D H

It's the other war around. Physicists chose to use the concept of Hilbert spaces (note: Not Hilbert space; this is a very generic concept) because the concept is useful in modeling aspects of quantum reality.

You have presented no evidence here. I presented evidence in post #25 that shows that Kepler's Laws are only approximately correct. Believe it or not, science has progressed just a bit in the 399 years that have passed since Kepler published his laws. You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts. Fact: Force is mass times acceleration (or more generally, dp/dt) and thus has units of mass times length/time^2. This is not just a fact, it is the definition of force. Weight is tautologically defined as the force due to gravitation only. BTW, the concept of force has much broader application than just gravitational force. Did you include the Moon, perchance? The Moon, for example, does not obey Kepler's Laws. With time expressed in units of years and distance expressed in units of astronomical units, the planets have P2/a3 approximately equal to 1 (to a paltry 2 or 3 decimal places of accuracy). The ratio for the Moon: 329648 years2/AU3. Good! You can do some math after all. You have one more step: Divide by the bodies' masses to compute the acceleration. Force is mass times acceleration. There is no contradiction. Kepler's third law is the law of gravitation and perturbations are correctly explained using his law. Kepler's Laws are purely empirical. Kepler had no perturbation terms in his laws. On one hand you claim Kepler's Laws are perfect and on the other you claim unexplained perturbations when confronted with discrepancies between Kepler's Laws and reality. I just used the JPL DE405 ephemeris tool to calculate the distance between the Earth and Moon at JD 2400421.63. The result: 396,771.252 kilometers. That's OK. NASA knows when the Moon crossed into the Moon's "sphere of influence". From http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11transcript_pao.htm (emphasis mine): Those two distances sum to 407,920 kilometers, which of course is not the Earth-Moon distance cited earlier. So what is going on here? The answer is simple: Apollo 11 did not fly a straight line from the Earth to the Moon. It instead flew a distorted figure-8 trajectory that took the vehicle well in front of the Moon. The goal was to go into orbit around the Moon, not crash into it. Apollo 11 was ten thousand or so kilometers away from the Earth-Moon line when it "crossed into the sphere of influence" of the Moon. The vehicle was not even close to your vaunted "Neutral Point". Your entire concept of the "Neutral Point" completely falls apart because of this. There is no magical boundary in space that demarcates the Moon's sphere of influence from the Earth's. The distinction is purely man-made. This man-made distinction was particularly important in the Apollo era because the best ground-based computers of that era had less computing power than the computer in today's microwave oven. The computers in the Apollo spacecraft had far less computing power than those puny ground-based computers. Those 1969 era computers were incapable of a numerical solution of the n-body problem. Instead, the Apollo 11 engineers used a two-body model with perturbations. Near the Earth they used a geocentric model and near the Moon, a selenocentric model. This switch was made (rather arbitrarily) at this "sphere of influence". Science does not advance by taking every crackpot idea out there and presenting them on equal footing with well-developed and well-confirmed scientific theory. Science, on the other hand, does relish true discoveries that shake up the "accepted dogma". These shakeups give scientists a whole bunch of shiny new toys to play with. The real scientists are the ones who constantly push the boundaries. You and your ilk are the ones who wants to suppress 400 years of development and ignore evidence. Let's review the facts: Fact: Force has units of mass times length per time-squared by definition. Fact: The Apollo 11 spacecraft did not fly anywhere close to the point where "the gravitational force of the Moon exactly cancels the gravitational force of the Earth". It was ten thousand kilometers off of the line between the Earth and Moon when it crossed the "Moon's sphere of influence". Fact: There is no physical significance in crossing this sphere of influence. There is, however, a numerical significance. It is computational best to propagate state in a reference frame centered at the body whose sphere of influence contains the vehicle. Fact: The Moon's mass is about 0.0122999811 Earth masses, and lunar surface gravity is about 1/6 Earth surface gravity. Fact: The US landed people on the Moon and Russia landed autonomous vehicles on the Moon in the 1960s. These vehicles were built to withstand the well-known value of lunar gravity. Fact: Thousands of scientists have worked on the problem of understanding the Moon's mass (and the mass of every other major body in the solar system, and many minor ones as well). The Moon's mass is known to a very high degree of precision. Fact: Newton's law of gravitation does a much better job of explaining the motion of the planets than do Kepler's Laws. Fact: Newton's law of gravitation does an infinitely better job of explaining the motion of the Moon than do Kepler's Laws. Kepler's Laws are empirical laws that describe the behavior of the planets only. Newton's law of gravitation is much more general and explains gravitational interaction in general. Fact: Newton's law of gravitation is not the final word in physics and astronomy. General relativity does an even better job of explaining observed behaviors than do Newton's laws. Fact: General relativity most likely is not the final word, either. Fact: Spolter's Laws are not the answer.

