pantheory

It is often the case that science takes two steps forward and one backward. For maybe the last 110s years I think science is taking the one step backward and hopefully in the coming ten years this period will end. Unforetunately I think dark matter, dark energy, the Higgs particle and much of modern physics for the last 110 years is still part of the one step backward. The turning point I expect to be about 2025 after the James Webb has been up for a few years. That's my take.

There is a difference of opinion concerning problems with science journals and the peer review process. On one hand no matter how good a paper is or how much real discovery or insight it provides the paper will very often be summarily rejected with a form letter without review, if the subject and theme of the paper is contrary to mainstream theory within the area of focus of the journal. For such non-mainstream proposals, lesser known journals or non-mainstream journals are needed, and should be used. This also may mean far less readers for the paper and that real discovery by the mainstream will not be realized by the paper. On the other hand if one's paper is a minor variation or proposed confirmation of a mainstream proposal and properly documented, it may be accepted for publication but not well read because the implications of the variation of theory may be too speculative or trivial. The referee may regard the paper as not be controversial or objectionable to journal readers and let the paper go without serious review or consideration. The present system is not good but I think it is difficult to produce a better system.

The idea seems too futuristic to me for the foreseeable future. Cear, limited sized surface domes and internal cities seem more realistic and practical to me.

Petter Higgs is a cool guy but like the so-called discovery of dark energy, I think the Higgs particle is inconsequential, not part of any Higgs field, and that the Nobel committee has made another mistake. In time I believe these ideas and so-called discoveries will turn out to be something different. Higgs will probably not be alive at the time when such realizations are made so congrats to him, and I expect he will have fun spending the money, and deservedly highly respected for his remaining life

My opinions of your survey: Who is responsible for funding science? Science is funded primary by mainstream organizations, institutions, and often with some public funds. Funded technology searches, personal funds, non-mainstream grants, and non-mainsteam organizations might fund alternative science -- which consists of probably less than 1% of the total science. Most researches cannot keep their job, funding, or line of research if such research is not in line with mainstream theory. Do you trust the findings made in the article? I think it is an interesting hypothesis and trust is not the right word when hypothesis are involved. In my opinion most so-called theories might be better described as hypothesis. Natural Selection and Plate techtonics in general are my ideas of good present-day theories. Do you trust the findings of scientists generally? I think it must be realized that most all findings of study are interpreted by theory. I think very few in science purposely fudge the results to match thoery however. Do the benefits from science outweigh the potential harm? Yes, in almost every case. Do you think scientists have a positive effect on the world we live in? Many or most advances in technology and new inventions in the civilized world started as pure research in science. The entire modern world was built using scientific inventions and research. Do you think that the media are always accurate and fair in their reporting of scientific matters? The medias reporting of science relates to press releases which themselves are often based upon what science believes to by valid through interpretation rather than having true validity. I think a skeptical approach can sometimes help to read between the lines What regulation exists for scientific research and application? Each field of science adapts its own standards for research and applications. Some research and application have legal limitations or well delineated methods for testing and application. Do you think they should launch comets to other planets therefore creating life on other planets? If public funds were used, a great debate would be involved with any proposals involving panspermia.

Seems like possibly a big computational advancement that might in the future provide insight into an area of quantum theory that is presently believed by many to be generally lacking in common logic.

Yes, It would not seem to prove that the vacuum consists of matter, as in the many hypothetical proposals of background field Higg's particles, dark energy, dark matter, gravitons, etc., but it might suggest that the vacuum consists of particulates, of other pure energy of some kind, that the stongest vectors of which are obsorbed by the presence of the two plates in very close proximity. One expanation could be vector obsorption by the two plates whereby lesser vectors would exist between the two plates could cause the plate to be pushed together by the full-force of the zero point energy field or extenal particulate extenal forces. As to time: Time appears to be an interval of change in matter whose rate of change can be altered by its proximity and velocity relative to the center of a gravitational field. There are many unsettled, non-consenses opinions of time in present-day theory as it relates to models of quantuam theory and other theory. As arguments might wash out over time, I expect time will eventually be defined as a valuable "concept involving a metered interval measured by a rate of relative change in matter or energy, compared to a standard or measuring instrument/ device/ "measuring stick," which we call a clock -- and nothing more.

