Did you know that if every Hydrogen, Neutron, and Atomic bomb were detonated, it wouldn't even penetrate the earth's crust?
Not so. A sequence of hydrogen bombs dropped into a weak spot in the mid-atlantic ridge would definitely penetrate the oceanic crust.
Did you know that nuclear reactors exist that put out only about 6 MegaWatts? In comparison, the smallest coal plants puts out about 30 megawatts.
What is the point of bringing up power output? This seems like a red herring. There are research reactors which produce less than 1 kw, and there are coal furnaces which operate on a similar scale. These facts have nothing to do with the relative safety of nuclear power.
Did you know that the laws of physics say that 6 megawatts of destructive force is the same whether it's 6 megawatts of coal, nuclear, oil, or dynamite power?
This is meaningless. Any measurement of destructive force requires some kind of context. Besides, destructive force is often measured in units of energy rather than power (joules versus watts): moment magnitude for earthquakes, TNT equivalents for nuclear weapons, etc.
Did you know that Russia TRIED to get Chernobyl to blow in order to perform safety tests?
This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. The explosion was due to stupid negligence, not malice.
You arguments would be strengthened if you didn't exaggerate so much, and people would be more willing to listen if you adopted a more personable manner when debating.
The people near the reactor would be in serious danger, and an airplane directly over the plant may be in danger
Even this is doubtful. Because fusion is so efficient, there is no need for much plasma in a magnetic confinement reactor (current ignition attempts seem to work with densities on the order of 10^21/m^3 - about 1/10000 the particle density of the atmosphere at sea level), and should the walls fail, almost all of the excess thermal energy would be dissipated before the gas could leave the building. The main problem with a structural failure is the liberated magnetic field, which may throw chunks of metal around.
Your theory will have to explain a lot more than the expansion of the universe before it can replace general relativity. Right now, you seem to be in the "lots of hand-waving" stage, without any sort of mathematical model to back it up. You might want to try the canonical gravity BS test:
Can this "space displacing matter" account for how the apparent force follows the inverse square law with respect to distance? Start cooking up real formulas with real numbers.
If you have an inverse square law, does your theory account for small perturbations from Newtonian predictions, like the precession of Mercury's orbit?
How do you account for gravitational lensing? Heavy objects have been found to bend the path of light that comes near them.
Does your theory say anything relativistic? You haven't said anything about gravitational time dilation, which has been observed, e.g. in GPS satellites.
I imagine there are other tests I am failing to recall. Note that all of the tests I listed have concrete observable consequences, so you can check your work with the large body of experimental evidence found to date. Good luck!
Your methods sound completely off-the-wall. Do you have any sources or did you just make this up?
... causing the atoms that cause air glow to seporate into layers. this shows up on the image as bands.
This doesn't make much sense. Is "air glow" your term for aurora borealis (or australis)? How do the atoms (or ionized particles, as it were) separate? The upper atmosphere is not exactly a rigid object. How would you be able tell this occurred because of gravity waves, anyway?
... these gravity waves are emitted from the center of the earth.
The center of the earth emits basically no gravitational radiation. In order to emit gravity waves of any remotely detectable magnitude, you need very heavy objects undergoing rapid acceleration (e.g. a binary pulsar system in the final stages of inspiral). There are no such dymanics inside the earth.
It would be all but impossible to isolate the miniscule atmospheric effects that may be caused by gravity waves from the huge sources of noise that come from solar flares, weather, disturbances in earth's magnetic field, man-made radios, city lights, etc... This (among other reasons) is why people have settled on interferometry. You may want to read up on LIGO, and see what kind of noise reduction effort is necessary to even have a hope of detecting waves.
The basic idea is this: a quantum fluctuation creates a matter/antimatter pair of particles near the event horizon of a black hole. The antiparticle falls in, destroying some of the mass of the black hole, while its partner escapes.
I've heard this explanation many times but it was never clear that this was the right way to think of this kind of process. It might be better to dispense with virtual particles and negative energy states, and view this via its relation with the Unruh effect.