Mars is believed to have lost its atmosphere as a result of losing its magnetic field, which on Mars occurred because its plate tectonics shut down. Without a magnetic field to deflect the solar wind around the planet (and away from the atmosphere), the solar wind over time stripped Mars of its atmosphere. Some references: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_1.htm http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993emhw.work...14J Regarding the Earth's geomagnetic reversals: First and foremost, these reversals occur over a fairly short time span compared to the amount of time needed for the solar wind to strip the Earth of its atmosphere. We will not lose our atmosphere as that would require the complete loss of our magnetic field over a geological time span. The Earth's magnetic field will not completely vanish during a geomagnetic reversal. Only the dipole moment will vanish; there will still be some remnant field in the higher order moments that will offer some protection against cosmic radiation. We might experience higher cancer rates and wacky weather for a decade or two, and it almost certainly would wreak havoc with our power transmission and data communications systems. Only the wackos say it is the end of the Earth (and in 2012, no less). Life has survived many such reversals. There are no signs of even minor extinctions event correlated with such reversals.

A largish cluster of sunspots on the Sun is about 20 Earth diameters across. The angle a similar sized cluser would subtend on Proxima Centauri is [math]20\cdot2\cdot 6378\,\text{km} / 4.2\,\text{light years} = 3.2\cdot10^{-9} = 1.3\,\text{mas}[/math] Seeing such a cluster even on the closest star would require a telescope capable of twice that resolution to avoid aliasing problems, or less than a milliarcsecond. In comparison, the best telescopes do not yet have the resolution to see the objects the Apollo project left on the Moon, and doing that would require a telescope capable of seeing things at the 2.7 milliarcsecond level.

The Earth and Moon will still be orbiting each other when the Earth becomes tidally locked with the Moon. The Earth will not stop rotating about its axis; it will have a day equal in length to a month -- a future month, that is. Think about it this way: The Moon is tidally locked with the Earth, but it is still spinning about its axis. One lunar "day" is one month long.

The title of the thread is a bit ambiguous: I presume you mean Colorado's first openly gay Congresscritter (Congressman is a sexist term, Congressperson sounds stupid, and Congresscritter derogates them all in one swell foop.) If you mean the first openly gay Congresscritter period, the answer is no. Barney Frank/MA, Jim Kobe/AZ, and Tammy Baldwin/WI beat your guy to the punch.

Stop that! "Physics Expert" is not a title I gave myself. It is a title conferred upon me by the moderators of this forum. Politicians can turn a complete nonsense into the "truth" by spouting the same nonsense over and over. Fortunately, that is not how science works. Spouting scientific nonsense over and over is just scientific nonsense spouted over and over. This equation of yours doesn't make one bit of sense because it doesn't even have the right units. Acceleration times area has units of length3/time. Force has units of mass*length/time2by definition. Let's see. If Kepler's Laws are true the ratio [math]P^2/a^3[/math] should be constant. Let's see: Mercury. [math]P=0.240846\,\text{yr}\,\, a=0.387098\,\text{AU}\; \Rightarrow P^2/a^3=1.00004\,\text{yr}^2/\text{AU}^3[/math] Earth. [math]P=1.0000175\,\text{yr}\,\, a=1.0000001124\,\text{AU}\; \Rightarrow P^2/a^3=1.00004\,\text{yr}^2/\text{AU}^3[/math] Mars. [math]P=1.8808\,\text{yr}\,\, a=1.523679\,\text{AU}\; \Rightarrow P^2/a^3=1.00001\,\text{yr}^2/\text{AU}^3[/math] Saturn. [math]P=29.657296\,\text{yr}\,\, a=9.58201720\,\text{AU}\; \Rightarrow P^2/a^3=0.999751\,\text{yr}^2/\text{AU}^3[/math] Jupiter. [math]P=11.85920\,\text{yr}\,\, a=5.204267\,\text{AU}\; \Rightarrow P^2/a^3=0.99777\,\text{yr}^2/\text{AU}^3[/math] Whoa! The supposedly constant ratio is only approximately constant. Moreover, the value for Jupiter differs significantly with respect to the less massive planets. A bit more than two decimal places of accuracy was extremely good four hundred years ago. It is not so good nowadays. These measurements of orbital period and semimajor axis falsify Kepler's Laws as the ratio P2/a3 is not a constant. You are contradicting yourself. There are no perturbations by other bodies according to Kepler's Laws. Perturbations do however arise in Newton's law of gravitation (and in general relativity, which surpassed Newtonian theory almost 100 years ago). I stand corrected. That distance is not the L1 point. It is the point when the Apollo 11 entered the Moon's "sphere of influence". Let's take a look at those numbers in Time magazine: From http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901102-1,00.html (page 6), From this article, it appears the Earth and Moon are 243,495 miles apart. This differs from the 238,855 miles distance cited in literature. Did Times make a typo? No. The Moon isn't in a circular orbit. The Moon was near apogee on July 19, 1969. From http://history.nasa.gov/ap11-35ann/apollo11_log/log.htm 4:40 p.m.- One of the clearest television transmissions ever sent from space is begun, with the spacecraft 175,000 nautical miles from Earth and 48,000 from the Moon. It lasts an hour and 36 minutes. 11:12 p.m.- Velocity of spacecraft has slowed to 2,990 ft. per second just before entering the Moon's sphere of influence at a point 33,823 nautical miles away from it. 223,000 nautical miles is 257,000 miles or 413,000 km (to three digits). Using that number and Roy's sphere of influence equation, the sphere of influence on that day was 44,000 miles. End of conundrum. As I mentioned before, I don't call myself Physics Expert. This board endowed me with that title. You've already listed where you have published articles on physics: A borderline journal (Physics Essays) that is no longer indexed by the Web of Science abstract and citation database, and a completely quack journal (Infinite Energy) that has never been indexed. Think about it this way: If your conjecture is correct, you have seen something that completely flew over the heads of Newton, Euler, Lagrange, Hamilton, Poincaré, Einstein, and a host of lesser scientists. If your conjecture is correct, the US never landed people and the USSR never landed automated spacecraft on the Moon, and every space agency in the world is lying about the Moon's gravity. If your conjecture is correct there are thousands of people alive today who know that NASA, Rosaviakosmos, ESA, JAXA, CNSA, and others have created the greatest fiction ever written. Think about it.

