D H

rigney: I suggest you look for some more reputable source, either an expert in the field or a respected science writer. You have found the ramblings of some random nut job who doesn't know what he's talking about. The internet is full of net jobs, crackpots, and charlatan, and you are very good at finding them.

You are apparently talking about Einstein's musings when he was 16. About a decade later he realized that these were nonsensical musings. This realization is what led him to publish his 1905 paper on relativity. Asking what happens when light hits a mirror going at the speed of light is nonsensical. A mirror cannot go at the speed of light. The structure of the universe makes such an event impossible.

Basically you are asking "what do the laws of physics say would happen if we violated the laws of physics?" There's a huge difference between a nonsensical question and a hypothetical question. Yours falls in the first category.

A laser can't move at c. No massive object can.

This is the exactly the kind of reporting that makes Faux so distinctive and sets it apart from the rest of those news channels. Note to CNN: Stop all of that reporting about the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. Nobody cares! In fact, stop reporting the news in general. Follow Faux News and pretend to show the news instead.

Your bullet example assumes velocities add as 1+2=3. That is how things work in Newtonian mechanics, but not in relativity. Your Newtonian mindset is pervasive. You have to get rid of that mindset or you will not understand things. Imagine that the ship sends out a single photon. There is no interaction between the spaceship and the photon after the spaceship emits the photon. That photon is gone, moving away at the speed of light. Now imagine the ship sends out a stream of photons. There is still no interaction. There is no traveling into the beam of light. It doesn't make sense. Finally, imagine that the ship sends a photon in the opposite direction. I'll leave that thought up to you.

Your bullet example is implicitly assuming a Newtonian universe. The universe isn't Newtonian. The local speed of light in all frames of reference is 'c'. The ship does not "travel into the tail end of that light, absorbing the difference between its velocity and 'c.'" Once a photon is emitted it is gone. There is no further interaction with it. And to be blunt, what you are saying doesn't quite make sense. Travel into the tail end of that light? What does that mean. It's hidden here, but you are assuming there is some absolute frame of reference in which an object's true velocity can be specified. There isn't.

You're the one with the fuzzy terminology. How does adding energy and momentum not constitute a "push"? No. You have to surrender your Newtonian point of view. A Newtonian POV is valid in our everyday world experiences, but that's only because a bullet fired from a gun is moving at many, many orders of magnitude less than the speed of light. The difference between what relativity and Newtonian mechanics say will happen is immeasurably small in this domain. Newtonian mechanics is only approximately as speed increases. For very high speeds, they aren't valid at all. This is the heart of your problem in this thread (and elsewhere). Stop insisting the universe is Newtonian. It isn't.

I think that you did not understand properly the presented objections. md65536 summed it up nicely with Bart, your concept is about as useful as an acquaintance's grandfather clock. It looks cool, but it doesn't work. He has it set at 12:00. It's exactly right twice a day. Plus it let's him say "Hey, look! It's noon already. I can start drinking!" (He has a slight problem with that.)

Of course. Nobody, well hardly anybody, uses relativity when dealing with rockets. There's no point. The uncertainties in thrust and errors in sensor measurements overwhelm the errors that result from ignoring relativistic effects.

Light can be "pushed". Just not in speed. Suppose you shine a laser at a mirror moving toward you. The reflected light is blue shifted. It has more energy and more momentum than does the light moving toward the mirror.

Simpler? There isn't much that could make things harder. The laws of physics won't be the same from place to place. Fundamental constants aren't. What to do at some place that can't see the pulsars because they're occluded by a gas cloud? Synchronization from another location won't work. What to do at some other place that sees multiple images of the pulsar thanks to gravitational lensing?

Meanwhile, philosophers still worry about whether Zeno's paradoxes show that motion is impossible. Diogenes had it right: Just stand up and walk out. Done. Conjecture falsified by a physical experiment.

Baloney. Imagine you are driving down the freeway and pass by a car at constant speed v. Imagine that other car has a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from its rear view mirror. Suppose you and the other car have a car-based coordinate frame with the x-axis pointing in the direction of the car's motion. From your perspective, the x coordinate of that pair of dice varies with time, x'(t)=x(0)-vt. From the perspective of the driver of that other car, the x coordinate of that pair of dice is some time-invariant value ξ.

