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Like the BIG bang.. is just an assumption by many assuming the same thing.. but it is indeed an assumption.. Up until about 1900 many assumed that opium and mercury(compounds) was a beneficial soup(laudanum)-medication..

People believed a lot of crazy things were medicinally good for a long time. Witness the Then they actually started doing systematic studies to gather evidence and accounted for things like the placebo effect.

The big bang is NOT an assumption... It is a theoretical explanation that fully accounts for the avaialbe evidence.

Does order come of chaos by itself? Prove it.

It happens all the time

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/

Ordered states are often a more energetically favorable configuration than unordered states. This is how crystalization occurs.

Life comes from pasta, I am increasingly convinced. The only question is whether the pasta is best accompanied by Italian sausage, meat sauce, red clam sauce, or white clam sauce.

HERETIC!!! Life formed from the primoridal pesto!

there was a lot to not understand about that movie. Like why it was made.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a BIG Jet Li fan, but I mostly go for the stuff he did IN CHINA. Most of his movies that have been targeted for the US audiece have quite frankly stunk.

Have you seen "Fist of Legend"? It has some of the best fight scenes of any martial arts film I've ever seen!!!!

SampleMan said:
Apparently not all the scientists at Princeton are drinking the "everything there is to know about evolution is already known" Kool-Aid.

WKB said:
Evo articles are ALWAYS full of if, could have, might have, may have, might possibly be, etc etc etc.

For some reason we scientists either know EVERYTHING or know NOTHING. Make up your minds.

Part of good science is in defining not just what we know but also the boundaries on that knowledge. EVERY measurement made in a laboratory or in some kind of observation of the universe has some kind of error associated with it. You acknowledge that uncertainty and judge how accurate or precise your measurement happens to be (the two are not exactly the same) and therefor how much confidence you can have in your results. This is how science works.

Yup, that sounds about right, except that usually you should still be able to see the core idea of the original theory under layers of extension and new notation. Newton wouldn't recognize the way we use his laws of motion nowadays (and if he did, he'd be pissed because we all use his old enemy Leibniz's notation for doing calculus), but the new formulas are all derived from his basic ideas.

Of COURSE you're stationary with respect your pants! I mean, I HOPE they're not flying away from you right now...

It might have just been science fiction, but there has been a lot of speculation that time travel is possible if you can manipulate matter and energy to the point where you could create and manipulate worm-holes and things like that. So perhaps the disks you refer to could lead to time travel if they were, say, the density of neutron stars and rotating at relativistic speeds. Such things are so far beyond our capabiltity to test that it's easy for theorists to come up with crazy ideas that are mathematically possible but completely impractical.

The short answer is, don't hold your breath for real time travel, but it's cool to think about anyway!

Nope, we even had a thread about this question not too long ago... although I can't seem to find it.

You can't just ADD speeds that way when dealing with relativisitic velocities. It works fine for slower relative velocities (like two cars passing one another on a racetrack) but not at all when the velocities approach light speed (like two particles passing one another in an accelerator).

The math is different, and in physics that's what counts. This website explains more, but is not really written for the layman, sadly.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/velocity.html

To me it seems to be a possible or impossible but unprovable in either situation.

At this point I guess travel to distant stars will come in the form of another method.

It's VERY provable, though not in the sense that we can actually build a spacecraft and accelerate a person in it to relativistic velocities, which is what you're picturing. We usually have to settle for subatomic particles, and we do this EVERY DAY. We simply would not be able to run a particle accelerator without accounting for special relativity. So if you have a proton travelling at 99.99999% of the speed of light (as opposed to a train) and it emits a photon (as opposed to turning on a flashlight) you get an independent confirmation of what WOULD happen if you were to be on a relativisitic train. The math is the same, and in physics that's what counts.

My personal feelings are that we can't tweak anymore. That we will discover something basic that shows we are seeing only a slice of what the universe is truly all about. And it will be so revolutionary, it will shake the foundations of existence and meaning and life itself.

This thread died over the weekend, but I felt I needed to respond anyway.

I share your exitement about future advances in science, but I have to say that I disagree that the foundational theories of physics (quantum mechanics and general relativity in particular) are in any kind of real trouble. These theories have been spectacularly succesful in explaining a wide variety of phenomena and it is highly unlikely that they would ever be completely supplanted. Each operates in a specific 'realm' of phenomena and IN THAT REALM each is strong, useful, and in no danger of needing major changes. Even modifying GR to effectively replace the need for dark matter would only represent a slight modification to the theory in a realm that is really outside of what we have been able to apply it to in the past, so tweaking is perfectly acceptable.

The main problem right now, and this is where your hopes of major new ideas has a lot of merit, is in combining the two theories. Right now, we simply cannot explore experimentally the realm where quantum mechanics and general relativity both hold sway, so there is room for a lot of new ideas and thinking. But the thing to bear in mind is that even this will likely be viewed as an extension of the previous two theories.

Remember that just because Einstein suggested a different theory of reference frames in Special Relativity for use when speeds approached the speed of light, it doesn't mean that everyone stopped using Galileo's old theory for more everyday problems. The old theories of Newton and Galileo were never replaced, mearly extended, and that is the image you should probably hold in your mind for future scientific advances. We don't give up good ideas without a damn good reason.

