MigL

I can see it having an effect on the established age of the universe, and universal expansion/acceleration, depending on the preponderance of these types of supernovae at different stages of galactic formation/age of the universe. This would then have an effect on the need/quantity of dark energy required. But I don't see how it would affect the need for dark matter.

Who says managing a forum site is a thankless job... Thank you

One could regard Communism as an extreme form of Socialism, where everything is not simply state controlled, but actually state owned. As such, it is prone to abuse and just as totalitarian as Fascism, where the state supersedes individual rights. One could make the argument that Fascism is the more 'natural' way, as many animal populations seem to value the fate of the herd/colony over their own lives. We are animals, but like to think we have evolved beyond basic instinct; Still, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one". The US reaction to Cuban Communism is not indicative of US reaction to Communism in general. There are no embargoes or travel bans to Venezuela, for instance. It is more of a 'revenge' reaction. But the governments of Chile, since the 70s, and the government of Cuba,, since the 60s, can be compared. Their economics, standard of living, and immigration ( not just cheap vacations ) can be compared. It seems Chile has become one of the best places to live in South America, and people are actively immigrating. What can we say about the Cuba experiment ? How many people want to live there ? This doesn't excuse the murderous acts by the Pinochet regime, as the ends certainly don't justify the means, but all the Communist regimes have at least as much blood on their hands, with no results to show for it.

Sure Ten oz, the cold war was all about the US resistance to the spread of Communism. But the WORLD WAR that preceded it was all about the eradication of Fascism. No one is addressing the double standard in the way these two murderous ideologies are perceived. ( and what the US government does in the past year has little to do with what most sensible people think ) And Prometheus, I, like Phi, tend to think Democracy is the best mix of Capitalism and Socialism. Certainly not a good system, but it's the best we have.

I could go into details, CharonY, but why not just read the link thoughtfully provided by Waitforufo ? It details the difference in the way Pinochet was treated as compared to Castro. ( one was convicted by foreign heads of state, the other was praised at his death ) And the differences/changes in the living conditions between Chileans and Cubans brought about by the two. ( accomplished with similar body counts ) Not saying one is better than the other, but why the difference in the way we treat them ?

Just to be clear ( before the usual squabbles begin ), I did not mean this as a comparison of socialism and capitalism, but rather the general perception that COMMUNISM is still a viable ideology whereas FASCISM is considered an evil ideology to be exterminated wherever it arises. Both ideologies have proven to be vile in execution ( and have used the same tactics to control people ), I'm certainly not comparing body counts. But Cuba for example, has often been admired by many in my country, even father and son Prime Ministers ( as well as China ). The feelings would be vastly different if it was a Fascist, military regime just off the coast of Florida.

One hundred years ago, on the night of the 7-8 November, Bolsheviks stormed the Tsar's winter palace, and began the Russian revolution, which established the world's first communal socialist regime. Thhe death toll, over the last century, that can be directly traced to this event, numbers close to 100 million. More than the two World Wars combined with other major conflicts and murders and genocides of the 20th century. Way more than the deaths attributed to Fascist regimes. A lot of these deaths occurred under Stalin, with his mass starvation of Ukrainians, purges and executions of ethnic minorities, pacts with Hitler, invasion of Eastern Block countries, etc. But many more were carried out by his imitators, such as Mao during his 'great leap', who murdered and starved close to 45 million, and Pol Pot, who 'disappeared' one fourth of the Cambodian population. Communist states have also produced some of the worst environmental disasters of the century, such as the Aral Sea, Chernobyl, etc. Yet there is still a certain reveretion for Communism. You see the hammer and sickle on display, Che Guevera t-shirts, Mao Zedong memorabilia, praising of Castro by my Prime Minister ( and his father before him ). Not so much for the diametrically opposed ideology of fascism, which is reviled by all. It's actually illegal in a lot of places to display the Nazi swastika. Now one might argue that the Communism that was practiced was a perversion of that envisaged by Marx and Engels, but then you could also say the same of Hitler's, Mussolini's and Pinochet's versions of fascism; and with a much smaller death toll. So why is communist ideology still discussed in polite society, but fascism is the 'boogey man' of ideology, and feared by all ? ( inspired by an article by Dr Michael Bonner, historian, PhD from Oxford, and a thread on another forum I belong to, Historum.com )

Two expressions... 0*1=(0.z1)*1=0 0*1=(0.z2)*1=1 Divide through by 1... [0*1]/1=[(0.z1)*1]/1=0/1 [0*1]/1=[(0.z2)*1]/1=1/1 And cancelling 1s, gives... 0=0.z1=0 0=0.z2=1 So unless *, =, ( ), /, and 0 mean something else in your 'new' math, it is garbage, not just different.

Wish we could go back to the previous version.

At the risk of going off topic again, your eye ( and any other viewing device ) is equipped with a set of convex lenses which focus the incoming parallel rays to a spot on your retina. It does not matter how many reflections there are; the only one you 'see' is the one that strikes your eye. So the only way to analyze the situation is by considering straight rays from the eye back to the source. That's why we call it geometric optics. Leave photons and waves out of this ; they are not suitable for this analysis and would only complicate it unnecessarily. How many more times and more people need tell you the same thing ?

