D H

You had better find a way to cache that page because, from the discussion page, Moving towards deletion I hate to be a curmudgeon, but I am tending towards proposing this article for deletion. I would be delighted to be shown wrong, but until a loophole is found and accepted in the refereed literature, I have to regard Bender's proposal as self-published fantasy. I wish I were competent to pass judgment on it with a reasonable investment of time and labor. But it does seem clear to me that the ratio of "The conceivable" to "The real" is very large, maybe infinite. Using a wiki page as a scientific reference is bad enough. Using one that the wiki maintainers think is dubious fantasy is, well, dubious.

So you, like far too much of the media (and that includes both CNN and Fox News), feel you need to resort to yellow journalism? Sad, sad day. The thread title is remarkably inaccurate. You could have tried to understand why some conservatives are against this program. But that would have been too much work and would have against your political bias. They are enraged by the teaching points that the DOE is sending out in advance of the speech, not the speech itself. You have made a straw man of their arguments and you implied all conservatives think this way (association fallacy). I think what we can collectively agree with is that use of logical fallacies at this site is not a good idea.

Moving the goalposts, huh? The committee could have jointly recognized Lorentz and Einstein. (They were jointly nominated for the 1912 prize, for example.) They didn't, in part because the committee had a distinct bias against theoretical physicists for the first 40 years of its existence. The committee recognized 40 physicists between 1901 to 1940: 29 experimentalists and 11 theoreticians. Einstein did win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. A vanishingly tiny number of physicists think this award was a travesty because Einstein did not deserve to receive it at all. Many, many more physicists think this award was a travesty because Einstein deserved four Nobel prizes, not one, and because the committee took way too long to recognize him for any of his numerous contributions. So what were his contributions to science? His 1905 papers: "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" introduced the idea of the photoelectric effect. This paper was one of the seminal papers in quantum mechanics. It has important applications to this day. Do you want our society to go green? Solar power panels rely directly on the photoelectric effect. "On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat" explained the concept of Brownian motion. This was another key paper in the development of quantum mechanics -- and was the first paper in the field of statistical physics. "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" -- we've discussed this already. "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?" derived the mass-energy equivalence equation, [math]E=mc^2[/math]. That was in one year. He made numerous contributions to physics after that. Bose-Einstein statistics and general relativity, for example.

You are right to be confused by that post. The poster was confused. I think that you might be trying to bite off a bit too much at once, munion. You started with a reasonable question, but then you delved into more esoteric stuff before (inflation, expansion of the universe) before getting a good understanding of special relativity. One step at a time! Let's start with the first word in special relativity. Special here means that the theory is of limited domain. It does not apply to objects undergoing gravitational acceleration, and it does not apply to the expansion of the universe. For that, you need general relativity. Your opening post regarded what would transpire if the speed of light was very small. Nobody really delved into this question: What would we see if the speed of was 5 km/hr? For grins, how about making that just a bit faster? (There's no need for wheeled vehicles if the top speed is a leisurely walk.) Somewhere out on the 'net is a site that helps with visualizing special relativity by asking what if the speed of light was 20 km/hr, or something like that. The answer is that things would like quite bizarre. Round bicycle wheels would appear to go out of round as a bicyclist accelerated toward the speed of light. The bicycle will appear to get longer and longer to someone on the ground. Getting the bike up to speed would take a lot of energy. Getting the bike up to racing speed (and racing speed in this universe is low) would take immense amounts of energy. If you are the one on the bike, the landscape will change in bizarre ways as you get up to speed. Things will get compressed from the perspective of the rider.

Bingo! EVERY scientist builds on top of what others have already put forth. Nothing special there. Where Einstein was special was in making leaps of creativity and connecting the dots. Who woulda thunk that time and space being more pliable than silly putty would result from the speed of light and the laws of physics being the same in all inertial frames? That the speed of light was constant was a well-known fact at the onset of the 20th century. That the laws of physics were immutable was something every physicist believed. Yet none of Einstein's contemporaries put these two ideas together. Without anyone else to do the thinking for him, how could he have plagiarized using those simple ideas as the basis for relativity theory?

