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Snake
SFN Addict
USA
2511 Posts |
 Posted - 01/17/2002 : 22:30:14 [Permalink]
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quote:
Vincent Price....didn't he recently get named Dean of The Royal Fellows or somesuch? No, I'm remembering wrong; he recently dropped the Dean of the Royal Fellows in a vat of wax. That's it.
My kids still love me.
Touché, Garrette
Rap Crap is to music what Paint by Numbers is to art!
Yes, I am NormaL!!
Carabao forever!!! |
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 01/18/2002 : 15:59:16 [Permalink]
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quote:
In the immortal words of Carl Sagan "They laughed at Einstien, they laughed at the Wright brothers, yeah, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Let us not forget Woody Allen in Casino Royal.
"Crazy? They called Einstein crazy!"--Dr Noah
"That's not true. Nobody ever called Einstein crazy ." --Beautiful naked victim with judiciously placed props
"Well, they would have if he had carried on like this." --Dr N
quote:
We can't travel faster than light, is my understanding of relativity, so I'd say, if we're going to explore space efficiantly, wormholes or hyperspace would be the way to go, IF they're possible.
Hyperspace?! No problem, we'll just reverse the polarity of the Androian Matrix and be off. Now which pocket did I leave my sonic screwdriver in?
Has anyone noticed that this website is bigger on the inside that it is on the outside? Oh well, have a jelly baby. |
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@tomic
Administrator
USA
4607 Posts |
Posted - 01/18/2002 : 18:10:20 [Permalink]
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quote:
Has anyone noticed that this website is bigger on the inside that it is on the outside
Damn and I thought no one would notice. Much of the extra space is reserved for the spacecraft that crashed and was stored in Area 51 for years. You guys should see the cool cigarete lighter it has with a completely unknown power source. Ditto for the tachyon particle detector to help get out of speeding tickets.
@tomic
Gravity, not just a good idea...it's the law! |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 01/18/2002 : 21:24:56 [Permalink]
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Speaking of Dr. Who, which was your favorite? I have to go with the populist view and say Tom Baker.
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Sum Ergo Cogito |
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@tomic
Administrator
USA
4607 Posts |
Posted - 01/19/2002 : 00:58:57 [Permalink]
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Booooooo, no it has to be Jon Pertwee.
@tomic
Gravity, not just a good idea...it's the law! |
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Chippewa
SFN Regular
USA
1496 Posts |
Posted - 01/19/2002 : 02:24:42 [Permalink]
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quote:
My opinion: The human species will find a way to "cheat" the speed of light someday. Just not for a long bloody time. To pull a number out of my ass, I say 500 years.
What does everyone else think?
We'll have to pace ourselves as a human race and just accept gradual colonization over lifetimes, and human exploration of Mars, the out solar system, deeper space between stars, and eventually the area of the nearest star's solar system. On and on over time until there are human-like beings living on worlds and in space throughout this portion of the spiral arm, within the "short" time of just 10,000 years from now. This may sound impossible, but in reality it might be much more realistic and feasible than "warp drive." (But I'd still like us to have "warp drive.")
Actually, there have been some ideas about negitive energy portals and telepotation over the last year in Scientific American.
It may not seem like we have the motivation to start interstellar travel right now, but we are in fact moving in that direction if one takes the broad historical view.
"I'd never join an organization that would have a man like me as a member." |
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 01/19/2002 : 19:20:33 [Permalink]
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quote:
Speaking of Dr. Who, which was your favorite? I have to go with the populist view and say Tom Baker.
I would have agreed with you (though my wife would have sided with @tomic) except ....for Christmas I was given a VHS tape of Doctor Who: The Curse of Fatal Death with 5 new Doctors.
Now it's a toss up between Rowan Atkinson and Joanna Lumley (those regeneration cycles can be pretty tricky)
Remember that Douglas Addams bit where a deadly space armada sets out to destroy the Earth but due to a slight miscalculation in scale they are swallowed by a Labrador Retriever?
Maybe the problem isn't that we can't move faster than light. Maybe it's that we die too soon. If we had lives that were 100,000 years long instead of only 75 we wouldn't think anything of taking 100 years off to visit a star. There are bugs whose life spans are only three days. Two weeks of vacation in the islands is impossible to them but fun to us. A matter of scale.
