We do not have practical experience with anything traveling at C, because nothing with mass _can_ travel at C. Showing you the proof you want would invalidate the theory, since nothing with mass can reach C.
We have, however, accelerated protons, electrons, etc, to 0.999999% C, certainly close enough to detect any irregularities. And while there's always a gap, because there has to be, something like what you describe would probably violate enough laws of energy conservation to send physicists into the mental ward.
Not that energy conservation isn't violated in the quantum scale, but in the macroscopic level, it's not something you dismiss lightly.
And the theory of relativity has been proven just as much as any other scientific theory. The whole point of a scientific theory is that you can't prove it correct, you can simply show that nothing disproves it yet. A theory is as good as scientific thought gets. Every once in a while, something is called a law, like Newton's Laws of Gravity. But they're still theories, suspect to reinspection and study. (see what happened to Newton's laws?)
There are large amounts of experimental evidence for both theories of relativity. Special relativity predicts bending of light rays, and the slowing of clocks on moving platforms from your point of view, the relativistic increase in mass at high velocities, and some other things, as well. All have been observed in nature and in the laboratory. Particle physics wouldn't work at all if these equations weren't right.
General relativity is harder to test, but its predictions of gravitational redshift, black holes, and so on, have evidence. Some of the more estoteric predictions (like the twisting of spacetime around a massive spinning body) will most likely soon be tested. (The twisting bit will be tested by Gravity Probe B)
There is nothing unproven about the theories of relativity, at least when compared to any other scientific theory.
The patent is for a gene sequencing machine, not the genome. They're not claming any rights to the genome of anything. They merely have a patent on a machine that does rapid DNA sequencing, useful in many fields.
In my experience (NetMeeting, University-University connection, possibly over the Abiline network, with webcams) the delay is usually small. At times, it can build up to a second or two, but a reconnect usually fixes that.
The basic used is a bit funny-looking for basic, a lot of fairly low-level input/output stuff. And it works well.
For example, the robots for the FIRST Robotics Competition (http://www.usfirst.org), which are about 4x4x4 ft, and weight 130 pounds, use(d?) these for their control systems. Four or five motors, limit switches, pneumatics, potentiometers, it worked with all of them, and worked just fine. The language is easy to pick up, and it's fast enough. Why spend more?
None of these features are particularly new in space simulations.
Independence War, as a prime example, used very newtonian physics. You could easily fly past an enemy ship in a fraction of a second, the flip around and shoot while flying backwards, and other such points. Lateral, etc, thrusters were available as well. Plus, the damage model was complex (if your thrusters were hit, for example, you really couldn't turn in those directions. It's a lot of fun to be spinning helplessly in space, waiting for your repair crews to finish, while the enemy ships are streaking toward you). Also, Allegiance, which just came out, has similar lateral thrust (not to mention Descent)
Trading has been around since Elite (I think, never played it) and more recently Privateer and probably other games.
Of course, a full online trading community, like tradewards, hasn't yet been done in a graphical format, and not all these features have been combined in one game before. And it seems they are making things more detailed than in previous games of this type. So, it could be very cool.
Momentum, energy, mass and so on get a bit mixed up once you start dealing with special relativity.
In short, photons have no rest mass. However, they do have both momentum and energy, as those two are very much related in special relativity. Anything with mass or kinetic energy has momentum.
Therefore, being hit by a photon does give you a push, and shooting a photon off does make you recoil. Though not much. This is the principle behind light sails.
Well, a photon has zero inertial rest mass. Which, since as far as we know, inertial mass=gravitational mass, would mean that a photon also has zero gravitational rest mass.
The bending of light doesn't occur in Newton's world, anyway. You have to resort to general relativity, and there light does bend, even though it doesn't have mass. So this doesn't neccessarily invalidate what he's saying. Though I'm personally very skeptical.
If the company _gives_ you a computer, no, that shouldn't give them any rights to the content stored on it. Like in the northwest case, legal action can still be used to search the computers, but that's more or less normal law.
