Dude, they measure it to 1.24 Trillion, not 10^(Trillion).Someone had pointed that out, but...
If you think about it, you could not have fitted the entire observable universe with enough paper to record (even if you write in very very very very small fonts) the number of decimals if you know PI to 10^(Trillion).
In fact the entire observable universe had about 10^120 atoms. So you are out of luck very soon. (You can imagine packing more atoms, but then the universe will become too dense and collapse on herself so fast you won't have time to expand to her current volume).
At first when I read Sagan's book at the impressionable age of 15, I was dumbfounded by this idea.
Now I am older and more cynical, I became somewhat disappointed that good old Carl himself have fallen into his own trap of "hiding signatures" in randomness. Basically, if you look hard and long enough into a series of random numbers, you might find an apparently "unrandom" event, perhaps the 1432323th decimal place of PI spelling out "God is Here". He had himself written about this in his book The Demon Haunted World.
In science, you only cares about experiments that are repeatable, or at least statistically sound if not repeatable (e.g. The Big Bang happens only once but...). Finding a circle in PI is exactly the kind of unrepeatable, unpredictable idea that is beyond the realms of science.
So that's too bad.
BTW, Sagan could not have used the motivation from String Theory since at that time he wrote the book 11-D ST has not been invented yet. He probably used base 11 because you can paint an ASCII picture with 0 and 1. (Base 2 is the other common example, wonder why he didn't use it.)
Re:Humanity's egocentrism
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Please list your references and sources. As all good scientists do.
Mrs. Einstein discovered SR? Some conspiracy theory floating around I've heard before.
Jocelyn Bell is widely known in the physics community to be the discoverer of pulsars. So what are you talking about?
And pls, deriving equations is one thing, getting the idea to do the calculation is another. Like one of my physics friend like to say : "It is easy to compute, it's hard to think." So Rutherford gets the credit, and deservedly so.
Prince is a good artist. In fact, he is very good.If he is "out-of-favour", then it is just a sad case of how the current "in-favour" musicians suck because his "old" music is still much better than your regular Britney crap.
Now that aside, you are missing the point of his article.
His article is not about defending the file-sharing people : he is writing about protecting artists' rights. Yes, he wants to make lots more money. But he has the right to, like everybody else.
Take a look at the solar system Family Picture that voyager sent back.
>Prove NASA *didn't* fake the moon landings.
Go have a look at the moon rocks in a museum.
>Prove computers work by electricity, and not magic.
Put your index and thumb between the little socket that plugs into your computer.
>Prove these things to someone that starts off thinking you're a flake anyway, and just *knows* you're making this stuff up from some fantasy books you read somewhere. (That's all high-energy physics is, right? Fantasy and magic.)
You have very little understanding of what constitute science and its methodology. If you want to play around the semantics of the word "proof", then go ahead. You can't prove anything. But you can build up a solid confidence in knowing how things really works.
Many religions require the use of the Special Pleading argument to "prove" their point (i.e. praying will cure cancer etc.) That is the point of the OP : if your religion (i.e. Jedi) claim you can do mindtricks, then show that it exist by doing just that.
Unfortunately, most people don't care about believing in believable things. Things that are nice and fuzzy inside is so much more comforting.
>The BBC was from the very start conceived as a television and radio broadcasting company.
Pardon my ignorance, but how can the BBC be conceived a TV broadcasting when television was not invented (patented) till 1927. >The BBC was formed as a corporation in 1922 and received its royal charter in 1927. The first televisionsignals were broadcast in 1936. The Hansard records of the House of Commons debates demonstrate thatthe potential of television was fully understood.
Can you provide the link or references to the date of the Hansard records for such debates?
It does not take a great leap of imagination to realize the potential of combining the movies and radio.
Please elaborate on the point of the statement with regards to protecting the newspaper barons from TV.
On the contrary, gravity as a theory (General Relativity) is a very well tested theory and gives extremely accurate predictions.