If you're travelling on a train moving at 99.9999% the speed of light and you get up and walk to the front of the train, didn't you just surpass the speed of light?

Wow! This post generated a LOT of responses! I don't have much to add except to say that your question is ALMOST EXACTLY the original problem that got Einstein thinking about the subject. Specifically, he asked what would happen if you were traveling in a train at a significant fraction of the speed of light and turned on a flashlight. The answer (as has already been described several times apparently) is that you can't simply add speeds when dealing with relativistic velocities. The math is more complicated.

If you are referring to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement (I assume you are), it's important to point out that one of the biggest misconceptions about it (which I've even see a few physicists fall into) is that the implied 'action-at-a-distance' somehow implies a violation of relativity. It simply doesn't. (This question has been explored extensively.)

I LOVE this stuff! I had to do a report on the EPR paradox as an undergrad and it was one of the things that made me love physics enough to seek a career in it.

Just an extension on your explanation: I've also heard an analogy drawn to the movement of a shadow or a point of light from a laser pointer. If you shine a laser onto the moon, then change the angle of the laser quickly enough, you can make it appear as though the laser 'dot' is moving faster than the speed of light. However, there is no real 'thing' that is actually moving. The photons from the laser obey the rules and there is no transfer of energy, momentum, or information that exceeds the speed of light. Even if you were to have observers at points 'A' and 'B' on the moon and move the laser between them, there would be no way to confirm that the dot had 'traveled' without having the observers compare notes and agree that they had both observed the laser. This comparison must be done at normal speeds.

Oh! And don't forget tachyons! Everybody loves tachyons!

I know I will be scorned for saying it, but I think physics needs a new paragigm. They are up against a brick wall. Cracks are appearing in Einsteins work. Locality has been relegated to the dust heap.

Locality has BEEN in the dust heap (so to speak) for a while now. There are no "cracks" in Einsteins work that I am aware of. (although general relativity may have to be tweaked. It's wrapped up in the whole dark matter thing.) The Standard Model (governing high-energy particles) is one of the most succesful theories in the history of science.

True that there are a lot of new things that we still don't know much about, but we physicists are all hard at work (when we are not chatting on internet forums) exploring the frontiers. I guess I'm not sure what your "new paradigm" would really entail.

I think I see it, and it explains a lot.

Aacckkkk!!! Ctrl-Alt-Delete! CTRL-ALT-DELETE!!!!!

You'd think his name would come up more often on these threads.

Kelvin came closer than anyone to finding a LEGITIMATE scientific attack on Darwin's theory. I remember reading that they were contemporaries and that Kelvin's measurements of the Earth's core were showing that the center of the Earth's crust was too hot and that Earth was FAR too young for Darwin's theory to be valid. Kelvin was practicing GOOD science and making a credible case against evolution that was not necessarily influenced by his religious views (though he was a very religious man). In the end, Kelvin's measurements were proven wrong due to the fact that the Earth is continually being heated by radioactive materials, something he could have known nothing about at the time.

An actual scientific argument. I dream of such a thing sometimes....

There's no doubt the explanation begets other questions (why does the earth rotate?, etc); anyone who's talked to a bright four-year old is familiar with the infinite chain of questions and answers. And ultimately we get back to the really fundamental questions of where the universe came from, and so on. We can't yet answer those questions with confidence. But what we can answer are the immediate questions, and the immediate questions all have natural rather than supernatural explanations. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the harder and more distant questions will have natural explanations, and to exclude supernatural explanations, because the imminent problems, without exception, do not have supernatural explanations.

I really like the image of the 'bright four-year-old'. You are very right that we can more easily explain the more immediate questions, but that our answers get less sure the farther back we go. One of the aims of science is to push along the line of questions, just like a determined four-year-old, until we get to some kind of end. Of course, there is the chance that there IS not end, and simply more questions await us.

_I_ think that obscure movie knowledge is a virtue. I don't know about anyone else....

Nah, he didn't. I beat ya both. :)

I bow before your superior movie triva knowledge and fast typing skills!! ;-)

Well, then I wonder why millions of humans over the centuries never figured it out until Darwin.

A lot of ideas are built upon an existing framework of other ideas. If the framework is not present then the odds of anyone THINKING of it is unlikely. In the case of evolution, the necessary precursor was the concept of geologic change over millions of years and discovery of fossilzed dinosaur remains. Darwin spent most of his time in the H.M.S. Beagle looking at rock formations. The specimen gathering that he did was secondary to his interest in geology. It was only later, while thinking about the possibilities of small changes in the earth's surface over millions of years that could produce an entire mountain range that it occured to him that similar long processes could govern the development on biological systems.

Incidently, he only published his book when he became aware that another biologist had INDEPENDENTLY come up with the same idea. He then wrote a paper outlining both his ideas and his colleagues and had BOTH papers published in the same issue of a scientific journal(or presented to some society... I forget which.). Darwin is who we remember because he had also spent years gathering more evidence than the other guy and wrote that up in the "Origin of Species" that REALLY made him famous. The point is, evolution was an idea whose TIME HAD COME. If not Darwin, someone else surely would have come up with it. This is true of a LOT of scientific discoveries and theories, which are often discovered by more than one scientist who were obviously working independently. It happens all the time.