D H

Of course the derivatives are the same. The two functions differ by a constant over any compact neighborhood in the complex plane where both functions are defined. Wolfram Alpha has a hard time seeing that the solution to Re(arctanh(x)-arccotanh(x)) = 0 is the complex numbers less the points at which arctanh(x) and arccotanh(x) are undefined.

Have you read any of the previous posts, or are you just here to soapbox? Read post #26 by me, or post #36 by Edtharan. That's the universe for you: Nothing. Total energy: Nothing. Total momentum: Nothing. Total charge: Nothing. The universe not only was created from nothing, it is nothing, in total. The consensus view is that the universe created itself out of nothing. There was nothing before the big bang, there was no "before", period. The notion of "before the big bang" is nonsensical. At least that's the consensus view. The notion of the nature of time is important here. What does "before" even mean? Time may not be a fundamental concept. It may well instead be an emergent feature. Physicists don't quite know yet what time is. If time is an emergent feature then asking about "before the big bang" truly is a nonsense question. Just because the consensus view holds that asking about before the big bang is a nonsense question doesn't stop some physicists and cosmologists from asking it. One answer is that you get universes galore, an infinite number of them, forming from one another as quantum fluctuations. The universe is nothing, in total. It takes nothing to create one per these non-standard views. For now, however, there is no evidence that supports these concepts. Not yet, anyhow.

Someplace just like that. It was killed for political reasons, not technical ones.

That is indeed the argument some make, and it is downright naive or downright dishonest (or both; every movement has its useful idiots). Nature causes some pretty nasty forest fires, and yet we know that people do start forest forests and we do worry about those forest fires caused by people. Nature causes some downright massive erosion (just take a trip to the Grand Canyon), and yet we do know that some farming practices foster erosion and we do worry about that erosion caused by mankind. So why is it that just because natural climate variations (perhaps even some extinction level events) are much more severe than what we are seeing now mean that we are not the cause of this particular warming episode, or that we should do nothing about it?

Eek, for several reasons. Those subduction zones are deep, deep, deep in the ocean. The canisters that contain that radioactive material will be subjected to extreme pressure. They will be subjected to extreme pressure in salt water or rock that is saturated with salt water. Salt water is a rather corrosive substance. They will be subjected to extreme pressure and salt water corrosion for years on end. Subduction is kinda slow: 2 to 8 centimeters per year, on average. They will be subjected to extreme pressure and salt water corrosion for years on end, with intermittent jolts from nearby strong earthquakes. Subduction is not a smooth, continuous process. Nothing happens for a few years, and then kaboom! The plate slips and dives a bit. Those kabooms are some of the strongest earthquakes on the planet, and those canisters will be right at the epicenter. They will be subjected to salt water and extreme pressure for years on end, with intermittent jolts from nearby earthquakes, followed by increasing temperatures, steam, and molten rock. The plate heats up as it dives into the Earth, eventually reaching to temperatures hot enough to eject that salt water burden, and then reaching temperatures hot enough to melt rock. This steam and molten rock often escapes back to the surface. Many of the worlds most explosive volcanos result from this process. Do you really want to subject our children's children's children to radioactive volcanic eruptions? Eek!

It doesn't make sense, for a number of reasons. As others have already mentioned, just getting something into orbit is extremely expensive. Getting that something into orbit and on a collision course with the sun is beyond extremely expensive. It would be much, much cheaper to send the stuff out of the solar system than it would be to send it into the Sun. So why not send it out of the solar system? First off, that would still be ridiculously expensive. Expense aside, our launch capabilities do not have anything close to the reliability needed to undertake such a venture. We have at most two nines of reliability About one percent of launches fail -- and even seeing that level of reliability requires one to look squinty-eyed at the process, and wearing rose-colored glasses. Getting rid of the accumulated wastes would require thousands of launches. A good number would fail, some catastrophically. Do you really want the waste from those failures dispersed into the atmosphere? Why send the waste into space at all? A lot of the detritus that we deemed as useless garbage just a few decades ago turns out to be quite valuable thanks to recycling. Some future generation will almost certainly find a use for our radioactive waste as well. It makes much more sense to safely stash it away for future generations. Even if it isn't valuable, that safe stash means that the nasty portions of the waste will naturally decay into a much less hazardous substance. So, here's a much better proposal: Store that nuclear waste underground in a manmade cave in a formation that is geologically stable and that is in a very dry climate. Or has someone already thought of this?

