Morat

are mercury and venus already tidally locked with the sun then? this objection can be circumvented by claiming their absolute motion through the ether is slowing i guess; since we only have relativistic tools at our disposal this would be unmeasurable, so we couldn't disprove it.

so you're claiming that reductions in spin rate of massive bodies are the cause rather than consequence of gravity (or 'tidal forces')? That seems workable - since its exactly the same as existing theory in every respect but the other way round. and you haven't explained fully the relationship between gravity and magnetism, which are experimentally seperate forces at energies currently existing naturally. (gravitational and em fields being independent).

This only highlights a problem with orbiting bodies, that their gravitational effect on one another would be dependent on their rate of rotation, which i have here and they are not proportional to their masses, nor is their any rank correlation between mass and spin rate. As their masses correctly predict orbital motion i conclude your theory cannot be valid. In the case of satellites, by your logic differently spinning satellites could not occupy the same orbit. In reality a satellite's rotational control can be exerted without affecting its orbital path. Secondarily the magnetic fields of the planets show no gravitational effect. However, perhaps i'm wrong. in which case i'd like to observe that the last (only?) case of an alternate perspective not accompanied by a change in predictions was feynman's sum-over-histories. This was because it was a mathematical framework that answered some questionss just as precisely but more easily. Do you have such a framework?

Just a minor point, but he's right (sort of) about this at least. Supporting a large organism has never been as much of an issue as getting enough oxygen for it, since you have to use a membrane to exchange gases with the resp. system and its area doesn't go up as fast as the organism's volume. Higher atmos. pressure would hasten gas exchange, hence assisting with this. In practiced the main constraint on such large organisms is usually going to be ecological tho.

I don't know the mathematical formulation, but iirc it's a limit how dense a certain amount of matter can be (or vice versa, how much matter of a certain density there can be) before its gravity causes it to collapse into a black hole. ed - do you know how, if at all, the initial condition of the matter affects this? would it matter that the matter in the big bang would have been incredibly hot and fast moving? and does the expansion of space have any bearing on it?

the elements are mobile between generations of individual organisms, not particularly within generations of cells in an individual (mobile in the germ line but not in the somatic cells if you like). Even if there were a great deal of disruption between generations of body cells, cell turnover (especially in nerve cells, which are pretty much permanent) isn't fast enough to generate any kind of erratic personality.

(junk genes is an oxymoron btw, genes by definition are expressed as proteins and junk by definition isn't - altho it's a little more complicated than that). junk dna is pretty individual because it contains a lot of transposons ('jumping' dna) and long sequence repeats which confuse the copying mechanisms, and cause trouble with chromosomal crossing over. but there's no reason to suppose this dna affects our individuality directly (it can have an indirect effect by damaging other genes). Most of that comes from mixing up of parental genes/chromosomes.

I'm almost certain they keep on upping the number when it turns out to be easier to do that than make it work with the current number.

Scott Adams (the man who writes Dilbert in case you don't know him) suggested semi-seriously that the world is being made more complicated all the time. This is done by the tiny percentage of highly educated, intelligent people who deal with the cutting edge of science and technology, and everyone else is getting left behind. Knowledge and technology naturally beget more knowledge and technology, especially under our current system. Hence, education systems (with no comparative mechanism driving them) naturally become relatively less effective over time.

So far, string theory has not made a single experimentally verifiable prediction with differs from existing physical theories (afaik). In fact, at the moment they can't even solve the equations they do have.

1) Divide by zero error 2) $1 != (10c)^2, $1 = (10^2)c 3) I'm not sure, i think the axiom applies to defined terms only, not functions with multiple values.

18 (19 in a few days) and between my first and second years of studying biology at uni.

Well i'd reply but i'd just be quoting the book lying open next to me... which is the elegant universe. more seriously... the basic idea is that all of the properties of the current physical theories can be explained by regarding the fundamental particles as actually resembling (in mathematical ways) tiny, vibrating loops of string. That and the universe has nine or more dimensions, but mostly they're knotted up really small and so you can't perceive more than 4. This resolves the conflict between general relativity and quantum theories. To me, the book makes string theory sound really vague and speculative, but the description of other theories is good.