Well.. I dont think muslims have a problem with all cartoons. Just cartoons that make fun of religious figures they respect.
In the west, its okay to make fun of Jesus. Here is one I heard while living here in the west - "Q: Never ask yourself What would jesus do? Answer: Coz He'd Get crucified and DIE!" I am willing to bet that any practicing christian who reads this might be amused, but would more likely find it unfunny. Some would find it offensive. This is in a culture that is quite tolerant about making fun of people who are in a position of respect.
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I disagree with you. I don't think that the cartoons made fun of religious figures, and I don't think that your analogy with a crude joke about Jesus is accurate.
Full disclosure: I'm an atheist. I live in and grew up in America, which is largely Christian, but I think that I'm far enough removed from theism in general that the differences between all the various monotheistic religions seem very petty to me. I don't really identify with Christians, so I think I can play the part of an unbiased observer. Of course, it's difficult for one to identify one's own biases, so take that with a grain of salt.
Here's my take on the situation. A newspaper in Denmark believed (correctly, I think) that the media was engaging in self-censorship on the topic of Islam, probably out of fear of violent extremists. They commissioned cartoons of Mohammad to explore this self-censorship. I believe they were interested in the public's reaction to the cartoons, but they were just as interested to see what cartoons would be drawn in the first place. The idea here is that the newspaper saw a story that seemed to be "covered up", namely that people are reticent to discuss topics that deal with Islam, and they tried to find a way to display that story in a sensational way (as newspapers tend to do).
I think the cartoons they received proved their point. Look at all the timid cartoons in that bunch. One of them has the cartoonist with a turban with the words "PR Stunt" holding a picture of a stick figure that presumably represents Mohammad. One of the other cartoons has "Jyllands-Posten's journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs" written on the chalkboard. Another cartoon has a cartoonist sweating nervously while drawing Mohammad. Yet another cartoon shows Mohammad saying "Relax, folks, it's just a sketch made by a Dane from the south-west Denmark".
I don't know exactly what to make of some of the cartoons (perhaps I'm not sophisticated enough), but I do think the cartoons I just mentioned are essentially preemptive apologies. And, in truth, the cartoon with the "we've run out of virgins" quote is kind of similar to your joke about Jesus- it's got very little context and meaning aside from the intention of producing a guffaw. But no one really cares about them, do they? All they care about is the cartoon with the bomb.
I *REALLY* like the cartoon with the bomb. I don't think it's intended as a mere insult or a trivial joke like your Jesus example. I think the cartoonist responsible for that cartoon has a set of really enormous balls (or really enormous ovaries if she's a woman), and a keen insight into the problems facing Islam today, albeit he/she clearly isn't burdened by an over-abundance of tact.
No, really.
Think about it. The bomb is on Mohammad's HEAD. When the bomb goes off, it's going to hurt Mohammad more than anyone else. Thus: the cartoonist isn't trying to say that Mohammad is a terrorist! He's trying to say "Mohammad (or, rather, Mohammad's religion) is in danger. The bomb (terrorism) is going to seriously wound or kill Islam."
IMHO, This cartoon is an extraordinarily heroic attempt to try to warn people in the Middle East that their religion has a serious PR problem in the rest of the world. I don't think that any serious Westerner believes that all Muslims are terrorists,
Um don't you need protons for that also? Adding neutrons would just create isotopes...
The extra neutron very quickly decays into a proton and an electron (thus conserving electric charge). The electron flies out of the nucleus, leaving plutonium behind.
I think it is time to change the fact we call them games. I personally still deal with the fact that gaming is a waste of time to so many. My parents sit and watch the tv all night after dinner but they can't see that doing that is no different from me playing my games for the same amount of time. Why doing something on a console or computer is so different than sitting in front of a television I will never know.
I agree that games are often considered to be a bigger waste of time than television. However, I must disagree that videogames are "no different" than watching TV. Sitting in front of a screen, passively absorbing a storyline seems much less beneficial than interacting in a storyline, making choices about long-term strategy, improving hand-eye coordination and learning how to adjust tactics on the fly to cope with the constantly changing game environment that characterizes so many modern FPS games.
No, TV is VERY different than games. It's a MUCH bigger waste of time. Several articles have come out recently that show videogame addicts have a higher ability to multitask, ignore irrelevant information, and don't seem to experience age-related cognitive decline as intensely as control subjects. Personally, I'm not very surprised by this- I've played videogames since I was ten, and I'm currently working on a PhD in physics (insert standard disclaimer about anecdotes not being good evidence, blah blah blah). I think I can say that part of my ability to understand complicated theories is due to my gaming experience- I've routinely had to figure out how to get past a certain level in a game ON MY OWN from a very early age. These types of problem solving skills probably carry over into real life. In addition, more than anything else I've found that success in a hard science program is due to tenacity. I may not understand everything I see at first, but just like in Mario Brothers, I've learned to try and try and try and try... something that sitting in front of a moving picture won't teach you.
Of course, none of these advantages matter if you spend your entire waking life playing EverCrack. My point is that videogames in moderation are much more beneficial than TV in moderation.
These are iron oxide chrondules from the vaporisation of a nickel-iron meteorite. There's no need to invoke aliens or intelligent designers.
They do look like iron oxide chondrules, but look at table 1. Iron only makes up 1% of the substance by weight. The main elements present are carbon and oxygen.
Also, as someone else pointed out, their other two papers make it more clear that the "glass beads" are alive. Of course, this didn't make it into the peer reviewed paper so I'm treating it with a little more skepticism than usual.
The only point of difference between evolutionists and ID (different from creationism) is macro-evolution. We actually don't have substantial evidence (fossil or otherwise) that mutation ever caused inter-species changes, just the assumption that it could occur, given that intra-species changes occur. This is the 'flaw' in evolution that IDers seek to have pointed out - macro-evolution _isn't consistent with the scientific method_.
Why do people still believe that there is no evidence for speciation? Dozens, if not hundreds, of observed speciation events have been published in peer reviewed journals for decades. If you for some reason disagree with the scientific methods used in proving that ALL of these speciation events did indeed occur, then you should put forward some evidence to support your claim. Of course, in addition to posting your wisdom here on/. you might also want to give those useless hacks at "Nature" and "Science" some advice on how to properly review articles.
On the other hand, it may simply be that you were unaware of these articles. That's certainly nothing to be ashamed of (everyone is ignorant about something or another), but let me leave you with one tidbit of knowledge: THIS IS EXACTLY WHY SCIENTISTS DON'T DEBATE ID PROPONENTS! Every time I (used to) get into a discussion with a creationist, I would find that he usually had a very, VERY dim grasp of the subject they were attempting to discuss with an air of authority. It gets real irritating real fast to have to explain why we don't need to know initial quantities of radioactive elements in order to properly determine that the earth is 4.5 Gyrs old, etc.
