J'Dona

Grrrrr... my exams haven't even started yet. Which is weird because if you live in Nottingham then they should be at around the same time. :/ My first one is in three days, my last one a month and a day after that.

Myabe I'm thinking of a different aether, but I thought that the eather through which light was thought to travel was shown not to exist around the year 1900. Everyone thought that it did exist and these two guys set up an experiment to show that it did. The results were negative... I'll have to check who they were some time.

 

Or has there been new evidence to show that it might exist?

Well, they tried passing an act to institute the draft a few years ago, but it's been circling in the courts since (thankfully). Try going here: http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/legislative/g_three_sections_with_teasers/legislative_home.htm and put "H.R. 163" into the search bow, without quotes of course. It might not load, I'm having some trouble with it here.

 

It has in which women are made to draft, just as men. Good thing this thing got lost.

Personally, I don't believe that UFO's in the alien sense exist, nor do I think that alien abductions are occuring. Area 51 is probably just a military base that's been expanding recently (I mean, they know where it is http://www.aleinn.com/area51/sat_image_1968.html) because it's expanding to encompass a lot of R&D, but not alien R&D. Also Roswell... don't know enough about it but that could have been anything, maybe a crashed military aircraft that the government covered up, causing the media to come up with wild claims and "evidence".

 

I do, however, think that aliens definitely exist elsewhere in the universe. The chances of that not being the case are just way too small.

J'Dona is, ermm.... a character from some book I'm planning to write. :S

 

She's an alien! *claps*

Well, of course, otherwise pirating software would be legal. I was referring to copying the original and then selling the original, which you could only do once.

 

Anyway, this is getting off-topic of even the off-topic slant to the original point. What was it again?

Ah, right, I see. I'm not so sure about copying something and then selling the original... so long as you have the original, you can copy it, but that's all I know. :/

It's true, you can legally make backups of your own media if you own it in the first place. ROM's on PC's for console computer games are legal if you own the game in the first place, just as backing up you own films is legal. And whereas I'm not so sure about Canada as it's been almost 10 years since we moved to the UK from there , I'll bet it's the same there. I think those laws are international.

 

Hmm, 100th post. I'm a baryon now... but which one?

Some quick jury-rigging with the webcam and some picture compression, and viola: our whole VHS Voyager colection, with our entire DVD collection under (a bit behind the times, we are).

Grrr, I tried to get the first episodes but I could only get the first one, in two parts, in about a 200 by 150 pixel size or something, recorded with a camcorder... and I haven't watched them so as not to ruin it. In fact, I'll delete them now.

 

... there we go. By the way, do you actually have all the Voyager series on DVD? We've got the entire thing on VHS here but not DVD... cost about £2000 or something over seven years for that. :/

Erm, maybe you could try something on this to get a Region 1 DVD to work on your player: http://www.dvd.reviewer.co.uk/info/multiregion/full/pacific1002.asp

 

Well, it worked for mine anyway. Every DVD player has the ability to play all regions, it's just set to one as default. I set mine to Region 8 (all), and now I can play USA DVD's as well as UK ones.

 

By the way, I'd love to see the Invader Zim episodes (only breifly saw a few but it's exactly my kind of humour), I just wish they showed them in the UK... but Nickelodeon cancelled it.

... retire and go fission?

 

Bah, that was bad... the rest mass one is the best.

Your scenario doesn't account for any relative movement between the clocks, which is where relativity comes in. Whether the astronaut is moving or both clocks are moving together relative to him, the results would be the same.

 

Also, just to clear this up... light appears to travel at the speed of light, c (something like 2.997 x 10⁸ ms^-1), completely regardless of an object's relative motion. So even if the astronaut is receding from one clock and approaching the other, the light from both still appears to travel at c. The way that light always travels at c isn't something that can be argued over... I mean, the entire scientific community at the turn of the century tried to disprove it, and couldn't. It was only Einstein who managed to explain it, with relativity.

