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Whatever. Can I take it that this means that you have no meaningful response to my post?

Yes, it is. No, they didn't. You appear to have missed by rebuttal to your nonsense in post #38. So, here it is again: It appears that you are incapable of reading and understanding even your own crackpot sources. Quoting directly from your crackpot source, "We have searched the proper motion catalog of 951 faint blue stars measured by Luyten (1969) for quasars in the recent Hewitt and Burbidge (1993) catalog." What Varshni did was to determine which of those 951 objects listed by Luyten in 1969 have positions very similar to those of quasars listed by Hewitt & Burbidge in their 1993 QSO catalog. It's right there at your crackpot site. Follow the links. Let's see what they give for TON 202: Absolute Name RA(1950) Dec mpg color mualpha mudelta Ref. ------------------------------------------------------------------- TN 202 14 25.3 +26 46 15.1 -0.1 +019±16 -049±16 ms The "Ref." column is the reference (e.g., journal publication) for the entry. Now what is that "ms" in the "Ref." column? It means "revised, or new values for proper motions not yet published." Bottom line: Varshni is basing his claims on unpublished data taken from a 40+ year old catalog that mistakenly interpreted some quasars to be stars. That's no ding on Luyten; a lot of quasars were originally mis-identified as stars 40+ years ago. Astronomers didn't have a clue what quasars were back then. What happens if modern data, using modern telescopes, VLBI, and other techniques that did not exist 40+ years ago are used in lieu of that 40+ year old unpublished data? The answer is simple: Varshni's claims fall apart. Ironic? Yeah, that is one way to put it. The irony is that crackpots are so wont to sling that quotation around when it is invariably the crackpots who are ignoring facts. You really ought to pay attention to that quotation. Back to the most recent post, No, they don't. An utterly crackpot notion, yes. A notion borne out by science, no. ROTFL.

By your personal definition of universe. By the definition used by astronomers and cosmologists, no.

There is no paradox here, LHW. Just because your crackpot site shows up as the very first link when you do a google search for TON 202 does not mean that it will show up that way for everyone. Read post #44 to see why. There is no censoring here, LHW. There are only some goofy interactions between your browser and the IP.Board software that is the engine for this site. That is why the admins are asking about your browser. They want to look into fixing those problems. The last technical discussion in this thread was in post #38. Do you care to address any of the issues I raised there?

That is not what astronomers and cosmologists now mean by the word "universe". Instead of arguing semantics, why don't you try googling the terms omniverse and multiverse? Neither granpa nor I invented those terms.

Or multiverse. There are a lot of variations on what this means, and whether it means anything at all. No. Some in cosmology have moved beyond that. According to some, we live in our own private little universe. Whether any of this multiverse / omniverse stuff is science (i.e., observable / testable) is a different question. Not quite right, but much closer to the mark than the OP's hypothesis. Our universe may just be a zero energy quantum fluctuation in some other universe, something absolutely huge from absolutely nothing at all.

You should know that Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results. From the link, The short story is this. By watching what you click on in search results, Google can learn that you favor particular sites. For example, if you often search and click on links from Amazon that appear in Google’s results, over time, Google learns that you really like Amazon. In reaction, it gives Amazon a ranking boost. That means you start seeing more Amazon listings, perhaps for searches where Amazon wasn’t showing up before.The results are custom tailored for each individual. For example, let’s say someone else prefers Barnes & Nobles. Over time, Google learns that person likes Barnes & Noble. They begin to see even more Barnes & Nobles listings, rather than Amazon ones. The page in question shows up first for you because google knows that you have visited this site before from google searches. It knows that this is a site that nominally has very low page rank, but that you tend to go pages that have low page rank. You like crackpot sites, so google presents crackpot sites to you. The page in question will not show up first, or even close to first, for the typical scienceforums.net member.

It appears that you are incapable of reading and understanding even your own crackpot sources. Quoting directly from your crackpot source, "We have searched the proper motion catalog of 951 faint blue stars measured by Luyten (1969) for quasars in the recent Hewitt and Burbidge (1993) catalog." What Varshni did was to determine which of those 951 objects listed by Luyten in 1969 have positions very similar to those of quasars listed by Hewitt & Burbidge in their 1993 QSO catalog. It's right there at your crackpot site. Follow the links. Let's see what they give for TON 202: Absolute Name RA(1950) Dec mpg color mualpha mudelta Ref. ------------------------------------------------------------------- TN 202 14 25.3 +26 46 15.1 -0.1 +019±16 -049±16 ms The "Ref." column is the reference (e.g., journal publication) for the entry. Now what is that "ms" in the "Ref." column? It means "revised, or new values for proper motions not yet published." Bottom line: Varshni is basing his claims on unpublished data taken from a 40+ year old catalog that mistakenly interpreted some quasars to be stars. That's no ding on Luyten; a lot of quasars were originally mis-identified as stars 40+ years ago. Astronomers didn't have a clue what quasars were back then. What happens if modern data, using modern telescopes, VLBI, and other techniques that did not exist 40+ years ago are used in lieu of that 40+ year old unpublished data? The answer is simple: Varshni's claims fall apart. Ironic? Yeah, that is one way to put it. The irony is that crackpots are so wont to sling that quotation around when it is invariably the crackpots who are ignoring facts. You really ought to pay attention to that quotation. ============================================================================ I found his crackpot site long ago. I'm not going to post that link because I disagree with how scienceforums.net loves and cherishes its crackpots. I did give more than enough info for you to find it: Just do a search for "TON 202" "laser star". I'll even do the search for you: http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=%22TON+202%22+%22laser+star%22.