Here's a simple solution: phrase your statement differently. Instead of making an absurd claim like "there are no observed instances of speciation", just ask "Hey- this whole speciation thing. Is there any evidence for it?". You'll come off sounding less like an ignorant dogmatic Believer, and more like a curious newcomer. The person you're talking to will respect you more, and you'll have more productive conversations. Who knows- you might even learn something.
With all the public backlash and misrepresentation of what the ID movement really stands for, I thought it important to add a bit of reason into the mix, to give the majority of people speaking out against ID (who don't really understand what it stands for and just see it as a Bible-pushing fundamental Christian movement) some idea of what ID is really all about.
There are generally two ways to react to ID proponents. The first is to attempt to talk to them on the level of rational, scientific debate (thus assuming that they are working on the same level). The second is to be more cynical and try to expose them as being religiously motivated.
The reasonable "let's pretend that ID proponents are actually scientists" approach
I agree with ID proponents that certain body parts and physiological mechanisms are so complicated that we simply don't understand the intricacies of exactly how they evolved. What I don't understand is why ID people seem to believe that this means that these mechanisms are "irreducibly complex". It seems like the first, most obvious mistake here is the equation of "we don't understand how this mechanism evolved right now" with "this mechanism COULDN'T have evolved". It's the God of the Gaps, pure and simple. Oops- "Designer of the Gaps". Sorry.
All this last point shows is that, at the very least, ID proponents are practicing flawed science. They're making unjustified leaps of logic in assuming that our ignorance of certain aspects of nature demonstrates ANYTHING beyond the fact that we're not omniscient. But there's a far more serious problem, one that I believe strikes at the very core of science itself- naturalism. All scientists look at the world and assume that all causes and effects are natural- that they follow rigorous
You're right- desktop computers have continued to get more powerful over the last few years. But the point is, the clock speeds have begun to slow their frantic increase (yes, I know that this isn't related to Moore's law). There are lots of examples of this, but I'm way too lazy to look them up. I'm pretty sure that if you plot the highest frequency attained by consumer-grade CPUs over the last 10-20 years, you'd see it rising quite fast, then starting to level off near 2000 or quickly afterwards. Recently there's been a drastic example of this- AMD stopped reporting clock speeds because they weren't increasing very fast, and Intel suffered a similar defeat recently. I can't recall the exact codename of the Intel chip, but several times in the last couple of years Intel has been forced to drastically scale back their roadplan expectations of the highest attainable clock speeds for their best chips.
The reason that this failure isn't more obvious is because computer engineers have gotten very clever and inventive lately regarding ways to increase perceived performance without actually increasing the clock speed of the chip. Things like making a chip perform more calculations in parallel, adding two CPUs to a chip, predicting memory requests more intelligently so as to make better use of the chip's cache, etc. Optimizations like this will eventually hit a point of diminishing returns, which is why so many groups are researching ways to make faster transistors or looking for entirely new computer architectures that will replace silicon (eventually) when it finally hits a hard-and-fast performance limit.
I wonder if this analysis has an effect on the chain of inferences leading to the conclusion that the galactic expansion is accelerating.
I doubt it. We believe that the universe's expansion is accelerating because of supernova emission lines. When a supernova occurs, an afterglow persists for a while wherein newly created unstable elements decay into other elements. This decay process has a very precise spectroscopic signature (i.e. each decay process produces a very recognizable spectrum). Because the supernova are "moving away from us" (the more precise explanation is more complicated, but boils down to the fact that the space between the Milky Way and the distant galaxy has "stretched" in the eons since the light was emitted), they exhibit a doppler shift, exactly the same effect that is responsible for our speeding tickets.
Here's where it gets interesting: we used to think that the universe's expansion was slowing down. This assumption essentially followed from an analogy: the universe expands because of an initial "kick" from the big bang, but is held back by its own gravity, in the same manner that a football rises into the air from a literal kick and is held back by the earth's gravity. Thus all physicists expected the rate of expansion to SLOW DOWN as time went on. That means that if we look at very distant supernova, their recession velocities should be very high (because on a galactic scale, far away objects = long ago objects) and the expansion simply HAD to be faster in the past. Similarly, "close" and "recent" supernova should exhibit relatively small velocities.
Though I don't want to oversimplify the analysis, the end result is that this isn't true. The recession velocities should be able to be plotted on a straight line (where horizontal axis is distance from us in, say, megaparsecs, and the vertical axis is recession velocity, usually given in km/sec). This isn't quite true- the more distant supernova lie BELOW this line, implying that the velocity was lower in the past than we thought, which implies acceleration.
Umm... end point is I doubt dark matter would affect anything in this chain of reasoning. Anyone care to point out any flaws? I wouldn't be surprised... been a while since I've sat in on a cosmology lecture.
Hmm... I'm really not sure. Large magnetic fields in the vicinity of a magnetar are supposed to do really wierd things, like stretching electron clouds from their usual shapes into something elongated in the direction of the magnetic field. If there are *moving* and *unbound* electrons near the magnetar, what you're saying would probably happen.
But more likely, the only electrons on the magnetar would be in the thin shell of relatively normal matter that sits on top of the star. Because they would be bound to atoms, they wouldn't be able to radiate much.
First of all, IANAABIAAPAGDDILA (I am not an astronomer, but I am a physicist, and god damn do I love acronyms).
I believe that the confusion you're pointing out comes from two places:
1. The simplistic model of a neutron star being "pure neutrons" is probably intended to get the main point across to lay people. The complexities involved in analyzing the composition of a typical neutron star as a function of radial distance are simply staggering, and it's difficult enough to explain the basic concept of electrons and protons combining to form neutrons (and neutrinos).
2. It may also be that the field has advanced recently. The basic idea of a "neutron star" was accepted soon after the first discovery of LGM-1. The exact structure of such an exotic object, though, has long been mysterious and/or controversial. New computational models are being invented all the time, resulting in a greater understanding of what quantum chromodynamics predicts will happen at extremely high densities. For example, a neutron star is usually considered to be a giant atomic nucleus because its density is comparable to an atomic nucleus. Recently, though, a new type of object was suggested called a "strange star" which is even more dense. A strange star is comparable to a neutron star, except that instead of individual neutrons being packed tightly together, the neutrons themselves are crushed out of existence and all that is left is a "sea" of the quarks that made up the neutrons. Therefore, a "strange star" is effectively a single nucleon. New discoveries such as these may be gaining greater acceptance by mainstream scientists, thus legitimizing the more mundane predictions of exactly how a neutron star's composition varies as radial distance.
