Norman Albers

This is getting funner. (My Dad was a Lutheran minister..) My usage would say the atheist makes the step of faith, and not the agnostic, who says they don't know. ParanoiA's point if you have decided it is not knowable, seems not so much faith to me as a perception of the world. There are people who say "I am unsure" and others who say "we cannot know", and both are agnostics.

In my papers I am realizing E&M and gravitation as polar and nonpolar manifestations of the vacuum polarizability.

Yah, large venues like an airport or the Grumman manufacturing plant I once worked in.

When pressed for identity, especially by Christians, I will proclaim myself to be a Christian-Buddhist-Born-again Pagan. Very interesting statement by ParanoiA that agnostics have made a step of faith.

So some police considered them and decided against using them on the job. The price here is about $5k. My contact says he carries a "good amount" of groceries in mounted cases and backpack.

I recently enjoyed a demo riding the Segway one-person gyro-controlled conveyance or whatever to call it. It is quite impressive and I enjoyed feeling dumb like a six-year old as I fell off making a backup turn. Clearly it would be useful in some circumstances, with a battery range of more than thirty kilometers, and one can mount two hardshell carrying cases for a moderate amount of groceries. My question: are folks finding these things useful or are they just a "rich man's toy?" Are you Europeans whizzing around towns on them, or even back and forth to towns?

Klaynos, this statement on temperature is important. To me it reflects how a blackbody spectrum infers a body, or at least it assumes a radiation distribution in equilibrium with "a wall" of atomic emitters. Do you agree? By itself, the photon field does not constitute a statistical kinetic ensemble......In this thread we have been rock-and-rolling with several questions. I am hoping people knowing more cosmology than I will say more on questions in the large.

Klaynos, in the 1s state, yes, or any excited s-state.

I just read in Wiki that some ocean clathrates are formed within sediments by microbes reducing CO2. Others are formed by digestion of organic matter. I guess such matter must have been fueled by growth at the top in light, ultimately. What do you know, scalbers?

Could you elaborate this for me, Klaynos, I'm not sure why you say "across the r-axis"?

Foodchain, interesting question on how slow can something go. I see quantum mechanics making a statement about indeterminacy of things in the small. Importantly, this also pertains to "zero temperature". You cannot actually get there from here.

People are theorizing that gravitation in the small-field limit goes as 1/r, not as 1/r^2.

Here is a gedanken: we can perhaps perceive what to us is the light of first galaxy formation, as a light-radius of some 13 billion light-years, if I have it right. What does someone moving rapidly nearby perceive? (I don't yet know.)

"Properties available, lots with a back fence bordering on NOTHING... Not much to see, but serene".

I agree that good puzzles and questions lie here in cosmology in the large. You seem to imply a finite ball of universe albeit with a receeding edge. I am still not up to speed in cosmology, but I don't think we can find cosmic real estate at the edge.

Yes we are free to define coordinate systems, and in GR we make convoluted coordinate transforms to solve the complicated system of differential equations. Do not fool yourself into thinking any other center wouldn't be as good or equivalent in terms of its physics. This is what we think we have observed.

No, no, my light cone centers on myself!!! I am <0,0,0,0>. Riiiight. How do you locate your grid?

This is a good attitude with which to approach physical theory.

Yes there is no place especially to hang our hats, or as Jimi Hendricks sang it, "There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief..."

My apprehension of these things has steadily grown for the last forty years (I have squawked 58 years on the planet). In college as a research assistant I was part of an accelerator physics team, and I did programming of relativistic kinematics, the billiards of high-energy collision. Mesons which have a lifetime of so many nanoseconds or whatever, in their own frame, went whizzing across many feet from the target to our walls of counters, lasting a much longer time in our reference lab frame. Angles were folded forward as per momentum conservation, etc. Then it is also useful to hang out with models like "long trains with a clock in each car", or a "police car with really long antlers with lights", whatever your style. You will see that according to the Lorentz transform rules we know to be so, time and space fold into one another. Now that I am working to develope understanding of fundamental things from inhomogeneous electrodynamics, I really can see matter as basically light caught in circles. I see light and matter as manifestations of the deeper field which presents itself a priori the same to all observers regardless of their mutual velocity. This is relativity, and many questions lie in this realm of unification. dstebbins, careful with CMB analogies. There is at any locale in the large, a unique frame which in which the CMB is perceived isotropically. CMB is not the same as the virtual vacuum.

I read Einstein had a dream about cows against a fence wire. He sat at the far end of the fence while the farmer turned on the electricity to the electric fence. One by one as the voltage propagated down the wire the cows jumped away. The farmer saw them jump one after another at a rate double the SOL divided by separation of cows. What did Einstein see at the far end? No this is not directly relevant, because the characters are stationary to each other, except the cows which presumably manifest transverse motion away from the wire. Foodchain, 10kfps is low compared with the SOL. If, say, [math]\beta=\sqrt{1/2}[/math], then [math]\gamma=\sqrt 2[/math] and you are getting relativistic.

Glider, bingo! Are there any significant beds of ocean-floor growth like the surface growth that became petroleum? I'd think it is more localized.

Think of matter as light which has convinced itself to be more or less at rest. You have a form of energy measuring energy propagating.

Seeking to represent circular currents as per a nearfield electron, I am working with the Kerr GR solution for the exterior of a rotating axially symmetric mass, for starters. Dealing with radii larger than Planck length I get a form depending upon geometric angular momentum, expressed as the product: [math] ma=-GJ/c^3[/math]. My goal is to unite this with a solution inside the circulating radiation angular momentum pictured as source. Lense-Thirring accomplished this sort of solution in a "low mass density" where they expressed interior and exterior solutions. So also I hope to accomplish, in the realm appropriate to what I am theorizing. In electrons the Schwarzschild radius, or geometric mass m, is very small compared with the angular momentum manifested. Certainly if the geometric angular momentum, is described by the product ma, above, this implies roughly the Compton radius of the electron for the value of a. The Lense-Thirring model is used extensively in analyzing rotating stars shy of black hole intensity (low-field limit). There mass is much larger than its angular momentum. I need the original Lense-Thirring paper if anyone can help me. The other avenue of approach is the Reissner-Nordstrom solution for an electric field density. Magnetic terms such as I have change the relatively simple solution for the radial fields, and the tensor algebra for the off-diagonal terms are complicated, but I can say that a reasonable electric field solution exists in this context, consonant with what I said in the R-N thread elsewhere. Figuring the magnetics inside and their contribution to the metric is the final challenge in this problem.

I think of electrons as the singularities that the vacuum wants to create. Give them an environment, like a nucleus, or nucleus plus other electrons, or maybe in a crystal, and the get the wave expressions that are manifested. Super-pinball.