MigL

There is NO problem with black body radiation ! I'll repeat, colour in QCD is just a label, nothing more. Just like 'strangeness' is a label in QCD. Or are you going to tell me its related to some abnormal behavioral properties of the particles ???

There are very few, if any Swartzchild ( non-rotating ) and deinitely no charged black holes. A rotating black hole is the only physical solution. Black holes conserve angular momentum, and even if they could emit matter other than Hawking radiation, that matter would also conserve angular momentum and spiral away in ever increasing orbits. Not straight radial paths.

What singularity are you talking about ? Any two objects whose velocities are offset by any amount ( ie not in-line ) will, on collapsing together gravitationally, conserve angular momentum. They will speed up their rotation as they draw together, just as a skater does when he/she draws in his/her arms. A large air mass, huge gas cloud or galaxy with hardly any rotation, will show appreciable rotation ( spirality ) upon pressure or gravitational collapse to a hurricane, solar system or spiral galaxy.

What is matter anyway ??? Mostly empty space permeated with overlapping fields. Two of these fields happen to be an electromagnetic field which gives rise to the bosonic photon, and the associated electron field which gives rise to the leptonic electron, the heavier versions called ( I believe ? ) mu and tau and their antiparticles. But they are not the only fields. there are also 'colour' and 'weak' fields along with their associated leptonic fields. The jury is still out on gravitational fields.

Maybe an introductory course in QM would help as most lead in with the black body UV catastrophy. Your concept of black body radiation is flawed as you assume a common everyday approximation of a black body should be able to work at uncommon temperatures such as that of the sun. You not understanding the concept does not imply a problem with the concept.

Read about this light speed drive ( not faster than light since space -time distortions such as gravitational field propagate at speed of light ) in The Physics of Star Trek. An area of space-time is expanded behind you and contracted ahead of you, and you, in effect, ride this space-time wave like a surfer riding the leading edge of an ocean wave. You are technically not moving through space-time but along with it and so, relativistic effects are not manifested. Similar to universal expansion where distant galaxies can recede faster than the speed of light because they are being 'carried' by an expanding space-time. The problem is that to warp space-time in the needed fashion, would require extremely large amounts of energy, The book gave estimates but I don't recall a value, just that it was ( impossibly ? ) large. Universal expansion gets around the problem of causality violation by creating an 'event horizon' to the observable universe. For this light drive, causality violation, ie ftl transfer of information, would not be an issue, because it is my understanding that this drive,if possible, would not be ftl.

You are the one who said to check Wiki for an explanation of the principle in one of your previous posts. And by _that_ definition, it does not apply to hurricanes or spiral galaxies, even if there are exceptions. And the 'colours' of the strong interaction have nothing to do with actual colours, they are just labels, or would you care to explain what the 'strange' label means ?? You and Wilmot are pulling laws and principles out of your a##es and applying them to a phenomenon for which a perfectly viable, PHYSICAL, simple explanation exists. Stop complicating the issue with laws and principles which are not fundamental, may or may not apply, and even if they do, not necessarily all the time; ever hear of Occam's razor ?? Or would yo prefer the K.I.S.S. principle ??

No, relativistic mass increase, time dilation and length foreshortening are frame dependant effects.

If you actually READ the piece on Wiki, it states that the 'principle of maximum work' was developed by some French chemist. It subsequently was abandoned because of too many exceptons to the principle. It was further developed by Gibbs into the 'free energy' concept, but not in its original form. It states, in its modified form, and I quote from the Wiki article 'For all thermodynamic processes between the same initial and final state, the delivery of work is a maximum for a reversible process.' Note that it says REVERSIBLE process. No large scale ( macroscopic ) statistical process is reversible. So for an irreversible process, like a tornado/hurricane or a spiral galaxy this principle has no application whatsoever. I suggest you listen to Imatfaal and seriously consider the only viable alternative, conservation of angular momentum.