The underlying problem behind this even being a controversy is that our country has become far too polarized. Bush was just evil to liberals from 2000 to 2008. Obama is not just evil to conservatives: he is pure evil. Neither said is rational. Crap like this: "Conservatives Enraged that the POTUS Wants to Encourage School Children to Try Harder" does not help. There is too much rhetorical crap out there.

I am not claiming you are a racist. I am claiming that you are a racist, a crackpot -- or someone who has fallen prey to their arguments. Anti-Einstein sentiment falls into one of those camps. If you do a bit of internet sleuthing you will find answers to your questions. For example, http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2576/was-einstein-a-plagiarist Was Einstein a plagiarist? Several articles have been written saying he was. What do you think? — mcsage1, via e-mail This letter will raise two questions in the mind of the average reader: 1. You mean to tell me that in 1905, when Albert Einstein published his groundbreaking paper, there were, assuming that every cribber requires a cribbee, two people on the planet who understood the theory of special relativity? Lorentz certainly didn't, nor did Poincare. The reason they didn't is that they clung to the idea of absolute space and time. Had they given up this idea they might have beaten Einstein to the theory of special relativity. But they didn't. Poincare's 1905 paper, published a month before Einstein's, still had the Lorentz transformations as ad hoc postulates. Einstein's paper derived the Lorentz transformations from two simple postulates. Does Einstein deserve all of the credit for relativity? Of course not. The idea goes back to Galileo. Does he deserve credit for putting some seemingly simple hypotheses together and seeing where that goes? Yes. None of his contemporaries made that seemingly simple leap. It only seems simple in hindsight.

That was Samuel Tolver Preston. He arrived at his results by some rather convoluted and very ad hoc reasoning. Moreover, he predicated his reasoning on the existence of an ether. The Michelson-Morley experiment of course showed that there was no such thing as the luminiferous ether. Riiight. DePretto, like Preston, started with an assumption of a luminiferous ether. He compounded this error with a zinger: he forgot the factor of 1/2 for kinetic energy (T=1/2 mv2). No, it isn't being discussed. It was discussed. The thread is locked. Let me zoom to the last post in that thread:

It is a reasonable line of speculation. The OP's style of presenting speculation as scientific fact is a bit irksome. That, coupled with the fact the OP can't get his facts straight (Tachibana and Huss found Nickel-60, not Iron-601) and can't even get his speculations straight (Type II versus Type IA supernova), is what motivated me to move this to speculations. Note well the title of the subforum to which I moved this thread: "Pseudoscience and Speculations". It is perhaps unfortunate that Science Forums lumps the two categories together. The argument for lumping them together: Where is the boundary between the two? ============ Footnote: 1 The half-life of Iron-60 is somewhere between 1.5 million years (old value) or 2.3 million years (somewhat disputed new number). Even with the longer half life, and even if the Earth was 100% Iron-60 4.6 billion years ago, there would be zero atoms of Iron-60 left today. It would all have decayed to Nickel 60. That is of course what Tachibana and Huss found. A finding of Iron-60 itself rather than its decay products would have been a sign of some much more recent supernova.

The original hyopthesis, sans all the silly colored text: A change of gears occurred midstream, and now the change is official: OK, which is it, Widdekind, that "triggered" the formation of our solar system, a type I or type II supernova? You are contradicting yourself. Moved to pseudoscience and speculations.

