swansont

OK, I'll go with this. "Your view employs the wrong concepts" Are you willing to be dismissed this trivially?

Yes, light slows when it enters a medium with a higher index of refraction, but it can propagate through vacuum, whereas sound cannot. Light propagates through air, but the air isn't required. Note also that sound is a longitudinal wave, while light is a transverse wave. Light exerts pressure on things; it's the basis of laser cooling, which won the Nobel Prize for Chu, Cohen-Tannoudji and Phillips in 1997. Atoms are being trapped with light pressure in my lab at this very moment. It's not normally noticed because it's such a small force once you get above atomic mass scales.

They may be the same, but that does not mean they are derived.

The EM spectrum has some fuzzy definition. Most of the low-frequency stuff has general guidelines based on frequency or wavelength, though where e.g. RF stops and microwave starts depends on whether you talk to an engineer or a physicist and what their specific area is. But in physics, X-rays come from atomic interactions and gammas come from nuclear interactions. So it's possible to have X-rays higher in energy than some gammas. (In astronomy, AFAIK, they use an arbitrary energy division. IIRC it's 1 MeV) In general, gammas are considered to be high-energy, and there's no other name — nothing higher than gamma. Radio waves get subdivided, like high frequency, low frequency, very low frequency and extremely low frequency. But nothing lower. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum

Since when is smart defined as "able to divide by 1000" ?

Muddled and so difficult to always say exactly where it strayed. However Momentum transfer will be maxmized when the masses are equal [math]K_e=\frac {1}{2} mv^2[/math] doesn't "turn into" [math]E=mv^2[/math] [math]\frac {1}{2} mv^2[/math] is a nonrelativistic approximation, valid for v<<c

Probably. You need to be aware of the risks involved with playing with radioactive sources, though.

It's possible to make a homemade cloud chamber.

Yeah, and it was way cool. Here's a summary: http://www.physorg.com/news88439430.html

[math]E = \gamma m_0c^2[/math] Gamma is imaginary and also negative. So it all depends on what you want — if the energy is to be real and positive, then the rest mass must be imaginary and positive. If you want a real rest mass, that makes the energy imaginary and negative, or you could have negative and real rest mass, giving you an imaginary and positive energy. None of that currently has any physical meaning. I think that in some high-energy/particle physics, the relevant tems are mass^2 and energy^2 in some of the equations, but I think you still end up with a sign problem.

Into the EM radiation that you see, or don't see (outside the visible spectrum, or not hitting earth).

Before you jump, you (and the surrounding atmosphere) are moving at that same speed. So you not moving relative to the earth, and that's what matters. Similarly, consider someone in a train or car going by at 10 m/s. They throw a ball up in the air. To them, it goes straight up and down — they don't notice that they are moving. Someone on the ground sees the ball already moving at 10 m/s, and sees the ball move in a parabola. The situation with jumping on the earth is almost the same (there are some situations where the circular path will make a difference, but probably not for a 1-sec jump). An outside observer would see you jumping in a parabola, going at the rotational speed.

Really? This is basic calculus. [math] \omega = \frac {d\phi} {dt} [/math] Basic definition of frequency. Time is the phase. All I've done is integrate it. You mean c + v? Sorry, but that's faulty logic. It contradicts what has been observed to hold. Again, faulty logic. It will occur, just as a ball tossed vertically in one frame (e.g. on a train) will follow a parabolic path if observed in a moving frame (e.g. the ground). It seems more logical to say that it's impossible to claim the opposite, given that it been observed to hold true. A laser gyroscope, like a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. I can certainly imagine a photon travelling that path, and they exist — they work. So the photon does actiually travel that path. But a rotating system is an accelerating frame, not an inertial one. Your "mispositioning effect" stems from at least one faulty assumption about how light will behave.

The slowing works independent of the direction of travel. Since time is the integrated frequency (i.e. a phase), if you change frequency, you change the time rate. The acceleration is required to bring one of the clocks into the other's frame, so that a side-by-side comparison can be made. Since acceleration is not relative, we then know whose clock has changed frames.

You'd need an increase in the free energy of the system (probably Helmholtz free energy, but it's been a while since I did any real thermo). That is, you'd need an increase in entropy to offset the absorption of heat. It might be possible if one or both of the reactants are solid or liquid, especially if they are big molecules (many constituent atoms) that form several molecules when they react. But I don't know if you can get this with combustion.

Clocks in different inertial frames will not stay in sync. They will each observe the other frame as running slow.

Rest mass isn't a function of velocity, it's a Lorentz invariant. Your analysis is flawed. There was no reason to continue past that point.

You can induce transitions from excited states; that's what lasers do (stimulated emission) But time is not an observable - not a property of the particle. You entangle properties that are governed by some conservation law.

Don't hold your breath waiting for him to answer. 7 posts, 7 threads.

No. The amount of mass converted to radiant energy is small compared to the mass. What will happen is that eventually the hydrogen in the core will have fused into helium (and possibly then on to carbon, oxygen and up to iron) and can no longer sustain the fusion reactions. Once the gravity overwhelms the pressure from fusion, fun things happen. Red giants and then white dwarfs, or supernovae and then neutron stars or black holes ... several different scenarios, depending on the initial mass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution

Exactly. And Farsight has the burden of making predictions, and hasn't been doing very much of that. It's fortuitous that there is a discussion on what makes a good theory (Theory evaluation) going on right now The summary is that explaining is not enough, since more than one model can explain a phenomenon, especially if you limit the scope of what you're looking at. Explanations are not theories.

Haven't made one from scratch, but I bought kits that lets you do similar things. Search for "marble run" at http://www.mindwareonline.com and I also have a chaos tower. I'm not advocating you go and buy either of these, but it will give you an idea of the kinds of components that work. Doing a Google image search on "rube goldberg" might be helpful for inspiration. Marbles rolling down a track, hitting a switch, electromagnet dropping things, dominos, a lever/double-pan balance, a wind-up toy, a mousetrap — all sorts of things you can put together in a chain reaction.

You'll need to explain what you're talking about. Antiprotons exist and spaceships exist, but what is an antiproton spaceship? A spaceship made of antiprotons? A spaceship opposed to protons? A spaceship that runs on an antiproton power source of some kind?

It's because the data indicates that the electron (or photon, or atom or molecule) actually goes through both slits. IOW, it doesn't have "a path" unless you actively restrict it to having only one option. Like I said, you have to read up on this. It's not philosophy or belief or opinion. It's all backed up by experiment, even though some of it is counterintuitive.

It takes energy to pull the electron from the earth. But g being so small, we're talking about a part in 10^16 per meter. Propping this up with pseudoscientific stuff about electromagnetic loops being electrons isn't going to fly. You'd need to defend that, too, and do it first. You state without proof that the mass is invariant in a gravitational system — you haven't demonstrated it. Gravity isn't a force in GR, and as such energy need not be conserved. The mass is a Lorentz invariant, but that only works in certain metrics. You can't assume it works in a gravity field. But that's about as far as my understanding of GR takes me. But the non-GR argument is basically this: gravitational redshift is real, as the Pound-Rebka experiment demonstrates. A photon emitted from an excited nucleus at the top of a gravity well has a different energy than one emitted at the bottom. That frequency difference would violate conservation of energy if the mass were the same. It's explained in the Feynman lectures on gravity, here, about halfway down: http://www.qedcorp.com/pcr/pcr/feynman/feyngrav.html