Crackpots are passionate. Ignorant, but passionate. There are always unknowns and open questions in science -- at least that is the fervent hope of all of those clunky old mainstream scientists. They are not so clunky or old or hidebound as you think. The vast majority of scientists who are making active contributions to their field are between 25 and 45 years old. These younger scientists yearn for weird discoveries. The problem with crackpot science (and this electric sun stuff is pure crackpot science) is that the proponents see these unknowns and open questions as fatal flaws and try to build ill-formed, non-scientific explanations to answer these questions. The proponents of crackpot science do little to develop their own concepts and instead hang the validity of their concepts on disproving the existing science. This is a fatal flaw in crackpot science. Discrediting existing science does not prove their science correct. If successful, it would only prove existing science incorrect. The author of this particular concept has failed in discrediting the standard models and has completely failed in establishing the validity of his own conjectures. Most crackpot science is simple. Unfortunately, this electric sun conjecture violates laws of physics, does not explain facts, and does not explain how the stars shine for billions of years. It hangs its validity not on its own ill-developed concepts but on the open questions in solar science. Like other crackpot science, this one continues to hang on to the open questions long after the questions have been answered. A good example is that the problem of the missing neutrinos. This problem vexed solar scientists in the latter half of the last century. However, this problem has been fully solved. We now know that neutrinos change flavor, and this flavor change fully explains why we see fewer solar neutrinos than expected per 1960s era models. What high voltage and what current? The solar wind comprises positive ions (mostly protons) and negative ions (mostly electrons) and is on the whole electrically neutral and is moving away from the Sun en-masse. There is no current coming out of or going into the Sun. Those links you provide talk about magnetohydronamics, a very important part of the standard model of the Sun. They do not describe an "electric sun".

What ever gave you the idea that the luminiferous aether is "nothing"? The luminiferous aether (the proper name of the thing the Michelson-Morley experiment was trying to find) was definitely not "nothing". It was some unknown physical material that occupied all space. Physicists of that day did not know what the luminiferous aether was, but they fervently believed it was something rather than nothing. Light was widely believed to be a pure wave phenomenon, and all wave phenomena they were familiar with required some underlying medium through which they propagated. Regarding your measurements with a ruler. Suppose you use something a bit more precise than a ruler -- say a caliper accurate to 0.01 inches -- and measure the length of some object to be 6.01, 5.99, 6.00, 6.02, and 6.00 inches in five separate measurements. Are you going to try again, or are you going to say that your measurements all agree with one another? A major aspect of any scientific experiment that involving measurements is getting a handle on the errors in that experiment. Two measurements of the same quantity are rarely identical, and hence the need for examining error. Having measurements that are too good is one of the hallmarks of bad science -- possibly something as simple as observer bias all the way up to out-and-out forgery.