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The brain that was stolen from my laboratory was a criminal brain. Only evil will come from it. |
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ljbrs
SFN Regular
USA
842 Posts |
Posted - 01/22/2002 : 20:47:37 [Permalink]
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quote:
quote:
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Light passing through water goes much more slowly than sound (for instance).
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Umm... that seems to be saying that the velocity of light in water is less than the velocity of sound in water.
The velocity of sound in pure water at room temperature is around 1480 m/s. The optical refractive index of pure water is about 1.33, so the velocity of light in water would be c/1.33, or about 2.254 x 10e8 m/s, or more than 150,000 times faster than sound.
Or have I misunderstood what you said?
Sorry to be so late in answering. That was a misstatement. I should have stated that sound speeds up tremendously in water, while light slows considerably. Of course, light still is traveling faster than sound in water.
Then again, they are now capable of slowing the speed of light in experiments almost to the point where a person might be able to run faster than the light in those experiments. I read this either in SCIENCE or in NATURE, so it comes from a good source. I do not have the energy to go to either website to find out.
Oh, well, I goofed. I get caught up in my grammar and spelling and forget the important things which need to be stated.
ljbrs 
"Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error." Goethe |
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Dr Shari
Skeptic Friend
135 Posts |
Posted - 01/23/2002 : 03:38:16 [Permalink]
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I believe in my own naive way that light speed is just a number like the sound barrier. Also we have already found sub-atomic particals that travel faster then the speed of light.
Simply in my Jules Vernian philosophy if it can be thought it can be done. We just need to invent the technology.
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Garrette
SFN Regular
USA
562 Posts |
Posted - 01/23/2002 : 04:33:01 [Permalink]
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Allow me to demonstrate my ignorance on yet another topic:
quote:
I believe in my own naive way that light speed is just a number like the sound barrier. Also we have already found sub-atomic particals that travel faster then the speed of light.
Is this true, or have such particles been merely theorized?
Light speed may be just another number, but the barrier it poses is demonstrated mathematically and experimentally if my impressions are correct, whereas the idea that we could not break the sound barrier was really the product of ignorance and conjecture.
I recall having the impression that special relativity (is that the right one?) does not prohibit something from traveling faster than light; rather, it prohibits something from crossing from one side of light speed to the other--i.e., anything traveling slower than light speed will always be slower, and anything traveling faster will always be faster. I have no idea where I got that impression. I am right? Wrong? Inebriated?
My kids still love me. |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 01/23/2002 : 06:38:09 [Permalink]
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quote:
quote:
I believe in my own naive way that light speed is just a number like the sound barrier. Also we have already found sub-atomic particals that travel faster then the speed of light.
Is this true, or have such particles been merely theorized?
It appears to be true, but sometimes science articles (and scientists) are reluctant to be straightforward in this area, I've found. One must sometimes dig deep to find out that what they seemed to be claiming was a reality, is in actuality just a theory.
But check this out: http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/07/20/speed.of.light.ap/
This was back in 2000, so whether it's still valid, has been confirmed or not, I don't know. I just did a quick search on "particles faster than light", and this was my first hit.
Also from this article, just a little confirmation of my first post, and why I think this way: quote:
Wang said the effect is possible only because light has no mass; the same thing cannot be done with physical objects.
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Sum Ergo Cogito |
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Garrette
SFN Regular
USA
562 Posts |
Posted - 01/23/2002 : 07:42:46 [Permalink]
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Okay, I'll tread dangerous ground here. Dangerous because it's hard science, AND I'm relying on a faulty memory.
I think the cnn site you gave is talking about an experiment I read about some many months ago, though I'm not sure. In the article I read, it warned against misinterpreting the results by emphasizing that the light 'as a whole' did not travel faster than itself.
Here's the analogy they gave, probably poorly remembered:
Imagine a car that is 2 meters long. It crosses line x and races toward line y which is ---- meters away. The time it takes for the front of the car to traverse the distance between x and y is, say 10 seconds. Likewise, the time it takes for the back of the car to traverse the distance between x and y is also 10 seconds.
Now we conduct the experiment by trying to speed the car up. We are partially successful, but only partially.
What happens is that the front of the car remains at the same constant speed and still takes 10 seconds to traverse the distance between x and y, but the back of the car does, in fact speed up and now takes only 9 seconds to traverse the distance. The car compressed.
So did the car go faster than itself? Not really, not 'as a whole'.
--
That's how I remember it anyway. Shoot it down, now...
My kids still love me. |
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