Strange

I don't know what that means. You get red or blue shift when you move towards or away from a source of light. In most situations, this would be far too small to be seen. The point is that white is not a frequency; it is a mixture all frequencies. If you Doppler shift white light, I am guessing it will still be white (assuming the spectrum extends beyond the visible range).

Yes, because that changes the colour. So it will contrast with the background. I have no idea what you are asking. It might be helpful if you said which Wikipedia page you were quoting from. Without context, I have no idea what those sentences mean.

This doesn't make much sense. What is the black part? What is the "the invisible, transparent ,constant"? Any light that enters our eyes will be seen. Whatever its source. So I don't understand what you are asking. Are you saying that if you hold up a piece of white paper in front of a white wall, it will be hard to see it?

Yes, you can only see things that the light is reflected or emitted from. You can't see the empty space in between.

No. Glass is a solid material. Light isn't material and isn't stationary.

I suppose so. It doesn't interact with itself so we can't see that it is there.

Yes to most of your questions. But... I don't think the word transparent makes much sense in this context. Transparent means a material that lets light through (glass, water, air) but EMR is not a material. All EMR can be described in terms of photons, not just light. EMR has energy, but not potential energy. Potential energy is a property of objects. No. A laser, for example, sends light in a single direction.

In a laser, the direction is not random. If you want to know more about lasers, I suggest you ask in the appropriate part of the forum. The rest of your post is just the usual random nonsense. What if photons got a taxi part of the way? What if photons wore little plaid jackets? What if they were strawberry flavoured? If light didn't travel in straight lines, then we wouldn't be able to see what was around us. Lenses would not work. And, in the case you suggest, we would not be able to see clear image of galaxies. A "distant glowing thing" is not a laser. It requires materials to be specially engineered to get lasing effects. I don't know if there are natural lasers (another interesting question you could ask in the Physics section) but if so they are rare and not what we see from stars. Even if the direction of emission from a single atom is not random (and I don't know if that is the case or not) that is hardly relevant as the light we see comes from gadzillions of atoms all of which are moving. So the direction will be fully randomized. Comes in and goes out of what?

How did they talk about these ramps and other slopes for the thousands of years of prehistory if they didn't have a word for them? "Hey, I'm just going to walk up this, er, you know, thingy ... "

Bigger letters: you win! (Oh yeah. That and the evidence.)

As I say, it is very easy to check this. Those of us who have done it know that you are just making baseless assertions here. Obviously not, or it would fly away in a straight line. And it really is made of cheese.

How is that relevant? You claimed that no one lives or travels in "the desert". Given the subject of the thread, I assumed that you meant the Sahara. I could have found references to people living in and travelling through all sorts of deserts but I focussed on the one you are talking about. Once again a load of waffle and bluster, rather than admit you were wrong. This behaviour is just silly. But as you ask... http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/236545/Gobi/47956/Plant-life#toc47958 (Which is obviously not "nobody"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley And all this waffle is irrelevant to refuting your claim that no one lives there or travels across it. Er, it is exactly that. Because you said that they don't because of "common sense". I am just trying to help you learn that every random "fact" that pops in to your head is not automatically true because you thought of it. Of course it isn't. It uses the scientific method. That makes it a science. What is that supposed to mean? I would suggest a course in historical linguistics. Unfortunately, it would destroy all your fantasies about the way language works. (You know what they say about people not accepting new ideas...)

I assume e is electron charge, rather than Eulers number? And C is c? What are Ex, Rx, mx and fx? And how did you find / derive these equations? I only recognise mc2. What are F, m, C and U? What is the derivation of this equation? What is V? What is λx ? Is it one thing or λ * x ? What is the derivation of this equation? Is "Compton radius" the same as the classical electron radius? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_electron_radius

Oh, good grief. And on a science forum. You may not have noticed that common sense is frequently wrong. That is one of the reasons for the scientific method. And in this case you are, once again, trivially wrong. Of course people live in deserts and of course people travel through them. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/516375/Sahara/37016/The-people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedouin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_trade No this is your claim. I am impressed (not) by your ability to waffle on without addressing the point. As you are unable to provide a citation to support your claim, I will assume that there is no Egyptologist who claims to know everything. Again, good grief. Linguistics is a science. Of course they won't "swear" to it. You are setting ridiculous standards. However, they could, of course, provide you with a large pile of evidence for the existence of the words for ramp or slope in prehistory.

Yep. That is kind of the definition of science.But you aren't interested in science and I'm not interested in pages of waffle with no apparent meaningful content. In other words: tl;dr.

Then maybe "boat" is not the appropriate English translation. It is not as if there is a one-to-one mapping between words. Translators have to choose the word(s) that best express the meaning, not just pick a single definition for all cases. I would like to see some evidence to support that claim. Sounds like another of your made-up "factoids". Citation needed. The fact it isn't attested doesn't mean it didn't exist. From historical linguistics (which is a science, rather than your Tower of Babel fantasy) the existence of unattested forms can be determined with some certainty.

