MadScientist

Yup and yup to Subjunk with the ditch answer too. I'm just wondering, what's the point in posting riddles to a group of really clever people with superbrains like ourselves?? (Let's not be modest - a spade is a spade. )

Yup and yup. That just leaves these two: What is lengthened by being cut at both ends? What always remains down even when it flies up in the air?

How about a new forum for showing experiments (mainly safe ones ) that we can do at home?? Like I recently found out laser pointers can be used to create holograms with. Or how you can cook a CD in a microwave oven and get a nice effect. Or ideas for ways to use things other than their original purpose.. Like when you shine a laser pointer through a bottle of Coke/Pepsi it lights up the contents. Or how you can shine the laser dot onto a surface to mark it without actually marking it, not that I do much DIY though. And why can't the posters ID show their sex too?? It drives me mad having to refer to people as s/he or him/her.

That's what I mean, once you realise that, you realise the clock can't be chiming at 5 second intervals.

It's pretty easy once you realise 5:59:30 leaves the final chime at 5:59:55 instead of 6:00:00. And I couldn't figure out why you didn't mention when the chimes for 4 o'clock started either, you must've left that out for a reason. As for the attached program, it just shows the chiming patterns for the different times like this: 12 o'clock at 5 second intervals := Chime number 12 at 12:00:00 Chime number 11 at 11:59:55 Chime number 10 at 11:59:50 Chime number 9 at 11:59:45 Chime number 8 at 11:59:40 Chime number 7 at 11:59:35 Chime number 6 at 11:59:30 Chime number 5 at 11:59:25 Chime number 4 at 11:59:20 Chime number 3 at 11:59:15 Chime number 2 at 11:59:10 Chime number 1 at 11:59:05 12 o'clock at 6 second intervals := Chime number 12 at 12:00:00 Chime number 11 at 11:59:54 Chime number 10 at 11:59:48 Chime number 9 at 11:59:42 Chime number 8 at 11:59:36 Chime number 7 at 11:59:30 Chime number 6 at 11:59:24 Chime number 5 at 11:59:18 Chime number 4 at 11:59:12 Chime number 3 at 11:59:06 Chime number 2 at 11:59:00 Chime number 1 at 11:58:54 With similar outputs for 6 o'clock to verify things. I think it burned up all my brain cells for the day, so I'd better head back to my nice cosy padded cell.

Too easy?? Or are you and Sayonara looking on the same riddle site that I am??

That reminded me of something else I was thinking about RE this thread.. I'm going to start talking about aliens visiting us from other worlds. I'm not going to say they do exist just theorise about what they might be.. The chance of any life that developed on another planet turning out to look almost human like is astronomical. The number of different ways for life evolving on alien worlds is unbelievable. So let's forget about these "aliens" we keep getting reports of coming from other planets. They look far too much like the human race after a few million years more evolution OR a few generations of genetic manipulation. So the most likely explanations are they could either be humans from our future, genetically enhanced to survive the trip or something like that. Or just figments of peoples imaginations, back in the days when aliens were first "invented" they wouldn't have realised the chances of aliens having arms and legs with 5 digits on each, 2 eyes, 2 nostrils, a single mouth, 2 ears etc.. would be slim to none. So they're either us from the future or figments of our imaginations from our past. And until Hawking finds out whether they're actually real or not how can he say we've never been visited by people from the future??

Here's one for you... If you travelled back in time to yesterday how would the universe know where to put each particle of matter and energy?? The computer this simulation is running on would have to have random access memory. But there is no hard drive storing the log file for the universe. So the only way to move through time is linearly, either forwards like we are or backwards. Travelling forwards quicker or slower than we currently are (time dilation) isn't a problem because you're moving through each instant of time as is the rest of the universe but you're moving from one to the next quicker or slower than the rest of the universe. Because all the particles are following their natural path from one instant to the next. So to "rewind" time the entire universe is going to have to throw all those particles into reverse just for you.