What a crock of ... something. You are good at finding the nutjob sites. Why don't you try something else. For example, read Einstein's 1905 papers themselves. Since you are good at finding the nutjob sites, I assume you can find easily his papers. In his 1905 paper "The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", Einstein talks about Maxwell's equations and the Lorentz transformations. He did not claim credit for them, or steal them. He most certainly did not plagiarize them in Maxwell or Lorentz sense of the word. Maxwell's equations, published in 1865, go by a different set of names: Gauss's law, Gauss's law for magnetism, Faraday's law of induction, and Ampère's law. So why are they called Maxwell's equations? Simple: Maxwell showed how they worked together as a whole. They were not just four distinct laws of physics. One thing that they show as a whole: All electromagnetic radiation travels at one speed, c. The velocity of the transmitter and velocity of the receiver are irrelevant. You probably have heard of the Michelson-Morley experiment. The purpose of the experiment was simple: To prove Maxwell was wrong. That experiment didn't work as planned. It ranks very, very high on the list of failed experiments. For the last 30 years of the 19th century, electromagnetism and classical physics conflicted with one another. The best physicists of the time worked to redress this conflict. Among those who worked on it: Fitzgerald, Larmor, Lorentz, Minkowski, Poincare, Planck, and of course Einstein. Note the names Einstein used in his paper: The Maxwell-Hertz equations, the Lorentz transformations, Lorentz' theory of electromagnetism. If he did plagiarize their work, why did he name those people in his paper? Lorentz believed in the existence of absolute reference frame. The philosophical difference Lorentz' formulation and Einstein's was immense. Lorentz postulated the Lorentz transformations. It was an ad-hoc theory. Einstein postulated some seemingly simple statements and derived the Lorentz transformations. Poincare was the closest to developing a theory of relativity, but even he still clung to some absolute reference frame. Einstein's contribution to relativity theory was relativity and simplicity. This kind of thing happens a lot in mathematics and science. People develop an ad-hoc explanations of some phenomena, someone comes along later and puts it all together in an encompassing, simplifying theory. In this case, the Lorentz transformations are still called the Lorentz transformations, Maxwell's equations are still called Maxwell's equations, but the theory that puts it all together in a beautifully simple form is Einstein's.

Full moon is tomorrow, September 4, at 16:05 UTC. We are being attack by a wave of lunatics.

The Mobius strip discussion was moved because it has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is "faster than the speed of light". It is off-topic.

What Van Flandern did in that link was to create a straw man of general relativity and then prove that that straw man version of general relativity is false. Van Flandern's reasoning would be correct if the only difference between general relativity and Newtonian mechanics was that general relativity adds a finite transmission speed for gravity to Newtonian mechanics. That of course is not all there is to general relativity. There are effects in general relativity such as frame dragging that nearly cancel the effects of a finite transmission speed of gravity, particularly for objects well removed from and moving slowly with respect to a gravitational source. General relativity reduces to Newton's law of gravity under these conditions (far from and moving slowly with respect to a massive body). What about cases where those conditions don't quite apply? Mercury is close to the Sun and is moving fairly fast with respect to the Sun. One well known problem in physics at the end of the 19th century was that measurements of the precession of Mercury did not agree with predictions based on Newtonian mechanics. General relativity fully explained the discrepancy, and did so with no tweaking to make it match observation. The gravitational aberration upon which Van Flandern bases much of his argument is also incorrect. See http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9909087 for details. Van Flandern never understood general relativity, but he certainly did know how to misinterpret it.

