Xyph

But within stars there is also huge and sustained temperature and pressure. If fusion is self sustaining and only dependant on the amount of fuel present once its begun, then why do stars not have far longer lifetimes than they do? There seems no reason why stellar fusion shouldn't continue well into the outer layers of stars, if this is the case, instead of moving on to the fusion of heavier and heavier elements as the core hydrogen runs out.

So, there's still movement going on. But with the lack of a temporal dimension, movement through where? How would you define the contemporary idea of time?

I'm fairly certain only chemical reactions can be self-sustaining. If nuclear fusion was self-sustaining, I suspect all our energy would be coming from fusion reactors by now.

That sounds like a description of increasing entropy to me. You still need a time dimension for the change to occur in, though... If everything possesses a set amount of "time potential", but there's no time dimension, then the amount of time potential/entropy will never change.

I'm not sure if this is what you're asking, but I've heard that the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies usually go through cycles of feeding and dormancy. This happens because the black hole will accumulate a huge accretion disk around it, constantly adding to its mass, and, therefore, adding to its gravitational pull and accelerating the movement of the accretion disk around it further. Eventually, the outer layers of the accretion disk will be spinning fast enough to escape the black hole's gravity and be cast outwards. The black hole finishes consuming the inner layers that didn't escape, then lies dormant while the outer layers of the disk gradually lose momentum. Eventually, the outer layers will be moving slowly enough for the black hole to draw them in, and the cycle starts again.

We can't see space. We can see it indirectly through the absence of photons and matter, but we can also see time indirectly through watching things change.

I think defining time as some sort of energy which can be "used up" in the same way as kinetic or potential energy just complicates things. If the amount of "time energy" something has is changing, then it has to be changing over time. It seems to me you still need a way for this time energy to change, otherwise it will stay constant, and you'll have no time. If it does change, on the other hand, then you'll need time for this change in time energy change to occur. Edit: Having read a bit more of the thread, perhaps the phrase "time energy" in the above paragraph should be replaced with "time potential", although I don't really see what difference it makes. Leaving time defined as a dimension seems a lot simpler.

There's no need to turn to String Theory for an explanation of consciousness. It can be explained, for the most part, by what we know now. Or, at least, it could, if people weren't so collectively insistent on placing themselves somehow 'above' everything else.

Unless I've misunderstood what you're saying... You can't get something to orbit an object that's in a geostationary orbit around the Earth... The Earth would have a hugely destablizing influence, and it's likely that this lift would just crash into the Earth, tearing the geostationary object it's tethered to out of orbit as it went, rather than continue to swing out to space and back again in a stable manner. Also, even if you did manage to have something rotating around a point in geostationary orbit, you're not going to be able to have it matching the speed of the rotation of the Earth, because the Earth, from the perspective of the geostationary orbit, won't be rotating... So if you wanted to supply 1g of gravity to the interior of this spinning thing, it would be whirling through the atmosphere at near 20km/s - stepping onto it wouldn't be very safe, to say the least, but probably no-one would even get the chance to do that since it would almost certainly burn up very quickly. The gravity would also vary greatly, since if you wanted to supply 1g to the inside surface, you'd end up with 2g at the point that touched the Earth because the centripetal acceleration would be added to the Earth's gravity. Yes, most likely. If it's center of gravity is at the geostationary orbital height, and it's made of rigid materials, I suppose there's a chance it wouldn't... But the stress on such an object would probably be far too much, so even if it didn't tear itself out of the ground it might well just tear itself apart or snap.

For this ringstation to have one g on the surface facing the Earth, the centripetal acceleration would have to equal the gravitational acceleration, plus 1g acceleration (~9.81ms^-2), so... [math]\frac{4\pi^2r}{T^2} = \frac{Gm}{r^2}+9.81[/math] Errr... Hm, I'm too tired to rearrange that properly now, but I'm pretty sure if you work out r from that (T=86400 (the time for one revolution in seconds), G=6.673*10^-11 (Gravitational constant), m=5.9742*10^24 (mass of the Earth)), then subtract the radius of the Earth from it (6378100 metres, according to Google), you'd get, in metres, the distance from the surface of the Earth to which this anchored planet-girdling space station would reach. You'd then have 1g of gravity on the inside of the space station. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to get a ring to orbit something, but it will be much further out than the geostationary height anyway because if it was at that point the interior would be a 0g environment. As it is, the ring will still be extremely unstable and you'll either need to dynamically stabilize it (with thrusters, and such) or anchor it to the surface with (probably) unrealistically strong materials. That said, the ring will probably need to be made of unrealistically strong materials just to hold itself together.

