md65536

I'd venture a guess that it's a wave consisting of energy. I assume rigney's question is essentially asking "Is everything in the universe energy, and is everything in the universe a wave?" What's a flurfle? At least rigney was using real words. If I asked, "Is everything in the universe made of gravy waves?" would you be able to answer? Is the problem that there is both a reasonable answer for "yes" and for "no" depending on an interpretation of what "energy wave" might mean, or is it that there is no reasonable interpretation of what it might mean, or that "it could be something that sounds kinda like that but no one really knows", or none of the above? Technically that's a false dichotomy and suggests that you can't determine what anything is unless you define it to be that thing. Eg. Is all matter nothing more than particles? If you define particles to be all matter then the answer is yes. If you don't define it that way then the answer is no. Well, not really...

Yes, because it's not enough to just record everything you've ever thought or experienced, but you have to do it in a way so that it is a "double blind" recording of experiments. That means that you have to blindfold yourself while you're writing everything, so that you can't recognize your writing later which will bias your interpretation of it. You also have to write it all in disappearing ink so that other people can't read your writing and bias the experiment. It's too bad that no one here seems able to explain this all in a way that someone intelligent can understand. Wait... couldn't you just record the frequency at which unexpected results occurred, so that you'd only have to count the ordinary experiences instead of documenting them all meticulously? Nah... I'm dum. I like your "must record every detail of ones stream of consciousness" idea better.

On the other hand... In another thread's post I linked to some explanation about how the information we get about what's inside a black hole comes from its horizon, not from inside (as no typical useful information can escape). So then I suppose that the gravitational attraction of a black hole would be determined by the density of matter as it falls into the event horizon? Now I'm completely lost, but would we have to separate a black hole's singularity (which would have a spherically symmetrical gravitational field, and the field is static so we don't need to have information about it transmitted from inside the black hole because that information is already available outside it) from the matter that falls in and appears to get stuck on the horizon (which would not be spherically symmetrical? and so the overall gravitational field around the horizon wouldn't be spherically symmetrical?)? Another aspect to this is the holographic principle, which says something like that every point on the horizon maps to every point of a black hole's interior and vice versa. I think this would imply that any shape that the horizon may have, can be completely independent from any shape that the interior may have. So like, if you had a horizon made of say a sponge, it's not like the singularity is just that sponge squished to a point. It's also not like silly putty, where the shape of the horizon is stretched or twisted into a modified shape. It's also not even like lego, where the horizon is chopped into pieces and those pieces rearranged into a new shape. It would be like if it was made of lego, and you blended up all the pieces and made new pieces out of them, so that every individual new piece of lego has a bit of every piece of the whole original structure in it. But you could still build the original shape with the new pieces, so I suppose it doesn't answer the question. Anyway, in conclusion I think you're probably right that a black hole's gravitational field may have a non-spherical shape to it, but I don't think that that tells you anything about a topological shape of its singularity.

Yes, you all agree that his ticked faster relative to yours, but I don't think he's going to accept your clock as an authoritative answer. If your friend was on Earth while you were in a spaceship, you might say that all clocks on Earth ticked faster relative to yours, but everyone on Earth might prefer to say that all their clocks ticked normally and that it was yours that was slow. Both make equal sense. Best is to just consider the clocks relatively, and not that any clock is absolutely slow or fast, because all working clocks tick at a normal rate in their inertial frame. I suppose that's reasonable.. but when you say "the future" you can ask yourself "whose future?" If you defined "the future" of a given clock (say Earth's, or your friend's) as some specific time relative to another arbitrary time on the same clock that you might define as "the present" (ignoring the common understanding that what we define as the present or future is always changing), then yes you can have that time pass quickly relative to your own clock (eg. with your fast spaceship), and move into Earth's future faster than Earthlings are. "Future" is a confusing term because when you get there, it's the present! If you return to "a future Earth", it's Earth's present, and your present too. Nothing weird happens besides clocks ticking (and things ageing) at different rates.

