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Sorry, I didn't know Venik from Adam. Here's some other links about the passive radar angle.

http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/flying/f117a_nightha wks.htm

http://www.flymig.com/forum/posts/1108102615.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_technology

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/t-47020_Passi ve_Radar_System.html

I wondered whether this is snake oil. This is what I came accross:

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/t-57321_Plasm a_focus_fusion.html

There is an awful lot of politics involved with this it seems, independently of whether it works or not.

Simply put, it is not possible to rotate an object into the time dimension without that object gaining a velocity. Thus the time dimension itself must be expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions. Another way of looking at this is asking, "Why does something always move when it is rotated out of the three spatial dimensions and into the time dimension?" If someone can conduct a Lorentz transformation on a ruler, and rotate it into the time dimension without it moving through the three spatial dimensions, I would very much like to hear about it.

I'm treating this as an open-source physics project, if anyone would like to join me at http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?t=16
http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=80559

Theory Underlying SR: The Time Dimension is Moving Relative to The Spatial Dimension
The Theory of Moving Dimensions
Dr. Elliot McGucken
mcgucken@jollyroger.com
In this paper I propose that the time dimension is moving relative to the three spatial dimensions. Such a concept may be used to explain physical phenomena encountered in relativity and quantum mechanics, while offering a path for the unification of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity.

Einstein's two postulates of relativity state:

I. The laws of physical phenomena are the same in all inertial frames.
II. The velocity of light in free space is a universal constant, independendent of any relative motion of teh source and the observer.

I propose that the two postulates may be expressed in an alternative manner, by stating the following law of moving dimensions:

I. The time dimension is moving relative to the three spatial dimensions.

Also, if we trace the path of a photon on a space-time diagram, the only way for a photon to remain stationary in space time is to move at the speed of light, or to keep up with the expanding time dimension.

The null vector, which represents a vector of zero length in space-time, can only imply zero movement through space-time. Even though a photon moves through space at a velocity equal to C, it stays stationary in space-time. Is it not strange at first that in order to remain stationary in space time, a photon appears move at the speed of light through space? This is only because the time dimension itself is moving relative to space.

Einstein proclaimed that all objects travel through space-time at c.

Even though we perceive a ruler along the x axis to be stationary, it is yet traveling through space-time at the fixed speed of c, implying that time is moving through it. Rotate it towards the y axis, and its projection upon the x axis shortens, yet it still appears to be stationary, and it is still traveling through space-time at the rate of c. Rotate it into the time dimension, and it's projection along the x axis still shortens, but now it begins to move through the three spatial dimensions, while maintaining the fixed speed of c through space-time. Again, we see it move through the three spatial dimensions as it is rotated into the time dimension because the time dimension is moving relative to the three spatial dimensions.

As Brian Greene points out in the Appendix to Chapter 2 of The Elegant Universe, we note that from the space-time position 4-vector x=(ct,x1,x2,x3), we can create the velocity 4-vector u=dx/d(tau), where tau is the proper time defined by
d(tau)^2=dt^2-c^-2(dx1^2+dx2^2+dx3^2). Then the "speed through space-time" is the magnitude of the 4-vector u, ((c^2dt^2-dx^2)/(dt^2-c^-2dx^2))^(1/2), which is identically the speed of light c. Now, we can rearrange the equation c^2(dt/d(tau))^2-(dx/d(tau))^2=c^2 to be c^2(d(tau)/dt))^2 +(dx/d(tau))^2=c^2. This shows that an increase of an object's speed through space, (dx/d(tau))^2)^(1/2)= dx/d(tau) must be accompanied by a decrease in d(tau)/dt which is the object's speed through time, which also may be considered t

"SPEC is subject to all kinds of problems."

All benchmarks are subject to problems. If you are testing for the CPU, somehow you must control for variables of compiler, OS, system architecture, and the amount of time and expertise of the tester.

Uh, how exactly do you get "GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised than Intel's" from "GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised for x86"?

Sigh. read: "Dell's own figures were calculated using different compilers and host operating system: Windows XP Pro, Intel's own C++ and Fortran compilers, and the MicroQuill SmartHeap Library 6.01. Secondly, the compiler used by VeriTest, GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised for x86." QED less well than intels compiler in the previous sentence

GCC for PowerPC is not as mature: "The gcc scheduler is not really designed ideally for a processor like the 970 and the Power4...that was one of the things that we're continuing to work on to try to get the best performance out of the processor."

