[Tycho?]

There were no theoretical restrictions on passing the speed of sound.

Copernicus, Gallileo, Newton, Kepler, Hubble, Einstien, Brache, von Braun(sp?). etc.

You can't measure your speed relative to light. You start at rest- light is moving towards you at 3x10^8m/s. You move forward at a velocity of 1.5x10^8m/s. You measure the velocity of the light coming at you to confirm your velocity... and find lights velocity to be unchanged. c never changes.

Well it is explained using a 4 dimensional model. It isn't visualized in 4 dimensions simply because humans cannot visualize it in 4 dimensions. The curving 2d one (so not really 2d) gives us a good analogy, so we use that.

Then that I agree with, even protons are said to decay, although it could take 10^35 or 10^36 years for this to happen. If it happens at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay

I never got this either.

GR is presumably General Relativity. Known to be correct by the scientific world. Now, you can't "know" its correct. There still could be a flaw in it. However, the theory has worked amazingly well, and since it was published in 1915 it has stood up to every test people have thrown at it. It is for all intents and purposes correct at this time.

But then is fire affected my a magnetic field? The wikipedia article on plasma does not mention fire, nor any sort of cumbustion.

If it can't be falsified, it isn't a proper theory. Sting "theory" falls into this catagory, since right now it can't be proven or disproven. Yes, big bang theory can be proven to be false, if some new peice of evidence came up that totally contradicted it. You can't really definitively prove a theory, since there is always something else that you could find that disagrees with it. But some theories, like special relativity, can be pretty much proven to be correct.

The curvature of space is because of gravity. Consider: the earth has a lot of mass, and so curves space. Try to visualize how it is curved. .... .... Right, its curved in 4 dimensions, which humans can't visualize. A way to think about this however is to think of space as say a soft matress. Think of the earth as a bowling ball on the matress. It causes the matress to curve down, so that if something like a marble was near it, the marble would roll down the slope towards the bowling ball. In a similar way a sattellite falls towards the earth through curved space. The shape of the universe itself is the same thing on a much larger scale. It wouldn't be completely flat, there would be bumps in it caused by matter. The actual curvature of the whole universe depends on a number which is not really known... hubbles constant perhaps, I'm not really sure. I think its believed that the universe is pretty close to flat.

Man, that first post was the most convoluted thing I've ever seen.

It would have to explain the fundamental workings of the universe, from which all other phenomenon can be derived. If only explained a few things it wouldn't be very final.

Indeed. We'll know how these events turn out many years from now.

Well no, time and temperature are not related in this way. And since you can never reach the speed of light at most the people on the inside of the ship would just be moving very very very slowly. But since temperature is 0 when all movement (including atomic scale movement) ceases, I guess if you did reach c and time was seen to stop it would appear as though the temperature was 0 as well. But if you had a thermometer in the ship, you would not observe that temperature to change, so temperature isn't **really** decreasing, even if it may be measured that way (which im not sure it is).

Huh. I thought a plasma had be completely ionized, so that the electrons were just floating around in a soup instead of around atomic nuclei.

I dont think magnetic fields bend space time. Gravity does, which is part of general relativity. Einstien did not have a Unified Field Theory, and nobody does today. Its an effort to unify all the forces, which as not yet been done. This is a wacked out conspiracy theory, and not a very good one either.

The rings are mostly ice. I dunno, check for yourself: http://www.google.com http://www.wikipedia.com

Nobody knows how aliens would/will react to humans. Currently our only example of intelligence is ourselves. Therefore all our ideas about what an intelligent species would be like are based at least somewhat on ourselves. They could be totally different than anything we think.