If they merely say 'here is a company computer to use at home' and don't actually transfer ownership, then they could theoretically do anything with them they want. But Intel and Ford, from what I understand, are actually giving the computers away, not just placing company-owned computers in homes. So there should be no privacy concerns with this.
> And thus is the difference between theoretical > science and engineering! Anybody have a > massless, frictionless pulley that I can borrow?
Sure, but you'll have to climb up the frictionless slope first. I put it on top of it, along with my Carnot engine and Lisa's little machine. Thought they'd be safe there.
> No,but seriously, even if you could create a > conductive core which could touch a black hole > (precisely on the event horizon) any electricity > would instanty be consumed by the hole itself; > or rather the matter entering the hole > (electrons being a component of matter but > inexistent without it)
But that's exactly the point... electric charge is always conserved. If electrically charged matter enters a black hole, the black hole must now have electric charge.
An even better way to charge a black hole would be simply to set up a bunch of electron guns, and shoot at the hole for a while. Eventually it'll get a charge, at which point some magnets would be just fine in moving it. True, it'd have a huge inertia, but it'd move.
In general, true black holes (not these optical ones) have 3 properties:
1) Mass 2) Charge 3) Angular momentum. (i.e. spin)
> Killing Napster right now was only easy because > of the way it's designed. With Open Source > napster servers already being developed, you'll > no longer be able to just block connections to > *.napster.com, and since they're open source > they can be configured to use any port.
Though you're right about the ease of which *.napster.com servers can be blocked, at least my version of napster(v2.0) can already be set to any port.
Well, the university owns their network, so, yes, they can perfectly well block whatever sites they feel like, legally. Especially since this university seems to be a private one.
This doesn't mean they should, of course, and in this case I'd disagree with them. How about banning NetMeeting because it does the same thing (albeit both ends need a computer, instead of just one as in the case of DialPad, etc)
As to the Coke bit, some universities are the reverse... I went to visit UCLA, and there isn't a coke machine on campus. It's all pepsi. That annoyed me a great deal, as well.;-)
The feature certainly wouldn't have to come with any preset addresses, or lists.
Just a general feature of being able to block requests to certain addresses would be a very welcome addition, even if it is just a listbox in netscape.
From what I understood of the article, it was merely saying that the use of falsely generated images during war in order to confuse the enemy is against international law.
There is no mention of normal computer morphing technology being illegal; merely the use of it against enemies during times of war by the army itself is against international law.
For people interested in tests of general relativity...
Gravity Probe B is a satellite that will be launched in a few years' time. It plans to check for one untested prediction of general relativity (the frame-dragging effect of massive spinning objects like the earth) by placing several hyperaccurate gyroscopes in orbit and measuring the change in the rotation axis of those gyroscopes from this effect.
It's been under works for 30 years now... here's the website for the project.
The whole system has to be incredibly accurate... I worked with this over the summer, and the technical details are scary (for example, the gyros used are the smoothest spheres ever made by man... if they were expanded to the size of the earth, the greatest height difference between valleys and peaks would be about 16 ft)
I've been using Speak Freely for a month or two now... also between university broadband connections.
There is a slight delay in the message transmission, but typically that's less than a tenth of a second, easily short enough for normal conversation. In experimenting through a 56K modem, it's mainly the delay that gets worse, and you get choppiness more often. Speak Freely also supports various encryption options, if that's important to you (it can be obtained from ftp sites in Switzerland, so no encryption limits)
In short, over a modem, it's not a phone replacement. Over broadband, it works just fine, and it's free.
If anyone's interested, Caltech, the home of Professor Zewail, the chem winner, has a press release up as well as video from a press conference from earlier today.
Of course, I'll have to insert a Go Caltech! here (so I hadn't even heard of the place when he did his research in the late 80's... I'm here now.)
Well, I've learned both metric and standard systems ever since elementary school.
