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And maybe that is because different materials have different densities. You, sir, are far too quick to accept non-scientific (aka crackpot) explanations, quicker yet at jumping to conclusions, and even quicker yet at ignoring confirmatory evidence. I recommend you think twice -- in fact, think many times -- before continuing down this road. You posted links to gravity models of the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The observed variations in the gravitational potential are fully explained by variations in density rather than something more esoteric. The equivalence principle has been tested to an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy even by physics standards. The best measured physical constant is the fine structure constant [math]\alpha[/math]. The uncertainty in the measured of this constant is 0.7 parts per billion. The uncertainty in the equivalence principle is a few parts per trillion. The equivalence principle is one of the very best tested concepts in physics. The variations in the gravitational potential of the Earth, Moon, and Mars. are many, many orders of magnitude greater than the uncertainties equivalence principle. observed gravitational potential models are much greater than that. In short, the observed variations do not arise to the failure of the equivalence principle. They arise from something much simpler: Different kinds of rock have different densities. You have posted this link several times. You seem to miss the point. Physicists really do not like assumptions. They would much prefer a deeper model that at least in part gets rid of the assumptions. Lacking that, they test and test and test the assumptions. This experiment was one such test. You have not posted the results, which are reported in http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/18may_equivalenceprinciple.htm, for example. Galileo's experiments were only accurate to about 1%, leaving room for doubt, and skeptical physicists have been "testing EP" ever since. The best modern limits, based on, e.g., laser ranging of the Moon to measure how fast it falls around Earth, show that EP holds within a few parts in a trillion (1012). This is fantastically accurate, yet the possibility remains that the equivalence principle could fail at some more subtle level. "It's a possibility we must investigate," says physicist Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. "Discovering even the slightest difference in how gravity acts on objects of different materials would have enormous implications." Two things to glean from this article: As far as we know, the equivalence principle is indeed true. Moreover, we know this to an amazingly high level of accuracy. That will not stop scientists from probing even further. The equivalence principle is an assumption, not a known fact, after all. Again from the article, One test mission, called the Satellite Test of the Equivalence Principle (STEP), is being developed by Stanford University and an international team of collaborators. STEP would be able to detect a deviation in the equivalence principle as small as one part in a million trillion (1018). That's 100,000 times more sensitive than the current best measurement.

I'll let you in on a secret: I'm an agnostic. I am not, as Sisyphus impugned, "coming in with religiously motivated rants". Nowhere have I said that God is real. On the other hand, our collective belief in God over the course of human history has been very real and has been very influential on our thoughts and behaviors. To say that religion played no role in the development of human moral thinking is, to me, ludicrous. The two concepts are deeply intertwined. It is quite possible to study religious thinking from a historical, scientific perspective and do so without getting tangled up in religion itself.

To the OP: Two pertinent, pithy quotes apply here. "You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts." and "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". You have made some fantastic claims. You had dang well better back them up. Until you do so, this thread will be in the pseudoscience section. To everyone else: The Moon of course pulls on the "solid" Earth and on the oceans. The Earth is not truly solid. Most of the Earth is molten rock, so the Earth as a whole does indeed undergo tidal motion. The Earth's relatively thin crust does little to hinder this motion. This wikipedia article on Earth tides provides a good lay overview of the concept. The standard formalism for describing the Earth's (or any other planet's) solid body tides was developed by AEH Love over 100 years ago and is thusly called the "Love number formalism". (I recommend against googling the phrase "Love number" as it results in far too much information.) The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (Web site: http://www.iers.org) is *the* definitive source on Earth rotation models and on reference systems used by scientists worldwide. For those of you who want a technical description of the Earth's solid body tides, refer to IERS Technical Note 32. Section 6.1 covers the topic at hand. The solid body tides and ocean tides share the same underlying mechanism, which is the second gradient in the Moon's and the Sun's gravitational potential (a tensor). Another way of putting this is that the gravitational pull toward the Moon (or Sun) is a bit stronger on the side of the Earth facing toward the Moon (or Sun) versus the side facing away from the Moon (or Sun). While the two kinds of tides result from the same mechanism, the responses are quite different. While the Earth's crust does little to hinder the solid tides, the Earth's crust obviously has huge effect on the ocean tides.