Unruh says: an accelerating observer will see a thermal spectrum in empty space. If you are accelerating uniformly in a flat vacuum, you will fell like you are immersed in blackbody radiation. Note that the intensity of the radiation is rather small for everyday acceleration levels (this page gives a figure of about 1K for an acceleration of 10^20 m/sec^2, or about 10^19 times what we feel on Earth). Quasi-stationary observers near the event horizon are necessarily accelerating outward (since they are not falling in), and thus are bathed in thermal radiation. Faraway observers see this radiation, but it is gravitationally redshifted.
This sort of radiation will occur outside any massive body (e.g. a cat), but for everyday objects it will be immeasurably weak. More detailed explanations can be found here and here. Or you could just spend some time with Google.
I recall reading that neutron stars are largely Bose-Einstein condensates.
I think the more common model is a fermion gas. While Bose-Einstein condensates involve a massively degenerate ground state, fermion gases have energy levels stacked up. Bose-Einstein condensates do not provide any counter force to gravitational attraction, while a fermion gas can give an equilibrium with the degeneracy pressure, as the energy levels rise when the radius of the body decreases. A solar mass Bose-Einstein condensate would collapse rather quickly.
Incidentally, the naive, noninteracting fermion gas model also provides a decent (i.e. consistent with pulsar observations) estimate for the radius of a neutron star. However, since no one seems to know the equation of state of a large body of strongly interacting particles, the actual structure of a neutron star is rather poorly understood, and the mass at which the equilibrium breaks down yielding gravitational collapse is not well known.
Well, the 'other' part that I've heard about entanglement is that once they're entangled, any change to the spin (I think its the spin) in one object is also seen instantaneously in the other object.
No. If you make identical measurements of spin at distant locations, you will notice they are well correlated, but this effect cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light. Indeed, the information content in the correlation came from deciding which measurement to make. If you change the spin of one of the particles (e.g. by measuring it), you lose your entanglement - this process is called decoherence. You do not affect the state of the other particle at all. Teleportation requires both quantum entangled pairs and a classical "scan" with the associated information sent via conventional means.
The velocity at which the photons travel is constant.
This is only true in a vacuum. If you have charged particles around, there are electrodynamic interactions which are not necessarily coming from absorption and reemission.
What they have NOT done is altered C.
No one said they did.
In essense, the photons that emerge from the other end are not the same photons that entered it. They are equivalent copies.
This is a meaningless statement. Photons do not have serial numbers - they are indistinguishable particles, and the only information they can carry is their helicity. If a photon passes through a piece of glass, and its polarization upon exiting is the same as when it entered, there is no reason to call it a different photon.
Yes. The communication scheme described by eesreenim doesn't work, since entangled states by themselves cannot transmit information. The man in the middle will not be able to intercept any communications, because they will not happen in the first place.
... by firing rhubidium [sic] through a photon of light...
This is completely meaningless. Photons don't occupy volume in any well-defined way.
The problem was that for quantum communication, you need to disentangle 2 separate photons from an entangled state so that any change you make to one makes ann instantaneous change to the other, it's twin if you like and that can be done it seems.
This is not how a quantum cryptosystem works. See this article, and note that the technique that currently seems to show the most promise for cryptography is (A). Messages cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, as relativity dictates that your actions cannot affect a distant "simultaneous" measurement, and no one has found a reproducible experiment to contradict this assertion (despite lots of trying). It is a popular misconception that quantum entanglement can be used to communicate instantaneously, but the correlations that are measured do not actually cause any exchange of information. If you do something to one of your photons, it will simply destroy the entanglement.
Perhaps you are referring to the ROPOD. I imagine aligning the lasers to project precise graphics would be somewhat more difficult than placing LEDs on a bar.
For what (little) it's worth my point was that two objects could travel away from each other with a relative speed of (2*C)-1 i.e. if they're both traveling near the speed of light, relative to each other they will be moving near twice the speed of light.