The sun happens to be 150 mill km away, so the rays reaching the Earth are essentially parallel. I imagine ( hope ) you could calculate the angular difference between the rays subtended by your statues' separation.

My apologies for the OT discussion. I only brought up how sight works as a response to Dalo's reference to Homunculus. I did suggest that he would have better understanding if he considered the ray going back from his eye, to the object ( and to the light source ) Not the other way around, which generates the multiple reflections.

I don't think I said that at all. A film camera produces an image on the film which cannot be ignored. The eye produces analog electrical impulses which are deciphered by the brain, and can be ignored by a distracted brain, or added to by a hallucinating brain. A digital camera produces digital data, which is interpreted by a computer, using Bayer filtering, for example, to produce color; use differing filters, get different colors. See the differences, and similarities ?

The biggest issue does seem to be distance determination ( and has been constantly revised for the last century ). It would be nice if a new 'standard candle' or metric for distance determination also did away with accelerated expansion and dark energy. It would simplify cosmology ( slightly ).

Your eyes are essentially cameras. But instead of an image on film, your retina produces a set of electrical impulses which are deciphered by your brain; sometimes even ignored, and sometimes extraneous information is added ( or did you really see everything doubled last time you were drunk ).

When I first lost most of the vision in my left eye ( due to PDS glaucoma ), on bright days, I could still see the lane dividers while driving down the highway, and the image from my left eye did not match up with that of my right eye. After an adjustment period my right eye has become dominant and my brain ignores the image from the left eye ( and all sorts of other things that it chooses to ignore ). Things are now a little less confusing, but unless I keep my eyes/head moving, depth perception is a big problem. Are you familiar with ray tracing to put specular reflections on 3d digital objects? They are extremely realistic because they are done backwards; from the viewer, to the object, to the light source. Same as real life. What you see, a reflection of light, is determined by the viewer ( eye ), not the object reflecting the light.

Aren't bottom quarks a decay product of the Higgs boson? Seems like a lot of trouble to go to... Build an LHC. Search for a few Higgs particles. Collect their decay products. Build a bomb with a couple GeV yield.

This is the kind of thread that makes you want to bang your head against the wall. After 11 pages, Butch still doesn't understand that 'expansion' is NOT achieved by a radial velocity or acceleration. This is the perfect example of Phi's assertion that, before you venture outside the box, you should familiarize yourself with what's in the box.

I think the analogy works well to demonstrate how a test mass moves in the presence of a gravitational field based on curvature. Two dimensional curvature only, not four dimensional, but what do you expect from a model ? So it's unrealistic in some aspects, but so is every other model, no matter how elaborate. Are you going to throw away the mathematical model based on GR, because it predicts unrealistic singularities ? Or because it predicts infinite strengths at close separation, because of self-coupling ? Heck, Quantum Mechanics/Field theory requires a whole new paradigm as to how we view reality; Should we say that model is flawed ? If you don't ask unrealistic questions from a model, you don't get unrealistic answers.

It is only half accurate. It shows bending in 2 out of 4 dimensions.

I'm going to propose a 'wild guess'... The last symmetry break which broke up the Electroweak force into the EM and weak force also gave rise to two classes of particles, one massless and one massive. Could previous symmetry breaks, such as the Color decoupling from the Electroweak have provided the mechanism which resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter ? We could not know this until we have a theory and a viable mechanism for this to happen, of course.

Aside from the fact that 'creating' energy is also non-sensical... Energy, mass and relative time are all frame dependent quantities, ie. different observers measure different value. While a section of strongly curved space-time may seem to be highly energetic to a distant observer, it is 'normal' to a local observer.

Interesting, but misguided. Yes, gravity, or more exactly space-time curvature, was there before the symmetry break, and the Higgs mechanism, gave certain particles the property of mass. These particles had the property of energy, before the symmetry break, and yes, energy gravitates, ie. it causes space-time curvature. Gravity also gravitates, and it is this self-coupling which makes attempts at a quantum field theory non-renormalizable, ie. plagued with infinities. This has led to the 'ground up' approaches of SString theory and Loop Quantum Gravity theory. It is impossible for mass-energy to outrun its gravitational field, as that information moves at c, so warped space-time vacated of mass-energy is non-sensical. So, if your suggestion is that high gravitational energy density itself, is the cause of the increased/modified gravitational field that causes the galactic rotation anomaly, instead of the commonly believed 'dark matter', that is also non-sensical.

Even in GR, you can always pick a frame where the Lagrangian is not time dependent. You just can't pick a global frame. And according to Noether, the corresponding total energy is conserved. ( it is only for the global case that we can't say anything ) As such, it definitely applies in the case of colliding stars, and Strange has a valid point. Why would you expend more energy than you would get back ? ( remember our old friend entropy ? )

That's all I wanted to hear. +1