Pari, I'll get to your post in a bit. Your entire work is based on statements in a lay article and lay text that loosely imply that Apollo 11 went through the "neutral point" between the Earth and the Moon, which you take to be the point at which the gravitational force toward the Earth and the Moon are equal in magnitude but opposite in sign. No Apollo spacecraft went anywhere near this point. This point lies directly on the line between the Earth and the Moon. The Apollo spacecraft went into orbit around the Moon. They were 10,000 or so kilometers off of the Earth-Moon line at the time you claim they went through this point. Think of it this way: If Apollo 11 spacecraft did pass through this point, it would have had to have fought against the Moon's gravity to make the vehicle go into orbit around the Moon. The fuel costs would have been astronomical. That is not what happened. The Apollo spacecraft instead followed a trajectory that took them in front of the Moon. The Moon itself applied most of the change in velocity needed to make the Apollo spacecraft go into orbit around the Moon. The Apollo spacecraft did not come anywhere near your vaunted neutral gravity point. Your entire work is nothing more than a bunch of cracked pottery. Where is the flippin' ROTFL smiley? It would come in real handy right now. [math]F=dp/dt[/math] is the definition of force. If you want to call this weight, go ahead and have fun. If you want to call something else force, go ahead. Have even more fun. Be as non-scientific as you want. Make up your own terms, and redefine existing terms just to obfuscate. Just beware: You are entitled to your own opinions -- but you are not entitled to your own facts. Nice ducking of the question. I noticed you did not address why I asked if you included the Moon -- the Moon does not obey Kepler's Laws. Kepler's Laws apply to the planets only. Instead you went on to make another logical fallacy: Kepler's Law does not explain the motion of the Earth's Moon or the motion of a pair of binary stars. Kepler's Laws only explain the motions of the planets. Moreover, getting a correlation coefficient of 0.99 for the ratio [math]P^2/a^3[/math] is no big deal. Kepler's laws are accurate to about 99.7%, even better if you ignore Jupiter or if you throw in a bunch of asteroids to obfuscate the fact that Jupiter is an outlier. Guess what? Two digit accuracy was good 400 years ago. It is not so good now. Even a tiny error will result in a huge error in the propagated state. Many nines of accuracy in the predictions of orbit state to enable sending space vehicles to the Moon and to other planets. Two digits is incredibly bad. NASA does not have those numbers readily availably for a bunch of reasons. The numbers vary with time because the Moon is in an elliptical orbit. The numbers at any one point in time are easily calculable from the Moon's mass and planetary ephemerides (see post #8). NASA publishes the Moon's mass (see http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/dat/lunar_cmd_2005_jpl_d32296.pdf) and planetary ephemerides (see http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons). NASA does not use these points in determining the mass of the Moon or in designing a trajectory to the Moon. They are irrelevant. You wouldn't have run out of attachments if you had used the spiffy little quote button instead of the code button.

That of course is a logical fallacy, and an idiotic one at that. =================================== From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanking#Legal_status, spanking has been outlawed in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Israel, Germany, Iceland, Romania, Ukraine, Hungary, Greece, Chile, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Costa Rica. These countries, with the exception of the Venezuela, Israel, and Costa Rica, have exceptionally low birth rates. Raising a single child is a much easier task than raising multiple children. Keeping constant vigilance over a single child is possible; with multiple children it is nigh impossible. Another possibility is that punishments for corporal punishment in those countries is administered selectively. Are parents who still administer corporal punishment but do so without excess punished? (I don't know, but I suspect the answer is that they aren't.) Yet another possibility is that these countries have exceptionally low birth rates because they have made it exceptionally onerous to have and raise children. =================================== Corporal punishment is not appropriate for older children and teenagers. Besides, there are much better forms of punishment for this age group. For example, I used this technique after my son wrecked a car for the third time. He thought he could make life painful for us by making us haul him around. One day he insisted that I pick him up from high school. I told him to take the bus home. "I'm a senior, Dad! I can't take the bus! You have to pick me up!" I told him I had meetings in the afternoon. He persisted and asked me (told me!) to cancel my meetings. So I did. I wanted to look good when I picked up my son. No child wants to be picked up by a Dad wearing a dorky shirt and tie. Kids were into wearing clothes that didn't fit and had mismatching colors. I canceled my early afternoon meetings to give myself plenty of time to go home and change out of my fancy work clothes. I did my best to make sure my clothes didn't match: I changed into some raggedy lawn mowing pants and a flannel undershirt. I then mowed the lawn a bit so I could smell my best, too. Now a problem arose -- I didn't want to get my nice car sweaty and stinky. I took our beater pickup instead. When I got to school, I parked cattywonkers so my son would be sure to see me. I waited a while -- 10 seconds, if I recall -- before tapping on the horn. That didn't get my son's attention, so I stepped out of the truck and yelled for my son. That worked! "Dad, are you trying to ruin my LIFE?" "Yes. Do you want me to pick you up again tomorrow?"

