MigL

As I said in an earlier post, either Lockheed Martin or Boeing ( I don't think Northrop-Grumman is doing airframes anymore ) is going to get a contract for an Advanced Tech. Bomber to replace the B-2. I would imagine the program cost, including development, to be well over 20 bil ( each of the 20 B-2 costs a whopping 1 bil ). If this money was used to develop an affordable, small fusion reactor, and the technology given to anyone who wants it, I don't think there would be a need for bombers anymore ( or fighters, ships, tanks and missiles for that matter ). Well maybe most of the middle east, Venezuela and western Canada would be upset that they lost their oil leverage.

There seems to be some confusion as to my stand on GW. I thought I had explained myself better in my original post #533. Governing bodies did not engineer ( or make up ) the GW emergency. But when the ready made opportunity came along, they seized on it. The UN likes cap and trade because it has the effect of taking wealth from industrialized nations and redistributing it to poor non-industrialized nations, for not emitting GH gases ( i.e. doing nothing ). These poor nations have no incentive to industrialize as that would be the end of 'free money', so they stay poor. The industrialized nations just increase prices to pay for the carbon credits and continue releasing the same amount of GH gases. Nothing changes. Now you may say this is just aid or charity, but charity is voluntary, a forced charity is just a tax. I am definitely not saying nothing should be done. But whenever governments are involved it becomes a total screw-up. I just think some of the ideas and schemes that are being implemented are counter-productive, do little or nothing, and are just to 'show that something is being done'. The fact that people are being taken advantage of without any real benefits could be one of the reasons why people consider GW a hoax. I have suggested an alternate course to 'save the world', see post #533 and #536. Technically all this is off topic, as I'm not a GW denier, I just don't agree with the way a 'solution' is being implemented. ( and no, I don't agree with subsidizing big oil/gas/coal industry either )

Yes, seriously swansont, but maybe I should have said 'Often, when a governing body...'. Have you forgotten the WMD emergency which necessitated the invasion of Iraq, the fear mongering which necessitates the forfeiture of our civil rights, etc. ( I think you'd understand it better using examples which I know bother you ). The subsidies you mention are all well and good, Ten oz. Sure governments should invest to improve the quality of life of citizens. But the examples I gave, do not, nor will they in the future, improve quality of life. Cap and trade is simply a way to go on doing things as they've always been done. Release the same amount of CO2 and pass on the extra costs to consumers. While the Ontario government subsidy is ill thought out. It doesn't supply base-load power and only ensures the pensioned seniors of this province pay 'an arm and a leg' for hydo. I still say all these investments are prolonging the agony. Start a crash research program into nuclear fusion, like Kennedy did in the 60s with the Moon landing program, and we could have unlimited energy by 2040. I have faith in America and what they can do when they set their mind to it. Heck, just by scrapping the future bomber program ( to replace the B-2 ) they could free up 10-15 bil dollars. Give this money to Lockheed Martin to develop their fusion design. Can you imagine what a game changer it would be if a garage sized fusion reactor provided energy in abundance for a whole city ? It would change our way of life. Or do you guys think this is just 'pie in the sky' ?

I don't think its Physicists or Mathematicians that are crackpots, Overtone. Its more that crackpots tend to focus on Physical ideas and concepts. Maybe because modern Physics is so far removed from 'everyday' reality, the crackpots feel free to make all sorts of outlandish claims, without need to back them up, and claim that everyone else doesn't 'get it'. Maybe they figure, if you can believe something like QM and its interpretations, relativity paradoxes, string theory, big bang cosmology, holographic universe theory, etc., then you'll believe anything ( or anything IS possible ). What they don't figure, is that some members of this board actually understand, and work with, some of the previously mentioned Physical theories and concepts.

Whenever any governing body wants to impose an unpopular tax or social engineering program they always create an emergency first. In this point I agree with Wild Cobra. I also understand the science behind the greenhouse effect, and the preponderance of evidence for global warming. The risks associated with ignoring it are too serious. Something must be done. That being said I like spirited discussion, so... This is where the self serving, governing bodies ( the UN, national governments, etc. ) come in. An emergency has been conveniently created for them, so they come up with various schemes to fleece taxpayers. One that I don't like is 'cap and trade'. It has spectacularly failed in Europe, yet there is still a push to adopt it here in North America. It doesn't actually cut greenhouse gas emissions, it just allows wealthier users an opportunity to buy credits from poorer users. It is in effect, a wealth redistribution scheme pushed by the UN. Another I don't like is "green energy' subsidies. Here in Ontario, Canada, our provincial government is paying private, 'green', electricity producers 8x the going rate for hydro, and paying them first, sometimes paying them NOT to produce power, while publically produced hydro is sold at a loss to the US. Meanwhile the price of hydro in Ontario to the public is skyrocketing. These are just a couple of examples that contribute to the 'average Joe's' dislike of the Global Warming effect, and a possible reason for the denial. I'm sure others have their own list of schemes forced on us in the name of Global Warming. Everyone wants to do what is right for our home ( planet ), but we don't want to be taken advantage of, or have our hard earned wealth redistributed by politicians who think they know what to do with our money better than we do. If you want to save the world, you need to do less screaming and protesting. You need to invent a way to make economical, environmentally safe, power ( nuclear fusion is standing in the back of the room, behind the others, jumping up and down, screaming "Pick me. Pick me ! ).

Finally, someone understands my (admittedly lame ) sports humor. Yes Becks would run rings round me. Even in my youth, but now my knees are shot ( old age and metal pins and wires ). Anyway, sorry for the derailment. Back to the crackpot track.