Nice looking craft! It might also have safety advantages over a heavy lift helicopter. Depending on the dirigible lift relative to the engine lift of the fans, maybe a loss of the engines might not necessarily be fatal for the crew, cargo and/or passengers. A passenger version might slowly cruise around from location to location like a cruise ship. An erector-set blimp version of this design concept possibly might someday sail the night skies of Venus or the methane skies of Titan.

Of course there could be a theoretical basis and justification for Migram's MOND, but so far I've heard no theoretical basis coming from Milgram; and if he has proposed a basis, it has not been considered meritorious by the mainstream. It is one thing to take all the available data and come up with appropriate equations to match them, but it is another to justify it/ them by a "first principles" derivation. Milgram's MOND only seems to apply to spiral galaxies. Elliptical galaxies may have closer to Newtonian gravity, or unpredictable stellar motions. Milgram also opened the door for a number of other MOND models by others that have similar predictions as Milgram and at least one with a GR type foundation. Dark matter is still a very active research objective. Within maybe a decade I think the mainstream thinking about gravity will change. We'll see.

Yeah, someday robots that have a type of artificail intelligence and who can reproduce themselves, might someday become a threat to humanity as in many sci-fi movies. Until then I expect robots will be our servents in our quest to find and develop other worlds for humanity .

NASA's Chandra catches our galaxy's giant black hole rejecting food. http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/08/29/nasas.chandra.catches.our.galaxys.giant.black.hole.rejecting.food http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.5845 We may not understand galactic black holes nearly as well as we think we do. The link above indicates that a galactic black hole may reject up to 90% of the matter within its grasp and instead can reject and/or jettison it away from itself rather than pulling it in. This finding could better explain the reasons and behaviors of the huge sizes of galactic jets and large matter clouds moving away from the galctic center instead of towards it.

One reason astronomers and physists do not like Milgram's MOND is because it has no logical or theoretical basis to explain why the strength of gravity should change over different scales of the universe. On the other hand, the dark matter hypothesis is an addendum to conventional gravity theory, but it fails to predict as well as MOND, and in some cases its predictions are contrary to observation, or none can be made, as is the case concerning some dwarf galaxies, according to the above article.

"3D printing" is already beginning to produce very large amounts of manufactured goods. Sometimes very complicated designs that cannot be manufactured any other way, can be manufactured by these machines. Almost any kind of part, plastic or metal, can be made by this 3D manufacturing method. Only the most finely machined parts with very high dimensional tolerances, might require conventional machine. Remember 3D printing is just a very poor name given for what these CAD CAM machines are really doing. It's just a cool buz word. We are already making great use of these machines. Maybe 10% of everything manufactured in our future all over the world, may be made by these kinds of machines. Manufacturing is much more economical with these machines, concerning low-volume parts (maybe less than a thousand parts).

3D printers are cool alright. That metal part you showd on your link seems like it could not have been manufactured any other way. Engineers can run wild designing square holes and other otherwise impossible to manufacture features.

Bill Angle, My opion is that the question of where life originated from is still unanswered. The Earth primordial soup orgin and other Earth origins of life ideas are by far the most dominant but other origins of Earth life, I think, are still possible, and to me quite interesting. It is not unlikely that the conditions favorable for generating DNA life could have originated somewhere else first, like Mars for instance. Then through a meteor blast on Mars, sent this living material on a million-year-ride to Earth as the article suggests.

This would be true for Special Relaivity, right? For General Relativity if both ships were within a system with a common center of gravity, and one ship was moving faster than the other relative to the same common center of gravity of the field, its time would be more dilated. Also if one ship was closer to that center or gravity, then that ship would have more time dilation (time moving slower) than the other ship -- unless one ship was moving relative to the center of gravity of both, while the other was closer to the center of gravity but not moving relative to it, whereby the time dilation of both might balance out between them, right? -- time for both being somewhat dialated. A little convoluted but correct, no? From the OP question "When they stop whos clock is behind?" The aswer, I believe, would require General Relativity and the answers to the above questions concerning distances and velocities relative to a common center of gravity. Then calculations may be needed for an answer.

