Myuncle

thanks, interesting. Ooops, I meant 0.125 RPM, not 8 RPM (1/8=0.125)., sunlight takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to arrive on earth.

Imagine a Ferris wheel on space, made of carbon nanotubes, the diameter of the wheel is about the distance between Sun and Earth, rotational speed is 8 RPM. So can the wheel go faster than light without breaking?

Why not to pack a light weight parachute inside the seat then? When it's time to escape, you detach the seat and carry it away with you.

Yes, that's what I was thinking about. A parachute is basically too heavy the way it is. They could make disposable parachutes also, less efficient, but they could potentially save your life, for example they could use some sort of expandable foam spray that is going to fill a huge inflatable umbrella.

If they can eject you at 30000 feet, it means the pilot can wait and eject you at 5000 feet. that's a good question.

If you leave the airplane in mid air there are no shrapnels, and you activate the balloons with a button before touching ground of course... If they crash at landing or take off then you are right, I thought most accidents happened in mid air. I imagine simple compressed air, the same used for airbags, wouldn't be that heavy.

Since the parachutes may be too heavy for each seat, why they don't provide each passenger with inflatable balloons? The airbags would be strapped one in the front and one in the back, front pack plus back pack, this wouldn't assure 100% survival of the victims, but at least it can soften the impact on the ground.

Weeks can be scrapped altogether if we want, they are useful only to remind us that "we are suppose to rest every 7 days...". But adding one day in the final week on the year (and two in the leap year) is still better than trying to figure out how many days there will be in a month. well, counting until 356 it's not big deal, counting until 61.200 it's a bit stressful.

If we use cotton, straw, or sheep's wool to insulate homes, can we use compressed dust? (cheap and easy to collect...)

As wikipedia says "A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. A date is the designation of a single, specific day within such a system. Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon." But why don't we get rid of the months? After all, they were based on the Moon's orbital period, but do we still need that today? Do we even need to think about them? As long as we know that a year is 365 days (apart from the leap year), isn't that enough for our calendar? So, if we want to keep a useful cycle in our calendar, we could keep the days, weeks, and year, but scrap months completely. So, example, instead of writing a date like this: "14, Fabruary, 2014" we could simply write: "45, 2014". Each year has 365 days, and every year would have 52 weeks (364/7=52), but the last week of the year will be 8 days, instead of seven. And during the leap year, the last week will last 9 days. Simple and logical. What do you think?

Well said. Priority of science should be rationality, logic and experiments. If priority is just being mainstream, then you are just going against science and progress. I would feel proud of having a nice thread moved to speculations, the only problem is that it will be cancelled in the future, so those who enjoyed the thread should save it in their computers.... Mathematically you can treat any human idea as a dimension.

Sharpness, the focal-ratio, contrast, image resolution, the ability of an imaging system to distinguish small details within space (usually two-dimensional space), angular resolution. If all these things were possible you would discover much more about atoms, subatomic particles, their behaviour etc. Zooming an image can be, in theory, infinite.

I said clear images like in normal photos, we don't have them.

I share the same curiosity you have. Visualizing atoms, with a clear image like in normal photos, is still impossible. We still know so little about atoms, and since there is always something smaller than what we know, probably we will never end to learn new things about atoms. But yet, even if we can't see them the way we would like, we can detect them (the same way we can detect things not only with our eyes, but also with our nose, ears, touch, bats have echolocation, we can detect things with a radar, etc). But it's interesting that we know more than Democritus and Dalton, only thanks to experiments. The game changer in my opinion has been quite recent, in 1798, when Volta observed that if he placed pieces of silver and zinc on his tongue he felt an acid taste. Did he see any electrons passing by saying hello? No, but yet he detected their presence. The discovery of a nucleus has been almost accidental, in 1909, when Rutherford shot Alpha particles from a radioactive material, through a thin layer of gold, and what happened? Happened that most Alpha particles went through the gold foil, or deflected, but very rarely bounced back. This showed that the atom must have almost all of its mass concentrated at its center, in a nucleus, and the vast majority of the atom is empty space. What a great experiment! Isn't it? These kind of experiments change our lives, and studying them or repeating them, is always exciting. See this good documentary from BBC, it's in three parts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhgo9fAlAQQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtNdQ2UOG_0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT8yeMzHvKY

Exactly. Since the invention of the first cameras by Daguerre in 1836, images could be recorded, and that had a big impact even among scienists. I am sure this was the beginning of the hunt for a new dimension. The first photos meant that, if we could watch preserved images from the past, it meant somehow that time existed, and it was even possible to catch a "glimpse" of it. Then the development of recorded sounds, videocameras etc, only corroborated this illusion that it was possible to "grasp" time, and people went berserk. In fact scientists started fabricating the weirdest theories, time was finally upgraded to a new status, it was a "new dimension". But made of what exactly? Made of gas? No. Made of liquid? No. Radio waves? No. Made of electrons? No. Spiritual? No. It just became a new err...dimension...

Proving the non existence of Santa Claus doesn't make any sense, the problem is proving his existence. The same is for "time" as a dimension. (and I hope this will be my last post in this addictive interesting thread).

True (time being the measurement of speed of motion with our clock)

And happening means moving.

I was talking about time as idea in our brain, not as a dimension. You can detect any brain activity with a brain scan, which of course has got nothing to do with detecting time as a dimension.

We can't be certain 100% of anything, I have never seen Napoleon or Julius Ceasar, but I tend to believe their historical existence much more than Santa Claus. How do you know time exists outside your brain?

Yes, you answered your question, I have no problem in understanding the existence of time as a concept, and as chemical reaction in our brain. But has anyone ever detected time outside our brain?

As long as subatomic particles move, things happen, and the order of events is just dictated by their movements. Matter can move only in a single direction at once, otherwise is going to split. This is how subatomic particles move. But if you ask me why they can't move at once in every possible direction, I can't answer that (nobody can answer that), it's just the way universe works. Hehe, I detected those movements with my eyes (I didn't touch them, heard them, or smell them, but my eyes detected their motion), for me it's enough evidence

I am not an expert, but Newtonian physics, GR or QED can work perfectly with time as 1 Speed of motion according to our clock (it does exist in space, and can be measured and compared with our clock), or 2 The idea of events flowing (it does exist in our brain, just like any other ideas, love, fear, etc). I think nobody is perfect, including Newton and Einstein, maybe considering time as a dimension it was the "trend" of that period. Certainly if Newton and Einstein were still alive, I would like to ask them: dear Isaac, and dear Albert, many of us are confused by the way you used the word "time", do you seriously believe time is a dimension, and if yes, how can you prove its existence?

Why should everything happen at once? It's like asking why subatomic particles don't move at once in every direction. Evidence?? Are you joking? Which evidence?

All of us have the ability to judge the time between events, and that's absolutely fine. Yes, it is all in our brain, like many other ideas. Does love, or hope, exist in our brain? Yes, they do exist, but they are not dimensions. Fear is an idea, does it exist? Yes, in our brain, as a state of mind, but we would never say that fear is a dimension. The same is for time, it does exist in our brain as an idea of things and events flowing. The word "time" can mean three things: 1 Speed of motion according to our clock (it does exist in space, and can be measured and compared with our clock) 2 The idea of events flowing (it does exist in our brain, just like any other ideas, love, fear, etc) 3 Time as a dimension (it doesn't exist, and never existed).