Delta1212

Why would it be that? It doesn't require a universal frame to obtain that result and attempting to extrapolate what a frame based on the speed of light would look like leads to some nonsensical results (e.g. distance not existing and no passage of time) which is why you can't build a frame from the perspective of a photon, and certainly not a universal frame.

That's not a separate point of discussion. That's what the constant speed of light means. It is constant with respect to any frame. Rather than being an indicator of some "universal framework" as it pertains to motion, the constant speed of light is what caused us to drop the idea that such a thing exists in the first place.

It has to get energy from somewhere. If it's entirely self-sufficient with no outside energy source, it is equivalent to a perpetual motion machine, which is thermodynamically impossible. There's nothing special about life that allows it to violate the laws of physics.

City of Heroes + Oculus Rift w/ Omni-directional treadmill = You're welcome.

That seems a bit far fetched, but also rather arbitrary in singling out religious rituals (really seems like it could apply equally well to any cultural practice at all). I'm also having trouble coming up with a lot of religious rituals that would be particularly effective at transferring gut bacteria between individuals.

No one said they wouldn't be co-moving in every frame. But although co-moving objects will be co-moving in every frame, they may not simultaneously exist in every frame. Take the pole moving at relativistic speed through a barn. There are four events: The front of the pole enters the barn, the front of the pole exists the back of the barn, the back of the pole enters the barn, and the back of the pole exists the back of the barn. Now, in the frame of the barn with the length contracted pole, the order is "front of the pole enters, back of the pole enters, front of the pole exists, back of the pole exists." In the frame of the pole, with the length contracted barn, the order is "front of the pole enters, front of the pole exits, back of the pole enters, back of the pole exists." In the first instance, both the front of the pole and back of the pole exist within barn at the same time. In the latter, they do not. In all frames, the front and back of the pole are co-moving. Now, you could set up a situation where you have the events "first photon is emitted, second photon is emitted, first photon is absorbed, second photon is absorbed" where the photons travel parallel to each other and so are co-moving. If the events are all separated in space, you could conceivably find a frame where the order is "first photon is emitted, first photon is absorbed, second photon is emitted, second photon is absorbed." The photons will be co-moving in the sense that their relative velocities will be zero, but they will not exist simultaneously in that frame.

It's also possible that, rather than being delusional, she is merely wrong, and something else is causing the reaction she attributes to water.

I don't think md is saying that the relative speed will be different, but the relative position will be if they are not emitted simultaneously. That relative position won't change within any single frame, but it won't necessarily be the same in every frame, and so you could conceivably construct a frame where the relative distance between the photons is greater than the distance between the photons and their destination, leading to one photon arriving before the other is emitted in that frame. The relative speed will, obviously, be the same but the order of events would not be. Of course, this only make sense as long as they have both different start and end points.

Maybe he didn't.

I didn't actually claim that religion needed a god, but you've made much more expansive claims about what qualifies as a religion than just "it doesn't necessarily need a god." In the context of "everyone has their own personal religion" it is effectively a synonym for "worldview." Not everyone who doesn't believe in a god subscribes to an organized belief system like Buddhism. Obviously, most people share most of their beliefs about the world with at least one other person, but religions tend to be large sets of beliefs encompassing many aspects of reality: what it is, why we're here, how we should live, etc. A religion tends to cover all or most of these subjects and its adherents will thus generally share the same beliefs across multiple categories. Once you drop away from organized religion, where people get their answers varies wildly as they draw them from different sources. So two people who agree on the nature of the world may not agree on how to live in it and vice versa. If you're grouping all of these beliefs together and calling them a person's religion, even if they don't share their full set of beliefs with any other single person, you are effectively using the word religion to mean worldview. In which case, sure, everyone has one of those. I think it leaves a rather large gap in the language in terms of describing large, organized worldviews if we strip the word religion down to that particular definition, though.

All massless particles travel at c; Not all massless particles are photons. There are also gluons and, potentially, gravitons as changes in gravity also propagate at c.

I think he's using it as a synonym for "worldview."

A dictator could force you to have a smartphone and keep it on you at all times.

So are smartphones opposed by religions the world over? Because I could see payment options moving in that direction over the next decade. Or heck, credit cards. Are those going to spark a religious war?

Alchemy basically is proto-chemistry, though. A lot of the modern science of chemistry grew out of work that was done by alchemists. Granted, most of what they believed was nonsense, but when you play around with chemicals as much as they did, you do wind up discovering some things about how they work.

That is not what falsifiable means. Falsifiable means that I can conceive of a test that could, feasibly, produce results that would prove the theory wrong, if it is, in fact, incorrect. Falsifiable does not mean that theory is wrong and can therefore be proven wrong. You can have a theory that is both falsifiable and 100% correct. In that case, it is falsifiable but will not be falsified. The logical conclusion of what you just said is that only theories that are false are scientific. Any theory which is correct is unscientific. Therefore, science must be wrong or it isn't science. You are equating "falsifiable" with "false" and this is incorrect. Something must only be capable of being proven false in principle to be falsifiable. It does not have to be able to be proven false in reality to be falsifiable (as in the case where it is correct). "I have 5 toes on my left foot" is falsifiable. I can count the toes on my left foot and see whether there are 5. It happens that there are, so it is not falsified by my count, but it is still a falsifiable statement. If I had other than 5 toes, I have a rest that would demonstrate that statement as false. "I have a 6th toe on my left foot that cannot be detected by any means" is not a falsifiable statement. If there is no way to detect the toe, there is no test I could conduct to demonstrate that it is or is not there. There is no way to falsify that statement. It is (probably) false, but it is not falsifiable.

