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What weak gravity pull? Astronauts and cosmonauts do float around weightlessly aboard the Space Station. The reason is not that gravitation is weak. It isn't. The acceleration due to gravity at the Space Station's altitude is about 90% of the acceleration due to gravity on the ground. Rhetorical question: So if gravitation is still strong at the Space Station's altitude, why do the astronauts and cosmonauts float around in the Station, why are conditions aboard the Station called weightlessness? The answer is that you don't feel gravity. You feel everything but gravity. Suppose you go to an amusement park and take one of those rides where you sit in a chair that is raised up high and then released. You feel a bit queazy when the chair is released. Your guts, your inner ear, your bones tell you that something is very different. You are feeling weightless! Something is very different. What's different is not gravity. It hasn't changed. What's different is that for a brief moment, you don't feel the chair pushing upwards on your rear, with that upward force propagating throughout your body. You are briefly in free fall, and this is exactly the condition the astronauts are in 24/7.

This doesn't make sense grammatically. I suspect you meant to say "There is only one kind of photons". (In other words, "photons are photons".) Using the indefinite article a instead of the definite one changes the meaning entirely. Note well: The "this doesn't make sense" problem here is due to your native language not being English. It's not a technical "this doesn't make sense" problem. This doesn't make sense, period. Here's a simple thought experiment. Spaceships A and B are at rest with respect to one another. Scientists on each spaceship conduct experiments to measure the speed of light. Each sees no variation of the speed of light with direction, and the two agree on the speed they measure. Now spaceship B accelerates to a high speed and then cuts its space drive, ending with a velocity equal to 99/100 the speed of light with respect to spaceship A. After cutting the engines, the scientists on spaceship B once again conduct their experiments to measure the speed of light. What do you think they will they see, alpha2cen? Will the measured speed of light vary with direction?

Emphasis mine: The highlighted phrase is nonsense. It represents a very serious misunderstanding of physics. This misunderstanding led you to say earlier in post 48 When we travel in the space by space craft at the speed 99/100 C. This too is nonsense. The spacecraft is moving at 0.99 c with respect to what? You seem to think there is some universal reference frame against which all speeds can be referenced. Your notion is that of a luminiferous aether. It doesn't exist. Relativity 101: The laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames. This concept goes way back in time to Galileo. It's implicit in Newtonian mechanics. While Newton did occasionally write about absolute motion ("God's frame"), he also noted that this absolute motion is unknowable. All we mere mortals can see is relative motion because the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames. The speed of light has the same value the same to all inertial observers. The invariance of the speed of light is implicit in Maxwell's equations and has been confirmed by a huge number of experiments, starting with the Michelson-Morley experiment. However, the invariance of the speed of light is very much at odds with Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics would say that the speed of light in your spaceship going at 0.99 c is only 1/100 c. This is not the case. They will see the speed of light as being c. Explaining this conflict between Newtonian mechanics and electrodynamics (Maxwell's equations) was the most important problem facing late 19th century theoretical physicists. The current inability to join general relativity and quantum mechanics pales in comparison to this late 19th century conflict. The problem with general relativity versus quantum mechanics is one of incommensurability. The problem with Newtonian mechanics and electrodynamics is one of complete disagreement on the predicted outcome of easily conducted experiments. Because it was the key problem of the time, it attracted the attention of many physicists of the time. Poincare and others tried to whitewash the problem away. Einstein's insight was to simply take Maxwell's equations and it's invariance of the speed of light at face value and see where that led him. The takeaway point here is that the speed of light is the same to all inertial observers. Taking this one step further, the speed of light as measured by a local experiment is the same to all observers, inertial or not. You do not appear to understand this crucial concept. This is nonsense even in Newtonian mechanics. This is the Newtonian point of view. It is wrong. The only difference is that photons in a star travel but a short distance before being absorbed. Otherwise, photons are photons. They are indistinguishable particles. Photons always move at c. Always.

The light speed is C inside the space craft as well. Learn some physics. No. Learn some physics.

Two comments: 1. Thanks for that completely meaningless, paranoid rant. It helped me get a picture of why some are attracted to this expanding Earth nonsense. It's not a pretty picture. 2. Instead of posting nonsense, why don't you try answering the questions posed to you?