Your statement about "redefining" makes no sense, since any theory that you have must meet experimental constraints. And GR meets them, and meets them well. My research consists of trying to find alternatives to GR, and its hard as hell due to the current extreme tight experimental evidence that we really do know how gravity works.
There is no proof of anti-gravity. But first, you have to tell me a theory of anti-gravity before you can prove it wrong. Right now, there is none. If Mr Russian Scientist has one, he is not telling. The sad thing is that people are still giving money to "test" his non-existent theory.
before you plonk a few million bucks into something, you should be better prepared to defend it in front of your peers. A few thousand heads is ALWAYS better than one. (Don't give me those Einstein=genius crap : several including Hilbert were close to what he was going after, and he did not do it in seclusion).
Of course, Our eminent Russian Scientist refuse to devulge his "secrets", which by the way, if true will win a few nobel prizes. not to mention violate a few fundamental physical principles.
But, this is just nuts. Give science a really bad name.
->but we can't understand why additional workers are still being brought in while so many experienced programmers can't even get their resumes acknowledged.
A light horizon of an event A is the spatial distance travelled by photons (or any massless particle) sent at opposite directions, from event A at time t_0 to some time later t_1. The horizon traces out the light cone in a spacetime diagram.
There are other horizons (this is semantics though). Send a couple of particles from event A, but if these have mass, they will travel at a slower velocity than light, they will trace out a smaller horizon.
Essentially, the light horizon defines the causal "reach" of event A. So you might hear people call it the "causal" horizon of some event.
The curvature of the earth, of which I take what you mean is the curvature of spacetime caused by an object of one earth mass, does not define any horizon, except for the fact the earth is there. So its existence traces out a future light cone. For example, if the earth blows up at event A, then people within the future light cone of A will eventually realizes the earth is gone. This is not as obvious as it sounds, since spacetime itself is not static (as in special relativity), but itself has dynamics (for example the expansion of the universe). There will be regions in spacetime where the light cone from event A will never reached. The line which separates the region "reachable" by event A and those that is "not-reachable", for eternity or at least to the end of time if the universe is a close universe, is called the "event horizon of A".
A more common "event horizon" is the event horizon of a black hole (i.e. some event that occured within the event horizon will never reach the "outside"). But we don't need black holes to have event horizons.
All this discussion, of course, have nothing to do with the my original post on the completely wrong statement of the debunker.
The funny thing about the Africa expedition (carried out by I think eminent astrophysicist Eddington, though I am not sure) is that it measures what it expects.
It turns out that their measurements was wrong, but wrong in the right way to get the expected result:). It was hailed at that time as a "confirmation of a German Theory (einstein) by a British astronomer (eddington)", in 1919 I think, as a nice "reconciliation" after WWI. Well, Eddington got it wrong. Maybe that's why WWII happened:).
>Everything you said is roughly correct (plus/minus semantics). Although it is completely unhelpful to think oflight cones and horizons existing in 3/4 dimensions (eg : a light cone is defined by the zero norm of the metric, which has both time and spatial coordinates in them). So what's your point?
I take that back. *Not* everything you said is roughly correct. In fact saying that light cones exist in 3D 'because' of the curvature of earth is completely wrong. Light cones exist, period.
>(a) I trust that you are not saying that light is not affected by gravity? The mass of photons is debatable, but it is a well known, observed fact that light is indeed affected by gravity.
Light is bent by gravity. But not according to Newton's Law. Light follows null geodesics (a technical term : imagine space-time being curved and the shortest line between two points, called the null geodesics). To compute gravitational lensing effects, one has to use the full general relativistic equation of motions, where Newton's gravity is just an approximation.
>(b) Sure there is. Everything that has mass exerts a gravitational pull. It may be small and far away, but that don't mean it doesn't exist! As for the planets, well, they don't crash into 'us' do they? It ain't just centripital force keeping them out there...
Of course they exist, just not strong enough to have an effect on us. Now you ask : why don't everything crash into us. The answer is twofold : stuff in a galaxy (and in fact around the local galactic cluster) will eventually crash onto each other. That includes all the stars in our galaxy. However, the other stuff outside a certain distance scale (larger than a few 10s of Mega Parsecs : depending on the matter content of the universe), *might* not collapse if the universe keeps on expanding forever. The search for the exact scale is an area of ongoing research.