Yup that's basically what I was saying. I'm not sure if there's anything "magical" happening, the big bang just spews out loads of fundamental particles of energy called quarks which get packed into protons, neutrons, electrons and packets of energy and whatever else. Those larger building blocks just naturally bond together the way they did to form all this... I'll assume everything is made from these same fundamentals either quarks or strings, if you're a string theorist. That means there's just two things in this universe, those fundamentals and our consciousnesses that can perceive these things in our universe. We really are just computers, the universe throws all these facts at us which we process and react to, creating new facts to throw out into the universe. Trippy pothead type section: What amazes me though is if the string theorists are correct and conscious thought does exist at that level, IOW the strings themselves contain all the data we have in our minds. What if those same strings can do amazing things like talk to each other over any distance?? If all the strings in a mind are working together to achieve their goals of providing us with memory and thought processing, then why can't they use some of their other abilities to achieve other goals?? If we don't have to use any huge powerful devices to get them to all work together so we can add 2 and 2 together in our minds, why should we need devices to get them to all work together to do something similarly amazing?? They'd just be doing what they naturally do already... I don't think it's wrong or insane to think along these lines, the only way to find out if a road is a dead end is by travelling along it. Nonsense!! The universe wants you to think and if there are things you can do to yourself to think better you should use them. Not that I'm advocating the usage of soft drugs of course.

As far as I know the planet would have to be orbitting far FAR faster than our own OR we'd have to stay on that planet for a long time before we noticed the effects of time dilation. The other thing is you could still only travel into the future, just at a different speed than we are on Earth. You could let the Earth overtake you or overtake the Earth then return to the Earth. What would be the point though?? It would be better to put yourself in suspended animation for a while and stay on Earth. I think it might be interesting to do the same thing on a large scale though. What's going to happen when we colonise other worlds either in this solar system or others?? If we colonised Mars or the planets with the fastest and slowest orbits, right now what would be the time difference for that colony in 100 years, at a guess I'd say - probably just a few seconds. What would happen in another solar system though?? Could there be systems with stars that have far more gravity than our Sun and the planets orbit at greater distances?? I was wondering what the extra gravitational forces would have on time in a solar system like that. Or say a black hole passed by close enough to distort time but not damage the system physically. Or doesn't it work like that??

About using random number generators on a computer... I'd have thought it would make the process of prediction more difficult, to visualise the number shown on a computer monitor, all those photons hitting the mesh to illuminate them. Wouldn't a dice or coin toss be easier to visualise for predictions since it's something you can both see and touch already.

I've no idea if you're joking or not but we were just having a laugh with each other, at least that's the way I meant it which is why I put the in there. Edit: BTW infinity to the power of infinity + 0.00000000000001, I reckon it's more like a draw. ;)