That is a belief. It isn't scientific. Scientific notions are testable. There are some cosmologists who are working on notions along the lines of "before the big bang", but there are a whole lot more who think that such notions are nonsense, not science, or both. A WAG?? Big bang cosmology is not a WAG. There are still some unknowns. Grand unification (combining the electroweak and strong interactions) is something physicists don't know how to do. The inflationary period is perhaps a WAG; there's a lot of cosmologists who don't really like it, and a lot more who only begrudgingly accept it. So the first 10-32 seconds of the universe is perhaps a bit fuzzy. There's still 14.6 billion years after that where the science is pretty dang solid. Come off it. How long have you been at this site? You should know by now that the phrase "only a theory" is a pile of stinking nonsense used by crackpots, creationists, and scientific illiterates. Scientific theories are the best that science can offer. Why? That is an unreasonable wish, and also represents an ill-formed view of science. Science is constrained to giving answers that are testable. If you want the answer to life, the universe, and everything, either read the Hitchhiker's Guide or seek religion. Religions have no problem with answering unanswerable questions. It's pretty simple: Just pull nonsense out of some orifice. Whether it's true or not is irrelevant. Science is honest. It eventually says "we don't know." There's nothing wrong with "we don't know." It is the honest answer, after all, and it gives future scientists a place where they can extend the boundaries of science.

Photons always travel at c. Always. What happens in a transparent medium is that the medium briefly absorbs photons, only to re-emit them shortly thereafter but with some time delay. The end result is to delay the signal. It is the speed of the signal that is less than the speed of light in a transparent medium. Photons still travel at the speed of light. Note that this absorption is not at the atomic (electron) level. That kind of absorption/reemission can only happen at discrete wavelengths. Instead, it's a collective action of the medium. In solids, the physics is best described by phonons. Phonons pop up in all kinds of places in solid state physics. In fluids, it's a bit messier. Fluids are always messier physics. The absorption/reemission is still a collective action even in a fluid.

Arxiv preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.1162

And even that won't do it. You have to account for the seething sea of virtual particles as well if you want to explain the mass of a baryon from a theoretical perspective. What I was getting at was that the flavors of the quarks that comprise a baryon provide but a part of the picture with regard to the nature of that baryon.

This expanding Earth concept isn't a new revolutionary idea. It is an old idea, long since falsified. I can somewhat understand scientists such as S. Warren Carey, and through him, James Maxlow. It's sad, but some scientists refuse to acknowledge paradigm shifts in their field. They instead hold tight to falsified notions because of some emotion, irrational attachment attachment to those old ideas. This kind of thing happens all the time with paradigm shifts in the sciences. Poincaré completely rejected Cantor's notion of transfinite numbers. Fred Hoyle held tight to his steady state universe theory long after it had been falsified. Albert Einstein could never quite accept quantum mechanics and coauthored the EPR paradox paper to try to debunk QM. It's part of the overall "throw excrement at the wall of science and see what sticks" philosophy that appears to predominate amongst many creationists. Creationists glom onto fringe/crackpot scientists such as Tom Van Faldern, Halton Arp, and Maxlow because in the minds of creationists these crackpot notions cast doubt on science as a whole. If the expanding Earth nonsense is correct, then a whole lot of paleontology and the proof it offers for evolution goes down the drain. For example, expanding Earth says that the 505 million year old Burgess shales must be wrong somehow because there were no oceans 505 million years ago. One problem with this line of thinking: It is expanding Earth nonsense that is wrong. The dates attached to and the significance of the Burgess shales are just fine.

There's more to baryons than just the quarks that comprise them. You must also account for how the quantum numbers such as isospin combine. The Λ0 has isospin 0, while isospin is 1 for the Σ0.

I refuted your solar wind nonsense a few posts back. You did nothing to challenge my rebuttal. So why are you bring it up again? Mass gain from meteorites and dust does occur, but it is very small. Nonsense. More nonsense. Nonsense is way too nice a word for this garbage. This is excrement. A temperature in the millions of degrees would mean that the Earth's core is plasma at an extremely high pressure. The combination of pressure and temperature would vaporize the Earth and blow the Earth away. The D'' layer would need to be made of unobtainium to keep those high temperatures and high pressures at bay. This is a straw man. Nobody presumes the Earth's core is only molten iron. It is mostly but not entirely iron and nickel, and it comprises a solid inner core and liquid outer core. Scientists know this from seismograph returns from earthquakes. The techniques are very similar to those used to "see" a fetus or tumorous mass via ultrasound. That some of the Earth's heat flux arises from radioactivity is known. Some of this heat might be produced by fission rather than radioactive decay. The Oklo reactor is direct evidence that natural nuclear reactors can exist. However, fission, even deep in the Earth's core, would produce observable signatures in the form of anti-neutrinos. The observed flux of geo anti-neutrinos rules out a sizable (> 3TW) natural nuclear reactor at the Earth's core. Plate tectonics is that answer to your questions. It explains exactly why the oceanic crust is young, continental crust is old. It explains not only why Pangea formed and broke up but also why the six or so supercontinents that preceded Pangea formed and later broke up. It makes an immense amount of sense. It is the grand unifying theory of geology. Only with a wildly vivid imagination, plus an incredible ability to ignore discrepancies, plus an equally incredible ability to ignore evidence of widespread oceans for the last three plus billion years. For the most part, yes, there is. Are the boundaries known perfectly? Of course not. Nothing in science is known perfectly. What is this insufficient subduction to which you refer? Citation needed, please. Finally, a fact with which we can all agree.