Not near enough. You are a rank beginner. Your continued attempts to find paradoxes in classical mechanics are proof of this. There is no idea. Just bad physics here. That would be a good idea. An even better idea is to think in terms of physics and mathematics, rather than Alex's fantasy physics. No. One more time. A force causes both translational and rotational motion. Think in term of a single point mass. A point mass has zero moment of inertia. Yet it still has angular momentum with respect to some origin because angular momentum is defined as [math]\mathbf L = \mathbf r \times \mathbf p = m\,\mathbf r \times \mathbf v[/math]. That is the definition of angular momentum in classical mechanics. Now suppose some force [math]\mathbf F[/math] acts on the point mass. By the definition of force, [math]\dot{\mathbf p} = \mathbf F[/math]. Differentiate the definition of angular momentum with respect to time: [math]\dot{\mathbf L} = \mathbf r \times \dot{\mathbf p} = \mathbf r \times \mathbf F[/math]. A single force causes to point mass to undergo change in linear and angular momentum via [math]\dot{\mathbf p} = \mathbf F[/math] and [math]\dot{\mathbf L} = \mathbf r \times \mathbf F[/math]. Now consider a collection of particles. Some of the forces acting on an individual particle are a result of interactions between the particle and other particles in the system. These are called internal forces. Other forces come from outside the system. So long as the internal forces obey the strong form of Newton's third law, the changes in the total linear and angular momentum of the collection of particles are given by [math]\aligned \dot{\mathbf p}_{\text{tot}} &= \sum_i \mathbf F_{\text{ext},i} \\ \dot{\mathbf L}_{\text{tot}} &= \sum_i \mathbf r_i \times \mathbf F_{\text{ext},i} \endaligned[/math] The external forces are the only things that change the collection's linear and angular momentum, and each external force contributes to the change in both linear and angular momentum. Finally, consider a solid body. A solid body is just a special kind of collection of particles. I've given the equations of motion many times. You can find these in previous posts. You can find the derivations in any college level classical mechanics text. Read a physics text. Take a physics class. You do not know physics, yet, and until you do all you are accomplishing is making a fool out of yourself.

No. All of the force makes a body undergo translational acceleration and all of the force makes the body undergo angular acceleration; see post #7. It might seem paradoxical, but it is not. That is the only way that the conserved quantities, energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum, can be conserved simultaneously.

That is not how physics works. A force, and all forces, cause both translational and rotational acceleration. You really need to learn how classical physics is rather than making things up yourself. Your stubbornness to learn does not do you any service. That is not covered by classical mechanics because that is not how classical mechanics works. Read a book or take a class.

This list raises a couple of questions: Which of these are truly significant for the emergence of life, and how often do these characteristics arise?

Alex, you have not discovered a paradox or a new feature in classical mechanics. You have made several mistakes in the google.docs document cited in this thread, and the simulation done by your friend also appears to be buggy. Alex, you have a tendency to create overly complicated systems. To make things worse, you use some poorly defined concepts in those systems. This makes it a bit tougher to find where your reasoning has gone awry. So, let's simplify and clarify this system. Simplification #1: In both experiments a pair of equal-but-opposite forces are applied to the two rods. The force is applied at the center of mass of rod #1 in both experiments. A question arises: Why bother with a rod for rod #1? There is zero difference in the resulting physics if you use a point mass, so you might as well use a point mass. Clarification: What is the nature of the force? If you make the energy source that applies the force internal to the system then the total linear momentum and total angular momentum of the system comprising the two objects and the energy source will be conserved. If you make that force a conservative force then energy will be conserved as well. For example, a spring will do the trick. All of the conserved quantities are conserved: energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum. You can still make the mass+rod+spring system rather complex. For example, the finite amount of time it takes for the spring to fully propel the point mass away from the rod means that the rod rotates while it is ejecting the mass. One way around this: Simplification #2: Make the spring extremely stiff. Making the spring very stiff makes it so one can ignore this rotation issue. Whether you do this or not, Alex, the bottom line is that energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum will be conserved if you use a conservative force such as a spring. So what is this new contraption? It's a spaceship. Aerospace engineers have known for a long time that firing a single rocket engine whose thrust vector is not directed along the line from the vehicle's center of mass to the thruster will cause the vehicle to accelerate in translation and in rotation. Thrusters can be used in pairs to help eliminate this cross-coupling between translational and rotational acceleration. This is not always possible. For example, consider the Mars Climate Orbiter. From http://www.jamesoberg.com/mars/loss.html The use of jet thrusters for attitude control raises further operational issues. In a world of perfect symmetry and unlimited payload size and budget, a spacecraft could rotate cleanly about its center of mass (often carelessly called its center of gravity) if opposing ends were equipped with jets and if those jets pointed in opposite directions and were set at right angles to the axis to be turned. In the real world, rotational jets may not be arranged in such a theoretically perfect alignment. ... On the Mars Climate Orbiter, four separate clusters of jets were located around the vehicle's waist. However, because of the large solar array extending from one side, the craft's center of mass did not coincide with the center point of the waist. Thus there was a significant imbalance each time these small thrusters fired. The Mars Climate Orbiter needed to use its attitude jets once or twice a day to dump angular momentum from its momentum wheels. The use of these attitude jets also made the vehicle accelerate translationally. Failing to account for this properly was the ultimate cause of the demise of the Mars Climate Orbiter. The mission controllers did try to account for this undesired acceleration, but there was a units mixup. The vehicle reported the undesired acceleration as a number in English units. The controllers interpreted that number to be in metric units. According to a JPL spokesman, every maneuver intended to dump momentum added a velocity error of about 0.001 meter per second, on a probe that was traveling at a rate of tens of kilometers per second. These deflections themselves were not the problem, but their incorrect modeling was, when the computer was told the spacecraft had received a force of four or five times as great as it really had. The end result: The Mars Climate Orbiter entered Mars atmosphere, something it was never intended to do. The vehicle most likely blew up 70 kilometers or so above Mars.