Okay, but your point is wrong. Relative speeds do not add like real numbers. Rather, if you were to fix a frame and let two bodies move in opposite directions at speeds a and b (written as fractions of the speed of light in a vacuum, i.e. between 0 and 1), then in each of the bodies' frames, the other is moving away at speed (a+b)/(1+ab). You should notice three things about this formula:
This number is less than 1 as long as a and b are less than 1. This is expected, since special relativity dictates that massive objects can never reach the speed of light.
When a and b are very small (e.g. the speeds we see in everyday life), then the ab in the denominator becomes imperceptible, and speeds appear to add normally.
It is just the hyperbolic tangent addition formula from trig (okay, you don't need to notice this). This is because the frame shift is just a Lorentz transformation, and adding velocities is equivalent to adding angles in Lorentz space.
It might be worth your while to find a text on special relativity.
The expression is very close to an integer, because of a rather strange collection of facts. The imaginary quadratic field of discriminant -163 (elements are sums of rational numbers with rationals times sqrt(-163)) has class number 1 and Weber showed in the first half of the last century that the modular j function takes algebraic integers in class number 1 fields to rational integers. The function j(z) has fourier expansion 1/q + 744 + 196884q + O(q^2), with q=exp(2*pi*i*z), so feeding in (-1 + sqrt(-163))/2 for z gives exp(pi*sqrt(163)) as the first term. The second term is an integer, the third term is less than 10^(-12), and the rest of the terms get really small, so the first term is necessarily close to an integer.
You can also try same expression, but replacing 163 with discriminants of other class number one imaginary quadratic fields, such as 67, 43, 19, 11, 7, 3, 2, 1. The effect is not so great, since the third term gets substantially larger with smaller primes.
Thinking of "curves" in space-time is an interesting analogy for gravity, but still doesn't address the mechanism - sure, the planet may be on a "45 degree" incline in spacetime, but what forces it down... and not up?
That is the wrong question. Curvature is an intrinsic property of any spacetime; unless you are standing on something, there is no notion of down, up, or 45 degree incline. These notions arise only when using simplified "rubber-sheet" analogies to describe the effect of mass on the geometry nearby.
You would nearly have to posit the existence of some constant stream of gravitons coming at 'right angles' to three-dimensional space in order to actually push things 'down the well'.
This is meaningless. General relativity is a purely geometric theory, and says absolutely nothing about gravitons. It would be nice if people trying to poke holes in relativity (e.g. van Flandern) took the time to understand what it actually predicts.
Incidentally, do any of these alternative theories predict the proper precession of Mercury's orbit, or the timing adjustment for clocks on the GPS satellites? General relativity does. This page might be useful to people who haven't seen these sorts of debates before.
Muon-catalyzed fusion was first observed in a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, by Alvarez in 1957. You can google for any of the interesting above words to get a reference. Protons with a muon replacing an electron are about 1/200 the radius of a normal hydrogen atom, so the amplitude of an interesting nuclear interaction is much higher than normal.
There are two obstructions to getting this to work on a large scale. First, there aren't enough naturally occurring muons to create any sort of chain reaction, by which I mean they decay much too quickly (half-life ~ 1.56 microseconds) to catalyze many reactions, unless the hydrogen is compressed to some absurd concentration. Second, muons are sufficiently heavy that artificial production would cost more energy than you'd get out of the fusion, so it would be difficult give nature a hand this way.
Weight is a measure of force (usually the amount necessary to keep an object from falling through the ground). Mass is a measure of the amount of matter in an object. They are fundamentally different.
Think of this; if a planet didn't have weight, what would keep it in orbit around a star?
Planets don't have weight - the mass of the star bends spacetime around it so that the planet's geodesic appears circular. In the planet's frame, it is essentially following a straight line.
The terms "frozen star", "collapsed star", and its abbreviation "collapsar" arise from the notion that in the faraway observer's inertial frame, the star never stops emitting light. However, the photon flux has been shown to decay roughly exponentially so the frozen aspect is a bit misleading. The intensity of a body that is N times the mass of the sun halves about every N*1.8*10^-5 seconds (see MTW page 872), so it will emit its last photon about N milliseconds after it starts getting dim.