Canada uses but one reactor to make medical isotopes for our own use plus several other countries, Why does Iran need so many enrichment facilities ? Iran burns the natural gas which is a byproduct of their oil wells, in amounts which could supply the energy needs of a country like Canada, why does it need to enrich Uranium for energy ? It may not be proof that they have or have not a nuclear weapon program, but it is proof that they are hiding their true intentions. I don't think the opinion of someone who would believe the word of the Iranian LEADERSHIP over that of his native or host country is relevant as it obviously implies a bias, because of course, in their history Iran, or the Persians were never an imperial power, only those evil Americans were. . And while American fuel rods may have the impurities to make them unuseable for weapons, can the same be said of the ones produced by the Iranians ? I guess not, ydoaPs. I may not know about the type of reactors used in the US today, but given the fact that no new reactors have been built since Tree Mile Island, I would assume they are still mostly of the breeder type, and so, no, they don't use a higher pecentage of U235 ( fissionable ) to U238, than a fission weapon does.

I'd first like to warn you that my background is physics, and of course, the big bang theory makes the most sense to me. I would suggest that it would to you also if, and only if, you take the time to learn and understand it. If you ask questions like " what happened one hour/ year/millenia before the big bang ? "or " how could a point of infinite density expand to fill the universe ? ", then I really don't think you have a very good handle on it at all. Of all your other possibilities, the creation by (a) God could also work, but (S)He would be a devious God. And just as people of Darwin's time, who thought the world was only 6000yrs old ( Biblically ) and fossil records were millions of yrs old, assumed God had created 'false' fossil records, we could extend this kind of thinking to encompass your computer program scenario. We would be in effect be either living in the 'now' and God has created all previous history, including personal memories, or not even living and God has even created our sense of 'being' and of 'now'. In effect our existence would be just a trick by a devious, malevolent God. But that seems kind of far fetched, don't you think ?

The last re-boot movie. Hah! Obviously you're no Trekkie.

It is my understanding that your interpretation is correct. If you were to cross the event horizon ( of a massive black hole such that tidal effects are delayed ) you would see nothing but blackness coming from your foreward direction, ie no light is coming up towards you from the central region nearer to the singularity, and you would see an ever shrinking circle of light from the outside universe coming from your rearward direction.

I would think that any photon which 'crosses' the event horizon of a black hole, has as its ultimate fate, an encounter with the ( possible ) singularity very quickly as they are constrained to travel at only one speed. The event horizon is the closest possible distance at which a stable orbit can possibly be acheived, and the orbital speed is the maximum allowed, the speed of light, c . For light to 'escape' from this orbit requires moving faster, which is not allowed, so an outside observer will never see this light, it must originate outside the event horizon to be seen by external observers. Any orbit inside the event horizon, by even the smallest amount, requires moving faster than c , which is, again, not allowed, and so the photon 'crashes' into the singularity in virtually no time at all. If you look at a Penrose diagram for a Swartzchild ( non -spinning, non-charged ) black hole you will note that the diagonals represent the event horizon AND the speed of light ( like light cones ) and to avoid the singularity ( Hawking and Penrose came up with the singularity requirement in the 60s or 70s but have since changed their minds ) you need to travel faster than c . The only realistic black holes are, however, spinning and non-charged, so this may make a difference.

Congratulations, you just demonstrated how faster than light travel violates causality. You can get hit in the head by a ball before seeing it being thrown at you.

All reduction/oxidation reactions involve swapping/sharing of electrons and so, are controlled by electromagnetic force, more specifically, because of scale, quantum electrodynamics.

Well by all means, show us how your mathematical 'mechanism' restricts the vacuum energy estimate to reasonable values and not the current predictions that are up 120 orders of magnitude too high. I don't know what you mean by parent or daughter Higgs boson. The Higgs particle is an excitation of a quantum field, the higgs field, just like the photon is an excitation of the QED field and the gluon is an excitation of the QCD field.