Your friend's clock ticks faster according to you. All time is relative. This all makes more sense if you talk about it in terms of relative rates of ageing, instead of "moving through time". You age at the same rate as a local clock, which ages at a rate of 1s per second. "Moving forward through time" or "time travel to the future" usually refers to you ageing a relatively small amount while some reference location (ie. your friend) ages a lot. So to your friend, you have aged very slowly. He has aged at a regular rate according to him, and at an accelerated rate according to you. No, I don't think it makes sense to say that he moved "forward in time" more than normal. By whose clock has he passed through a great time? By his clock, he has passed time at the regular rate. By your clock, which is slow to him, he has passed very little time. There is no clock in this example that has aged an extraordinary amount according to your friend. Another way to say it is that if you choose an arbitrary future clock time as "the future", you reach that point on your friend's clock relatively quickly. You really do end up experiencing accelerated rates of advancement/decay in your friend's world, and it feels like you've travelled to what you'd considered to be the future. Your friend does not reach any such "arbitrary future point" any quicker than normal, in any clock in this example. Yet another way of putting this is that you're speaking of "forward in time" or the future as when your friend is much older, say. You may feel that your friend has "moved quickly forward in time" because he has aged quickly, but he has moved at a regular rate according to himself. Him being old may be what you consider the future, but it is always the present to him. He always moves to his own "future" at a regular rate. Your different experience of his ageing doesn't change anything for him.

Disclaimer: I am an idiot. The geometrical shape of a black hole's center is a point singularity, right? A point singularity* can have a different topological shape without having geometry, however. It can have any shape. Yes, a point is a degenerate sphere, but it is also a degenerate of many other 3D shapes (anything closed maybe?). From outside the horizon, the distance to any part of the black hole's center (point) will be the same as to any other (since it's a point singularity all its mass or parts are at the same spatial location), which means its shape has no bearing on distance-related measurements. So gravitational force at a specific distance r (ie. from any point on a sphere of radius r surrounding the BH) will be the same as any other point at the same distance. The external gravitational influence of a BH's point singularity would be spherical regardless of its topological shape. * Though not necessarily a black hole singularity... I don't know enough to say what the topology of a BH may or may not be.

You didn't provide references for the images. http://wattsupwithth...dtrans_img1.png http://wattsupwithth...dtrans_img2.png wattsupwiththat is garbage. Also I don't see anything about windspeed changes due to windfarms, reduction in convection, or low-altitude radiation vs. high-altitude radiation or anything like that in the graphs.

How much?

http://physics.ucsd....eets-physicist/: "the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that's via (infrared) radiation." Reducing convection doesn't directly remove a means of removing heat from Earth. If there's any truth to what you're saying, it's a lot more complicated than you're suggesting. Even if there is some effect, "how much?" is important. You would need to provide quantitative details to back up your claims. Wind turbines slow the wind, but do windfarms slow the wind more than say forests? Forests slow the wind, and they haven't caused the Earth to boil and explode.

Sounds like you want to get energy from the stack effect or chimney effect. The idea's been considered and/or implemented: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2002/aug/19/energy.renewableenergy http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/2625-feet-solar-power-supertower-to-rise-over-arizona-video/7954 (Those are some random links, the first is a bit old, there are probably better references). Your description above is more vague and sounds like you're proposing the idea of heating the earth's surface using some kind of energy source, which will cause convection currents, and that you could put wind turbines in the windy areas to harness energy from it. That idea's also been implemented before. Upon further consideration I detect humour in your posts and feel that the following emoticon is an appropriate response: Hrm, it almost sounds as if you're suggesting, in a really convoluted way, that Wind farms cause global warming.

Evolution isn't pre-designed. It's not like there would be a end-product wing design that would slowly evolve over that long. If it "started now", what would keep it going, to make each iteration more wing-like? What would make the iterative steps---the partial wings---into significant evolutionary advantages? It could be done artificially of course... are you considering that option or are you talking about evolution through natural selection? Here's an example scenario: Suppose in the future we've built massive skyscrapers that last essentially forever, but that mankind has "fallen" and is essentially dumb and primitive. Suppose we all live high in these buildings, the only place where there's enough sunlight to survive on. Suppose the windows have all fallen out and there's a significant danger of dying from falling out of buildings, so much so that it becomes a deciding factor in our survival (which is really unlikely because food and water scarcity would likely make "deaths due to falling" negligible). But suppose lots of us fall out of buildings and many survive, maybe due to some combination of body composition, weight, body surface area, etc. So those able to survive falling have some major evolutionary advantage. The "surface area" might involve more skin, loose skin, and long or rigid body hair. It assumes we've stopped wearing clothes which would negate any natural adaptations. Perhaps we'd evolve a type of "parachute" ability to slow our descents. Along with other adaptations we might evolve an ability to jump between buildings, which would be a huge competitive advantage. --- This by the way mimics the way wings may have evolved in the past, where surviving falling out of trees and jumping between them were useful abilities... But I don't see humans doing this with trees in the future, and dying from it enough to naturally evolve a survival mechanism. So perhaps humans evolve huge webbed skin between arms and bodies, and become lighter, and grow hair that becomes feather-like, and eventually develop hang-glider-like abilities. With perfect conditions (harsh conditions that really favor anything wing-like but not harsh enough to hinder survival of the species)... I really have no idea but I'd guess a few hundred or thousand generations (which might evolve to be shorter in between, with the right conditions) might do it. I think this scenario is completely improbable and even with "perfect" conditions, I'd expect to see any number of other unknown adaptations occurring before functional wings happen. Without nigh-perfect conditions I wouldn't expect any wing-like adaptation to evolve into anything functional on something much like today's human in today's environment... not in billions of years. I just don't think any partial mutation would provide a significant evolutionary advantage enough to be selected. Another scenario is if anything wing-like becomes socially/sexually desirable, which could evolve decorative (peacock tail style) wings.