GCC on intel is far more mature with a long history, read a little of the history: "...When Intel released the Pentium some of their team produced a version of gcc with enhancements which gave 30% speed improvements on some benchmarks..."

Look at these redhat GCC 3.3/4.0 benchmarks. Notice how the 2-way PPC970 is twice as fast as the 4-way P4 on many tests and at close to par on the others. Now this is not the end all, am I'm sure you could come up with a different test that shows the P4 beating the G5, but certianly the G5 is not a "peice of crap".

You arguement about standardizing compilers is equivalent...

Standardizing of compilers is scientific method. Ideally you'd do a bank of tests, and unroll the variables: Standard compilers, standard OS, standard CPUs. Or you could tune each system to the max and then compare, that was LinPack and you didn't like that one either.

Hmm, does this appear to be vector processing done by a compiler?

Exactly my point! Intels compiler does auto-vectorization. GCC doesn't. If you test C code, P4+intel against GCC+G5, you are crippling the G5 by leaving out the altivec unit, which is a more capacble vector unit than SSE2

"hand coding...becomes completely out of reach for humans"

Hand coding is still done frequently on high performance algorithms:

• "I've also recently started hand coding the low level math kernels... P4, this gives a ~30% boost to performance on this particular MILC code."
• "However, once that level of optimization becomes necessary it's generally just easiest to hand-code the instructions, rather than jumping through a bunch of hoops to try to trick the compiler into doing what you want."
• "In some cases, complete vectorization is not possible and you may want to include hand coded SIMD instructions for the best possible performance"
• "Altivec requires hand-coding to exploit"

I agree on your point on senseless real estate appreciation and have been making similar comments myself for years. Houses do not appreciate, they depreciate; the damn things fall apart. The land may, however, may appreciate in value if it is in a popular area (i.e. a city). I always thought that real estate appreciation was a scam concocted by real estate agents to offset their commissions. If every time you sold your house it sold for the same price that you bought it for, you would be out $10,000 in commissions. This would make you seriously look at why you are paying $10,000 for a (usually incompetent) agent. Fortunately, appraisals are done by real estate agents; often not the agent selling the house but a buddy. So, you jack up the appraisal of the house by at least the amount of the commissions so you don't pay too much attention to why you are paying five times as much for a real estate bimbo to sell your house as you would a surgeon for life saving surgery (the hospital will make up the difference, though). Did the seller do any remodelling or redecorating? Add the cost of that (plus some) to the appraisal as well. Never mind that they buyer will probably have to spend more money undoing the "improvements".

These real estate idiots are way behind on using technology and actual information to sell houses. A few now offer panoramic camera views. A large number of people who buy houses do so in a different city than the one they now live in and those that live in the same city have better things to do with their time than shlep around to houses that could have been ruled out with a real estate bimbo who insists on showing houses during customers working hours. Hire some architecture students to draw up a decent floorplan/3D model of the house, take pictures that are linked so you can select any view of each room from the floorplan, and photograph, catalog, and test all ethernet, phone, cable tv, and electrical outlets including which circuit breaker they connect to. Real estate agent incompetence and the constant stream of disinterested potential buyers traipsing through also severely impacts the lives of people who live in rental property which is being sold to a new landlord. Give people decent virtual tours at their convenience and then let them visit the house only if it is really one of their top candidates.

Besides making real estate agents among the top ten overpaid professions in America, housing is not affordable to those entering the housing market. When the baby boomers, who bought their first houses for realistic prices before appreciation ran amok under favorable loan terms, die off the bubble will have to burst.

A few thoughts, not having read penrose, but being quite familiar with philosophical arguments based on psychology (as i do research pretty much in that domain):

consciousness and free will are different. the argument that free will and voluntary behavior are somehow dependent on quantum uncertainty is an easier claim to build than that of consciousness. consciousness is generally understood in cognitive psychology to be a top-down executive filter and chooser...

so it's quite possible for nonhuman animals to have free will/exhibit voluntary behavior, but not have what we understand as consciousness (or, if it's a gradient, have as much consciousness).

now, as far as neural development and the neurophysiology: repeatability does not entail deterministic function. the nervous system is highly stochastic (probabilistic). neural firing depends on activation to cross a critical threshold, mediated by molecules bouncing around. i'm not a biochemist, but i'm pretty sure one would tell you that "protein machinery" isn't machinery like humans build machinery. it's messy. it involves a lot of bouncing around until things end up "just right." this bouncing is at a low enough level that it very well can be influenced by quantum uncertainty.

now take this stochastic system and build a massively parallel processor from it, and build in the ability to filter the noise, basically. now you've got at least an illusion of voluntariness, in that behavior is unpredictable and self-initiated.