The same thing you would do if X tried to hijack the thread without creating sockpuppets: Report the post. There's a little warning sign icon and the word "Report" at the bottom left of every post. Just because you made the original post of this thread does not mean that this is "your" thread. The thread, any thread, is community property at this site. (Pretty much the same concept applies to almost all internet fora.)

Did you even read the link you posted, or did you just get this link second hand from some crackpot site and take it for granted that the link says what you think it says? You are referring to Hewitt and Burbidge's "Revised and Updated Catalog of Quasi-stellar Objects" of 1993. Hewitt and Burbidge didn't look at the objects in this catalog. No single astronomer, or even team of astronomers, could. This is a compendium of tens of thousands of observations published in multiple astronomical journals. Astronomers have been publishing star catalogs for quite some time. It is an incredibly valuable service. So, does the Hewitt & Burbidge QSO catalog say anything about proper motion of any quasar? No. Data on proper motion is not in that catalog. Here's the SAO/NASA ADS Astronomy Abstract Service entry for the ApJS publication that lists the catalog: http://adsabs.harvar...ApJS...87..451H You can retrieve the journal article, free, from this page. The entry for TON 202, listed as 1425+267, is on page 761 (the article starts on page 451). Is there anything on proper motion there? Nope. You can also get to the online data from the abstract server page. Just click on "On-line Data". This should bring you to this site, http://vizier.cfa.ha...-source=VII/158. Click on the VII/158/table1 button. This will bring you to a query form for the Hewitt & Burbidge QSO catalog. Just below Query by Position on the Sky you should see a text entry box. Type TON 202 into that box and hit return. This will give you a list of 18 entries for this quasar. As the form says, To get all details for a row, just click on the row number in the leftmost `Full' column. Selecting the very first one gives you this page: http://vizier.cfa.harvard.edu/viz-bin/VizieR-5?-out.add=.&-source=VII/158/table1&recno=16236. Is there anything on that page on proper motion? No. This QSO catalog doesn't have proper motion data. You are getting your nonsense non-data from a crackpot site. You will not find this nonsense in Hewitt and Burbidge's "Revised and Updated Catalog of Quasi-stellar Objects" of 1993 because it's nonsense.

In a sense that is exactly what the CMBR is: Light from an opaque cloud of plasma that was radiating as a black body. It appears to be a black body at 2.7 Kelvin now because of cosmological redshift. Per the big bang model, the temperature was about 3000 Kelvin when the universe cleared. Is the big bang model wrong: Could the CMBR be coming from a much cooler, much closer gas cloud? The answer is no. The glow is much too uniform. That the glow is so uniform is one of the key pieces of confirming evidence for the big bang model.

Hydrazine and now TNT? This is a student. Do you want him to fail, or die? forufes, if you haven't made your decision yet, do not consider something as nasty as hydrazine or as something stupid and nasty such as TNT. One option is of course to use a commercially-available model rocket engine. If you are going to make your own (a serious undertaking), you will need to decide very quickly whether you are making a solid or liquid fueled engine. Each can cause serious damage if you are not very careful. Each can get you in serious trouble with the law if you do not follow regulations. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. A fairly safe solid fuel can be made with potassium nitrate and sugar. A fairly safe liquid fuel can be made with hydrogen peroxide (not your mother's hydrogen peroxide, however). Whatever you do, get the appropriate Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), read them, follow the precautions, and follow any additional precautions when mixing and handling your fuel. Find the appropriate regulations, and do consider using a commercially-available engine as a backup plan. Good luck and be safe!

In a nutty nutshell, yes. You are simply rehashing some old, long-since debunked Halton Arp nonsense. I am not going to bother re-re-re-debunking that nonsense, it will fall on deaf ears. Crackpots are immune to logic, evidence, and reason. Is that really the camp you want to fall in? You're talking about this post in your crackpot anti-relativity thread. The measurement that is taken by professionals to be flawed is the proper motion measurement. First off, the large errors inherent in those visible observations combined with the small measured motions from those observations make many of those apparently large motions also consistent with the null hypothesis (no detectable proper motion). Moreover, there are systematic errors in these measurements that result in a perceived superluminal motion. Once those systematic errors are also taken into account the problem of proper motion vanishes. I'll get some references later this evening.