There's no trick. There's only you intentionally misreading. A point with fixed coordinates in the moving system will have time varying coordinates in the stationary system, and vice versa. If you don't like Einstein's original presentation as translated into English, you can find plenty of other derivations of the Lorentz transformation that don't invoke Einstein's original terminology. Just pick up any text for the typical upper undergraduate classical mechanics course or for the typical upper undergraduate E&M course.

That was pretty much my first response, too. "Yet another anti-relativity crackpot. Been there, done that." There's nothing to be learned as every single one of those anti-relativity crackpots are wrong. There's very little to be gained in arguing with them as almost all of those anti-relativity crackpots are beyond intransigent. After being challenged in post #5, I did take the time to find the first flaws in each of the two cited papers, and after quickly finding huge gaping holes in each, well, at that point I stopped reading.

It takes 6 months or longer if you use a low-thrust solution such as ion propulsion or solar sails. It took SMART-1 over a year to get to lunar orbit, and that required the vehicle to be firing its engines about 2/3 of the time. It takes only 3 days or so to get from low Earth orbit to low lunar orbit if you use a high-thrust solution such as was done with the Apollo missions, and that requires the firing the engines for only ten minutes or so.

Yes and no. There's always been a bit of woo in systems science, systems engineering, systems analysis, and that woo appears to have congealed in this general systems theory. From the wikipedia article on the subject: "As a transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and multiperspectival domain, the area brings together principles and concepts from ontology, philosophy of science, ..." Come on. Multiperspectival? Concepts from ontology? Woo. That's the no part of my answer. Now for the yes part of my answer. For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. That old proverb is a simple example of a failure modes and effects analysis, one of many techniques used in systems engineering to analyze, predict, and prevent problems. Systems engineering, system of systems engineering, systems science: They are very real, very useful, and they are not offshoots of this general systems theory.

Back to Mars One: It's the basis for a TV reality show. Here's a fluff piece at gizmag that highlights the details: http://www.gizmag.com/mars-one-human-settlement-2023/22799/.

What about eigenvalues?

Start with some definitions. What is a nilpotent matrix, and a diagonalizable matrix? What are some key characteristics of such matrices? Finally, what does rank mean? Note: We do not do your homework for you at this site. We help you do your own homework. You need to show some work. You can't just ask for help.

That's the term! Counter-intuitive was counter-intuitive, but I also knew it wasn't counter-preservative. There's nothing nefarious here. That we have a two party system is a consequence of how we elect officials. The dominant scheme in the US is winner-take-all. Suppose every House district in some state voted 50.1% for one party, 49.9% for the other. All of the representatives from that state will come be members of the same party. The representation is completely out of proportion compared to the vote. That winner takes all tends to create stable two party systems is called Duverger’s Law. Not "or more". That would be unconstitutional. The Constitution says "The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one representative." The population is just over 300 million. Divide by 30,000 and you get 10,000 as the constitutional upper limit on the number of representatives. More than 10,000 representatives would require a constitutional amendment. Your 10,000 figure would not. It would just require an act of Congress. They would have to amend the law it passed just over a century ago that fixed the number of representatives at 435. Note that your 10,000 representatives might well be counter productive (too many cooks spoil the broth!) and it would probably still result in a two party system if those representatives are chosen by winner-take-all. You would have to fundamentally change how the representatives are chosen to get away from a two party system. Addendum Here's the web site for an organization that advocates for something very close to your 10,000 representatives: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/index.htm. Second Addendum, "Article the first" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_the_First

You are reading the graph wrong. Your interpretation doesn't make sense if you look at the larger graph, which extends |α| down to less than 10-10. Also note that the vertical axis on that plot from physicsworld.com should be absolute value. What they are ruling out are Yukawa-type potentials as a modification to gravitation.

You are reading the graph incorrectly.

You aren't going to explain predator prey relationships with physics; it's a case of TMI. Reductionism runs afoul of TMI, chaos, the uncertainty principle, and quantum indeterminism. Take reductionism too far and you can't see the forest for the trees. Auguste Comte argued that it was sociology that was the queen of all sciences, with mathematics, astronomy, and physics at the low (and least interesting) end of the scale. Arguing which science pwns all the others is silly.