No, and doubly so in a well-designed experiment. First, there is always experimental error. Forget about this particular experiment for a bit. Suppose you have an instrument that measures some quantity. You measure a value of 0.01. Does that mean your measured value is not zero? Not necessarily. All instruments yield somewhat erroneous values. Instruments exhibit bias and random error. A bias means the instrument consistently yields a high (or low) readings. A random error means the instrument might read 0.01 one time and -0.01 the next time for the exact same input. A well-designed instrument will have a bias as close to zero as possible and a very low random error. It is impossible to completely eliminate either bias or random error. A reading of 0.01 is consistent with a true value of zero if the expected bias + random error might well exceed the reading. No. This "fringe shift expected" is what the experimenters expected to see if the luminiferous aether existed and altered the apparent speed of light. The result of 0.01 is almost certainly inconsistent with the expected value of 0.9 and might well be consistent with a value of 0. The particular experiment you cited does not have an entry in the "Experimental Resolution" column. The only experiment that does specify a resolution is the 1927 Illingworth experiment. The measured fringe value was 0.0002 and the resolution was 0.0006. Thus the 0.0002 is completely consistent with a true value of 0.0 and is completely inconsistent with a true value of 0.07. They don't.

The article was trying to paint Bubba as an ignorant rube who would be voting for Obama if only he had a little bit upstairs. Bubba isn't the only kind of person in this country who prefers profanity over punctuation. Have you never been to New York f**in City or to f**in Boston? The f**in natives of those two f**in cities f**in carpet bomb their vocabulary with the f-bomb -- and they predominantly vote Democratic. The obvious reason why conservatives aren't leaning to Obama is right here:

McCain would probably have been better off in naming Ginsberg and Breyer only, as they have acted exactly as they were "told". Naming Souter and Stevens along with those others implies that he will have a highly political vetting process, and that in turn will inevitably result in a doomed nominee. A Democratic Senate will not condone replacing Ginsberg or Stevens (the two most likely to retire) with an Alito or Roberts clone. The best McCain can hope for is replacing one of those Justices with someone like Kennedy.

He was not asked which justices he wants to remove from the Supreme Court. He was asked which members of the Supreme Court he would not have nominated to the position, and why. This is a substantially different question. Obama answered the same question with Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts.

Correctly speaking, the energy acquired increases exactly as Janus described in post #2.

You have provided more than enough evidence right here in this thread to convince me that there is no reason to read your book. You have done nothing of the sort. What you have completely misunderstood the meaning of the phrase "neutral point" as used in lay literature and you have completely misunderstood how we assess the mass of the Moon. Your entire analysis is based upon these misunderstandings. I have shown that NASA itself describes the L1 point as the "neutral gravity point" in lay writing. I have shown how scientific organizations assess the mass of the Moon agencies. These scientific organizations do not assess the mass of the Moon by in terms of location of either the L1 point or your so-called "neutral point" because no instrument can be constructed to assess the location of either point directly. Doing so would require constructing an instrument that could directly assess the force of gravity. No instrument that we know of can do this and there are very good reasons to believe that no such instrument could be constructed, period. No, it is not. Yes, it is, just as is every other physical law, including Newton's laws. Kepler's laws are only approximately correct even in our own solar system. Kepler's laws explicitly state that the planets have elliptical orbits. This is not quite true (google the phrase anomalistic precession). Accounting form the gravitational interactions among the planets explains most of the anomalistic precession. Kepler's laws give an incorrect answer for Jupiter's orbital period because Kepler's laws implicitly assume that the planets have masses many orders of magnitude smaller than the Sun's mass. Jupiter's mass is 1/1048 solar masses, large enough to make Jupiter's orbit deviate from that predicted by Kepler's laws. Newton's laws themselves have been proven to be only approximations that fail in regimes far removed from day-to-day experience. Newton's laws yield incorrect results when applied in very small domains (quantum mechanics provides more accurate models), very fast domains (special relativity), or very large domains (general relativity). You, on the other hand, are arguing that Newton's laws are wrong, period -- that they don't even apply in the day-to-day world. This goes counter to an incredible number of experiments performed from before Newton's time to the present day. It goes counter to almost all of modern day engineering, which are largely applied Newtonian mechanics. We use Newton's laws when we build bridges, cars, buildings, and spacecraft, just to name a few things. The references you cited simply talked about a "neutral point". It is you who has misinterpreted this as the point where the gravitational force toward the Moon equals the force toward the Earth. In lay terms, the L1 point is the neutral point. I have provided references that specifically describe the L1 point as the neutral point. The distances you cited are exactly the distances between the Earth (or Moon) and L1 point. Nobody but you thinks of the point where the gravitational forces are equal but opposite as the neutral point because this point is physically meaningless. Thanks, but no thanks. Please stick to the topic of discussion. My full name and address are not part of that discussion. These, along with my phone number and social security number, are things I do not give out freely on the internet.