Again, this is somewhat out of my field, but... um.. I get drunk with a astronomers pretty regularly. So take all this with a grain of salt, as always.
Actually, they did find a correlation, they just dismissed it as cognitive decline as being due to age rather than marijuana use.
The point is that cognitive decline occurs in every group (nonusers, light users, heavy users) to the same degree within the bounds of experimental uncertainty. In fact, if you'll notice right under table 3, you'll see this direct quote:
"Both light and heavy users of cannabis evidenced less cognitive decline than nonusers, although this finding was not statistically significant at the conventional level of p (less than) 0.05 (model 1). After adjustment for the other variables in models 2-4, there was no association between cannabis use and cognitive decline."
They even admit the test they used isn't that sensitive to measuring cognitive decline.
I think what they mean is that they would like to be using an MRI on the subjects while testing them to look for evidence of decreased brain activity that wouldn't be revealed in a simple scantron-like test. Or, possibly, they mean that there are other written tests available that are "better" (though I'm not sure how to quantify how exactly the test could be better) but that they didn't use for some reason. For instance, the "better" test might have been longer, thus serving to discourage people from signing up for the study and as a result decreasing the statistical validity of their results.
In any event, I wouldn't read that statement as a disavowal of the results. This type of self-doubt is extremely common in scientific journals- any scientist worth his salt lists all the problems with his experiment that he can see by himself. And, yes, IAAPSS (I am a pot smoking scientist).
Long story short: a study involving repeated IQ tests of nearly 1400 participants over a time period of 12 years showed absolutely no statistical correlation between marijuana use and cognitive ability.
I had a forever flashlight once. It broke within 3 weeks without any abuse. Of course, my experience may not be representative, and the Hummer might not be any better, but I do NOT recommend the forever flashlight as anything other than a cheap novelty item.
Actually, it might be worse than that. Every galaxy we've examined has a supermassive black hole in its center, including our own. Galaxies that are very young (e.g. very far away) seem to be radiating withering levels of radiation, a phenomenon known as a "quasar". The most popular theory at the moment is that quasars are simply supermassive black holes feeding on matter in the galaxy, and spitting some of the incoming matter out as gamma rays and x rays.
Our galaxy is "quiet" because the black hole has "pushed" the surrounding matter away from it so that it no longer has any significant incoming matter. A galactic collision would probably play hell with this balance, though, sending material into our very own supermassive black hole. When this happens, the levels of radiation could be so high that small perturbations in the earth's orbit will be the LEAST of humanity's concerns.
The good news is that at the very earliest, the Milky Way won't collide with another galaxy for several million more years, when Andromeda MAY hit us.
The real lesson in the Tower of Babel story is that you shouldn't be doing dumbass things just for the sake of doing them, because sometimes they fail, and if you haven't even thought about what's going to happen when it fails, you're gonna get screwed, really really hard.
The Space Elevator is in fact such a case: think about the absolute nightmare a cable cut would be. I mean, all that has to happen is a plane goes the wrong way, or a meteor happens through the wrong area, or bad weather, or lightning, or god knows what. That cable is going to be seriously heavy - half a ton per mile, maybe more, even designed to be as light as possible - and it's flexible so it won't get brittle, and it's, well, long. So it starts falling to earth, right?
A space elevator that had the linear density you quote wouldn't be able to support it's own weight, let alone the weight of any climbers. Most estimates of the total mass of the elevator's ribbon are on the order of 1000 metric tons.
It's roughly equivalent to a highway just sort of coming out of the sky one day. There's pretty much nowhere you can put the space elevator where, if it gets cut, it's not going to cross some urban areas; the Earth/Moon lagrange 1 point is about 200,000 miles above Earth - enough to wrap around the planet a little over eight times. That's how it would fall, too - it'd be dragged behind a planet moving forward, and would wrap around under its own momentum, like a whip.
So, you've got a highway coming down, in bands, around the Earth eight times. Right through the middles of cities. Over the ocean. Into parks, monuments, farmland. Cutting cities in half. Killing tens of millions.
This is one of the largest and most common misconceptions about a space elevator. A broken space elevator would not kill tens of millions of people. In fact, a severed space elevator would likely be a disappointing anti-climax, as the powerpoint file on TFA shows. Impact occurs at 0.5 m/s (that's the terminal velocity of the ribbon).
On my planet we obey the laws of physics - so sorry, not going to come close to breaking even without some incredible breakthroughs in electricity, magnetism or tribology.
I didn't mean to imply that I'd found some magical way around the 2nd law. What I meant was that all existing launch systems recover 0% of the energy expended to send objects into space, whereas the space elevator has the potential to recover at least some of the energy spent to send mass into space. All physical devices will have inefficiencies, but those inefficiencies will diminish as technology improves.
As for the current re-entry method, it's the cheap way of slowing down without using fuel, it doesn't have to happen but it is a carefully calculated risk.
True, it's the best we have at the moment. What I'm saying is that it is (a) dangerous and (b) wastes energy by shedding it as heat instead of reclaiming that energy for the next launch.
I'm not a practising materials scientist anymore, but from what I've read of carbon nanotubes they have a possible potential to be strong enough someday - but since we don't know how much it's going to cost us per unit volume to make the stuff or how much we'll need it is way to early to make up numbers from nowhere.
That's true, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't invest in some relatively cheap studies of what carbon nanotubes could do when we finally get them working. In addition, I sincerely doubt that economics of carbon nanotubes will be a large problem because there are a huge variety of applications for nanotubes that don't involve spaceflight at all. Economies of scale and all that. Plus, the whole point of a space elevator is that the costs associated with each launch are miniscule- it's only the initial construction that is expensive. A large initial investment will prove less expensive over the long haul than continuously wasting energy by sending small payloads into orbit and then wasting all their orbital energy in re-entry.
It's hype - and from the way people in the west have been brought up it strikes a Biblical chord.
I agree that the people who think an elevator can be up and running within 15 years are probably overoptimistic to the point that you could call it "hype", but I've honestly never seen anyone besides you compare the space elevator to a biblical story. Most of the discussions I've had with colleagues regarding the space elevator, and most of the articles I've read about it have been concerned with the technical challenges involved and the incomparable riches it could provide to the human race if we ever manage to construct one. It's an engineering project, albeit an ambitious one, which is fundamentally no different from, say, the moon shot.