The upshot of this? Nobody knows _either_ system.
Most people in my classes, including me, have no idea how many cups are in a gallon. At least I know there are 10 deciliters in a liter, but that also has escaped most people.
Yes, we might refer to distance in miles, but practically everywhere in high school, we used metric units. In science, and in math. Thus, the few standard conversions people did learn were quickly forgotten. So now, we know two systems poorly, but of those, probably the metric better.
The other problem is that a post can catch an eye of a moderator in the first hour or so and then it dwindles for obvious reasons. To alleviate this difficulty, the moderator must have some mechanism to be able to view sections of comments based on time intervals. ("give me the discussions in the last half an hour.") You can view posts in 'newest first' order... shouldn't that solve most of this problem?
No, as far as I know, there's no problem with minors having credit cards (my girlfriend has one, has had one since she was 16 or so). I'm not sure if they have to be linked to the parent's account, or whether you can have your own account, but they can have a credit card.
I don't think there'd be many restrictions on banking activities for minors, if parents give permission. (though I doubt a 14-year-old would get loans easily, but anyway)
The Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, CA, is actually building a gravity-wave detector; the actual building sites are far from civilization. Essentially, if I remember right, they're gigantic laser inferometers, a mile or so in length (don't know exact number) that will detect gravity waves contracting and expanding the mass they travel through through the changes in the laser inferometry
A black hole can be charged electrically; just shoot enough charged ions into it. Then, especially considering its weight, all you'd have to do is suspend it magnetically.
Though I'd still be inclined to believe it'd vanish before it can suck up much matter; that thing would be _tiny_
... it'd have a mass of what, a few atomic particles? It's even horizon would be less than an atomic radius, if that's even possible.
And if I remember right, Stephen Hawking showed recently that micro black holes 'evaporate' almost immediately; the smaller they are, the faster they vanish
Slashdot Mirror
We do not have practical experience with anything traveling at C, because nothing with mass _can_ travel at C. Showing you the proof you want would invalidate the theory, since nothing with mass can reach C.
We have, however, accelerated protons, electrons, etc, to 0.999999% C, certainly close enough to detect any irregularities. And while there's always a gap, because there has to be, something like what you describe would probably violate enough laws of energy conservation to send physicists into the mental ward.
Not that energy conservation isn't violated in the quantum scale, but in the macroscopic level, it's not something you dismiss lightly.
And the theory of relativity has been proven just as much as any other scientific theory. The whole point of a scientific theory is that you can't prove it correct, you can simply show that nothing disproves it yet. A theory is as good as scientific thought gets. Every once in a while, something is called a law, like Newton's Laws of Gravity. But they're still theories, suspect to reinspection and study. (see what happened to Newton's laws?)
There are large amounts of experimental evidence for both theories of relativity. Special relativity predicts bending of light rays, and the slowing of clocks on moving platforms from your point of view, the relativistic increase in mass at high velocities, and some other things, as well. All have been observed in nature and in the laboratory. Particle physics wouldn't work at all if these equations weren't right.
General relativity is harder to test, but its predictions of gravitational redshift, black holes, and so on, have evidence. Some of the more estoteric predictions (like the twisting of spacetime around a massive spinning body) will most likely soon be tested. (The twisting bit will be tested by Gravity Probe B)
There is nothing unproven about the theories of relativity, at least when compared to any other scientific theory.
I thought he didn't have any sort of permission for Amish Paradise... I think whoever it was who made Gangsta's Paradise was very pissed off at him.
The patent is for a gene sequencing machine, not the genome. They're not claming any rights to the genome of anything. They merely have a patent on a machine that does rapid DNA sequencing, useful in many fields.
In my experience (NetMeeting, University-University connection, possibly over the Abiline network, with webcams) the delay is usually small. At times, it can build up to a second or two, but a reconnect usually fixes that.
The basic used is a bit funny-looking for basic, a lot of fairly low-level input/output stuff. And it works well.
