Daecon

I didn't mean it quite like that, but I'm probably using an inaccurate idea of the exact definition of a black hole.

If time dilation is effectively infinite past the event horizon, would that imply that once a body has collapsed past its Schwarzschild radius it could be seen as effectively frozen in time - and therefore once past that threshold it will never have time to collapse further and become a singularity because of the infinite time dilation? Ah, that sounded a lot less garbled in my head.

It's already been explained a few times now why people "intuitively" think the chance is 50:50 when it isn't. If you have a different perspective then why don't you present your viewpoint instead of asking us to guess, or dismissing our other responses?

Yes it does. Why do you think it doesn't?

Think of it this way: I have two cards, an Ace and a 2. I shuffle them and lay them face down, and ask you to choose which one is the Ace. You have a 50:50 chance of guessing correctly, right? Now, after you've made your decision, I deal eight more cards face down next to the first two. Does your chance of having already guessed the Ace go down to 1:10 or does it stay as 50:50? Likewise, if I first shuffle and deal ten cards, and then ask you to guess the Ace, your chance of guessing correctly starts at 1:10. I then remove eight of the non-Ace cards. Your chance of having already guessed the Ace don't increase to 50:50 just because the situation has changed, it stays the way it was when you first made your decision, at 1:10. It's the same principle with three doors instead of ten cards, your original chance was 1:3, so it stays that way even if one of the doors is opened. People disregard that and just see the two doors, and so think "Oh, it must be 50:50 now."

You must have had too much alcohol, I think. There were no sequels. You must have hallucinated both of them. If there were two, of course, but there weren't.

Fascinating stuff, although I do wonder if newer members would benefit from having a couple of paragraphs from the BBC News website quoted, so that they know what the link will be telling them about?

So... Do you want us to give you our answer as to why the incorrect answer seems intuitive, or to guess whatever answer you're thinking of?

Your attitude does seem to imply that you have a vested, personal interest in that specific book getting exposure.

As long as people don't use the non-science forums to preach or proselytize, push racism/homophobia/etc, or peddle woowoo with a blatant contempt for critical thinking, I don't really see any problems.

If they were all part of a single spectrum, where would transgender homosexuals fall on this scale?

Does it not give you an option to select "Content I have not read" under the "By time period" selection?

It raises suspicion when a new poster joins a web forum, and one of the first things they talk about is another website.

Where did you conjour up that number from?

Thanks for that, a couple of new things for me to read up about. Other than the Grandfather paradox, another paradox that has always caught my imagination is the Bootstrap paradox, where some information is received from the future, and then later on that same information is what's sent back in time. The paradox being the origin of that information.

I can't copy/paste text on my Vita, but NASA's website has an interesting article from 2001 on creatures discovered living by a hydrothermal vent, if you do a Google (or whichever) search for NASA and hydrothermal vent life, the title of the piece is "Life as we didn't know it".

I think a big distinction is between discovery and invention. Discovering that atoms can be used to make bombs, or that oil can be used as a fuel source, etc. is different to inventing a way to achieve those objectives. Critics of scientific progress seem to confuse the two and blame scientific discovery for bringing about bad things like nukes and pollution.

People create life all the time, even sometimes by accident. If you're referring to the ethics of manufacturing a fully self aware, sapient and sentient artificial intelligence, then that's a whole world of cans of worms.

I see. I also just realised that there's a difference between a closed system and an isolated one (thanks Wikipedia), I should have referred to the Universe as an isolated system instead, shouldn't I?

Wouldn't time travel violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics? With the Universe as a closed system, wouldn't sending matter and energy back through time cause jumps and dips in the total amount of entropy in the Universe?

So... does that mean you're suggesting that gravitational potential energy is converting into virtual particle/anti-particle pairs?

If they can't be exploited for profit, they'll be treated like black gay mexicans.

There's a difference between thinking outside the box and ignoring the box.

Rome? What in the world are you going on about?

Why are you wanting to have the text of one specific religion be allowable as "evidence" but not the texts of every other religion? That's bias at best, hypocrisy at worst.