If you look down, you won't see much.
Also, I just realized that you could see something because light is able to travel away from the star surface - just not past the event horizon.
You won't see the star when you're inside. Any light emitted by the star travels toward the center, because the future light cone of any point on the star is twisted that way. Causality is such that you will only be affected by events further from the center.
Actually, there's no reason why light couldn't pass the "event horizon." It's just that light emitted from within the event horizon doesn't have enough energy to completely escape the black hole.
This is not true. Any photons emitted at the event horizon in a directly outward direction will stay on the event horizon, and those emitted in other directions will travel toward the center. Any photons emitted in any direction inside the event horizon will travel toward the center. Any light that does happen to be outside the event horizon has no obstructions to "completely escaping", although it may be severely redshifted depending on its proximity to the event horizon.
A black hole is more than just a place with a high escape velocity. The associated curvature of spacetime ensures that events inside the event horizon cannot affect events outside. You may want to read something like MTW
(especially chapter 33) to get a non-pop-science view of relativity.
Unless the 'curvature' turns out to be nothing more than a mathematical construct. No one has really proven that space actually curves, only that objects moving in a gravitational field move as if space were curved.
Your notion of curvature seems completely useless. Curvature is an intrinsic property of a space indicating infinitesimal changes in distances and angles, and does not depend on any particular isometric embedding in any larger, ambient space. If all possible measurements of distances and angles behaved as if spacetime were curved, then there would be no reason to say it is not curved. Our current measurements (e.g. time dilation in GPS, light deviation, orbiting bodies) are not comprehensive, but there are no known reproducible experiments indicating the contrary.
Oh, and the curvature makes general relativity easier to grok, but the equations could all be perfectly valid even if space doesn't really curve.
Which equations do you mean? Curvature is absolutely central to Einstein's field equations.
ramscoop ideas have been around for a while, and while they're not exactly "production quality" ideas, there's nothing fundamentally killing them.
Dialogues concerning the viability of ramscoops tend to follow a "death by a thousand cuts" pattern, mostly because whenever someone finds a reasonable obstruction to their practicality, someone else will propose a wildly unrealistic and ad hoc remedy, saying it could be plausible one day with future technology. Perhaps a better description of the situation would be that ramscoops are fundamentally dead, but that there are also many people who insist that the technology is merely... pining for the fjords.
It's not an issue of viability (because it is viable), it's simply scale.
Scale tends to dictate viability of technologies. The article here
describes several problems with the ramscoop design. One of them, involving radiation loss, looks like it would be overcome with a ramscoop about the size of the sun. This is not viable.
As far as I can tell, practical interstellar travel requires "new physics" (read: don't hold your breath).
I know that the Richter scale works on the idea that an earthquake of 6 on the Richter scale is double the strength of one of 5 on the Richter scale.
I am not a geologist, but the Richter scale seems to follow the relationship log_10(radiated energy in joules) = 4.4 + 1.5*(richter number), or approximately so (it is difficult to decipher the language in sites like this one). It's not clear what you mean by "strength" of an earthquake, but the above formula indicates that a magnitude 6 quake would release sqrt(1000), or about 31 times as much radiated energy as a magnitude 5 quake.
Incidentally, 3dB is approximately a doubling of radiated power, and an increase of a factor of sqrt(2), or about 1.414 in amplitude. 10dB is a tenfold increase in radiated power. I'm not sure how the doubling of perceived intensity with each 10dB increase would be rigorously measured.
Mr.Robertson said recently in the wake of the SCO vs IBM filing, that he'd paid money to SCO to keep quiet, atleast as regards his flavor of Linux.
You seem to be summarizing the news reported here,
here,
and here,
but your interpretation of the deal as some kind of hush money payoff seems kind of skewed. The deal Robertson mentioned took place two years ago, long before the recent brouhaha. In fact, this was back when SCO was Caldera, they were reasonably Linux-friendly, and McBride was not yet in charge.
This sounds so cowardly and backwards for true Linux enthusiasts. Those who really buy Lindows to use the bundled Linux can load other and better distros as well.