'The smallest mass ever measured would have to go to the electron.'

Give yourself a quick reality check ask yourself these two questions.

What's the mass of Light?
is is smaller than the mass of and electron?

The mass of an electron or light it proportional to the energy contained in the light or electron.
But they are both equally proportional, i.e. they are both leptons.

The energy of Light is Planck's constant times its frequency. E = hv, I assume this is the same for an electron. (google doesn't turn up anything).

Typically the wavelengths of light are equivalent to an electron with a potential of just a few volts, so sometimes light is heavier than an electron, but more frequently electrons are heavier than light.

I suppose for an atom you should count the ironzation levels for the potential of electrons, they they are between 500 and 2500 kj/mol, which works out as roughly between 5 and 25 electron volts. again showing electrons to be heavier than photons.

Intrinsic is just another way of saying unexplainable: saying the redshift is "intrinsic" means that it is not due to anything. In other words, it has no explanation. That doesn't exactly seem scientific.

On the contrary. You do not have to have an explanation in hand. Dark energy, for example, has a name, but not an explanation (calling it Einstein's cosmological constant doesn't help much either :) Yet it can be used to generate hypotheses and tested, given certain assumptions.

In this case, we have an existing theory, and some disparate observations (e.g. at their measured redshift distances, older galaxies in any cluster seem to group on the near side, which is anti-Copernican) that have raised suspicions.

Having a hypothesis that expansion of space cannot statistically account for the observed redshift is a perfectly valid, and scientific, premise for experimentation.

That said, there are some theorists working on the problem.

Contenders for a mechanism:

• CREIL
• Compton Effect
• Plasma Redshift
• Variable Mass Theory (cf. Mach's Principle)

Some of these have got to be wrong, of course, (and this doesn't rule out other mechanisms) but those will show up on further experiments.

Cheers :)

There's a decent amount of evidence that has been mounting over the past few years that a large component of redshift is in fact intrinsic, i.e. not attributed to the Doppler effect.

In some ways, it seems related to the much-glossed-over "K Effect" of a few decades ago, where it was found that bright, bright blue stars seemed to be systematically redshifted.

Researchers like M. B. Bell are of the opinion that the intrinsic redshifts are superimposed on a Big Bang flow (reducing the actual velocity we should be measuring). Others, like Arp, believe that the Hubble Flow is an illusion, and that the universe is actually relatively static once you take away the intrinsic redshifts.

David Russell's paper that just came out supports either view, and shows that other explanations (like Tully-Fisher Relationship errors or rotational velocities) are far too small to account for the large discrepancies.

(Some more hubbub on the topic.)

In either case, intrinsic redshifts will take a lot of pressure off researchers to find 'dark energy', because the discrepancies of speed/distance are much reduced.

Then, perhaps, we can stop looking for something that isn't there? :)

This experiment supports Dr. Elliot's theory of moving dimensions:
Link1
Link2

The four-dimensions of space-time are divided into three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. In the space-time metric, s^2=x^2+y^2+z^2-c^2t^2, the minus sign and c^2 distinguishes t from the three spatial dimensions. Why the minus sign exists is most often glossed over--it is considered to just "be" there. This paper explains the minus sign by proposing that the time dimension, the actual coordinate system, is moving relative to the three spatial dimensions.

The time dimension is expanding at a rate of c relative to the three spatial dimensions, in a spherically symmetric manner. Many trained physicists have a knee-jerk reaction that the time dimension cannot be moving because "dimensions cannot move." First off, since the universe is expanding, space-time is also expanding, showing that dimensions are moving and expanding. Secondly, general relativity demonstrates that massive objects warp space-time, meaning that as a massive object moves though space-time, it stretches space-time, showing again that space-time in one area can move, or deform, relative to space-time in another area.

