Starship Asterisk*

aristarchusinexile wrote:Wow! Earth really IS at the centre of the universe after all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You're always at the center of the universe, though.

there's no way in that case to distinguish between a photon of zero energy, and the simple absence of the photon Another crazy idea on this one :) what if we run towards the black hole very fast, shouldnt we see those zero energy photons effectively blue-shifted back to non-zero, vs seing nothing a...

Hello Qev Actual Time cannot change, relative time can because the speed of EMR can be altered during experiments here on earth and when EMR comes close to compact object... What frame of reference are you going to use to define 'Actual Time', though? I'm going by the assumption that you're suggest...

harry wrote:and if you have evidence to support what you say or some form of logic that time can change.

Well, what exactly do you mean by 'time cannot change'? Are you referring to time dilation? Time travel?

I guess it really underlines how virtual photons don't have to play by the same rules that real ones do.

I'm assuming that there's a catch here that prevents this method from actually being useful for signalling faster-than-c (like their is in all the other 'faster-than-c' setups)?

Time has no matter or energy or any other form of particles or wave forms. Neither do up, or left, or forwards? I did not say that GR is wrong or right, just stated that time cannot be changed. Then, depending on what you mean by 'changed', you're saying that GR is wrong, as time dilation is part o...

Do you have a comment on the two Germans who claim to have broken the speed of light? I'm not aware of any such claims. People have modified the phase velocity of light to be both faster and slower than c, but that doesn't break any rules because no energy or information is traveling faster than li...

While interesting, these cases don't do anything to undermine Special Relativity. No signal is ever transmitted faster than c in these experiments. This page goes into some detail why this is the case, for the caesium-gas experiment. There are also challenges to Dr.s Nimtz and Stahlhofen's interpret...

G'day Aris It is not my opinion, its fact. Time, Clocks and Causality http://www.quackgrass.com/time.html#existence So, this page is effectively stating that General Relativity is wrong (despite all of it's supporting observations) because Ayn Rand and Aristotle say so? I chuckled at the anti-time-...

The GRB in question in the physorg article wasn't coming from 'the first moments'. It occurred when the universe was roughly 900 million years old. Very early, certainly, but not quite the beginning. And more than time enough for stars to form and die.

I don't mean spontaneously, exactly. I was of the understanding that large persistent electric charges just don't happen in nature due to the way that any charge will repel other like charges, while strongly attracting opposite charges (and vice-versa), neutralizing themselves. I'm not saying that a...

Wouldn't it be unusual for a black hole to maintain a significant electric charge, though? Don't charge imbalances like that rapidly neutralize, in general? I think black holes hold charges indefinitely. Objects only neutralize when there's some place for the charge to go. Wouldn't a black hole tha...

It is not known if black holes can carry a magnetic charge- the most common theory is that they can't. But they can carry an electric charge, and the spinning charge induces magnetic fields in surrounding material. That is the presumed source of energy that drives relativistic jets. I don't know if...

I believe the most common view is that the magnetic field is being generated not by the black hole itself, but rather by the moving plasma of the accretion disk around the black hole. I think the rotational energy transfer is occurring through the effects of the black hole's ergosphere , but I'm not...

As I understand it, it's just a statement that, if the total energy of a system is zero, then under the influence of quantum mechanical effects it's not 'cheating' to have that entire system just pop into existence out of nothing at all. For this to occur, the system in question would have to be sma...

I think you're basically running into an Occam's Razor problem, here. You're adding complexity to the model without adding any greater explanatory power, as pure attractive-only gravity already seems to be able to produce the structures astronomers observe.

Okay .. in nature the larger seems to mimic the smaller: as in our solar system somewhat mimics atomic structure (or is this comparison so outdated as to be thought dead?) This comparison is so outdated as to be thought dead. ;) Although the solar system would be an utterly amazing thing to experie...

Harry! Exellent idea. I also just discovered I might be able to boost my moped's miles per gallon by placing a strong magnet near the combustion chamber's air-fuel intake port .. the field allowing gas and air molecules to mix more efficiently. Won't do you any good, I'm afraid. The molecules aren'...

Dennis Avery is about the last person I'd give any credibility to on AGW issues.

Regardless of what else rocket launches and jet aircraft emit into the atmosphere, the heat pollution must be enormous. Nah, not so much really. I mean, the total world energy consumption for 2008 is estimated to be around 500 exajoules (less, if you ignore renewable energy, which is effectively ju...

By the way, some brown eyed South American scientists say they have discovered human habitation 200,000 years old near the sea in what I think I remember them saying as Peru. The blue eyed, U.S. scientists are saying "nonsense". We all know how white supremacy works. I think you might be ...

What permanent north polar cap? <g> Haha, you know what I mean. :lol: Seriously, while the ice may be fairly low salt, it doesn't matter as far as sea level is concerned. The density effect is fairly small to begin with, and there just isn't that much surface ice in the boreal arctic. The north pol...

Also, like Qev pointed out, I too thought that freezing salt water would force out the dissolved salt. (so long as there was more water for it to relocate to.) I think it does, to some extent. When you make ice cubes out of salt water, you get wet ice- it's briny on the outside, enough so that the ...

Chris, I'm not really sure you have the qualifications to continue this discussion, so you should probably let it end here. But before you continue befuddling middle schoolers everywhere, let’s point out a couple of facts that are well documented about your experiment and sea-ice. Unless you’re tal...

I'd kind of find it weird that a photographer would pick up his camera to shoot a phenomenon he couldn't have noticed without having already been looking through the viewfinder and already about to shoot. I suppose he could have been going to shoot something else in the field, but there isn't terrib...