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bascule

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Everything posted by bascule

  1. We don't know what happened before the big bang. About as far as we can attempt to model is one Planck time after the big bang supposedly occured. There are several hypotheses as to what happened, many of which suppose an early universe prior to the big bang, most notably inflation which would assume that a random alignment in inflaton infused space created a massive expansion of 3 spatial dimensions
  2. bascule

    best system

    The system is trying for balance, and I think all we'll see now are hybrid models with varying degrees of socialism vs. capitalism. If you start deviating away towards pure socialism or Laissez Faire capitalism you will begin angering/alienating a growing sector of the population.
  3. bascule

    Puzzled

    What you see is time relative to the ship condensed into time from your frame of reference. In the ship's frame of reference, nothing is askew, but for you the whole ten light seconds of its voyage is condensed into one in a massive blue shift. The ship would not appear to exceed the speed of light, it would appear to travelling .9c, but from your frame of reference that's rather fast.
  4. In a background independent theory, time should be irrelevant, or perhaps more specifically an effect of a more fundamental underlying structure.
  5. Here's a quick quote from my good buddy Terrence McKenna: "Hemlines are rising and falling in resonance with the rise and fall of ancient empires, and these things are as causally linked as the earth's orbit is to the sun"
  6. The magnetic field of the sun recently flipped in 2001, and is due to do so again in 2012
  7. Well, given Planck's Constant... [math]h = 6.626068 * 10^{-34} J s[/math] and the formula... [math]E = h * v[/math] where v is the photon's frequency, then given a photon of visible light with a frequency of [math]7.5 * 10^{14} Hz[/math], we can calculate its relativistic mass as follows... [math]7.5 * 10^{14} Hz * 6.626068 * 10^{-34} J s = 4.969551 * 10^{-19} J[/math] and then use [math]E = mc^2[/math], or more specifically, [math]m = E/c^2[/math] to calculate its relativistic mass, which is approximately [math]3.1 eV / c^2[/math] or perhaps more generally, you can solve for the relativistic mass of a photon as: [math]m = h*v/c^2[/math] Unless, of course, I'm terribly confused, which is entirely possible...
  8. Then there's the G Block on the FOX Report which reports how well American Idol did the previous day. FOX - You'll hear about our programming one way or another!
  9. A massless spin 2 particle, or in string theory a certain species of closed string which is not bound to our D-p-brane and can freely move in other dimensions, making it virtually impossible to detect.
  10. The bottom line is this: it takes a very large lifter to lift anything of considerable mass. Only once (really wish I could find a link now) have I seen one large/dense enough to lift its own power supply/transformers, and that was something like 50 feet across and could only fly very briefly (5 minutes or so, I believe?) on an entire car battery's worth of juice. And sadly, its only payload was a battery and a transformer. Every other lifter I've seen has been tethered by wires to a transformer/power source on the ground. These things are thoroughly impractical for anything which overlaps with the problem domain of airplanes, which is why no one has ever bothered to commercialize them. Airplanes are simply the most practical approach to this problem domain. This is a role which I think will be filled by carrier planes like the "White Knight" which carried SpaceShipOne up to an altitude of 50,000 feet.
  11. I see substantially more potential in the space plane approach being pioneered by Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites. Airplanes are a tried and tested technology, and substantially more efficient than the ballistic missile approach pioneered by NASA which is basically a throwback to the German V2, whereas despite over a half decade of research into lifter technology since it was first pioneered by antigravity crackpot Thomas Townsend Brown, it has yet to materialize into anything more practically useful than Ionic Breeze air filters, which, if you read another thread on these forums, aren't all they're cracked up to be. Now this is what I thought was really cool... Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2): http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/propulsion.html
  12. String theory says the reason things behave differently at smaller scales is because the 5 (or 6) extra compactified dimensions string theory predicts have a substantially higher impact on particle behavior as you approach their size, which as yet hasn't been accurately estimated by the theory but you can think of it as approximately where QM behavior starts kicking in. Thanks to inflation 3 dimensions would up inordinately larger than the other 5/6, so on large scales their impact can be largely ignored, but on small scales they have a significant impact on particle behavior. Of course, there's no direct evidence of their existence yet. Hopefully the LHC will do something to change that
  13. Capitalism is a game: the winners get rewarded with decadent luxury; the losers get punished by living in destitute poverty. Now if only people would wake up and realize that we shouldn't be playing a game with other people's lives...