The original question is "where do morals come from?" Excluding religion from the discussion of this topic doesn't make much sense because religion historically played a big part in the development and promulgation of morals. So far, nobody has advocated in this thread that religion is right or that religion is the root of all evil. We should be fine if we keep the discussion to the history of moral and religious thinking.

You don't see the point because you are blinded by modern morality. Killing people in the name of God was not viewed as murder. In fact, it was the other way around: it was immoral in some circumstances not to kill! The Old Testament dictates that some people must be killed -- murderers, for example -- and also includes explicit instructions emanating from God on how to kill in warfare and who must be killed. Note: I am not advocating a belief in the Judeo-Christian god in the above. I'm just relaying how those people saw things.

Sea levels have risen 400 feet since their minimum 18,000 years ago at the peak of the last ice age. Modern talkative and superstitious humans were certainly around then. In most places the sea level rise would have merely pushed humans living near the shore inward. However, if the sea level rise breached a barrier of some sort the flooding could have been quite severe. Some hypothesize that the Black, Caspian, and Red Seas formed extremely quickly as the rising sea levels opened these seas up to nearby larger bodies of water.

It does not mean that at all! You are reading to much into / misreading the article, and you are completely ignoring the fact that StarDust did not and could not detect the volatile component of the comet. Nobody has said that comets are formed strictly of water/ice/methane. The dirty snowball model says comets are 70% volatiles or so. The goal of the StarDust project was to investigate what comprises the remaining 30% of a comet. That said, scientists did indeed find some strange stuff in the StarDust return, and this might well force them to rethink details of cometary formation and comet structure -- but not where comets form. You are right to question this. While such objects are hard to see when they are in space, they are not hard to see when they enter the atmosphere. Some excerpts from http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=77 At the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, December 8-12 1997, there were press reports of controversy concerning the claim by Lou Frank of the University of Iowa that he had discovered evidence of mini-comets striking the Earth in quantities approximately the million times greater than would be indicated by other lines of scientific evidence. Although there is almost no support in the scientific community for this mini-comet hypothesis, Frank continues to advocate it, and the press continues to keep the issue alive in the public consciousness. Following are four press releases from the AGU meeting dealing with this issue. But the snowballs may not exist. University of Washington geophysicist George Parks has analyzed Frank's ultraviolet (UV camera images and has concluded that the white snow in space is no more than black "snow" on the television screen. After a close analysis of one hour of data supplied by Frank, Parks says he and his collaborators are certain that Frank has been looking at "instrument noise." It is very similar, says Parks, "to the static you hear on your hi-fi." Earth's sky would sparkle like a Christmas tree, its air would hold at least 30,000 times more inert gas and its moon would be pocked with millions more bright-spot craters than spacecraft see if a prominently publicized small-comet theory were correct, scientists from The University of Arizona in Tucson report in the Dec. 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The material gathered by StarDust does not contradict the dirty snowball model. StarDust gathered particulate matter -- the "dirty" part of the dirty snowball. Look at it this way: Suppose the comet was 99% volatiles and 1% particulates. Even then, StarDust would still have brought back particulates only and no water. It wasn't designed to collect water or look for water.