You're welcome. It wasn't a burden!

I thought the asshole would say, "You can talk about who's boss and make whatever decisions you want, but in the end all shit still has to go through ME!" or pØØp...

finster, you've made some interesting points about advantages to sending out unmanned missions but they've all been debunked. I think that you're missing the main point, which is that while it would be nice to have supplies "just there" waiting for you, any such supplies will be coming from Earth and must make the same journey that the people do, and ADDING an unnecessary separation between the supplies and the people doesn't gain you anything. Here are two more reasons why one might send out early unmanned missions: 1) Testing/experimentation. For the same reason they sent monkeys into space before people, you might want to do the same. We might want to send out a test spacecraft to research problems that haven't been considered. If equipment is needed at the destination, it might make sense to send it out a couple years ahead of time, so that any problems it encounters might give the manned mission some time to prepare for, or something like that. On a large-scale journey, the benefit of doing this decreases. If it's a 1000-year journey, you probably wouldn't want to wait for the experiment to end before setting out, and besides you'd have 1000 years of technological innovation that the supply ship missed out on. Imagine sending moon exploration equipment in 1920s to prepare for manned missions in the 1960s. 2) The supply ships might do something useful while they're waiting for the humans. For example, if you had some method of gathering fuel in deep space, then unmanned ships might head out and start harvesting fuel. Then the manned missions don't have to bring all their fuel with them. However, if the unmanned supplies all come from Earth, you're bringing all your fuel with you whether manned or unmanned, and there's little point to sending it out ahead of time. Another example is if you have a destination where a robot crew will go and build infrastructure. You may want to have a manned mission get to planet X and have a city built and waiting for them. On the other hand, with such a large endeavour, the ship you travel in is going to have to be home enough to live in for a long time, and it might just be easier to build one home instead of two and remain on the ship after you arrive. However, there is certainly much prep work and exploration that robots could do, with a much easier mission than with humans, so it could be done earlier.

Assuming you meant "near c"... In a case like this, with gamma = 4.0, they'd be travelling faster than 0.968c. In the 80 years it might pass on Earth, they'd travel over 77 light years. If you could travel that fast, you could travel to a destination 77 light years away from Earth in only 20 years local time. The Earth would age 80 years. This doesn't violate special relativity, questionposter, because your travel distance would be length-contracted to 19.4 light years, and you'd remain sub-luminal with a speed of .968c.

Yes but again I don't think the interaction is of a type that could transfer information. Changes in gravity could theoretically be used to transmit information and can't propagate faster than c according to relativity. Hypothetical "real" gravitons would be restricted by c. Hypothetical virtual gravitons wouldn't. A static field wouldn't be able to transfer information (only a changing field could). I think. Anyway, I don't know much, but I think it's best to not get hung up on thinking about virtual particles as if they're physical things. Perhaps they're the effects of some physical thing that we haven't quite worked out all the details of, or perhaps they're just an abstraction---a tool for calculation---whose behavior makes the most sense described as a "particle" as far as what we know about. If they're "real things", they're not so for long enough to imagine them doing any real in the world.

I don't think you can measure individual virtual particles? ("If a single particle is detected, then the consequences of its existence are prolonged to such a degree that it cannot be virtual."[1]) I don't think you can transfer information at all with them (As individual particles. "only their average or side-effects may be noticed"[1]). Virtual particles are different in behavior in some ways from "regular" particles. I don't think the same notion of "interaction" (as with information transfer) applies... I think a good understanding (which I lack) of some Feynman diagrams with all the weird and backwards paths that are possible, would answer your questions. References: 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle

As per the other thread about FTL... From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Quantum_mechanics: "In quantum mechanics, virtual particles may travel faster than light, and this phenomenon is related to the fact that static field effects (which are mediated by virtual particles in quantum terms) may travel faster than light (see section on static fields above). However, macroscopically these fluctuations average out, so that photons do travel in straight lines over long (i.e., non-quantum) distances, and they do travel at the speed of light on average. Therefore, this does not imply the possibility of superluminal information transmission."