Exactly. From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/05/030526103731.htm, "Right now we can only guess that the correct answer for the total number of species worldwide lies between 2 and 100 million," says [Michael] Rosenzweig [of the University of Arizona, Tucson]. So, my guess is that the total number of transitional species worldwide lies between 2 and 100 million.

Suppose you have two equalities, [math]\aligned a&=b\\c&=d\endaligned[/math] Step-by-step, here is why [math]c-a=d-b[/math] 1. Adding the same value to both sides of an equality does not change the equality. If [math]c=d[/math] then [math]c+x=d+x[/math] for all x. So, add [math]-a[/math] to both sides of [math]c=d[/math]: [math]c-a=d-a[/math] 2. Equality is transitive and reflexive. Since [math]a=b[/math], then [math]d-a=d-b[/math]. Thus [math]c-a=d-b[/math] In short, you can subtract one equality from another.

Where do you think the torque comes from? (Hint: Think force.)

I have given you the correct equations. The only glitch here is your understanding and Francois' calculation of angular momentum due to translation. The correct equation is [math]\mathbf L = m\mathbf r\times \mathbf v[/math]. BTW, sqr(x) calculates x squared, not the square root of x.

Note well, Alex: That is angular momentum due to translation. That is not a discovery. It most likely results from using single precision arithmetic in the simulation. We do not have adequate insight into Francois' simulation to pinpoint the problem. (I for one I am not going to download a binary).

Really. Those are the correct equations of motion. One force causes translation and rotation. Read a physics text. Look at your own example as simulated by Francois. When the two rods are viewed collectively as a system, any forces between the rods are internal to the system: They are internal forces. If these internal forces obey the strong form of Newton's third law, they cannot change the total momentum and angular momentum of the system. The rods are initially at rest. The total linear momentum and angular momentum are trivially zero because neither rod is rotating or translating. After applying the initial forces (one on the green rod and a corresponding equal-but-opposite force on the red rod), the momenta of the rods are Linear momentumGreen rod: [math]-1.042\,\text{kg-m/s}\;\hat {\mathbf x}[/math] Red rod: [math]+1.042\,\text{kg-m/s}\;\hat {\mathbf x}[/math] Total linear momentum: 0 [*]Angular momentum Green rodAngular momentum due to translation: [math]+0.521\,\text{kg-m$^2$/s}\;\hat {\mathbf z}[/math] Angular momentum due to rotation: 0 [*]Red rod Angular momentum due to translation: [math]+0.521\,\text{kg-m$^2$/s}\;\hat {\mathbf z}[/math] Angular momentum due to rotation: [math]-1.042\,\text{kg-m$^2$/s}\;\hat {\mathbf z}[/math] [*]Total angular momentum: 0 There is no glitch. The only "glitch" here is that you do not understand classical physics, and yet you are trying again and again to find paradoxes within it. Read a physics text.