First off, this is a red herring because the location of either of these points, the L1 point or your "neutral point", is derived, not measured. Second, your so-called "neutral point" has negligible physical meaning. In comparson, the L1 point has deep physical meaning. For example, NASA currently has a satellite operating at the Sun_Earth L1 point and has contemplated putting a space station at the Earth-Moon L1 point. In a very real sense, the Earth-Moon L1 point is the neutral point between the Earth and the Moon. In the Earth-Moon synodic frame, the second derivative at the L1 point is zero acceleration. Many people refer to the L1 point as the neutral point because in a very real sense it is the neutral point between the Earth and the Moon. Examples (emphasis mine): http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/soho/ssu/ssu_stills.html "3. THE UNQUIET SUN--- This sequence of images of the the Sun in ultraviolet light was taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft on Feb. 11, 1996 from its unique vantage point at the "L1" gravity neutral point 1 million miles sunward from the Earth." http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/news-release/releases/1999/99-079.htm "The Triana mission will carry three independent instrument groups mounted on the SMEX-Lite spacecraft. The spacecraft will be launched from the Space Shuttle (as a secondary payload) to provide continuous scientific measurements of the Earth's atmosphere and surface from the Lagrange (L1) point between the Earth and the Sun, the neutral gravity point between the Earth and the Sun." What has happened is that you have misinterpreted the meaning of the term "neutral point" in that lay article in Time magazine and that lay book by Von Braun and Ordway. What is the mass of the Moon? Valado, "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Applications", McGraw-Hill, 1997 "Table D-4 Mean Planetary Constants for Epoch J2000 Moon mass = 0.01230 earth mass = 7.3483*1022 kg" NASA determines the moon's mass by observing satellites sent to orbit the Moon. Thus they are measuring the product of the univesal gravitation constant and the Moon's mass. While the uncertainty in G isn't all that great (one part in 105), the uncertainty in the product GMMoon is much reduced: better than one part in 107. Lunar geodesy (sic) typically reports GMMoon rather than MMoon. Ralph B. Roncoli, "Lunar Constants and Models Document", JPL Technical Document D-32296, California Institute of Technology, 2005 Available online at http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/dat/lunar_cmd_2005_jpl_d32296.pdf "GMMoon = 4902.801076 km3/s2 (Gravitational parameter from LP150Q) Note: While the LP150Q gravity field represents the current best (complete) lunar gravity field, the GMMoon value from LP150Q does not represent the single best estimate of the gravitational parameter (GM) of the Moon. Reference 2 provides a more precise estimate of the lunar GM -- it is 4902.8000 ± 0.0003 km3/s2. For calculations that require a lunar GM value (as opposed to a complete gravity field), the value from Reference 2 should be used." The 2006 CODATA value for G is 6.67428*10-11 ± 0.00067 m3/kg/s2, or 6.67428*10-20 km3/kg/s2. With this value and the above estimate of GMMoon, the Moon's mass is 7.3458*1022 kg, more-or-less the same as that published by Valado. [math]F=ma[/math] is the definition of force. Your equation reduces to [math]F=ma = aA[/math], or [math]m=A[/math]. That doesn't make a bit of sense and completely disagrees with observation. Your "equation" doesn't even have the right units. Force has units of mass times acceleration, or mass times length per time squared. Acceleration times area has units of length cubed per time squared. You published this nonsense in a book?? Kepler's Laws are purely empirical laws and apply to the orbit of planets around the Sun only. Newton's law of gravitation is much deeper and much more general. It applies to the orbit of the Moon about the Earth, the orbit of a pair of binary stars about each other, and of course to an apple falling to the surface of the Earth. Since Kepler's laws describe an acceleration, the force is obviously proportional to the smaller mass. (F=ma). Newton realized that there is nothing special about the larger mass -- the force should also be proportional to its mass as well as to the mass of the smaller object. That the gravitational force should exhibit some symmetry makes even more sense when you look at it in light of Newton's third law. Forces come in equal but opposite pairs. Note well: Kepler's laws are only approximately valid (the same goes for Newton's law of gravitation; general relativity is an even better model of gravity than Newton's). Kepler's laws work because the planets are many orders of magnitude smaller than is the Sun. The Moon is 1/81 of the Earth's mass. A tiny satellite at the Earth-Moon distance would orbit the Earth a bit slower than does the Moon.

