Martian

What if a theory (or just a glorified idea) that someone is stating on this board is not as intellectually flattering or complex as todays theories but is in fact right? I keep saying the earth is round but people balk at me for lack of mathematical expression.

This statement is proof that he may be onto something.

I have a lot to learn in math. Can you explain what the above equation is or how it works? (Or was it a joke?) ...the first one I mean.

Can you translate this to binary for my time machine? Thanks.

Who were the BIGGEST contributors to astronomy (preferably old-timers) and what significant equations did they discover? Its a project for work. We just want to make sure we haven't overlooked anyone. So far the only ones I can be sure of are Newton and Galileo. Thanks

Thats a loaded answer...Could you explain a bit more so lay-people such as myself can understand it? I get the original question. I just don't get the answer it was given.

Hi. Thanks for the meaningful reply. I saw your webpage and its nice! Just for the record, I'm not questioning mathematics or trying to imply that its ficticious. I'm in the process of learning it myself. Still, I'm tormented with the terrible combination of original thought and the desire to express it. Ok. Lets eliminate self-reference. Without any knowledge of past interchanges these statements are made: Martian: "matt grime is telling the truth." matt grime: "Martian is lying." So who is telling the truth? Its a humorous thing, isn't it? Whats a meta statement or a second order statement? I tried to compensate for my lack of methodical reasoning with humor. A sense of irony is important in science and maths as we will no doubt find the unified theory to be a joke. (42 to be exact.) If you find this funny its ok to laugh. So back to my original request, can at least the original problem (the liar paradox) be tested or disproven by mathematics? In a non-self-reference situation such as the one posted above? In the strictest sense, are the core essense of these questions mathematical or not?

At first reading this, it may not appear that this post really belongs in a mathematics forum, but on closer attention it may be found that its a very appropriate place for this seeming paradoxial word problem. Its nothing new, just (as far as I know) still mathematically/logically unanswered. I would prefer it to be spoken for or against on strictly mathematical terms, but verbal logic may also help. First assumption: Paradoxes cannot exist. Human misunderstanding on logic/truth can. Second assumption: Time travel is possible. Third assumption: There will be at least more than one moderator considering deleting or moving this post. No doubt most are familiar with this paradox that ancient greeks used to stay up all night debaiting and exausting that time period's supply of coffee: Its an established fact that Cretens always lie. A certain man who is of a set of people who are considered Cretens makes the statement "Cretens always lie" thus making a statement that is truthfull. But then, still being a Creten, he is still among the set of those considered Cretens, and having told the truth, the fact exists that there is at least one Creten who tells the truth, and in effect, his statement becomes a lie. Now, if the paradoxial nature of this situation has at some point been solved, and there is no logical contradiction anymore due to modified understanding, then I would invite this post to be deleted as its irrelevent. If not, then here is a suggested answer to this paradox, making it logically sound, and then no longer a paradox. So this man, who is a Creten (a peaple who only speak lies) makes a truthful statement. If it were left to the above we will see him either simultaniously speaking a falsehood and a truth, or we would see him perpetually being changed from the status of a liar to a truthteller to a liar to a truthteller...and so on. Let us make another assumption, as a means to kill the paradox, and with it a few others that revolve around similar logic. Assumption: Regardless of his geneology and cultural status, his statement of truth causes him no longer to be a Creten. Hense, at the moment he said "Cretens always lie" he stopped being a Creten. Now, being that he himself is reading this, he finds it utterly rediculous that his ability to tell the truth altered his inherent status as a Creten by this new assumption, as it would be the logical equivilent of being changed from a boy to a girl based on the influence of nothing more than mere thought and words. So to prove that such reasoning is foolish (he believes his geneology can't be altered based on his actions) and wishes to prove the paradox can exist he decides to travel back in time before he was concieved to kill his great grandfather. He expects that doing so will rule out his existence, as this would be the assumed case: He exists. He goes back to kill his great grandfather, causing his existence to be annulled before it was concieved. If he did not exist, he couldn't kill his grandfather. Likewise, as his argument goes, its meant to be a paradox mentally and likely he will not be able to kill his grandfather as the governing dynamics of reality will probobly show his grandfather will always succesfully evade his murderer. But we are saying that if he kills his grandfather, then the truth is the man was not his grandfather, and when the Creten discoveres who is real grandfather is, he will kill him, only to discover his real grandfather still exists and has yet to be killed, and he murdered two strangers in cold blood. So we have a repetition somewhat similar to the above. (e.i. the man who is responsible for his existence keeps rerouting itself everytime the Creten interpheres with his own existence.) This may seem foolish, but it can be illustrated by a real phenomenon: As long as an electrical positive and negitive potential exists and a number of closed routes exist between the two, the electricity will always take the path of least resistence from its origin to its goal. If that path is blocked, it will find a new path of least resistence untill every concievable path is blocked. Let us assume that there is an infinite number of paths the electricity will always take in an infinitely large system, and its path can never be truly blocked. In a system where time is a mental illusion and cause and effect (governed by the speed of light) are the only true dynamics, the Creten will never truly be able to block the path to his own existence, as an infinite number of possibilites exist and they will always reroute to give the final outcome, regardless of interpherence. (Or more simply said, he merely traveled backward in cause and effect and changed the dynamics that led to his own existence.) So you might then realize that when he killed his great-grandfather, his geneology even preceding his great grandfather was changed, and traveling back in time did not merely change time from that point onward, but time previous to it and after it. I'm certain this translates to a very simple argument in mathematics. I'm also certain many will not agree and this post will be deleted or reassigned to a different catagory.

Since I'm the villiage idiot of the Science forums, I don't fear asking this question: If spacetime is curved, isn't it reasonable to think that the question "where does space end" would be as irrelevant as "where does it begin?" Aren't we the equivelent of a microbe living on the inner walls of a beachball?

Is there an alternative to using pi in calculating area/circumference? I'm curious if a method has ever been explored that can measure the area of a circle as perfectly as a square, even if it is complicated.

...thanks!

Positive side, rather. Aren't they also called poles? (Polarity?) Maybe I'm misunderstood? Question: I was also under the impression that electrons could not travel in free space, but rather they "blip" from one atom to another without actually "traveling" the distance between. So what I'm wondering is how a magnetron curves the otherwise "straight path" an electron would take, when they really can't "travel" at all. Do they convert to wave form?

I don't think I'd even be able to begin to do that.

I don't get your point. Maybe thats the same reason I'm so easily impressed?

I thought it better to post a new question on this thread than to flood Scienceforums with new posts on my simple-minded questions. In my idiocy I've thought to apply a rule in Electronics to Spacetime just to see what would happen. In electronics: Conductance is the recipricol of resistance. IE, if there were no conductance, resistance would be infinite, if there were no resistance, conductance would be infinite. In spacetime: If light did not encounter a resistance of a sort, then its speed would be infinite. (An assumption by posing that the same rules apply) The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. 1/c=3.3356409519815204957557671447492e-9 What could that number, the recipricol, stand for? If you multiply it by two, you get a number not too far off from the beginning part (6.6712), of this infinitely-above-me equation, or the gravitational constant: G=6.67390 x 10-11 m3/kg/s2 Just for fun, is there mathematical harmony to it somewhere? Hey, thats clever. Interestingly based on the same chance governing evolution, if you put a incredibly large number of monkeys in front of a keyboard, eventually they will successfully type at least one line from the bible. If you put the same number of monkeys in front of a chalkboard while in a coffee shop, they will successfully write at least two modern physics books. Thus, the path to truth is found in coffee, and StarBucks will soon replace religion, if the logic holds, which I'm sure it doesn't.