I find the 'order/disorder' concept more confusing for people not familiar with entropy. But that is only an observation from postings on this and other forums. I suppose a chemist would find the concept of 'energy available/not available for a reaction' ( I don't remember, is that Gibb's ) useful in describing entropy just as physicist do. As the useful, available energy decreases , so entropy increases ( remember the box with a partition separating a gas and vacuum ?). If the association is not made between order/disorder and degrees of freedom, it is very difficult to say whether a system is more or less ordered, and as a result, whether entropy has increased or decreased.

I would say you are absolutely correct, there are way more crackpots amongst soccer fans than in science forums. Did you happen to watch the Italy-Croatia qualifier today ? Pandemonium !!

Oh no, you don't get off that easy, AJB. You didn't say he was a superior man playing football, you said he was a superior football player. And while he had talent ( mostly directed at promoting himself and publicity ), he suffers from the same malady as other English football stars. They all suck in international competitions. I do however, enjoy watching Premier league more than Italian Serie A ( I'm of Italian origin ) as it's a more exciting style of football. And Rooney and Welbeck did great yesterday. My apologies for the hijack.

Well now I have to take you to task, John. Don't get me wrong, I am suitably convinced of man-made global warming ( until evidence to the contrary may/may not be demonstrated ), but when have we injected so much CO2 into our atmosphere so as to raise global temps by some of the predicted amounts ( anywhere from 2 to 12 deg for most models, with some fringe as high as 50 deg or even decreasing ) ? What we have done, is build mathematical models, and ran simulations on computers. Given the available information, these models predict a rise in global temps, and as this jives well with observational evidence of the last hundred years or so, one would have to be a fool to bet against global warming. That doesn't mean we have all the information needed to build accurate model, so there is always a slim chance we may be wrong. Do you see how that's different from actually taking two lumps of uranium, slamming them together to acheive critical mass, and then having a distant survivor publish the results of the experiment ? You did redeem yourself, however, when you state "questioning is allowed, denying is nonsense" because, you're absolutely right, there is a difference. AS for you, AJB... Really ? David Beckham ? A superior football player ?

I should have known Ten oz. You're a cat person. Have you no shame ? ( Sitting in my recliner with my two cats, BB and DD, purring and snoozing next to my legs. )

As mass of the BH decreases due to HR, so does proportionally the area of the horizon. The area of a spherical object will decrease faster than its radius. I would think a BH's angular momentum would decrease. This of course depends on the specifics of the moment of inertia of a BH, which I'm not too familiar with.

Well if the neutrino is coming from another galaxy cluster which is receding from our local group, then, as it travels at a speed close to c, the separation between its origin and destination increases. Its effective speed is therefore reduced and it loses energy. Even if the neutrino was massless, it would still lose energy as the separation increased, but it would manifest as redshift instead. I would agree with Dima. But the fact remains that we would not detect low energy neutrinos. As Strange has said, the neutrino background radiation would provide even more information about the big bang than the CMB as it is much closer to t=0.

I always thought the whole argument for Intelligent design was that the universe is too complex to have originated by chance. There must have been a guiding 'intelligence' to design it. The best argument against it is that the 'designer' must have been even even more complex to be able to do this. So who designed 'Him' ???

I told you not to get him mad. Now you really went and did it.

I would suggest that the sociological is the only valid angle.

Lets not just make it always about us and our suffering... What kind of a vain God would create a whole universe for the sole, perverse purpose of worshipping Him.

Religion unfortunately tends to attract the morally weak, and those who need to be 'given' a purpose in life. These people are then easy to control and take advantage of by unscrupulous clergy. Anybody want to buy salvation ?

Venus has probably been a 'wasteland' since shortly after it formed. It's not like it was ever earthlike, and runaway greenhouse effects altered it, to the way it is today. Oh, and dinosaurs did not all become extinct. Some did survive and continued to evolve in the new environment. You may have had one for supper. You do like chicken don't you ?

You are suggesting a lot of effects, but not the mechanism to enable them. I don't see how this time 'flux' could create particles or allow for universal expansion.

Just my opinion... Neutrinos are produced in fairly energetic processes, so their initial speed is very high ( close to c ). They interact rather weakly, so they don't really lose that initial speed. Your chances of finding one at rest beside you is, therefore, virtually nil. Neutrinos started a race with photons from the Magellanic Clouds. They were produced by the same event, a super nova, yet because the photons interact with the plasma surrounding the super nova and were slowed down by these interactions, they arrived here after the sub-luminal neutrinos.

What does the fact that Thorham hasn't got a clue about frames of reference have to do with the 'speed' of time ?

The 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics is just one of many interpretations designed to make sense of the paradigm shifting, probabilistic nature of reality. Nobody is actually suggesting that a new universe is created whenever a wavefunction collapses. Are you suggesting another interpretation ? I have read about a similar idea for a 'single' photon, but don't see how it could work with other particles. Your suggestion that particles were 'accelerated' by universal expansion to account for particle species is not useful or accurate, as there was no acceleration away from a central point ( as in an explosion ), rather separation increased. That is why the expansion looks the same from every point in the universe.

Please don't make elfmotat yell again . Nobody likes it when he's angry ! Are you moving as you read this question, Thorham ? If you can ( intelligently ) answer that question without reference to another object or location then you have finally found absolute motion. Nobody else ever has because it doesn't exist. If you can't, you only have relative motion, so suck it up and move on. Almost two pages of this drivel is making my teeth hurt.

Well that puts the life of the proton at 1800 billion yrs. using your decay rate. I thought it had been established, from the various proton decay experiments around the world, that the lower limit for proton stability is higher than 1000 billion, billion, billion yrs. ( all numbers approximate of course ) You do know how many protons are in a mole of Hydrogen, don't you ? According to you, we should be seeing about billion, billion decays per year from every mole of H2.