Hahaha, that's great. I do actually think about that sometimes, though. It just seems that people who are so obviously wrong (and, more importantly, could so easily show themselves that they are wrong!) could, in fact, just be attempting to deceive others because they see themselves as being on a mission from God, or somesuch... Of course, I realise that this probably isn't the case the vast majority of the time, but I still wonder occasionally.

No, he would just see a single slice of the sphere as it passed through his 2D universe. As the sphere passed through his 2D universe in front of this 2D man, it'd be like a glass point appearing from nowhere, expanding to a glass circle, then shrinking again to a point and disappearing. So, by analogy, if a glass hypersphere was passing though our 3D universe, we'd see a glass sphere expand from a point, then contract again. In String Theory, as far as I understand it, gravitons "leaking" from other branes could provide an explanation for dark matter. Or dark energy. I forget which, although I'd think the latter. There's no way to prove that this is actually the case though, and that dark matter doesn't just exist as dark matter in the literal sense in this universe.

Disregarding all the usual problems inherent in matter teleportation (uncertainty principle, unrealistic energy requirements, etc, etc), you could maybe deconstruct something atom by atom, convert the resulting atoms to photons, beam them at light speed to their destination, convert them back into atoms, and reconstruct the original object, but that doesn't seem remotely practical.

I'm pretty sure the expansion of space is what gives the receding objects their relative velocities in the first place.

Where in that link does it say anything about travelling faster than light?

All the factors that make Mercury unsuitable for the evolution of life notwithstanding, it's safe to assume that Mercurians, if they existed, would be comfortable with their day length. That doesn't mean it would be an exact correlation, though. Animals on Earth go through very different sleep cycles, for example, and presumably all experience the passing of time at a different rate as well - flies, for example, have lives that last much longer from their perspective than the few days they seem to us. The apparent rate of time's passing varies even within individual humans, too, so you wouldn't get a replica of Earth with the only difference being longer days, but you would get Mercurians adapted to such long days and experiencing the passing of time in whichever way worked best for them.

[math]2log_{\phi}\pi - \pi = \phi[/math] Yeah, it's not the same x, I was just using it as an example of how x is always going to equal some function of pi and phi.

x is always going to be defined by phi and pi, since they're both irrational numbers, so whatever you do you'll just end up saying something like... [imath]\frac{\pi}{\phi} = x[/imath] [math]x\phi = \pi[/math] ...which is obvious anyway.

Not possible. It would take infinite energy. Plus I don't think we can yet observe the sort of black holes massive enough to whirl whole stars around them at speeds approaching c. At least, not with enough detail to watch something like this happening (assuming it was actually happening at slightly less than c).

You could try drowning it out with other (real) music, then, after a while, see if it's gone away. Failing that, I've heard that forcefully replacing such repeating thought patterns with something else (that hopefully won't be so persistent) can sometimes help, although I've been lucky enough never to have to test this personally.

Oh, hm, maybe there is a physical aspect to it then. Apparently it takes about a month (if I remember correctly) for habits to be ingrained/removed, though, so maybe you just need to not do it for longer? Of course, if it's not an inconvenience (and it doesn't sound like it is at all) it's probably not worth the effort of removing the habit.

Why not just simplify it further and say [math]x\phi = \pi[/math], so [math]x = \frac{\pi}{\phi}[/math]? I don't see what you're trying to do. What's special about [math]\phi^{(\frac{\pi + \phi}{x})}[/math] that you're picking it over a simpler operation? There's always going to be some way to get from one number to another, so an equation that gets [math]\pi[/math] from [math]\phi[/math] with the aid of an arbitrary process and another irrational number isn't proof of anything.

If you wouldn't buy it for the full price anyway, it's not like any profit is being lost from you downloading it. I doubt there'd be that much extra profit made from your application to get a shared license of some kind from your school either. There's really very little chance of getting caught, if that would be a factor in your decision... It's not a physical product. Although I agree there might be some ethical ambiguity here, if it's the choice between no copy and a downloaded copy, I don't see any problem with choosing the latter. I would do it.

I don't see what the incentive would be for people to pick this over piracy, to be honest. That said, iTunes seems to have become popular, so this probably will be as well.

Probably quite a few of them are.