Even if you hadn't twisted the facts, this would be a rather strange thing to say. The "true Linux enthusiasts" aren't anywhere near the target market for Lindows. It's geared toward first-time buyers and people whose previous computer experience has been primarily with Microsoft Windows.
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Did you know that if every Hydrogen, Neutron, and Atomic bomb were detonated, it wouldn't even penetrate the earth's crust?
Not so. A sequence of hydrogen bombs dropped into a weak spot in the mid-atlantic ridge would definitely penetrate the oceanic crust.
Did you know that nuclear reactors exist that put out only about 6 MegaWatts? In comparison, the smallest coal plants puts out about 30 megawatts.
What is the point of bringing up power output? This seems like a red herring. There are research reactors which produce less than 1 kw, and there are coal furnaces which operate on a similar scale. These facts have nothing to do with the relative safety of nuclear power.
Did you know that the laws of physics say that 6 megawatts of destructive force is the same whether it's 6 megawatts of coal, nuclear, oil, or dynamite power?
This is meaningless. Any measurement of destructive force requires some kind of context. Besides, destructive force is often measured in units of energy rather than power (joules versus watts): moment magnitude for earthquakes, TNT equivalents for nuclear weapons, etc.
Did you know that Russia TRIED to get Chernobyl to blow in order to perform safety tests?
This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. The explosion was due to stupid negligence, not malice.
You arguments would be strengthened if you didn't exaggerate so much, and people would be more willing to listen if you adopted a more personable manner when debating.
The people near the reactor would be in serious danger, and an airplane directly over the plant may be in danger
Even this is doubtful. Because fusion is so efficient, there is no need for much plasma in a magnetic confinement reactor (current ignition attempts seem to work with densities on the order of 10^21/m^3 - about 1/10000 the particle density of the atmosphere at sea level), and should the walls fail, almost all of the excess thermal energy would be dissipated before the gas could leave the building. The main problem with a structural failure is the liberated magnetic field, which may throw chunks of metal around.
A map like this might do the trick. Implementation details are left as an exercise to the reader.
Your theory will have to explain a lot more than the expansion of the universe before it can replace general relativity. Right now, you seem to be in the "lots of hand-waving" stage, without any sort of mathematical model to back it up. You might want to try the canonical gravity BS test:
I imagine there are other tests I am failing to recall. Note that all of the tests I listed have concrete observable consequences, so you can check your work with the large body of experimental evidence found to date. Good luck!
Your methods sound completely off-the-wall. Do you have any sources or did you just make this up?
This doesn't make much sense. Is "air glow" your term for aurora borealis (or australis)? How do the atoms (or ionized particles, as it were) separate? The upper atmosphere is not exactly a rigid object. How would you be able tell this occurred because of gravity waves, anyway?
The center of the earth emits basically no gravitational radiation. In order to emit gravity waves of any remotely detectable magnitude, you need very heavy objects undergoing rapid acceleration (e.g. a binary pulsar system in the final stages of inspiral). There are no such dymanics inside the earth.
It would be all but impossible to isolate the miniscule atmospheric effects that may be caused by gravity waves from the huge sources of noise that come from solar flares, weather, disturbances in earth's magnetic field, man-made radios, city lights, etc... This (among other reasons) is why people have settled on interferometry. You may want to read up on LIGO, and see what kind of noise reduction effort is necessary to even have a hope of detecting waves.
The basic idea is this: a quantum fluctuation creates a matter/antimatter pair of particles near the event horizon of a black hole. The antiparticle falls in, destroying some of the mass of the black hole, while its partner escapes.
I've heard this explanation many times but it was never clear that this was the right way to think of this kind of process. It might be better to dispense with virtual particles and negative energy states, and view this via its relation with the Unruh effect.