Try again. 1) Causality is a valid concept. Not quite. Newton's third law was the start of the downfall of the notion of cause and effect. It is invalid to label one of the forces that comprise a third law pair as the cause and the other as the effect. One way out is that there are not two forces. There is but one force, and this one force results in equal but opposite reactions by the two particles. So does this rescue cause and effect? No. Relativity theory with its relativity of simultaneity says you better think hard about this concept of causality. But at least the universe obeys local realism. So is cause and effect rescued, at least locally? No. Quantum mechanics says you better think even harder about this concept of causality. There is a tinge of causality in some interpretations of quantum mechanics, but this quantum causality is weird -- and still hotly debated. Does somewhat elusive quantum causality rescue our naive concept of cause and effect? No. Bell's Theorem says you better think real hard about this concept of causality. Our primitive notion of cause and effect is, well, primitive, and is inextricably coupled with our primitive notion of time. Relativity theory once again says you better think hard about this notion of time. Quantum mechanics goes one step further and questions whether time really exists (with no answer, at least no yet.) Regarding your statement The currently dominant hypothesis is that the Big Bang did indeed cause itself. One explanation is that the total energy of the universe is identically zero. Nothing is required to create nothing, and the universe as a whole is ultimately nothing. Your #1 is "Causality is a valid concept". This needs to be qualified with sometimes. Newtonian mechanics is also a valid concept. Sometimes. The #1 rule learned by physicists over the last century plus is "don't extrapolate." Just because "causality is a valid concept" sometimes does not mean that it is universal. Your strike through "the Big Bang caused itself" implicitly assumes that causality is universal. That causality is universally true is falsified by radioactive decay, as I mentioned in an earlier post. And what's this?! I'll be looking it up, but a direct explanation would be greatly appreciated! (I mean, if the decay happens only in a certain circumstance, wouldn't that place the cause somewhere near the circumstance? Not to mention, without cause and effect, well...decision-making gets kinda...tricky.) Older point of view: Radioactive decay just happens. There is no cause. It just happens, randomly. Newer point of view: Radioactive decay results from vacuum fluctuations. Vacuum fluctuations just happen, randomly. There is no cause. Regardless of the point of view, radioactive decay comes down to "stuff just happens." Regarding your final comment, "well...decision-making gets kinda...tricky": Yep. That's exactly right. Relativity of simultaneity says that cause and effect are kinda tricky. Bell's Theorem says that you should put a strike through the "kinda". Exactly. While the consensus view is that the big bang created itself, that does not mean that it is true. Some cosmologists are starting to ask about "before the big bang." And they get an infinite regress. The OP responded to your question with You didn't supply a link. Here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_regress 1. It's wikipedia. It's free. You get what you pay for. 2. That quote is supposedly from reference 1. Big problem here: Where is reference 1? This is a broken wikipedia article. 3. Very nice quote out of context. The very next sentence, which you omitted, is "Not all regresses, however, are vicious." The argument as presented in the OP is fallacious for many reasons. 1. It is a "god of the gaps" style argument. 2. It assumes the primitive notion of causality is universal. It isn't. 3. If valid, why just one god? Why not a panoply of gods? 4. If just one god, why yours? At best you get some kind of deism from this argument. You do not get the Jewish/Christian/Islam God.

Of course he was. Almost all of the great scientists were cracked. It pretty much goes hand in hand with being one of the greats. Just some examples: Galileo was a bit cracked politically, and more than a bit politically inept. Just as tax evasion was the excuse the US government used to put Capone behind bars, Galileo's published views on the nature of the Jovian satellites were the excuse used by the Catholic church to put Galileo under house arrest. His rantings against the Catholic church were what truly raised the ire of the church. Newton was utterly cracked. Per Newton, the world is going to end in 2060, or perhaps 2034. He was a deeply religious man who read the Bible daily, and read things into the Bible on a fairly frequent basis. He was also an alchemist. Newton spent a lot more time and effort, a whole lot more, investigating the Bible and looking for the recipe for the philosopher's stone than he did on the things for which we remember him. Einstein was a bit cracked. He was friends with Velikovsky and gave positive reviews of Velikovsky's works. Einstein was so biased against the non-realistic nature of quantum mechanics that he, along with Podolsky and Rosen came up with a paradox to illustrate the flaws in quantum mechanics. We remember the EPR paradox nowadays because it is so precisely wrong. If you want a physics windmill to tilt against, you should look to Bell's Theorem, not Einstein's concepts. (You'll still be tilting against a windmill, however.) The list goes on and on. Orthodox scientists rarely if ever came up ideas that turned science upside down. The great scientists necessarily had to have a bit of the crackpot in their nature to first come up with their revolutionary ideas and then to champion those ideas against the sometimes great resistance from those with more orthodox views.