Certainly they exist in these models. Whether they have any physical reality (when, for example, we have a theory of quantum gravity) is less clear.

Actually, all black holes lose mass through Hawking radiation. Although any realistic size black hole will always gain more mass by material falling in. And when you say "singularities less than a nanometer across" you actually mean "event horizons". Singularities are, by definition, zero sized. (And probably don't exist.) There are very good reasons to think that: a) Nothing can travel faster than light b) Matter cannot leave a black hole, whatever its speed. We already have an explanation for Hawking radiation. Devised by someone called Hawking, by a remarkable coincidence. Your description so far suggests you are thinking of the big bang as some sort of explosion. It isn't. Also, the energy released from a black hole dissipated due to Hawking radiation can be no more than the mass that fell into it. As you are talking about a very small black hole, you will create a really teeny little bang. It is widely believed that dark matter attracts matter in the same way as normal matter. Ah, perhaps you are thinking of dark energy? This is not the reason that galaxies are speeding away from us (actually, they are speeding away from each other, not just us). It is proposed for an explanation of the apparent acceleration of that expansion. You have so many basic errors, I gave up reading at this point. Conclusion? Back to school.

Maybe I am on a higher plane of existence then Or, more likely, my natural scepticism extends to the dream world.

Me too. I would be interested to know what the author cites as evidence for that idea. Nothing I have read on the subject suggest that the brain is hard-wired for all possible sounds, of which only a few are kept active. One objection to this is that I would expect to see this being affected by evolution. If there is a genetic component to the sounds produced (which is what this claim says) then you would expect the areas of the brain associated with the local language(s) to be selected for over the others. This would also mean that the sounds in the language would not change much (because the speakers have evolved to favour those sounds). This feedback should lead to populations who were actually incapable of producing non-native sounds. None of these things are true. The other objection is that it suggests that the sounds used by different languages are "quantised" - either this sound or that sound. But they aren't. There is a continuum of sounds - different languages produce different ranges of vowels which overlap and consonants which are articulated in all sorts of subtly different positions.

You really don't get it, do you. It is not about what I "believe". It is about the quality of the evidence. Belief should not come into it. I don't have any particularly strong beliefs on the issue. Obviously any old footage is going to be convincing to those who "believe". This is what we find with people who believe in ghosts or UFOs. Show them a fuzzy blob and they will be convinced. But you are not trying to convince people who already "believe". You are, I hope, trying to produce credible, objective evidence of something that might warrant further investigation. This you are failing to do in a spectacular fashion.

My understanding is that it is less random - exited atom are stimulated to emit coherent photons but you still can't say exactly which atom will react when.

No. That is not the argument. If you can't be bothered to filter your own evidence to remove the obvious, why should I consider your evidence to be credible. This comes back to the often repeated question: how are you eliminating mundane explanations? In most cases it is by assertion. In which case your arguments can be simply dismissed. You need better evidence. You need to demonstrate that alternatives are impossible or less likely than the unknown. You need to do this with an array of different tests producing different forms of objective evidence. You need to stop relying on "it looks like" as an argument. This is about the worst sort of evidence you could provide. Most people in this thread are trying to help you understand that what you have is not compelling. You need to cross the chasm from "unknown" to some plausible alternative.

I assumed everyone knew they were dreaming. Apparently not. I think that being on a train that grows wings and turns into a dragon that swims through the water while the pigs start playing the tuba ... is not something that future technology is going to bring about. There are also dead give-aways like not being able to read writing (or if you do, it is different every time you look at it).

This is part of the problem. Why lump "easily debunked" ones in with "hard to debunk" ones. YOU should be eliminating those that have (or could plausibly have) a mundane explanation. This is just one of the [many] things that undermine your credibility and will make it hard for people to take you seriously. (Right behind starting the presentation of your ideas by insulting your audience.) And this is another problem. You leap, with absolutely no reasons, from "unknown" to implying that they are dangerous (as here) or alive or plasma (elsewhere). And then, when questioned on any of these things you say "I never said that". And true, you very carefully use weasel words so that you can deny what you very strongly imply. Yes, people see unidentified and unidentifiable objects in the sky. They always have. In the past people said "angels. Then they said UFOs/aliens. Now you saying that they are "not plasma, living, intelligent, dangerous" things. Yet there is zero evidence for any of these conclusions because they are unidentified. If we don't know what they are then then the only conclusion we can draw, without more data (and I don't mean more videos) is that we don't know what they are. You have filmed some things that I cannot identify. You have also filmed some things that look trivially identifiable. I see no reason to assume that the currently unidentified ones are also not ordinary objects.