If we are going to ship millions of tonnes into space it could either be an elevator or infrastructure to get stuff from places that are not in such a deep gravity well.
Mining near earth asteroids is definitely a good way to jumpstart the human presence in the solar system, but it doesn't address the fact that some things need to be taken into space from the surface of the Earth. For instance: people, any technology that requires large factories to be constructed (such as computers), and food (at least until greenhouses can be constructed in orbit). In addition, mining near earth asteroids may be a way to reduce the amount of mass that needs to be lifted into orbit for a space elevator. If we can manage to capture an asteroid of the right size and put it into GEO to act as a counterweight, the cable length can be shortened considerably, from 143,000km to 36,000km.
I see this whole concept as just being another aspect of people getting too influenced by Biblical sound bites - they want to build a tower of Bable for the sake of it, while similar ludrous schemes for launch like building a mass driver circling the equator would be orders of magnitude cheaper. Keep your religeon and your science seperate guys. People would argue this came from SF, from people that have heard of geostationary orbit but don't have a clue, but it gets rooted in our heads from Sunday School and the Bable story.
You might find it surprising, then, to hear that I'm very excited about the possibility of a space elevator, despite being a lifelong atheist.
It's true that the space elevator relies on technology that doesn't exist yet. But that technology is rapidly advancing, and there have been extensive studies
of the material properties of carbon nanotubes in the context of use in a space elevator. Of course, you'll have to wade through pages of Biblical references to get to the actual science, but that's something you'll just have to get used to if you want to read about space elevator technology.
In addition, a mass driver is simply NOT a substitute for a space elevator. Even if a practical electromagnetic mass driver could be built, each launch would require a large amount of energy that would never be recovered. The space elevator uses less energy to send each ton of matter to GEO than any other proposed system, but that's not the really cool part. You see, each ton of matter that is returned from GEO effectively recovers the energy required to send that matter up in the first place via regenerative braking.
This is also where I should mention that, energy concerns aside, the space elevator removes one of the largest risks from space flight - reentry. Mass drivers help you get into orbit, but they don't help you return from orbit at all. In a space elevator, though, you just press the "down" button. Simple as that.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go do my religion homework. Oops, I meant to say science homework. I have such a hard time keeping those two subjects separate... but you can't really blame us clueless space elevator kooks for that, right?
First of all, the galaxy is believed to have condensed from a much larger cloud of primordial hydrogen and helium (it's theorized that supermassive black holes played a large role in this process). Because the proto-galaxy condensed from something MUCH larger, its moment of inertia reduced dramatically (rather like an ice-skater drawing her arms in to spin faster). This caused the angular rotation of the galaxy to increase around whatever axis the angular momentum pointed originally (which I would imagine is completely random for each galaxy).
So each galaxy should have non-zero angular momentum. This doesn't mean that there shouldn't be ANY spherical-like orbits, just that the majority of objects orbit in the "pancake" that is perpendicular to the axis of rotation. Here's the punchline: over billions of years, the objects that are NOT orbiting in the galaxy's pancake have close encounters with the more numerous objects in the pancake, and are either flung out of the galaxy or put into more normal orbits. The same process accounts for the fact that all planets in the Solar System orbit in a common plane (called the ecliptic plane).
As for elliptic galaxies, my impression was that they are the result of low-speed collisions between two spiral galaxies of roughly the same size. The two pancakes then combine to form a diffuse cloud of strars. For instance, when the Milky Way impacts Andromeda in 2 billion years (or is it 3? I can't remember), the result should be an elliptic galaxy if I understand the dynamics correctly.
As much as I agree that China is an oppressive regime that is far worse than the U.S. in terms of censorship, I have to take issue with one of your claims:
"How many Americans still think Saddam had an active WMD program?... Al queada links? How many of you think most of the world support your actions?"
Honestly, I'd say that at LEAST a majority of Americans knows the truth about these things. Contrary to YOUR ignorant belief, most Americans are NOT un-educated or un-informed about domestic and world issues.
Unfortunately, that's not true. Here are the results of a survey taken of Americans right before the election:
As you can tell, the majority of Americans *are* ignorant and un-informed about world issues. It might be an unpleasant surprise, but there it is in cold hard statistics.
Forgive me my cynicism, but I just lost whatever faith I had in my own countrymen about a month ago. There's always Europe, I suppose...
Actually, I think people's #1 fear should be biological weapons, not nuclear weapons.
Think about it- a thermonuclear bomb can kill maybe 10 million people if it is detonated at the right altitude above a major city. A biological weapon, on the other hand, has the possibility of wiping out the entire human race...
Nope. The quantum state of the particle *is* the particle. There's no difference between one electron and another electron except for its quantum state (look up the chapter on "indistinguishable particles" in any quantum mechanics textbook.
The reason that this is true is that quantum states of particles are very different than classical descriptions of particles (ie "the baseball is travelling at 5 m/s due north at 1 radian above the horizontal at 5 degrees north and 3 degrees south at sealevel, etc, etc). You can't, for instance, take the information about a particle and make TWO copies. This is forbidden by the "no cloning theorem", a fundamental result of quantum information theory. These two points are the reason that every quantum information theoretician or experimentalist that I know regards quantum teleportation as "actually moving the particle from point A to point B without going through the intervening space".
Granted, we haven't perfected this process yet. For instance, most experiments have only teleported a photon's polarization wave function. The spatial wave function has been in a very trivial state that is replicated very easily. This is going to change, though. There is no fundamental physical law that prevents teleporting the *entire* quantum wave function- it just requires more classical information to be sent.
To recap... in every experimentally distinguishable sense, the particle disappears from point A and reappears at point B. It does not have to move through the intervening space. What *does* have to be transmitted through that space is classical information. That classical information doesn't have to be sent immediately, though, and it can take a very innocuous form. For instance, in order to teleport the polarization state of a photon all I need to do is call my friend at the other end and give him two bits of information (ie "Hey, Bob, the results are '1,0'. Enjoy the photon.")
I actually read the PDF and I have to say that I think they're dead serious.
The first part of the article deals with all the legitimate ways to move particles from point A to point B without going through the intervening space. These methods (while very, VERY far off in the future) are scientifically plausible even if they sound like they were lifted from a bad Star Trek script. The second part, of course, is full of the worst kind of pseudo-science, like telekenisis and psychic abilities. But, really, the first half of the proposal is only a waste of money because the technology involved is too far off to be useful in any reasonably timeframe.