While Fay and Edouard seemed to vex the forecasters this year, the predictions on Gustav have been very consistent. I suspect there is no more low hanging fruit to pick on the severe weather forecasting tree. Fortunately, the lower quality forecasts appear to me to be correlated with weaker storms. It looks like the major hurricanes are more predictable. The problem is not paying attention. Katrina, like Gustav was not a surprise storm. There was plenty of warning for both. This time around the response this time appears to be very good. City, state, and federal governments are working together rather than against one another. People are thinking rather than squabbling. New Orleans even used their school buses to help people evacuate this time, and there are no plans to pack people into a sports stadium as a last ditch effort. Police and National Guard are on hand to stop looting. 95% of the population of greater New Orleans has evacuated the city. Time will tell. One toubling sign: Some cities haven't done so well. 90% have evacuated Houma, which is much closer to the predicted landfall. The problem area is preparedness. One big problem in New Orleans is the levee system. It is based on protecting against a "100 year storm". New Orleans has been subjected to four 100+ year storms in the last forty years, one of them a 500 year storm. Something is wrong with this definition. Even if the definition was correct, there is still something quite wrong in protecting against even a 500 year storm. In it's External Panel Review of Katrina (http://www.asce.org/files/pdf/erp_letter_4-15-08_FINAL.pdf), the American Society of Civil Engineers notes that Netherlands designs their coastal defenses against a 10,000 year storm, and goes on to say "In addition to the risk to human life, the risk to property and the quality of life for the people of New Orleans is very high. The probability for this level of flooding, once per 500 years, is equivalent to a ten percent probability that it will be exceeded one or more times in the next 50 years. In our opinion, a one-in-ten chance every 50 years of catastrophic flooding of a city and loss of property, life, and life-style is unacceptable as a design basis for an engineered system. Nevertheless, this appears to be the reality of the current situation, and that reality must be properly communicated and managed until improvements are made."

First off, the New York Times article was written in 1997. Stardust brought its samples back to Earth just a couple of years ago or so. The Times would have to have trained their reporters to be time travellers for them to have incorporated 2006 results in a 1997 article. The Times might be good, but I don't think they're that good. Secondly, where is the contradiction? Stardust was designed to collect particulate matter from Comet Wild 2. Water is a volatile material; Stardust was not designed to collect it. It was designed to collect the "dirty" part of the dirty snowball.

Just to be pedantic: A circle is not such a good model if you want to explain all those pretty iridescent colors one sees on the bubble. A better model is needed to explain soap bubble iridescence -- and that better model is a spherical shell, or in cross section, an annulus. Circles are infinitely thin. An annulus is not. I disagree with you here. Scientists should always be cautious in reading too much into their math models. Math models are approximations of reality. While some models do a bang-up job of representing reality, they are not reality. In the words of Alfred Korzybski, The map is not the territory. This thread is chock-full of statements that equate the map with the territory.

No, for several reasons: The edge of a bubble is at least one molecule wide. A circle has zero thickness. The bubble comprises a finite number of molecules. A circle comprises an uncountably infinite number of points. Bubbles (literally) do not exist in a vacuum. At the macroscopic scales, wind, sound, and turbulence will make the bubble deviate from a perfect sphere. Bubbles are not at absolute zero. At multi-atomic scales temperature variations will also make the bubble deviate from a perfect sphere. Things get bizarre at the atomic scales, and yet more bizarre at sub-atomic scales. The atoms and molecules that form the bubble dance all over the place. At this scale, the bubble doesn't look anything like a sphere.

A point by definition has zero size, and if you want to say otherwise you are neither doing Euclidean geometry nor are you working with real numbers. You will have to start from the ground up starting with a set of axioms that describe your new mathematics. When you do so, please do not use terms like "pi" in your new mathematics. The term "pi" is already reserved to mean the ratio of the area and radius of a circle on a Euclidean plane. Mathematicians have developed several non-Euclidean geometries in which the ratio of the area of a circle to the radius of a circle is not pi -- and they do not redefine pi to be that ratio. Throwing out Euclidean geometry is one thing; mathematicians have done exactly that already. Throwing out the real numbers is quite another thing. I wish you luck in your endeavors.

Layman77 most certainly implied that a natural nuclear power plant is ridiculous and by extension used this to ridicule iNow's argument. This is argument from ridicule. Moreover, the Oklo site doesn't have the manmade plumbing, the signature cooling tower, the turbine generators, and electrical power lines that characterize a manmade nuclear power plant. This stuff doesn't grow on trees; we have to build it. Arguing that a nuclear power plant with a cooling tower, turbine generators, and electrical power lines disseminating from the plant do not occur in nature is a red herring, a straw man, and argument from ridicule all rolled in one. That such things do not exist in nature has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not we are animals (which we are). That a natural nuclear fission plant (sans cooling tower, turbines, and power lines) did exist 1.5 billion years ago just makes this argument from ridicule even more ridiculous.

