Janus

For you, The distance between Earth and Sun would have contracted to zero, which is why you deem it to take no time. For someone watching you from the Earth, it takes 8 mins by their watch, but your watch remains frozen at 0 for the entire trip. Now, it is also true, that for you, no time would would pass on the Earth clock either. However there is a third effect in Relativity, known as the Relativity of Simultaneity. To explain this, imagine that there is a clock at the Sun also, and that according to the Earth observer, this clock reads the same time as his own. According to you, this clock will read 8 min behind the clock at Earth. So when you leave the Sun, according to you it is already 8 min later at the Earth. One thing should be said here. You really can't talk about what would be seen while traveling "at" the speed of light, only about traveling at near the speed of light. The speed of light itself is not a valid reference frame from which you can make observations.

I hold to the Bertrand Russell idea of Liberal:

Well, there is the equation for finding the time for tidal locking of a satellite : [math]t = \frac{\omega a^6 IQ}{3Gm_p^2 k_2 R^5}[/math] Here, a is the semi-major axis of the satellite's orbit (m^6), mp is the mass of the planet(kg^2) and R the radius of the satellite (m^5)

Same particle. Look, the nickname " the God Particle" is only used by the media. It was taken from the title of a book by Leon M. Lederman. He thought it made a catchy title. Fuzzwood's response refers to the fact that the original title was going to be "The Goddamn Particle", but his publisher wouldn't let him use it.

I used to look a lot like my Uncle on my mother's side as a child, but as I aged we looked less and less alike. Though according to my Mom we were still alike in other ways such as mannerisms and the sound of our laugh. (There were times when she heard me laugh from another room and wouldn't sworn that it was him.)

The Anomalistic month (perigee to perigee) averages about 27 d 13h 18.5 min. I say averages because perturbations can cause this to vary slightly. The synodic month (full Moon to full Moon) averages 29.53 days, bt can vary from 29.18 to 29.93 days for the same reasons. Here's a calculator that will give you the perigee and apogee dates for any year along with the Full and New Moons. http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/pacalc.html The extreme high-low tides will occur when Perigee coincides with a new or full Moon. If this happens when Earth is at perihelion, they'll will be even more so.

I'm sorry, but all I see is yet another person that doesn't have a grasp on what Relativity is actually about and mistakes that lack of understanding for a flaw in Relativity. The correct reaction to finding what you yourself call such a simple flaw that it makes one wonder how it has been missed this long, is to consider that it is your own understanding of the theory that is in error and that the "flaw" is actually an result of your own misconceptions. ( as it is in this case. ) For instance, you talk about the spaceship moving "slower that the Earth" and thus reducing it mass further. This is a nonsense statement since it assumes such a thing as absolute velocity, which does not exist In Relativity. It seems to me that you are mixing in a few preconceptions of your own that are not a part of Relativity and it the conflict between these preconceptions and Relativity that is causing you a problem.

Better yet, look up "solar wind" at wikipedia and go to the section titled "Emission".

Herein is a big part of your problem. You don't even understand what the "conventional gravity thinking" is, yet you think you have a "better" idea. Current theory does not require any increase in mass when a black hole forms. All that happens is that weight of the star is held up by the energy produced by fusion at the core. The final stage of fusion produces Iron which uses energy to fuse. The Iron builds up in the core choking things off until the remaining fusion can no longer support the weight of the upper layers of the star. The upper layers fall in, and when they hit the core ignite in a huge explosion (supernova) blowing away a large part of its mass. The remaining mass will collapse in a much smaller denser object. If the mass is large enough, it will collapse smaller than its event horizon,( the distance from its center where the escape velocity equals the speed of light) and it becomes a black hole. The mass of this black hole will be less than that of the star from which it formed. The black hole does not have more gravity, its mass is just more concentrated, which allows you to get very close, where the gravity is strong. Another problem is that failed to work out all the consequences of your hypothesis. For example, you never considered the variation in neutrino output from the Sun. Ignoring anything else, this would cause gravity to vary also. Not only that, but neutrino flux from the rest of the sky varies also, due to gamma ray bursts and supernovae. So you would not get an even neutrino "pressure" from all sides at all times, leading to variations in gravity that we do not detect. There are other insurmountable problems with "push gravity" models, which is why they were abandoned a century ago. This these are common failings I see time and time again with "amateur theorists": They generally have a weak or misinformed understanding about what mainstream science says about the issue. "Modern theory says "x", and I have a problem with this." when Modern theory doesn't say "x" at all. They usually don't know the history of the issue. What ideas have already been tried, rejected and why Does their idea fall into this category? And finally, they fail to be their own worst critic. You can't be afraid to look for the flaws in your own idea. Think the consequences of your idea all the way through. Actively look for way to poke holes in it. Try and come up with experiments or observations that would prove your idea wrong, and then research into whether or not they have already been made or not. If you do find such flaws, don't be reluctant to toss the whole idea onto the trash heap.