For example, negative energy is a real phenomenon in quantum physics. It is most commonly discussed in the context of the Casimir effect. Here's an article that discusses the Casimir effect. Basically, the negative energy arises because empty space itself has a certain amount of vacuum energy, and the Casimir effect reduces these fluctuations inside two metal plates (which have to be spaced absurdly closely together and manufactured to extremely exact precision for the effect to be measureable). Because we generally say that empty space has zero energy and the space between the plates has less energy than that, the Casimir effect is regarded as a source of "negative energy". This could actually be useful (one day in the far FAR future) for opening up space-time wormholes. And, no, I'm not joking either.
Also, while "warp drive" may be an overused Trek term, it's also a (semi) legitimate topic of discussion in physics. In 1994, Dr. Miguel Alcubierre found a solution to General Relativity that seemed to allow for faster than light travel while obeying special and general relativity. What followed was a lively debate on the plausibility of the "Alcubierre Warp Drive". One of the most recent objections argued that Alcubierre's warp drive would never be able to cross lightspeed but might allow for non-Newtonion sublight travel.
Not surprisingly, it's quite complicated. It's taken me nearly 5 years of college and 1 year of grad school to understand how this works at even a rudimentary level. I am by *no* means an expert in this field, I'm just getting started...
The most constructive thing I can do is give you some buzzwords to google for. Quantum teleportation is possible because of a quantum effect known as "quantum entanglement", an effect that was predicted in the 1930's and proven experimentally in the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any decent references for this effect on the web in my ~5 minute search. On the other hand, if you want to see what a real scientific explanation of quantum teleportation looks like, check this out. The first page actually looks like it's pretty comprehensible.
I agree that this is a serious waste of taxpayer money- this kind of pseudo-scientific bullshit has no place in any government organization.
However, most scientists that discuss teleportation don't talk about simultaneous teleportation. That *would* definitely be impossible due to relativity, like you mentioned.
In reality, quantum teleportation is a legitimate scientific topic (that's what I study, as a matter of fact). It's possible because the teleportation isn't instantaneous- it happens at a speed less than or equal to the speed of light. The reason it is called teleportation is that quantum effects are used to make a particle disappear from point A and reappear at point B (a suitable time later) without crossing the intervening space. Cool, huh?
This effect has already been demonstrated for photons, and limited effects have been demonstrated for single atoms. Whether or not it will ever be possible on a larger scale is a matter of debate... but it isn't a debate about relativity.
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In the west, its okay to make fun of Jesus. Here is one I heard while living here in the west - "Q: Never ask yourself What would jesus do? Answer: Coz He'd Get crucified and DIE!" I am willing to bet that any practicing christian who reads this might be amused, but would more likely find it unfunny. Some would find it offensive. This is in a culture that is quite tolerant about making fun of people who are in a position of respect.
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I disagree with you. I don't think that the cartoons made fun of religious figures, and I don't think that your analogy with a crude joke about Jesus is accurate.
Full disclosure: I'm an atheist. I live in and grew up in America, which is largely Christian, but I think that I'm far enough removed from theism in general that the differences between all the various monotheistic religions seem very petty to me. I don't really identify with Christians, so I think I can play the part of an unbiased observer. Of course, it's difficult for one to identify one's own biases, so take that with a grain of salt.
Here's my take on the situation. A newspaper in Denmark believed (correctly, I think) that the media was engaging in self-censorship on the topic of Islam, probably out of fear of violent extremists. They commissioned cartoons of Mohammad to explore this self-censorship. I believe they were interested in the public's reaction to the cartoons, but they were just as interested to see what cartoons would be drawn in the first place. The idea here is that the newspaper saw a story that seemed to be "covered up", namely that people are reticent to discuss topics that deal with Islam, and they tried to find a way to display that story in a sensational way (as newspapers tend to do).
I think the cartoons they received proved their point. Look at all the timid cartoons in that bunch. One of them has the cartoonist with a turban with the words "PR Stunt" holding a picture of a stick figure that presumably represents Mohammad. One of the other cartoons has "Jyllands-Posten's journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs" written on the chalkboard. Another cartoon has a cartoonist sweating nervously while drawing Mohammad. Yet another cartoon shows Mohammad saying "Relax, folks, it's just a sketch made by a Dane from the south-west Denmark".
I don't know exactly what to make of some of the cartoons (perhaps I'm not sophisticated enough), but I do think the cartoons I just mentioned are essentially preemptive apologies. And, in truth, the cartoon with the "we've run out of virgins" quote is kind of similar to your joke about Jesus- it's got very little context and meaning aside from the intention of producing a guffaw. But no one really cares about them, do they? All they care about is the cartoon with the bomb.
I *REALLY* like the cartoon with the bomb. I don't think it's intended as a mere insult or a trivial joke like your Jesus example. I think the cartoonist responsible for that cartoon has a set of really enormous balls (or really enormous ovaries if she's a woman), and a keen insight into the problems facing Islam today, albeit he/she clearly isn't burdened by an over-abundance of tact.
No, really.
Think about it. The bomb is on Mohammad's HEAD. When the bomb goes off, it's going to hurt Mohammad more than anyone else. Thus: the cartoonist isn't trying to say that Mohammad is a terrorist! He's trying to say "Mohammad (or, rather, Mohammad's religion) is in danger. The bomb (terrorism) is going to seriously wound or kill Islam."
IMHO, This cartoon is an extraordinarily heroic attempt to try to warn people in the Middle East that their religion has a serious PR problem in the rest of the world. I don't think that any serious Westerner believes that all Muslims are terrorists,
The extra neutron very quickly decays into a proton and an electron (thus conserving electric charge). The electron flies out of the nucleus, leaving plutonium behind.
I agree that games are often considered to be a bigger waste of time than television. However, I must disagree that videogames are "no different" than watching TV. Sitting in front of a screen, passively absorbing a storyline seems much less beneficial than interacting in a storyline, making choices about long-term strategy, improving hand-eye coordination and learning how to adjust tactics on the fly to cope with the constantly changing game environment that characterizes so many modern FPS games.
No, TV is VERY different than games. It's a MUCH bigger waste of time. Several articles have come out recently that show videogame addicts have a higher ability to multitask, ignore irrelevant information, and don't seem to experience age-related cognitive decline as intensely as control subjects. Personally, I'm not very surprised by this- I've played videogames since I was ten, and I'm currently working on a PhD in physics (insert standard disclaimer about anecdotes not being good evidence, blah blah blah). I think I can say that part of my ability to understand complicated theories is due to my gaming experience- I've routinely had to figure out how to get past a certain level in a game ON MY OWN from a very early age. These types of problem solving skills probably carry over into real life. In addition, more than anything else I've found that success in a hard science program is due to tenacity. I may not understand everything I see at first, but just like in Mario Brothers, I've learned to try and try and try and try... something that sitting in front of a moving picture won't teach you.