Poincare's recurrence says that any statistical aggregate of particles will, given enough time, return to its original state. It was a rebuff of the simplistic Boltzmann statistical interpretation of entropy ( which says that an ideal gas will become more and more disorganized and that is a measure of entropy ). As such it makes use of 'determinism', ie present follows past and future follows present or past and future can be interchanged . A wave function is also 'deterministic' in the sense that past states are encoded into it as are future states, and it is also time symmetric. The difference is that on observation, measurement or anything which causes the wave function collapse into a specific state, this symmetry and 'determinism' is lost. What lies in the realm of philosophy is that ,the Wheeler-deWitt equation being a wave function of the universe, who or what is making the observation or measurement which collapses it ??

Your last point is right ! Actually the one I like is the account for dark energy. The Higgs mechanism consists of a scalar Higgs field interacting with massless particles to give them mass, the field excitations are manifested as the Higgs bosons. Now a scalar field ( directionless ) which pervades all space is otherwise known as vacuum energy and can be shown to lead to a 'cosmological constant' as in Einstein's original version of GR. This cosmological constant then acts to accelerate expansion just as dark energy does.

Energy is never 'lost', it just changes. Taking your nuclear example, the binding energy which keeps the nucleons ( protons and neutrons ) together in an atomic nucleus is exactly equivalent to the mass loss ( the difference between the mass of the individual nucleons added together and that of the combined nucleus ). This mass, multiplied by c^2 is equal to the energy which would be released by dissociating nuclei heavier than iron or released by combining nucleons to form nuclei up to iron. Particle/antiparticle annihilation is an even better example, as in that case the particles' combined mass as well as any excess momentum ( kinetic energy ) is all converted into energy ( in the form of an energetic photon ). The universe is actually a very good accountant when it comes to keeping track of energy transactions. If any theory or experiment indicates that mass-energy is not conserved, I would think there is an error in the theory or experiment.

The event horizon is NOT a point, you have it confused with the singularity, and, along with the other invalid assertions you made about black holes, it provesmy point that you lack understanding of black holes. Dark matter was first conceived to explain abnormal galactic orbits and the indication is that there is 'more' mass surrounding every galaxy which is not accounted for by visible radiant mass. Only later was it used to explain the universe's flatness problem. Dark energy has been called a lot of other things, but the original name given to it by Einstein, was cosmological constant. And that predates the big bang theory , the steady state theory and even Hubble's universal expansion. I suggest you look all this stuff up and educate yourself before trying to criticise thoeries that hundreds of brilliant minds have worked on over the last 80 yrs.

A single electron's quantum mechanical spin will produce a magnetic dipole moment, yet it cannot be argued that the electron is actually spinning since it is treated as a point particle and it does not return to its original orientation after a 360 deg rotation ( actually need 720 deg ). So, where's the current ???

I don't usually post in speculation but any steady state theory has to, by definition, create mass-energy. In one of your previous posts you implied that black holes destroy mass-energy and your theory just returns this mass-energy to the universe. Now maybe you don't understand black holes or GR too well but black holes conserve all mass-energy they ingest on the event horizon, after all, they still gravitate don't they ? That would be pretty hard to do without mass-energy, would it not ? So this extra emass-energy that causes the universe to expand, in the steady state theory, must be created, falsifying the law of conservation of mass-energy. This law is one of the paradigms of modern physics and arises from consideration of a basic continuous symmetry in time. The big bang theory accounts for all its participating mass-energies very accurately, and on this basis alone, I am willing to reject your theory and stick with the accepted big bang theory.

Your critique of the article applies to most of David Levy's posts also !!!

The rubber sheet is an analogy and it can be used to represent several things. The one we are interested in EMField, is gravitational potential. Do you still need to be spoonfed what that implies for the motion of the masses causing the indentations or potential wells ??? In your rush to put foreward your pet theories of a plasma dominated universe, you display an amazing lack of insight into the simplest gravitational processes.