I have a typically mad theory for overcoming that black hole problem. A ship with a powerful anti gravity generator, as you fly into the black hole you turn the anti grav up so there is more gravity going out from the centre of the ship pushing things out more than they're being pushed in. A bit like increasing the pressure in a submarine so it can dive deeper.. Small problems... How the hell would you build a device capable of generating enough gravity to overcome the gravity a black hole generates? You'd need something as powerful as a black hole in the ship. Then the ability to control the amount of anti gravity it generated, whilst flying in normal space everything would be pushed outwards away from it. Flying into a black hole without being affected by gravity would be pointless, you wouldn't get crushed into a small point or affected by time dilation, you'd just fly over it wouldn't you?? The same would go for just hovering near it, the time dilation effect would be negated by the anti gravity bubble you and the ship were in, wouldn't it?? But you should be able to turn the anti grav device down so you were still slightly affected by it but even then the time dilation would only be as powerful as the amount of gravity you could safely deal with from the black hole. You would need a really tough ship to survive the "pressure".. Another mad theory. The only "time barrier" method I can imagine is finding out how particles naturally travel from one time to another, then how to block that natural process. Doing it on a human scale you could then prevent a person from moving forwards in time with the rest of the universe. That would be difficult because the device blocking time would travel to the future along with the rest of the universe. Then there's the problem of travelling through space too. If you stopped the person from travelling into the future while everything else naturtally moved forwards in time, the Earth itself would move through time and space so the person would drift out of the field you were generating. So it would have to tow the person along frozen in time. You would have to find out how particles naturally move forwards in time and not only how to block that process but how to apply more force to push the person backwards in time and how to aim them at a specific point in space. If the Earth was moving xd, yd and zd you'd have to fire the person -xd, -yd and -zd but the Earth orbits in a circular/elliptical orbit and it's rotating... BUT when you fired the person back the sun and Earths gravity would still be affecting the person in the same way.. Unless you fired them backwards too quickly so the gravitational effects didn't have enough time to affect the persons location in space. Like watching a DVD running backwards of a car driving forwards at twice the speed the DVD normally plays, our eyes wouldn't see everything that happened. And once you've got them moving backwards in time would they stop moving backwards or just continue going backwards forever?? It would have to act like moving upstream in a river, push the boat upstream and it moves against the flow for a while but eventually the current slows it down to a stop where it starts to move with the natural current again. BTW infinity plus 1.0000000000000000000000000001 Your move.

I've got to agree with T-77 on his idea that we are living inside the time machine right now and that we've got to start thinking outside the box. Given the size of the universe it's a BIG box to think outside of. I think what T-77 is trying to describe is a means of looking into the future by sending something there but how would you send the signal back in time to you?? Read on... The only way I can ever see us being able to travel faster into the future is using a really fast space ship which is pointless IMO because it would be easier to perfect cryogenic suspension. But for the big one - the only way I can ever see us travelling backwards in time is by learning how to convert matter into energy well enough to be able to do it with a full human being. We'd need to invent a molecular transmission system or something like that... Then tachyons need to be discovered and how to convert the energy sent as a molecular transmission into tachyons so the energy a human has been converted to can travel faster than light and backwards in time... So we'd need a biological molecular to energy convertor, a transmission system for that energy and a convertor to reconstruct the human from the energy. That is gonna be TOUGH!!! The conversion from matter to energy would HAVE to be absolutely instantaneous!!! If it converted from top to bottom or vice versa or in any other fashion like inside to outside.. Say it went top to bottom, what happens when the body is sending blood or thought patterns upwards and they try to pass into part of the body that's no longer there because it's been converted to energy?? The blood would spurt out of the missing part or the neural connection that was being made would break. A bit like a car driving along a road then all the road from a millimetre ahead suddenly disappearing. So it's got to be an instantaneous conversion at both ends, hasn't it?? Freezing the subject in time would help with that process though, maybe cryogenics would allow the person to be converted to/from energy slowly.. Then we need a particle accelerator or some similarly incredible machine to turn those energy particles into tachyons and a way of guiding them to the reconstructor in the past... I've read that most of the cosmologists like Hawkings reckon any time machine would only be able to send you back to the first time you got the time machine working. With the idea I'm talking about you could only ever send a person to a time when the receiver was turned on and wasn't busy reassembling another person. The BIG problem is keeping all the tachyons together in one package and filtering out tachyons not part of the package. Back to T-77's future observatory, convert the signal to tachyons and send that back in time to your receiver.. And if you think all that's too out of the box because "Tachyons don't exist!!" Maybe we need to invent them. What if some advanced species in the future has invented/discovered them and they're sending beings or data back waiting for another less advanced species to figure out how to catch them and reassemble them into their original forms?? It's all science fiction though, a bit like men flying to the moon in rocket ships. Or cooking a meal by firing radio waves at it. Or making a glass ball light up when you connect two bits of metal wire. Or reproducing a human being without sex. Or sending a moving picture through the air to peoples homes. Or... So forget my idea cos obviously it's just a load of old bollo...