Of course, none of these advantages matter if you spend your entire waking life playing EverCrack. My point is that videogames in moderation are much more beneficial than TV in moderation.
They do look like iron oxide chondrules, but look at table 1. Iron only makes up 1% of the substance by weight. The main elements present are carbon and oxygen.
Also, as someone else pointed out, their other two papers make it more clear that the "glass beads" are alive. Of course, this didn't make it into the peer reviewed paper so I'm treating it with a little more skepticism than usual.
Why do people still believe that there is no evidence for speciation? Dozens, if not hundreds, of observed speciation events have been published in peer reviewed journals for decades. If you for some reason disagree with the scientific methods used in proving that ALL of these speciation events did indeed occur, then you should put forward some evidence to support your claim. Of course, in addition to posting your wisdom here on /. you might also want to give those useless hacks at "Nature" and "Science" some advice on how to properly review articles.
On the other hand, it may simply be that you were unaware of these articles. That's certainly nothing to be ashamed of (everyone is ignorant about something or another), but let me leave you with one tidbit of knowledge: THIS IS EXACTLY WHY SCIENTISTS DON'T DEBATE ID PROPONENTS! Every time I (used to) get into a discussion with a creationist, I would find that he usually had a very, VERY dim grasp of the subject they were attempting to discuss with an air of authority. It gets real irritating real fast to have to explain why we don't need to know initial quantities of radioactive elements in order to properly determine that the earth is 4.5 Gyrs old, etc.
Here's a simple solution: phrase your statement differently. Instead of making an absurd claim like "there are no observed instances of speciation", just ask "Hey- this whole speciation thing. Is there any evidence for it?". You'll come off sounding less like an ignorant dogmatic Believer, and more like a curious newcomer. The person you're talking to will respect you more, and you'll have more productive conversations. Who knows- you might even learn something.
With all the public backlash and misrepresentation of what the ID movement really stands for, I thought it important to add a bit of reason into the mix, to give the majority of people speaking out against ID (who don't really understand what it stands for and just see it as a Bible-pushing fundamental Christian movement) some idea of what ID is really all about.
There are generally two ways to react to ID proponents. The first is to attempt to talk to them on the level of rational, scientific debate (thus assuming that they are working on the same level). The second is to be more cynical and try to expose them as being religiously motivated.
The reasonable "let's pretend that ID proponents are actually scientists" approach
I agree with ID proponents that certain body parts and physiological mechanisms are so complicated that we simply don't understand the intricacies of exactly how they evolved. What I don't understand is why ID people seem to believe that this means that these mechanisms are "irreducibly complex". It seems like the first, most obvious mistake here is the equation of "we don't understand how this mechanism evolved right now" with "this mechanism COULDN'T have evolved". It's the God of the Gaps, pure and simple. Oops- "Designer of the Gaps". Sorry.
All this last point shows is that, at the very least, ID proponents are practicing flawed science. They're making unjustified leaps of logic in assuming that our ignorance of certain aspects of nature demonstrates ANYTHING beyond the fact that we're not omniscient. But there's a far more serious problem, one that I believe strikes at the very core of science itself- naturalism. All scientists look at the world and assume that all causes and effects are natural- that they follow rigorous
The reason that this failure isn't more obvious is because computer engineers have gotten very clever and inventive lately regarding ways to increase perceived performance without actually increasing the clock speed of the chip. Things like making a chip perform more calculations in parallel, adding two CPUs to a chip, predicting memory requests more intelligently so as to make better use of the chip's cache, etc. Optimizations like this will eventually hit a point of diminishing returns, which is why so many groups are researching ways to make faster transistors or looking for entirely new computer architectures that will replace silicon (eventually) when it finally hits a hard-and-fast performance limit.
I doubt it. We believe that the universe's expansion is accelerating because of supernova emission lines. When a supernova occurs, an afterglow persists for a while wherein newly created unstable elements decay into other elements. This decay process has a very precise spectroscopic signature (i.e. each decay process produces a very recognizable spectrum). Because the supernova are "moving away from us" (the more precise explanation is more complicated, but boils down to the fact that the space between the Milky Way and the distant galaxy has "stretched" in the eons since the light was emitted), they exhibit a doppler shift, exactly the same effect that is responsible for our speeding tickets.
Here's where it gets interesting: we used to think that the universe's expansion was slowing down. This assumption essentially followed from an analogy: the universe expands because of an initial "kick" from the big bang, but is held back by its own gravity, in the same manner that a football rises into the air from a literal kick and is held back by the earth's gravity. Thus all physicists expected the rate of expansion to SLOW DOWN as time went on. That means that if we look at very distant supernova, their recession velocities should be very high (because on a galactic scale, far away objects = long ago objects) and the expansion simply HAD to be faster in the past. Similarly, "close" and "recent" supernova should exhibit relatively small velocities.
Though I don't want to oversimplify the analysis, the end result is that this isn't true. The recession velocities should be able to be plotted on a straight line (where horizontal axis is distance from us in, say, megaparsecs, and the vertical axis is recession velocity, usually given in km/sec). This isn't quite true- the more distant supernova lie BELOW this line, implying that the velocity was lower in the past than we thought, which implies acceleration.
Umm... end point is I doubt dark matter would affect anything in this chain of reasoning. Anyone care to point out any flaws? I wouldn't be surprised... been a while since I've sat in on a cosmology lecture.
But more likely, the only electrons on the magnetar would be in the thin shell of relatively normal matter that sits on top of the star. Because they would be bound to atoms, they wouldn't be able to radiate much.
I believe that the confusion you're pointing out comes from two places:
1. The simplistic model of a neutron star being "pure neutrons" is probably intended to get the main point across to lay people. The complexities involved in analyzing the composition of a typical neutron star as a function of radial distance are simply staggering, and it's difficult enough to explain the basic concept of electrons and protons combining to form neutrons (and neutrinos).
2. It may also be that the field has advanced recently. The basic idea of a "neutron star" was accepted soon after the first discovery of LGM-1. The exact structure of such an exotic object, though, has long been mysterious and/or controversial. New computational models are being invented all the time, resulting in a greater understanding of what quantum chromodynamics predicts will happen at extremely high densities. For example, a neutron star is usually considered to be a giant atomic nucleus because its density is comparable to an atomic nucleus. Recently, though, a new type of object was suggested called a "strange star" which is even more dense. A strange star is comparable to a neutron star, except that instead of individual neutrons being packed tightly together, the neutrons themselves are crushed out of existence and all that is left is a "sea" of the quarks that made up the neutrons. Therefore, a "strange star" is effectively a single nucleon. New discoveries such as these may be gaining greater acceptance by mainstream scientists, thus legitimizing the more mundane predictions of exactly how a neutron star's composition varies as radial distance. Again, this is somewhat out of my field, but... um.. I get drunk with a astronomers pretty regularly. So take all this with a grain of salt, as always.
