md65536

My experience has been that when you do as much science as I have (both in blog form and in spreadsheets) you tend to lose subjective bias when you realize that the maths say something other than what you expected, and that what you expected can't be. Also, you tend to gain objectiveness when you realize that your results can be interpreted in a different way that may be equally valid. To be absolutely objective may require abandoning all of our subjective experience, but then where would you start? What does epistemology have left to say after we remove subjective experience as a basis of understanding? I think you are being ironic, because you're suggesting that including subjective disagreement would make things more objective, as if it is just a matter of opinion as to which maths work and which don't, or a matter of opinion as to which theories correspond to experimental measurements and which don't, or a matter of opinion whether the maths even matter.

Agreed. You really need to grow a sense of humor to fulfil your role here, which is to be the butt of jokes and contempt. Sure this is a serious science site, but if you're being serious and scientifically curious you should know that we're all so far above you that we won't even address your post in a scientific manner. Poetry must be difficult for you. Not really. The speed of light isn't a limit because it's difficult to get to, but because it physically makes no sense (given the postulates of relativity) to accelerate faster. If something could be said to travel faster than light, it wouldn't do so by accelerating from subluminal speeds, so I'd say the answer is "no".

Ah no worries, I don't think any of us are right but they're all interesting ideas. Oh, I see now what you are getting at. Then, I think the answer to the puzzle would be this: The hypothetical time traveller doesn't experience repeating the process because he is going forward through time during the entire process. The time traveller should have his own clocks that are independent of others---otherwise I don't think it would be time travel. If he is able to acquire information and not lose it (thereby remembering experiencing anything at all) then he is changing, and ageing, the whole time that he is observing whatever he ultimately remembers. I don't think it's physically possible to happen this way, though, so I agree there would be paradoxes.

You go 3 sec. in your past and becomes 3 seconds younger? Oh you mean correcting me. Yes. To be clear I meant that I did not know that going 3 seconds into your past was actually possible.

Thank you for correcting me. I was not aware that this was possible. Yes, I suppose spontaneous pair-production of a large(mass and/or time)-scale object would be impossible... "Virtual particles exhibit some of the phenomena that real particles do, such as obedience to the conservation laws. [...] allows existence of such particles of borrowed energy, so long as their energy, multiplied by the time they exist, is a fraction of Planck's constant." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle] So I guess questionposter is right, that if this type of time travel were also possible (in addition to the description that you say is possible), it would require some energy input in order to do it (it would not involve virtual particles, nor effortless time travel). The energy input would occur in the earlier, "past" time, and an energy output would occur in the later time. Your Delorian would not require plutonium stolen from terrorists to make the initial jump into the past, but rather it would disappear in a burst of released energy as it collides with an anti-matter Delorian already travelling backward through time to 1955. It would require energy from where (when) it appears, not from where it disappears.

Why couldn't he see something like a pair-production of a (duplicate) self and an anti-self, spontaneously created, and then 3 seconds later he sees himself collide with his anti-self and annihilates, leaving only the duplicate self continuing on? I think this type of thing can be described in quantum mechanics, so I don't see how it can show that time travel is impossible. But then I suppose the question changes to another philosophical puzzle: Would an exact duplicate of one's "self" be oneself? Or would you say that the simultaneous existence of two duplicates means there are two consciousnesses, and the annihilation of one means that time travel of a consciousness is impossible? But then you can keep changing the puzzle---how do we know that a conscious "self" that wakes up one day is even the same self that went to bed the previous night, etc---and I don't think there are easy and certain conclusions.

I suspect that if you resolved the thought experiment satisfactorily (including time dilation, length contraction, and relativity of simultaneity as Janus mentioned) that relativity of simultaneity might provide the key "Aha!" moment. "Almost instantly" implies a notion of simultaneity that wouldn't be shared by all observers. Other observers would consider a different set of events to be simultaneous or "almost instantaneous".

(Information), or... (a probability amplitude described by a wave function?) I suppose the latter doesn't make sense, because a wave function doesn't carry information about an event, but rather information about a particle??? So the wave function doesn't propagate at the speed of light, but at the velocity of the particle (limited by c)??? Bell's theorem implies violation of locality or counterfactual definiteness. Does non-locality imply superluminal transmission of "useful" or exploitable information? There is neither experimental evidence for that, nor any accepted theoretical prediction of it that I know of. Meanwhile there seems to be much evidence of violation of counterfactual definiteness. I suppose there's not enough evidence to say which is violated, and so guessing would be silly. How about: A particle without rest mass propagates away from an event at c, as a probability amplitude describing the state of the particle, whose wavefront is a sphere of radius c*t, where the magnitude of the amplitude may be severely directionally biased. ???