  14. How about if we linked to them with something disparaging like crazy crackpot bullshit pseudoscience raving lunatic discredited fraud theory?
  15. No, it's not. Most evidence today paints a picture of an infinite flat universe, although it's possible it's sphere shaped with positive curvature or saddle shaped with negative curvature. Because the big bang was an explosion OF space, not an explosion IN space.
  16. Not that I was even talking about GR, but... String theory provides substantially more compatibility with general relativity than quantum because its primitives (strings) have a spatial extent whose effects GR can be used to model, as opposed to the zero dimensional point particles of the standard model.
  17. Which obviously means I was talking about an active one...
  18. And look, he's a former Hitler Youth: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1080732.cms POPE BENEDICT XVI, the Enforcer, the Panzer Pope, God's Rottweiler!
  19. Okay, that was probably a bit hard for people to pick through, so here's an easier way to sum up the question: Has time reversal symmetry been broken? To save yourself some time googling, here are some experiments that claim to have broken time reversal symmetry: http://lfw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=ARCHI&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=199245 http://www.answers.com/topic/t-symmetry (violation of CP-symmetry in kaon decay) http://arxiv.org/abs/chao-dyn/9909005 A fundamentally unresolved asymmetry in time would very much not mesh well with my intuition about the structure of the universe... but a T-symmetry violation is what a lot of people want to pin the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe...
  20. Can you point to a non-speculative theory of quantum gravity? We have experimentally measured the exceptional weakness of gravity relative to the electromagnetic force, and this is something any theory of quantum gravity must be able to explain. M-theory certainly explains this with the dilution of gravity across multiple D-p-branes. So far I'm not seeing any kind of explanation in this photonic hypothesis...
  21. You might want to refrain from repeated use of a transition to start multiple paragraphs as you have done with "As such". Your writing is taking on the characteristics of Joseph Smith's with his overusage of "And it came to pass" I'm not sure what exactly you're contending here, but it seems something similar to Descarte's use of the pineal gland as a sort of gateway into a transcendental realm where the soul resides, and our body is merely a puppet dancing upon the transcendental strings of our soul. However, the best biomedical research we have available paints a materialist picture of consciousness, and altering the brain's electrochemical balance seems to have profound and direct effects on consciousness itself.
  22. In the cyclical cosmology hypothesized within the framework of M-theory time is still highly asymmetrical. I was wondering if time reversal symmetry had truly shown to be broken experimentally or if there could exist reflection points around which time itself is symmetrical, creating a cyclical cosmology with perfect symmetry in all dimensions.
  23. Umm, you're the one claiming photons mediate the gravitational force, which is itself total nonsense. Quantum models predict the graviton is a massless spin 2 particle. String theory predicts that all particles in the standard model are open and thus bound to a D-p-brane, whereas the graviton is not, it's a closed string that manifests itself as a massless spin 2 particle. And somehow you picked up on the significance of my question... then completely ignored it. The string theory explanation is simple: the other three forces are comprised of open strings bound to a D-p-brane, and so their spread is contained, whereas gravitons are closed and are thus diluted across all dimensions. What is your explanation given the ridiculous assertion that the photon mediates gravity? Your assertion seems to be based on little more than that the propagation of gravity is bound by c, when in reality the speed of all massless particles is bound by c...
  24. Probabilistic behavior is engrained into quantum mechanics at the most fundamental level, namely through the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Scrodinger Wave Equation. However I (and string/M-theory) blame this on our rather limited 4 dimensional perspective of observation... as events transpire on a level which closes in on the size of the extra compactified dimensions, their significance in events rises rapidly, and particles in other dimensions begin interacting with single particles from ours, when a collision with a particle from our everyday 4 dimensional space would destroy such interactions. In an experiment like the double slit experiment, when an interference pattern is observed even if only an electron/photon every few seconds is fired, the culprit may indeed be interference with entangled extradimensional particles, rather than the (somewhat contrived) quantum explanation of "interfering probability waves." So they universe may yet prove deterministic, and the probabilistic nature of quantum may merely prove to be a lack of (fundamentally unobtainable) information. Personally I still espouse causal determinism.
  25. Yes, it works, just like an airplane, as long as there is air to displace to bear the weight of what you're lifting, they'll lift just fine. However there's nothing mystical or unexplained about them. Behold the wonders of air pressure.
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