The point is that cognitive decline occurs in every group (nonusers, light users, heavy users) to the same degree within the bounds of experimental uncertainty. In fact, if you'll notice right under table 3, you'll see this direct quote:
"Both light and heavy users of cannabis evidenced less cognitive decline than nonusers, although this finding was not statistically significant at the conventional level of p (less than) 0.05 (model 1). After adjustment for the other variables in models 2-4, there was no association between cannabis use and cognitive decline."
They even admit the test they used isn't that sensitive to measuring cognitive decline.
I think what they mean is that they would like to be using an MRI on the subjects while testing them to look for evidence of decreased brain activity that wouldn't be revealed in a simple scantron-like test. Or, possibly, they mean that there are other written tests available that are "better" (though I'm not sure how to quantify how exactly the test could be better) but that they didn't use for some reason. For instance, the "better" test might have been longer, thus serving to discourage people from signing up for the study and as a result decreasing the statistical validity of their results.
In any event, I wouldn't read that statement as a disavowal of the results. This type of self-doubt is extremely common in scientific journals- any scientist worth his salt lists all the problems with his experiment that he can see by himself. And, yes, IAAPSS (I am a pot smoking scientist).
Long story short: a study involving repeated IQ tests of nearly 1400 participants over a time period of 12 years showed absolutely no statistical correlation between marijuana use and cognitive ability.
I had a forever flashlight once. It broke within 3 weeks without any abuse. Of course, my experience may not be representative, and the Hummer might not be any better, but I do NOT recommend the forever flashlight as anything other than a cheap novelty item.
Our galaxy is "quiet" because the black hole has "pushed" the surrounding matter away from it so that it no longer has any significant incoming matter. A galactic collision would probably play hell with this balance, though, sending material into our very own supermassive black hole. When this happens, the levels of radiation could be so high that small perturbations in the earth's orbit will be the LEAST of humanity's concerns.
The good news is that at the very earliest, the Milky Way won't collide with another galaxy for several million more years, when Andromeda MAY hit us.
The Space Elevator is in fact such a case: think about the absolute nightmare a cable cut would be. I mean, all that has to happen is a plane goes the wrong way, or a meteor happens through the wrong area, or bad weather, or lightning, or god knows what. That cable is going to be seriously heavy - half a ton per mile, maybe more, even designed to be as light as possible - and it's flexible so it won't get brittle, and it's, well, long. So it starts falling to earth, right?
A space elevator that had the linear density you quote wouldn't be able to support it's own weight, let alone the weight of any climbers. Most estimates of the total mass of the elevator's ribbon are on the order of 1000 metric tons.
It's roughly equivalent to a highway just sort of coming out of the sky one day. There's pretty much nowhere you can put the space elevator where, if it gets cut, it's not going to cross some urban areas; the Earth/Moon lagrange 1 point is about 200,000 miles above Earth - enough to wrap around the planet a little over eight times. That's how it would fall, too - it'd be dragged behind a planet moving forward, and would wrap around under its own momentum, like a whip.
So, you've got a highway coming down, in bands, around the Earth eight times. Right through the middles of cities. Over the ocean. Into parks, monuments, farmland. Cutting cities in half. Killing tens of millions.
This is one of the largest and most common misconceptions about a space elevator. A broken space elevator would not kill tens of millions of people. In fact, a severed space elevator would likely be a disappointing anti-climax, as the powerpoint file on TFA shows. Impact occurs at 0.5 m/s (that's the terminal velocity of the ribbon).
I didn't mean to imply that I'd found some magical way around the 2nd law. What I meant was that all existing launch systems recover 0% of the energy expended to send objects into space, whereas the space elevator has the potential to recover at least some of the energy spent to send mass into space. All physical devices will have inefficiencies, but those inefficiencies will diminish as technology improves.
As for the current re-entry method, it's the cheap way of slowing down without using fuel, it doesn't have to happen but it is a carefully calculated risk.
True, it's the best we have at the moment. What I'm saying is that it is (a) dangerous and (b) wastes energy by shedding it as heat instead of reclaiming that energy for the next launch.
I'm not a practising materials scientist anymore, but from what I've read of carbon nanotubes they have a possible potential to be strong enough someday - but since we don't know how much it's going to cost us per unit volume to make the stuff or how much we'll need it is way to early to make up numbers from nowhere.
That's true, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't invest in some relatively cheap studies of what carbon nanotubes could do when we finally get them working. In addition, I sincerely doubt that economics of carbon nanotubes will be a large problem because there are a huge variety of applications for nanotubes that don't involve spaceflight at all. Economies of scale and all that. Plus, the whole point of a space elevator is that the costs associated with each launch are miniscule- it's only the initial construction that is expensive. A large initial investment will prove less expensive over the long haul than continuously wasting energy by sending small payloads into orbit and then wasting all their orbital energy in re-entry.
It's hype - and from the way people in the west have been brought up it strikes a Biblical chord.
I agree that the people who think an elevator can be up and running within 15 years are probably overoptimistic to the point that you could call it "hype", but I've honestly never seen anyone besides you compare the space elevator to a biblical story. Most of the discussions I've had with colleagues regarding the space elevator, and most of the articles I've read about it have been concerned with the technical challenges involved and the incomparable riches it could provide to the human race if we ever manage to construct one. It's an engineering project, albeit an ambitious one, which is fundamentally no different from, say, the moon shot.
If we are going to ship millions of tonnes into space it could either be an elevator or infrastructure to get stuff from places that are not in such a deep gravity well.
Mining near earth asteroids is definitely a good way to jumpstart the human presence in the solar system, but it doesn't address the fact that some things need to be taken into space from the surface of the Earth. For instance: people, any technology that requires large factories to be constructed (such as computers), and food (at least until greenhouses can be constructed in orbit). In addition, mining near earth asteroids may be a way to reduce the amount of mass that needs to be lifted into orbit for a space elevator. If we can manage to capture an asteroid of the right size and put it into GEO to act as a counterweight, the cable length can be shortened considerably, from 143,000km to 36,000km.
You might find it surprising, then, to hear that I'm very excited about the possibility of a space elevator, despite being a lifelong atheist.