Unruh says: an accelerating observer will see a thermal spectrum in empty space. If you are accelerating uniformly in a flat vacuum, you will fell like you are immersed in blackbody radiation. Note that the intensity of the radiation is rather small for everyday acceleration levels (this page gives a figure of about 1K for an acceleration of 10^20 m/sec^2, or about 10^19 times what we feel on Earth). Quasi-stationary observers near the event horizon are necessarily accelerating outward (since they are not falling in), and thus are bathed in thermal radiation. Faraway observers see this radiation, but it is gravitationally redshifted.
This sort of radiation will occur outside any massive body (e.g. a cat), but for everyday objects it will be immeasurably weak. More detailed explanations can be found here and here. Or you could just spend some time with Google.
I recall reading that neutron stars are largely Bose-Einstein condensates.
I think the more common model is a fermion gas. While Bose-Einstein condensates involve a massively degenerate ground state, fermion gases have energy levels stacked up. Bose-Einstein condensates do not provide any counter force to gravitational attraction, while a fermion gas can give an equilibrium with the degeneracy pressure, as the energy levels rise when the radius of the body decreases. A solar mass Bose-Einstein condensate would collapse rather quickly.
Incidentally, the naive, noninteracting fermion gas model also provides a decent (i.e. consistent with pulsar observations) estimate for the radius of a neutron star. However, since no one seems to know the equation of state of a large body of strongly interacting particles, the actual structure of a neutron star is rather poorly understood, and the mass at which the equilibrium breaks down yielding gravitational collapse is not well known.
Well, the 'other' part that I've heard about entanglement is that once they're entangled, any change to the spin (I think its the spin) in one object is also seen instantaneously in the other object.
No. If you make identical measurements of spin at distant locations, you will notice they are well correlated, but this effect cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light. Indeed, the information content in the correlation came from deciding which measurement to make. If you change the spin of one of the particles (e.g. by measuring it), you lose your entanglement - this process is called decoherence. You do not affect the state of the other particle at all. Teleportation requires both quantum entangled pairs and a classical "scan" with the associated information sent via conventional means.
The velocity at which the photons travel is constant.
This is only true in a vacuum. If you have charged particles around, there are electrodynamic interactions which are not necessarily coming from absorption and reemission.
What they have NOT done is altered C.
No one said they did.
In essense, the photons that emerge from the other end are not the same photons that entered it. They are equivalent copies.
This is a meaningless statement. Photons do not have serial numbers - they are indistinguishable particles, and the only information they can carry is their helicity. If a photon passes through a piece of glass, and its polarization upon exiting is the same as when it entered, there is no reason to call it a different photon.
Is there anything that stops this sort of attack?
Yes. The communication scheme described by eesreenim doesn't work, since entangled states by themselves cannot transmit information. The man in the middle will not be able to intercept any communications, because they will not happen in the first place.
This is completely meaningless. Photons don't occupy volume in any well-defined way.
The problem was that for quantum communication, you need to disentangle 2 separate photons from an entangled state so that any change you make to one makes ann instantaneous change to the other, it's twin if you like and that can be done it seems.
This is not how a quantum cryptosystem works. See this article, and note that the technique that currently seems to show the most promise for cryptography is (A). Messages cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, as relativity dictates that your actions cannot affect a distant "simultaneous" measurement, and no one has found a reproducible experiment to contradict this assertion (despite lots of trying). It is a popular misconception that quantum entanglement can be used to communicate instantaneously, but the correlations that are measured do not actually cause any exchange of information. If you do something to one of your photons, it will simply destroy the entanglement.
Perhaps you are referring to the ROPOD. I imagine aligning the lasers to project precise graphics would be somewhat more difficult than placing LEDs on a bar.
For what (little) it's worth my point was that two objects could travel away from each other with a relative speed of (2*C)-1 i.e. if they're both traveling near the speed of light, relative to each other they will be moving near twice the speed of light.
Okay, but your point is wrong. Relative speeds do not add like real numbers. Rather, if you were to fix a frame and let two bodies move in opposite directions at speeds a and b (written as fractions of the speed of light in a vacuum, i.e. between 0 and 1), then in each of the bodies' frames, the other is moving away at speed (a+b)/(1+ab). You should notice three things about this formula:
It might be worth your while to find a text on special relativity.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word incentivise dates from 1968. Hope that helps.