I find it interesting that nobody disputes that the recent drop in oil prices is due to reduced demand while at the same time Congress is still blaming the rise in oil prices on speculators. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/biz/5944958.html. The immense decline of the American dollar was a bit too precipitous. The focus on the faltering American economy was also a bit overblown and ignored that the European economy has been faltering as well. http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/deutsche-bank-says-euro-zone-recession/story.aspx?guid=%7BC3F278D5-6006-4F2A-A069-C5A7F1A31844%7D&dist=msr_1 How about a pool on whether Congress will bail out the poor oil speculators who have lost their shirts and their trousers as a result of the spectacular drop in oil prices?

No, it does not. You are making the same erroneous inferences regarding evolution that you made in this thread. The ADD/ADHD problem has been with us all the time. What has changed is society, not us. We haven't changed at all biologically. There is no new ADD/ADHD gene that suddenly popped up in the human genome thirty years or so ago. Society on the other hand has changed immensely over the last thirty years. What was viewed as normal childhood behavior up until the onset of the information age is now viewed as abnormal. We have become much less physically active (a big factor in our obesity problem). We are constantly subjected to information overload. We expect our children to sit still and pay attention for hours on end in classes and at the same time inundate their senses in a way that encourages short attention spans. Many schools have cut out the one physical outlet that lets kids release their pent up energy, recess. This lack of physical outlets, increased demand for sedentary behavior, and information overload simply does not sit well with some kids. In some it causes a real biochemical response that is exactly counter to what society demands. I am not saying that ADD/ADHD is not real. While some kids diagnosed with ADD/ADHD are just normal kids acting like normal kids, there are a number of kids who truly are afflicted with this disease. Even these kids who truly do have ADD/ADHD would have had an easier go at life forty or more years ago because society back then did not aggravate the condition and provided meaningful outlets that mitigated the problems associated with the condition.

Pari, You have based your work on two false hypotheses. One is your interpretation of the meaning of the term "neutral point" in non-scientific magazines such as Time and lay literature such as the History of Rocketry & Space Travel. The other is your misunderstanding of how we have assessed the mass of the Moon. Your so-called "neutral point", the point where the gravitational force toward the Moon is exactly equal to the gravitational force toward the Earth, has little or no physical meaning. A body at this point moving at a speed less than lunar escape velocity will orbit the Moon because the Moon's Hill sphere is about 60,000 km in radius. As another example, consider the "neutral point" between the Earth and the Sun. The Moon itself is well beyond this point (do the math). The Moon still orbits the Earth because the Moon is well inside the Earth's Hill sphere. The location of the Sun-Earth "neutral point" has little physical meaning. The same goes for the Earth-Moon "neutral point". Because this point has little meaning, nobody uses the term "neutral point" to describe this point. On the other hand, the L1 point in a very real sense is the "neutral point" between the Earth and the Moon. What happens to a vehicle with the same orbital angular velocity as the Moon placed near this point depends very much on the vehicle's location. If it is just a bit closer to the Earth than the L1 point it will fall Earthward; just a bit closer to the Moon and it will fall toward the Moon. Scientists and engineers try not use technical jargon when they write for the general public. Because the L1 point is in a very real sense the neutral point between the Earth and the Moon, lay writing refers to this point as the "neutral point" rather than the first collinear libration point. Your other misconception is that this point forms the basis for our assessment of the Moon's mass. It is exactly the other way around. We can calculate the location of this point on the basis of the already known values of the mass of the Moon and the separation between the Earth and the Moon. We had reasonably good estimates of the Moon's mass well before the start of the space age. Columbus not withstanding, we have known the size of the Earth for thousands of years. We determined the distance between the Earth and the Sun on the basis of transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 and later transits in 1874 and 1882. These values coupled with multiple observations of solar and lunar eclipses gave us estimates of the distance to the Moon. The Moon's orbital period leads to estimates of the mass of the Earth-Moon system. Finally, observations of the apparent monthly nutation of the Sun and planets gives an estimate of the extent of the Earth's orbit around the Earth-Moon center of mass. Put all of this together and you get estimates of both the Earth's and the Moon's mass. We had a good estimate of the Moon's mass over one hundred years ago. By sending vehicles to the Moon we obtained even more refined estimates of the Moon's mass. We never used estimates of the density of the Moon (or of the location of the L1 point or the neutral point) to determine the Moon's mass. It is exactly the other way around. Knowing the Moon's mass let us make estimates of the Moon's density and the location of the L1 point.