Apparently not. You are ignoring everything I wrote. Links, please. Maxlow rejects subduction because he doesn't like it. Just because he (or you) don't like it doesn't mean that it is false. It just means he (and you) don't like it for some irrational reason. Subduction is an observed phenomenon. It is his irrational rejection of subduction that led to his erroneous conclusion that all of the oceans are expanding. The Pacific Ocean is shrinking. Look at the map in my previous post. Those earthquakes that light up the Ring of Fire occur predominantly at subduction zones. Um, no. Subduction has a well-defined mechanism, and is based on multiple lines of evidence. Plate tectonics has a well-defined mechanism, and is based on multiple lines of evidence. A constant-sized Earth does not need a mechanism based on magic / ill-formed physics, and is based on multiple lines of evidence. Regarding the latter, M. A. Ward, "On Detecting Changes in the Earth's Radius", Geophysical Journal 8:2 (1963) Estimates of the Earth's radius in the geological past can be made from paleomagnetic evidence. A method appropriate to the spherical environment of the data for dealing with this problem is given, which is applied to Devonian, Permian and Triassic data from Europe and Siberia, yielding estimated radii for these periods of 1.12, 0.94 and 0.99 times the present radius respectively. These estimates are not considered to be significantly different from the present radius. M. W. McElhinny et al., "Limits to the expansion of Earth, Moon, Mars and Mercury and to changes in the gravitational constant", Nature 271, (1978) New estimates of the palaeoradius of the Earth for the past 400 Myr from palaeomagnetic data limit possible expansion to less than 0.8%, sufficient to exclude any current theory of Earth expansion. G. E. Williams, "Geological constraints on the Precambrian history of Earth's rotation and the Moon's orbit", Reviews of Geophysics, 38:1 (2000) These figures are the only available direct estimates of I/I0 for the Precambrian and argue against significant overall change in Earth’s moment of inertia since ~620 Ma. Moreover, they rule out rapid Earth expansion since that time by endogenous (noncosmological) mecha- nisms, particularly the hypothesis of rapid expansion since the Paleozoic. That is a false analogy. There were very strong evidential and theoretical reasons to overturn the Newtonian view of the universe. What is a good analogy is that quantum mechanics, relativity, and the big bang theory turned a good number of formerly good physicists and astronomers into sad has-beens who clung too tightly to the old paradigm. That is exactly what has happened with Maxlow. He isn't advancing a new bold theory. He is instead irrationally clinging to a long-since discarded notion. This describes Maxlow to a T. He is a formerly good geologist who has turned into a nut. Formerly good scientists turning wacko is an unfortunate side effect of every major paradigm shift in science. That's the old expanding earth nonsense, of course.

The same goes for your silly 1687 value. Just because the value isn't known doesn't mean the error isn't known. This is a monotonically decreasing alternating series. The first omitted term provides an upper bound on the error. This latest set of posts represents a massive sidetrack. Orion, you appear to have missed this post: The series under discussion in the last bunch of posts is a terrible way to estimate pi. It is very, very slow to converge. The series upon which this is based, the Maclaurin series for arctan(x), is also a terrible way to estimate arctan(x). It is not how your computer computes the inverse tangent.

To four places, pi is 3.142, not 3.141. This is the problem in a nutshell. You have three, not four, place accuracy after your 1687 elements. This series is incredibly, incredibly slow to converge, taking on the order of 10n iterations to acheive n place accuracy. Compare that to some techniques that yield over ten decimal places per iteration.

The age from the Hubble expansion is not nearly so obscure to the lay audience as the age given by WMAP. The age of the Earth, 4.54 billion years, is also not so obscure as the techniques used with WMAP, and this a lower bound on the age of the universe that is well within your "few orders of magnitude". Have you personally sailed around the Earth? If you haven't, aren't you taking it on faith that the Earth is round?