Farming or grazing. Those are contour strips. Amateur-1, this is the semi-arid Colorado plateau, not the Nazca Desert. Those Nazca lines would only last a few years on the Colorado plateau. Vegetation and rainfall would erase them in no time. Look at your images. The nearby mountains and hills are covered with scrub forest. The contour buffer strips between the grazing land or fields are filled scrub vegetation. That land is not flat. Farmers and ranchers would lose what meagre topsoil there is if they didn't follow good conservationist agricultural practices. Fields follow contour lines of the terrain, with unfarmed contour buffer strips separating the farmed areas. Grazing is similar. That scrub vegetation is not very nutritious. Cutting down that scrub vegetation allows more grass to grow, but also allows erosion to occur. Ranchers use a bush hog to create contours strips of grazing land, leaving contour buffer strips of uncut vegetation to reduce erosion.

You are looking at the big bang as an explosion in space rather than an explosion of space. All of the observations would not be the same regardless of the cause. Most of what we are seeing in the redshift of the not-so-faraway galaxies is velocity. There is however a big problem with your concept: The remotest of galaxies are apparently moving away from us at a velocity greater than the speed of light. Anything with a redshift greater than three is receding superluminally. This, and a number of other things, are why you cannot look at the big bang as if it were an explosion in space.

The exact same can be said of general relativity. It too is incomplete at best as it has not yet been melded with quantum physics, and it is presumably wrong in some arrangements such as the prediction of a singularity at the very heart of a black hole. Rhetorical question: If Newtonian mechanics is "wrong", why is it that NASA and other space agencies still use Newtonian mechanics to model the trajectories of their spacecraft, and why do engineers still use Newtonian mechanics to build highways, buildings, and robots? The answer is that "wrong" is a bit of an overstatement. The disagreement between the observed and predicted behavior of Mercury per Newtonian mechanics is very, very small. There's a mismatch of 43 seconds of arc per century in the anomalistic precession. 43 arcseconds is tiny, tiny angle. Stack a yardstick (meter stick) on top of another. Raise one end by about 5/8 inches (1.75 cm in the case of a meter stick). The angle subtended between the two measuring sticks is about a degree. Now put a postcard on top of the lower stick and lower the upper stick so it rests on the postcard. The angle subtended between the two measuring sticks is now about 40 to 50 arcseconds. That tiny angle is a measure of the wrongness of Newtonian mechanics with regard to Mercury's orbit -- and that is over a course of a century. Rather than saying that Newtonian mechanics is wrong, a better statement is that Newtonian mechanics is not universally true. It is an approximation of reality that is approximately correct in the narrow domain of velocities that are very small compared to the speed of light and distances that are large compared to the Schwarzschild radius (and compared atomic scales; Newtonian mechanics misses the boat on quantum scales as well).

Sheesh! Are all of your posts this long and nonsensical?

It has. This is why the most distant galaxies in the Hubble deep field are noticeably red. This redshift is one of the many reasons for the Webb space telescope. The visible light from the furthest galaxies has been red shifted right out of the visible range into the infrared. Finally, this observable redshift is how astronomers "measure" distance to those far-away galaxies.

These are not your words. These words that are not yours do not answer mississippichem's question, nor do they address Klaynos' notice in post #47.

Regarding the final comment ("take yourself seriously"): Right back atcha. You give the appearance of one who gloms onto every nutty notion out there. Take yourself seriously. Learn some real science. Regarding the first, yes, I am. We all make mistakes. However, people who make simple mistakes over and over again are in my mind (and in the minds of others) prima facie evidence of someone who should not taken seriously. If you want to be taken seriously you should present yourself seriously. Look at what you wrote before you post it. Regarding the meat of your question, FFS, we have reviewed the material over and over. Here's a small subset of the threads where this nonsense has been addressed: In 2007: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/25863-the-electric-sun-hypothesis/ In 2008: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/32027-a-plasma-universe/ In 2009: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/35486-how-gravity-really-works/ In 2011: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/53843-was-einstein-wrong/ That's just a subset. After a while it gets old. You appear to have missed my questions that I asked in another of your multiple threads on the same subject. So I'll ask them again. They are simple yes/no questions. Has the Sun been shining for more than 4.5 billion years? Is fusion the ultimate source of energy that explains why the Sun does shine? Does gravitation explain why the planets orbit the Sun, the planets' moons orbit their planets? Does gravitation explain why the sun and other stars orbit the galaxy? At the scale of solar systems and larger, is gravitation the dominant force in the universe? Does electromagnetism play any role in explaining the cosmos? Contrary to the parody of cosmology as presented by electric universe crackpots, the answer to the last question is "yes". I'll leave the others up to you.

What does this have to do with my post? Don't hijack the thread with off-topic nonsense. To answer your question, was Tesla a crackpot? Almost certainly. Almost all of the great scientists and mathematicians had a tinge, and in many cases, much more than a tinge of crackpot to them. We remember those greats not for their crackpot notions but for the true contributions they made to science.