>(c)A light horizon exists in 3 dimensions and only because of the curvature of the earth (or other solar body). An event horizon exists in 4 dimensions. They are two different things. The same goes for a future light cone [caltech.edu]. It exists in the 4th dimension.
Everything you said is roughly correct (plus/minus semantics). Although it is completely unhelpful to think of light cones and horizons existing in 3/4 dimensions (eg : a light cone is defined by the zero norm of the metric, which has both time and spatial coordinates in them). So what's your point?
Funny how a bunk statement is bunked by another bunk statement:).
(a) Photons are massless, so you can't use newtonian gravity F=GmM/r^2 to compute gravitation effects on it.
(b) There is no such thing as "stuff" out there to pull light beam away from us. That is even more completely bunk. According to your logic, the planets will be pulled away from us too.
(c) There is a light horizon from the solar system. It is but the future light cone of the event called the 'solar system' now in a space-time diagram. The word you want to use is "event horizon".
The more correct answer is that the curvature of space-time caused by the sun's mass is not enough to curve space upon itself, i.e. start with a photon, and the
photon will follow the curvature back onto the source. (Roughly speaking of course.)
Slashdot Mirror
As a horny unattached male physicist, let me tell you this :
EUREKA!!!!!!
Gawd, you are offensive.
But... excellent rant. Haven't had such a good one for a while.
They have 800 CD burners, but most of them are slow.
Which is also wrong of course, since pi is an irrational number,i.e. it has formally infinite number of decimal points.
Dude, they measure it to 1.24 Trillion, not 10^(Trillion).Someone had pointed that out, but...
If you think about it, you could not have fitted the entire observable universe with enough paper to record (even if you write in very very very very small fonts) the number of decimals if you know PI to 10^(Trillion).
In fact the entire observable universe had about 10^120 atoms. So you are out of luck very soon. (You can imagine packing more atoms, but then the universe will become too dense and collapse on herself so fast you won't have time to expand to her current volume).
At first when I read Sagan's book at the impressionable age of 15, I was dumbfounded by this idea.
Now I am older and more cynical, I became somewhat disappointed that good old Carl himself have fallen into his own trap of "hiding signatures" in randomness. Basically, if you look hard and long enough into a series of random numbers, you might find an apparently "unrandom" event, perhaps the 1432323th decimal place of PI spelling out "God is Here". He had himself written about this in his book The Demon Haunted World.
In science, you only cares about experiments that are repeatable, or at least statistically sound if not repeatable (e.g. The Big Bang happens only once but...). Finding a circle in PI is exactly the kind of unrepeatable, unpredictable idea that is beyond the realms of science.
So that's too bad.
BTW, Sagan could not have used the motivation from String Theory since at that time he wrote the book 11-D ST has not been invented yet. He probably used base 11 because you can paint an ASCII picture with 0 and 1. (Base 2 is the other common example, wonder why he didn't use it.)
Argument from History is a fallibility. Btw.
Please list your references and sources. As all good scientists do.
Mrs. Einstein discovered SR? Some conspiracy theory floating around I've heard before.
Jocelyn Bell is widely known in the physics community to be the discoverer of pulsars. So what are you talking about?
And pls, deriving equations is one thing, getting the idea to do the calculation is another. Like one of my physics friend like to say : "It is easy to compute, it's hard to think." So Rutherford gets the credit, and deservedly so.
Prince is a good artist. In fact, he is very good.If he is "out-of-favour", then it is just a sad case of how the current "in-favour" musicians suck because his "old" music is still much better than your regular Britney crap.
Now that aside, you are missing the point of his article.
His article is not about defending the file-sharing people : he is writing about protecting artists' rights. Yes, he wants to make lots more money. But he has the right to, like everybody else.
>Prove the earth revolves around the sun.