I guess you could do the same thing with metal. I have not heard of the technology yet though. After the patent runs out the technology will be cheaper. But the machines are not too expensive right now. As I recall just a few thousand dollars for a small desk size model. One interesting facet of the technology is that such a machine can produce most of the parts for another machine like itself.

I expect someday this will be something big. We have been looking for a way to have a mind computer interface. Maybe the first step might be mind to mind tranferral, then computer retreaval, visually put into mind A, then transferred to mind B. Fun possibilities. Thanks Daedalus

Let's just spread ourselves (humanity) widely enough so that bombings and other catastrophies will not be the end of humanity as a whole. Once we are multi-planetary and have both undergound and space colonies, and maybe Noah's ark-like expeditions to other stallar pletary systems, then, I think we can be certain of the survival of the human race and the proliferation of some Earth life in our galaxy. But the first hump of protecting our ultimate survival might be the most difficult one.

We may all be Martians http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/eaog-wma082613.php This is not the first such proposal concerning "Earth-life" first evolving on Mars. The possibility is very speculative, but interesting none the less. Because the first life on Earth was probably very delicate there may be no remnants or fossils left on Earth. But the first microbial DNA life that we know of was very complicated and it may have taken longer than just a few hundred million years for it to have evolved, as in the present Earth primordial soup hypothesis. If so the Mars-First hypothesis might provide maybe another few hundred million years for the first evolution of life to have evolved there, but even close to a billion years may not still have been enough time for complicated DNA RNA life to have evolved. This is why people like Fred Hoyle thought such DNA life needed billions of years to first evolve. Such people proposed that the first DNA life development inside large comets, or similar sized icy entities, maybe before the sun, solar system, or our surrounding stars formed, and afterwards seeded all the planets and moons in our solar system in a process called panspermia. Today Earth may be the only solar system body where life can survive and proliferate on the surface of a planet or moon, but we might someday find complicated microbial life below the surface of Mars, our moon, in the sub-surface oceans of the icy moons of the outer planets, etc.

This article emphasises more the succusses of MOND gravity rather than the failures of dark matter to pridict observed reality concerning stellar movements in dwarf gallaxies. The bigger news, however, may be the lack of predictive power concerning the dark matter hypothesis. I think such successes and failures may imply that the dark matter hypothesis is more a retrodictive system than a predictive one, while at least in these cases the MOND hypothesis made accurate predictions. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/cwru-mpd082813.php

"3D printing" is unrelated to printing of any kind. It is just a name for a new type of manufacturing. It works with plastic. I saw them in operation and there is no doubt that low volume plastic parts in the future will be made by these machines. For higher volume plastic parts molds are made that often cost $50,000. and up. When prototypes or volumes less than maybe 10,000 parts are needed, the "3D printing" machinery/ process will probably be cheaper. Also great detail and precision can also be acheived with this equipment. It's certainly a technology of the future.

EdEarl Yes, there is a a pretty big difference in distance 10.4 billion years away for the farthest type 1a supernova. Its redshift was 1.914 vs. 12.7 billion years for your type II supernova. Type II supernova are much more powerful/ brighter so that we should expect to see more of them at those distances. Because of their brightness this should be true ever if they didn't happen more often than type 1a supernova.

I think it would mess up, to some extent, General Relativity and most other models of gravity that I know of, including my own. Maybe some theories might benefit. Plasma Cosmology, for instance, proposes anti-matter with matter interactions to explain the expansion of the universe, for instance. This is not anti-gravity but it might help explain, if there is a lot of anti-matter out there, why we don't see more gamma rays resulting from matter interactions. Any new descovery has the potential for new technology, which is the positive aspect of it. But it would probably goof up a lot of present theory. If they can substanciat just a little difference between the two that too would be hard to explain using present theory, which might imply lesser matter.

Ophiolite, I think both points of view were expressed by my quotes. They were surprised by the appearance of some galaxies but not by the sparcity of large galaxies like the Milky Way. With all the new scopes coming online, as well as the James Webb going up, I expect it will not take that long to find out which perspectives or assertions will prevail concerning distant galaxies, maybe involving the future of cosmology.