Wesley was a bit of self indulgence on Gene's part. He was based on Gene at that age. In this, Gene ran afoul of what was typically a trait of fan-fiction, essentially putting the author into the story. ( though for some inexplicable reason, a great number of these works of fan-fiction were written by females and usually involved being stranded on a planet with Spock and a sudden onset of Pon far.) One of the issues that Gene simply refused to bend, even under pressure from the network, was on that of smoking in the series. This was when you could still advertise tobacco on TV, and the network felt that if you saw member of the crew light up from time to time, it would help land some sponsors. They even went as far to suggest the Spock could smoke some type of "space cigar".

I think the Ferengi was more of a case of Gene having a little fun. Back in the days of the original series, He used to have a lot of issue with standards and practices as to what he could do on the show. One of the rules at the time was that Big Business could never be portrayed as the villain. So when he got the chance in STTNG, he created an entire race of uber-capitalists and made them the bad guys. He did something similar early in the first season with Data. After Star Trek, Gene made a pilot for a proposed series called "The Questor Tapes". The premise was that, in some point in our prehistory, an alien race put an android on earth live among us, watch over us and prod our civilization in the right direction when needed. When this android reached a certain point, it built its own replacement, and there have been many "generations" of androids since then. The show starts with the activation of the last android. Unfortunately, his predecessor ceased functioning before he completed the work and the new android awoke without human emotions (sound familiar?). The show was supposed to revolve around the android helping humanity avoid various disasters etc, while the android struggled to learn emotion. Okay, so in the pilot, there was a scene in which the android was trying to elicit information about his creator from a young woman. The original scene had him seducing her. (There is even a line about his being "fully functional"). The network suits threw a fit. You couldn't have a machine having sex with woman on TV if if it does happen off screen. So this was cut. So what does Gene do? In only the second episode of TNG, he has Data sleep with Tasha Yar. He even keeps the line about being fully functional.

Er, it's the wavelength and frequency of the individual photons that is undergoing the red-shift.

I'm not clear on this, but are you suggesting putting an actual physical track around the Earth? If so, there is a couple of problems with that. For one, it won't stay there. The section closest to the Earth will feel more gravity and be pulled to the Earth and eventually hit it. This would happen to any solid ring around the Earth. This was proven to be true mathematically more than a century ago. (This proof was originally used to show the Saturn's rings could not be solid.) For the other. even if you could keep the track in place, it would not generate any extra energy. While the object would gain speed as they got closer to the Earth, they would lose it again as they climbed back away. As mentioned in a couple of the posts above, your system would not take advantage of the slingshot effect which requires the object to first be in an independent orbit around the Sun before it whips around the planet. In addition, the energy gained by the object is not "free" nor infinite, as it comes at the expense of the planet's own orbit around the Sun.

While the force remains the same the results and energy change can be different. consider this example: You are in a car traveling at 20 m/s with respect to the road. You throw a 100 g ball at at the back of the car at 1m/s and have it bounce back to you. In the frame of the car, the ball leaves you at 1m/s and returns to you at 1m/s for no net change in kinetic energy. Now consider things from the frame of the road. When the ball leaves your hand it is moving at 19 m/s and when it returns it is moving at 21 m/s. This results in a net energy difference of 40 joules.

Not all masses are flying apart. For instance, the planet in the solar system are not flying apart, nor is the galaxy, nor are the local group of galaxies... All these things are gravitational bound together strongly enough to overcome the expansion. It is only at larger scales that expansion becomes the rule.

Maybe they mean the rare Northern White RhINO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_white_rhino

As pointed out it is GR and QM that have compatibility issue. The Merger of SR and GM has actually produced the most predicatively accurate theory to date. Even then, GR has been found to be highly accurate at the macro scale, So any theory that "replaces" it would not only have to resolve the issues it has with QM at the sub-atomic scale, but also retain the predictions it makes at the macro scale. IOW, relativity will not be thrown out in its entirety.