Take a look at the solar system Family Picture that voyager sent back.
>Prove NASA *didn't* fake the moon landings.
Go have a look at the moon rocks in a museum.
>Prove computers work by electricity, and not magic.
Put your index and thumb between the little socket that plugs into your computer.
>Prove these things to someone that starts off thinking you're a flake anyway, and just *knows* you're making this stuff up from some fantasy books you read somewhere. (That's all high-energy physics is, right? Fantasy and magic.)
You have very little understanding of what constitute science and its methodology. If you want to play around the semantics of the word "proof", then go ahead. You can't prove anything. But you can build up a solid confidence in knowing how things really works.
Many religions require the use of the Special Pleading argument to "prove" their point (i.e. praying will cure cancer etc.) That is the point of the OP : if your religion (i.e. Jedi) claim you can do mindtricks, then show that it exist by doing just that.
Unfortunately, most people don't care about believing in believable things. Things that are nice and fuzzy inside is so much more comforting.
>The BBC was from the very start conceived as a television and radio broadcasting company.
Pardon my ignorance, but how can the BBC be conceived a TV broadcasting when
television was not invented (patented) till 1927.
>The BBC was formed as a corporation in 1922 and received its royal charter in 1927. The first televisionsignals were broadcast in 1936. The Hansard records of the House of Commons debates demonstrate thatthe potential of television was fully understood.
Can you provide the link or references to the date of the Hansard records for such debates?
It does not take a great leap of imagination to realize the potential of combining the movies and radio.
Please elaborate on the point of the statement with regards to protecting the newspaper barons from TV.
Yeap. And pay $50 for 80 channels which 75 of them are useless channels that totally suck.
Try BBC. They are pretty good. In fact, they are very good (with typical brit stiff-upperlipness of course).
arises Transgaming!
Hmmm...Loki sounds better than Transgaming.
And have him defend his record. I think this will settle his credibility once and for all.
Unless, of course he turns it down, and then we'll know where he stands.
>..only Dilbert rarely manages to relate to anything that's actually happening (except for w.r.t. my office politics, where it's scarily accurate!).
Bingo.
On the contrary, gravity as a theory (General Relativity) is a very well tested theory and gives extremely accurate predictions.
Your statement about "redefining" makes no sense, since any theory that you have must meet experimental constraints. And GR meets them, and meets them well. My research consists of trying to find alternatives to GR, and its hard as hell due to the current extreme tight experimental evidence that we really do know how gravity works.
There is no proof of anti-gravity. But first, you have to tell me a theory of anti-gravity before you can prove it wrong. Right now, there is none. If Mr Russian Scientist has one, he is not telling. The sad thing is that people are still giving money to "test" his non-existent theory.
before you plonk a few million bucks into something, you should be better prepared to defend it in front of your peers. A few thousand heads is ALWAYS better than one. (Don't give me those Einstein=genius crap : several including Hilbert were close to what he was going after, and he did not do it in seclusion).
Of course, Our eminent Russian Scientist refuse to devulge his "secrets", which by the way, if true will win a few nobel prizes. not to mention violate a few fundamental physical principles.
But, this is just nuts. Give science a really bad name.
->but we can't understand why additional workers are still being brought in while so many experienced programmers can't even get their resumes acknowledged.
Uh, maybe they are not good enough?
France just sucks.
I love african football (it's football, not soccer dammnit!). They are so much more playful and entertaining than the rest...
(Then there's brazil....)
A light horizon of an event A is the spatial distance travelled by photons (or any massless particle) sent at opposite directions, from event A at time t_0 to some time later t_1. The horizon traces out the light cone in a spacetime diagram.
There are other horizons (this is semantics though). Send a couple of particles from event A, but if these have mass, they will travel at a slower velocity than light, they will trace out a smaller horizon.
Essentially, the light horizon defines the causal "reach" of event A. So you might hear people call it the "causal" horizon of some event.