Many tens of thousands of us would. There are many from outside the United States who would have to be in on the secret. Students from all over the word would have to be in on the secret. Do you really think there are no students in Italy who are working on the GOCE or LARES experiments wouldn't just love to make the US look stupid? People whose very job it is to understand gravitation would have to be in on the secret. The thousands of people around the world working on this topic would blurt it out. Think of the scientific papers they would get their names on if they did. The thousands who work on precise orbit determination and rendezvous/docking in space would have to be in on the secret. They vast majority do not have any kind of security clearance. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who can't say what they do (google the terms "geospatial intelligence" and "gravimetric MASINT") who would have to be in on the secret. Some of them would almost certainly leak the secret to Jane's or Aviation Week. What does this have to do with the topic at hand? Aside: - Sentences start with a capital letter. - They end with a single period, not two or three or more. - There is no space before the ending period. - Proper names, such as Richard Dolan, start with capital letters. - So do titles of books, even if they are nonsense books. - Electricity is spelled "electricity", not "electgricity". - Text speech, such as " ill post a list" and "Not 1 of you has reviewed thunderbolts of the gods" is something best avoided. If you want to be taken seriously, write seriously. Aside finished, what about Richard Dolan? He's just another crackpot. What is it that attracts you to all of these crackpots? There is a world of wonder out there in real science. Crackpots have nothing to offer. I suggest that you try learning some real science rather than glomming on to any and every crackpot notion you can find on the web.

mississippichem was trying to give you some sage advice. I suggest you think multiple times about following it, lest we form a bad opinion of your intellectual prowess. Yes, we have. Here's a small subset of the threads where this nonsense has been addressed: In 2007: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/25863-the-electric-sun-hypothesis/ In 2008: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/32027-a-plasma-universe/ In 2009: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/35486-how-gravity-really-works/ In 2011: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/53843-was-einstein-wrong/ That's just a subset. After a while it gets old. You have yet to answer any of the questions posed to you. I'll repeat them. They are simple yes/no questions. Has the Sun been shining for more than 4.5 billion years? Is fusion the ultimate source of energy that explains why the Sun does shine? Does gravitation explain why the planets orbit the Sun, the planets' moons orbit their planets? Does gravitation explain why the sun and other stars orbit the galaxy? At the scale of solar systems and larger, is gravitation the dominant force in the universe? Does electromagnetism play any role in explaining the cosmos? Contrary to the parody of cosmology as presented by electric universe crackpots, the answer to the last question is "yes". I'll leave the others up to you.

By -30” of mercury you mean pressure relative to one standard atmosphere. Note that a standard atmosphere at freezing is 29.92 inches of mercury. There is no such thing as absolute negative pressure. Your -30” of mercury doesn't quite make sense. BTW, measuring pressure in inches of mercury is an old and outdated concept. You also have a very confused notion of the capabilities of our space programs. You have an even more confused notion of the concept of vacuum. Rather than repeat what DrRocket already said just in this thread, or repeat what many of us have said over and over, in other threads, read those posts.

Hypothesized models of cyclical universes falsify your final premise ("we cannot invoke a infinite regress of causes"). That is exactly what these models do, invoke an infinite regress of universes. Radioactive decay falsifies your first premise. In fact, modern physics says you better think hard about that primitive notion of cause and effect.

Apparently everything I know is wrong. "Our mobile 'phones connect us via invisible electromagnetic threads to satellites orbiting overhead" (So what are those ugly cell towers for?) "Acceleration is a change of speed over some time" (What about uniform circular motion?) "A child whirling on a merry-go-round is tugged outwards by the distant stars." (What about Newton's first law? This is Mach's principle done badly.)

You cannot prove x≠x. It is nonsense. Mathematics is extremely intolerant of nonsense. It is of course possible to arrive at a result by means of some calculation. However, this does not mean you have proven that x≠x. It instead means that - You made a mistake somewhere along the way in getting to that result, or - One or more of your assumptions is invalid. This latter possibility leads to a very powerful mathematical tool for proving or disproving hypotheses, powerful precisely because mathematics is extremely intolerant of nonsense. It's called proof by contradiction.

There isn't. Poundals are units of force: mass*length/time2. Your kg/m3 is a density: mass/length3. The two are incommensurate.

I side with Schrödinger's hat here. NP means non-deterministic polynomial. By saying "non-polynomial" instead of "non-deterministic polynomial" you are implicitly assume P≠NP. We don't know that yet. That's the whole point of the P versus NP conundrum. There are algorithms that are known not to be polynomial in space or time, even with the aid of an oracle. These fall in a different set of classes than the NP algorithms. Computer scientists who study complexity theory do not use NP to describe these algorithms that are known not to be polynomial in nature. They instead use terms like EXPTIME or EXPSPACE instead.

Oh please. We don't need another stupid division by zero "proof" to show that 1=2 or x≠x.