bascule

I like two. Symmetry. Paired opposites. There can never be unification because for everything there is an equally significant paired opposite.

<ot> If there's one thing people stab in Carl Sagan's back it's the fact that he smoked marijuana </ot>

You seem to be asking a "if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound" type question. The detectors can still be present but disabled. When they are disabled the interference pattern still appears. Only when they are "switched on" and thus are detecting the "which path" information is the interference pattern destroyed. It doesn't matter if anything is actually there to observe the information being garnered... as long as the information is being garnered the interference pattern will be destroyed. The presence of an actual human is irrelevant.

However that's a systemic effect across the entire universe (caused by inflation?) and not caused by any other influencing location-specific factors

Short answer: no. Light always goes c.

Well, perhaps your focus should be more upon legitimate scientific use of Internet2...

Planck length is the distance light travels in one Planck time. I don't think there's anything profound or striking about that.

It was also edited by Marcia Lucas, who also edited the original Star Wars. Lucas can't edit a movie worth beans.

Intertia is the telltale sign of rotational motion. If "empty space" is truly permeated with a "Higgs ocean" which resists change in velocity, then if you were an astronaut lying against the wall of a cylinder spinning in an otherwise empty universe, you would still feel the inertial effects of "centrifugal force" pinning you against the wall as the cylinder spins (within the absolute spacetime metric, or relative to the "Higgs ocean" if you prefer to think of it that way) Wow, did I just say it was both absolute and relative? I think we'll have to wait for the LHC to observe the Higgs boson to really find out...

Someone on another forum suggested that spontaneous collapse of the probability wave would render the device unusable. I say this is false. For example, consider the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment where the "which path" information is erased 50% of the time. The photon stream traces out the combination of the presence and absence of an interference pattern: Compare to when which path information is always taken and the interference pattern is completely destroyed: The consequence of this is that you have to look at statistical trends of millions or perhaps billions of photons to reliably discern between the two, so countless photons are required to send just a single "bit". However this approach does provide redundancy and reliable transmission even in the wake of spontaneous probability wave collapse.

I would say the general trend of all human thinking is a movement to solve all of human knowledge as a singular, unified system. As the persistency and communicability of knowledge increases, the rate at which we approach a singular, unified system increases.

Awful. Boring. Hackneyed. Formulaic. But occasionally interesting. However, in my opinion, George Lucas should be forbidden from writing a screenplay ever again

Represented by numbers and the control logic for a Turing-complete state transition engine (which is inherently discrete and deterministic) It's more akin to Conway's Life, which is a Turing-complete state transition engine. Everything in Life can be represented as binary sequences, but the sequences are essentially meaningless unless the state transition engine runs. I didn't mean to actually say that the universe "runs" on a Universal Turing Machine; what I really meant to say was that the underlying state transition engine is Turing-complete, i.e. you can use it to emulate a Universal Turing Machine. As an example here is Life being used to emulate a Universal Turing Machine: http://rendell.server.org.uk/gol/turing_js_r.gif This all fundamentally stems from my desire not to give up my common sense view of time as being either 'now' (the current state of the transition engine), 'past' (a state the transition engine has already been through), or 'future' (a state the transition engine must eventually be in due to the deterministic nature of its operation). It seems to me this has to hold true if reality is truly causally deterministic, i.e. all events in frame n of the state transition engine are causes of all events in frame n+1, which are effects of the causes in the previous frame. In a discrete causally deterministic universe there must be a minimum level of granularity in the flow of time, and therefore 'now' is very real. If my understanding is correct, loop quantum gravity is both deterministic (i.e. non-probabilistic) and discrete.

Yes! I have been saying this for years. Godel's proof works within the realm of math which in turn is constructed upon a set of underlying axioms. Thus Godel's incompleteness theorem only holds true for systems of mathematics which obey that underlying set of postulates. Godel himself wrote extensively on the subject and his main argument seemed to be the insistance that because his proof holds true for our set of axioms then it still disproves it for whatever higher level system our mathematics is a subset of. He had a great deal of reasoning behind that assertion, but personally I think it's all bullshit.

Rotation is possible within the absolute spacetime metric. Something spinning in an otherwise empty universe is still spinning, regardless of if there's any non-spinning matter to compare to. As interesting as Mach's ideas were, they were wrong.

Greatest? That's kinda arbitrary. I'm gonna pick the guy I'd like to hang out with the most, Brian Greene. Hell yeah!

I'm fairly convinced this can't work for whatever reason, and what I'm really looking for is why...

The bottom half provides a second entangled beam which can interfere with the first. So long as an observer at A doesn't turn on the "WPD", the probability waves passing through the device from B to C should interfere with each other, creating an interference pattern. When the "WPD" is switched on, the pattern should be destroyed.

My vote goes to condensation on the lens

Well, this is the first hit on Google, an article by an M.D. who teaches at Harvard on a site that contains "Medical Content Reviewed By Harvard Medical School," so I think it's a fairly reliable source: http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH/WSIHW000/35320/35321/378037.html?d=dmtHMSContent

You desire a Machian universe. Mach's ideas greatly influenced Einstein in his creation of General Relativity, however Einstein later rejected them and insisted that spacetime itself was absolute.

There's definitely a biological component to it. The inordinately preferred proportions for a female are when bustline is approximately equal to hemline and the waist is 7/10ths of the other two. For example, the classic 36-24-36 yields 2/3, or .666... which is approximately .7 I really wish I had a source on this... it was something I saw on PBS probably a good 10 years ago or so. Maybe I can dig one up with Google. As for an evolved genetic response to big breasts... that seems stupid... what's the advantage? As I recall the size of breasts has little to no effect on milk production, so...

"Absolute stationary" is basically defined by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) reference frame which permeates the universe equally in all directions... the time dilation of our motion relative to the CMB reference frame (determined because it's slightly doppler shifted) is taken into account when calculating the age of the universe via the CMB (and since we are in motion relative to it, our [i.e. the Milky Way Galaxy's] perception of the age of the universe is slightly less than the actual value)

Perhaps this will make it clearer still:

If we live in a discrete universe governed by causal determinism then then universe itself can "run" on a Universal Turing Machine and "now" would merely be the current iterative frame of some underlying state transition engine. I believe such a model of the universe is hypothesized in the form of loop quantum gravity