1968 Guardian 10 June 7/6 You have got to appeal to people's greed. The most successful station operators incentivise their forecourt staff.
The expression is very close to an integer, because of a rather strange collection of facts. The imaginary quadratic field of discriminant -163 (elements are sums of rational numbers with rationals times sqrt(-163)) has class number 1 and Weber showed in the first half of the last century that the modular j function takes algebraic integers in class number 1 fields to rational integers. The function j(z) has fourier expansion 1/q + 744 + 196884q + O(q^2), with q=exp(2*pi*i*z), so feeding in (-1 + sqrt(-163))/2 for z gives exp(pi*sqrt(163)) as the first term. The second term is an integer, the third term is less than 10^(-12), and the rest of the terms get really small, so the first term is necessarily close to an integer.
You can also try same expression, but replacing 163 with discriminants of other class number one imaginary quadratic fields, such as 67, 43, 19, 11, 7, 3, 2, 1. The effect is not so great, since the third term gets substantially larger with smaller primes.
Thinking of "curves" in space-time is an interesting analogy for gravity, but still doesn't address the mechanism - sure, the planet may be on a "45 degree" incline in spacetime, but what forces it down... and not up?
That is the wrong question. Curvature is an intrinsic property of any spacetime; unless you are standing on something, there is no notion of down, up, or 45 degree incline. These notions arise only when using simplified "rubber-sheet" analogies to describe the effect of mass on the geometry nearby.
You would nearly have to posit the existence of some constant stream of gravitons coming at 'right angles' to three-dimensional space in order to actually push things 'down the well'.
This is meaningless. General relativity is a purely geometric theory, and says absolutely nothing about gravitons. It would be nice if people trying to poke holes in relativity (e.g. van Flandern) took the time to understand what it actually predicts.
Incidentally, do any of these alternative theories predict the proper precession of Mercury's orbit, or the timing adjustment for clocks on the GPS satellites? General relativity does. This page might be useful to people who haven't seen these sorts of debates before.
Muon-catalyzed fusion was first observed in a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, by Alvarez in 1957. You can google for any of the interesting above words to get a reference. Protons with a muon replacing an electron are about 1/200 the radius of a normal hydrogen atom, so the amplitude of an interesting nuclear interaction is much higher than normal.
There are two obstructions to getting this to work on a large scale. First, there aren't enough naturally occurring muons to create any sort of chain reaction, by which I mean they decay much too quickly (half-life ~ 1.56 microseconds) to catalyze many reactions, unless the hydrogen is compressed to some absurd concentration. Second, muons are sufficiently heavy that artificial production would cost more energy than you'd get out of the fusion, so it would be difficult give nature a hand this way.
Weight is a measure of force (usually the amount necessary to keep an object from falling through the ground). Mass is a measure of the amount of matter in an object. They are fundamentally different.
Think of this; if a planet didn't have weight, what would keep it in orbit around a star?
Planets don't have weight - the mass of the star bends spacetime around it so that the planet's geodesic appears circular. In the planet's frame, it is essentially following a straight line.
The terms "frozen star", "collapsed star", and its abbreviation "collapsar" arise from the notion that in the faraway observer's inertial frame, the star never stops emitting light. However, the photon flux has been shown to decay roughly exponentially so the frozen aspect is a bit misleading. The intensity of a body that is N times the mass of the sun halves about every N*1.8*10^-5 seconds (see MTW page 872), so it will emit its last photon about N milliseconds after it starts getting dim.
If you look down, you won't see much.
Also, I just realized that you could see something because light is able to travel away from the star surface - just not past the event horizon.
You won't see the star when you're inside. Any light emitted by the star travels toward the center, because the future light cone of any point on the star is twisted that way. Causality is such that you will only be affected by events further from the center.
Actually, there's no reason why light couldn't pass the "event horizon." It's just that light emitted from within the event horizon doesn't have enough energy to completely escape the black hole.
