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Strange

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Everything posted by Strange

  1. What properties does it have, and how do you measure them?
  2. Light will orbit a black hole at the right distance. The trouble is, if it is close enough to do that, then it is too close to ever leave and it will continue in its orbit (which probably isn't stable and so it will enter the black hole). I suppose this would be the extreme example of Shapiro delay.
  3. You could have a single sex, where any two individuals can exchange gametes. You could have three sexes where a contribution is needed from all three to form viable offspring. You could have N sexes where a contribution is needed from all N to form viable offspring. I'm not sure how you would make the N > 2 scenario work with the existing structure of DNA.
  4. With this level of ... [i don't know what it is: denialism?] ... is it about time to close this thread. Clearly some people are just not equipped to understand the world around them, no matter how clearly and simply it is explained. Another 400 posts are not going to change that.
  5. In this case. It can also be a small force applied for a long time. I wonder if reading the definition of impulse will help tar get to grips with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_%28physics%29
  6. The simplest open source licenses are probably the MIT and BSD ones: http://opensource.org/licenses You can have a general statement along the lines you suggest ("take this code and do whatever you want with it, I don't care") and then include the license terms under a heading called "Tedious Details" or similar. There are a few pieces of open source software out there which have explicit statements that their owners are placing them in the public domain. (Despite the caveats noted in swansont's link earlier.)
  7. I fail to see how it could be much simpler than it is. (I am just baffled that this, and related threads, have gone on for many hundreds of posts, with you and Rob failing to grasp even the simplest concepts.)
  8. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tide.html#mstid That was supposed to be in my previous post. It answers the question: Why is the moon the dominant tidal influence? (but swansont has already answered that.)
  9. Not if you work out the tidal forces correctly.
  10. So clearly I should have read more: evidence has been posted that demonstrates you are wrong, and yet you are maintaining the same position. How does that work?
  11. I haven't read every post. (But I suspect that, like most of your threads, the same arguments are made repeatedly ... ) Does that matter? I haven't seen any evidence for your claim that "the atmosphere of the Sun reduces most objects to molecules which are then blown away in the Solar Wind".
  12. Fair comment: I suppose I meant "have never" rather than "are never". But that is still a possible answer to the question, which was in the present tense: i.e. what we have done so far.
  13. As the Earth still has an atmosphere this provides no support at all for the claim that "the atmosphere of the Sun reduces most objects to molecules which are then blown away in the Solar Wind".
  14. Or not ... That made me laugh.
  15. I don't know what this is supposed to mean, either. But one possible answer is no; there is probably a lot of work done in mathematics, and theorems proven, which are never referred to again. So those "tools" are never used.
  16. That is a pretty impressive experiment.
  17. No one could see what happened inside the event horizon, so approaching the singularity is not observable.
  18. And yet you still haven't been able to provide an example.
  19. That is just as untrue as the original version. It is also completely unquantified ("close to zero", "minimum level") and therefore meaningless in a scientific sense.
  20. That's a pretty big strawman you have there. I'm impressed. However, as it has nothing to do with the theory of relativity, and little to do with science, I don't think you should be booking any flights to Sweden. It is generally a good idea to learn a little about the subject you are going to criticise before embarrassing yourself in public.
  21. As studiot says, the integers can be used to count things so in that sense map onto the physical world in a straightforward way. Some of their properties and the operations on them can be easily understood in similar terms (e.g. basic arithmetic operations). But you soon get to properties and operations that don't have a simple relationship to the real world (e.g. primality, exponentiation). But the natural numbers can also be defined in purely abstract mathematical terms based on a couple of set theoretic axioms. In which case, their relationship to the real world appears more coincidental. Perhaps more relevantly to this thread, English also distinguishes between countable and non-countable nouns. (Interestingly, Japanese has two sets of words for small integers: one set treats nouns as countable and the other set treats them as non-countable.)
  22. Any evidence or data to support this?
  23. Yep, I would say refinements in our understanding of what the theory says will happen, and the development of some seriously impressive experimental techniques to test them.
  24. Much mathematics is developed without any relation to physics or physical reality. Some of it may turn out to be useful to describe the world, some probably wont.
  25. Strange

    Sharing ideas

    As the page you link to notes, this method is not even worth the price of the stamp. If you were really bothered (and you live in one of the countries that doesn't have a copyright registry - which is statistically likely) then you could get a copy notarized. It might also be that there isn't much (commercial) value in stealing a scientific idea. On the other hand, technological ideas are often stolen (or attempted to be stolen) for commercial gain.
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