Rather than just accepting the minus sign in front of the c^2t^2 as being there because it just is there, this paper aims to look at the deeper reality which gives rise to the minus sign. A physicist's job is not to accept things on blind faith, nor only ask questions that are allowed to be asked, but a physicist's job is to wonder. And that wonder, which seems all but forgotten in the bureaucratization of modern physics, leads to a deeper beauty.

That the time dimension is different somehow from the three spatial dimensions is obvious. This difference is a result of the time dimension moving relative to the spatial dimensions. Picture four dimensions--three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. An object can be rotated so that its projection along any particular axis decreases. When an object is rotated into time, its projection along the x, y, and z directions decreases. This is known as relativistic length contraction. Relativistic length contraction is *always* accompanied by time dilation and an increase in the object's velocity. It is not possible to conduct a Lorentz transformation on a ruler, where it is rotated into the time dimension, without the ruler gaining a velocity through the three spatial dimensions. Because rotating an object into the time dimension always results in the object gaining a velocity relative to the spatial dimensions, one can conclude that the time dimension must be moving.

Einstein's two postulates of relativity state: I. The laws of physical phenomena are the same in all inertial frames. II. The velocity of light in free space is a universal constant, independent of any relative motion of the source and the observer. I propose that the two postulates may be expressed in an alternative manner, by stating the following law of moving dimensions: I. The time dimension is moving relative to the three spatial dimensions.

This can be shown illustrated in several ways: Consider an expression for the space-time interval of zero length, or of the null vector, which traces a photon's path through space-time: x^2+y^2+z^2-c^2t^2=0 or x^2+y^2+z^2=c^2t^2 which for one spatial dimension becomes x^2=c^2t^2 or x=ct. By taking the derivative of both sides with respect to t, we get dx/dt = d/dt (ct) = c, so dx/dt = c. And hence the time rate of change of the spatial dimension relative to the time rate of change of the time dimension is equal to the velocity of light. ct | / | / | / | / | / |/_______________ x

Also, if we trace the path of a photon on a space-time diagram, the only way for a photon to remain stationary in space-time is to move at the speed of light, or to keep up with the expanding time dimension. The null vector, which rep

The specific reason for women to excel in certain professions is that the society has been forcing them all their life to do things and then take professions that are socially acceptable for women.

Actually, females have genetically-mediated low IQs (a deficit of 5.55 SD15 IQ points)...
http://www.google.com/search?q=nyborg+helmuth+lynn +jensen+iq+girls+allik

. ...and genetically-mediated poor spatial abilities...
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=6515 0

. ...in addition to genetically-mediated feminine interests and outlooks:
http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/society_culture/the_ inevitability_of_patriarchy.htm

Wrong. The effect of gravity is instantaneous. The Earth would immediately take a tangential path out of the orbit it was in. http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/t-56345_Speed _of_Gravity_Controversy.html

Some farmer did that decades ago.

2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .
3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

Some would prefer 11, that's a whole other topic.

Another point: regarding your link to the blog, I mention the following comment from Physics Forums: The blog did not indicate two things: (1) that there's no references to the Afshar experiment and (2) that it is having problems in the refereeing stage. In fact, unconfirmed reports have indicated that the Afshar experiment report that was uploaded to the e-print archive was removed, something that is unheard of for arXiv. Until peer review of this supposed invalidation, lack of skepticism is silly.

It's true. Criminals actually have a lower average IQ than non-criminals.

Hmm, while I do admit that that would be nice there already is PhysicsWeb, BottomQuark, and the Physics Forums. If anyone else can add to this list please do!

Einstien was so disturbed by the implications of quantum mechanics he exclaimed: God does not play dice!

Einstein said that because he first believed there were hidden variables, not truly random processes governing the laws of mechanics. Here is more information.

Darwin is on record as stating that while evolution explains the mechanism by which living things develop, there is some guiding force directing it all in the background.

Not sure what you're implying here, but the "guiding force" is not supernatural -- if that is what you mean.

Adam Smith's theories on markets rely on an unseen hand holding everthing together.

Smith's "invisible hand" is a congragate effect of each individual's self-intest. Or, to put it another way: "it is a metaphor for an unintended consequence. There is no hand at all which is why it is invisible."

All three examples you give employ symbolic language. They're not meant to be taken literally but instead to help explain a principle.

don't sit too close to the end of the barrel, like Isaac did.

That's not so bad. The real Isaac stuck a knife in his eye just to see what would happen.


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