[Tycho?]

There may be something to bending space around a ship in order to move faster than light. But its a maybe, a very large maybe. Most Star Trek stuff is just pure fiction; with little to no basis in real life. They would be less interesting if you couldn't see the beams. But lasers are only visible if some of the light is being reflected; which would decrease the effectiveness of the weapon. So its not like it would be good to make future lasers more visible. About the splitting strings? I dont know. I'm not personally a fan of string theory, but I'm sure someone here would be able to give you info on it. Last question is again one of asthetics. The torpedoes glow so the audience can see where they are moving, no other reason.

Oh well.

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html Seems like a credible source anyway. This is pretty interesting, as it is an aspect of relativity that it turns out I know nothing about. Most things on this subject are garbage; people saying they create anti gravity machines by arranging some magnets in a clever way. I didn't know that a spinning superconductor could actually create measureable gravitational effects. But apparently such effects are predicted by GR. It also turns out that "frame dragging" is also associated with this "gravitomagnetism". So yeah. I found it neat anyway.

I didn't do any relativity in high school. Or university so far for that matter. But just looking it up online and some books will provide you will at least a conceptual gasp of it, if not necessarly a mathmatical understanding.

Dont think of c as a speed limit; things dont go faster and faster and suddenly become unable to get any faster than c. Instead, its the faster you go, the more difficult it becomes to go faster. This is because as your relative velocity grows to a signifigant fraction of c, you will start to get a noticable relativistic mass. Analogy time: You are rolling a rock along a flat surface for some reason. It's a big rock, so you have to push really really hard just go get it moving. You keep pushing harder and you get it rolling. You keep pushing and you get it going faster and faster. If you got this rock going close to c you would start to notice that the rock seemed to be getting heavier, and it becomes very hard just go get it moving a little bit faster. The closer to c the harder it becomes to speed it up. At very close to c you would be pushing and pushing and pushing and all you would get is a very very tiny increase in speed. Closer you get, the harder it gets. Which is why you can never actually reach c, it would take an infinite amount of energy to do so.

Sounds like homework to me. Just use google.

...a little of topic, but yes. Well, at the very center there is no gravity from earth, there would still be tiny amounts from the moon, sun and other bodies. So effectively zero.

Uh...... ok...... is that supposed to mean something to us?

Woah woah woah. LIGO is designed to test gravitational waves. Gravitons are the supposed force carries of gravity. So anything with mass would emit gravitons, while only an accelerating mass would emit gravitational waves. The waves have energy, its the gravitons that I'm not sure about. Although I still doubt it. And we will likely detect gravitational waves from something like neutron stars colliding, or black holes eating a huge mass very quickly. Quasars arn't likely to be a source of much gravitational radiation, especially since they're so far away we wouldn't be able to detect it anyway.

I'm not sure what you are asking here. I can't visualize your problem, could you try to rephrase it?

Inflation is an idea, this is evidence to support the idea, which was previously pretty lacking.

Would gravitons actually carry energy away from the source? If they did one would thinkwe would have noticed thses effects long ago.

lol yeah, piece of cake.

But do orbits become less eccentric over time? Triton apparently does, but do all orbiting bodies? Is it only tidal interactions and interactions with other bodies that causes it?

I figure that wiring and basic electrical engineering are quite useful skills. I am also interested in the physics involved.But a big problem with talking about capacitance or current or whatever in a classroom is that it is not hands on, and so doesn't help me a lot in real life. So in this thread I would ask for people to suggest very simple projects to give me some experience with basic cicuits, wiring things, stuff like that. Basic is the key word here. While I know a fair amount of basic theory I've never wired a single thing in my life. So a project doesn't have to be big, or educational, or anything. Basically as long as I can make something, and then somehow see a result is what I'm looking for. And the BIG requirement is that it must be cheap. I dont have money to go out to buy all kinds of wires or resistors or other components. I have some basic materials already (aligator clams and the like) and some batteries. But other than that I'd like to be able to collect my materials from scavanging. I dont have any problem rooting through dumpsters to find a radio or something to get the _____ that I need. And I would likely need advice on what I can actually scavenge the component from. Is this too much to ask? I'm not sure, which is why again I will emphasize that I'm looking for the simplest of the simple, at least to start me off. Any takers?

But you dont artificially reproduce an electromagnetic field. You just create an electromagetic field, period.

What kind of sources? Aerospace pretty well insures excellent pay because it is presice, and is in constant demand by airlines, NASA, military etc. Buts its hard, presumabely. If your only a junior in high school I dont see why you'd want to be this specific so early on. Just go with engineering until you take some engineering courses, then you will have much more information on which to base your decision.

Hows about creating a gravitational force that makes delicious pies? Not to sound like like an asshole, but just making up a force that does whatever you want doesn't really make sense in physics. You'd have to explain what causes such a force, how and why it works. So such an idea isn't so much far fetched as... not physics. Suitible for soft sci-fi perhaps.