What JPL knows is observed right ascension and declination of the planets at various times. These measurements are only 2D and are not particular accurate, at least not in the sense of the meter-level accuracy JPL claims for the planetary positions. They also have a very detailed simulation that models the behavior the planets and minor bodies. I don't know how they are modeling state in this simulation (it might not be Cartesian coordinates), but I do know they go so far as to model relativistic effects. They most likely have the state of the system at epoch time use a batch update to tweak that epoch state to minimize the errors between the propagated state and observations. With this calibrated simulation they can now compute the state at any point in time. There is no dynamics at all in the DExxx ephemeris model. It instead simply determines which set of Chebyshev polynomial coefficients are to be used and computes position and velocity using these coefficients. The dynamics comes into play in generating coefficients. The simulator yields position vectors at various time points picked according to Chebyshev polynomial formalism. The coefficients are rather easy to compute; a dozen or so lines of code does it. I suspect they also compute position vectors at other points. These other points will not be used to compute the coefficients; they are explicitly reserved for testing the validity of the fit. One question: what degree polynomial should be used? Too small and the fit will be lousy. Too big and the fit will be great but the polynomial will be absolutely useless. Think about it this way: You have 99 data points comprising (t,x) values at hand that, when plotted, yield a curve that looks quadratic. You could fit the data points to a 100th degree polynomial and get an exact fit. However, all this exact-fit polynomial is good for one thing and one thing only: Replicating the data you already have at hand. The polynomial will oscillate wildly between your sampled data points and will quickly diverge outside of the data points. It is much better to fit the data to a quadratic and accept the loss in fit accuracy. The people who generate the coefficients have to make a similar trade. Their goal is to reproduce the simulation results to within one meter. If this requires a high-degree polynomial, so be it. An overfit will be rejected because the evaluation data are distinct from the generation data. However, the evaluation data are still position vectors. This is what JPL guarantees the accuracy of. The velocity vectors are a freebie, and like everything else in life, you get what you pay for. If you want something easy, write it in Matlab. (rk4(5) for example is written in Matlab.) Move to another language if performance is an issue. One thing you will find if you do write your own integrator is that your simulation will speed up immensely. Matlab's rk4(5) makes an inordinate number of calls to your derivative function at the start just to determine what it thinks is the correct time step to use. Another problem with the standard rk4(5) algorithm: It isn't very good with stiff systems. The Moon orbits once per month and Jupiter orbits once per 12 years; the outer planets are even slower. These widely-varying frequencies are the hallmark of a stiff system. Do you know of the work of Cesar Ocampo, University of Texas? The Copernicus system his group at UT is developing in conjunction with NASA has the ability to do both. I suggest you do a literature search. You now have a name. I use Matlab's rk4(5) integrator when I just want a quick-and-dirty answer and don't care much for accuracy. Otherwise I use something different.

What you are doing is misunderstanding and misapplying existing evolutionary theory. There is no connection between human evolution and tobacco. None. The genetic propensity to nicotine addiction is a by-product of some genetic trait that presumably was selected for evolutionarily, but this trait has nothing to do with tobacco per se. Proof: The trait most likely has been around for millions of years (animals other than humans get addicted to nicotine); widespread use of tobacco products is 400 years old.

I have two suspects: Your initial conditions and your state propagation. Initial conditions. In order to do what you did you need initial position and velocity vectors for the planets. This means your initial positions and velocities must both be very accurate if you wish to have any chance of replicating the "truth". The HORIZONS system you are using in turn uses the JPL DE4xx (probably DE405) ephemeris model. If you delve inside this system (and you can do this; the software is available to the public), you will see that the DE series represents planet position by means of Chebyshev polynomials in time. Planet velocities are not represented directly. Instead, velocities are obtained by computing the time derivative of those Chebyshev polynomials. While JPL claims accuracy of one meter for the position vectors, it makes no claims about the accuracy of the initial velocity vectors. State propagation. From other posts, I suspect you are using the standard Matlab/Simulink RK45 integrator to propagate state. I have three words: Yech, and double yech. I do use this integrator when I need to do a quick-and-dirty kind of analysis. Even then I will do a sanity check because it the Matlab RK45 integrator oftentimes does a rather lousy job. One solution is to write your own integrator. You can take advantage of the conservative nature of the problem whereas RK45 cannot because it is a general-purpose integrator. An alternative. Another solution is to abandon the concept of integrating the planetary states. You can instead obtain them from the ephemeris model at each and every each time step. That means replacing your use of HORIZONS with the Chebyshev polynomial coefficients and software to use those coefficients. See http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?planet_eph_export for (some) details. There is a book on the system; I'll see if I can dig up a reference for you later today.