For example, the robots for the FIRST Robotics Competition (http://www.usfirst.org), which are about 4x4x4 ft, and weight 130 pounds, use(d?) these for their control systems. Four or five motors, limit switches, pneumatics, potentiometers, it worked with all of them, and worked just fine. The language is easy to pick up, and it's fast enough. Why spend more?
None of these features are particularly new in space simulations.
Independence War, as a prime example, used very newtonian physics. You could easily fly past an enemy ship in a fraction of a second, the flip around and shoot while flying backwards, and other such points. Lateral, etc, thrusters were available as well. Plus, the damage model was complex (if your thrusters were hit, for example, you really couldn't turn in those directions. It's a lot of fun to be spinning helplessly in space, waiting for your repair crews to finish, while the enemy ships are streaking toward you). Also, Allegiance, which just came out, has similar lateral thrust (not to mention Descent)
Trading has been around since Elite (I think, never played it) and more recently Privateer and probably other games.
Of course, a full online trading community, like tradewards, hasn't yet been done in a graphical format, and not all these features have been combined in one game before. And it seems they are making things more detailed than in previous games of this type. So, it could be very cool.
Momentum, energy, mass and so on get a bit mixed up once you start dealing with special relativity.
In short, photons have no rest mass. However, they do have both momentum and energy, as those two are very much related in special relativity. Anything with mass or kinetic energy has momentum.
Therefore, being hit by a photon does give you a push, and shooting a photon off does make you recoil. Though not much. This is the principle behind light sails.
Well, a photon has zero inertial rest mass. Which, since as far as we know, inertial mass=gravitational mass, would mean that a photon also has zero gravitational rest mass.
The bending of light doesn't occur in Newton's world, anyway. You have to resort to general relativity, and there light does bend, even though it doesn't have mass. So this doesn't neccessarily invalidate what he's saying. Though I'm personally very skeptical.
Of course, I am not a physicist.
If the company _gives_ you a computer, no, that shouldn't give them any rights to the content stored on it. Like in the northwest case, legal action can still be used to search the computers, but that's more or less normal law.
If they merely say 'here is a company computer to use at home' and don't actually transfer ownership, then they could theoretically do anything with them they want. But Intel and Ford, from what I understand, are actually giving the computers away, not just placing company-owned computers in homes. So there should be no privacy concerns with this.
> And thus is the difference between theoretical > science and engineering! Anybody have a > massless, frictionless pulley that I can borrow?
Sure, but you'll have to climb up the frictionless slope first. I put it on top of it, along with my Carnot engine and Lisa's little machine. Thought they'd be safe there.
> No,but seriously, even if you could create a > conductive core which could touch a black hole > (precisely on the event horizon) any electricity
> would instanty be consumed by the hole itself; > or rather the matter entering the hole > (electrons being a component of matter but
> inexistent without it)
But that's exactly the point... electric charge is always conserved. If electrically charged matter enters a black hole, the black hole must now have electric charge.
An even better way to charge a black hole would be simply to set up a bunch of electron guns, and shoot at the hole for a while. Eventually it'll get a charge, at which point some magnets would be just fine in moving it. True, it'd have a huge inertia, but it'd move.
In general, true black holes (not these optical ones) have 3 properties:
1) Mass
2) Charge
3) Angular momentum. (i.e. spin)
All other information disappears.
Thus the saying, "black holes have no hair"
> Killing Napster right now was only easy because > of the way it's designed. With Open Source
> napster servers already being developed, you'll > no longer be able to just block connections to > *.napster.com, and since they're open source
> they can be configured to use any port.
Though you're right about the ease of which *.napster.com servers can be blocked, at least my version of napster(v2.0) can already be set to any port.
Well, the university owns their network, so, yes, they can perfectly well block whatever sites they feel like, legally. Especially since this university seems to be a private one.
