swansont

I don't think this is happening. Your infinitesolid2 account is the most active (and last one accessed), so the others have now been taken offline. Do not open another new account. You also need to pay attention to points made about your posts. Your bewilderment and assertions are … unusual.

Please type properly. This is not a chat channel for texting.

Light is observed to behave this way. Even though it's a wave, when it interacts it is observed to have discrete amounts of energy, which it deposits in a localized area (e.g. an atom) Welcome to the world of quantum mechanics. It turns out that trajectories are not well-defined on this scale (unlike the classical world we're used to), so the light travels both paths.

Google leads me to Wikipedia. These two sites are your friends for this kind of question. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit

That where math and models come in.

It's explained here. Meson is next.

I didn't mean to imply that you did. Sorry. I was just clarifying my position in light of your comment about applying a label at the outset of a discussion. I agree — I think there are times where people are labeled far too quickly, and that detracts from any discussion. Labels are a convenience, and a double-edged weapon: they make for easier sorting of people and their arguments, but you run the risk of assuming a certain position based on the label. (Label someone based on one or two positions and one tends to assume that seven or eight other positions are held as well, and this is probably not the case.) However, there are those that reverse this as bascule pointed out in the OP. Someone labels themselves as a skeptic when they are actually not a skeptic — you assume from the self-label that they carefully and objectively weigh evidence, applying logic and scientific rigor, and then you find that they aren't doing that.

Massive particles can't travel at c.

Light is a wave, but unlike classical waves, it has certain behavior like being localized when it interacts and having quantized energy. We associate those properties with particles, so we call a photon a particle. But it never stops being a wave — it's just that it doesn't act like a classical wave.

Acceleration means v is changing.

The details of the acceleration. What speed you're traveling at and for how long tell you the dilation. So even if the final speeds are the same, the dilation may be different. Length contraction is only in the direction of motion. So the target will be vanishingly thin, but the width and height are still there.

As iNow has already said, I am not advocating any label at the outset of a discussion — that would be poisoning the well. Finding that someone is a crackpot, denier, etc. has to be a conclusion drawn from what they have said and the arguments and tactics they have (mis)used. Is it desirable? No, I'd say not. But it's unreasonable to expect two groups to play by different rules, and ridiculous for people engaging in such behavior to complain when they are the target instead of the instigators. It's like a mud-slinging politician complaining about defamation when his opponent calls him a liar. Hypocrisy. Some people are never going to be convinced, so saying that the tactic hasn't worked is misplaced IMO. No one tactic is likely to work with everyone. Mostly I think it "resonates with the base," much like calling liberals elitist or conservatives war-mongers (or whatever). Did any liberals stop being liberal because they had been called an elitist? Selling AGW (i.e. the politics of it) breaks predominantly left/right. All I'm saying is stop kvetching because the left finally has a useful tag to use; the right is usually much better at this sort of thing.

There is an inherent shortcoming (AFAIK) of trying to visualize how photons behave, since the visualizations always seem to be based on classical notions. Interactions with electrons break down into cases: for bound electrons, whether you ionize the electron or not, and then there's the case of a free electron. Bound electron interaction is absorption (and re-emission in the case of scattering). If the photon energy is high enough, the electron will be freed (ionization). Free electrons can't absorb photons — they must scatter. The photon doesn't change speed in any of this.

You have frequency, and you have phase, which it the time reading. Two objects moving with respect to each other will have a different frequency. Two objects with a different history of motion (with respect to a common reference) may have a different phase — it will depend on the details — even if they end up in the same frame and thus have the same frequency again. You can't dilate an object to zero length.

Since there is already an open thread on a very similar topic I am closing this one. Go here

Steady-state vs Big Bang doesn't have much of a political aspect, so it's not being "debated" by non-scientists very much, and doesn't get many op-eds in newspapers. And it's when the discussion leaves the scientific sphere that we start having the problems with people trying to sway you not by facts, but by any means possible. If steady-state had some ideological or financial backing to it, I'm sure we would see the same thing, as we have with creationism and the tobacco industry. BTW, "evolution deniers" garners > 50k Google hits, while "global warming deniers" gets just under 100k. It's out there, but "creationists" is a more convenient label and gets more press. I think it's ironic for people to complain about a tactic to score debating points, when that's the very behavior that earned the label in the first place. If the discussion hadn't spilled over into rhetoric and attempting to convince the lay audience with lies and appeals to emotion and other fallacious tactics, we wouldn't be in this situation. As far as the purer pursuits of science goes, we do have labels. We call people engaging in anti-science various things: crackpots, cranks, wingnuts, hoax-believers, woomeisters, etc.

There are a number of ways you can measure it, but in some way it will involve light traveling from the object to the detector. It could be picture taken as the object passes by a ruler — light travels to the detector and is recorded, which is why simultaneity is an issue. Was the measurement of the front and back simultaneous? No — that depends on the frame of reference.

I second this. The effort one would have to expend to explain how to use the data could be a huge drain on the experimenters' time. And as Klaynos indicates, there are a lot of data that are bad for technical reasons, and shouldn't be in any kind of database.

You are drawing a classical analogy here, and this behavior isn't classical. As Bob has stated, it's still a wave, even though the energy is quantized.

Because the speed of light is constant, what you measure for a length will depend on your reference frame. Measurements depend on light (or other signals) getting to a measurement device. Simultaneity is similarly dependent on the constant speed of light — it means there is no absolute simultaneity. These are different aspects of relativity which derive from the same principle of constant light speed.

Simultaneity is important because it relates to how we measure length. Reality is what we measure it to be, and it depends on your frame of reference. We don't ban people for asking questions.

You can measure round trip speeds. There are implications of the constant speed of light — E&M giving you the wave equation, and special relativity. You can experimentally check the implications of constant lightspeed.

Regardless of the accuracy of this assessment, the discussion should focus on the topic at hand and the arguments presented.

Are the nanowires made of Si as well, or are they another material? I know KOH etches Si (though anisotropically), so if the nanowires were not etched, they would break free.

Calling them deniers or not isn't really the issue. The so-called skeptics have already made up their mind and have chosen an intellectually dishonest path of argument. Their minds aren't going to be changed. The underlying problem, IMO, is that it's not a fair fight. It's the observer of the discussion who can potentially be convinced, and the observer doesn't know that fight is unfair because they don't know that the two sides are using different rules. The AGW deniers are free to use deception in the form of logical fallacies; their credibility is measure in their ability to score rhetorical points, while the science crowd sticks to facts, because their credibility is measured differently. If they manufactured data, they would be outcast. So a denier is free to claim that e.g. we've been cooling since 1998 by cherry-picking data to support that conclusion, and a scientist can only present data that shows this to be false. The onlooker thinks the question is undecided. I blogged about this, in a more general sense, just this morning. http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/2820