Nowhere, there are no "lost hours" There's nothing to balance. Take the following example, two men start out at the same spot and walk to another spot. One takes a straight path and the other walks along a curved path. When they meet up again, one man has walked more step than the other. This does not mean that there are any "lost steps" we have to account for in order to "balance the books", only that the paths the men took were of different lengths. With the fast traveling spaceship, we say that it took a different path through space-time than the other person, and this accounts for the difference in elapsed time for the two.

Again, What are you talking about, and what does it have to do with the original question? We have many telescopes pointing at many different points of the sky pretty much all the time. We will catch a fair number of Supernovae. The fact that we might not catch all of them has no bearing on the question of how we use them to determine distance.

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Are you saying that it took a 19 min exposure to take a picture of Andromeda? If so, that was only so you could get a good resolution. Andromeda itself is visible by the unaided eye, you wouldn't need a 19 min exposure to notice that it had more than doubled its brightness. Besides that, 19 minutes is not a long time compared to the light curve of a 1a supernova, which is measured in days.

Dark matter would behave gravitationally just the same as normal matter and is just as likely to settle into a stable orbit. More likely, in fact as it doesn't have to worry about running into other matter orbiting the BH. The only DM that it will collect is that which already has an event horizon crossing orbit, And how exactly would you test this? Considering that it would take some 2e70 yrs ( 1.5e60 times longer than the current age of the universe) for a typical stellar black hole to evaporate, even with no in-falling matter or radiation, you'd be in for a long wait seeing whether or not calculations match actual evaporation rate.

You have to remember, while there is a lot more dark matter in the universe, it is a lot more evenly spread out. Consider our galaxy. It has a dark matter halo. But this halo consists of a large sphere much larger than the galaxy itself. The visible matter is more or less confined to the galactic disk, which has a much smaller volume. As a result dark matter is spread out much more thinly than visible matter, so much so, that even accounting for dark matter swept up by the Sun's gravity since its formation, the total dark matter in the Solar system is only estimated to be equal to that of a single asteroid. So the amount of dark matter encountered by a black hole during its lifetime would be extremely small, much smaller than the uncertainty in estimating what its mass should be. The point is that for a DM particle its initial trajectory would have to hit the event horizon in order to be captured. Given that a typical 10 solar mass BH has an event horizon only 30 km in radius, this is a small target to hit. Normal matter doesn't have to be aimed as accurately. Since it interacts with other matter surrounding and falling into the BH. The collisions between the matter near the black hole causes it to radiate energy, which causes it to fall in closer to the event horizon. As a result, matter which starts with a trajectory that wouldn't initially intersect the event horizon ends up falling in; this means that the BH is effectively a larger target for normal matter.

Bare bones: It starts with the postulate of SR that the speed of light is invariant. (this is very important, the fact that there is even such a thing as an invariant speed results in a whole series of consequences.) This in turns leads to the ideas of time dilation and length contraction ( which both include c² in their formulas) If you then apply these ideas to a moving object you get a formula which gives the energy of that moving object in Relativity, which turns out to be different than than the one for Newtonian physics (E= mv²/2). This formula, when solved for v=0 (the object is at rest) leaves E=mc².

Two things:Nothing that we do on the Earth(that does not involve throwing stuff away from the Earth at better than escape velocity) can alter its orbit. The orbital energy of the Earth is so large that even if all[i/] of the World's energy consumption came at its expense, after 100 years, the Earth would have moved less than 3 meters closer to the Sun. Tidal action between the Earth and Moon has no effect on the Earth's orbit, just the Earth's rotation and the Moon's orbit. Now the Earth's rotational kinetic energy is ~2.58e29 joules. The total yearly World energy consumption is only 4.7e20 joules It would take about 64 years at this rate for the Earth's period of rotation to increase by 2 milliseconds( again we are assuming that all the World's energy use comes at the expense of the Earth's rotation). Normal tidal interaction already increases this period by 2 milliseconds per century. Since we would never come anywhere close to extracting that much energy from the Earth's rotation via wind turbines, even if they had such an effect, we are not talking about something that we need to be concerned about.

It's very simple. the rate at which the Moon collects dust isn't as high as you think it might be. Using Satellite penetration date we can estimate how much dust there is out there and how fast it should collect on the Moon. The measured values are in complete agreement with the dust thickness we find on the Moon. The argument made by the creationists is based on a single measurement made by catching dust in a net from a mountain top. By assuming that nickel would only be found in meteor dust, it was estimated how much of the dust was extraterrestrial in nature. The assumption however was mistaken, which led to a an estimate of meteor dust that was magnitudes too large.