How do you figure? In whose frame of reference would you expect to see such a thing? Are you considering that the speed of light [does not vary] relative to the speed of the source or observer, so that even a very fast-moving atom would still have light (or force carriers travelling at the speed of light) emitted or absorbed with a relative speed of c [according to any observer]? (Edited for clarity but I'm still not sure what I wrote makes sense.)

Is this the same as saying that probability waves propagate at c? Or perhaps that possible information about an event travels at c? Assuming that you're measuring some information from an event that occurred 1 second ago and that the information travelled at c, then the information would have oscillated or something while trapped, still travelling a total of 3e8 meters (and still defining a time). Information or probability waves don't have to be measured in order to change direction, do they? The "expanding sphere" would only be the simplest case, that of no change in direction.

http://en.wikipedia....ermal_radiation "All matter with a temperature greater than absolute zero emits thermal radiation." http://en.wikipedia....isplacement_law "Wien's displacement law implies that the hotter an object is, the shorter the wavelength at which it will emit most of its radiation" So my last post wasn't very accurate. Anyway, since thermal radiation occurs over a range of frequencies, continuous temperature need not imply continuous EMR frequencies. But I'm pretty sure the frequency of thermal radiation isn't quantized! ??? Anyway DrRocket knows what he/she's talking about more than I do! Edit: I was curious about what you wrote---haven't dealt with this since high school but it sounded familiar!... and found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_spectrum "Although the emission lines are caused by a transition between quantized energy states and may at first look very sharp, they do have a finite width, i.e. they are composed of more than one wavelength of light. This spectral line broadening has many different causes." Causes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_line_broadening#Spectral_line_broadening_and_shift

D'you wanna dog out my five-point-oh? (I had to look that one up. I'm sure there are many movie quotes I've had to look up to grok.) I have glimpsed our future. And all I can say is.....go back! He tried to lam, but they cheesed him! Candystriper. Gumshoe. Cob nobbler.

Everything radiates EMF EMR with frequency proportional to temperature, I think. I figure that if EMR had only discrete possible values (quantized) then it would imply that things could only have discrete temperatures. Neither is true, and my argument is probably invalid anyway.

Derr, I dunno. A drug store cowboy is someone whose hangout is the street corner. A car hop is a preplanned social gathering at a drive-up restaurant. A soda jerk is someone who works in a malt shoppe serving up sodas and floats.

The only ones that come to mind are phrases that are rarely used to mean what they used to mean: The lady doth protest too much, methinks. That begs the question...

Well count me as part of the 1%; I think that this part is correct (according to my own crackpot theory). By "anything with gravity" you must mean "anything with mass", due to universal gravitation. That includes individual atoms. I think it's possible that any mass has a singularity at its center, where there is infinite spacetime curvature. I think that any mass that could be observed as an indivisible particle would have its own "black hole", but a planet wouldn't have its own black hole apart from the singularities of all its constituent particles, unless you were observing it in some way that those particles were indistinguishable (eg. perhaps from very far away). A black hole doesn't "suck matter in" more than its mass would justify. So, just as an apple 2m above the Earth has a very small pull on the Earth, a black hole the mass of an apple would have very small pull on the Earth at the same distance. The event horizon of such a small black hole would be so tiny, that it would be hard to interact with it I think. Light (of large enough wavelength?) would pass right over it... like a tiny hole that is too small to get trapped in. So I think that the things that prevent you from getting to the center of a massive particle (or a planet, if you like) can hide a black hole and prevent it from behaving like large black hole does. My version of the idea is this: Any local maximum of spacetime curvature (in an open neighbourhood???) is infinite. Despite adding additional craziness to the thread, I think this version is still correct. Formation of planets makes sense with current understanding of gravity. If you conjecture that there are black holes where we don't know they are, you would still have to show that our measurements which correspond to current theories will still correspond when those black holes are factored in.

