Recent content by John Richard

Thank you for your encouragement DEMcMillan, I will undertake the preliminary assesment using your very useful tips and links and report back in due course. Thank you again John Richard

An article in the National Geographic states: "According to Berkland, the U.S. Geological Survey said such a theory is ridiculous—the Earth is 82 times more massive than the moon. Though the Earth can trigger quakes on the moon, they said, the moon is too small to trigger any earthquakes."...

I think Gordon Brown (GB) stinks of Barak Obama (BO).

I'm British so unfortunately I can't vote in the forthcoming US ellection. Somehow I feel this is not entirely fair since my government does nothing but suck up to the US establishment and this effectively turns the UK into a US dependancy. You have a credit crunch and so do we, you decide...

Thank you for your helpful replies. Can I put it crudely to see if I am getting the right idea. Is it assumed to be a build up of the electromagnetic repulsion interaction that eventually defeats the strong nuclear attraction interaction? In a manner of speaking, does the strong force...

If a free proton is pushed to within 10^-13 centimeters of a nucleus, it overcomes the repulsion interactions and is locked into the nucleus. Is there a known limit to the size of a nucleus? Is there a limit to how many protons we can add to a nucleus? Thanks for your help John

Marcus, thank you for your reply. I think I was just factually wrong and I appologize to rbj. Sometimes, stating what you think you know, gets a better answer than any question you may have asked. That is certainly true for me in this case. You speak of speeds in excess of C and of CMB...

O good, back to the question. I may be wrong but I think this has to do with the nature of the observational isotropy of the speed of light. The frequency of light can only be affected by its source. Once propagated any observer will observe the finger print of the velocity of the light source...

If your misconceptions made you interested enough to learn then they did you a favour. If you had no misconceptions what would you need to learn? Analogies, by there very nature, are not that which they are seeking to explain. This is really a debate for the philosophy section, but reading your...

Well said DaveC. I had a misconception about the big bang theory when I first came to this forum. On reflection, I have to admit that this stemmed from my lazyness and nothing else. Luckily, I joined the Physics Forum, and I'm not lazy anymore! In the UK we have Sir Patrick Moore, he's as...

Hasn't the path of physics been one of complementarity of investigation. The smaller gets smaller, the bigger gets bigger. Microscopes cracked open the molecule and telescopes broke the bounds of space. Partical accelerators smashed the atom and rockets took radio telescopes into space. With...

Your question is answered by the fact that the theorists, in fairness, are looking at all the angles, one of which is dark matter. Try this link, it deals with just the issue you are questioning: http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/08/21/dark-matter-exists/ John

Ha, ha, ha, ha, that's a tall order ZapperZ. Do camels have humps? Do laymen speculate when they really 'should' wait? Point taken though!

Thanks for the clues Barmecides, I will seek the MOND hypothesis out for sure. I understand that dark energy is just a way of saying we have observations we can't properly account for yet. It has to be agreed that this is quite an exciting period for cosmology though, given the recent and...

A good link to the WMAP page on dark matter / dark energy is: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101matter.html They seem to suggest there is a hell of a lot more of that than anything else in the universe. They have calculated that 96% of the energy density of the universe is a form of...