The only reason I didn't attack the first three numbers, R*, fp, and ne, is because I easily arrived at a number that indicates we are quite alone. So, attacking the first three numbers: R* This is the rate of formation of stars suitable for life. The overall star formation in the Milky Way is widely regarded to be on the order of one or so per day. Using one as the value of R* is ludicrous becauseMultiple star systems are much less suitable for life than are single star systems in part because of the orbit stability problem. Most star systems are multiples. The observational evidence of elliptical orbits among exoplanets suggests that even most apparently single star systems are in fact multiples; the partner is a brown dwarf. The center of the galaxy is much less suitable for life because there are too many other stars nearby. Those nearby stars can perturb the planets' orbits, or go supernovae, or emit a GRB. Most star formation occurs in regions of the galaxy that aren't suitable for life. Massive stars are less hospitable to life for the simple that massive stars have too short a life span. In our solar system, 4.6 billion years passed between the formation of the solar system to the development of life capable of performing interstellar communication. The star has to smallish so that its lifespan is at least on the order of the timespan needed to form communicative intelligent life. In short, the standard value of [math]R^\ast = 1[/math] is far too high. I would venture it is an order of magnitude to high at a bare minimum, and is much more likely possibly two or three orders of magnitude too high. [*]fp This is the fraction of suitable stars that form planetary systems. I'll leave this one alone. I suspect that most "suitable" stars form planetary systems of some form. [*]ne Lance, this is the number that you are arguing should be drastically reduced. I simply took the low end of the widely used range of values. You are essentially arguing that this low end is far too high. Recent observations of exoplanets indicates that this number might well be much less than one because our solar system might be a fluke. (Then again, maybe we are seeing so many more hot Jupiters than anything else because the current planet detection capabilities see hot Jupiters and not much else.) Some argue the other way: That this number is greater than one. In our solar system, Venus, Earth, and Mars all qualify as planets "suitable for life" in the minds of some. You shouldn't do that. With the Drake equation as it stands, that is a part of the probability of the formation of intelligent life. The Drake equation is a conditional probability equation. It is never a good idea to double count things in such equations. I'm not even going to try. I disagree here. Near-intelligence has arisen many times. Communicative intelligence, once. Near-intelligence is a great evolutionary advantage. What is the evolutionary advantage to our level of intelligence? We are, in a way, less intelligent than many of the species you mentioned. Non-human near-intelligent species use their brains to observe the world around them. Evolution channeled a lot of that brain power toward communicative and reasoning capabilities in our brains. Chimps, for example, have much better short-term memory than do we. The only reason this redirection was advantageous was because we had already developed an upright posture that freed our hands. In most species, such a development would be disadvantageous. Communicative intelligence might well have arisen multiple times only to disappear because in most species, true intelligence confers no advantage but does confers lots of disadvantages.

Perhaps I have not made myself clear. I'll be blunt. You are missing the point. Excluding entire star systems is the job of the factors R*, fp, and ne. It is not the job of the factor fl, which is the probability that life will arise given that a star, its star system, and some planet(s) in that star system are suitable for life. Think of it as a conditional probability. Bottom line: If you want to reduce entire star systems, attack the leading factors. You have not addressed my contention that life on most planets will simply die out. Think of Venus and Mars. Venus didn't have a perfect collision with a Mars size object that drew off most of the initial atmosphere. Mars is a tad too small, making its tectonic activity come to a dead stop. On planets where life does survive, it will reach a pre-intelligent plateau on most. On some planets life won't even progress to the stage of simple bacterial life. On others bacterial life will form, but not multicellular life. The steps from primitive to bacterial to multicellular spanned three billion years on our planet. There are several reasons to think that the odds of developing complex life alone is very, very small. The Earth's Moon is one such reason. Life would have been very different without Earth's Moon. The Moon was and remains a driver of life. The Moon stripped the Earth of most of its initial atmosphere. We would be another Venus if it hadn't been for the Moon. While the time span from the development of complex life to the development of intelligent life was relatively short, there is little advantage in extreme intelligence for most species. Our brains are a huge challenge in birth. During hard times, our brains represent a huge energy drain. While life is inevitable, intelligent life is not. We are a fluke.

Several reasons for a lack of an answer to this question. The OP asked a question that is too open-ended. Your answer is 25 times longer than the question, and you did not come close to giving a full response. I'm not belittling your post; a full response would require a book. The OP is too lazy to deserve an answer. He couldn't even bother to use punctuation. All it takes to find an excellent answer is a quick google search. The OP might well be trying to cheat. If you had answered in a timely manner you would have just done the OP's homework for him.