I think you meant
that 9 out of 10 people polled can't tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and a dead crab.
Re:research to application life cycle
on
LHC Success!
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I think you could say at least for some areas of mathematics, it is the other way around. It was no accident that Ed Witten was awarded a Fields' medal and not a Nobel prize - if you consider string theory physics, for that matter.
Actually, from the viewpoint of a moving observer, any point in the universe can be reached in an arbitrarily small amount of time: it suffices that his velocity as seen from an external observer arbitrarily approach the velocity of light. In other words, what counts for the traveler is his proper time, not the time as measured by someone at Earth. So all this discussion of whether some alien will live long enough to reach us is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether someone would make this effort, and whether we at Earth will live long enough to contact it/him/her.
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I think you meant that 9 out of 10 people polled can't tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and a dead crab.
I think you could say at least for some areas of mathematics, it is the other way around. It was no accident that Ed Witten was awarded a Fields' medal and not a Nobel prize - if you consider string theory physics, for that matter.
Try Straumann's General Relativity: With Applications to Astrophysics: http://www.amazon.com/General-Relativity-Applications-Astrophysics-Mathematical/dp/3540219242/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215965048&sr=1-1
Actually, from the viewpoint of a moving observer, any point in the universe can be reached in an arbitrarily small amount of time: it suffices that his velocity as seen from an external observer arbitrarily approach the velocity of light. In other words, what counts for the traveler is his proper time, not the time as measured by someone at Earth. So all this discussion of whether some alien will live long enough to reach us is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether someone would make this effort, and whether we at Earth will live long enough to contact it/him/her.