Recent content by ZelmersZoetrop

Project Orion, I must say, does scare me. If the fututre of spaceflight really does lie in the commercial sector as this coming Monday's launch of SpaceShipOne would seem to indicate, I'm not sure it's a great idea to mass produce nuclear bombs and distribute them to companies. Not to mention...

Perhaps I should have said standard model physics. Squeezed vacuum state experiments have verified that negative energy can be produced, and metrics like Nan Den Broeck's (sp?) solution demonstrate that it is possible to utilize this energy for FTL travel. Nevermind that it requires energy...

That's not nessecarily true. In some cases, quantum effects produce FTL phenomena. For example, squeezed vacuum states and Casimir-type effects (ie, the so-called "zero-point energy") all create negative energy, which can be used in things like the Alcubierre drive or the Krasinov tube, both...

If one speaks of creating a human being from raw materials at a "receiver teleporter," that would require astronomical amounts of energy, as pointed out in The Physics of Star Trek. I think the first post in this thread was accurate in terms of one event preceding another, but the years...

I've been reading (rather, re-reading) Robert Zubrin's book Entering Space, in which he makes some fairly damning accusations of Michio Kaku. I'd like to know how Dr. Kaku responded, or if he did. I'd also like to hear from anybody who could argue Dr. Kaku's case, and people thoughts in...

RNA transcription takes place at light speed now, guys! Wow! Those ancients sure were brilliant to have known that. Erik von Daniken is proud of you, Oscar.

Although I must say I'm skeptical of any alteration of the Minkowski metric, this means of "Euclid-izing" normal SR space is vastly prefferable to multiplying by i the time co-ordinate. I'm curious, have you extended this concept into researching GR positive-definite metrics? Also, I looked...

By "could hardly exist," Noah, I meant not "could barely exist" but rather "could not conceivably exist." I should have made that clear in my post. Time most certainly exists without motion. It is represented by a vertical world-line in a space-time diagram.

Alright. I'll go over this in a slightly different way. The Minkowski metric tensor can be displayed as a 4X4 matrix. Hence, four dimensions. Doubting the existence of time as a dimension is doubting SR.

...wow. OK, let's begin at the top. Gravitons increase the angular speed of a charged sphere? I'm not sure where this one comes from. Gravitons increase mass? A very odd way of looking at it, but, I suppose, acceptable. Mass is that quality of a body which is it's resistance to...

Sure. Try this: Alright, suppose you somehow manage to extract energy from a magnetic field by allowing it to accelerate a charged particle. Even better, a stream of charged particles carrying a message in binary. Suppose it travels at 1.2c and arrives in the radios of some friendly aliens...

Thinking of other dimensions as smeel or touch? What- what- what-- For once, I am speechless.

Pallidin, you're absolutely right insofar as the concept in absurd. Nobody would just assume this all! But experiments contradict our common-sense assumptions about the world, and common sense dictates we heed those experiments. Ironic. Besides, why should we expect our experiences at 60 or...

I'm sorry, but I simply cannot allow an abuse of physics to go to. Look here at the metric for a black hole (I'll assume no rotation or charge, and take c=1, for simplicity, also, I use (r,H,I) for polar spatial co-ordinates): ds^2=(1-2Gm/r)dt^2-(1-2Gm/r)^(-1)dr^2-r^2*dH^2-r^2*sin[H]^2*dI^2...

Wow. OK, let's go over this. If I want to specify an event, I need 4 numbers: latitude, longitude, altitude, and time. Hence four dimensions. Or look at it this way: An object could hardly exist with width and length but no depth; there would literally be no distance between one side and the...