Recent content by FalseVaccum89

I think I know what the OP's getting at: Per GR, high local spacetime curvature has the same effect on duration as accelerating closer and closer to the speed of light does in SR. Though, I'm unsure whether this translates to a situation involving high *global* spacetime curvature. /my two cents

Strang is good, unless you want to learn some theory along the way. Don't get me wrong, he's really good at explaining calculus conceptually, you're just not going to be doing much in the way of proofs. To be honest, my advice is to look at two or three texts roughly simultaniously (if you have...

In Barbour's book The End of Time, he talks about the probabilities associated with QM being represented as densities of a "fog" in Platonia (the configuration space).

I'm almost certain your derivation is completely messed up. It would help if you posted an example of your logical progression from the first to the second equation. For instance, the primed W is a multiplied variable on the RHS, but a subtracted one on the LHS. Then you've got the constant "1"...

If you don't want us to think you're "making this up", you've got to show us some professional research on the subject, at least an arXiv perprint article or two. That's the way things work in the technical part of the Forums. Now, while what you describe sounds like a good science fiction plot...

Intriguing. . . Your comment spurred me to do some more digging, and it appears that virtual photons (per QFT) don't even have to travel at c over short distances. Thanks for setting me straight!

Spivak for calc I? Wow. To the OP: The way proofs are presented in most US high school courses (if presented at all) makes them seem just as banal as straight algebraic manipulation. At least in my experience. . .

I concur.

Bud, SR forbids *all* travel through space at or faster than the local value of C. Put another way, you can never go as fast or faster than light through a given medium. Escape velocity from Jupiter does not equal escape velocity from the sun.

Well, to my knowledge, not many mechanical waves are qudripole like a gravitational wave is. You are correct in assuming that space-time is the medium for such waves, however. As in it's the local value of the metric (the value of curvature) that changes as said gravitational wave passes through.

A physicist who believes in such things is probably not going to be taken seriously by fellow scientists to begin with and probably won't have an academic position.

Quite. His former instructor (the one who called him a 'lazy dog'), Hermann Minkowski came up with the idea. At first, Einstein didn't even like it, but he was eventually convinced of space-time's utility.

That's a good one!

Quite. Neither Oregon or Arizona are in the Deep South, though. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of my Southern heritage, but we could do with a better elementary/secondary/post-secondary educational system down here.

Of course. I just meant on the average.