Still wrong. Acceleration is not force/mass2/distance2. Look at the units! Force has units of MLT-2, so your equation has units of M-1L-1T-2. Use newton's second law: you know the mass and the force; acceleration is just force/mass. Solar radiation pressure, aerodynamic drag, to name a couple. 735 newtons is the gravitation force between a 75 kg person on the surface of the Earth and the Earth itself.

Your php script is wrong. Force is mass times acceleration, not acceleration divided by mass. You have done something very wrong here. All it takes to compute the acceleration (*not the "rate of acceleration") is to combine Newton's law of gravitation and Newton's second law using the equivalence principle: [math] \begin{aligned} F &=\frac{Gm_1m_2}{r^2} \\ a_1 &= \frac{F}{m_1} = \frac{Gm_2}{r^2} \\ a_2 &= \frac{F}{m_2} = \frac{Gm_1}{r^2} \end{aligned} [/math] The article you cited is written for layman, and is a bit oversimplified. Better stated, the equivalence principle asserts that inertial mass is equal to gravitational mass. Gravitational mass: In the equation [math]F =Gm_1m_2/r^2[/math], the quantities [math]m_1[/math] and [math]m_2[/math] are the gravitational masses of the two objects. Inertial mass: in the equation [math]F=ma[/math], the quantity [math]m[/math] is the inertial mass of the object undergoing acceleration. What I did above in computing the acceleration due to gravity given the force due to gravity works if and only if gravitational mass and inertial mass are always the same. What they do is actually trickier than that. Accelerometers measure the net acceleration that results from the external forces acting on an object except for gravity. There is no way to directly measure the acceleration due to gravity! How space vehicles get from one place to another, in a nutshell: Analysts develop a trajectory plan that gives a broad plan of how the vehicle is to move over time. The spacecraft's navigation system estimates the vehicle's state (position, velocity, attitude, attitude rate) by combining readings from navigation sensors and models of the gravity fields. The inertial navigation system (INS) must use a mathematical model of the gravitational field because, as I mentioned above, it is impossible to measure the acceleration due to gravity. Because the state is numerically integrated using sensed accelerations plus estimated gravitational accelerations, the modeled state will drift from the true state over time. To counter this drift, the vehicle needs some measurements of the true state to update the estimated state. The spacecraft's guidance system compares where the vehicle should be based on the trajectory plan versus where it is based on the navigation system. The spacecraft's control system makes the vehicle get back on track.

A little bit about fallacies: ad hominem attacks are attacks on the person making the argument. iNow did not ridiculed you (at least not in this particular statement). Many fallacies have been committed in this thread, mostly by you, layman77. Regarding "When was the last time you heard of a "natural" nuclear power plant. Yet, they said it was ok to hit because animals do it": This little bit of nonsense combines multiple fallacies. It is a strawman argument in the sense that you have built up this argument of nuclear power plants being unnatural and then rebutted this strawman to counter iNow's argument that we are first and foremost animals. It is an argument from ridicule in the sense that a "natural" nuclear power plant is patently ridiculous. It is a false dichotomy argument in the sense that you are arguing there are only two choices: We are either animals through-and-through or we are completely separate from animals. At least three fallacies in two short sentences; nice job! (And that, BTW, is an ad hominem attack.) More fallacies. Here you employ argument from ridicule, false dichotomy, and strawman arguments. That is not what a good parent does. That is what an overly protective parent does. Parents who go out of their way to keep their children away from all danger are doing their children a huge disservice. Good parents will teach their children that dangers exist and that children must take steps to avoid these dangers. Good parents at times intentionally expose their children to danger. For example, they teach their children how to drive. Good parents at times teach their children not to do stupid things like sticking a knife in an electrical outlet by teaching them not to do it. For a toddler, that takes a smack on the bum or a slap on the hand. A three or four year old has progressed some mentally. Other teaching techniques are available at this stage. One of my children had a deadly sense of curiosity. Electrical sockets was one of them. Neither spankings nor talking worked. I finally found something that did work. I told him that what comes out of the socket would hurt him and might even kill him. I then told him that this time he was going to punish himself for trying to put a fork in a socket. I gave him a nine volt battery and told him that his punishment was to lick the top of the battery. Call it child abuse if you want. It worked. ===================================== More fallacies lumped together, this time composition (applying the label lefty) and ad hominem (the implication is that lefties are inherently stupid and their arguments aren't worth squat). At least one of the posters who argues in favor of appropriately administered corporal punishment is, without a doubt, a "lefty".

