natural selection.

Damn you fizzicks!

I think the curtain can come down on this one.

An observer can view time moving faster or slower for someone else, can't they? All observers seeing all other frames as having slower clock speeds would make no sense whatsoever.

If you are going to hijack, at least state facts. Mars has been tectonically dead for a loooong time.

I think maybe restricting tag rights to the OP only would be a good plan.

http://www.opecfund.org/ Does the OPEC Fund count?

Mandriva Spring 2008 is rather tasty. I have had terrible problems getting various Ubuntu builds to work with my hardware, but Mandriva seems to be magically charmed by the compatibility elves.

An animated gif? Someone is going to shout "bingo" any minute now.

Can we not flame with the tags function please.

We do not condone the idea of people self-medicating when they should be getting proper medical treatment. Particularly when the "medication" being suggested causes peripheral neuropathy and liver failure.

Well no, it's not. That is what Cap'n meant by the Appeal to Authority fallacy. Hawking's expertise cannot be vicariously applied to an argument; only his reasoning. This is because -- as you quite rightly point out -- he has made many errors, and can make more, and the quotes we borrow from him might well be examples of such. I am sure he has a very good reason for the superluminosity/uncertainty statement, but to use it as part of an argument we would need to have an understanding of that reasoning, not just a summary of the idea.

I think there is some element of labelling going on here. In short, people identify you with a lack of referencing and this leads them to ask for references from you more frequently. The positive thing to take away from that (and I have to disagree with the Cap'n here) is that if people are asking you for references, then they must want to read around the topics which you refer to in your ideas, and this in turn shows they are willing to consider those ideas in some depth. It can be difficult to adjust to the idea of referencing if you have not been required to do it before, but it is worth doing. At the very least, it gives you more confidence that what you are proposing has a firm basis in established principles, while helping to convince others that you are not making it up as you go along.

At first glance I thought that said "slut", and I was wondering where this so-called lie was.

The thing is Grav, Hawking fudges for the sake of argument. He does it quite a lot in his coffee table books because there is not likely to be an academic backlash from those merely for the sake of argument, and it saves a lot of pages. This means that quoting his fudge without understanding what he meant by it or how it works (delete as applicable) isn't really a good foundation for one's own arguments, since it doesn't demonstrate a rationale.

I don't know why people even bother with the fabric or rubber sheet analogy. Envisioning it in a volumetric mode is hardly difficult.

The moral of this thread is that "what if, what if, what if" is not a very compelling argument. Closed because I don't believe any further posts of value can be expected.

Relativity shows that it is just not such an open-and-shut case. There are plenty of solutions to GR which allow for closed timelike curves, which allow (at least in theory) the possibility of time machines. The Gödel metric, for example, is an exact solution. But you don't even need to delve into that possibility because relativistic effects, where differential rates apply, are in themselves a form of time travel.