;-)
This doesn't mean they should, of course, and in this case I'd disagree with them. How about banning NetMeeting because it does the same thing (albeit both ends need a computer, instead of just one as in the case of DialPad, etc)
As to the Coke bit, some universities are the reverse... I went to visit UCLA, and there isn't a coke machine on campus. It's all pepsi. That annoyed me a great deal, as well.
The feature certainly wouldn't have to come with any preset addresses, or lists.
Just a general feature of being able to block requests to certain addresses would be a very welcome addition, even if it is just a listbox in netscape.
From what I understood of the article, it was merely saying that the use of falsely generated images during war in order to confuse the enemy is against international law.
There is no mention of normal computer morphing technology being illegal; merely the use of it against enemies during times of war by the army itself is against international law.
For people interested in tests of general relativity...
Gravity Probe B is a satellite that will be launched in a few years' time. It plans to check for one untested prediction of general relativity (the frame-dragging effect of massive spinning objects like the earth) by placing several hyperaccurate gyroscopes in orbit and measuring the change in the rotation axis of those gyroscopes from this effect.
It's been under works for 30 years now... here's the website for the project.
The whole system has to be incredibly accurate... I worked with this over the summer, and the technical details are scary (for example, the gyros used are the smoothest spheres ever made by man... if they were expanded to the size of the earth, the greatest height difference between valleys and peaks would be about 16 ft)
I've been using Speak Freely for a month or two now... also between university broadband connections.
There is a slight delay in the message transmission, but typically that's less than a tenth of a second, easily short enough for normal conversation. In experimenting through a 56K modem, it's mainly the delay that gets worse, and you get choppiness more often. Speak Freely also supports various encryption options, if that's important to you (it can be obtained from ftp sites in Switzerland, so no encryption limits)
In short, over a modem, it's not a phone replacement. Over broadband, it works just fine, and it's free.
If anyone's interested, Caltech, the home of Professor Zewail, the chem winner, has a press release up as well as video from a press conference from earlier today.
Of course, I'll have to insert a Go Caltech! here (so I hadn't even heard of the place when he did his research in the late 80's... I'm here now.)
Well, I've learned both metric and standard systems ever since elementary school.
The upshot of this? Nobody knows _either_ system.
Most people in my classes, including me, have no idea how many cups are in a gallon. At least I know there are 10 deciliters in a liter, but that also has escaped most people.
Yes, we might refer to distance in miles, but practically everywhere in high school, we used metric units. In science, and in math. Thus, the few standard conversions people did learn were quickly forgotten. So now, we know two systems poorly, but of those, probably the metric better.
The other problem is that a post can catch an eye of a moderator in the first hour or so and then it dwindles for obvious reasons. To alleviate this difficulty, the moderator must have some mechanism to be able to view sections of comments based on time intervals. ("give me the discussions in the last half an hour.") You can view posts in 'newest first' order... shouldn't that solve most of this problem?
No, as far as I know, there's no problem with minors having credit cards (my girlfriend has one, has had one since she was 16 or so). I'm not sure if they have to be linked to the parent's account, or whether you can have your own account, but they can have a credit card.
I don't think there'd be many restrictions on banking activities for minors, if parents give permission. (though I doubt a 14-year-old would get loans easily, but anyway)
The Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, CA, is actually building a gravity-wave detector; the actual building sites are far from civilization. Essentially, if I remember right, they're gigantic laser inferometers, a mile or so in length (don't know exact number) that will detect gravity waves contracting and expanding the mass they travel through through the changes in the laser inferometry
A black hole can be charged electrically; just shoot enough charged ions into it. Then, especially considering its weight, all you'd have to do is suspend it magnetically.
Though I'd still be inclined to believe it'd vanish before it can suck up much matter; that thing would be _tiny_
... it'd have a mass of what, a few atomic particles? It's even horizon would be less than an atomic radius, if that's even possible.
And if I remember right, Stephen Hawking showed recently that micro black holes 'evaporate' almost immediately; the smaller they are, the faster they vanish