The curvature of the earth, of which I take what you mean is the curvature of spacetime caused by an object of one earth mass, does not define any horizon, except for the fact the earth is there. So its existence traces out a future light cone. For example, if the earth blows up at event A, then people within the future light cone of A will eventually realizes the earth is gone. This is not as obvious as it sounds, since spacetime itself is not static (as in special relativity), but itself has dynamics (for example the expansion of the universe). There will be regions in spacetime where the light cone from event A will never reached. The line which separates the region "reachable" by event A and those that is "not-reachable", for eternity or at least to the end of time if the universe is a close universe, is called the "event horizon of A".
A more common "event horizon" is the event horizon of a black hole (i.e. some event that occured within the event horizon will never reach the "outside"). But we don't need black holes to have event horizons.
All this discussion, of course, have nothing to do with the my original post on the completely wrong statement of the debunker.
>What I did say was that light horizons exist in 3 dimensions and are caused due to thecurvature of the earth.
Which is wrong too, I am afraid.
The funny thing about the Africa expedition (carried out by I think eminent astrophysicist Eddington, though I am not sure) is that it measures what it expects.
:). It was hailed at that time as a "confirmation of a German Theory (einstein) by a British astronomer (eddington)", in 1919 I think, as a nice "reconciliation" after WWI. Well, Eddington got it wrong. Maybe that's why WWII happened :).
It turns out that their measurements was wrong, but wrong in the right way to get the expected result
>Everything you said is roughly correct (plus/minus semantics). Although it is completely unhelpful to think oflight cones and horizons existing in 3/4 dimensions (eg : a light cone is defined by the zero norm of the metric, which has both time and spatial coordinates in them). So what's your point?
I take that back. *Not* everything you said is roughly correct. In fact saying that light cones exist in 3D 'because' of the curvature of earth is completely wrong. Light cones exist, period.
>(a) I trust that you are not saying that light is not affected by gravity? The mass of photons is debatable, but it is a well known, observed fact that light is indeed affected by gravity.
:)
Light is bent by gravity. But not according to Newton's Law. Light follows null geodesics (a technical term : imagine space-time being curved and the shortest line between two points, called the null geodesics). To compute gravitational lensing effects, one has to use the full general relativistic equation of motions, where Newton's gravity is just an approximation.
>(b) Sure there is. Everything that has mass exerts a gravitational pull. It may be small and far away, but that don't mean it doesn't exist! As for the planets, well, they don't crash into 'us' do they? It ain't just centripital force keeping them out there...
Of course they exist, just not strong enough to have an effect on us. Now you ask : why don't everything crash into us. The answer is twofold : stuff in a galaxy (and in fact around the local galactic cluster) will eventually crash onto each other. That includes all the stars in our galaxy. However, the other stuff outside a certain distance scale (larger than a few 10s of Mega Parsecs : depending on the matter content of the universe), *might* not collapse if the universe keeps on expanding forever. The search for the exact scale is an area of ongoing research.
>(c)A light horizon exists in 3 dimensions and only because of the curvature of the earth (or other solar body). An event horizon exists in 4 dimensions. They are two different things. The same goes for a future light cone [caltech.edu]. It exists in the 4th dimension.
Everything you said is roughly correct (plus/minus semantics). Although it is completely unhelpful to think of light cones and horizons existing in 3/4 dimensions (eg : a light cone is defined by the zero norm of the metric, which has both time and spatial coordinates in them). So what's your point?
>The bunk debunker has been debunked..
Are you sure?
Funny how a bunk statement is bunked by another bunk statement
(a) Photons are massless, so you can't use newtonian gravity F=GmM/r^2 to compute gravitation effects on it.
(b) There is no such thing as "stuff" out there to pull light beam away from us. That is even more completely bunk. According to your logic, the planets will be pulled away from us too.
(c) There is a light horizon from the solar system. It is but the future light cone of the event called the 'solar system' now in a space-time diagram. The word you want to use is "event horizon".
The more correct answer is that the curvature of space-time caused by the sun's mass is not enough to curve space upon itself, i.e. start with a photon, and the
photon will follow the curvature back onto the source. (Roughly speaking of course.)