Primate evolution on Asia and Africa was far from independent. There was a lot of back and forth. The origin of New World moneys is an interesting problem, but key signs point to an origin in Africa about 35 million years or so. I'll get to that Tectonic Expansion nonsense at the end of this post. I've seen lots of woo nonsense at this site, but this is one of the biggest crocks of such. Morphology and DNA have resolved this. We're mammals. No, it wouldn't. For one thing the Earth comprises about 10-9 of a 1 AU sphere. For another, the Earth's magnetic field steers the solar wind around the Earth for the most part. For yet another, the isotope ratio is wrong. This conjecture isn't even wrong. It's wronger than wrong. No, it isn't. This, too, is wronger than wrong. I am very curious of the psychology that leads one to reject plate tectonics. It is the grand unifying theory of geology. It is falsifiable, it has mechanisms, it is observable. It is science. Maxlow's Tectonic Expansion is not science. It has no mechanisms. There are huge chunks that are not falsifiable. What little that is falsifiable has been falsified. It is not observed. The same goes for every other flavor of expanding earth nonsense. Subduction is very real. Here's a thousand word essay (a picture is worth a thousand words) on plate tectonics and subduction zones: There is a whole lot of evidence for plate tectonics beyond these simple graphs of earthquake locations. Just a smidgen of this evidence: Very long baseline interferometry and GPS provide scientists the means to measure the relative motion between different spots on the Earth. What they see are plates separating from one another at divergent boundaries, colliding into one another at convergent boundaries, and slipping past one another at transverse boundaries. The very same math that underlies ultrasound, CAT scans, and magnetic resonance imaging can be applied to seismograph returns. This lets geologists see inside the Earth. What they see at subduction zones is subducting slabs of Earth. This is the tip of the iceberg. Plate tectonics is about as good as science can get. Why people reject it is beyond me.

Some elementary particles have no mass. These massless particles are precisely the ones that do not interact with the Higgs field. Protons and neutrons are not elementary particles. Each comprises three quarks. Those quarks get their mass thanks to their interaction with the Higgs field. However, if you sum up the masses of those quarks you will only get 5% or so of the mass of a proton and a neutron. So where's that extra mass come from? It's not the Higgs field. It's the strong force that results in this extra mass. Mass is bound energy. Some advice: Drop your meaningless --------------- nomenclature. Instead of spouting nonsense, learn some physics, and learn the mathematics that underlies physics.

In four words, mass is bound energy.

Seriously? Agreed?? This thread is meaningless word salad. There's nothing with which to agree.

Money. Getting into space is somewhat expensive. NASA's budget is 17 billion dollars per year. SpaceX just sent an automated spacecraft to the Space Station. To date, SpaceX has received (and spent) about a billion dollars to develop their launchers and their Dragon vehicle. Lack of money. Getting into space isn't that expensive. Americans annually spend about twice NASA's annual budget just on pizza. Lack of money worldwide. NASA accounts more than 1/2 of the world's total spending on civilian space endeavors. No air, no food, no water. Everything needed to sustain life has to be brought up from Earth. That's expensive and constraining. The ideal rocket equation. Physics limits how much mass we can realistically send up into space, how fast we can realistically go. Zero-g. The rocket equation means that astronauts/cosmonauts spend almost all of their time in space in a zero-g environment. This is bad for our bones, our musculature, our organs, and perhaps even our brains. Radiation. There's no atmosphere, and further out, there's no magnetosphere to protect people from harmful radiation. Why should we? I work in the industry; I am very pro-space. I'm also a realist. Until we can find a very compelling reason to spend more on space exploration, we are going to continue to be hamstrung by budgets that are half the US pizza budget.

That's because they know how and when to violate the rules for emphasis. Find one dictionary that says "because" can be an adverb. "Because" is a conjuction. Period. "Because" can introduce an adverbial clause, but that does not mean "because" is an adverb.

Well of course it's nonsense. You reformed the sentence into a non-sentence. The sentence "Don't drink the tea that is steaming because you already burnt your tongue once today" is not nonsense. It's just ambiguous and poorly written. There is a problem here with constructions such as "Don't drink the tea because." A negated clause followed by "because" is oftentimes ambiguous. "I didn't marry Bob because I wanted a stable marriage" is a favorite of those who argue that using a comma before "because" is sometimes correct. Did the person marry Bob for some other reason, or did the person's desire for a stable marriage lead this person to not marry Bob? Those who think that adding a comma makes the distinction clear are IMHO wrong. All that adding a comma does is to make the sentence grammatically incorrect. If you think adding a comma before "because" will help, it won't. What you should think instead is that "I need to rewrite this sentence so it is clear."

You missed a lot of other crap, a whole lot of other pure unadulterated crap, that deserves highlighting. There would have been very little plain text left had you highlighted all the crap. The cited ages, mechanisms, and effects are completely wrong, but yes, the Moon's surface is of two different ages. The crust on the far side of the Moon is indeed much thicker than that one the near side, and the lunar mare (which only exist on the near side) are younger than the rest of the surface of the Moon, about half a billion to a billion years younger than is the Moon itself. Taking a truth and twisting it into something completely different is one of the best ways to lie.

Neutrons are neutral, but they are not their own antiparticle. You also need to look at more than electrical charge. There's also color charge to consider. Some gluons are their own antiparticle, some are not. It's the neutral (electrical charge and color charge) gauge bosons and the Higgs boson that are their own antiparticles.