swansont

! Moderator Note I think we can cease with the he said/he said. steevey, you might want to consider that our experts earned their stars and give their posts a good reading before you start telling them they're wrong. The odds are extremely good that they're right.

It's both. Their product is a constant.

! Moderator Note Split from the main discussion on tides. matterdoc, hijacking threads to promote your own views will not be tolerated.

! Moderator Note matterdoc's contributions and the resulting discussion have been moved http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/53309-tides/

This is a bald assertion with no science to back it up. It is also wrong. It's not clear the extent to which you are quoting your reference, or misunderstanding it and relaying it incorrectly. All I can say is that the answer you give is wrong. "Otis (1963), p. 10" isn't sufficient as a reference. We need a title, or better still, a link to the section in question or a fair use copy-paste of the relevant part. No, the transmission of EM waves does not presuppose a medium. That notion is a century out of date. General relativity reduces to special relativity when you have locally flat spacetime. There's a name for people who want to rewrite physics, without first understanding the physics they wish to rewrite. I suggest that it is not a title to which one should aspire. It's not logical at all. That's where the hundred years of experimentation come in. Your request suggests that you wish to elevate your claim to be equal with empirically confirmed physics. Science doesn't work that way.

It's how Bristol Palin stayed on "Dancing With the Stars" as long as she did. This is just a new reality show. We'll call it "Science Survivor: Can or Cantor"

A more tightly bound system has less energy, so it has less mass. Not having confirmed the Higgs as the source of mass is a different question from mass decreasing for a bound system, as is the detail of the mechanism.

I don't know what you mean by "uncontrolled parameter control." It appears to be an oxymoron. One problem with relying on pop-sci articles is that they are not written by scientists and they miss things. Achieving "negative temperatures" is not a new phenomenon. The population inversion of a laser is an example of a negative-temperature system.

Negative temperatures are not naturally occurring and are not equilibrium (or steady-state) conditions. I suspect that a substance's specific heat capacity for a negative temperature will not be the same as for a positive temperature.

How to turn mass into other forms of energy? Form a more tightly bound system.

Actually yes it is, when one is drawing on more than a hundred years' worth of research that depends on whether it's true or not. As mississippichem has stated, you would rewrite a lot of physics, and you'd be in the mystifying state of having things like GPS working, and yet the theoretical basis for its operation being wrong.

Sympathetic vibrations. Molecules can bend or rotate, and the oscillating electric field of the microwaves causes this to happen. The efficiency with which this happens depends on how close the resonance frequency is to the frequency of the microwaves, and the resonance frequency depends on the molecular structure. It's not much different from yelling at a bell or tuning fork. It will begin to vibrate when you do so, and the loudness of the ringing depends on how close you are to resonance.

The wave function and the wavelength aren't the same thing. The latter would be redshifted.

No. I'm not sure where you heard this, but it's not true. In a vacuum the speed of light is a constant, which is a ramification of Maxwell's equations. If it weren't your car radio wouldn't work. The Doppler effect changes both frequency and wavelength in inverse relation, so that the speed remains constant.

It's not simple. You need to read up on bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung

It's politics, man! Etiquette? Etiquette? We don't got no etiquette. We don't need no steeenking etiquette!

An object with momentum also has kinetic energy, and you have to take that into account. E=mc^2 refers to rest energy only.

The amount of time dilation and the amount of length contraction are inverses of each other. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/tdil.html

Anything that far away isn't going to be an individual star that we see, it will be a galaxy and we wouldn't be able to resolve individual stars. If we take an arbitrary level of 10 photons/sec to be able to see a star with the naked eye, then a sun-like star is visible at 1,000 LY. (I'm estimating, so this isn't a firm number) Of course, our sun is a middle-of-the-road star, so brighter stars would be visible at a greater distance. I don't think you would see it intermittently, though. It would just fade from view as it got dimmer, like just about any light source does as its intensity decreases.

Light does change speed within a medium, and that does generally vary with the wavelength. This is known as dispersion. v = c/n, where n is the index of refraction (n=1 for a vacuum as you might suspect from the previous answers)

One Watt of visible-light photons comprises of order 10^18 photons arriving per second. Our sun puts out a total power of more than 10^26 Watts, so that's 10^44 photons/sec if all of the light were in the visible spectrum. A light year is 10^18 cm, so a sphere of that radius has a surface area of ~10^37 cm^2. At a light year, you have ten million photons per cm^2 per second arriving from a sun-like star. That number drops off as r^2, assuming no attenuation.

There are no quarks comprising an electron; it's a fundamental particle.

! Moderator Note Please keep speculative science in the speculations forum

! Moderator Note This is what the "report post" button is for, but in this case, I disagree. The OP seems to have been addressed, and this is a reasonable followup on the same topic.

You asked "Why?" I answered.