 

By the way, mutual time dilation is strange, but it's not a paradox. I'm not sure exactly which way you're referring to it, but if you have two people with synchronised clocks, and one moves away from the other at some great speed and then stops, the time on the clocks will be different. If they move back together again to compare, however, they will be the same again due to the reverse movement and reverse change in the time difference. That only applies for straight back-and-forth movement, of course. In a real example, they once synchronised an atomic clock on Earth to one on the space shuttle. After the shuttle's mission, where it spent quite some time at a significant speed (several miles per second) ad then landed again, the shuttle's clock was slower by a few milliseconds, which is something major as atomic clocks don't vary by more than one second over about a hundred thouasand years.

 

If I've made a mistake in here somewhere guys, point it out please. We haven't done any relativity in school yet, and I'm drawing this mostly from what I've learned about it in my own time.

It seems like a paradox, but unfortunately it's correct, even though it seems to defy common sense. You've got to understand that common sense is wrong, because people aren't used to this sort of thing in real life. Did you know that as the sun rotates, light coming from the approaching side and light coming from the receding side are exactly the same speed?

 

Also, please don't change the subject by avoiding any possible flaw in your scenario. I agree with what your flash shows because that's what relativity says would happen anyway. However, because of this, your flash in no way demonstrates that relativity is "wrong", so we need more examples.

 

EDIT: Sorry, didn't mean to be rude... it's just that I'm getting paranoid about anything that might be pseodoscience lately. In the past week we've had or are having people we try to prove that there is a space-faring civilisation currently on Mars, or to disprove the First Law of Thermodynamics. I need to calm down.

The symbols on the list change every time so that any number you choose will land on the same symbol.

Ah, it's working for me now. There's one problem with your flash... everyone sees incoming light coming in at the same speed - the speed of light - regardless of their relative motion. Aside from the fact that the astronaut cannot be moving at the same speed as the light particles (as he would then have infinite mass), the incoming light from the clock behind him will appear to be coming in at the speed of light, not a tiny fraction of it. I'm not exactly certain how this would affect it, but I'm sure someone else here can explain.

 

How about this: you have the same moving astronaut and the stationary clocks, and also another clock moving toward the astronaut at the speed of light, who is also moving toward it at the speed of light. The astronaut then takes the changing values he sees on all three and divides them by three to get the average. The result? A time value which increases at about three times the rate of your experiment.

 

In fact, you get a different result if you have even one of the clocks in your flash moving.

But if the two clocks and the observer are all stationary, and relative to each other aren't moving, then isn't that what relativity says would happen anyway? Not sure if I'm thinking about this case in the right way, but I thought relativity and time dilation were really only noticed when things actually moved, and usually close to the speed of light, and behaved just as normal at zero or very low velocities, like on Earth and these stationary objects in the flash.

"4) The water returns to tube A."

 

Hmmm... putting the water in again at the bottom still requires forcing it in at high pressure, because the high pressure water at the bottom of the tube will resist being pushed against by the entering water, whether it is a solid (like a log) or not. Also, I'm not sure what this has to do witht he original reason why the First Law of Thermodynamics could be wrong, that is, the loss of gravitational potential energy due to a loss of mass (though it seems to me that that extra energy the GP energy lost might just be expressed in the form of more kinetic energy in the reaction products). And if the law was wrong and energy could be destroyed, that doesn't necessarily mean that energy can be created as well (much like the Universe's entropy can decrease, but not increase).

I don't get it... is anything supposed the happen in it except sit there with one clock that says "0" and another that says "5"? I pushed the play button but neither moved. What happens in it?

I'm not sure what mlj means MandrakeRoot, but I think the best known age of the universe is 13.7 billion years (scaled down from 10-15 billion after they got better reading on the background microwave radiation by some new probe). The solar system is probably about 5 billion, and the Earth is something like 4.6 billion they think. But none of it really matters anyway, just values.

I dont believe in the UFO stories though !

Clearly "aliens" would not visit our planet and waste there time making circles in crops or stupid stuff like that. Could you imagine us doing that ?

After years of research or in whatever way, we finally arrive to a planet habited by aliens (with all the technical difficulties of such huge space travels) and then we would stay hanging around, not letting them detect us and make circles in their fields just to amuse us ?

Highly unlikely i would say !