This is not true. Any photons emitted at the event horizon in a directly outward direction will stay on the event horizon, and those emitted in other directions will travel toward the center. Any photons emitted in any direction inside the event horizon will travel toward the center. Any light that does happen to be outside the event horizon has no obstructions to "completely escaping", although it may be severely redshifted depending on its proximity to the event horizon.
A black hole is more than just a place with a high escape velocity. The associated curvature of spacetime ensures that events inside the event horizon cannot affect events outside. You may want to read something like MTW (especially chapter 33) to get a non-pop-science view of relativity.
Unless the 'curvature' turns out to be nothing more than a mathematical construct. No one has really proven that space actually curves, only that objects moving in a gravitational field move as if space were curved.
Your notion of curvature seems completely useless. Curvature is an intrinsic property of a space indicating infinitesimal changes in distances and angles, and does not depend on any particular isometric embedding in any larger, ambient space. If all possible measurements of distances and angles behaved as if spacetime were curved, then there would be no reason to say it is not curved. Our current measurements (e.g. time dilation in GPS, light deviation, orbiting bodies) are not comprehensive, but there are no known reproducible experiments indicating the contrary.
Oh, and the curvature makes general relativity easier to grok, but the equations could all be perfectly valid even if space doesn't really curve.
Which equations do you mean? Curvature is absolutely central to Einstein's field equations.
ramscoop ideas have been around for a while, and while they're not exactly "production quality" ideas, there's nothing fundamentally killing them.
Dialogues concerning the viability of ramscoops tend to follow a "death by a thousand cuts" pattern, mostly because whenever someone finds a reasonable obstruction to their practicality, someone else will propose a wildly unrealistic and ad hoc remedy, saying it could be plausible one day with future technology. Perhaps a better description of the situation would be that ramscoops are fundamentally dead, but that there are also many people who insist that the technology is merely ... pining for the fjords.
It's not an issue of viability (because it is viable), it's simply scale.
Scale tends to dictate viability of technologies. The article here describes several problems with the ramscoop design. One of them, involving radiation loss, looks like it would be overcome with a ramscoop about the size of the sun. This is not viable.
As far as I can tell, practical interstellar travel requires "new physics" (read: don't hold your breath).
I know that the Richter scale works on the idea that an earthquake of 6 on the Richter scale is double the strength of one of 5 on the Richter scale.
I am not a geologist, but the Richter scale seems to follow the relationship log_10(radiated energy in joules) = 4.4 + 1.5*(richter number), or approximately so (it is difficult to decipher the language in sites like this one). It's not clear what you mean by "strength" of an earthquake, but the above formula indicates that a magnitude 6 quake would release sqrt(1000), or about 31 times as much radiated energy as a magnitude 5 quake.
Incidentally, 3dB is approximately a doubling of radiated power, and an increase of a factor of sqrt(2), or about 1.414 in amplitude. 10dB is a tenfold increase in radiated power. I'm not sure how the doubling of perceived intensity with each 10dB increase would be rigorously measured.
Yes, indeed, a fusion reaction does emit light, and not photons.
I suppose you mean "electrons," as the parent said.
You can test electron degeneracy pressure in everday life by trying to compress a metal.
I think you're ignoring the rather significant contribution from Coulombic repulsion between the individual atoms.
Mr.Robertson said recently in the wake of the SCO vs IBM filing, that he'd paid money to SCO to keep quiet, atleast as regards his flavor of Linux.
You seem to be summarizing the news reported here, here, and here, but your interpretation of the deal as some kind of hush money payoff seems kind of skewed. The deal Robertson mentioned took place two years ago, long before the recent brouhaha. In fact, this was back when SCO was Caldera, they were reasonably Linux-friendly, and McBride was not yet in charge.
This sounds so cowardly and backwards for true Linux enthusiasts. Those who really buy Lindows to use the bundled Linux can load other and better distros as well.
Even if you hadn't twisted the facts, this would be a rather strange thing to say. The "true Linux enthusiasts" aren't anywhere near the target market for Lindows. It's geared toward first-time buyers and people whose previous computer experience has been primarily with Microsoft Windows.