This is a big part of your problem. What "same" instant? Simultaneity is relative. There is not such thing as "the same instant".

All I see are legitimate articles that say that Ton 202 is a very remote quasi-stellar object (a quasar) with a redshift of z=0.364 and a bunch of nonsense articles published on crackpot websites or in crackpot journals with zero impact (literally zero; so bad that they aren't even rated). In short, nothing to see, move along, move along.

GR is short for general relativity. This is not what dark matter is about. The problem is that the motion of the matter (stars and galaxies) that we can see does not jibe with the what gravitational models say those motions should be -- assuming that what we see gives us a picture of the matter that matters (as far as predicting motion is concerned). There are only a few of ways around this problem: 1. Our models of gravity are wrong. 2. We aren't seeing all the matter that matters. 3. Both of the above are true. Option 2 combined with the fact that we can see so far and so clearly into the universe rules out a lot of possibilities. Astronomers have pretty much ruled out regular matter of all sorts, including dust. If option 2 is the case, whatever it is that is making our observations and predictions disagree is something rather exotic. Option 1 is problematic for a couple of reasons. First off, our models of gravity do jive with a lot of what we can see, including very, very far into the universe. Another problem is that every proposed alternative to general relativity so far, including some rather borderline crackpot ideas, still requires option 2. There are couple of good reasons most astronomers and physicists go with option 2 rather than option 1. One reason, a weird mix of arrogance and humility, is that it is much easier to conjecture that some unknown type of matter exists than it is to think that our basic model of gravitation is wrong. A better reason is that multiple models that go "beyond the standard model", including string theory, propose various candidates that fit the bill rather nicely.

Gravity has a very small, barely observable, effect, even in the upper atmosphere (which is where the atmospheric tides are most observable). The effects of solar heating (aka "thermal tides") swamps the gravitational components of the atmospheric tides. The diurnal bulge that results from this solar heating has a marked effect on vehicles in low Earth orbit. Properly modeling this bulge is important if one for precision orbit determination of such spacecraft. This is however a perturbative effect, so modeling the relatively small gravitational effects of the Moon and Sun on the atmosphere isn't all that important from an orbit prediction perspective. Moreover, the uncertainty in the predicted thermal effects is huge, much larger than the gravitational influences. Modeling the gravitational contributions to the atmospheric tides falls in the "why bother" camp -- in this particular domain, at least. BTW, the Moon and Sun also induce tides on the Earth itself. The Earth is not a rigid body, so it too is subject to tidal influences. These are called Earth tides or solid body tides. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_tide.

To answer your first question, math has everything to do with it. If you are not using math you are not doing physics. If the math you are using does not spring from some deeper principles, you are not doing physics. By deeper principles, I mean something analogous to using binding energies or the Higgs mechanism to explain mass. Both, by the way, explain why mass is positive, not negative. To answer your second question, I am reminding you once again that per the rules of this speculation forum, you either need to give some evidence that your conjecture has merit (you won't find such evidence) or some proof of your conjecture. Relying on foolish consistency is not proof. Coming up with something very different from binding energies or the Higgs mechanism would constitute proof. You cannot just say "what if mass is negative" and leave explaining what that means to us. That is not how science works. An experiment whose results stand up to time and which contradict theory is the deepest wish of experimentalists of all ilk, experimental physicists in particular. It is the evidence that is not consistent with existing theory that pushes science forward. Some examples: Galileo's experiments, the Michelson-Morley experiment, the precession of Mercury, the discovery of radioactivity, the discovery of the muon (to which Nobel physicist Isaac Rabi quipped "who ordered that?"), the expansion of the universe, just to name a few. When I referred to "foolish consistency" I was paraphrasing Emerson, and I left out the insulting part. Mass is a very different property from charge, so why should it be consistent with electrostatics? My thoughts on your demands that it should be, contrary to all evidence and contrary to very deep theory, and with nary a reason but a foolish consistency is best left unsaid.

While little statesmen and philosophers and divines often adore a foolish consistency, physicists do not necessarily do so. We need evidence and math before we dive off the deep end. You have neither.

There is no problem. Mass isn't negative. There is zero experimental evidence that mass can be negative. You need to cite some evidence in favor of your conjecture.

So, you are smarter than multiple generations of physicists? Give me a break.

From the rules for the Speculations Forum: So what problem are you trying to solve and what is the evidence of your conjecture?

Garbage and nonsense are the best descriptors or your ... stuff. Conjecture is being nice. Even the speculations forum has rules, lemur. Did you read them?

Once again, you are just making up nonsense garbage, lemur. Science doesn't work that way. What outstanding problem are you trying to solve? What is the math behind your conjecture? Without math you are not doing physics, and it is not the job of a physicist to add the math to your nonsense proposals.

You contradicted yourself, lemur, just a few sentences later: