MigL

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.

Soooo, its been estabilished. The proton is stable, not just really long-lived ?

I haven't read it completely but I believe Mordred's second link explains why the CMB, no matter how faint it becomes, will never 'recede' outside the horizon.

I think you need to re-think this elfmotat. The observable universe has a horizon, and over time, far-flung potions of our universe pass outside this horizon. But just inside this horizon, information still has a chance to reach us. Next year, this point just inside the current horizon, will have past outside and become unobservable. The time may come when everything outside our local group passes out of the horizon. But every point still inside the horizon was once at approx. 4000 deg. and some of those photons are coming towards us. Because the separation keeps increasing. the red shift increases. Even after the point of origin has passed outside the horizon, the photons are still on their way. Every year more and more of these photons lose the ability to reach us but there are many more which started off closer. That is why I used the exaggeration that, eventually after billions of billions of years, the only CMB radiation may have originated from your neighborhood. The exit of the CMB from the observable universe could only happen if the CMB was of a spherical nature and surrounded ( a portion of ) the observable universe, i.e. a fixed distance from us. Only then could it expand out of the horizon. But that is not the case, the CMB is everywhere.

I would consider Venus to have always had its present conditions, not a result of the runaway greenhouse mechanism. Then life forms would have evolved to suit those conditions. I could be wrong, but I think there are strains of bacteria which will survive the conditions you mentioned. ( I've always wondered why we don't seed Venus' atmosphere with bacteria to start the slow process of transforming the atmosphere ) A chemistry expert may be more help, but I believe Carbon forms the most compounds of the elements, and life makes use of this diversity for a certain range of temperatures and environments. I believe the second element forming many compounds is Sulfur, and any life chemistry involving Sulfur would involve higher temperatures. So maybe stinky, sulfur based life forms ?

Every single point in the universe emitted these photons. As the universe expands we may not be able to see the ones that came from a great distance, but we'll still be able to see the ones that came from closer distances. Even after the universe has expanded a billionfold more than it has since the big bang, we'll still be able to 'see' those photons that originated a short distance away, say down the street. I say 'see' because the photons will have red-shifted a billion times more, and will be undetectable.

Further, rotation or downwash from a wing produce induced drag, as energy is expended to alter the direction of the airflow downwards. This induced drag increases with pressure ( lo altitude, higher density ), slowing the plane. A helium balloon, on the other hand, rises faster in higher pressure/density air implying that a different mechanism is at work.

Ha-Ha I like that Strange.

No, you're still thinking of the CMB as an event that happened at a particular place, and radiation has to travel to us for us to 'see' it. That is not the case. The hot, opaque plasma which gave rise to the CMB happened here, and everywhere, throughout the universe. We are not expanding or racing away from a surface ( that's why I don't like last surface analogies ), because the photons are still here. They've just been red-shifted by the expansion to the microwave length. We will never expand or outrace the CMB for the same reason. It will always be there, only red-shifted to longer and longer wavelengths, making its detection harder. I wonder, had our civilization developed much later, and say the universe had expanded by a further factor of 10 or 100, such that the CMB was only 0.27 deg. or 0.027 deg, would we have considered it just background noise ? Might it have gone undetected ?

But there is no 'absolute' EM potential. It is a gauge field, and the universe works the same if everything is at zero potential and the electron is at one, or if everything is at 1000 eV and the electron is at 1001. Or am I misunderstanding you ?

Let me see if I can clarify what some of the others have said... Consider the early universe. A seething mass of energy and particles appearing and disappearing, as the universe is expanding ( this is after the inflationary period ). As it expands the temperature drops. When it drops enough for the familiar particles to have precipitated out ( disregard matter predominance over anti-matter ) they collide with each other. If the temperature is still too high, they have too much energy and don't stay captive, but at a certain temperature they do 'stick'. Hydrogen, helium and some lithium is formed ( that's all ) and the universe keeps cooling. At this point the universe consists of energy, free floating electrons and the lightest atomic nuclei, The free electrons collide with the nuclei, but don't 'stick', since their temperature or energy is higher than the ionization energy. The whole universe is a glowing plasma, like the Sun is, it is opaque and it is glowing with the black body spectrum appropriate to its temperature. When it expands enough that its temperature drops to approx. 4000 deg., electrons are finally able to 'stick' to the light nuclei and form atoms. This is when the universe becomes transparent, and it occurred approx. 300 milyrs after the big bang. What we are 'seeing' as the CMB, is the 4000 deg. glow from that time, but red shifted by the expansion of the universe by a factor of about 1500 times ( gas laws, V is inversely proportional to T ), to a present day temperature of approx. 2.7 deg.. And we see it everywhere because it was everywhere.

Do we really discuss religious theology here or do we discuss religion as viewed by a bunch of science nerds ? I myself once had a T-shirt that said... "And God said <Maxwell's Equations>, and there was light" * ...along with the preamble from Genesis. And I was raised a Roman Catholic, but have long since stopped practicing ( or believing ). My opinion is that the Bible is a bunch of parables which are meant as guidelines for our morality and spirituality. Same goes for other religious texts like the Koran, OT, Torah, etc. They are not, nor do they need to be, accurate or based on reality. I don't even think the Pope believes the Bible is accurate, as none of the RC priests I've known did or do. I wish I could find another T-shirt like that. *-don't do LaTex

I apologize for the capital letters, 2501. Didn't mean to yell, was only trying to emphasize. Next time will use italics or bold.

My apologies at having misunderstood you. Can we split the difference and agree that both, your causes, as well as the ones I mention contribute to the problem. I would still like to see what iNow suggested and whether attitudes are changing for younger people in the area. ( before they get cynical and cranky, like me )

But Mordred can back up any assertions he makes as it is 'established', i.e. it has support from other physicist and some evidence/observation. Your verbage cannot. You do realize that 'dark' matter is detected gravitationally, don't you ? But yet you state if it doesn't "reflect/refract light it cannot be observed or measured". There are other things which don't reflect/refract light, yet we still observe or measure them gravitationally, such as the galaxy's central black hole. There are particles which don't interact with light ( EM ) or (vey very weakly ) gravitationally, but only through the weak force. Are you suggesting they don't exist or don't have equivalent anti-particles ? This may be "Speculations', but it is not Fantasy.

My first instinct would have been to write that you are always blaming the West ( and its big trillion $ influence ) for the world's woes. But that would have started an argument, not continued the discussion. I certainly don't want that, so how about this... Sunys, Shiites, Christians and Jews have been at each other's throats in that part of the world for a thousand years. Long before there was an America, cheap labor or trillion dollar outside influences. I suggest that old habits ( individual beliefs and behavior ) die hard, and unless those habits change, neither will the situation. This is evident in other areas of the world that don't have the influences you mentioned, yet have been and are still powder kegs waiting to go off, such as the Balkans. I think iNow's suggestion would show wether change of individual beliefs and behavior is starting to change in younger generations, and provide a metric for bettering/worsening situations, and/or, which groups of people are becoming more reasonable and which groups are becoming worse.

Instead of always blaming Americans for their attitudes and responses to world events, why don't we put the blame where it actually belongs. As CaptainPanic previously stated we have UN institutions full of people who are supposed to co-ordinate the efforts to control/minimize the spread of these types of infections. Instead the WHO is conferencing around the globe attempting to stop smoking in Russia, controlling obesity and diet related disease in North America ( diabetis, etc. ), and other forms of social engineering, since these are all diseases 'of choice'. Maybe they should stick to their mandate. They should have had systems in place for such epidemics since the first outbreak in the late 80s ( I think ), as there is no vaccine for it yet. An emergency response plan, if you will. We are a global community. An infectious outbreak has to be controlled at the source, and the WHO should be the ones calling for a quarantine of the affected areas. Not British Airways and not some hospital in Texas. Should this belong in the political, or some other, forum, please feel free to move my post and any/all responses to it.

'Probably in our nature ' ?? That's the point I've been trying to make all along. It IS in our nature, as we are but animals with an instinctive nature to strike back at sources of pain and discomfort. ( the only reason Dekan's cat doesn't strike back when he steps on its tail, is because it knows who fills its food bowl, I know, I have two cats ) It is only through what I will call enlightenment, whether that be through religion, a sense of community, or social justice, that we learn to suppress this instinct.

Don't have time to look this up now, but I thought I read L-M has already filed for three patents. One relating to containment metchanism/geometry.

I'm having a serious issue understanding the posts you've directed at me, dimreepr. Where, for example, did I state I was offended by anything ? It seems you have some pre-conceived notions about the intent of my posts. Maybe you should just read the posts, and stop trying to read my mind. Have I maybe offended YOU in some previous discussions ? If so, I assure you it was purely intentional, as everyone has a right to an opinion, and no one has the right to not be offended. And if I have previously offended you, are you now trying to take your revenge ? ( See how I kept this on topic ? )

Of the two problems, heating and the much more serious confinement problem, supposedly they've got a design for a cylindrical containment using modified mirror technology for the ends, and other 'tricks' to re-confine escaping plasma. I don't really know much about fusion tech to be able to describe it. I have always believed the way forward is not renewable energy, but fusion energy, so if anybody is doing research/engineering to make it feasible, I get excited. The fact that its a big, capitalist company like Lockheed-Martin gives added confidence as they don't do anything without seeing the light of profit at the end of the tunnel. They must believe they have some hope of succeeding, unlike a research institute which doesn't care about eventual profits. The fact that the L-M research/engineering effort is being conducted at Clarence "Kelly" Johnson's Skunk Works also gives me confidence. Any outfit that could engineer a plane like the SR-71 back in the 50s has gotta have a few tricks up their sleeve.