That's like a particle of death right?

It's quite simple, really. You strip down the governments ability to interfere in your business and then deputize citizens to enforce the laws that prevent other people from doing things that are immoral. Without big government getting in the way of our well regulated militias, everything would sort itself out in short order. Just like how government shackles the invisible hand of the free market, preventing it from making our economy run more efficiently.

I don't know where this idea that you can't measure velocities faster than an input comes from. For instance, if I have a supersonic jet and I where it is starting from, I can use a gunshot (or some other loud sound) that goes off when the jet starts to determine its average speed between it's starting point and when it passed me, even if it is moving faster than the speed of sound. The jet might pass me before I hear the signal indicating that it has started, but knowing how far away it was, I know how long it took that sound to reach me, so I can determine when it must have gone off and therefore what the difference in time between the jet starting and reaching me must have been. In this way I can use an input much slower than what is being measured to detect the speed something moving much faster. Similarly, I could easily use light to measure the speed of something moving faster than c. It wouldn't even require any sort of convoluted set up. I could see where the object was at time A, check where it was at time B and then see how much ground it covered in that interval. If it went farther than light would have gone in the same period, it's moving faster than c.

Incidentally, on most forums IRC is more likely to refer to Internet Relay Chat than the charitable organization.

Yes. Most of the good ones have their own proprietary map that includes a lot of metadata about all of the streets. Then you need good path finding algorithms that make effective use of all that data. A few, like google maps (especially after buying up and incorporating Waze), crowd source real time data so that you can see where traffic is building up on a route, where there is an accident or construction and the probable time a given route will take in light of those things, with the option to choose among routes or even dynamically rerouting you in the middle of your trip if the path you're on has a traffic build up that makes an alternative route better. How to weight information like that, make those decisions and even things like finding the shortest route vs finding a slightly longer but more easily navigable route are all down to the programming that the receiver contains. Relativity is required to obtain information about your position on Earth, everything the GPS does after that is down to human engineering and programming, and that opens a lot of doors to excel or crash and burn (hopefully not literally).

I've given up being surprised when Ann Coulter says anything angry and nuts, but even still, I wasn't expecting that rant. I realize her job is to be a troll that attacks anything new and different, but soccer is really not a "left-wing" thing, and I'm pretty sure I can use this article to some effect on a few "leans Republican" friends who are basically soccer hooligans. The problem with politicizing literally everything is that eventually you put yourself on the wrong side of some otherwise innocuous crap from people who would otherwise support you and wind up alienating them. Especially in the current GOP environment of "If you don't exactly share every one of my positions on every issue, you're against me." They really have become the party of "everyone should share my opinion on everything."

What we really need is a trade school to start training electoricians so someone can fix America's broken electoral system.

A couple of points: in colloquial usage, the word "theory" is used more or less interchangeably with the word "idea." In science, a theory is something very specific; it is a mathematical model that describes some behavior. If your theory is not that, then you are most likely using the common definition of the word theory and not the scientific one, which means that it's not a scientific theory. Scientists tend to get annoyed and bristly when they hear things like "it's just a theory." It's not because they are naturally angry people out to insult you. It's because in science, a theory is not a guess. A theory is a very rigorous, well tested, highly specific, experimentally verified explanation of how something works. When I talk about the Theory of Gravity, I'm not talking about our best guess at what gravity is. I'm instead talking about a set of formulas that will allow me to very precisely predict the behavior of object in a gravity field. "Gravity pulls things down" is not a scientific theory. "The Earth's gravity accelerates objects toward its center of mass at 9.8 m/s/s" is more in the ballpark, although really we'd be talking about a set of formulas that would allow you to predict the motion of any object in any gravity field given information on the masses, distances and initial velocities of any objects involved. Similarly, a scientific Theory of Everything had a very specific meaning. It is not an idea that explains what everything is. It is a formula or set of formulas that will allow you (hypothetically) to accurately calculate the behavior of anything given enough information about it and, of course, the time/computational power. Between General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics, we actually come pretty close to that. There are still some problems that persist, however, especially when it comes to areas of overlap between the two theories where one or both tend to be inadequate on their own and their incompatibility becomes an issue. Of course, it would be much too complicated to fully model certain complex systems (such as the workings of the human body) using solely quantum mechanics, but theoretically you could given enough time. When one refers to the Theory of Everything, this is what is meant, the ability to accurately model the behavior of anything in the universe. If it does not allow you to make those kinds of calculations, it is not what scientists think of when they talk about a Theory of Everything and they will most likely become agitated when you describe something which is not that as a Theory of Everything.

Doesn't obesity affect fertility and sex drive, though? So people may not (typically) be dropping dead before the age that they'd reproduce, but they may be somewhat less likely to have children than someone who metabolizes the crappy diet better. And even if the adverse health effects are more likely to show up later in life, that doesn't mean they never start early. Even a slight decrease in reproductive fitness will have some impact. It's just that this probably won't be a particularly strong pressure, so any evolutionary changes resulting from it are likely to take quite a long time to manifest on a population level.