If you shine a laser at one target P and then at another target Q (as well as any in between), there is nothing physical that moves from P to Q. The "laser dot" as a thing at P consists of different photons than the laser dot at Q. No, not anything that seems to travel faster than light breaks relativity. http://en.wikipedia....non-information Typically it will break relativity only if it is possible to send information faster than light, and there is no way by shining a laser at P and then at Q, that you can transfer information from P's location to Q's. Any observer who observes the dot at P and then at Q, even if the two events are nearly simultaneous, will still make these observations subject to the speed of light (the laser hitting P, and light from that being observed remotely, etc, all involve information travelling with v <= c).

I don't know of anything that can release more energy than the annihilation of matter and antimatter (if with E=mc^2 you start with exclusively mass and end with exclusively energy, then you have the largest energy gain possible?) If you had equal amounts of neutrons and anti-neutrons, you'd have a pretty massive storage of easily extracted energy in a compact space. I don't know how you would contain neutrons; I think they can slip through normal matter. I suppose that a gravitationally bound blob of neutrons and another blob of anti-neutrons, with the blobs orbiting around each other, could be made stable, with a huge amount of potential energy but requiring no energy to maintain it. I'm not sure how one would create or move such a thing, where you'd keep it (in orbit maybe?), and how you'd "trigger" a complete self-annihilation.

I dunno! Are they both in the same race? Is first place given to the one of them who reaches the finish line first? Are their distances from the finish measured in the same units, as measured from the part of them that would be considered as crossing the finish line? Does their running speed equal the speed that said part of them is moving and is that speed constant from now until the end of the race?

Well it's all part of communicating the idea. If the code's ugly but does what you say and the data are interesting, it doesn't matter that much. I don't think it's helpful to try to get me interested. Tailoring this for me is a dead end. It's just a slight curiosity (but not a huge curiosity because the program's bugs hide any interesting behavior), but I don't know anything about the topic---I'm not even a scientist---and I'm not seeing the point that you're seeing in all this. Even if I saw what you're seeing, I can't see what I would do with it. There are others who would be able to see pages of grandiose but vague claims, equations and numbers, and descriptions of simulations... and put it all together in their head much better than I can. But I don't expect you'll find that. I would suspect that there's a lack of interest in discussing your ideas because you start so big that there's nothing to respond to eg. "The Bohr model falls out of QSA" would need to be researched maybe for hours before someone could comment on it! For me the specifics also get lost in a sea of explanations and data. Anyway, if you want my advice anyway as a non-scientist I'd suggest working on an abstract (I think http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/03/14/how-not-to-write-an-abstract/ gives good advice about it). My non-professional opinion is that you should describe in one paragraph: - What it is that you're simulating (I mean your methods, not what you think it represents), - What your results are, - Why you think that's important. Something simple, not "all of QM..." unless you're showing that literally every detail of QM really does correspond (either covering every detail or show how your stuff precisely accommodates it as a whole or explain why the details that you don't know about don't matter). - Perhaps address what I see as a problem: show that the results happen naturally rather than that the program has been molded and tweaked to arrive at the results you want. I know a lot of that has been mentioned but for me it's too scattered and impossible for me to synthesize. I think your goal should be getting the interest of others, by writing something that's simple enough for experts in the field to say "Here's what is wrong or missing: ..." I'm using gcc-4.6 on Ubuntu. How about you?

Are they moving forward?

It seems that when shares of Nokia go down, Microsoft goes up. (Actually it seems like MS often goes up when everyone goes down, as if they directly benefit from the misery of others.) I've heard that most of Nokia's shares are owned by groups who have a greater stake in MS. If MS "needs" Nokia, and if MS can buy Nokia when their shares are low enough, then those who own both may find it helpful to sacrifice Nokia as long as MS benefits. This of course isn't fair to those who only own Nokia shares. Does that matter? Do the laws say that a company must make the most profit for its shareholders, or can it do whatever a majority of the shareholders want? Do the non-MS shareholders have grounds to sue? Would they have to prove there was an explicit conspiracy to devalue Nokia? It seems to me, the controlling ownership of Nokia is not acting in its best interests but in external interests, and may even have installed a CEO with external interests.