It's true that the space elevator relies on technology that doesn't exist yet. But that technology is rapidly advancing, and there have been extensive studies of the material properties of carbon nanotubes in the context of use in a space elevator. Of course, you'll have to wade through pages of Biblical references to get to the actual science, but that's something you'll just have to get used to if you want to read about space elevator technology.
In addition, a mass driver is simply NOT a substitute for a space elevator. Even if a practical electromagnetic mass driver could be built, each launch would require a large amount of energy that would never be recovered. The space elevator uses less energy to send each ton of matter to GEO than any other proposed system, but that's not the really cool part. You see, each ton of matter that is returned from GEO effectively recovers the energy required to send that matter up in the first place via regenerative braking.
This is also where I should mention that, energy concerns aside, the space elevator removes one of the largest risks from space flight - reentry. Mass drivers help you get into orbit, but they don't help you return from orbit at all. In a space elevator, though, you just press the "down" button. Simple as that.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go do my religion homework. Oops, I meant to say science homework. I have such a hard time keeping those two subjects separate... but you can't really blame us clueless space elevator kooks for that, right?
So each galaxy should have non-zero angular momentum. This doesn't mean that there shouldn't be ANY spherical-like orbits, just that the majority of objects orbit in the "pancake" that is perpendicular to the axis of rotation. Here's the punchline: over billions of years, the objects that are NOT orbiting in the galaxy's pancake have close encounters with the more numerous objects in the pancake, and are either flung out of the galaxy or put into more normal orbits. The same process accounts for the fact that all planets in the Solar System orbit in a common plane (called the ecliptic plane).
As for elliptic galaxies, my impression was that they are the result of low-speed collisions between two spiral galaxies of roughly the same size. The two pancakes then combine to form a diffuse cloud of strars. For instance, when the Milky Way impacts Andromeda in 2 billion years (or is it 3? I can't remember), the result should be an elliptic galaxy if I understand the dynamics correctly.
Umm... no. Your acceleration is always directed towards the center of the earth. Your velocity is initially upwards, then eventually turns downwards.
"How many Americans still think Saddam had an active WMD program? ... Al queada links? How many of you think most of the world support your actions?"
Honestly, I'd say that at LEAST a majority of Americans knows the truth about these things. Contrary to YOUR ignorant belief, most Americans are NOT un-educated or un-informed about domestic and world issues.
Unfortunately, that's not true. Here are the results of a survey taken of Americans right before the election:
As you can tell, the majority of Americans *are* ignorant and un-informed about world issues. It might be an unpleasant surprise, but there it is in cold hard statistics.
Forgive me my cynicism, but I just lost whatever faith I had in my own countrymen about a month ago. There's always Europe, I suppose...
Think about it- a thermonuclear bomb can kill maybe 10 million people if it is detonated at the right altitude above a major city. A biological weapon, on the other hand, has the possibility of wiping out the entire human race...
The reason that this is true is that quantum states of particles are very different than classical descriptions of particles (ie "the baseball is travelling at 5 m/s due north at 1 radian above the horizontal at 5 degrees north and 3 degrees south at sealevel, etc, etc). You can't, for instance, take the information about a particle and make TWO copies. This is forbidden by the "no cloning theorem", a fundamental result of quantum information theory. These two points are the reason that every quantum information theoretician or experimentalist that I know regards quantum teleportation as "actually moving the particle from point A to point B without going through the intervening space".
Granted, we haven't perfected this process yet. For instance, most experiments have only teleported a photon's polarization wave function. The spatial wave function has been in a very trivial state that is replicated very easily. This is going to change, though. There is no fundamental physical law that prevents teleporting the *entire* quantum wave function- it just requires more classical information to be sent.
To recap... in every experimentally distinguishable sense, the particle disappears from point A and reappears at point B. It does not have to move through the intervening space. What *does* have to be transmitted through that space is classical information. That classical information doesn't have to be sent immediately, though, and it can take a very innocuous form. For instance, in order to teleport the polarization state of a photon all I need to do is call my friend at the other end and give him two bits of information (ie "Hey, Bob, the results are '1,0'. Enjoy the photon.")
The first part of the article deals with all the legitimate ways to move particles from point A to point B without going through the intervening space. These methods (while very, VERY far off in the future) are scientifically plausible even if they sound like they were lifted from a bad Star Trek script. The second part, of course, is full of the worst kind of pseudo-science, like telekenisis and psychic abilities. But, really, the first half of the proposal is only a waste of money because the technology involved is too far off to be useful in any reasonably timeframe.
For example, negative energy is a real phenomenon in quantum physics. It is most commonly discussed in the context of the Casimir effect. Here's an article that discusses the Casimir effect. Basically, the negative energy arises because empty space itself has a certain amount of vacuum energy, and the Casimir effect reduces these fluctuations inside two metal plates (which have to be spaced absurdly closely together and manufactured to extremely exact precision for the effect to be measureable). Because we generally say that empty space has zero energy and the space between the plates has less energy than that, the Casimir effect is regarded as a source of "negative energy". This could actually be useful (one day in the far FAR future) for opening up space-time wormholes. And, no, I'm not joking either.
Also, while "warp drive" may be an overused Trek term, it's also a (semi) legitimate topic of discussion in physics. In 1994, Dr. Miguel Alcubierre found a solution to General Relativity that seemed to allow for faster than light travel while obeying special and general relativity. What followed was a lively debate on the plausibility of the "Alcubierre Warp Drive". One of the most recent objections argued that Alcubierre's warp drive would never be able to cross lightspeed but might allow for non-Newtonion sublight travel.
Thanks for pointing that out!
The most constructive thing I can do is give you some buzzwords to google for. Quantum teleportation is possible because of a quantum effect known as "quantum entanglement", an effect that was predicted in the 1930's and proven experimentally in the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any decent references for this effect on the web in my ~5 minute search. On the other hand, if you want to see what a real scientific explanation of quantum teleportation looks like, check this out. The first page actually looks like it's pretty comprehensible.
However, most scientists that discuss teleportation don't talk about simultaneous teleportation. That *would* definitely be impossible due to relativity, like you mentioned.
In reality, quantum teleportation is a legitimate scientific topic (that's what I study, as a matter of fact). It's possible because the teleportation isn't instantaneous- it happens at a speed less than or equal to the speed of light. The reason it is called teleportation is that quantum effects are used to make a particle disappear from point A and reappear at point B (a suitable time later) without crossing the intervening space. Cool, huh?
This effect has already been demonstrated for photons, and limited effects have been demonstrated for single atoms. Whether or not it will ever be possible on a larger scale is a matter of debate... but it isn't a debate about relativity.