Maddad

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000DC8B8-EA15-137C-AA1583414B7F0000 Url for the actual article, not a picture of it.

Gravity represents potential energy. It's there if you've already put the work into making it there. There's energy in a bowling ball at the top of a tower if you've already hauled it up there. Once you use that energy, it's gone until you haul it back up again.

Outside Mainstream Science Warning I think of an intense gravitational field, such as you would would see near a black hole, as a region where space-time is decreasing. Around a massive object, there is less space-time now than there was a second ago. The effect is greater closer to the massive object, so more space-time disappears closer to the massive object than further away.

Oh, boy! Classic runs into quantum mechanics!

A large part of the problem is that spending is how politicians get re-elected. If they do not pass bills for their own locality, then they are not the representative the next time around. Politicians are not dumb, so they vote for pork. We all knew that it was a bad idea to give away all that tax money, but congress voted for it. Harry Homeowner wanted it because he was told he would get several hundred dollars, and he did. For that moment. Then the inevitable expenses came along, and now he's got to pony up several $thousand to replace the several $hundred he got earlier. He was told it was going to happen, but all he saw was the several $hundred being held in front of him by a politician asking if he wanted it. It's the way politics works, and blaming just one of them ignores the big picture.

I am still trying to wrap my mind around the run of black hole discussions I have seen recently. Fortunately, my cat Bella has been helping me out. She likes playing with a shoelace. It doesn’t matter where I put it; she will find it and drag it out again. If I throw it in the trash, she will be on it before the echo dies down, showing only her hindquarters and tail as she digs it out. After she has lost interest in the shoelace, it is no longer straight. Saying that the shoelace is not straight though does not really tell you much about it. She may have left it wadded up in a corner, draped over the armchair with one end dangling, or just left as a double strand wrapped around the table leg because she likes to carry it from the middle. In the same way, saying that a concentration of mass warps or bends space does not tell you much about the gravity. It does not tell you the shape of space after gravity has bent it. My own take on gravity is that it thins space in the concentric shells around a massive object. Any given shell will be thinner the next moment from now. Objects in that shell will then be closer to the massive object because the intervening space has decreased. The objects do not move through space so much as being carried along with contracting space, much as galaxies do not move through space as expanding space pushes the universe further apart.

The duality in the double slit experiment has been observed with particles up to a mass of about 70 daltons. It may have nothing to do with the Higgs Field, since that is supposedly responsible for imparting the quality of mass to particles, and massless photons are also subject to the two-slit duality. What struck me as odd with some two-slit experiments is that for the photon, there could have been no time and no distance between being emitted and detected. Both of those geometries would have reduced to zero at light speed. The photon would have been in all places at the same time, and that same time was the same for the start of the trip as the end. It might explain why a galaxy, gravity lensing a more distant object, through a two slit experiment today can alter the path that the photon took many millions of years ago. It's enough to make you scratch your head.

The homepage, http://www.rmcybernetics.com/ , seems to be oriented to selling things. I would be suspicious of science presented here.

herpguy, you've got a tough row to hoe in creating a new science forum. Others exist, so people that might participate easily could go to a forum like this one. To overcome inertia, you need to cut down on the number of difficulties. You at least one which will slow you down. I looked over your thread titles. They were less than informative. Without opening the thread, I was unable to tell what I might find inside. Examples were: could it be real Cool Facts What might be real? If the visiter knew, he might be tempted to drop into the thread rather than just closing the page. What more might you tell us in "Cool Facts" so that we thought it was cool too? Additionially, "black hole?" doesn't really tell you that much, and it's a beat-to-death topic generally. What is it about a black hole that you could put in a thread title so that a visitor knew what you were talking about before opening it? You'll have to do some monitoring and editing of thread titles for a while, but it may pay off in higher traffic. Good luck.

A close question to whether time is limited is whether it loops back on itself. Is the time we experience now the same time as we experienced before or will experience again? Yet another closely related issue is whether time actually exists or not. If time is equivalent to a fourth spatial dimension, then everything that ever was or will be is present now.

I'm new, but that doesn't make me bad. I have to work at that.