The equation a=g is an approximation. Newton's law of universal gravitation still applies (hint: the law is universal). The Earth is nearly spherical, with a radius 6378 km and a mass of 5.974*1024 kg. The gravitational force on a 75 kg person standing on the surface of the Earth is [math]F=\frac{GM_{\text{earth}}M_{\text{person}}}{{r_{\text{earth}}}^2}=735\,\text{newtons}[/math]. The acceleration of the person toward the Earth is [math]\frac{735\,\text{newtons}}{75\,\text{kg}} = 9.8\,m/s^2[/math]. The acceleration of the Earth toward the person is [math]\frac{735\,\text{newtons}}{5.974\times10^{24}\,\text{kg}} = 1.23\times10^{-22}\,m/s^2[/math]. This is an immeasurably small value. That 9.8 m/s2 is the acceleration at the surface of the Earth. Because the Earth is so large, the acceleration is nearly constant for a good distance above the surface. For example, at 1 kilometer above the surface of the Earth the acceleration is 9.797 m/s2.

This site is a prime example of why real engineers do not let software engineers develop models of physical models. While jewelers and gunpowder do use the Troy scale, Americans use the international avoirdupois pound for everything else. A pound of produce in the US has a mass of 453.59237 grams.

Mathematics is not bound by reality. If space is curved (which it is, at very long scales of distance and near large concentrations of mass), this does not invalidate Cartesian geometry. It merely invalidates the use of Cartesian geometry for modeling the shape of the universe at those long distance scales or near large concentrations of mass. If space is quantized (which it might be, at very scales of distance), this does not invalidate continuum mathematics. It merely invalidates using continuum mathematics to model space at those short scales of distance.

So make your search a bit more scientific then, such as googling "sexual coercion in non-human animal species" -- no porn sites on the first ten pages -- and plenty of examples of coercive sex among non-human animal species, including beetles that have taken rape to an extreme, chimps, and dolphins, who are downright nasty when it comes to rape and apparently engage in homosexual nasal sex when they can't get any.

While the concept of planck scale as a physical limit might well result in interesting mathematics, it will not change mathematics itself. Whether the planck length is a true physical limit is completely irrelevant to mathematics itself because mathematics per se has nothing to do with reality. Show me a one (not one apple, or something that masses one kilogram) in the real world. Closer to this problem, show me a circle in the real world. There are many things in the real world that have a shape that can be described mathematically as circular, but none of these things truly is a circle. The fact that there is no such thing as a true circle in the real world does not stop mathematicians from talking about circles, nor does it stop scientists from modeling things in the real world as circles. Mathematics is not science. The core operating principles of mathematics and science are quite different. The core mathematical principle is proof. Once some mathematical hypothesis is proven true in mathematics it remains true forever. It becomes a mathematical theorem. The core scientific principle is experimentation. While a scientific experiment can discredit a scientific hypothesis, no experiment in the world can prove a scientific hypothesis to be true. Given enough confirming evidence and a strong theoretical basis, a scientific hypothesis becomes a theory. Scientific theories are always provisional in nature: They can be proven false. All it takes is one lousy experiment to do so. For example, suppose some future refinement of the Michelson-Morley experiment shows that the measured speed of light does indeed exhibit some variation as the speed of the observer changes and suppose furthermore that the experimental results are confirmed. This experiment would invalidate much of modern physics; physicists would have to either modify relativity theory or replace it with something else. On the other hand, this experiment would not invalidate the mathematics behind relativity theory. The underlying mathematics of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction would remain valid. They just would no longer be a physically valid mathematical model. Pi is 3.14159265..., period.

Since you responded to my question, I must reiterate: Stop with the stupid videos, please. Give a recap, or even better, a paper.