Umm, whereas I agree that it's strange, we have to remember that aliens might have completely different psychologies and agendas than us. A particular alien might see an immediate meaning in a crop circle, and they assume that we will, but it's just nonsense to us. Doesn't mean they wouldn't though. Although I'd just like to say that I don't believe that UFO's in Earth are real, and also if an alien race is intelligent enough to get here, they'd surely have the sense to do a background check on us and realise that a circle in a field means precisely nothing to us.

It sounds crazy, but I wouldn't be surprised if the first people to become "clinically immortal" i.e. they don't age, could be alive today, assuming they don't get into a fatal accident. Ageing is really just a combination of diseases and eventual wear and tear on the body I thought; a result of toxins and conditions on the body... and those toxins can be removed and those conditions controlled, those diseases eventually cured. If that's not possible within our lifetime, I'll bet human cloning is (which isn't on the list for some reason ), and assuming you don't have qualms about it you could get a clone of your body made (minus the brain, if they could do that) and get your brain transplanted into. After that clone's lifespan, medical technology would probably have advanced to the point of clinical immortality. Maybe I'm skimping on the details I don't know, but I thought that this was the general idea coming from the medical community.

 

If it's the case then maybe everything on the list we could see in our lifetime.

That's true Sayonara, hadn't thought of that. Bah, everyone in the USA should just follow the UK's example then and get one-wheel drive Mini's! Or Jaguar E-Types. They're both British.

 

About Alaska, yeah, they'll probably start drilling there soon as well. They've already got the longest pipeline in the world going from Alaska through Canada to the USA, I believe. I heard somewhere that they think there's about as much oil in those reserves as in the Middle East, though I find that hard to believe.

Well, whether things would end up more expensive or not under a Kerry administration given the fluctuating international issues is speculative (though you're almost certainly correct), and not really the point of this thread... although it is your thread. Just trying to avert this from a political debate.

 

I have to wonder, if the USA has one of the highest GDP's per capita (second only to Luxembourg, I believe), why would the "common American" think that petrol that costs less than half that in the UK is too much? :S Is this because the oil reserves in places like Texas have now passed their peak, and until then oil in the USA was cheap? I don't know enough about the situation so forgive me if I sound a bit rude, but it seems a bit, er, complaintative on the part of the American public (those of them who do complain, that is).

actually that was at a fancy ass preppy private school. but i think it was pretty much what you were talking about.

 

makes me wish i was home schooled.

I was homeschooled actually... and it helped, I can tell you.

 

EDIT: Snipped a large part that didn't add anything to the thread...

 

Homeschooling helps, because you're allowed to go at your own level. I don't think I would have gained anything more if I'd stayed in any longer, but I can safely say that if I'd been in normal school I'd have been miserable, as I am now for having blown my lead on extra A-Levels and soon a gap year If you have kids, try to homeschool them. As long as they get the social mixing they'll turn out fine, better than fine. Homeschooling is on the rise and governments are generally taking them more seriously... it worked for me.

 

It's true that creativity is somewhat supressed (if that's not too strong a word) in the normal education system. Also, since there's so much to learn and they want everyone to start out broad so that they can choose what they want to do (even if they already know), everyone's made to do a large splice of subjects. I know this sounds a little off-topic, but memory also suffers from the current system; the mnemonic systems that most of the "perfect" memorisers use require lots of imagination and association, which are discraded in a standardised system. If someone has an inquisitive mind and is gifted in a particular field, they are quite often forced into boring, standardised material from a range of subjects they mostly hate, and the would-be top student remains at everyone elses level. This is one of the areas where homeschool helps; because you can concetrate more on certain fields, without the near-useless essays that the system requires and parental encouragement, homeschooled students can do better than not. It just depends on the parent in that respect. Maybe I'm just biased because I was homeschooled myself, but it makes sense, doesn't it?

 

 

Oh, and I went to a private school for a while too, when I was about 4. I pretty much got expelled... for helping the other students. :/ When I finished something I'd help the ones who might still be working on it, and after the management changed they cracked down on elements such as myself. Not that I'm unhappy; they made us sing "Baby Beluga" every... day...

A: Because it's funny. But to get a little more on topic again, or at least more serious...

 

Q: Do you believe in free will, or do you believe in fate? (one or the other)