Well that's the thing... it's not really a fight. I'm not saying you are wrong, just that I think it's possible you might be wrong. Changing accepted science isn't about convincing people to see it your way. It's about showing that it needs to be changed because some evidence can't fit into the accepted theories. If it's possible to fit into accepted theories, there's no need to change them. So the process is meticulous and usually slow and taken in small steps, including repeating experiments and eliminating other possible explanations. I want to believe in PSI phenomena. Nothing in science proves that it's all theoretically impossible. But like you mentioned, a controlled lab environment can disrupt some of the effects of psi phenomena... which leads to the possibility that the effects are psychological and not parapsychological. The evidence needs to be meticulous before it can be accepted.

Any, I should think, because a given frequency can be Doppler-shifted. I would guess that you would need at least both of velocity and temperature to be quantized in order for EM frequency to be quantized???

It's because everything you see, ie. light, will follow the curvature of spacetime. So given a curved path of light (a geodesic) between you and some distant source, any signal sent to you from anywhere along that curved path will follow the same path and appear to come from the same direction (thus appearing as a straight line).

Perhaps I'm confusing different experiments. The one I was thinking of is documented thusly: Were there additional experiments without the hypnosis, and without a "go between" who could transfer information from sender to receiver through ordinary means? No, I am correct. As you know I try to use words according to their accepted meaning. A lie is "a false statement deliberately presented as being true", which is exactly what you describe in one of your examples. Yes, I've been sloppy and mixed together some of the example experiments you've mentioned. Nevertheless, your examples do in fact describe deception (eg. being told that someone else is your mother) in other cases. Therefore it is difficult to accept the impossibility of deception in some cases, when there is direct evidence of it in other cases. The words I used do not denote anything sinister. The reasons for the deception, whether well-intentioned or bad, are irrelevant. Likewise, trickery need not be sinister (not all magicians are evil). The problem is that some of your examples suggest simple explanations for others of your examples. If you want to convince people that something extraordinary happened, and not something simple, then you need extraordinary proof. "They had no reason to trick me" doesn't cut it. No, I've only skimmed it. No need to repeat. Perhaps I was wrong, but my understanding of it was that you're claiming there are physics-based explanation for PSI phenomena. If it suits you to abandon physics in favor of anthropology, that's fine. But I don't think you can start with physics, propose a hypothesis using physics, completely remove the physics, and still claim that the hypothesis is valid. Now that would be quite the magic trick. By the way, I also don't think that all deception is intentional.

What could be an explanation for why the object doesn't appear blurred? The camera shutter speed wouldn't be that fast, would it?

I disagree that it was impossible for them to trick you. The example that you cite has been previously documented, describing these facts: - The witness to these experiments was under hypnosis at the time and highly receptive to suggestion. - The witness "hardly remembered" the events but was told of them in hushed tones afterwards. - The witness describes being lied to and told to accept the lies --- but was not tricked??? - The witness describes the experiment as a "created reality" based on the will of the experimenter. Are you sure that the witness cannot possibly be mistaken? Might there not be an alternative explanation for the experiment that you cite? There is documented evidence of false memories being planted in subjects under hypnosis. How can you rule out that possibility, in order to support your claim that some new scientific theory is needed to explain the experiment? It was explicitly stated. You were the one who stated it. I don't see anyone else stating that social science isn't a real science, only that the principles of physics apply to your claims. Are you describing a social science theory here, or are you proposing a theory that involves physics?

Create a silly quote. Dumbfoundedly take offense at your own quote. Employ sarcasm. Immediately react as if you don't understand sarcasm. Glad to see you're still bringing an element of humour to these long threads!

That's the way the universe works, and its behavior is described very accurately with quantum mechanics. Various aspects things are different if they're measured vs. not, which is counter to a classical understanding of the universe. It has nothing to do with whether there is a consciousness associated with the measurements (observations), at least not in any scientific interpretation of QM that I know of.

Is the effect only present for a short time after they reduce the power? How much of the heat that gets converted into light, comes from heating up the LED while running with higher energy consumption, earlier? Obviously, if the LED cools itself and/or immediate environment, then the amount of energy it can draw from the environment must diminish (it can't keep making the environment colder without outside energy coming in to replace it). I don't even know if the energy comes from a relatively hot LED cooling to ambient temperature, or if it actually draws energy from its surroundings, cooling them below ambient. The way it's written I suspect the effect only happens while reducing energy input, rather than a sustained effect at a fixed energy input. I think it is similar to saying that the pedalling efficiency of a bike is > 100% when biking down a mountain... but you still have to get up the mountain first.